CHAPTER ONEDescribes a journey to the Church of St. Simeon Stylites in Syria i to the ruined pilgrimage city of St. Sergius. I stay at Palmyra my way to Babylon.
§ I
WHILE it was still dark the little cargo-boat came into the Gulf of Iskanderun and cast anchor, waiting for day to break.
I was aroused by the sudden silence as a Londoner is sometimes awakened in the country. For a moment I wondered what had happened, and then I realised that the engines had stopped, the iron doors had ceased to bang, the steel-shod giants no longer stamped the deck, and even the hideous stammer of the donkey-engine was stilled at last. against these noises I had built such a splendid resistance that now, when they no longer existed, my defences crumbled and silence strode over them like an invader and tapped me on the shoulder.
But there was one sound so low that I had to listen for it: the lovely ripple of water running along the side of the ship, touching the iron plates with a gentle playfulness and then stealing away into the darkness. I lay half awake, enjoying this sound. Then suddenly and inappropriately a cock crew, surely one of the strangest of all sounds to hear at sea. I knew this bird by sight. He lived among the angular Syrian cattle in the forward hatch, and as I heard him, I became entirely awake: putting my feet down on the cabin floor, I found myself as thrilled as if I were eighteen again and about to set foot for the first time in a foreign land. We were at Alexandretta.
It was difficult to believe that only ten days had gone by since that cold January morning in England when I had set out for Babylon. The train, the boat, the waiting in a foreign port, another boat, the hastily encountered people, the sudden glimpses into other lives, the half-made friendships, and the slow progress up the Syrian coast in this little coastal steamer, had built such a barrier between myself and the start of my journey that I could well have believed the ten days were ten months. And now the moment had arrived of which I had almost lost sight: the moment when I would step ashore in Syria and motor across mountain and desert to Palmyra, to Baghdad, to Babylon.
I went on deck into a bitterly cold wind. There was a mountain blacker than the night rising out of the land, with a few sleepy lights clustered at its base, but else- where was the sea, dark and empty. A few stars were still burning and a pale light was growing in the east. I could smell snow. It was lying all round on the yet invisible mountains. The cold north wind came down from the Taurus. The Greeks, I thought, must have worn warm woollen underclothes. It is strange to think of them muffled to the eyes and probably suffering from colds in the head; but these Hellenistic cities, Antioch, Tarsus, and the rest, must have been bitterly cold in January.
Slowly, uneasily, the light grew in the east, until it became almost warm and spread fanwise into the sky, touching the sea with a glint of yellow: and then, as the sun came up behind Alexandretta, I saw all the mountains of Syria lilting white heads into a windless morning, for with the coming of the sun the wind dropped and the sky was blue.
§2
The Gulf of Iskanderun has a grand and beautiful name. All over the Arabic-speaking world Iskander is the name of Alexander the Great. He left his name in these waters, as he did in places as far away as Kandahar, when he came down over the Taurus and fought the Battle of Issus, which gave him the keys of the East.
This gulf is the north-eastern extremity of the Mediterranean Sea. Its waters, steamy and warm in summer and coldly blue in winter, penetrate for about seventy miles among the marshes and foot-hills which rise into the mighty chain of Mountains dividing Syria from Asia Minor. Antioch looks across them to Tarsus, on the northern shores, and from the hights behind both these places Cyprus is visible on a clear day, lying out at sea. This is one of the old, lost corners of the world. There was once a time when the triremes and galleys of Egypt, Phoenicia, Greece, and Rome sailed from marble city to marble city across these waters, lowering their painted sails in harbours now vanished. The Rhegma at Tarsus, where Cleopatra's burnished barge once sailed to the sound of flutes, is now a swamp where wild birds nest, and the harbour of Seleucia, from which St. Paul set forth on his first journey, now grows big purple figs. The Gulf is empty to-day save for some lonely coasting vessel crossing to Mersine for raisins and timber, or taking the old route to Cyprus to collect mules for the Syrian market. Yet history has been marching round this Gulf for centuries and only just missed it during the war, when our armies, instead of landing at Alexandretta as we at first intended to do, went to the Dardanelles.
As I looked at the mountains rising all round in this bright morning, my thoughts always returned to St. Paul, who was born over the water at Tarsus and who knew so well " the church that was at Antioch." Many a time on such a morning as this St. Paul must have looked across the sea to the opposite mountains, wondering when the melting snow would open the Cilician Gates. He must have watched the snow, wondering how his Galatians were faring on the high plains beyond, and into what mischief they had fallen during his absence. I think missionaries, like mothers, must love their naughtiest infants, and no doubt St. Paul, waiting impatiently at Antioch for the seas and the passes to open, gazed northward where the ridges of the Taurus rise white against the sky like a nibbled wedding cake, composing in his mind some sternly affectionate rebuke for the improvement of beloved Galatians.
As the sun mounted into the sky, the air lost its bitterness and a feeling of spring, of lightness, and of happiness, came rushing into the world, driving the winter to the highest mountain-tops. From the little white Turkish-looking port Alexandretta came a motor-launch full of those disappointing first contacts with the gorgeous East: the port officials. Most men who have traffic with the sea are proud to proclaim it by some article of clothing, some salty gesture or word; but not these men, who seek rather to convey an undying allegiance to the boulevard and the cafe. They come bobbing up and down on the swell, unshaven, cigarettes alight, their cloth-topped boots poised uncertainly on the gunwale, ready for a hazardous leap aboard. And having landed heavily in outstretched arms, they pass importantly down the companionway to the purser's office.
I looked from a black hole in the ship's side to a blinding vision of sunlit sea on which a primitive boat was rising and falling, in charge of five men who would have done great credit to any performance of the Pirates of Penzance. I descended the gangway, and in a few moments we were moving over the dancing waters towards the land.
§3
Alexandretta looked neat and white, lying on sea marshes with the mountains behind. It reminded me of those Nineteenth Century aquatints in a book of eastern travel which, though they did not attempt to convey warmth and heat, nevertheless gave somehow a better idea of these places than the best of photographs.
Morning shadows lay in ebony stripes across the chalk- whiteness of the streets: one half of the town was black, and the other half dazzled the eyes. Donkeys, camels, and hillmen on thin ponies passed from sunlight into shadow, and the merchants opened their shops, their tarbushes shining like red cherries, gesticulating and discussing some minor event with the vitality which another race might expend on the approaching end of the world. Little brown boys with thin bodies swept out the cafes and set out the hookahs, and blew up charcoal braziers, while lean Arabs, with their heads swathed as if in the throes of toothache, warmed their hands at the hot embers, moving their shoulders gratefully as they felt the gathering warmth of the sun penetrate their thin clothes.
I stood on the wooden jetty, feeling that this starting out in a strange country was one of the grand moments of life. I had the whole golden day before me, wmountains to cross, and plains, and the brown desert that leads to Aleppo. My plans were to be at Palmyra in two days' time, and there I would get the desert car to Baghdad. I had come this way in order to see two of the lost Christian sanctuaries of Syria, Kala'at Sim'an, which was on the way to Aleppo, and Resafa, a pilgrimage town in the Syrian desert about which little has yet been written. Resafa lies south-east of Aleppo, and I thought it would be possible to visit it on the way to Palmyra.
I was soon seated in a car whose driver, a mournful little Armenian, agreed to take me to Kala'at Sim'an if the road were possible, and then onward to Aleppo. Hooting through the main street at donkeys and camels, we were soon out of the town and running along a straight road to the mountains. The road mounted rapidly, and we passed through gorges Dusted with snow. At first it was a thin powder on the hard rock then, as we rose higher, it was thick and crusted, half melted by day and frozen again at night; and at last, when we came near the mountain top, we saw new snow lying on the Heights above, soft and glittering in the sun.
In the mountain gorges through which we were passing it was January in the shadows and June where the sun had been at work. On the shady side icicles were hanging to the rock in a green fringe; on the sunny side, a few yards away, the ice and snow had melted and a musical rivulet of cloudy green water was running down the hill.
We met villagers descending the mountain with winter in their faces; donkeys trotted beside them; miserable children peered from bundles of rags; and camels slouched along like disdainful rich relations. As the sun grew warmer cotton draperies were cast back and men and children strode forward with a cheerfulness which is perhaps the most attractive characteristic of these people. We passed through the mountain village of Bel&n, clinging to the sides of the gorge like a wasp's nest. The wooden houses were built in steps, one above the other, completely covering the mountain-side. The air was full of the downward rush of torrents. So we came to the famous Pylse Syria, the culminating point of the pass; suddenly I looked down on the Plain of Antioch through an opening in the gorge.
Spread out like a map below, a few roads running across it like brown string, was the country I was to cross on the way to Aleppo. The Lake of Antioch, swollen by floods, covered about twenty square miles of the plain; and even from so great a height I was able to see that the water was covered with thousands of wild fowl, which would rise swiftly from one part of the lake and settle on another. Mountains lay on the boundaries of the plain; the Amanus to the north, swinging westward into Asia Minor; to the south lay the volcanic-looking cone of Mount Casius, on whose peak it is possible to find the calcined bones of Greek and Roman sacrifices. Straight ahead to the east I saw the low, khaki ridges ofJebel Sim'an, lying between the plain and the stony desert on which Aleppo stands.
We crossed the plain on an embankment, clouds of wild duck rising all round us. At a village called, I think, Yeni Cheir, we linked up with the main road from Antioch, which more or less follows the line of the old Roman road from Antioch to Bercea, which was the Greek name for Aleppo before Islam conquered this portion of the Christian world.
Well metalled, wide and straight, the road ran eastwards between fields where the first wheat was already tracing green lines on the brown earth. Then leaving the fertile valley of the Orontes, it invaded a rocky wilderness inhabited only by herds of goats. Sometimes we met French police, rifles slung on their backs, riding fine Arab horses; and now and then we passed gangs of half-clad Arabs breaking stones to mend the road.
If you walked a little way among the rocks beside the road, you would find traces of older European roads: a Roman road, or perhaps a Crusading road. But you would have to look closely for them. The big, well-quarried stones were carted off centuries ago, and you will probably find them in the wall of a mosque in the nearest village. All attempts to bring Western civilisation to this hard, lion- coloured country have failed, and the roads which once led to Hellenistic, Roman, and Crusading towns and castles have long since fallen into ruin.
§4
As we made our way across this bleak landscape, I found myself thinking of the lost cities of North Syria. There are perhaps a hundred of them scattered over this bare land, and little is known about them. They were Christian cities which existed and nourished from the Peace of the Church in the Fourth Century until they were swept away by the Arab Conquest in the Seventh. Many were pilgrimage cities grouped round the shrine of a Christian saint, and they were spiritually and architecturally children of the great Church ofAntioch. It is surprising to realise that in the first centuries of Christianity hosts of pilgrims from Britain to the boundaries of Persia Were travelling from shrine to shrine. Such spiritual migrations were no doubt possible because Roman Christendom knew no frontiers, and the splendid military roads offered the pilgrims easy and safe access to the most distant portions of the Empire. It is a little difficult, perhaps, to understand how thousands of men and women could suddenly leave home, sometimes for years, to go on pilgrimage, or how they fared financially; but it is clear that an organisation as efficient and as well known as the tourist organisations which now move large numbers of people from here to there, existed in those distant times to provide for the needs of the Christian traveller.
If you ask anyone to draw a picture of a pilgrim, he will without hesitation draw a little man in a wide hat with a cockle shell in it, and he will give him a long staff: the typical mediaeval pilgrim. We have forgotten that pilgrimage has an infinitely longer history. Its first period began in the Byzantine Age, when St. Helena discovered the Holy Cross and the site of Calvary, and this period lasted until the Crusades. It was a time when Greeks and Romans went on pilgrimage, when great ladies set out to see the hermits of the Egyptian desert, and gave up their houses in Rome to go and live at Bethlehem. Then the second period, which is the period most people think of, is the post-Crusade period of the Middle Ages.
There is still a lot to be known about the first period of Christian pilgrimage. Many a holy man is now forgotten whose name was once revered all over the Christian world. Every devout Christian in the Fifth Century would, for instance, have known of the shrine I was on my way to see, Kala'at Sim'an, the place where St. Simeon Stylites spent his life sitting on top of a pillar. Pilgrims came to him from Gaul and Brittany, from Italy and from Spain. They came travelling easily along the great Roman post-roads and they arrived at last, not in this Islamic land of mosques, but in a Christian Syria as full of saints as a field of poppies.
Simeon Stylites was the first of the pillar hermits. He was born in a village called Sisan, or Sis, on the borders of Cilicia, in the year 338 A.D., in the reign of the Emperor Theodosius. His parents were well-to-do Christians. At the age of sixteen Simeon began to show that indifference for his own physical comfort which marked him out for the spiritual life: he spent the whole of one summer buried to his neck in the garden. If this really means that his hands were buried and unable to wave away flies, I really cannot understand how any human being could have endured this torture.
He then entered a monastery near Antioch and, like all the more noted ascetics, soon found that the ordinary monastic rules, though strict enough for others, imposed no hardship on his ardent nature. He believed that only by the complete humiliation of his body could his soul set itself free and fit itself to 'contemplate God. He invited the dislike of his fellow-monks by devising all kinds of self-torture, including a girdle sewn with sharp goads and pricks which tore his skin. He devised whatwas probably the forerunner of the tilting choir-stall: a piece of wood so balanced that if he fell asleep during his nightly prayers, it would fling him to the ground.
After nine years, the monks succeeded in expelling him. Simeon then went to another monastery nearer Aleppo, where he asked to be walled up in a cell for the whole period of Lent. The monks agreed, and the cell was sealed by Bassus of Edessa, a periodeutes or assistant bishop, who happened to be in the monastery at the time. Six loaves and a jug of water were walled up in the cell, but when the door was opened after Lent Simeon was found on his knees in a state of exhaustion, and neither bread nor water had been touched Simeon's feats of fasting, which are well vouched for by contemporary authorities, appear to us almost incredible. He seems frequently to have gone without food until he was at the point of death.
His next move was to a hillside not far from the monastery. He sat with a heavy iron collar round his neck, chained to a pillar six feet high, rarely moving and never descending. As time went on he increased the height of his pillar bit by bit, until it was sixty feet high. An iron rail on the top prevented the saint from falling, and his disciples, with the aid of a ladder, provided him with the bare necessaries of life. Throughout the bitter frosts of thirty Syrian winters and the intolerable heat of thirty summers, Simeon sat there in devout contemplation. At one time he had a little shelter of boughs to save him from the burning sun, but disdaining this a sinful luxury, he threw it down one day and never used again.
The news of the holy man who sat on a pillar naturally spread through cities and villages, and even across the deserts. Simeon's visions, and the miracles of healing which he performed, drew thousands of pilgrims, both Christian and pagan, from all parts of the country. An account of his life and of the influence which he exerted would be incredible were they not described by trustworthy contemporary historians, such as Theodoret, Bishop of Cyrrhus, who knew him personally.
Many were the letters on contemporary Church problems which Simeon wrote or dictated from his pillar, even addressing his communications to the Emperor Theodosius and, after him, to the Emperor Leo. When the saint became gravely ill with an ulcerated foot, Theodosius wrote him a letter begging him to descend from the pillar to receive the attention the royal physician. This letter was delivered by three bishops, who added their entreaties to the supplication of the Emperor. But Simeon, while he was grateful for their sympathy and advice, would have nothing to do with the doctor, neither would he consent to descend to earth. He sent the messengers back to the Emperor with a rather sharp letter on a current matter of government. It is recorded that during the following Lent Simeon remained without food, and at the end of the fast found his foot to have been healed.
His nights and early mornings were spent in meditation, prayer, and prostrations, for the early Eastern Christians prostrated themselves as the Moslems do to-day. One admiring observer has recorded that he counted while the saint performed one thousand, two hundred and forty-four consecutive prostrations during his devotions. In the afternoons Simeon held court and issued verdicts on the theological, legal, and domestic problems which large crowds brought to the foot of the pillar. Among the spectators were crowds of wondering Bedouin, among whom, it is said, the saint made many converts, for the birth of Mohammed was then more than a century distant. From remote deserts they brought their grazing disputes for him to settle.
Some writers say that Simeon's approaching death at the age of seventy-two attracted enormous crowds to the pillar, all anxious to hear his last words and to receive his blessing; others say that his death was kept secret in case his corpse should be stolen. His body, probably embalmed, was carried in magnificent procession to Antioch in the autumn of the year 459 A.D., to be interred in the church built by Constantine. The Emperor Leo was anxious to remove the remains to Constantinople, but refrained from doing so in answer to the prayers of the people of Antioch, who had just suffered two frightful earthquakes and hoped that the body of Simeon would avert another one.
About fifty years after Simeon's death, when the Eastern Empire was at war with the Persians, it was requested that the head of the saint should be sent to Philippicus, Commander-in-Chief, for the protection of the armies in the East. It was at this time that the church historian, Evagrius, saw it. He noted that the head was in a remarkable state of preservation, that several teeth were missing, having been extracted by devout visitors, and that near the head lay the collar which Simeon had worn during his life, " for not even in death," commented Evagrius, " has Simeon been deserted by the loving iron."
An interesting sidelight on the time in which St. Simeon lived is that pilgrims from France brought news to him of the austerities which were then being practised in Paris by Ste. Geneviève; and the saint looked down from his pillar and requested them to take back his greetings and ask her to pray for him.
We bumped slowly over a villainous road, frequently making detours to avoid the sharp stones and boulders in our way. Turning a comer, we saw the ruins of Kala'at Sim'an not far off, outlined against the sky. It was now afternoon: the sun was warm, the sky was blue, and as we ascended the track towards the ruins a stillness which the church had never known in its life-time enfolded it now in death.
I climbed the hill, unprepared for the lovely sight that awaited me. Burning and glowing in the sun as if flood-lit in day-time, for that is the effect of the warm, brown stone of Syria, I saw the skeleton of Kala'at Sim'an, silent and roofless. The hillside fell away into desolate brown distances. The only sign that these ravaged slopes had ever known mankind was a mass of masonry on a lower hill, the remains of the inns and guest-houses used by pilgrims in the Byzantine Age. Remote and blue to the north-west I saw the mountains which I had left that morning, with the snow-capped peak of Casius rising sharply above them all.
The Church of St. Simeon is entered from the west by a majestic triple archway, which is almost undamaged. I looked into the church beyond, which was piled with fallen pillars and big, honey-coloured blocks of stone. Walking inside, I climbed over these stones, astonished by the size of the church and by its design. Before the church was built there was nothing on the hill but Simeon's pillar, and the problem of erecting a church round it cannot have been a simple one. The architects solved it brilliantly by leaving the pillar in a wide space open to the sky, and this was made the centre of the church, which was built in the form of a Greek cross.
This central space is an octagon formed of eight superb double arches which admit to the four arms of the church, so that no matter from which door you entered, north, south. east, or west, you were faced by a central shrine open to the sky, a blaze of golden light in the day and a blue bowl of starlight at night. If you can imagine the four arms of the cross roofed, and light pouring down into the central octagon, it is not difficult to realise that the Church of St. Simeon Stylites must have been in its time one of the most impressive churches in the world.
The architecture of this remarkable building is neither Roman nor Byzantine. The style is massive, yet never heavy; decorative without being too ornate. It is a style peculiar to Syria. When the church was built, and Evagrius visited it in 560 A.D., Antioch was still a great and stately city; and though it has vanished to-day, we can catch a reflection of its architectural splendour in this church and in many another stately ruin of North Syria.
One of the unexpected features of the church is the stone platform on which St. Simeon's pillar was erected, which is still in position in the centre of the o. It lies surrounded by a chaos of lesser stones in which—who knows?—might be discovered the complete pillar, broken as it fell. I wonder why the French archseologists, who are so good at putting things together, have not attempted to salvage the pillar of Stylites, pr why the Societe Tourisme, which exists somewhere in Syria, has not insisted on this; for no one will dispute the strange fact that if these stones were perpendicular, instead of horizontal, the place would once again be famous. Pilgrims would flock to it as once they did in the days of Evagrius, and the authorities -would be obliged to make a decent road.
I can well imagine how eerie the church must have been in the time of which Evagrius writes, for he clearly believed that it was haunted; in fact, he is sure that he saw the ghost. It took the form of a moving light in a gallery round the octagon, and he saw it one day while he was standing there with a crowd of rustics, some of whom were dancing round the pillar. There was a more impressive ghost, which he did not see. It was the head of St. Simeon, bearded as in life, which would flit here and there about the church. As I sat in the ruins I thought how ironic it is that a man who asked of life only one sixty-foot pillar should have been given so many pillars after his death. And may it not be possible that the bearded head of Stylites flitted about the church from time to time in the hope of finding someone with whom it might lodge a complaint ?
The ruins were deserted save for a barefoot Arab boy in charge of a herd of velvet-eared kids, black, white, and tan-coloured. They swarmed over the ruins, devouring each blade of green in their path with that eager voraciousness which has deforested classical and Biblical lands. Now and then two of them would pair off and, lowering their pretty heads on which no horns yet sprouted, would tilt at one another with a lift of forefeet. The kids, the boy, and the ruins made me think of those sad pictures that Piranesi loved to draw; I say sad because so many civilisations have ended in just such a scene as this: broken arches, voracious goats, and picturesque but destructive little Arab boys.
While I looked at Kala'at Sim'an, which is certainly one of the grandest Christian ruins of its period in the world, I thought it almost unbelievable that such a place, with its attached monasteries, its elaborate guest-houses, in fact a whole town devoted to pilgrims, could have grown up round the memory of a man who had spent his life on a pillar. I am sure that we have no right to criticise either St. Simeon or his age, because it is only with difficulty that we can even try to understand the mental attitude of the Fourth Century world. It was a world in revolt against materialism. After centuries of persecution the Christian Church had emerged into the light of day, and, in the sudden release from oppression, Christians expressed their faith in a number of eccentric ways. An age that thought more of the other world of this did not, of course, think them eccentric, and probably for every man who scoffed at St. Simeon on his pillar, a hundred gazed up at him, and beyond him to the heavens. He was merely expressing in his own uncomfortable way the ascetic movement which was sweeping over the East, and which drove a proportion of the population of Egypt into the desert to live in hair-shirts and on bread and water.
His fame and his example were so powerful that Syria became a land of pillar hermits. They perched like owls on every favourable vantage point, and some even took up their abode in the branches of ancient trees. It is recorded that in the reign of Constantine II, a great storm in Syria caused havoc among them, blowing the holy men from their perches and even uprooting their pillars.
From Syria this peculiar cult spread into Asia Minor, Palestine, and Mesopotamia, but there is only one recorded example of a pillar hermit in the West; the monk Wulflaicus of Carignan, in the Ardennes, who, according to Gregory of Tours, mounted a pillar from which his bishop ordered him to descend. In the East isolated Stylites were still to be seen in the Sixteenth Century, and one, the last, is said to have lived in Georgia as late as the first half of the Nineteenth Century. It occurs to one naturally that such men were expressing a belief voiced first, maybe, in India and echoed in all oriental faiths, and even in the philosophy of Greece, that the body and the soul are always at war, and only by the defeat of the body can the soul achieve freedom. Therefore the hermits strove not to control the passions by rule and will as the monks did, but utterly to stamp them out. And the extraordinary fact about the movement is that the hermits and anchorites were not churchmen but laymen who, in the sudden revolt against materialism which seems to liave swept over the East in the Third and Fourth Centuries, gave up everything to go out into the desert and train their souls.
Strangely enough this physical hardship seems to have been extremely healthy. Most of the hermits lived to a good old age. There was one pillar hermit who sat on his perch until he was over a hundred years of age. Daniel of Constantinople, who was the most famous of all the Stylites after St. Simeon, sat on his pillar for thirty years and died at the hale old age of eighty. In the winter he was frequently covered with snow and ice and frozen hard by the bitter winds that sweep down from the Black Sea, in which condition he once so touched the compassion of the Emperor Leo that men were sent up to build a little hut over him. But the frozen old saint on top of the pillar refused to have anything to do with such a frivolous pandering to the flesh, and they were obliged to descend. So it would seem that the wicked body took its revenge on those who were trying to slay it by making up its mind to live as long as possible.
My driver came up to say that we must be moving because Aleppo road swarmed with thieves after dark. I said good-bye to Kala'at Sim'an and we were soon speeding across a lonely countryside. The sun, sinking behind us, flushed the sky with a fan of flamingo pink that turned to red and died away in long streamers of dark blue. The queer villages, so characteristic of the Ateppo plain, like rows of eggs in their trays, lay sometimes near the road, sometimes on the edge of the sky. Darkness fell and the stars shone. A hare with enormously powerful hind-legs, like the hares on the old coins of Messana, ran for a time in the whiteness of our lamps. Then suddenly we saw the lights of Aleppo lying on the plain.
§ 5
I was introduced that night to a young Bey of Aleppo. This may suggest a picturesque person with a gold scimitar across his knees, but times change and this Bey was a diffident young man in a flannel suit and a pair of brown suede shoes. His interests were rich and youthful. He knew Paris and he hoped one day to fly to London to see the Motor Show,
I happened to mention to him that I was finding it difficult to procure a Syrian driver who would face the desert road to Palmyra. One man said he did not know the way and was afraid of getting lost, another said the road was too bad, and a third, though willing, had become extortionate.
"I will motor you there. I have nothing to do," said the Bey
I reminded him that I wanted to start at four o'clock in the morning.
That is nothing,"he replied" I will call for you at four o'clock."
Palmyra is a little less than two hundred miles from Aleppo as the crow flies, but I wanted to go first to Resafa, and this meant a detour so that the journey was more like three hundred miles. It is perhaps a reflection on the West that if a stranger offered to motor one to Carlisle on the spur of the moment, it would not be unnatural to expect to see the famous gold-brick in the course of the journey.But in the East sudden surprising streaks of generosity are encountered,
from that of the poor Bedouin who will give you his last sheep, though he has never seen you before, to that of the Bey's sudden impetuous and entirely sincere offer. I was only too glad to accept, and went tobed to snatch a few hours' sleep, feeling that in Aleppo at least the mantle of the Caliph is not yet entirely thread-bare.
Shortly after four o'clock on the following morning the Bey arrived in a small but powerful car. He was dressed in a leather jacket lined with fur, Bedford cord breeches, and polo boots. Sitting beside him was a man in a tarbush and a long overcoat, who grasped a twelve-bore gun and wore across his chest a bandolier stuffed with cartridges.
I crouched in the small space behind, and we went off through the cold, sleeping town along a road that eventually lay across country which was already half desert. Had there been anyone to wonder about us, we must have presented an interesting problem. The car was of the kind whose dashing, cream-and-crimson body is seen rolling down the Champs Elysees, generally driven by a fashionable woman. We offered a choice of many possibilities to the inventive and even more perhaps to the apprehensive, with the Bey at the wheel, wearing an air of Hollywood in one of its out-of-door moments, the retainer, with the gun poked out of one window, and myself like a pallid captive at the back.
The Bey at the wheel abandoned his air of weary detachment and became superbly alert and competent. The car was fitted with those balloon tyres and reinforced springs which have killed the camel caravan traffic. When we came to any serious inequality in the road—though for sixty miles it was excellent—the car just poured over it with an almost imperceptible shudder.
As dawn was breaking we left this good road at a little group of huts and sheds called Meskene, and plunged into a region of low, ravaged-looking hills where the road became the wheel-marks of previous travellers. I shall never forget Meskene, because it was there that the retainer turned to me and, pointing, said, " El-Frat."
Looking to the left, I saw an ice-green river winding through the desert. It was the Euphrates. How modest and unlike my conception of the Euphrates was this slow stream just beginning its long journey across Mesopotamia into Babylonia! In the course of centuries it has changed its bed. The famous ford at Thapsacus, where Xcnophon crossed with the Ten Thousand and where Alexander forced the river, is only a few miles from Meskene, but it is now high and dry, about eight miles from the river-bank. Around us lay the ruins of cities which once drew their life from the Euphrates and from the commercial routes of the ancient world. These remains, lying dead in what was once green country, proclaim themselves as mounds in the sand and as ruins seen on low hills against the sky.
The country gradually changed. Slight foothills on either side advanced and retreated, sometimes opening into wide, level plains or into broken, steppe-like country bare of all vegetation. The only living creatures were enormous flocks of sheep moving slowly westward in charge of their shepherds. As a desert driver the Bey was. at his best. He was quick-minded, resolute, and daring: almost too daring at times, but he always managed to pull up before an obstacle. While we were crossing a hard, level plain he performed a spectacular act which I had never before seen. He suddenly ordered his man to load the gun, and accelerating his car, he aimed the gun through the window, firing both barrels at a flock of desert pigeons. It was a feat which reminded me of Buffalo Bill's famous bottle-shooting act from the back of a galloping horse.
He then settled down to two and a half hours' hard, nerve- racking desert motoring, speeding across the flat plains, crowling across sandy declivities, threading his way between sudden outcrops of stone, sometimes finding his path barred by a six-foot drop which forced him to go back and find a way round.
At last we saw the dead city lying ahead of us. A wall surrounded it, formed of massive blocks of stone, and above the wall we could see the masonry of buildings in the town.This was Resafa. From a distance the city looked as though it might be inhabited, then, as we drew nearer, we saw breaches in the wall; and as we came to the superb northern gate of the city, we saw that debris and sand lay piled almost to the lintels of the gateway.
What made the place so eerie was that, even when we got out of the car and- approached the gates, no Arabs emerged to gaze in curiosity or to offer themselves as guides. The place seemed to have been forsaken even by those natural inheritors of ruins. The retainer saw a jackal and went off with the gun, but I saw only this impressive Byzantine town lying in the desert, silent as the grave. We walked towards the gate that in its time had known all the restless sounds of life. What a superb gate it is. Under a stately colonnade of Roman arches, upheld on columns with Byzantine capitals, are three rectangular gates, the big central one for wheeled traffic, the two flanking entrances for foot passengers and horsemen. At first I thought that the walls, the gate, and those ruins which we could see beyond the gate, were all of marble, for the white stone shone and glittered in the sun. It was, however, white gypsum, and the Bey told me that it had been quarried about fourteen miles away.
When I passed under the gate I saw a whole town lying dead within its massive walls. Everything softer than this marble-like stone had vanished, leaving upright only the great buildings and the churches standing in empty spaces. The Bedouin had grubbed about in the ruins until the line of the streets had become lost beneath thousands of pits like shell-craters. Apparently cart-loads of Byzantine and early Arab pottery have been discovered there and sold to dealers in Aleppo. The Bey said that he knew an old Arab who had made thousands of francs in that way. On top of the pits lay beautiful fragments of iridescent pottery, which the Bedouin had rejected as not worth selling, and I could have filled a sack with them in half an hour.
As I climbed into ruined halls, to pause astonished by the beauty of the carved stone, which greatly resembles the work at Kala'at Sim'an, I recalled what little there is to remember about this town. It is mentioned in Isaiah, chapter xxxvii, verse 12, when Sennacherib, in an insulting message to Hezekiah, boasts that he has captured it with other towns. This reference is duplicated in II Kings, chapter xix, verse 12. The name is spelt Roseph in the Vulgate and Rezcph in the Revised Version. There is then a long gap in its history until it emerges in the Fourth Century A.D. as the great pilgrimage town of St. Sergius, the saint who is generally coupled with St. Bacchus. These saints were Roman officers and friends, who died for their faith early in the Fourth Century; one date given is 305 A.D., the year of Diocletian's abdication.
Bacchus is believed to have received martyrdom on the Euphrates, and Sergius three days later at Resafa. For some reason the fame of St. Sergius soon eclipsed that of Bacchus, and a pilgrimage town began to grow up at Resafa, where the remains of Sergius were buried. Pilgrims came from all parts of the world to visit the holy relics, and it is obvious from the magnificent remains visible to-day that the town of Sergiopolis, as it came for a time to be called, was one of the great shrines of the Fourth Century and remained so until the Arab conquest.
Like St. George, St. Sergius was a great warrior saint who was seen in shining armour, fighting in the Christian ranks. He linked Resafa with heaven and surrounded it with protection. The Emperor Justinian, who strengthened the frontiers of his empire by building forts and supporting the shrines of protective saints, sent to the shrine of St. Sergius, in the name of the Empress and himself, a beautiful cross of gold encrusted with precious stones. He also gave great sums for the building of a wall round the town and for the enrichment of the churches: thus Resafa is the same date—about 530 A.D.—as the Monastery of Mount Sinai.
Planted right in the path of the Persian attacks on the Byzantine Empire, the town must have led an anxious life, and many a time it beat off armies with the aid of the wsaint. Some indication of the fame of St. Sergius is the strange fact that one of his greatest devotees was Chosroes II, King of Persia, the famous pagan ruler of the time.
During a crisis in his affairs, Chosroes appealed for help to St. Sergius and vowed to the martyr a golden cross should his wish be granted. Not only did he fulfil his promise, but he sent back to Resafa the gold cross of Justinian, which had been looted during a Persian raid in the time of Chosroes I. On 2 second occasion the Persian King appealed to St.Sergius, this time that one of his wives might have a son. This desire was also granted. In order to show his gratitude, the Persian sent to the priests of Resafa many precious gifts, including rich vessels to be used in the services of the church and bearing his name. From the hazy accounts of these remarkable acts in the pages of Evagrius, it would seem that a promising convert was lost in Chosroes II.
Such stories help us to realise what a mighty power these pilgrim sanctuaries were in the Fifth and Sixth Centuries. There was hardly a thing that could not be asked of the saint: victory in war, children, riches, health. And heathen monarehs testified that the saint's generosity extended even to those who were not of the Christian faith. Swiftly the cult of St. Sergius spread all over the East, and in the Sixth Century he was regarded in that part of the world as the most important martyr after the Apostles. His fame spread to France, where Gregory of Tours recorded that he had heard how a king of the East had gone into battle with a relic of the saint strapped to his arm. He had only to raise his arm and instantly the tide of battle turned in his favour. There are two recorded fire miracles. Once when a fire raged in Bordeaux, the house of a Syrian was found to have escaped the flames, and it was then discovered that it contained a relic of St. Sergius. On another occasion, when a Jew was to be burned at the stake, a horseman in shining armour, who was instantly recognised as St. Sergius, appeared in the flames and rode round and round the victim, protecting him until the people, struck with fear and pity, dragged the Jew from the pyre.
As you look at Resafa in its thirsty desert, it is easy to forget that once it stood on one of the world's main roads, with populous towns and cities all around. It was on the great caravan road, with Palmyra to the south and Dura-Europos to the south-east. Hardly a day can have passed that did not see itreams of traffic converging on its walls. The pilgrims and other travellers who found their prayers answered at the saint's tomb would rapidly have spread the fame of St.Sergius as far as Rome and the Bosphorus to the west, and Persia to the east. So it is not difficult to understand why St. Sergius, again united with his friend St. Bacchus, crossed the Mediterranean and received the reverence of the Western Church. In Rome and Chartres churches were dedicated to them. The traveller in Istanbul to-day, when he enters Justinian's church of St. Sergius and St. Bacchus, is often heard to wonder who St. Bacchus was.
The ruins of Resafa have never been properly explored, and I believe that they may reveal many a secret to us. I entered a roofless hall whose richly decorated arches were lifted against the open sky. Debris lay almost to the top of the walls. This was the site of the martyrdom of St. Sergius. Some distance away, towards the south-east of the city, stands the noble ruin of the great church of St. Sergius, the splendid nave and aisles almost complete, but, like every building in Resafa, high with fallen masonry. The saint was buried before the high altar in a crypt which was reached by a double stairway. This part of the church is a chaos of fallen stones on which grass and weeds are growing, and it is a only just possible to see the design of this shrine, and impossible to penetrate into the choked entrances of the vault. Here again, as at Kala'at Sim'an, I felt that this superbly decorative Syrian architecture recompenses us for the disappearance ofAntioch. If a man should wish to know what Antioch looked like in the Sixth Century, I think a visit to Baalbec, to Kala'at Sim'an, and Resafa would give him a fairly good idea.
We examined the massive walls which surround Resafa almost without a break. It is possible to follow the sentry- walk for hundreds of yards at a stretch, and to enter the guard-houses where Byzantine garrisons kept watch over the desert. Ruins stand up here and there all over the city area, and there are four immense, vaulted underground rain-water cisterns, each one as high, I should think, as the aisles of Westminster Abbey.
While we were looking at them, a number of Bedouin stole up and sat watching us, rifles across their knees. The Bey soon established good relations, and looks of villainy were soon replaced by childlike smiles and laughter as they accepted our cigarettes. They were a wild-looking lot, evidently descendants of those tribes who gave travellers to Palmyra such a bad time as recently as fifty years ago. Nearly all descriptions of a visit to Palmyra in the days of horses and camels mention the danger of being captured by bands of horsemen flourishing spears and flintlock guns.
One of the most pathetic sights in the modern desert is the sight of a Bedouin's eyes as he looks into a car and sees so much easy plunder rolling off into the distance. I have seen my cat look like that when someone has walked past with fish on a plate.
The Bey said it would take six hours to reach Palmyra.Before-the war travellers had to take tents, a dragoman, a retinue of servants, an escort of Turkish soldiers, a consular permit, which was only granted when the tribes were quiet, and it took five days to get there.
We sped on across the desert, sometimes crawling over rocky country, sometimes travelling at eighty kilometres an hour for three or four minutes at a time. There was no road except marks made by previous cars. Suddenly we met three motor-lorries staggering along, driven by Arabs, tarpaulins strapped over their loads. I wondered what kind of cargo they Could be carrying.
" Truffles! " explained the Bey. " They grow in the desert after rain, and the Bedouin find them. The cars go round the desert now and then to collect them."
That this hungry country could have any connection with a restaurant struck me as fantastic. I have often thought, watching a gourmet in a fashionable restaurant pouting at the menu, how little we know of the fantastic organisation that exists in the world for the filling of the discriminating diner, and how no head-waiter, dealing with a petulant feeder, will ever admit that absence of lobster may be due to a hundred mile an hour gale. There is in fact a suggestion in restaurants I that such riches fall out of heaven; that if a certain rare food is not visible, it can be called into being by a slight gesture on the ; part of the maitre d'hotel. Truffles in the middle of the Syrian ; desert! Imagine the astonishment of the consumer of these ; truffles if behind the waiter there walked in procession the brown Bedouin women who had picked them, their children, who had helped, the sheik who had haggled with the whole-saler, the Arab drivers, with their faces bound from chin to eyes in keffiehs, and all the various Greeks, Jews, and Armenians who had taken a rake-off before the truffles came anywhere near the chef.
" Who are these people ? " he would cry in alarm."Sir, you ordered truffles. They found them for you..."
We sped on across the desolate landscape, and I understood why Palmyra should have remained lost in the desert for so long. Although Arabs had often told stories of the wonderful lost city of the sands, whose pillars were more numerous than the desires of men, no one had paid any attention until some English merchants ofAleppo went there in 1678. They were the first Europeans to see Palmyra after the Arab Conquest. They returned there in 1691, accompanied by Dr. William Halifax, who wrote an account of the city in the Proceedings of a learned society. But the men who really reintroduced Palmyra to world were two Englishmen, Robert Wood and James Dawkins, who visited the ruins in 1751 and wrote a massive volume full of wonderful engravings entitled A Journey to Palmyra, otherwise Tedmor in the Desert. Wood's book was translated into a score of European languages and helped, no doubt, to give the warrior queen of Palmyra, Zenobia, until then quietly interred in the pages of Pollio, the romantic vogue which she enjoyed in the early Nineteenth Century.
Strangest of all visitors to Palmyra was Lady Hester Standhope, the first woman who penetrated its mysteries. She had heard about Palmyra from travellers in Syria and had bought Wood's book, which her Arab associates naturally thought was a plan of buried treasure. In the confusion of this lady's mind there existed some idea that she was destined to rival Zenobia and to restore the ruined city to its ancient splendour. On March 20, 1813, she set out from her stronghold in the Syrian hills, dressed as an Arab sheik and surrounded by her Arab bodyguard. Bedouin chiefs, who had been well paid to ensure her safety, pranced beside her, grasping lances tufted with ostrich feathers. Forty baggage-camels padded behind the cavalcade.
Among the curious things which her vanity prompted was the queenly imposition of a tax of a thousand piastres on all European visitors to the ruins. The sheiks were naturally charmed with this idea. But it was imposed in the hope that it would deter other travellers from venturing to Palmyra.
Late in the afternoon the Bey removed one hand from the wheel and pointed ahead : he said, giving the Arabic name: "Tadmor!"
Looking into the distance, I saw a conical hill with a castle on its crest. At the foot of this hill, in all directions, and the colour of the bright, sunlit sand, were columns standing and prostrate, like the bones of some mighty skeleton lying in the desert.
§6
An Arab boy came riding on a white donkey up the main street of Palmyra, which was designed long ago for great processions and mighty caravans from Parthia. He was singing one of those long wailing songs which the Arabs sing with closed eyes and their heads flung back, and every now and then the donkey's hoofs hit a stone which made a sharp little sound in the hot silence of the afternoon.
There was no living thing but this singing Arab and his donkey going up the great street, along a path striped by the black shadows of the standing columns. Everywhere rose the remains of Palmyra, a great arch, temples, broken pavements: a ghostly city lying in a golden desert. Sometimes when you are travelling in the desert, even in these days of motor transport, you come across the skeleton of a camel lying on the sand. Palmyra is like that: a long Hellenistic back-bone, which is the main Street of Columns, and ribs leading off to right and left; a ruin picked clean by Time and bleached by the sunlight of centuries to the colour of pale honey.
It is a perfect example of the romantic ruin which the Nineteenth Century adored. So secure in itself and so tolerant of the unhappy past, this age could contemplate Palmyra, and indeed all ruins, with a calm detachment. The drums of columns and the scattered capitals seemed to invite visitors to sit down and moralise upon the crash of civilisations. But the traveller of a less certain period cannot drive away the thought that if Belgravia suffered a severe aerial bombardment and were set out in hard sunlight on the sand, it would bear a startling resemblance to Palmyra, especially if some of Barclay's larger banks were included.
I wandered all afternoon among the remains of this city, for the Bey had gone onward to Damascus, where he had business, and could not be persuaded to stay even for an hour. I thought the triumphal arch which links the Street of Columns to the gigantic brown temple of Baal one of the finest and richest pieces of Syrian architecture I had ever seen. It is about two centuries earlier than the pilgrimage churches of Syria, but you can see in its decoration the designs which the Christian architects adopted and introduced into the richly chased arches of their church doors and windows. They carved stone as if it were soft wood.
Palmyra is a strange ruin. It is not haunted by saints or warriors, but by merchants. Its history is one of trade. There is a legend that it began as " Tadmor in the wilderness," which the Bible says was one of the cities built by Solomon, and the Arabs call it Tadmor to this day. If it is the Tadmor of Solomon, he founded it for the protection of his caravans at a strategical point where two great trade routes met on their way to the sea; one from the Persian Gulf and the other from the land of the Queen of Sheba. There is nothing now left of Solomon's city. The ruins are of a later city, which rose to its greatest power in 270 A.D., and declined with the ambitions of its queen, Zenobia.
She had a great vogue in the Nineteenth Century. If a modern biographer revived her memory, she might have another lease of life, for even Gibbon said complimentary things about her. She was a woman of great force of character, who ruled this strange plutocracy of Palmyra during a, time when it seems rather to have lost its head. The population was half Arab, perhaps part Jew, and part Persian. It was a strange, half-breed city of fabulously rich merchants who had piled up fortunes on the eastern caravan trade. A Roman matron in a villa at Tivoli, which the Emperor presented to her. Her children married well, and when Trevellius Pollio wrote her life in the following century, an estate in that part of Italy still bore her name. But Palmyra never recovered from her defeat. Life slowly left it. The splendid mansions fell into ruin and the great temple was deserted. Its golden dream was over, and the time came when men forgot its existence.
I walked from end to end of the central colonnade which divided the city. Many a time Zenobia must have ridden there in the days of her brief triumph. Nearly four hundred columns marched together on each side of this street; now about a hundred and fifty remain. One end of the magnificent street stops at the great Temple of Baal. After Baalbec, this temple is the most massive ruin in Syria. The French have cleared away the Arab huts which were huddled together in the temple enclosure, and it is now possible to see all that remains of this extraordinary building.
It is a stupendous oriental temple built of huge blocks of yellow stone. The walls are inclined inwards like those of an Egyptian pylon, or the lower stage of a Babylonian temple tower. It is characteristic of Palmyra that this oriental giant should have been surrounded by graceful Hellenistic columns, which stand there looking rather surprised even in their decay. It is obvious that these columns must have been added to the old building at a later period, probably by Zenobia, who may have thought that the temple needed a civilising Greek touch.
At the temple gate I met an Arab custodian who offered to show me the tombs. He ran to get the keys, for the best tombs are now wisely under lock and key, and together we set off across the ruins of the city to some low hills to the west, where we could see a number of massive stone towers like square church towers, except that some were narrowed slightly towards the top. The Arab told me that there were underground tombs and tower tombs. The underground tombs were mostly hidden beneath the sand, but sometimes a camel fell in if the roof was weak; and, as he put it, this " was very interesting." The man said that there were hundreds of tombs still to be discovered—hundreds; and he kissed the tips of his fingers and made a gesture of abundance.
He unlocked a door and I walked down to a dark chamber full of warm air. The sides of the tomb were cut into shelves for the reception of bodies, and they reminded me of the wine cellars to be found in the basements of Victorian houses. I struck a match and saw that some of these niches still contained bones. The light from the open door fell on a startling sight. It was my first Palmyrene. He was carved life-size in white limestone, reclining gracon the lid of his sarcophagus. He was the owner of the tomb and the founder of the family who were buried there.
He was middle-aged, clean-shaven, and had staring eyes. His face, in fact his whole body, might have been modelled by a backward first-term student in any school of sculpture. He was reclining on rich cushions and rugs as if at a banquet. He wore a brimless cap rather like a tarbush, surrounded by a wreath; a long tunic, probably of silk, fell in folds over his body, and his legs were encased in thin trousers of the same material, gathered at the ankle. He wore buskins of soft leather richly embroidered or tooled. Instead of being some stray Persian, this was a typical wealthy Palmyrene of the Roman period. We entered other tombs, and many of them contained similar reclining figures, some with wine-cups in their hands. The women were shown reclining or sitting upright, covered with jewellery and wearing a Roman dress, often with a head-veil. The sculptors were good at jewellery. Each stone, each setting, the details of ear-rings and bangles, were carved with meticulous care, as if these women were determined to carry the ghosts of their jewellery with them into the next world. The impression I had was of a crowd of Orientals, some of whom imitated the Romans and some who did not; people devoted to couches and cushions, wine-cups, silks and jewels. They were far from unpleasing people. Behind the conventional stiffness of the sculptor's work I seemed to detect the quickness and intelligence of the living men and women.
This mixed race loved to spend its money with Greek architects, and prided itself on colonnades and buildings which no doubt they boasted were bigger and finer, and more expensive, than those of Antioch. But when it came to the intimacy of death, a touch of appealing sincerity seems to have caused them to employ their own native artists to perpetrate these hideous staring tomb portraits. It was strange to leave the splendid Hellenistic ruins of Palmyra, which might have belonged to Greeks, and to descend into the darkness of the tombs, where you discover this odd-looking race of semi-Persians, reclining in silk trousers on couches. Immense wealth had lifted them to terms of equality with the fashionable world which they loved to imitate in public, but death brought them down to realities; they never pretended to be Greeks in the tomb.
The tower tombs were extraordinary places: storey above storey, reached by a stone staircase, and each floor devoted to the dead. It was in one of these towers that an Arab attached himself to me, a young man in a keffieh, a blue serge jacket, a gallabta, and a pair of new brown shoes. I have no idea where he came from, for the place had seemed empty when I went in. He told me that he was cook to a French officer's family, for Palmyra is now a French air station.
Looking at him, I thought he resembled a thinner, more Arab version of the wide-eyed men in the tombs, perhaps his remote ancestors. He had a disconcerting fixity of expression and, I was to discover, of mind also. I wondered whether this restless desire to see the world was the old caravan feeling coming out. How much did cooks get in England ? he asked suddenly. I said, probably a fairly good cook received about a pound a week. He stood up and cried with terrible earnestness:
"I will come to England with you! I will come this night! All I get here is . . ." and he named a sum in Syrian money equivalent to five shillings a week. " In England I shall be rich," he cried. " Sir, I beg of you—take me back to England with you! "
I am told on good authority that cooks are difficult to find, but for the rest of that day my problem was how to lose one. He followed me everywhere, begging to be engaged and promising gigantic and indigestible meals. After dark that evening I heard a tap on the hotel window, and looking up, I saw his white figure standing outside, his face pressed to the glass, making mysterious noddings and mouthings. I went outside. He had been running hard. Evidently he had cooked and served his dinner and the French family were probably lying about in a state of comatose repletion, and would not miss him.
" When do you go to England? " he whispered quickly. " Not for a long time," I said as gently as I could, for his anxiety was pathetic. " I go to Baghdad to-morrow." I regretted this instantly, fearing that he might try and attach himself to me. But he sighed hopelessly, then brightened.
" Then—you write to me and I shall come," he said, pressing into my hand a bit of paper which contained his name and address. He turned and ran off into the darkness.
Suddenly the air, already chilled at sunset, had a touch of ice in it. The winter which I had seen spread over the Taurus was blowing down upon the Syrian Desert. I piled every coat and available cloth on the bed. Glancing through the window, I saw Palmyra lying in the white light of the stars. It was silent and still. Columns rose over the ruins like marching ghosts. I thought of the men and women reclining beneath the ground at their last banquets, and it seemed to me that this city shared to the full the pathos of all those silent places which have known the hopes and the desires of mankind.