PALMYRA TO-DAY

Evening Star, Issue 19062, 3 October 1925, Page 10

PALMYRA TO-DAY

A RE-AWAKENING CITY Palmyra, citv of temples and tombs, whose golden bones lie derelict in- tho desert, is slowly awakening to a now activity. For centuries her long colonnades, beautiful in desolation ns they never were ini life, have glowed forsaken above the dark green of the oasis, an oasis nourished by an ancient aqueduct which brings clear water from the hills, in the days when that aqueduct was constructed Palmyra stood on tho highway between West and East; through her streets passed caravans hound for Mesopotamia and Persia and the marts of the further Orient, and wealth was poured into the laps of her citizens. Then came the ambition of a beautiful queen and her counsellors, the fatal conflict with Aurelian, tho deflection of the desert traffic to other trade routes, the setting of the sun of prosperity, and the sudden flight of all that busy Levantine life which had flocked to the fleshpots. The city-state had risen rapidly, and was a parvenu among the city-states of the ancient world, with all the love of display and lavishness of the “ nouveau riche.” But its fall was as rapid and dramatic as its rise. Except for tho Arab tribe which jiested squalidly in tho shelter of its Temple of the Bun, Palmyra lay as dead as Babylon. But now there is a stirring among the bones. Twice a week convoys of cars draw up in the oasis as the mail passes through between Beirut, Bagdad, and i Persia. There is a coming and a going of cars, vans, and lorries to and from Beirut, Damascus, Homs, and other Syrian towns. There is a. modern hotel a-building close beside the golden temple of the King’s Mother, an hotel with electric light, bathrooms, and telephone. The ragged swarms of Palmyrene children, wild and impudent, have learnt the potent word ‘‘ Baksheesh 1” unknown in the old days of courtesy, and hurl it at you rudely and insistently. There is a new aerodrome in the desert, and the hum of planes breaks the silence of the tombs at the foot of the hills. Bo far has modernity thrust itself that an aviation officer, lacking better quarters, has taken up 'his dwel!ing_ in one of the tomb towers. There is a “ mustashar,” or adviser, representative of tho French Government, a barracks for Algerian troops, and the camel corps—“ les 'raohariates do I’Orient.” THE CAMEL CORPS. Tho camel corps strikes the least jarring note amongst all this innovation. The Arab camel riders, most of them Nejdis and subjects of Ibn Baud, coming in with desert songs on their dromedaries at sunset from sojne distant pasturage or expedition, tho X'ed and blue tassels of their accoutrements streaming in the wind, and their bodies swaying to the movements of their highly-fired beasts, belong to the place as surely ao the purple hula which shut out the last rays of the sun god. These desert riders are engaged, mount and man, for the sum of 600 francs a month. The dromedary remains the property of the owner, and when he leaves the corps he takes his camel with him. Out of his pay ho must feed both himself and his *' dellul,” and the splendid condition of men and dromedaries shows that this comparatively small sum is enough. The Nojdi is the ideal recruit from the French point of view. He can bo suspected of no sympathies with tho partisans oi the Sherifian family, and he is detached from local politics. By religion he is a Wahabi, but 1 noticed that on this foreign soil not 'a~iow of them smoked cigarettes and quaffed the forbidden “ araL”

There are three platoons of meharistes at Palmyra, each consisting of seventyone meij and officered by a French lieutenant ' and sergeant, while the commanding officer is also the principal military and civil authority of the place. The duties of the corps ary multifarious. They act as police, scouts, and escort. They skirmish, bring in recalcitrant sheikhs, and act as desert intelligence. The mobariste officers pride themselves on the carelessness of their attire. Only the captain wears anything resembling a decent uniform, and ho goes bare-leggcd and wears Arab sandals. For the rest, ono sees wild beards, bare chests, collarless shirts, and hair almost ns unkempt ap the Bedouin’s. A significant little test hangs on the walls of the mess room:— “Non, madarnc! Les officiers n’out pas obligatoiremcnt une barbe hirsute ot des cheveux mal poignes!” which may be rendered “ No, mndajp, there is no order compelling officers to wear face fittings and hair like Struwwelpetor’sl” In the _ mess room, too, is displayed the device of tho corps, a. verse taken from tho Koran, “ Peace lies iu the shadow of the sword.” VISIT TO TOMB TOWERS. I mounted a white dromedary of tho corps, with its gay trappings and silver studded pommels, and wont under tho guidance of a young meharisto lieutenant and a few of his men to visit some of tho outlying ruins of the city, for to do this on foot in tho month of July is tiring. We visited the Kasr al Arus, the tomb tower of dead women, which is tho best preserved of all the mortuary towers, with its plastered and painted interior and its bas-relief portrait busts of dead and gone ladies of Palmyra. Other tomb towers we visited, too, with their crumbling stairways from story to story, in which the dead were once packed away neatly like volumes in the shelves of wellkept libraries. Wo crept on hands and knees into, the burrow-like opening to the subterranean tomb of i lie Three Brothers, a fi.rtily .sepulchre in which the walls are painted with mythological subjects and portraits ol the dead, among them, most poignant of all, a young mother holding her child in her arms like a Madonna. They had the Asiatic love of jewel levy, these dead ladies, and artist and sculptor both took pains to reproduce earrings and necklaces and tiara:.. We visited the sulphurous springs, surprising a number of French soldiers at their bar live g, and we climbed up tho precipitous and ruined walls of the Aral) fittoeutheentury stronghold which dominates the. plain from its high eyrie on tho hill. From the summit we had a wonderful view of the wide area of 'he ancient, city, a scattered mass of fallen and standing masonry. Beyond tho ruins and the little oasis stretched the miles on miles of featureless desort, an ocean of barrenness, a boundless horizon. Behind us was the tawny rampart, of hills reaching to Homs on tho northeast and Damascus on the south-west; Palmyra standing between the two ranges like a gateway from the desert to the promised land of milk and honey in the highlands. It is never too hot in Palmyra. When the summer sun is at its warmest there is always a clean, fresh wind—sometimes laden with sand, it is true, but never the intolerable, suffocating blast of the plains of Mesopotamia. For the dwellers in those plains this is surely a halfway house to which they can come for a few days’ respite during the worst of the summer heat. It is but eighteen hours’ journey from Bagdad, and there is a rest-house on tho way.

The Sheik of Palmyra, a man who is in himself a parable of East and West, lives close to the massive front of the Temple of the Sun, that at sunset flames orange as the Western sky, and every day he holds court in the little mud room, innocent of chair or table, which is his reception room. Here to the reflective bubbling of the nargileh politics past and pi'esent are discussed, and coffee is handed round. Hero daily come two sheiks of the Hauran in the Jebel Druse, temporarily exiled from their homes by the French Government for political reasons, and here I famd myself welcome as an English-

woman and friend of those who had been friends of the Sheik. Ho has a long, long memory, and is an old, old man, handsome; even yet with his white beard and his keen eyes. it was lie who accompanied (he Blunts on their voyage to .Nojd in search of Arab marcs of"'pure blood. lie has memories of many well-known travellers, including that English'great ladv who followed the example of Lady IK ester Stanhope and married a Bedouin sheik at Damascus half a century ago. Local gossip says that in his youth ho,’too, married a European, a wealthy French lady who was travelling in the desert, and that with her ho wont to France, and stayed there for live years. But of this lie does not speak. Do has long since reinrnod to his own folk and his own ways, and has married many other women since. One of his throe wives died while 1 was there, of a galloping consumption. I went to otfer my condolences. He look a long whiff from his nargileh, and the water bubbled comfortably. “We must all die,” ho said philosophically, and changed the distasteful subject. ]t occurs to me that nil this while I have never mentioned Zenobia, that figure of romance with whose history the story of Palmyra is so inevitably attached. But with tho new Palmyra she has nothing in common. If again prosperity returns to her city, if shops are opened—there’is one already!—and the tide of commerce and travel flows once again through the little oasis, her ghost wifi not be troubled. Perhaps to the once-too-plentiful statues of prosperous merchants and caravanleaders there will succeed some seventeen centuries after the signs of patent medicines and the notices of kinema programmes. That is, happily, as yet in the distance. But it may come, I incline to imagine that her spirit, if it returns from its Roman exile, will prefer to visit the jewelled ladies of the tomb-tower, and the owner's of those subterranean tombs whose carven limestone doors still swing on their sockets under the sandy hills. In one such sepulchre, through too darijtg a spirit of exploration, 1 came near being entombed myself, only extricating myself by piling fragments of sarcophagi one upon the other to reach the upper earth. But had I been forced to remain there until found I should have consoled myself by the hope that I might see some such vision of a Palmyrene great lady as I sheltered among the bones and clean sand of the forsaken place.—‘ The T""'*" ;