The Book of Khalid (20 page)

“Now, I will bring you to a scene most curiously suggestive. Behold that little knot of daisies pressing around the alone anemone beneath the spreading leaves of the colocasia. Here is a rout at the Countess Casiacole’s, and these are the débutantes crowding around the Celebrity of the day. But would they do so if they were sensible of their own worth, if they knew that their idol, flaunting the crimson crown of popularity, had no more, and perhaps less, of the pure essence of life than any of them? But let Celebrity stand there and enjoy her hour; to-morrow the Ploughman will come.

“The sage, with its spikes of greyish blue flowers, its fibrous, velvety leaves, its strong, pungent perfume, which is not squandered or repressed, is the stoic of my native terraces. It responds generously to the personal touch, and serves the Lebanonese, rich and poor alike, with a little
luxury. Ay, who of us, wandering on foreign strands, does not remember the warm foot-bath, perfumed with sage leaves, his mother used to give him before going to bed? Our dear mothers!”—And here, Khalid goes in raptures and tears about his sorry experience in Baalbek and the anguish and sorrow of his poor mother. “But while I stand,” he continues, “let me be like the sage, a live-oak among shrubs, indifferent as the oak or pine to the winds and storms. And as the sun is setting, find you no solace in the thought, O Khalid, that some angel herb-gatherer will preserve the perfume in your leaves, to refresh therewith in other worlds your dear poor mother?

“My native terraces are rich with faith and love, luxuriant with the life divine and the wondrous symbols thereof. And the grass here is not cut and trimmed as in the artificial gardens and the cold dull lawns of city folk, whose love for Nature is either an experiment, a sport, a business, or a fad. ‘A dilettantism in Nature is barren and unworthy,’ says Emerson. But of all the lovers of Nature, the children are the least dilettanteish. And every day here I see a proof of this. Behold them wading to their knees in that lusty grass, hunting the classic lotus with which to deck their olive branches for the high mass and ceremony of Palm Sunday. But alas, my lusty grass and my beautiful wild flowers do not enjoy the morning of Spring. Here, the ploughman comes, carrying his long plough and goad on his shoulder, and with him his wife lugging the yoke and his boy leading the oxen. Alas, the sun shall not set on these bright, glowing, green terraces, whose walls are very ramparts of flowers. There, the boy with his scythe is paving the way for his father’s plough; the grass is mowed and given to the oxen as a bribe to do the ugly business. And all for the sake of the ugly mulberries,
which are cultivated for the ugly silk-worms. Come, let us to the heath, where the hiss of the scythe and the ‘ho-back’ and ‘oho’ of the ploughman are not heard.

“But let us swing from the road. Come, the hedges of Nature are not as impassable as the hedges of man. Through these scrub oaks and wild pears, between this tangle of thickets, over the clematis and blackberry bush,—and here we are under the pines, the lofty and majestic pines. How different are these natural hedges, growing in wild disorder, from the ugly cactus fences with which my neighbours choose to shut in their homes, and even their souls. But my business now is not with them. There are my friends the children again gathering the pine-needles of last summer for lighting the fire of the silk-worm nursery. And down that narrow foot-path, meandering around the boulders and disappearing among the thickets, see what big loads of brushwood are moving towards us. Beneath them my swarthy and hardy peasants are plodding up the hill asweat and athirst. When I first descended to the wadi, one such load of brushwood emerging suddenly from behind a cliff surprised and frightened me. But soon I was reminded of the moving forest in Macbeth. The man bowed beneath the load was hidden from view, and the boy directly behind was sweating under a load as big as that of his father.
‘Awafy!’
(Allah give you strength), I said, greeting them. ‘And increase of health to you,’ they replied. I then asked the boy how far down do they have to go for their brushwood, and laying down his load on a stone to rest, he points below, saying, ‘Here, near the river.’ But this ‘Here, near the river’ is more than four hours’ walk from the village.—Allah preserve you in your strength, my Brothers. And they pass along, plodding slowly under their overshadowing burdens. A hard-hearted Naturalist, who goes
so deep into Nature as to be far from the vital core even as the dilettante, might not have any sympathy to throw away on such occasions. But of what good is the love of Nature that consists only in classification and dissection? I carry no note-book with me when I go down the wadi or out into the fields. I am content if I bring back a few impressions of some reassuring instance of faith, a few pictures, and an armful of wild flowers and odoriferous shrubs. Let the learned manual maker concern himself with the facts; he is content with jotting down in his note-book the names and lineage of every insect and every herb.

“But Man? What is he to these scientific Naturalists? If they meet a stranger on the road, they pass him by, their eyes intent on the breviary of Nature, somewhat after the fashion of my priests, who are fond of praying in the open-air at sundown. No, I do not have to prove to my Brothers that my love of Nature is but second to my love of life. I am interested in my fellow men as in my fellow trees and flowers. ‘The beauty of Nature,’ Emerson again, ‘must always seem unreal and mocking until the landscape has human figures, that are as good as itself.’ And ’tis well, if they are but half as good. To me, the discovery of a woodman in the wadi were as pleasing as the discovery of a woodchuck or a woodswallow or a woodbine. For in the soul of the woodman is a song, I muse, as sweet as the rhythmic strains of the goldfinch, if it could be evoked. But the soul plodding up the hill under its heavy overshadowing burden, what breath has it left for song? The man bowed beneath the load, the soul bowed beneath the man! Alas, I seem to behold but moving burdens in my country. And yet, my swarthy and shrunken, but firm-fibred people plod along, content, patient, meek; and when they reach the summit of the hill with their crushing burdens,
they still have breath enough to troll a favourite ditty or serenade the night.

“And so is the breath of the pines. Here, the air is surcharged with perfume. In it floats the aromatic soul of many a flower. But the perfume-soul of the pines seems to tower over all others, just as its material shape lifts its artistic head over the oak, the cercis, and the terabinth. And though tall and stately, my native pines are not forbidding. They are so pruned that the snags serve as a most convenient ladder. Such was my pleasure mounting for the green cones, the salted pinons of which are delicious. But I confess they seem to stick in the stomach as the pitch of the cones sticks on the hands. This, however, though it remains for days, works no evil; but the pinons in the stomach, and the stomach on the nerves,—that is a different question.

“The only pines I have seen in the United States are those in front of Emerson’s house in Concord; but compared with my native trees, they are scrubby and mean. These pine parasols under which I lay me, forgiving and forgetting, are fit for the gods. And although closely planted, they grow and flourish without much ado. I have seen spots not exceeding a few hundred square feet holding over thirty trees, and withal stout and lusty and towering. Indeed, the floor of the Tent seems too narrow at times for its crowded guests; but beneath the surface there is room for every root, and over it, the sky is broad enough for all.

“Ah, the bewildering vistas through the variegated pillars, taking in a strip of sea here, a mountain peak there, have an air of enchantment from which no human formula can release a pilgrim-soul. They remind me—no; they can not remind me of anything more imposing. But when I was visiting the great Mosques of Cairo I was reminded of them. Yes, the pine forests are the great mosques of Nature. And for art-lovers, what perennial beauty of an antique art is here. These majestic pillars arched with foliage, propping a light-green ceiling, from which cones hang in pairs and in clusters, and through which curiously shaped clouds can be seen moving in a cerulean sky; and at night, instead of the clouds, the stars—the distant, twinkling, white and blue stars—what to these are the decorations in the ancient mosques? There, the baroques, the arabesques, the colourings gorgeous, are dead, at least inanimate; here, they palpitate with life. The moving, swelling, flaming, flowing life is mystically interwoven in the evergreen ceiling and the stately colonnades. Ay, even the horizon yonder, with its planets and constellations rising and setting ever, is a part of the ceiling decoration.

“Here in this grand Mosque of Nature, I read my own Korân. I, Khalid, a Beduin in the desert of life, a vagabond on the highway of thought, I come to this glorious Mosque, the only place of worship open to me, to heal my broken soul in the perfumed atmosphere of its celestial vistas. The mihrabs here are not in this direction nor in that. But whereso one turns there are niches in which the living spirit of Allah is ever present. Here, then, I prostrate me and read a few Chapters of MY Holy Book. After which I resign myself to my eternal Mother and the soft western breezes lull me asleep. Yea, and even like my poor brother Moslem sleeping
on his hair-mat in a dark corner of his airy Mosque, I dream my dream of contentment and resignation and love.

“See the ploughman strutting home, his goad in his hand, his plough on his shoulder, as if he had done his duty. Allah be praised, the flowers in the terrace-walls are secure. That is why, I believe, my American brother Thoreau liked walls with many gaps in them. The sweet wild daughters of Spring can live therein their natural life without being molested by the scythe or the plough. Allah be praised a hundred times and one.”

ALTHOUGH WE CLAIM SOME KNOWLEDGE OF the Lebanon mountains, having landed there in our journey earthward, and having since then, our limbs waxing firm and strong, made many a journey through them, we could not, after developing, through many readings, Khalid’s spiritual films, identify them with the vicinage which he made his Kaaba. On what hill, in what wadi, under what pines did he ruminate and extravagate, we could not from these idealised pictures ascertain. For a spiritual film is other than a photographic one. A poet’s lens is endowed with a seeing eye, an insight, and a faculty to choose and compose. Hence the difficulty in tracing the footsteps of Fancy—in locating its cave, its nest, or its Kaaba. His pine-mosque we could find anywhere, at any altitude; his vineyards, too, and his glades; for our mountain scenery, its beauty alternating between the placid and the rugged—the tame terrace soil and the wild, forbidding majesty—is allwhere almost the same. But where in these rocky and cavernous recesses of the world can we to-day find the ancient Lebanon troglodyte, whom Khalid has seen, and visited in his hut, and even talked with? It is this that forces us to seek his diggings, to trace, if possible, his footsteps.

In the K. L. MS., as we have once remarked and more than once hinted, we find much that is unduly inflated, truly Oriental; much that is platitudinous, ludicrous, which we have suppressed. But never could we question the Author’s veracity and sincerity of purpose. Whether he crawled like a zoöphyte, soared like an eagle, or fought, like Ali, the giants of the lower world, he is genuine, and oft-times amusingly truthful. But the many questionable pages on this curious subject of the eremite, what are we to do with them? If they are imaginary, there is too much in this Book against quackery to daunt us. And yet, if Khalid has found the troglodyte, whom we thought to be an extinct species, he should have left us a few legends about it.

We have visited the ancient caverns of the Lebanon troglodytes in the cliffs overhanging the river of Wadi Kadeesha, and found nothing there but blind bats, and mosses, and dreary vacuity. No, not a vestage of the fossil is there, not a skull, not a shinbone. We have also inquired in the monasteries near the Cedars, and we were frankly told that no monk to-day fancies such a life. And if he did, he would not give his brother monks the trouble of carrying his daily bread to a cave in those forbidden cliffs. And yet, Simeon Stylites, he of the Pillar, who remained for thirty years perched on the top of it, was a Syrian shepherd. But who of his descendants to-day would as much as pass one night on the top of that pillar? Curious eleemosynary phases of our monkish system, these modern times reveal.

On our way from a journey to the Cedars, while engaged in the present Work, we passed through a pine forest, in which were some tangled bushes of the clematis. The muleteer stops near one of these and stoops to reach something he had seen therein. No treasure-trove, alas, as he supposed;
but merely a book for which he lacerated his hands and which he cursed and handed to us, saying, “This must be the breviary of some monk.”

No, it was an English book, and of American origin, and of a kind quite rare in America. Indeed, here were a find and surprise as agreeable as Khalid’s sweetbrier bush. Henry Thoreau’s
Week
! What a miracle of chance. Whose this mutilated copy of the
Week
, we thought? Who in these mountains, having been in America, took more interest in the Dreamer of Walden Woods than in peddling and trading? We walk our mule, looking about in vague, restless surprise, as if seeking in the woods a lost companion, and lo, we reach a monarch pine on which is carved the name of—Khalid! This book, then, must be his; the name on the pine tree is surely his own; we know his hand as well as his turn of mind. But who can say if this be his Kaaba, this his pine-mosque? Might he not only have passed through these glades to other parts? Signs, indeed, are here of his feet and hands, if not of his tent-pegs. And what signifies his stay? No matter how long he might have put up here, it is but a passage, deeply considered: like Thoreau’s passage through Walden woods, like Mohammad’s through the desert.