IN THE STEPS OF ST. PAUL

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLII, Issue 20503, 22 August 1936, Page 9

IN THE STEPS OF ST. PAUL

BY

H. V. MORTON

(COPYRIGHT)

ISET off on a lovely morning driven again by a Syrian dandy with a rackish tarboosh and a pair of shining shoes. I smiled to myself, wondering what 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 von can imagine Loch Lomondside on a hot, sunny day, with apricottrees, 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 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 t’asius, 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 ear, got out, surveyed the land, and then timidly progressed. 1 was glad when at length we came to the end of the track, and to a stream where I got out ami walked. The ruins of Seleucia lie embowered in tig 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 the size of a pear, are agonising.

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. Sown. 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. Thi' 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 lias I 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 rilled 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 140 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 rushing water. It is over 20 feet high and 20 feet wide. When Gertrude Bell saw it she could read only the words “Divas 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 Legion and by mariners. But even more interesting to me than the ruins of the great city that once

stood on the mountain were the remains o£ the port on the foreshore. It is extraordinary to stand on the hills and look down on the site ot the harbour, clearly marked among the mulderberry 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 light-house, 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 ?

The Sheik of Aleppo

On my way from Antioch to Damascus, I broke the journey for a day and a night at Aleppo. I was glad to see this place again, because no Eastern city has ever impressed me with a greater sense of its mystery. To drift with the crowds in the bazaars, those vaulted avenues, cool and dim as the naves of Gothic cathedrals, is to enter another world: a fatalistic world in which violent emotions arc covered with a line veneer of manners. Such cities are like those curved Arab daggers that are hidden in velvet, scabbards. You can handle them and think them soft and pretty, but in a second they can flash out naked and murderous. Looking at the quiet, easy-going-crowds, the merchants sitting at their stalls, the old men removing their slippers at the mosque porch, the narrow stone streets, the little courtyards flooded in sun, where a man draws water from a well under a lemon-tree, one wonders what is really going on. It sometimes seems to me that in places like Aleppo, ordinary life is either a game or an elaborate pretence, and that, in the twinkling of an eye, the beggar at Ihe gate, the merchant among his spices, Ihe camel driver with his muddy beasts, the old patriarch in the sun might rise up at a signal and show themselves to be utterly different characters.

I may be wrong, of course; but that is the atmosphere of Aleppo. “By the way, have you ever met the Sheik?” asked a young Armenian who speaks perfect 8.8. C. English. “Who is the Sheik?” “He’s a great character. Everybody knows him. By profession he is an antique merchant.” We set off together for the Sheik’s house, crossing the sun-steeped square near the Citadel and plunging into ancient streets where gates swing on hinges forged in the days of Sultan Selim. We came at length to a quiet lane in which two veiled women were walkinglike featureless black ghosts, and at the end of it was a. massive wall and an arched door studded with the heads of nails about the size of a shilling. My Armenian friend knocked on the door with a stone picked up in the road, and, after an interval, it was opened by an Arab boy accompanied by a gazelle. We walked into a. courtyard, and, ascending a flight of rickety stairs, entered one of the most remarkable rooms I have ever seen. Tn a corner, with his back to a small window, sat a dignified old man with a black beard. He wore the green turban

of holiness. He sat in a mad chaos of junk. It looked as though the winds of I he world had for centuries been blowingodds and ends and worn-out. things into this strange room. There were piles of Arabic books that now and then had overbalanced and slid to the floor. But no one had over re-erected them. They formed the base for new pyramids of junk. There were glass eases full of scraps of Persian embroidery, modern

cigarette cases, Roman glass. Byzantine pottery, all of them covered in dust and

lying in rich and riotous confusion. On the floor, the skins of animals, stags’ antlers, and old armour, lay about mixed with Chinese pottery, silver spoons, and bronze pots full of Greek and Roman coins. Au empty Goldflake tin full of Egyptian scarabs, stood on a Greek tombstone. The walls were hung with strings of beads found in ancient graves. The ceiling was covered with flint-lock muskets, scimitars and Arab embroideries. The Sheik rose and, after greeting me with graceful formality (knocking down in the process a brass pot full of coins), settled himself again on his cushion and placed a kettle on a charcoal lire. He made Persian tea, picking pinches of spices from various tins lying round him, eventually handing me a small glass full of sweet, aromatic liquid quite unlike anything known in the West as tea. When I expressed a polite surprise at the splendour of his possessions, he smiled and waved me towards an inner room, which, to my astonishment, was even more congested than the first. In addition to this, I discovered that two floors above, and several rooms round the courtyard, were crammed to the roof with the fruit of a long and omnivorous life. Bit by bit, as I went through the protracted process of buying some silver Greek coins, I picked up the story of the Sheik’s life. He was not, as I had supposed, a Syrian Arab, but an Afghan and a British subject. He showed me his passport. It was the first British passport I have ever seen with four wives on it! The oldest wife was forty-seven and the youngest eighteen. The Sheik, I gathered, was seventy-six and was thinking of becoming a bridegroom again. It appears that before the war, when Syria was ruled by Turkey, this man was noted for his piety and his pilgrimages to Mecca. When war broke out, Enver Pasha sat. where I was sitting and suggested that on the next Friday the Sheik should preach a holy war in the mosque. The Sheik bowed his head.

When the Friday came, the Sheik mounted the pulpit and said that the friend of the Moslem world was Britain and that its enemy was Turkey. He was at once taken out and flung into prison, charged with sedition. At his trial, he said to the judges:

“I am an old man. I am all alone in this city. Yon can take me out and kill me. But remember that I am a British subject and behind me is the whole British army.”

At this point in his narrative the Sheik lifted his robe and held up first his right, and then his left, leg. Above the ankle on each leg there was a swelling as big as an apple. “I was in prison for three years,” he said, “and these are the marks of my chains.”

This remarkable character turned up Aleppo again as soon as the war Was over, and took up the threads of his life. The news spread across the Syrian desert. From near and far the Bedouin began once more to ride in with rings found in tlffi sand, with glass found in Roman graves, with beads, and with all the odds and ends that the Sheik loves to buy. I had occasion to go and see him again, and this time I saw him, not alone, but sipping his aromatic Persian tea in a circle of men from the desert. He was a changed man. The light of bargain was in his eyes. He was illumined by the love of barter. With relentless courtesy, he beat down his opponents and politely trampled their ambitious desires in the dust. Before him in a twisted rag lay a few worthless bits of broken pottery and a few ancient seals. It did not matter. He treated them as if they were gold or diamonds. It was the business of bartering that mattered to him. And I realised, as I watched him, that the fun he gets out of life is not in selling at enormous profit a few coins or pots to a stranger like myself, but in accumulating at his own price all the strange objects brought to him.

He Came Near Damascus

The distance as the crow flies between Aleppo and Damascus is about 215 miles; and no crow could fly much straighter than the caravan road to the south. My driver soon earned a place for himself in my gallery of queer people. He was a Syrian of about thirty-five—-raffish, sallow, melancholy, and addicted to garlic. He drove his car with fanatical enthusiasm. Like so many Syrian drivers, speed induced in him that state of anaesthesia bordering on ecstasy which is responsible for so many fatal accidents. Whenever he touched sixty miles an hour, I thought he was asleep. T was, therefore, obliged from time to time to tap him on the shoulder and order him to drop back into the dreary forties. He would then emerge from his trance and, in order to show resentment, snarl Arab songs in a tuneless monotone, his top lip curled, exposing his teeth like a dangerous dog. When wo had been going for about an hour, I noticed that the car was tilling with bees. 1 thought they had been

sucked in by the speed of our passage. Eventually I insisted on stopping. We discovered a wild bees’ nest under the back seat. He said lie was sorry. We killed a hen in Homs and buckled a mudguard against a French ammunition wagon somewhere else. As we were running into Damascus towards evening, he told me, in one of his less morose moments, that he was an Armenian. “Why should you,” I asked, “who are so obviously an Arab, try to pretend that you are not one?” “Sir,” he replied, “it is not so. lam truly Armenian. Arabs no good. I spit at them! Sir, in me you see an Armenian.” “I can’t believe it,” I told him, wondering what queer round-about, and possbly financial, reason there might be for this confidence. “You see,” he continued, “my father and my mother were massacred by Turks. They come into the village and pup-pup-pup-pup-pup! They make much gunfire! Many are killed with guns and with swords. My mother with a sword, my father with a gun. But myself and my small sister, we are left naked. We are taken away to another village and people think we are Arabs. So we are brought up as Arabs for many years. Then someone finds that we are not Arabs but Armenians. So we become Christians. Turks no good. “Arabs big fools! They hate the French. They say, ‘Go away and let us rule our own country.’ But if French go, then Turks come back and—pup-pup-pup-pup-pup! Then Armenians go too!”

Damascus has suffered a violent collision with the West in the form of French tramcars, telegraph and telephone wires, gramophones, Renault cars and a number of smart new buildings. In the heart of it all, side by side with the main streets where sheiks from the desert sit dreamily in the dusty tramcars, are a series of dark bazaars in which Greeks and Armenians, picketing their doorsteps, lure the visitor into Shops stacked with brass-ware and inlaid furniture that looks wonderful until it reaches Cheltenham.

There are whole streets hung with red, yellow, and blue slippers, while cobblers, sitting under these festoons, are swiftly adding to the collection. These are streets full of crystallised fruits, for which Damascus has always been famous; and there is a gold and silver bazaar, where a number of swarthy and obliging persons preside over safes and glass cases full of gold earrings, bracelets, watches, and old silver. But Damascus jewellery is not very good. There is an Arabic proverb to the effect that the art was born in Egypt, grew in Aleppo, and came to Damascus to die!

The finest things in Damascus are the mediaeval khans, which, now that the camel caravan has been superseded by the motor lorry, are merely storehouses. And it is only in Cairo and Aleppo that I have seen as many dulllooking gates in ugly walls reveal visions of lovely courtyards where fountains splash under orange-trees. The Grand Mosque, the Jami elUmawi, fascinates me. It is a huge, cathedral-like building with a nave and two aisles of Corinthian pillars. No matter how many Moslems are praying there, touching the floor with their foreheads, the place still looks like a Christian church.

In Roman times it was a temple to Jupiter; in A.D. 379 Theodosius rebuilt it as a Christian church dedicated to St. John the Baptist; and. when the Arabs conquered Byzantine Damascus in A.D. 635, the church was turned into a mosque.

An old sheik, with a sad, thoughtful face, showed me round, grave with the aristocratic melancholy of the Arab.

“Ah,” he said, “this world is like a theatre with many doors; some Moslem, some Christian, some Jew, some Buddhist; and some not labelled at all. But each of us thinks, as he passes through, that his own door will give him a front seat in heaven.” “You are not speaking like a fanatical Moslem,” I said. “I am an old man,” he replied, “and I live in a place where Jupiter, Jesus and

Mohammed have all in turn been worshipped . . .” He shrugged his old shoulders and moved towards the courtyard. In the blinding sun we stood a moment listening to the muezzin. When I turned to speak to him, I found him some distance away, kneeling in the direction of Mecca with his head to the polished tiles. Damascus is, of course, of unique interest to the Christian; because it was while on his way to persecute the believers there that Paul received the vision on which thenceforward his life’s work was founded. Few events in history have been more closely analysed, more scientifically examined, more violently assailed, and more vigorously defended, by men of great learning. There are three accounts of Paul’s conversion in the Acts: one by the author of the book, and two in Paul's own words as he spoke to the Jews in the Temple, and as he addressed Agrippa at Caesarea. “And as he journeyed,” says St. Luke in the Acts, “he came near Damascus: and suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven: and he fell to the earth, and heard a voice saying unto him, Saul, Saul, why perseentest thou me? And he said, Who are thou, Lord? And the Lord said, I am Jesus whom thou persecutest: it is hard for thee to

kick against the pricks. And he, trembling and astonished, said, Lord, what wilt thou have me to do? And the Lord said unto him, Arise, and go into the city, and it shall be told thee what thou must do.”

As Sir William Ramsay, the great, authority on Pauline topography, writes: “To Paul himself it was the most real event of his whole life. All else was, in comparison, shadow and semblance. There he had en joyed a brief vision of the truth, the Divine reality. He had seen God and spoken with Him. His earthly self had been permitted for a brief space to become aware of the omnipresent God, who is everywhere around us, and who sometimes permits mortals of finer mould and more sentient nature. His chosen prophets, to hear His voice, like Samuel and Elijah, or to see Him, like Moses: only by the inadequate and imperfect way of the senses can their human nature, become cognisant of the Divine nature. What is certain and fundamental is this. On that vision Paul's future life and work were built . . . . Further, through that vision the civilised world was conquered, and the whole history of the world was changed.”

I wondered whether the piety of the Greek or the Armenian churches had localised the scene of Paul’s conversion, and I was glad to find that it has not done so, because, obviously, the place is, and must always remain, unknown. Centuries ago, however, the scene was placed at the little village of Kokab, which lies in a hollow between two hills, to the south-west of the city. In early Christian times a church dedicated to St. Paul stood on the traditional place of the conversion “at the second mile post from the city,” and it was visited by the pilgrim, Antonio of Piacenza, in the year A.D. 570. This must have been the same church seen three centuries later by travellers like St. Willibald, but all trace of the building has now vanished.

In the absence of any traditional spot, the Christians of Damascus meet together on 25th January to commemorate the conversion of St. Paul near the Christian cemeteries just outside the walls of the city.

The Street Called Straight

Damascus is one of the oldest cities in the world. Its Hebrew name is Damneseq, “the abode of irrigation,” an allusion to the Abana, now called el Barada, whose rushing waters have transformed a corner of the desert into a fruit garden. In St. Paul’s day Damascus belonged to the league of Greek cities known, and referred to in the Gospels, as the Decapolis: thriving centres of culture and commerce in which large numbers of Jews lived side by side, but not always in agreement, with the Greek population.

The distinctive feature of all these Greek cities, as of all the Graeco-Roman cities in Syria and Asia Minor, was a common scheme of town planning. They prided themselves on the Street Called Straight, a magnificent avenue of marble pillars that traversed the city from the East Gate to the West.

Antioch possessed the finest colonnade, a four mile street as straight as a spear, of which not one trace remains

to-day. The Street Called Straight, or Vicus Rectus, in Damascus, was 1650 yards in length, running at each end in two imposing monumental gateways. How splendid these colonnades must have been, one gathers from the ruins of Palmyra and Jerash, where centuries of neglect and destruction have been unable to ruin the majesty of the lines of pillars that still tower above miles of fallen masonry. The Street Called Straight, to which Paul was led after his vision on the Damascus Road, still exists. It is the one authentic relic in Damascus that links the city with the time of the Apostle. It is true that no one who knew it in Roman times would recognise it to-day. The pillars have vanished. The beauty has departed. It is now a covered bazaar, but it runs, just as it used to do, straight from the east to the west, dividing the city in halves.

The survival of the Street Called Straight in Damascus, and the disappearance of the much finer street in Antioch, prove that a city founded on commerce can survive longer than a city created by political expediency. Antioch was fated to die when the Byzantine Empire crumbled up, but Damascus, which had been a market before Abraham journeyed to the south, continued to flourish under

a different civilisation without a break in continuity and without any loss in cammercial prestige. A small mosque was pointed out to me near the beginning of the Street Called Straight. This building is traditionally associated with the house of Judas, in which Paul lay blinded for three days until Ananias came to him. I took off my shoes in the street and entered the mosque. The sheik was anxious to show me everything, but there was little to see. It is an ordinary, vaulted building with an ablution pool in one corner; and it was the smallest mosque I have ever seen.

It has no minaret, and therefore the muezzin calls to prayer from a green iron balconv that looks down on the Street Called’ Straight. A wooden ladder is placed against an opening in the roof of the porch, and up this ladder the muezzin climbs to give the call at prayer times. I mounted it and was rewarded by a remarkable view of the long covered street, which is like a mile-long railway tunnel with hundreds of little shops let into the sides of it. The roadway is always crowded with two-horse Victorias, men on donkeys, foot passengers, mules and sometimes files of camels. I have no doubt that could we trace the history of this mosque back for 1300 years to the time of the Arab conquest, we would discover that it replaced a Christian church associated with the conversion of St. Paul.

I walked out of Damascus by the Gate of the East, which still contains Roman stones that may have been there in the days of the Apostle. This is the original gate that gave entrance on the east to the Street Called Straight. There was a central arch for traffic and a smaller arch on each side for toof passengers. Only one arch is open. The other two are walled in and hidden by warehouses.

The walls of Damascus are not impressive except on this side of the city, where for several hundreds of yards they are massive and high.

Bricked up in the wall near the Christian cemetries is an ancient gate called the Bab Kisan, which is the traditional spot from which Paul was lowered in a basket when the Jews sought to kill him because he had become a Christian.

But their lying in wait was known to Paul. And they watched the gates day and night to kill him. Then the disciples took him by night and let him down by the wall in a basket.

That is the account in the Acts. The memory of his escape—Paul’s first flight from persecutors—was evidently a vivid memory with him for years, because he mentions it in his second letter to the church at Corinth, and he even amplifies the description. “In Damascus/’ he wrote to the Christians of Corinth, “the governor under Aretas the King kept the city of the Damascenes with a garrison, desirous to apprehend me. And through a window in a basket was I let down by the wall, and escaped his hands.” This mention of Aretas. the King, is the only indication in ancient literature that at the time of Paul’s visit Damascus was under Nabataean government, a fact borne out by a study of Syrian coins. (Sixth Instalment Next Week.)