It was with ever-increasing eagerness of expectation that we hastened on, after asking our way from some railway workmen—Europeans—who were living in tents among the ruins, and who spoke a polyglot of Arabic, French, and Italian. Within a few minutes we crossed the line upon which they were engaged, intended—strange anachronism!—to connect Damascus with Mecca, an undertaking for which the Turkish Government deserves the credit of immense perseverance under very difficult conditions. It may be mentioned, in passing, as also to their credit, that they are now rapidly carrying out the line from Haifa northwards, undertaken some years ago by the English, and which—after the whole district had been surveyed, the line planned by the skill of Dr Schumacher, the German-American Vice-Consul at Haifa, and the work, in the hands of an English engineer and English foreman, had made some progress—was mysteriously abandoned, to the serious loss of many of the employés.
It is of this railway that Professor George Adam Smith prognosticated so hopefully, as being the most important material innovation from the West. "... Not only will it open up the most fertile parts of the country, and bring back European civilisation to where it once was supreme—on the east of Jordan—but, if ever European arms return to the country—as in a contest for Egypt or for the Holy Places when may they not return?—this railway, running from the coast across the central battlefield of Palestine, will be of immense strategic value" ("Hist. Geog. of the Holy Land," p. 20).
At the point where we cross the line the rails are not yet in place, but the iron monster will soon be here—fit symbol of an age which mocks the time that is, but creates few monuments which shall defy the time that shall be; which enables the curious to gaze at the wonders of the past, but leaves him no leisure to initiate what may survive our race, and speak, as do the ruins of Moab, to an age and a people of a distant future. We come on the wings of steam, and with all the miracles of science, but we leave no trace but unsightly heaps and a scar upon the face of the landscape. We were glad, some of us, when we had reached and crossed the unshamed anachronism, and, forgetting the noise that would break the silence of the plain, the smoke that would soil its purity, the advertisement, the competition, with their attendant vulgarity and vice, we could throw ourselves again into the arms of Nature, and listen to the voices of our Mother Earth.