THE ROAD TO DAMASCUS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXVIII, Issue 24009, 5 July 1941, Page 15

THE ROAD TO DAMASCUS

THERE are roads which are strewn with history. There is Watling Street, worn by the tramp of legions marching up to Chester and down to old Londinium. There is the Appian Way running south from Rome between its ancient tombs. There is the desert road to Samarcand deep with the dust of eastern caravans, and trampled by the nomad hordes when the steppes were stirring. There is the incense route through coloured Petra to Shabwa and the south. Along it rode the Queen of Sheba and the Three Wise Men with myrrh and frankincense and a star above them. Of all the ancient highways nono has gatherer! greater wealth of story than the Damascus road to Palestine. Abraham came that way, with Ur a distant memory behind him, and found in the most ancient of all cities that Eliezer of Damascus who played his trusty part in the story of Isaac's bride. Down the same road, whore the dusty guns to-day are rumbling north, canio Naaman, white with leprosy, to seek tho prophet in Samaria. Tyre And Sidon All Damascus is in the story. "Go wash," tho prophet said, "in Jordan." And Naaman was wroth and said: "Are not Abana and Pharphar, rivers of Damascus, better than' all the waters of Israel?" For Naaman was proud, and full of shame that health should come from the .Jordan, brown with the silt of Galilee. He passes from the .story clinging to the shreds of dignity. "Wh en my master goeth into the house of Rimmon to worship there and leanefh on my hand, and 1 bow myself in the house of Rimmon, the Lord pardon thy servant in this thing." "Go in peace," said Elisha. doubtless with a touch of irony. There are Vichy Frenchmen who cling to another Rimrnon with academic choice of loyalties, double-hearted and correct. The king who leaned on Naaman's hand to worship had sent a messenger south ten years before. He came to Ahab, Israel's monarch in Samaria. Ahab was rich, for the trade with Tyre which had brought Solomon wealth from Ophir and Tarshish had passed to Allah's kingdom, and the king had his ivory house with peacocks on tho lawns, gold for his tables, and carpets for his floors. "All thou hast," ran the Syrian's message, "is mine." Ahab trembled and bowed the knee.

Then Ben-hadad went too far. A second post came down the Damascus road. The Syrian commission, said the king, would arrive to take possession. Stung to bravery by the insult, Ahab sent a splendid answer back. "Let not him that girdeth on his harness boast himself as ho that putteth it off." We may shrewdly guess that the word was that of Ahab's queen. Jezebel of Sidon was the king's evil genius, bad but brave. Did she storm in the ivory house, and drive Ahab out to victory? When the message reached Samaria, Ben-hadad was drinking with his lords. He roared for his armies to march, and bring the enemy in alive. With the courage of despair, and Jezebel's tongue to lash him, Ahab cut their host to pieces.

The splendid ports of Tyre and Sidon, where Princess Jezebel's Phoenician kin ringed half the world with trade, have shrunk to fishing villages, but Damascus has lost no glory, and up the road from Samaria ; where the ruined 1 foundations of the ivory palace stand, come the dusty guns. The same road saw a turning point of history, when a young Pharisee halted one sultry noon in a blaze of light. He was riding north, so eager

By E. M. BLAIKLOCK

to carry persecution to Damascus, that he journeyed in the mid-day heat. But lie came to Damascus blinded and broken. He knew now that he had fought the plans of Heaven, "Paul," said Glover, "was the greatest of the Greeks," and Paul was made from Saul the Pharisee, on the Damascus road. Born at Tarsus, centre of Greek learning, and educated at Jerusalem, at Gamaliel's feet, the new convert was heir to two cultures. As he sat in darkness in the street called Straight, that mile of arrow road that still runs through the city's heart, there began in the Apostle's mind that fusing of Greek ways of thought with the message of the Cross, which a busy pen and a long life's preaching was to"carry to the world. And the bearer of sucn news left Damascus in a basket, lowered by cords down the city wall when baleful hate pursued 1 It Vas a humble beginning for a mission which was to change the course of history. A Fifth Column Lawrence, in 1918, came up through Kisw6. His tattered horde was in the open country, west of the ancient road. was a Fifth Column in Damascus, Feisal's Arab committee, and thev had the Arab flag over the town hall before the last echelons of Germans and Turks marched out. The hindmost general saluted it ironically. Behind them the time fuses ticked in the ammunition dumps. From Kiswe, Lawrence and his Arabs watched til© northern sky glow with sheets of flame. The sky above was pricked by the flash of shells, flung high from the magazines. "Damascus is burning," they sighed. And when dawn came they rode on, afraid to look north for the ruins they expected, but instead of ruins the silent gardens stood blurred t with mists from Abana and Pharphar, the rivers of Damascus, and the city shone like a pearl ki the rising sun. The uproar of the night had shrunk to a stiff tall column of smoke rising sullen from the railway yard. A horseman galloped down the road with a bunch of yellow grapes. "Damascus salutes you," he cried, So it saluted Ramses, Alexander, Pompey, Hadrian. And a Moslem army entered the Straight Street for the hundredth time, and an Australian army for the first time. And so ended the epic of the Arab revolt.