At this Najīb, whom no such scruple had withheld from enjoying the unwonted luxury of an ample meal, nodded his head and said:
"The Agha is an evil man, may God reward him according to his deeds! He squeezes their last metalīk from the poor, he seizes their land, and turns them out of their houses to starve."
"And worse than that," said Mikhāil darkly.
"By God!" said Najīb. "Every man who has a fair wife or a fair daughter stands in fear of him, for he will never rest until the woman is in his hands. By God and Muḥammad the Prophet of God! many a man has he killed that he might take his wife into his own harem, and no one is hated more than he."
"Who shall prevent him?" said Najīb. "He is rich--may God destroy his dwelling!"
"Oh Mikhāil!" said I as we picked our way across the muddy fields. "I have travelled much in your country and I have seen and known many people, and seldom have I met a poor man whom I would not choose for a friend nor a rich man whom I would not shun. Now how is this? Does wealth change the very heart in Syria? For, look you, in my country not all the powerful are virtuous, but neither are they all rogues. And you and the Druze of Ḳalb Lōzeh and Mūsa the Kurd, would you too, if you had means, become like Reshīd Agha?"
"Oh lady," said Mikhāil, "the heart is the same, but in your country the government is just and strong and every one of the English must obey it, even the rich; whereas with us there is no justice, but the big man eats the little, and the little man eats the less, and the government eats all alike. And we all suffer after our kind and cry out to God to help us since we cannot help ourselves. But at least I did not eat the bread of Reshīd Agha," concluded Mikhāil rather sententiously; and at this Najīb and I hung our heads.
[Illustration 153: ON THE BANK OF THE ORONTES, ANTIOCH]
Then followed five hours of the worst travelling. It may have been a judgment upon Najīb and me for sitting at the table of the wicked, but, like most of the judgments of Providence, it fell impartially on the just and the unjust, for Mikhāil endured as much as we. All that we had suffered the day before from the rocks we now suffered at the opposite end of the scale from the mud. The torture was a thousand times more acute. For five hours we crossed hills of earth on which there was never a stone, but the sticky slime of the slopes alternated with deep sloughs, where our horses sank up to their girths, and when at last we emerged from this morass into the Orontes valley man and beast were exhausted. The rising ground, which we had left, now rose into rocky ridges and peaks, the broad valley lay on our right hand, half full of flood water, and beyond it stood a splendid range of mountains. It was not long before we caught sight of the Byzantine towers and walls crowning the ridges to the left, and between hedges of flowering bay we stumbled along the broken pavement of the Roman road that led to Antioch. The road was further occupied by a tributary of the Orontes, which flowed merrily over the pavement. It was with some excitement that I gazed on the city of Antioch, which was for so many centuries a cradle of the arts and the seat of one of the most gorgeous civilisations that the world has known. Modern Antioch is like the pantaloon whose clothes are far too wide for his lean shanks; the castle walls go climbing over rock and hill, enclosing an area from which the town has shrunk away. But it is still one of the loveliest of places, with its great ragged hill behind it, crowned with walls, and its clustered red roofs stretching down to the wide and fertile valley of the Orontes. Earthquakes and the changing floods of the stream have overturned and covered with silt the palaces of the Greek and of the Roman city, yet as I stood at sunset on the sloping sward of the Noṣairiyyeh graveyard below Mount Silpius, where my camp was pitched, and saw the red roofs under a crescent moon, I recognised that beauty is the inalienable heritage of Antioch.