Paine Albert Bigelow
The Ship-Dwellers: A Story of a Happy Cruise

XXIII
INTO SYRIA

I picked up a cold that rainy day at Ephesus. Not an ordinary sniffling cold, but a wrenching, racking cold that made every bone and every tooth jump, and set my eyes to throbbing like the ship's engines. I felt sure I was going to die when we arrived in the harbor of Beirut, and decided that it would be better to die on deck; so I crawled out and dressed, and crept into a steamer-chair, and tried to appreciate the beautiful city that had arisen out of the sea – the upper gateway to Syria.

The Patriarch came along, highly elate. This was where he belonged; this was home; this was Phœnicia itself! Fifteen hundred years b. c. Beirut had been a great Phœnician seaport, he said, and most of the rare handiwork mentioned in ancient history and mythology had been wrought in this neighborhood. The silver vase of Achilles, the garment which Hecuba gave to Minerva, and the gold-edged bowl of Telemachus were all Phœnician, according to the Patriarch, who hinted that he rather hoped to find some such things at Beirut; also some of the celebrated Phoinus, or purple dye, which gave the tribe its name. I said no doubt he would, and, being sick and suffering, added that he might dye himself dead for all I cared, which was a poor joke – besides being an afterthought, when the Patriarch was well out of range.

I had no idea of going ashore. I was miserably sorry, too, for I was stuffed with guide-book knowledge about Baalbec and Damascus, and had looked forward to that side-trip from the beginning. I knew how Moses felt on Mount Pisgah now, and I was getting so sorry for myself I could hardly stand it, when suddenly the bugle blew the sharp call, "All ashore!" Laura, age fourteen, came racing down the deck, and before I knew it I had my bag – packed the night before – and was going down the ship's ladder into a boat, quarrelling meantime with one of the Reprobates as to whether Beirut was the Berothai of the Old Testament, where David smote Hadadezer and took "exceeding much brass," or the Berytus of the Roman conquest. It was of no consequence, but it gave life a new purpose, for I wanted to prove that he was wrong. Wherefore I forgot I was going to die, and presently we were ashore and in a railway-station where there was a contiguous little train ready to start for Baalbec and Damascus, with a lot of men selling oranges, of which Laura and I bought a basketful for a franc, climbed aboard, the bell rang – and the funeral was postponed.

The road followed the sea for a distance, and led through fields of flowers. I had never seen wildflowers like those. They were the crimson anemone mingled riotously with a gorgeous yellow flower – I did not learn its name. The ground was literally massed with them. Never was such a prodigality of bloom.

From Beirut to Baalbec is only about sixty miles; but it takes pretty much all day to get there, for the Lebanon Mountains lie between, and this is a deliberate land. We did not mind. There was plenty to see all along, and our leisurely train gave us ample time.

There were the little stations, where we stopped anywhere from five to fifteen minutes, and got out and mingled with the curious rural life; there were the hills, that had little soil on them, but were terraced and fruitful – some of them to the very summit; there was the old Damascus road, winding with us, or above us, or below us – the road over which Abraham may have travelled, and Adam, too, for that matter, and Eve, when they were sent out of their happy garden. Eden lay not far from here, and the exiles would be likely to come this way, I think. We saw plenty of groups that might have been Abraham and his household, or any of the patriarchs. I did not notice any that suggested Adam and Eve.

The road had another interest for me. Forty-two years ago, before the railroad came this way, the Quaker City pilgrims toiled up through the summer heat, setting out on the "long trip" through the full length of Palestine. Nobody makes it in summer now. Few make it at all, except by rail and in carriages, with good hostelries at the end of every stage. Still, I am glad those first pilgrims made it, or we should not have had that wonderful picture of Syrian summer-time, nor of "Jericho" and "Baalbec." Those two horses are worth knowing – in literature – and I tried to imagine that little early party of excursionists climbing the steep path to Palestine on their sorry nags.

It is warm in Syria, even now, but we were not too warm, riding; besides, we were going steadily uphill, and by-and-by somebody pointed out a white streak along the mountain-top, and it was snow. Then, after a long time, we got to a place where the vegetation was very scanty and there were no more terraced hills, but only barren peaks and sand, where the wind blew cold and colder, and presently the snow lay right along our way. We had reached the highest point then – five thousand feet above the sea. In five hours we had come thirty-six miles – thirty-five in length and one straight up in the air. Somebody said:

"Look, there is Mount Hermon!"

And, sure enough, away to the south, though nigh upon us it seemed – so close that one might put out his hand and touch it, almost – there rose a stately, snow-clad elevation which, once seen, dominated the barren landscape. It was so pure white against the blue – so impressive in its massive dignity – the eye followed it across every vista, longed for it when immediate peaks rose between, welcomed it when time after time it rose grandly into view.

With an altitude of between nine and ten thousand feet, Mount Hermon is the highest mountain in Syria, I believe – certainly the most important. The Bible is full of it. The Amorites and the Hivites, and most of the other tribes that Joshua buried or persuaded to go away, had their lands under Mount Hermon (all of them in sight of it), and that grand old hill looked down on Joshua's slaughter of men and women and little children, and perhaps thought it a puny performance to be undertaken in the name, and by the direction, of God.

Joshua established Mount Hermon as the northern boundary of Palestine, and from whatever point the Israelite turned his face northward, he saw its white summit against the blue. It became symbolic of grandeur, stability, purity, and peace. It was to one of its three peaks that Christ came when, with Peter, James, and John, He withdrew to "an high mountain apart" for the Transfiguration. So it became sanctified as a sort of holy judgment-seat.⁵

Down the Lebanon slope and across the valley to Reyak, a Syrian village in the sand, at the foot of the Anti-Lebanon range. Reyak is the parting of the ways – the railways – that lead to Damascus and Baalbec, and there is a lunch-room there – a good one by Turkish standards. It was our first complete introduction to Turkish food – that is a diet of nuts, dates, oranges, and curious meat and vegetable preparations – and I ate a good deal for a dying man. Then I went outside to look at the population, and wonder what these people, who scratch a living out of the sand and stone barrens, would do in a fertile country like America. They would consider it heaven, I thought.

At the end of the station sat a drowsy, stoutish man in semi-European dress, holding a few pairs of coarse home-knit socks, evidently for sale. I stopped and talked to him. He spoke English very well, and when he told me his story I marvelled.

He had been in America; in Brooklyn; had carried on business there – something in Syrian merchandise – and had done very well. He had married there – a Syrian woman; his children were born there – Americans. Then one day he had sold out and brought them all to this flat-topped mud village in the Syrian sand. Why had he done it? Well, he could hardly tell; he had wanted to see Syria again – he could think of no other reason. No, his wife did not like it, nor the children – not at all.

He pointed out his mud hut a little way from the station, and I could not blame them. He would go back some day – yes, certainly. Meantime, his wife is earning money for the trip by knitting the coarse socks which he sells around the station at Reyak at a few piastres a pair.

Our train was about ready to start for Baalbec, and I was lingering over a little collection of relics which a blind pedler offered, when I felt a hand on my shoulder and heard my name called. I turned and was face to face with the artist Jules Gurin, of New York. I had known nothing of his presence in Syria, he had known nothing of our coming. He was going in one direction, I in another. In this remote waste our lines had crossed. He was so glad to see me – he thought I had a supply of cigars. I never saw a man's enthusiasm die so suddenly as his did when I told him how I had been sick that morning and forgotten them.

Altogether that was a curious half hour. Reyak is the most uninteresting place in Syria, but I shall always remember it.

XXIV
THE HOUSE THAT CAIN BUILT

It was well along in the afternoon when we reached Baalbec, and drove through a cloud of dust to a hotel which stands in a mud village near the ruins. Long before we arrived we could make out massive remnants of what was once a wonder of the world, and remains no less so to-day. We could distinguish sections of the vast wall, and, towering high above them, the six columns of the Temple of the Sun.

I knew those six columns. I had carried a picture of them in my mind ever since that winter so long ago when the old first edition of the New Pilgrim's Progress became familiar in our household. I know they were seventy-five feet high and eight feet through, and had blocks of stone on the top of them as big as our old-fashioned parlor at home; also, that they were probably erected by giants. Those items had made an impression that had lasted. Now, here they were, outlined against the sky, in full view and perfectly familiar, but never in the world could they be as big as the book said. Why, these were as slender and graceful as fairy architecture! I recalled that there were some big stones to see, stones laid by Cain and his giants when the world was new. Perhaps they would not be so very big, after all. I had a feeling that we ought to hurry.

We did hurry – Laura and I. We did not wait for the party, but set out straight for the ruins, through narrow streets and byways, with beggars at our heels. By-and-by we came to a rushing brook, and just beyond it were the temple walls.

I remembered now. There had been a wonderful garden outside the temples in the old days, and this stream had made it richly verdant and beautiful. There was no garden any more. Only some grass and bushes, such as will gather about an oasis.

They would not let us into the temple enclosure until our party came, so we wandered around the outer walls and gazed up at cornices and capitals and entablatures as beautiful, we thought, as any we had seen at Athens. Then the party arrived, and there was a gatekeeper to let us in.

It would take a man in perfect health to carry away even an approximate impression of Baalbec. Trying to remember now, I seem to have spent the afternoon in some amazing delirium of tumbling walls and ruined colonnades; of heaped and piled fragments; of scarred and defaced sculpture; of Titanic masonry flung about by the fury of angry gods. Athens had been a mellowed and hallowed dream of the past; Ephesus a vast suggestion of ancient greatness buried and overgrown; Baalbec was a wild agony of destruction and desecration crying out to the sky.

It is a colossal object-lesson in what religions can do when they try. Nobody really knows who began to build temples here, but from the time of Adam Baalbec became a place of altars. Before history began it was already a splendid Syrian city, associated with the names of Cain, Nimrod, and Abraham, and it may have been Cain himself who raised the first altar here when he made that offering for which the Lord "had not respect." More likely, however – and this is the Arab belief – it was the city of refuge built by Cain, whose fear must have been very large if one may judge from the size of the materials used.

Cain could not fail to build a temple, however. He would try to ease the punishment which he declared was greater than he could bear, and with burnt offering and architecture would seek to propitiate an angry God. How long the worship inaugurated by him lasted we can only surmise – to the flood, maybe – but the Phœnicians came next, and set up temples to their Gods, whoever they were, and after the Phœnicians came Solomon, who built a temple to a sort of compromise god by the name of Baal – a deity left over by the Phœnicians and adapted to Judean needs and ceremonies – hence the name, Baalbec. Solomon built the temple to Baal to satisfy certain of his heathen wives, and he made the place a strong city to rival Damascus – the latter having refused to acknowledge his reign.

After Solomon, the Romans. Two hundred years or so after Christ – in the twilight of their glory and their gods – the Romans under Elagabalus brought the glory of Grecian architecture to Baalbec, named the place Heliopolis, and set up temples that were – and are – the wonder of the world.

What satisfactory gods they must have been to deserve temples such as these – each shrine a marvel of size and beauty – more splendid even than those of the Acropolis of Athens in their lavish magnificence! This carved doorway to the Temple of Jupiter; this frieze of the Temple of Bacchus; these towering six columns of the Temple of the Sun; still holding their matchless Corinthian capitals and amazing entablature to the sky – where else will one find their equals, and what must they have been in their prime, when these scarred remnants can still overpower the world!

It was another religion that brought ruin here – early Christianity – presently followed by early Mohammedanism – each burning with vandalic zeal. It was the good Emperor Constantine that first upset the Roman gods and their temples. Then Theodosius came along and pulled down the great structures, and out of the pieces built a church that was an architectural failure. Then all the early Christians in the neighborhood took a hand in pulling down and overturning; hacking away at the heathen sculpture and tracery – climbing high up the walls to scar and disfigure – to obliterate anything resembling a face. Then pretty soon the early Mohammedans came along and carried on the good work, and now and then an earthquake took a hand, until by-and-by the place became the ghastly storm of destruction it appears to-day.

I was ill when I saw Baalbec. My flesh was burning and my pulse throbbing with fever. Perhaps my vision was distorted and the nightmare seemed worse than it really is, but as I stood in that field of mutilation and disorder, gazing along its wrecked and insulted glory, and through tumbling arch and ruined door caught vistas of fertile and snow-capped hill, I seemed to see a vision of what it had been in the day of its perfection. Also, I felt an itch to meet one or two of those early enthusiasts – some night in a back alley when they were not looking for me and I had a piece of scantling – I felt a sick man's craving, as it were, to undertake a little damage and disfiguration on my own account. Oh, well, it's all in the eternal story. Religions established these temples; religions pulled them down. The followers of one faith have always regarded as heathen those which preceded them. There lies a long time ahead. Will the next religion restore Baalbec or complete its desolation?

Some little Syrian girls beset Laura on the way back to the hotel and tried to sell her some bead embroidery which it seems they make in a mission-school established here by the English. One of them – a little brown madonna of about ten – could speak English quite well. Laura asked her name.

"Name Mary," she said.

"But that's an English name."

She trotted along silently, thinking; then said:

"No, Syria – Mary Syria name."

Sure enough, we had forgotten. The first Mary had indeed been Syrian, and I imagined her, now, a child – brown, barefoot and beautiful, like this Mary, with the same pathetic eyes. Laura – young, fair-skinned and pink-cheeked – was a marvel to these children. They followed her to the door, and when she could not buy all their stock in trade they insisted on making her presents, and one of them – little Mary – begged to be taken to America.

We saw the celebrated "big stones" next morning. Several of them are built into the lower tiers of the enclosing temple wall, and three of these – the largest ones – measure each from sixty-two to sixty-four feet long and are thirteen feet thick! They rest upon stones somewhat thicker, but shorter – stones about the size of a two-story cottage – and these in turn rest on masonry still less gigantic. Evidently it was the intention of the builders to increase the size of their material as they went higher, and the big block still in the quarry carries out that idea.

Authorities differ as to when these big stones were laid, and how. Some claim that they were put here by the Romans, because they find Greek axe-marks on the ones below them. But then I found American jack-knife marks on them too, and the names of certain of my countrymen, which proves nothing except that these puny people had been there and left their measurement. If these monster stones had been laid by the Romans only two thousand years ago, we should have had some knowledge of the means by which they were transported and lifted into place. There is no such record, and nowhere else at least did the Romans ever attempt structure of such gigantic proportions. That is precisely the word, "gigantic," for there were giants in the days when these stones were laid – stones that could have been there six thousand years as well as two thousand, being of such material as forms the foundations of the world.

If Cain did any building at Baalbec, he did it here. He did not finish the work, it would seem, or at least not in these proportions. Perhaps his giants deserted him – struck, as we say to-day. Perhaps the hands of men were no longer against him and the need of this mighty bulwark about his place of refuge ceased. At all events, the first stone hewn out for the next layer stands in the quarry still.

We drove over there. It was half a mile away, at least – possibly a mile, down hill and rather rough going. The stones we saw in the wall were brought up that road. The one standing in the quarry had been lifted and started a little, and would have been on its way presently, if the strike, or the amnesty, had not interfered.

It is seventy-two feet long and seventeen feet thick. Try to think of a plain box building, a barn or a store-house, say, of that size, then mentally convert it into a solid block of stone. Mark Twain likens it to two freight-cars placed end to end, but it is also as high and as wide. Eight freight-cars set four and four would just about express it! Think of that! Think of moving a stone of that size!

It is squared and dressed and ready to be taken to the temple wall. It will never be taken there. Perhaps that last item is gratuitous information, but at least it is authentic. We have no means of moving that stone half a mile up a rough hill in these puny times, and the speculations as to how Cain did it have been mainly hazy and random – quite random.

One writer suggests that such stones were "rolled up an inclined plane of earth prepared for the purpose." I should love to see a stone like that rolled. I'd travel all the way to Baalbec again for the sight, and they could prepare the inclined plane any way they pleased. An Oriental authority declares that these stones were moved and laid by the demon Echmoudi, which is better than the rolling idea. I confess a weakness for Echmoudi, but I fear hard cold science will frown him out of court.

It has taken an Englishman to lead the way to light. He says that Cain employed mastodons to do his moving. Now we are on the way to truth, but we must go further – a good deal further. Cain did employ mastodons, but only for his light work. Even mastodons would balk at pulling stones like these. Cain would use brontosaurs for such work as that. There were plenty of them loafing about, and I can imagine nothing more impressive than Cain standing on a handy elevation overlooking his force of giants and a sixteen-span brontosaur team yanking a stone as big as a bonded warehouse up Baalbec hill.

Truly, there is no reason why those monster stones should not have been quarried a million or so years ago and moved by the vast animal creatures of that period. We have biblical authority for the giants, and I have seen a brontosaur in the New York Museum that seemed to go with stones of about that size. Think of any force the Romans could summon rolling a three-million-pound square stone up an inclined plane. Preposterous! The brontosaur's the thing.