CHAPTER III
MADABA
After fourteen hours in the saddle we were thankful to dismount at the friendly door of the presbytery at Madaba, where, by kind permission of the Latin Patriarch in Jerusalem, we were admitted to enjoy the hospitality of the parish priest, a Piedmontese, and his assistant, an Arab, both speaking excellent French, as well as Italian, the official language of the patriarchal clergy.
We found their reception room crowded with a group of some dozen villagers, prominent among whom was a dignified-looking shech, who at once claimed acquaintance with the Professor, and proved to have been his guide in this district upon a former occasion. He was engaged in a discussion with the priests, which we had evidently interrupted, and the moment opportunity permitted he returned to his point. There was nothing discourteous in his persistence, he was obviously attempting to make a bargain, and the price offered had already, we were told, reached 200 francs. The priest met all his advances with a decided negative, which grew more and more imperative as time went on, but time is of no value to an Arab, and we could not but be reminded of the parable of the importunate widow. After a time, at the express desire of our hosts, they all withdrew into an outer room while we enjoyed our much-needed refreshment, but when we afterwards went out to look about us they returned to the charge, and we even found them still at it next morning. The very delicate point at issue was afterwards explained to us. The man, a member of the Eastern branch of the Church, desired to marry his niece, and having failed—after perhaps equal pertinacity in enforcing his point—in obtaining permission from his own priest had come to see whether it might be worth his while to change his religious views, in hope of receiving the sanction of the Latins. Apparently he thought the real question at issue was "How much?"—and from time to time, after consultation with his companions, he would raise his bid by a few piasters. Again and again the priests roundly assured him it was of no avail; he was not to be convinced, and when we finally rode away he was sitting on a stone by the door of the presbytery. It would have been interesting to know what were the special attractions of the lady for whom he was willing to venture so much.
Madaba may best be described as a village of what, in England, we should call "squatters." They are Christian exiles from the Moslem town of Kerak, who, about 1880, took possession of a city which had been in ruins some thirteen hundred years, having been devastated, according to a learned monograph upon the subject by the Dominican Père Séjourné, most probably by Chosroes, in his destructive march to or from the north. The present population, of some 900, of whom about two-thirds are Greeks, the rest Latins, occupies a small hill about 100 feet in height, of which almost a third is debris. The new residents, in digging for foundations, have brought to light a great deal that is of extreme interest and, as naturally follows, have destroyed still more. Dr Bliss, referring to the article of Père Séjourné, and describing the town in 1895, observes that certain ruins have disappeared in the meantime, and we, in turn, failed to find others which appear in the sketches of Professor Brünnow, also of 1895.
Madaba is undoubtedly a place very precious to the archæologist; to the merely æsthetic it is disappointing and sad. The ruin, the débris, the desecration, the filth of the last quarter of a century force themselves upon our consciousness to a degree difficult to overcome, and it requires an effort, of which we were little conscious elsewhere, to realise its former dignity. When Joshua was old and well stricken in years it must have been a little discouraging to him to learn that, besides other large tracts of country in this district, "all the plain of Madaba unto Dibân" remained to be possessed. Mesha, King of Dibân, over six hours' ride to the south, mentions upon the famous Moabite stone (897 B.C.) that it belonged to the Israelites in his period, the reign of Omri, but it afterwards passed into the possession of the Moabites, and, still later, into that of the Nabateans, who came hither from the south of Arabia. Madaba withstood Hyrcanus during a siege of six months about a century before Christ, and, during the Christian era, was the seat of a bishopric. Early in the seventh century, like many places on this side of Jordan, it disappears from history.
Madaba must have been a town of some importance, although the space enclosed within its walls was barely a quarter of a mile square. Père Séjourné, the Dominican archæologist, saw gates on the north and east which have disappeared, but indications remain of the existence of four. The population was well provided for as to water, for, in addition to two smaller reservoirs, a pool at the S.W. angle measures 108 yards long, by 103 yards wide, and 13 feet deep. It is now used as a field for the cultivation of tobacco, for as long as it served its original purpose it was the cause of constant feuds with the Bedu. There was a street of columns 150 yards in length. Bliss and Baedeker mention five churches, the Père Curé told us he had evidence of the existence of eight, for which almost disproportionate number the bishopric may account. The piety of to-day takes another form. Schumacher, in a valuable monograph (1895), relates that the former curé, Pater Biever, describing his ten years' experience among the people, related that the hardest things to teach them had been not to bring their sabres and other weapons into church and not to greet him, if they chanced to arrive while service was proceeding, with the usual respectful but loud-voiced, Marhabā jā chūre!—"May thy path be broad, O priest!"
When he enunciated the teaching, "Love your enemies, do good to those that hate you," an old shech called out: "Halt, priest! you can preach that to the old women." In certain respects the people of Madaba stand higher than the Christians west of the Jordan, and offences against morality are very rare—among the genuine Bedu they are almost unknown. Monogamy is the rule in Madaba, though in Kerak, whence the people come, polygamy is found even among Christians, and among others is quite usual.
In matters of peace and warfare they observe the rules of the Bedu, and Schumacher quotes interesting examples of what he truly calls the sound views of honour and manliness, to be noticed even among the wild customs of these children of nature.
Their absolute disregard of the beautiful, their indifference to the abominations of their surroundings, is almost incredible. Chickens and goats defile the most exquisite mosaics; a Corinthian capital, picked up by chance, is inserted between an unhewn stone and a slab of marble; a squalid hut has a carved lintel. Père Séjourné points out that in a small church, which Bliss describes as the most interesting which he visited, an inscription reveals the age of the building, and serves, so to speak, as a point de repère for others. It recites that "the mosaic work of this sanctuary and of the holy house of the altogether pure Sovereign Mother of God has been made by the care and the zeal of this town of Madaba ... in the month of February of the year 674, indication 5"—that is, 362 of our present era. Another church, portions of which have to be sought for in several different dwellings, has been regarded as the cathedral; it is 125 feet long, with aisles twice the breadth of the nave, which is 29 feet, all in Corinthian style.
But the pièce de résistance at Madaba, the goal of the savant's pilgrimage, is the celebrated mosaic—the Madaba map—which, discovered in 1884, was not known to the public till 1897. We were armed with a letter from the Greek patriarch desiring that the Professor and his party might have every assistance in their investigations. We accordingly made our way to the Greek church at the foot of the rising ground upon which the town is built. They had not been aware of our coming, and suggested that, in order that suitable preparations might be made, we should return next day, which was, unfortunately, impossible. By the time that a solid mass of dust and dirt had been laboriously removed (for the means taken for the preservation of the mosaic, render it accessible only in detached sections, each covered by glass) the twilight was so far advanced that we saw it very imperfectly, and are glad therefore not to depend upon our own impressions for a description. It is a map, in fine mosaic, of Palestine, including a part of Lower Egypt, much broken and injured at the edges, and, obviously, reduced in extent. It serves, at present, as part of the flooring of the Greek church, but, on account of its value, as possibly the oldest map of Palestine in existence, it is, very properly, covered in with glass, on a principle strongly resembling a cucumber frame.
The colours, which are various, and arranged with a view to science rather than to art, are as fresh as the day they were laid, and the mosaic is a combination of a map, a picture, and a ground plan.
Père Cléopas, a Greek priest, who is spoken of as the discoverer, although it had been locally known for thirteen years, thus describes it: "The artist was not content to give simply the names of the towns, but, moreover, with careful pains, he shows the form, size, and plan of any town of importance; and further how many doors and gates it has, whether these lie to east or west, what important buildings it contains, what is their style, and what is the old name of the town, as well as that in use; where hills are found and where plains; where rivers and brooks and forests; where springs and where hot springs; where ponds and lakes; where boats and ships; where palms and where bananas; all these, in their natural colours, are exactly indicated upon the map."
It is worth while to give some short account of the Madaba map, not only because the history is interesting in itself, but because it is thoroughly typical of much which happens in this country. The facts are taken from a Mémoire presented by Mons. Clermont-Ganneau to the French Academy, and subsequently published in the Recueil d'Archéologie Orientale.
The discoverer of the mosaic was a Greek monk, of whom the very name has been forgotten, and who, in 1884, communicated the fact to the Greek Patriarch, who took no notice whatever. One feels little regret that this worthy ecclesiastic was, later, exiled to Constantinople, and succeeded by the patriarch Gerasimos, who, in 1890, six years after the original discovery, found the letter, and immediately sent off an architect with orders that the mosaic should be included in the church about to be erected at Madaba. We have the testimony of four monks that, at this time, the mosaic was almost complete, but the intelligent workman destroyed much of it in order to lay the foundations of the church, sacristy, and out-buildings; broke up part to insert a pilaster, and left much of the bordering, with its decorations of biblical imagery, outside. He then returned, with the assurance that the mosaic was unimportant.
Another six years elapsed, and Father Cléopas, librarian of the Greek patriarchate, who chanced to be arranging a visit to Jericho, was prevailed upon by Monsignor Gerasimos, who had never lost interest in the reported discovery, to continue his journey as far as Madaba, in order to report upon it. He returned in January 1897, thirteen years after the original discovery, bringing with him a sketch of the map, and some notes. M. Arvanitaki, a professional map-maker, was at once despatched to make a drawing. He was a Greek, a member of the Astronomical Society of France, and an accomplished linguist, a matter of great importance when abbreviations and contractions had to be correctly rendered. Before his work could be finished the patriarch died, and the geometer, not being new to the little ways of Jerusalem, was about to abandon an undertaking which any succeeding patriarch might possibly repudiate, but was, fortunately, encouraged by the Franciscans, who undertook to translate the MS. of Père Cléopas into French, and to publish the work of the artist in twelve sheets of half-a-metre square. This was successfully accomplished by means of Lumière's orthochromatic plates, and was forwarded to the Academy of France on the 16th of March. The story of the misfortunes of the map was, however, not yet complete. The Greek patriarchate claimed the original drawings, and the negatives were broken on their way to Paris. M. Clermont-Ganneau, however, succeeded in reproducing them, and made them the basis of a communication to the Institute, and so of introducing the valuable "find" to the archæological world.
Meantime, Père Vincent, of the Dominican Order in Jerusalem, had made another drawing, which was published in pamphlet form with a monograph by his learned colleague, Père Lagrange, collaborating with Père Cléopas himself. A further record was made, also early in March, by Père Germer Durand, of the Assumptionist Order, who also laid a complete photograph before the Academy of France, consisting of ten sheets, taken from above, a light scaffolding having been erected for the purpose, an experiment pronounced in the Mémoire as having been "carried out in the most satisfactory manner possible." Within two months, therefore, of the visit of Père Cléopas, the mosaic, neglected for thirteen years, had been the subject of three separate monographs. The representative of the English Palestine Exploration Fund made a visit to Madaba which was wholly unsuccessful, but the German architect, Paul Palmer, of Jerusalem, assisted by a couple of artists, succeeded in triumphing over many difficulties, political as well as mechanical, and has made a reproduction of the map, of the original size and colouring, which now hangs, by the desire of the patriarch, in the Greek School at Jerusalem, where it is accessible to all comers, an object of permanent value to scholars and archæologists.
The discovery has naturally given rise to a vast amount of discussion, and has involved much reconsideration of earlier topographical conclusions. We can never sufficiently regret all that has been so gratuitously lost, although, in Palestine, one necessarily becomes somewhat hardened to losses of the kind. Trustworthy witnesses who saw the map before the mutilation recently inflicted concur in testifying that it originally recorded the position of Ephesus, Smyrna, and Constantinople, showing that it must have included Asia Minor and the Bosphorus.
And so we wrangle and regret; we take long journeys to see this marvel of the science of at least thirteen hundred years ago; we dispute who shall be accounted the first to perceive its worth; what nation first presented the facts to the world; what bearing they have upon the learning of to-day; and, meantime, the name of the discoverer, though he may still be living, is never mentioned, and no one thinks of the human soul that imagined, the human hands that wrought—the nameless Byzantine priest into whose labours we have entered!
CHAPTER IV
MSHATTA
There was so much of interest at Madaba, that we did not succeed in accomplishing the early start we had intended, and even after we were in the saddle, and had picked our way, not without difficulty, among the scattered stones, the middens, the children and dogs and chickens which occupy such open spaces as serve for paths, a native, speaking excellent German, came out of a house to suggest a visit to yet another mosaic pavement. This, however, we reluctantly declined, for, although we had a journey of but five hours in view, the sun was already high, and we had a bare plateau to traverse.
We soon left all traces of town life behind, and in little more than an hour came upon a scene which was, to many of us, a new delight: that of many hundreds of wandering camels in their native surroundings—we had almost said their native element, so different are these creatures from the suffering, melancholy, over-worked, evil-smelling, grumbling brutes to which we are accustomed in Jerusalem. A camel to be seen to advantage requires the primeval spaces for which he was originally designed. He should stand clear against the horizon, however boundless; the background of narrow streets, the human brutality and noise, the mud beneath feet intended for desert sands, are an injustice for which we, and not they, are to blame. Bewildered, tortured, over-driven, he acquires that air of abject dejection which he shares with the London cab-horse, that habit of futile remonstrance which we learn to associate with him, to the entire exclusion of that dignity—an undoubted part of the freedom which is his birthright—that grace, which is inseparable from the surroundings that were his when the original type, never yet adapted to human environment, was first devised.
Camels of all shades of brown and grey were there; camels that had never had their coats disfigured by clipping nor galled with burdens; white camels, almost dazzling against the sapphire sky, the golden plain, the purple hills; baby camels, playful as kittens but with a puppy-like air of solemnity, and more graceful than young colts, because better proportioned as to legs. The Bedu speak of the white camels as "blue," possibly for the same reason that an inhabitant of the Hebrides, when on the sea in stormy weather, will speak of his island by a fictitious name or, after dark, will whistle to his dogs rather than call them by name, for fear of attracting the attention of the Evil One. Many superstitions among Arabs are associated with blue, as again, the Highlander associating them with green, the colour of the fairies, will avoid naming the hue of the grass, calling it blue if adjective be necessary. The Arab puts a blue bead on his horse, a blue necklace on his child; his wife carries blue beads on her market-basket, and one is often hung over the door of the house, especially a new house. So Caliban, in the Oriental story which Shakespeare preserves for us in "The Tempest," speaks of his mother Setebos, the witch, as "a blue-eyed hag" (not "blear-eyed" into which certain commentators have corrected the original); and in a commentary upon an Arabic poem by Al Chirnik, sister of Tarafah, belonging to the early part of the seventh century, a seeress is described as "Hy, the blue-eyed one, from the notorious people of the time of ignorance"—i.e. the period before the revelation of the Moslem faith.
Here and there the vast plain was dotted with the black temporary villages of the Bedu, generally arranged in a circle or square, dooah, around a central space upon which all the tents open, although, with some instinct of sanitation, the drapery was generally raised, both "but and ben," as they say in Scotland. The population seemed to be largely abroad, and every half mile or so we came upon a little group, more or less keeping an eye upon the herds, visible for miles, even to the farthest horizon, where they made long dados of themselves against the cloudless sky. Almost due south of us, each on its own hill, overlooking a Roman road running north and south, are two important ruins—Um Weleed (mother of children) and Um el Kuseir. They are only about half-an-hour apart, and we longed to make the short détour necessary to visit them, but the Professor's face was turned where duty called and we did not venture to propose the expenditure of time. Tristram describes these cities, and others lying along the same route, and thinks they may have been at least Maccabean, for they are obviously much older than the Saracenic khans and the Roman forts, which are alike numerous in the district. He says that in all he looked in vain for any traces of Christian worship but that in each case there were the ruins of a temple, always outside the city, with the entrance to the east, and, wherever the architecture could be determined, of Doric origin; and he speculates as to whether these High Places may have originally served for Baal-worship. Another point which he notes, and which we, later, had opportunities of verifying, is the immense number of cisterns and underground storehouses, still in use by the Bedu for storage of grain and protection of flocks. It is interesting to recall that one of the commands given upon the Moabite stone, which was found but a few hours' journey south west, was "Make for yourselves every man a cistern in his house." The present names of these ruined towns, Um Weleed, Kirbet el-Herri, Zebîb, Um er-Resâs, Um el-Kuseir, and others, are all Arabic, and do not help us in identification, and trace of any other name seldom remains. They must, nevertheless, have been important; Um Weleed, for example, measures half-a-mile in length within the walls, and has suburbs in addition.
Of Ziza, however, where we halted for a short time about four hours after leaving Madaba, we find a clear record in the Roman Notitia, where the name occurs, unchanged by a single letter, as an important military station, "Equites Dalmatici Illyriciani Ziza". Here we found traces of what must have been one of the largest towns of Roman Arabia, the most prominent feature being a great tank of solid masonry, 420 by 330 feet, still larger than that at Madaba, and, although the dry season was far advanced, and the reservoir is much reduced in available extent by debris, containing still a good supply of water. Steps, so wide and shallow as to be accessible even to horses, lead down to the water; many of the single stones are over six feet in length, and the reservoir was fed by an ingenious contrivance which, aided by two sets of strong sluice gates and an embankment of earth and masonry, formerly economised all the water which, in the heavy winter rains, would come rushing along the valley and down the hill side, upon which the town was built. In various parts of the valley there are embankments, to turn the water from other gorges and depressions into this central reservoir, which is also provided with dams in the event of flood, floods being frequent and dangerous in this country, where, in the early rains, the water rushes in torrents along the surface of the baked and hardened earth. In the neighbourhood of such provision for a large population one naturally looks for buildings of importance. Tristram observes that the tank, though of such infinite consequence as is barely conceivable to those who do not know the East, is not defended, pointing to a period of security, when the Dalmatian cavalry swept the surrounding plains and made their headquarters here and, possibly, at Castal. Against the horizon, on the crest of the ridge, are two castles, which we were unable to visit but which were described by Tristram: one a solidly-built fort, apparently Saracenic, although constructed of older materials, which, to judge from the sculpture remaining upon them, may have been the ruins of Byzantine churches, the other, to the east, is, he tells us, in a much more ruinous condition. The present remains seem to be Roman, but show traces of use as a mosque, and among the material are sculptured stones, possibly Byzantine, according to some Persian, as well as fragments of cufic inscriptions. Eastward, again, is the Roman town of Ziza, which includes a strange aggregation such as is found in no country other than Syria. There is a fine Saracenic building, said by the Arabs to have been perfect until the Egyptian invasion of 1832; there are cufic inscriptions and sculptured crosses; an olive mill of basalt; remains of sarcophagi; and a large Christian church, of which one apse still remains standing. All these ruins suffered considerably from the wanton destruction wrought by the Egyptian troops, who, it is said, threw down a very perfect building in the town, and several entire Christian churches. Tristram was the first European to visit Mshatta and Castal as well as Ziza; the last, at the suggestion of Zadam, the son of the great shech of the Beni Sakr, the local tribe of Bedu, who, by the intervention of Klein, the German missionary famous for the discovery of the Moabite stone, accompanied Tristram as companion, and protector of the expedition. The ruins appear to have been previously pointed out to Captain, now Sir Charles, Warren, the representative of the Palestine Exploration Fund, who, however, made no investigation, so that it fell to the share of Tristram to be the discoverer of Mshatta, one of the most remarkable architectural monuments in the world.
It was with ever-increasing eagerness of expectation that we hastened on, after asking our way from some railway workmen—Europeans—who were living in tents among the ruins, and who spoke a polyglot of Arabic, French, and Italian. Within a few minutes we crossed the line upon which they were engaged, intended—strange anachronism!—to connect Damascus with Mecca, an undertaking for which the Turkish Government deserves the credit of immense perseverance under very difficult conditions. It may be mentioned, in passing, as also to their credit, that they are now rapidly carrying out the line from Haifa northwards, undertaken some years ago by the English, and which—after the whole district had been surveyed, the line planned by the skill of Dr Schumacher, the German-American Vice-Consul at Haifa, and the work, in the hands of an English engineer and English foreman, had made some progress—was mysteriously abandoned, to the serious loss of many of the employés.
It is of this railway that Professor George Adam Smith prognosticated so hopefully, as being the most important material innovation from the West. "... Not only will it open up the most fertile parts of the country, and bring back European civilisation to where it once was supreme—on the east of Jordan—but, if ever European arms return to the country—as in a contest for Egypt or for the Holy Places when may they not return?—this railway, running from the coast across the central battlefield of Palestine, will be of immense strategic value" ("Hist. Geog. of the Holy Land," p. 20).
At the point where we cross the line the rails are not yet in place, but the iron monster will soon be here—fit symbol of an age which mocks the time that is, but creates few monuments which shall defy the time that shall be; which enables the curious to gaze at the wonders of the past, but leaves him no leisure to initiate what may survive our race, and speak, as do the ruins of Moab, to an age and a people of a distant future. We come on the wings of steam, and with all the miracles of science, but we leave no trace but unsightly heaps and a scar upon the face of the landscape. We were glad, some of us, when we had reached and crossed the unshamed anachronism, and, forgetting the noise that would break the silence of the plain, the smoke that would soil its purity, the advertisement, the competition, with their attendant vulgarity and vice, we could throw ourselves again into the arms of Nature, and listen to the voices of our Mother Earth.
It seemed far more in keeping with our mood of the moment when, an hour or so later, we crossed the Haj (pilgrim) Road from Damascus to Mecca; the road, or rather aggregation of paths, some hundreds of parallel tracks, dispersed over a width of 1000 yards, alternately dividing and amalgamating, over which, for some twelve hundred years, the followers of the Prophet have passed to the visible centre and cradle of their faith. It is possible that the sons of Isaac may have trodden this very path on their way from the desert to the land of promise, for here there can be little variation in roadways, as they are determined not by mountain passes or choice of gradient, but by the presence of water. The shech of the district is responsible for the safe conduct of the pilgrimage across his territory, and it is at their own risk that any wander from the caravan. It is not many years since a body of pilgrims, tempted by some vision of a nearer route, had to be followed up when they did not reappear. A few only were saved, but two hundred perished from thirst, and one shudders to think of the possible animal suffering involved, although, happily, most would be mounted on the long-enduring camel. The Professor told us that at times, when his caravan had lost its way in the desert at night, his mukaris would stoop down and scoop up a handful of sand some two or three inches deep, which they would smell for traces of camel droppings, showing, when they were deeper than a possible surface accident, that the travellers were on the timeworn track.
Almost involuntarily we drew rein, and paused, with mingled feelings, before this record of human emotions. Five times a day every good Moslem must turn toward Mecca, and once in a lifetime, if possible, he must journey thither in pilgrimage, either personally or by proxy. The road is strewn with the bones not only of animals but of men, who have fallen by the way, from thirst or exhaustion, it may be, or from plague and the cholera, which so constantly dog their footsteps. The Arabs have a story that a good Derwish in Mecca begged the leader of the pilgrimage to take the cholera away with him from a place where so many holy men were daily perishing. "But," said the Haj, "there are many good men in Jerusalem, whom we can ill spare!" "Well," said the Derwish, "take it, anyway, and if Allah does not want it in Jerusalem He will send it on elsewhere"; and that, says history, as well as tradition, has happened annually ever since, for though Jerusalem is left untouched, the dread cholera accompanies the returning pilgrims almost every season, and is seldom far away from the track which lay before us.
Although many now avail themselves of the steamers on the Red Sea and Persian Gulf, thousands assemble every year at Damascus, where the holy tent of the caravan is kept, and large numbers still come, even from Circassia, Central Asia, and Northern Africa, in order to make the orthodox journey in its entirety. Formerly it was reckoned as lasting twenty-seven days but, owing to various mitigations in the difficulty of travel, the time tends, every year, to become shorter. Nevertheless, the Arabs have a saying which expresses a journey of indefinite length (much as we say "to go to Jericho"): "To go to the gate of God"; (Bab-el Allah) the gate that is, at the end of the Meidân, the suburb of Damascus, where the pilgrimage assembles, known as Bawâbet Allâh.
Though, in these days when, even among Moslems, the tendency shows itself to minimise the duties of life, and many only contribute to the cost of the general pilgrimage, and compromise with conscience by a mere payment in money, nevertheless, even yet, custom, superstition, temporary advantage, hereditary conventionality or, it may be, pious instinct, religious fervour, cosmic yearning, avail now, as in all ages, to the direction of human conduct, and the parallel tracks are still well trodden. To us, who can enter in part only into the spirit of the East—its absolute faith in predestination, in the predetermination of salvation or perdition, in the irrelevance between religion and conduct, in the resignation which seems to us so utterly without hope, in its limitation of the relations between Man and God, its perpetual ascription of praise with but little margin for intercession—the whole position is a great mystery, and in the tramp, tramp of thousands of feet, which seems to us to echo wearily through vast avenues of time, we find it difficult to catch any note of love, or hope, or aspiration. They carry an inevitable burden of human sorrow, which is no fit offering at such a shrine as theirs; they have hopes and fears and human longings which they may confide to none but human hearts: God is great; there is no god but God; all that befalls them is already decreed; and the pilgrimage is to His glory and in no sense for their own consolation. Browning's Epistle of an Arab Physician recurred to the mind of some among us, with the startled utterance of the Syrian contemporary of Jesus of Nazareth:
Thus dreaming, we journeyed on, still over vast spaces with dim horizons, bounded by low ranges of hills, showing in deep purple against the cloudless, sapphire sky.
Suddenly all was changed! We were no longer among the unsatisfied yearnings of pilgrimage but the companions of that youngest brother in the fairy tales, whose long journeyings had so often entered into our dream of the distant lands, for were we not drawing up at the gate of the Enchanted Palace, more beautiful than any dream, more deeply mysterious than the wonders of the Arabian Nights?
Truly the place was under a spell—here in this wide wilderness, an unfinished dream of the sculptor of a giant age, stood the Castle of Mshatta; far exceeding any description which we had read or heard; paralysing us with such awe of its beauty and mystery as seldom seizes one before the work of Man; its immensity, its majesty, the unique perfection of its workmanship, above all, its silence, its absolute mystery, seeming in unison with the vast works of Nature all around, rather than with any conception of a merely human mind.
We were speechless in presence of this monument of a race to which we could give no name, of a purpose at which we could not even guess, of aspirations never fulfilled, hopes never realised.
Tristram, after his second visit in the year 1872, returned to England, declaring that the whole question continued to be an insoluble mystery. Even the name gave no clue, and such meaning as it may even have had as Um shita, "mother of winter," presumably so called as affording winter shelter for the flocks, is now subtracted, for although the spelling of Mashita or Meshita has been employed up to the present, even by the precise Baedeker in his English edition of 1900, the derivation is now declared fanciful, and Mshatta the more accurate rendering of the name.
That the problem is a difficult one is the more obvious from the very fact that it has none of the complications which beset the archæologist elsewhere. There have been no subtractions, no accretions, no changes. Hardly a ruin remains in Syria where Moslem zeal has not destroyed its sculptured imagery. Here all is perfect as when the artist laid down his chisel. Not a detail is defaced; the few stones which may have been removed have in no degree marred its completeness; its position has been its protection; far alike from the ignorant zeal of the fellahin Moslem, from the misdirected industry of the town Christian, it has inherited none of the blessings of civilisation. It is still the "unravished bride of quietness." As Tristram has well said: "Too proud to cultivate, happily too careless to destroy, the incurious Bedawin has roamed over its rich pasture lands: never tempted to loosen a stone, for he needs no building materials, and content if the old cisterns and arches afford a shelter in winter for his flocks."
In the wonderful façade upwards of fifty animals, exquisitely sculptured, in every variety of attitude, still quench their thirst in pairs, bending opposite each other, over a graceful vase; their outline, their very motion perfectly rendered; lions, lynxes, panthers, gazelle, buffaloes; here is a man with a dog, there a man carries a basket of fruit; birds hover; peacocks, storks, partridges, parrots, vaunt their beauty, with the grace of the models from which they were drawn, in days when we were living in wattled huts. The more conventional outlines—the cornices and mouldings, the continuous vandyke, with a great rose boss at every angle—although strikingly unfamiliar, are eminently satisfying to the eye, and the wonderful realism of the flowers, grapes, and vine-leaves, which fill up every remaining inch of the façade, is like a dream of Grinling Gibbon carved out in massive stone.
Where, unless in the Alhambra, or (as we learn from Fergusson, De Vogüe, Dieulafoy, and other authorities on Persian art) in remote parts of Persia, can we find anything in the least comparable to the bewildering richness of the designs which have blossomed for us here in the wilderness?—far, not only from mankind, but from such gifts of nature as would make possible the presence of mankind; where, for lack of water, even the rich soil of the great tableland cannot be cultivated, and the district must for ever remain, as it has ever been, a desert! The Arabs have no traditions of this place, as they have of so many other ruins, and they do not even ascribe its foundation to Saladdin or the Khalifs, to whom all that is great is almost invariably assigned. Can a building covered with human and animal designs owe its origin to the Moslem, to whom all such representations were forbidden? Although Thompson, the author of "The Land and the Book," proposed to consider the ruins as those of a church and convent, there is, apart from all other difficulties as to size, plan, and position, no single indication of Christian workmanship or symbol. Were the Romans likely to build a sumptuous Oriental palace in a lonely desert, far from any military road? If the Bedawy, the wandering Ishmaelite, sole denizen of deserts such as this, were for once to depart from his normal style of architecture—two or three poles and a piece of cloth—is it likely that his descendants would have preserved no tradition of so extraordinary a deviation?
One solution offered is, nevertheless, that it was the work of Byzantine architects, employed by the desert tribes, notably the Beni Sakr, in the days when they were rich with the subsidies paid to them by the Romans for protection of their colonies and forts and roads from the encroachments of other enemies of the desert; that it was never intended as a place of residence but merely for the reception of ambassadors, who were to be over-awed, partly by the miracle of this rose of the wilderness, partly by the skill shown in the triumph over niggard Nature; or, in the event of this being insufficient, were to be separated from their steeds, and presented with free house room until hunger, thirst, and loneliness should make them amenable. Whether the work remained incomplete from paucity of money or of ambassadors, is not revealed.
Another solution, of which Fergusson is the originator, is that it was the work of the Persian king, Chosroes II., who, between the years 611 and 614, overran the whole of Northern Syria and Asia Minor. Gibbon's enumeration, gathered from contemporary authors (Gibbon's "Decline and Fall," Chap. x. 701), of his 20,000 camels and 3000 concubines, his 960 elephants and 6000 horses, suggests, at least, that he had the money for the building of artistic palaces, and the fact that he spent the years of his youth at Hierapolis, where he had ample opportunity for studying the art and culture of Asia Minor, may suggest, further, that he possibly had the taste. These kings of the Sassanian dynasty were, indeed, noted for their love of architecture, and the Court favourite of Chosroes II., Ferhad, was an architect. A drawing of an ancient bas-relief at Shiraz, to be seen at the Institute of British Architects, presents Chosroes as slaying a lion, while his fair favourite, Shireen, watches Ferhad sculpturing birds and foliage upon a rock. Some forty or fifty Sassanian bas-reliefs, sculptured pictures such as those at Mshatta, still remain in various places. Moreover, we learn that Chosroes II. had thousands of Greek and Syrian slaves, whom he employed in the construction of sumptuous buildings. The site of Mshatta might well lie in his route between Damascus and the Nile. (See Chap. iii. p. 53.)
The sudden arrest of the work—one stone west of the entrance gate has been just laid down beside the place prepared for it, many stones have the sculpture incomplete, or merely indicated, we saw slabs upon which tentative sketches of horses had been made—might be accounted for by the fact that, in 623, the Emperor Heraclius, "the Roman eagle swooping magnificently in her dying throes," compelled Chosroes, after only, at the utmost, fourteen years of power in Syria, to recall his troops from Egypt, Syria, and Asia Minor, and though, for four years, the strife was fierce between Persian and Roman, the latter ultimately triumphed, and Chosroes died miserably in a dungeon. Barely ten years later the Romans were banished by the Saracens.
The learned Professor Brünnow has made the suggestion that this building originated with the Ghassanides, the Beni Jafn, who migrated from Yemen in the first Christian century and, having been made, by the Romans, wardens of the marches of the Empire, developed later into an important dynasty; submitting even to the civilising influences of Christianity, for, in 180, Amir I. founded a monastery in Haurân. Brünnow observed the same vandyke pattern, which, however, is in itself a somewhat elementary design, upon a water jar in Jaulan, a district considerably north of Mshatta, but where, he observes, the Ghassanides were at home. Although the jar was modern it was conceivably copied from an ancient design, as was, undoubtedly, another standing beside it. Moreover, he found a pattern of double vandykes—that is, of squares joined at the corners, upon a frieze in the same district. Other archæologists object that certain details cannot be older than Justinian, when Arabian kings held no sway near the Jordan, others doubt whether the Arabian kings ever extended their power into this unquestionably Roman province. To the mere layman it seems so probable that a row of vandykes was the first thing that Adam drew with a stick upon the sand, that he fails to find in it anything distinctive enough to form the basis of a historical or architectural theory.
The entrance, with its magnificent façade, is to the south, the sculpture, extending over 156 feet in the centre of the face, is broken by a gateway, and rises to the height of 18 feet. Behind this is a quadrangle, 170 yards square, at each angle a round bastion, and five others, semicircular, between them. On the south front alone there are six, the central gateway being flanked by two, boldly octagonal, and magnificently sculptured. The interior is best described as being divided into three portions, by parallel lines running north and south, the side ones about 46, the centre about 66, yards in width. The centre one has been divided into three sections; that nearest the gate, which is portioned into many chambers, was probably intended for a guard house; the second may have been an open space, with a fountain, and the third or northernmost was the palace itself. This consists of brick walls, resting on three courses of stone, the bricks, of somewhat curious form, resembling, it is said, those of no known building, except a ruined palace north-east of Damascus, described by Tyrwhitt Drake and Sir Richard Burton. They are like Roman tiles, but larger and thinner, 3 inches thick and about 18 inches square. The palace is divided into twenty-four rooms, the entrance hall being about 50 feet square, four others being perhaps two-thirds of that size. The entrance is through a wide doorway, with massive pilasters and elaborate capitals, with ornamentation, possibly, of Persian or Egyptian—certainly not of Greek—design. Architects have perplexed themselves over the problem, still unsolved, as to how the palace was lighted, as there is not a single window from without, and within only a few small round openings over the doors. Bliss, of Beirut, the distinguished American archæologist, conjectures that the large halls were unroofed, and that the smaller rooms opened upon them, a plan quite consistent with the Oriental conception of a house, originally derived from tents opening into a central space, and developing, first into rooms opening into a court, and, later, into the modern house, in which all rooms on both floors open into a leewan, or central apartment.
Naturally, all these observations were made later, for it was our privilege to remain for some nights within the palace walls, where, amid kind and hospitable friends, and in comfortable tents, bearing the familiar initials T. I. W. (Thames Iron Works), relics of the abandoned English railway, we found leisure to rest and to dream. Some of us found the spell of fairyland so strong that little else than dream seemed possible. Never, perhaps, so loud as here, did we "hear the East a-calling,"