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CHAPTER XIV

BEYROUT, TYRE, AND SIDON

OUR journeyings in Cyprus finished, we sailed from Limasol at night. Next morning when I woke up early, our ship, a Messagerie boat, was already anchoring in the waters of St. George's Bay, and before us lay the busy city of Beyrout, the Berytus of the Phoenicians. Presently an emissary of the Beyrout branch of the house of Cook arrived on board and asked us if we had any revolvers, or cigarettes. We had both.

"Give them me," he said, "and I'll see you through." Then it transpired that in this matter of revolvers there is little difference between the Turkish and the Cyprian governments. In a country where every peasant goes about his business with a double-barrelled gun slung across his shoulders, the respectable traveller may not pass a pocket-pistol through the customs.

We left the ship with our belongings and rowed to the landing-quay. Then the fun began. Such shouting, such gesticulating, such struggles! First, we were marched through a room where sat an aged Turk who stared at us sleepily. To him we protested that we had nothing, nothing! with such vigour that the least experienced might have guessed that we prevaricated. Then a minor Cook and his myrmidons hustled us through passages and gateways into the open street, and whispering mysteriously, "There is something wrong," left us and vanished.

In due course it transpired the "something" was that our sleepy-eyed Turk, who was by no means so simple

as he appeared, had caught sight of the large revolver projecting from between the folds of a coat gracefully arranged to hide it by the artifice of Cook. Further, he had impounded that revolver, but as Cook, with admirable promptitude and disregard of facts, informed him that we were sailing for Egypt in a day or two, he was so good as to promise that we could have it when we left. After this, thankful to escape so cheaply, we started for our hotel.

That afternoon I hired a carriage to drive out to a spot about ten miles away, called the Dog River, and by the ancient Greeks, Lykos, or Wolf River. Here, in the days of fable, a huge stone dog sat upon a rock and barked loudly whenever an enemy drew near. Perhaps —this is but a suggestion-the statue was so constructed that the wind rushing down his throat made a noise like to that of a hound which bays. At the least he did in truth sit there, since lying prone in shallow water I myself saw his gigantic, headless shape, large as that of an ox or a horse. Now he barks no longer, but whenever the sea rises its waves moan over him. saw him also in 1697, for he says:

Henry Maundrell

"In an hour or more, spent upon a very rugged way, close by the sea, we came to the river Lycus, called also, sometimes, Canis, and by the Turks, at this day, Nahr Kelp. It derives its name from an idol in the form of a dog or wolf, which was worshipped, and is said to have pronounced oracles, at this place. The image is pretended to be shown to strangers at this day, lying in the sea with its heels upward. I mean the body of it; for its oracular head is reported to have been broken off and carried to Venice, where (if fame be true) it may be seen at this day."

The first mile or so of our drive was through Beyrout, for the East, a very prosperous-looking town, where everybody seems busy at his trade-carpentering, copperfashioning, weaving, or dyeing. Most of the inhabitants

are Christian, which accounts for this strange activity; at any rate, their women, some of them may be called pretty while young, go unveiled. The roads, however, are fearful; I have never seen worse out of Central America. In places, indeed, it was as much as two good horses could do to pull our carriage through the mud, while the holes into which the wheels dropped continually were deep and disconcerting.

So soon, however, as Beyrout was left behind these same roads suddenly became excellent-no civilised turnpike could be better. The change puzzled me greatly, but afterwards I discovered the reason. We had passed into territory over which the Mussulman rules in name alone. After the fearful massacre of the Christians at Damascus and elsewhere by the Druses, encouraged thereto by the Turks, came the French expedition of 1861. This display of force, backed by the remonstrances of the Powers, obliged the unwilling Sultan to grant semi-independence to the Maronites, and to allow the establishment of an imperium in imperio, generally known as the Lebanon Government. Being Christian, affiliated to the Roman Church indeed, although they retain certain special privileges, since their priests have the right to read Mass in Syriac and to marry, these Maronites are industrious and progressive. Hence the good roads, the honest administration, and the suggestive fact that property which lies within the territories of the Lebanon Government fetches, if sold, about five times as much as that of similar extent and character which has the advantage of bordering on Beyrout, but the disadvantage of groaning under the rule of the Moslem.

Every inch of the rich land that lines this road is in high cultivation, a large proportion of it being planted with mulberry-trees, which are kept severely cut back, as the young shoots of two or three years' standing produce the richest crop of leaves. These mulberries are not grown for their fruit but only for the foliage, that feeds

the silk-worms, which are perhaps the principal source of wealth in this district. Between these plantations lie patches of vines and other crops.

Here the road was crowded with transport animals; donkeys staggering along under the weight of two great planks; camels laden with mighty sacks of grain, and so forth. As we went I observed a farmer engaged in setting a number of young trees, to receive which the ground had been carefully trenched to a depth of over two feet. Finding it troublesome to throw up the soil from the bottom of the trench, labour doubtless being cheap in Syria, he overcame the difficulty in a very ingenious fashion. To the stem of his shovel were attached two thin ropes, each of them held by a man who stood upon the surface level. When the agriculturist below had piled the spade with earth, at a word the assistants above pulled, and, without any undue exertion on his part, up came the shovel and its contents. plan is clever, yet it seemed to me somewhat wasteful to employ the muscles of three men to throw one spadeful of soil out of a hole not thirty inches deep. A Turk, however, would settle the question by planting the mulberries in untrenched land, or more probably by leaving them unplanted altogether.

The

For five or six miles our road ran on by the edge of the sea, till at length we reached our goal. Here a river or rather a wide torrent-that of the Dog-has in the course of unnumbered æons cut for itself a path to the ocean between two bold, bare-shouldered mountains. This stream is, or was, crossed by a fine stone bridge, but the winter floods, coming down in their fury, have undermined its piers and swept away several of the spans. At present no attempt has been made to repair

the wreck.

Above us, to be reached by a few minutes' scramble, ran the remains of the old Roman, or mayhap Phoenician, road, cut in the face of the precipice. Here, graven deep

upon the flat surface of the rock, are curious tablets, each of which marks the passage of some conqueror at different periods of the world's history. Altogether there are about a dozen of these inscriptions. The latest in date records the names of the French generals who occupied the land so recently as 1860; the earliest that of the Egyptian Pharaoh, whose standards shone in the Syrian sun before Solomon sat upon the throne of Judah; the sign manual of great Rameses, no less, for whose pleasure the Israelites moulded their strawless bricks from the mud of Father Nile. The Assyrian was here also, Sennacherib the king who flourished when Rameses had been some seven centuries dead, and others great in their day, whereof nothing now remains except a name and such monuments as these. Each conqueror as he trod these shores thus stamped his seal upon their cliffs, so that men unborn might learn the prowess of his arms. It was a poor and primitive expedient to avoid the oblivion which dogs even those at whose high-sounding titles whole nations shook, yet not altogether ineffective. At least it brings their exploits home to the minds of some few travellers thousands of years after those who wrought them have mingled their dust with that of the peoples whom they slaughtered. Will our daily press and voluminous records do more, or as much, for the conquerors and conquests of to-day? When the world has rolled along the path of another three thousand years some traces of these tablets may still remain, and with them traditions of the men who set them there. But who will remember, let us say, the Boer war and the generals that fought its battles?

The flowers that sprang in the crevices of this old roadway were beautiful and various. Doubtless the legions of Rameses and of Sennacherib trod such beneath their feet. The frail lily of the field is more immortal than the mightiest conqueror of the world. It serves to weave his crown and to deck his feasts awhile, but the

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