The Entire Project Gutenberg Works of Mark Twain eBook

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