SERIAL “In The Steps of St. Paul.”

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 53, Issue 3822, 16 October 1936, Page 4

SERIAL “In The Steps of St. Paul.”

(By

H. V. Morton)

MULBERRY HARBOUR.

The first time I tried to get to Seleucia I went in a Ford car which stuck in the mud about two miles out of Antioch. The. driver, a Syrian Arab, made an awful fuss (he was wearing patent leather boots with cloth tops) and the end of it was that covered in mud from head to foot, we had to ask a plough man to unyoke his oxen and give us a pull. It rained during the night and I was told at Daphne, where I was staying, that it would be madness to attempt the journey again, because the mud would be worse and the streams higher. However, as I never believe anything I am told on such occasions, I insisted on setting off on horseback in the hope of fording the streams. I got through the mud easily enough, but found that a tributary of the Orontes was in furious spate, and in

one step the unwilling steed was in up to his hocks. Once, many years ago, during the war, I performed the feat of sitting a swimming horse, but I must have lost confidence in myself since then! I looked at the furious torrent in despair and turned back. More rain fell, and I was defeated.

But I returned this year in good weather.. The snows had nearly all melted and the road was clear.

Seleucia, the ancient port of Antioch, is near the mouth of the Orontes and five miles from its parent city. The Orontes, now a shallow torrent, was in Roman times navigable for small ships as far as Antioch.

ißut the big merchantmen with their huge sails, the war triremes, and the fast, but fragile, phaselus, anchored in the port of Seleucia. The size of the ships in Paul’s time is surprising. Pliny tells us that the Egyptian ship, the Acatus, which brought an obelisk to Rome, canied in addition a cargo of papyrus, nitrum, petter, linnen and spices, no fewer than 1200 passengers. The mast of this ship was so immense that it took four men to clasp it. Seleucia was, however, an inade-

the shoulders of woollen garments can be made from a child’s hoop covered with a strip of silk cut on the bias, or a length of ribbon. An ordinary cup hook, screwed into the top of the hoop makes the hook, and the lower part of the hoop can be used for a woollen shirt, scarves, stockings, or collars, thus saving space in your wardrobe.

Should the fire seem dull when you want to make toast, sprinkle a handfull of sale over the top, and you will soon have a nice clear fire.

To lubricate the bearings of an egg-beater, or food mincer, use glycerine. It does not affect the flavour of the food.

When pasting paper covers on to jam jars, always use the paste while it is hot, and when dry these covers will be quite taut. Cold paste causes this type' of top to crinkle and sag untidily. To get rid of warts, which are very disfiguring, apply castor oil every night for three weeks, when they will have entirely disappeared. Sixty drops of any liquid equals one teaspoon. Two teaspoons equal one dessertspoon. Four teaspoons equal one tablespoon. Four wineglasses equal one tumbler.’One pound of flour is equal to one quart. One pound of butter, when soft, equals one quart. Cover the ironing board with not more than two layers of blanket and a final layer- of soft cotton material. If you have not got a proper ironing board, it is a good plan to attach tapes to the corners of the sheet so that you can tie it to the legs of the table.

To renovate a razor strop, rub a candle over it, and then rub it well to clean the greasei off.

quate harbour for Antioch. The town was built on the top of a mountain that sloped steeply to the sea, while the port occupied -the level ground at the base. Enormous sums of money were spent by emperor after emperor to improve and enlarge this port, but unfortunately for the engineers, the lie of the land was too difficult for such schemes to be entirely successful. The place was really more like a Syrian Gibraltar than a great commercial port, a fact which must have delighted the rival ports of Tyre and Sidon. As a passenger port for Cyprus and Asia Minor, Seleucia was, of course, perfect. It is mentioned in Acts, xiii, 4. From this we learn that after the leaders of the Church in Antioch had prayed and fasted they laid their hands as a token of benediction on the heads of St Barnabas and St Paul, whereupon the

missionaries “departed unto Seleucia; and from thence they sailed to Cyprus.”

Although this is the only mention of Seleucia in the Bible, Paul must have known it well. He must have sailed to and from it on more than one occasion.

I set off on a lovely morning, driven again by a Syrian dandy with a rakish tarboosh and a pair of shining shoes. I smiled to myself, wondering v.hat muddy misfortune would confront him. But, apart from getting lost twice, owing to his conceited objection to asking the way, we plunged successfully into a lovely corner of Syria, where men and women still wear brilliant coloured garments. If you can imagine Loch Lomondside on a hot, sunny day, with apri-cot-trees, mulberries and vines, you have some idea of the road to Seleucia.

The Syrian landscape is on a larger scale and the mountains are not heathery moors; they are bleak, brown wastes of splintered rock. Asphodels grow in pale beauty on the hills, bright oleanders in the marshy places, and hawks sail against the blue sky, gazing earthwards for the poor living that hawks pick up in such mountains. The country people wear astonishing colours. I saw an old man in blue, pleated Turkish trousers, with an embroidered Eton jacket of saffron and, on his head, a scarlet tarboosh. The women wear long skirts of dark red or green. They walk with a graceful stride, and they never veil their faces.

We came to a bay as lovely as the Bay of Naples. A pointed peak, Mount Carius towered 5000 feet into the sky. The ruined port of Seleucia is to the north of this bay. There comes a time in most of these journeys in Syria when it would be easier and quicker to take a mule or a horse than a car; and this happened on a narrow track crossed every hundred yards or so by an irrigation canal. My driver, who was a townsman and, despite his solemn oath that he had been to Seleucia and knew the way, had never been within miles of it, had never driven his car over such obstacles. He was shattered. Every time we came to one of these embankments he invoked the name of Allah, stopped the car, got out, surveyed the land, and then timidly progressed. I was glad when at length we came to the end of the track, and to a stream where I got out and walked. The ruins of Seleucia lie embowered in fig- and mulberry-trees. In the course of centuries the buildings of the ancient city have been broken up and the ground strewn for miles with horrible sharp splinters of marble and limestone. Some of these the villagers have removed from the fields and piled on the narrow tracks.

I endured the most uncomfortable half-hour’s walk to Seleucia that I have ever experienced. On a hot day

these paths of splintered stone, each stone about t(ie size of a pear are agonizing.

However, it was consoling to think that I was going to a place which few modern travellers have explored. The only first-hand descriptions in English can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

I can think of only three travellers who have described it: Alexander Drummond, an Edinburgh man who was British Consul in Aleppo in 1754; General Chesney, the founder of the overland route to India; and Gertrude Bell, in her delightful book, Syria, the Desert and the Town. I found, after a breakfast climb up the mountain, that the ruins cover an immense area. They are difficult to see and still more difficult to reconstruct. The whole mountain on which the Upper Town of Seleucia was built is dotted with the foundations of buildings. That side of the mountain which faces the sea has been hewn flat and is honeycombed with enormous caverns which may be the remains of warehouses and suchlike port buildings. There are also many tombs cut high in the cliffs, some of them as large as a big room, containing six to ten loculi with the lids removed, and looking as though the bodies had been rifled only yesterday. The most remarkable ruin of Seleucia is a gigantic rock tunnel cut in Roman times to divert the waters of a mountain torrent. This extraordinary work is about 1400 yards long. Two parts of it, one about 100 yards long and the other 45 yards, are cut through the mountain. A stream still runs through the tunnel, and the walls are worn smooth with the rushing water. It is over 20 feet high and 20 feet wide. When Gertrude Bell saw it she could read only the words “Divus Vespasianus” on an inscription at the entrance, for the rest of the stone was buried in the ground. The whole inscription is now legible, and reads: “Divus Vespasianus et Divus Titus,” thus proving that this great feat of engineering dates from the Jewish War of A.D. 70. In the interior of the tunnel are other inscriptions, one of which says that the work was done by men of the IV Syrian Legipn and by mariners.

But even more interesting to me than the ruins of the great city that cnce stood on the mountain were the remains of the port on the foreshore. It is extraordinary to stand on the hills and look down on the site off the harbour, clearly marked among the mulberry groves. The mouth of the Orontes, bringing down silt and mud for centuries, has altered the configuration of the land and the sea has retreated slightly. What was once the harbour is now dry land on whose flatness the natives have gladly planted their mulberries.

Sections of the harbour walls, and perhaps the foundations of a lighthouse, still stand in these mulberry groves. I saw beneath a covering of brambles a flight of steps which led down to the branches of fig trees, and it was on such steps—possibly these steps—that Paul, Barnabas, and Mark stepped aboard at the outset of their immortal voyage to Cyprus and Asia Minor.

I left the place with the feeling that here, if anywhere, excavation might bring to light something wonderful. Who knows what is lying hidden in this remote and almost unknown spot, waiting for the moment when the spade of the archaeologist will reveal its hidden mysteries?

(To be continued)