Page:Syria, the land of Lebanon (1914).djvu/267

HAMATH THE GREAT fuller and deeper than the heaviest organ-stop. Now, slowly and painfully, it forces up a few tones of the scale, then drops sullenly to its key-note. "Do mi sol, . Do sol la, DO DO DO"—on through the day and the night and the century. It is the music of the na'ûra, the water-wheels of the Orontes. You see them now and then in southern villages, but as other cataracts are to Niagara, so are all other water-wheels to the water-wheels of Hama. Great wooden frames revolving painfully upon wooden axles as, by means of buckets along the circumference, the river lifts itself up to the level of the terraces above—these wheels approach very near to perpetual motion. We stand amazed before one that is forty feet high, until the eye travels down the river to another wheel of sixty feet; and our guide takes us out to the edge of the city where a monster ninety feet in diameter is playing its slow, solemn tune.

It is impossible to shut out the sound of their creaking. I know of travelers who have been so distracted by the incessant, inescapable noise that they could not sleep in Hama; but we found the music of the wheels very soothing, like the distant roar of the ocean or a slow fugue played on some cyclopean organ. Now they are in unison, now repeating the theme one after another, now for a brief moment in a sublime harmony never to be forgotten, then once more together in the unison of a tremendous chorus. [ 217 ]