The Book of Khalid by Ameen Fares Rihani (best contemporary novels .txt) 📖

The City of Baal, or Baalbek, is between the desert and the deep sea. It lies at the foot of Anti-Libanus, in the sunny plains of Coele-Syria, a day’s march from either Damascus or Beirut. It is a city with a past as romantic as Rome’s, as wicked as Babel’s; its ruins testify both to its glory and its shame. It is a city with a future as brilliant as any New-World city; the railroad at its gate, the modern agricultural implements in its fields, and the porcelain bath-tubs in its hotels, can testify to this. It is a city that enticed and still entices the mighty of the earth; Roman Emperors in the past came to appease the wrath of its gods, a German Emperor to-day comes to pilfer its temples. For the Acropolis in the poplar grove is a mine of ruins. The porphyry pillars, the statues, the tablets, the exquisite friezes, the palimpsests, the bas-reliefs,––Time and the Turks have spared a few of these. And when the German Emperor came, Abd’ul-Hamid blinked, and the Berlin Museum is now the richer for it.

Of the Temple of Jupiter, however, only six standing columns remain; of the Temple of Bacchus only the god and the Bacchantes are missing. And why was the one destroyed, the other preserved, only the 15 six columns, had they a tongue, could tell. Indeed, how many blustering vandals have they conquered, how many savage attacks have they resisted, what wonders and what orgies have they beheld! These six giants of antiquity, looking over Anti-Lebanon in the East, and down upon the meandering Leontes in the South, and across the Syrian steppes in the North, still hold their own against Time and the Elements. They are the dominating feature of the ruins; they tower above them as the Acropolis towers above the surrounding poplars. And around their base, and through the fissures, flows the perennial grace of the seasons. The sun pays tribute to them in gold; the rain, in mosses and ferns; the Spring, in lupine flowers. And the swallows, nesting in the portico of the Temple of Bacchus, above the curious frieze of egg-decoration,––as curious, too, their art of egg-making,––pour around the colossal columns their silvery notes. Surely, these swallows and ferns and lupine flowers are more ancient than the Acropolis. And the marvels of extinct nations can not hold a candle to the marvels of Nature.

Here, under the decaying beauty of Roman art, lies buried the monumental boldness of the Phœnicians, or of a race of giants whose extinction even Homer deplores, and whose name even the Phœnicians could not decipher. For might they not, too, have stood here wondering, guessing, even as we moderns guess and wonder? Might not the Phœnicians have asked the same questions that we ask to-day: Who were the builders? and with what tools? In one of the walls 16 of the Acropolis are stones which a hundred bricklayers can not raise an inch from the ground; and among the ruins of the Temple of Zeus are porphyry pillars, monoliths, which fifty horses could barely move, and the quarry of which is beyond the Syrian desert. There, now, solve the problem for yourself.

Hidden in the grove of silver-tufted poplars is the little Temple of Venus, doomed to keep company with a Mosque. But it is a joy to stand on the bridge above the stream that flows between them, and listen to the muazzen in the minaret and the bulbuls in the Temple. Mohammad calling to Venus, Venus calling to Mohammad––what a romance! We leave the subject to the poet that wants it. Another Laus Veneris to another Swinburne might suggest itself.

An Arab Prophet with the goddess, this time––but the River flows between the Temple and the Mosque. In the city, life is one such picturesque languid stream. The shop-keepers sit on their rugs in their stalls, counting their beads, smoking their narghilahs, waiting indifferently for Allah’s bounties. And the hawkers shuffle along crying their wares in beautiful poetic illusions,––the flower-seller singing, “Reconcile your mother-in-law! Perfume your spirit! Buy a jasmine for your soul!” the seller of loaves, his tray on his head, his arms swinging to a measured step, intoning in pious thankfulness, “O thou Eternal, O thou Bountiful!” The sakka of licorice-juice, clicking his brass cups calls out to the thirsty one, “Come, drink and live! Come, drink and live!” And ere you exclaim, How quaint! How picturesque! a train of 17 laden camels drives you to the wall, rudely shaking your illusion. And the mules and donkeys, tottering under their heavy burdens, upsetting a tray of sweetmeats here, a counter of spices there, must share the narrow street with you and compel you to move along slowly, languidly like themselves. They seem to take Time by the sleeve and say to it, “What’s your hurry?” “These donkeys,” Shakib writes, quoting Khalid, “can teach the strenuous Europeans and hustling Americans a lesson.”

In the City Square, as we issue from the congested windings of the Bazaar, we are greeted by one of those scrub monuments that are found in almost every city of the Ottoman Empire. And in most cases, they are erected to commemorate the benevolence and public zeal of some wali or pasha who must have made a handsome fortune in the promotion of a public enterprise. Be this as it may. It is not our business here to probe the corruption of any particular Government. But we observe that this miserable botch of a monument is to the ruins of the Acropolis, what this modern absolutism, this effete Turkey is to the magnificent tyrannies of yore. Indeed, nothing is duller, more stupid, more prosaic than a modern absolutism as compared with an ancient one. But why concern ourselves with like comparisons? The world is better to-day in spite of its public monuments. These little flights or frights in marble are as snug in their little squares, in front of their little halls, as are the majestic ruins in their poplar groves. In both instances, Nature and Circumstance have harmonised between 18 the subject and the background. Come along. And let the rhymsters chisel on the monument whatever they like about sculptures and the wali. To condemn in this case is to praise.

We issue from the Square into the drive leading to the spring at the foot of the mountain. On the meadows near the stream, is always to be found a group of Baalbekians bibbing arak and swaying languidly to the mellow strains of the lute and the monotonous melancholy of Arabic song. Among such, one occasionally meets with a native who, failing as peddler or merchant in America, returns to his native town, and, utilising the chips of English he picked up in the streets of the New-World cities, becomes a dragoman and guide to English and American tourists.

Now, under this sky, between Anti-Libanus rising near the spring, Rasulain, and the Acropolis towering above the poplars, around these majestic ruins, amidst these fascinating scenes of Nature, Khalid spent the halcyon days of his boyhood. Here he trolled his favourite ditties beating the hoof behind his donkey. For he preferred to be a donkey-boy than to be called a donkey at school. The pedagogue with his drivel and discipline, he could not learn to love. The company of muleteers was much more to his liking. The open air was his school; and everything that riots and rejoices in the open air, he loved. Bulbuls and beetles and butterflies, oxen and donkeys and mules,––these were his playmates and friends. And when he becomes a muleteer, he reaches in his first venture, we are told, the top round of the ladder. This progressive scale 19 in his trading, we observe. Husbanding his resources, he was soon after, by selling his donkey, able to buy a sumpter-mule; a year later he sells his mule and buys a camel; and finally he sells the camel and buys a fine Arab mare, which he gives to a tourist for a hundred pieces of English gold. This is what is called success. And with the tangible symbol of it, the price of his mare, he emigrates to America. But that is to come.

Let us now turn our “stereopticon on the screen of reminiscence,” using the pictures furnished by Shakib. But before they can be used to advantage, they must undergo a process of retroussage. Many of the lines need be softened, some of the shades modified, and not a few of the etchings, absolutely worthless, we consign to the flames. Who of us, for instance, was not feruled and bastinadoed by the town pedagogue? Who did not run away from school, whimpering, snivelling, and cursing in his heart and in his sleep the black-board and the horn-book? Nor can we see the significance of the fact that Khalid once smashed the icon of the Holy Virgin for whetting not his wits, for hearing not his prayers. It may be he was learning then the use of the sling, and instead of killing his neighbour’s laying-hen, he broke the sacred effigy. No, we are not warranted to draw from these trivialities the grand results which send Shakib in ecstasies about his Master’s genius. Nor do we for a moment believe that the waywardness of a genius or a prophet in boyhood is always a significant adumbration. Shakespeare started as a deer-poacher, and 20 Rousseau as a thief. Yet, neither the one nor the other, as far as we know, was a plagiarist. This, however, does not disprove the contrary proposition, that he who begins as a thief or an iconoclast is likely to end as such. But the actuating motive has nothing to do with what we, in our retrospective analysis, are pleased to prove. Not so far forth are we willing to piddle among the knicknacks of Shakib’s Histoire Intime of his Master.

Furthermore, how can we interest ourselves in his fiction of history concerning Baalbek? What have we to do with the fact or fable that Seth the Prophet lived in this City; that Noah is buried in its vicinity; that Solomon built the Temple of the Sun for the Queen of Sheba; that this Prince and Poet used to lunch in Baalbek and dine at Istachre in Afghanistan; that the chariot of Nimrod drawn by four phœnixes from the Tower of Babel, lighted on Mt. Hermon to give said Nimrod a chance to rebuild the said Temple of the Sun? How can we bring any of these