The Innocents Abroad

M >> Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) >> The Innocents Abroad


Shortly after six, our pack train arrived. I had not seen it before, and
a good right I had to be astonished. We had nineteen serving men and
twenty-six pack mules! It was a perfect caravan. It looked like one,
too, as it wound among the rocks. I wondered what in the very mischief
we wanted with such a vast turn-out as that, for eight men. I wondered
awhile, but soon I began to long for a tin plate, and some bacon and
beans. I had camped out many and many a time before, and knew just what
was coming. I went off, without waiting for serving men, and unsaddled
my horse, and washed such portions of his ribs and his spine as projected
through his hide, and when I came back, behold five stately circus tents
were up--tents that were brilliant, within, with blue, and gold, and
crimson, and all manner of splendid adornment! I was speechless. Then
they brought eight little iron bedsteads, and set them up in the tents;
they put a soft mattress and pillows and good blankets and two snow-white
sheets on each bed. Next, they rigged a table about the centre-pole, and
on it placed pewter pitchers, basins, soap, and the whitest of towels
--one set for each man; they pointed to pockets in the tent, and said we
could put our small trifles in them for convenience, and if we needed
pins or such things, they were sticking every where. Then came the
finishing touch--they spread carpets on the floor! I simply said, "If
you call this camping out, all right--but it isn't the style I am used
to; my little baggage that I brought along is at a discount."

It grew dark, and they put candles on the tables--candles set in bright,
new, brazen candlesticks. And soon the bell--a genuine, simon-pure bell
--rang, and we were invited to "the saloon." I had thought before that
we had a tent or so too many, but now here was one, at least, provided
for; it was to be used for nothing but an eating-saloon. Like the
others, it was high enough for a family of giraffes to live in, and was
very handsome and clean and bright-colored within. It was a gem of a
place. A table for eight, and eight canvas chairs; a table-cloth and
napkins whose whiteness and whose fineness laughed to scorn the things we
were used to in the great excursion steamer; knives and forks,
soup-plates, dinner-plates--every thing, in the handsomest kind of
style. It was wonderful! And they call this camping out. Those
stately fellows in baggy trowsers and turbaned fezzes brought in a
dinner which consisted of roast mutton, roast chicken, roast goose,
potatoes, bread, tea, pudding, apples, and delicious grapes; the viands
were better cooked than any we had eaten for weeks, and the table made a
finer appearance, with its large German silver candlesticks and other
finery, than any table we had sat down to for a good while, and yet that
polite dragoman, Abraham, came bowing in and apologizing for the whole
affair, on account of the unavoidable confusion of getting under way for
a very long trip, and promising to do a great deal better in future!

It is midnight, now, and we break camp at six in the morning.

They call this camping out. At this rate it is a glorious privilege to
be a pilgrim to the Holy Land.




CHAPTER XLII.

We are camped near Temnin-el-Foka--a name which the boys have simplified
a good deal, for the sake of convenience in spelling. They call it
Jacksonville. It sounds a little strangely, here in the Valley of
Lebanon, but it has the merit of being easier to remember than the Arabic
name.

"COME LIKE SPIRITS, SO DEPART."

"The night shall be filled with music,
And the cares that infest the day
Shall fold their tents like the Arabs,
And as silently steal away."

I slept very soundly last night, yet when the dragoman's bell rang at
half-past five this morning and the cry went abroad of "Ten minutes to
dress for breakfast!" I heard both. It surprised me, because I have not
heard the breakfast gong in the ship for a month, and whenever we have
had occasion to fire a salute at daylight, I have only found it out in
the course of conversation afterward. However, camping out, even though
it be in a gorgeous tent, makes one fresh and lively in the morning
--especially if the air you are breathing is the cool, fresh air of the
mountains.

I was dressed within the ten minutes, and came out. The saloon tent had
been stripped of its sides, and had nothing left but its roof; so when we
sat down to table we could look out over a noble panorama of mountain,
sea and hazy valley. And sitting thus, the sun rose slowly up and
suffused the picture with a world of rich coloring.

Hot mutton chops, fried chicken, omelettes, fried potatoes and coffee
--all excellent. This was the bill of fare. It was sauced with a savage
appetite purchased by hard riding the day before, and refreshing sleep in
a pure atmosphere. As I called for a second cup of coffee, I glanced
over my shoulder, and behold our white village was gone--the splendid
tents had vanished like magic! It was wonderful how quickly those Arabs
had "folded their tents;" and it was wonderful, also, how quickly they
had gathered the thousand odds and ends of the camp together and
disappeared with them.

By half-past six we were under way, and all the Syrian world seemed to be
under way also. The road was filled with mule trains and long
processions of camels. This reminds me that we have been trying for some
time to think what a camel looks like, and now we have made it out. When
he is down on all his knees, flat on his breast to receive his load, he
looks something like a goose swimming; and when he is upright he looks
like an ostrich with an extra set of legs. Camels are not beautiful, and
their long under lip gives them an exceedingly "gallus"--[Excuse the
slang, no other word will describe it]--expression. They have immense,
flat, forked cushions of feet, that make a track in the dust like a pie
with a slice cut out of it. They are not particular about their diet.
They would eat a tombstone if they could bite it. A thistle grows about
here which has needles on it that would pierce through leather, I think;
if one touches you, you can find relief in nothing but profanity. The
camels eat these. They show by their actions that they enjoy them. I
suppose it would be a real treat to a camel to have a keg of nails for
supper.

While I am speaking of animals, I will mention that I have a horse now by
the name of "Jericho." He is a mare. I have seen remarkable horses
before, but none so remarkable as this. I wanted a horse that could shy,
and this one fills the bill. I had an idea that shying indicated spirit.
If I was correct, I have got the most spirited horse on earth. He shies
at every thing he comes across, with the utmost impartiality. He appears
to have a mortal dread of telegraph poles, especially; and it is
fortunate that these are on both sides of the road, because as it is now,
I never fall off twice in succession on the same side. If I fell on the
same side always, it would get to be monotonous after a while. This
creature has scared at every thing he has seen to-day, except a haystack.
He walked up to that with an intrepidity and a recklessness that were
astonishing. And it would fill any one with admiration to see how he
preserves his self-possession in the presence of a barley sack. This
dare-devil bravery will be the death of this horse some day.

He is not particularly fast, but I think he will get me through the Holy
Land. He has only one fault. His tail has been chopped off or else he
has sat down on it too hard, some time or other, and he has to fight the
flies with his heels. This is all very well, but when he tries to kick a
fly off the top of his head with his hind foot, it is too much variety.
He is going to get himself into trouble that way some day. He reaches
around and bites my legs too. I do not care particularly about that,
only I do not like to see a horse too sociable.

I think the owner of this prize had a wrong opinion about him. He had an
idea that he was one of those fiery, untamed steeds, but he is not of
that character. I know the Arab had this idea, because when he brought
the horse out for inspection in Beirout, he kept jerking at the bridle
and shouting in Arabic, "Ho! will you? Do you want to run away, you
ferocious beast, and break your neck?" when all the time the horse was
not doing anything in the world, and only looked like he wanted to lean
up against something and think. Whenever he is not shying at things, or
reaching after a fly, he wants to do that yet. How it would surprise his
owner to know this.

We have been in a historical section of country all day. At noon we
camped three hours and took luncheon at Mekseh, near the junction of the
Lebanon Mountains and the Jebel el Kuneiyiseh, and looked down into the
immense, level, garden-like Valley of Lebanon. To-night we are camping
near the same valley, and have a very wide sweep of it in view. We can
see the long, whale-backed ridge of Mount Hermon projecting above the
eastern hills. The "dews of Hermon" are falling upon us now, and the
tents are almost soaked with them.

Over the way from us, and higher up the valley, we can discern, through
the glasses, the faint outlines of the wonderful ruins of Baalbec, the
supposed Baal-Gad of Scripture. Joshua, and another person, were the two
spies who were sent into this land of Canaan by the children of Israel to
report upon its character--I mean they were the spies who reported
favorably. They took back with them some specimens of the grapes of this
country, and in the children's picture-books they are always represented
as bearing one monstrous bunch swung to a pole between them, a
respectable load for a pack-train. The Sunday-school books exaggerated
it a little. The grapes are most excellent to this day, but the bunches
are not as large as those in the pictures. I was surprised and hurt when
I saw them, because those colossal bunches of grapes were one of my most
cherished juvenile traditions.

Joshua reported favorably, and the children of Israel journeyed on, with
Moses at the head of the general government, and Joshua in command of the
army of six hundred thousand fighting men. Of women and children and
civilians there was a countless swarm. Of all that mighty host, none but
the two faithful spies ever lived to set their feet in the Promised Land.
They and their descendants wandered forty years in the desert, and then
Moses, the gifted warrior, poet, statesman and philosopher, went up into
Pisgah and met his mysterious fate. Where he was buried no man knows
--for

"* * * no man dug that sepulchre,
And no man saw it e'er
--For the Sons of God upturned the sod
And laid the dead man there!"

Then Joshua began his terrible raid, and from Jericho clear to this
Baal-Gad, he swept the land like the Genius of Destruction. He
slaughtered the people, laid waste their soil, and razed their cities to
the ground. He wasted thirty-one kings also. One may call it that,
though really it can hardly be called wasting them, because there were
always plenty of kings in those days, and to spare. At any rate, he
destroyed thirty-one kings, and divided up their realms among his
Israelites. He divided up this valley stretched out here before us, and
so it was once Jewish territory. The Jews have long since disappeared
from it, however.

Back yonder, an hour's journey from here, we passed through an Arab
village of stone dry-goods boxes (they look like that,) where Noah's tomb
lies under lock and key. [Noah built the ark.] Over these old hills and
valleys the ark that contained all that was left of a vanished world once
floated.

I make no apology for detailing the above information. It will be news
to some of my readers, at any rate.

Noah's tomb is built of stone, and is covered with a long stone building.
Bucksheesh let us in. The building had to be long, because the grave of
the honored old navigator is two hundred and ten feet long itself! It is
only about four feet high, though. He must have cast a shadow like a
lightning-rod. The proof that this is the genuine spot where Noah was
buried can only be doubted by uncommonly incredulous people. The
evidence is pretty straight. Shem, the son of Noah, was present at the
burial, and showed the place to his descendants, who transmitted the
knowledge to their descendants, and the lineal descendants of these
introduced themselves to us to-day. It was pleasant to make the
acquaintance of members of so respectable a family. It was a thing to be
proud of. It was the next thing to being acquainted with Noah himself.

Noah's memorable voyage will always possess a living interest for me,
henceforward.

If ever an oppressed race existed, it is this one we see fettered around
us under the inhuman tyranny of the Ottoman Empire. I wish Europe would
let Russia annihilate Turkey a little--not much, but enough to make it
difficult to find the place again without a divining-rod or a
diving-bell. The Syrians are very poor, and yet they are ground down by
a system of taxation that would drive any other nation frantic. Last
year their taxes were heavy enough, in all conscience--but this year
they have been increased by the addition of taxes that were forgiven
them in times of famine in former years. On top of this the Government
has levied a tax of one-tenth of the whole proceeds of the land. This
is only half the story. The Pacha of a Pachalic does not trouble
himself with appointing tax-collectors. He figures up what all these
taxes ought to amount to in a certain district. Then he farms the
collection out. He calls the rich men together, the highest bidder gets
the speculation, pays the Pacha on the spot, and then sells out to
smaller fry, who sell in turn to a piratical horde of still smaller fry.
These latter compel the peasant to bring his little trifle of grain to
the village, at his own cost. It must be weighed, the various taxes set
apart, and the remainder returned to the producer. But the collector
delays this duty day after day, while the producer's family are
perishing for bread; at last the poor wretch, who can not but understand
the game, says, "Take a quarter--take half--take two-thirds if you will,
and let me go!" It is a most outrageous state of things.

These people are naturally good-hearted and intelligent, and with
education and liberty, would be a happy and contented race. They often
appeal to the stranger to know if the great world will not some day come
to their relief and save them. The Sultan has been lavishing money like
water in England and Paris, but his subjects are suffering for it now.

This fashion of camping out bewilders me. We have boot-jacks and a
bath-tub, now, and yet all the mysteries the pack-mules carry are not
revealed. What next?




CHAPTER XLIII.

We had a tedious ride of about five hours, in the sun, across the Valley
of Lebanon. It proved to be not quite so much of a garden as it had
seemed from the hill-sides. It was a desert, weed-grown waste, littered
thickly with stones the size of a man's fist. Here and there the natives
had scratched the ground and reared a sickly crop of grain, but for the
most part the valley was given up to a handful of shepherds, whose flocks
were doing what they honestly could to get a living, but the chances were
against them. We saw rude piles of stones standing near the roadside, at
intervals, and recognized the custom of marking boundaries which obtained
in Jacob's time. There were no walls, no fences, no hedges--nothing to
secure a man's possessions but these random heaps of stones. The
Israelites held them sacred in the old patriarchal times, and these other
Arabs, their lineal descendants, do so likewise. An American, of
ordinary intelligence, would soon widely extend his property, at an
outlay of mere manual labor, performed at night, under so loose a system
of fencing as this.

The plows these people use are simply a sharpened stick, such as Abraham
plowed with, and they still winnow their wheat as he did--they pile it on
the house-top, and then toss it by shovel-fulls into the air until the
wind has blown all the chaff away. They never invent any thing, never
learn any thing.

We had a fine race, of a mile, with an Arab perched on a camel. Some of
the horses were fast, and made very good time, but the camel scampered by
them without any very great effort. The yelling and shouting, and
whipping and galloping, of all parties interested, made it an
exhilarating, exciting, and particularly boisterous race.

At eleven o'clock, our eyes fell upon the walls and columns of Baalbec, a
noble ruin whose history is a sealed book. It has stood there for
thousands of years, the wonder and admiration of travelers; but who built
it, or when it was built, are questions that may never be answered. One
thing is very sure, though. Such grandeur of design, and such grace of
execution, as one sees in the temples of Baalbec, have not been equaled
or even approached in any work of men's hands that has been built within
twenty centuries past.

The great Temple of the Sun, the Temple of Jupiter, and several smaller
temples, are clustered together in the midst of one of these miserable
Syrian villages, and look strangely enough in such plebeian company.
These temples are built upon massive substructions that might support a
world, almost; the materials used are blocks of stone as large as an
omnibus--very few, if any of them, are smaller than a carpenter's tool
chest--and these substructions are traversed by tunnels of masonry
through which a train of cars might pass. With such foundations as
these, it is little wonder that Baalbec has lasted so long. The Temple
of the Sun is nearly three hundred feet long and one hundred and sixty
feet wide. It had fifty-four columns around it, but only six are
standing now--the others lie broken at its base, a confused and
picturesque heap. The six columns are their bases, Corinthian capitals
and entablature--and six more shapely columns do not exist. The columns
and the entablature together are ninety feet high--a prodigious altitude
for shafts of stone to reach, truly--and yet one only thinks of their
beauty and symmetry when looking at them; the pillars look slender and
delicate, the entablature, with its elaborate sculpture, looks like rich
stucco-work. But when you have gazed aloft till your eyes are weary, you
glance at the great fragments of pillars among which you are standing,
and find that they are eight feet through; and with them lie beautiful
capitals apparently as large as a small cottage; and also single slabs of
stone, superbly sculptured, that are four or five feet thick, and would
completely cover the floor of any ordinary parlor. You wonder where
these monstrous things came from, and it takes some little time to
satisfy yourself that the airy and graceful fabric that towers above your
head is made up of their mates. It seems too preposterous.

The Temple of Jupiter is a smaller ruin than the one I have been speaking
of, and yet is immense. It is in a tolerable state of preservation. One
row of nine columns stands almost uninjured. They are sixty-five feet
high and support a sort of porch or roof, which connects them with the
roof of the building. This porch-roof is composed of tremendous slabs of
stone, which are so finely sculptured on the under side that the work
looks like a fresco from below. One or two of these slabs had fallen,
and again I wondered if the gigantic masses of carved stone that lay
about me were no larger than those above my head. Within the temple, the
ornamentation was elaborate and colossal. What a wonder of architectural
beauty and grandeur this edifice must have been when it was new! And
what a noble picture it and its statelier companion, with the chaos of
mighty fragments scattered about them, yet makes in the moonlight!

I can not conceive how those immense blocks of stone were ever hauled
from the quarries, or how they were ever raised to the dizzy heights they
occupy in the temples. And yet these sculptured blocks are trifles in
size compared with the rough-hewn blocks that form the wide verandah or
platform which surrounds the Great Temple. One stretch of that platform,
two hundred feet long, is composed of blocks of stone as large, and some
of them larger, than a street-car. They surmount a wall about ten or
twelve feet high. I thought those were large rocks, but they sank into
insignificance compared with those which formed another section of the
platform. These were three in number, and I thought that each of them
was about as long as three street cars placed end to end, though of
course they are a third wider and a third higher than a street car.
Perhaps two railway freight cars of the largest pattern, placed end to
end, might better represent their size. In combined length these three
stones stretch nearly two hundred feet; they are thirteen feet square;
two of them are sixty-four feet long each, and the third is sixty-nine.
They are built into the massive wall some twenty feet above the ground.
They are there, but how they got there is the question. I have seen the
hull of a steamboat that was smaller than one of those stones. All these
great walls are as exact and shapely as the flimsy things we build of
bricks in these days. A race of gods or of giants must have inhabited
Baalbec many a century ago. Men like the men of our day could hardly
rear such temples as these.

We went to the quarry from whence the stones of Baalbec were taken. It
was about a quarter of a mile off, and down hill. In a great pit lay the
mate of the largest stone in the ruins. It lay there just as the giants
of that old forgotten time had left it when they were called hence--just
as they had left it, to remain for thousands of years, an eloquent rebuke
unto such as are prone to think slightingly of the men who lived before
them. This enormous block lies there, squared and ready for the
builders' hands--a solid mass fourteen feet by seventeen, and but a few
inches less than seventy feet long! Two buggies could be driven abreast
of each other, on its surface, from one end of it to the other, and leave
room enough for a man or two to walk on either side.

One might swear that all the John Smiths and George Wilkinsons, and all
the other pitiful nobodies between Kingdom Come and Baalbec would
inscribe their poor little names upon the walls of Baalbec's magnificent
ruins, and would add the town, the county and the State they came from
--and swearing thus, be infallibly correct. It is a pity some great ruin
does not fall in and flatten out some of these reptiles, and scare their
kind out of ever giving their names to fame upon any walls or monuments
again, forever.

Properly, with the sorry relics we bestrode, it was a three days' journey
to Damascus. It was necessary that we should do it in less than two.
It was necessary because our three pilgrims would not travel on the
Sabbath day. We were all perfectly willing to keep the Sabbath day, but
there are times when to keep the letter of a sacred law whose spirit is
righteous, becomes a sin, and this was a case in point. We pleaded for
the tired, ill-treated horses, and tried to show that their faithful
service deserved kindness in return, and their hard lot compassion. But
when did ever self-righteousness know the sentiment of pity? What were a
few long hours added to the hardships of some over-taxed brutes when
weighed against the peril of those human souls? It was not the most
promising party to travel with and hope to gain a higher veneration for
religion through the example of its devotees. We said the Saviour who
pitied dumb beasts and taught that the ox must be rescued from the mire
even on the Sabbath day, would not have counseled a forced march like
this. We said the "long trip" was exhausting and therefore dangerous in
the blistering heats of summer, even when the ordinary days' stages were
traversed, and if we persisted in this hard march, some of us might be
stricken down with the fevers of the country in consequence of it.
Nothing could move the pilgrims. They must press on. Men might die,
horses might die, but they must enter upon holy soil next week, with no
Sabbath-breaking stain upon them. Thus they were willing to commit a sin
against the spirit of religious law, in order that they might preserve
the letter of it. It was not worth while to tell them "the letter
kills." I am talking now about personal friends; men whom I like; men
who are good citizens; who are honorable, upright, conscientious; but
whose idea of the Saviour's religion seems to me distorted. They lecture
our shortcomings unsparingly, and every night they call us together and
read to us chapters from the Testament that are full of gentleness, of
charity, and of tender mercy; and then all the next day they stick to
their saddles clear up to the summits of these rugged mountains, and
clear down again. Apply the Testament's gentleness, and charity, and
tender mercy to a toiling, worn and weary horse?--Nonsense--these are for
God's human creatures, not His dumb ones. What the pilgrims choose to
do, respect for their almost sacred character demands that I should allow
to pass--but I would so like to catch any other member of the party
riding his horse up one of these exhausting hills once!