Page:Syria, the land of Lebanon (1914).djvu/260

SYRIA, THE LAND OF LEBANON Pharaoh was again calling down the corn of Hamath to fill his granaries, against the impending seven years of famine. But even here the old things are passing. Just beyond the line of camels, a longer line of peasant women, with dirty blue dresses kilted above their knee?, were carrying upon their heads baskets of earth and stone for the road-bed of the new French railway. The carriage road is French, too; and a very good road it is. We noticed some men repairing it with a most ingenious roller. A huge rounded stone, drawn by two oxen, had its axle prolonged by a twenty-foot pole, at the end of which a bare-legged Syrian was fastened to balance the contrivance. If the stone had chanced to topple over, the spectacle of the captive road-maker dangling at the top of the slender flag-staff would have been well worth watching.

All along the journey we were reminded of the fact that this was not only the East, but the old, old East. The soil is fertile, but the very wheat-fields are different from ours. Only a few yards in width, they are often of prodigious length; the thin green strips sometimes stretch away until in the far distance they are lost over the curve of the treeless plain. At one place the road is cut through a hill honeycombed with rock-tombs, which the Haj said were of Jewish origin. Every now and then we passed a tell, or great hemispherical mound built up of the rubbish of dozens of ruined towns which, one [ 210 ]