Chapter XXI: Palmyra

It burst upon us all at once, Palmyra, in the desert--a chaos of golden pillars in the glow of the setting sun. We had been riding all day towards an indefinite shape on the horizon; slowly it had resolved itself into a barrier of yellow rock with dark lines becoming distinguishable against it. We had passed through the patches of rising corn, making green holes in the brown desert; we had wound through the gardens of pomegranate and plantations of palm trees and turned the corner of the ugly konak which barred the ruins from our view; and there it lay, the desert-girt city, in the unutterable lonely magnificence of its reckless confusion.

We drew rein under the Triumphal Arch; from here the eye is led on down the great colonnade from column to column, now upright, now fallen, to where a mile away a castle crowns a peak of the range under which Palmyra crouches--an old time harbour for the sand sea beyond.

Behind us the present village of Tadmor was concealed inside the walls of the great Temple of the Sun; its mud hovels lie rotting behind the gigantic columns of the inner court in the dirt which chokes the massive archways. Here it is that the present life of Palmyra, such as it is, is slowly obliterating the remaining evidences of her past; while on the opposite side of the ruins, where the hills cleave to form a lonely valley, the dead of Palmyra, buried in a line of square tomb-towers, still keep alive the memory of her ancient greatness.

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Was it the sun only, with its light on the yellow columns, that made one think of Palmyra purely as a city of gold? Or were one's thoughts unconsciously influenced by the fact that its traditions all rest on the getting of gold; its power was built up on trade; its great men were the successful traffickers of the desert; its statues and columns were raised to the memory of those who brought the caravans of goods from India and Persia unharmed through the dangers of the desert; its temples were dedicated to the Sun-god by those whose lives were spared in their getting of great wealth, or to the memory of those who perished in the attempt.

Those were the days when it was a man's boast that the blood of a merchant ran in his veins--when a youth could aspire to no higher goal than that of being a merchant prince of his proud city.

Her prosperity had been her ruin; the gold had led to her undoing; and now the Sun, to whom the temples had been raised at the time of her pride, mocked her ruins by giving them the semblance of scattered gold.

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This is the best way to realise Palmyra--to make it the culmination of a long and tedious journey through the desert. The first sight of it under any conditions must indeed be wonderful, but coming in from Damascus, which is the natural approach for visitors to the ruins, one could never feel about it in quite the same way. Civilisation is only five days behind you; the country you pass through, moreover, although desert enough in a way, does not give you the same sense of being utterly cut off from everything in limitless space; there are chains of mountains to be seen in the distance, and cultivated patches stretching round villages are more frequent. Then when you arrive at Palmyra you ride first through the valley of tombs--it is the dead that give you the first greeting; you get glimpses through the opening ahead of the highest columns, and are slowly prepared for what is coming, until, emerging finally through the gap, the whole scene is laid out before you, with the gleaming desert beyond.

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But approach it from the desert side, and all the meaning and force of its one time existence is borne in upon you with an overwhelming realisation. For three weeks you have been following the old trade route from the Persian Gulf. You have made one of a caravan amongst the doggedly jogging mules and the slow stepping camels, both heavily laden with the clumsy pack-saddles holding bales of merchandise; the sound of their jangling bells is the only sound you hear through the long, monotonous ride under the blazing sun; you have spent night after night in the circle round the camp-fire, with the men crouched under the bales of goods piled up on the ground to form a rude shelter; the places where you stop have been the regular halting places for caravans for all time--now they are oases big enough to support a village, now it is merely a well and a guard-house. As you ride through the immeasurable expanse every dark object on the horizon line forms a subject for speculation. Its appearance is a signal for the hasty consolidation of the straggling line of men and animals, arms are looked to, you all close up and ride on, apparently unconcerned, but equally prepared for a sudden onslaught or a friendly greeting. For it is not only the difficulties and dangers due to Nature's barrenness that have to be guarded against. What must it have been in the days when the countless hordes of wealth of a huge caravan were at stake, and when the whole desert was beset with marauding tribes specially on the look-out for such prey? What must have been the feelings of those responsible for its safe conduct when they once more saw the first dim outline of the Palmyra hills in the distance? The goal would be reached that day; the troubles, the anxieties, the sleeplessness of the watching nights would be over; proud and triumphant they would ride down the long colonnade, the pack animals jostling one another in the unaccustomed crush of the bounded way, and the noise of shouting drivers and jangling bells sounding strangely loud and near in the confining space. Down on them from the columns above would look the statues put up to honour those who had achieved the same feat which they themselves had just accomplished. Their names too would now be written up and handed down from generation to generation in remembrance of the service they had rendered their State. For such deeds as these had built up the great city, and their fellow-citizens honoured them in this way.

At first it would seem that Tadmor was merely an Arab encampment, a stopping place amongst others for the passing caravans. The abundance of its water and its position on the meeting point of two great trade routes would gradually cause it to become an important centre. Dues were levied on all goods passing in and out, and even the privilege of using the wells was heavily taxed. Slowly it became the market-place of the East and the West; its inhabitants were the carriers between the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean Sea. As the foundations of the city were built up on trade, so commerce was a pursuit for its aristocracy, involved as it was with all the elements of warfare and danger. Its merchants would be pure Arabs of good blood, welcomed as equals by the shaykhs of the desert tribes through whose territory their goods had to pass. Palmyra had thus gradually built up her own existence as an independent State. Political events then added to her power. The wars of Rome with Persia made her an important military post; recognised by Rome more as a partner State than a dependency, she was able to pursue her own policy with such effect that she tried to assert her entire independence and cut herself adrift from the Western power. Taking advantage of the temporary ascendance of Persia over the Roman arms, the desert Queen, Zenobia, fulfilled her ambition as sole Queen of the East. After her defeat by Aurelian the town was partially destroyed; a change in the political factors which had contributed to her importance now hastened her downfall by lessening the significance of her geographical position; safer trade routes further south led to the decay of her commercial prosperity. Bit by bit she loses her place in historical records, and at the present day Palmyra stands a lonely ruin on a deserted trade route, inhabited by a score of Arab families.

In one sense Time has dealt gently with her; there is no decay from the growth of vegetation in this dry climate. Neither moss nor ivy has softened the aspect of destruction; the overturned columns show as true and sharp a face now as the day they were set up, and the ornate carving stands out in the same relief. One thinks of the place as built entirely of columns; they lie in rank profusion everywhere, like a great forest of trunks overturned by a gale. The great central avenue runs from the Temple of the Sun in a north-westerly direction to the castle on the range of hills which bounds the city to the north. It has been calculated that it alone contains 1,500 columns. Much of this still remains standing, but the gaps become more frequent, until at the castle end the whole thing has collapsed, forming a perfect sea of broken columns and fragments of carved pilasters. It is evident that the minor streets also were lined with pillars in the same way; short rows of them stand up here and there in various directions. Groups of twos and threes suggest also their attachment to some public building or temple. The statues were placed on brackets projecting from the upper part of the pillars, and the inscriptions below, which have escaped destruction, give the names and dates of those whom they were intended to honour.

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As we had entered Palmyra with a vivid conception of its life, so we left it with an equally vivid conception of its death.

Standing guard like a row of sentinels at the base of the hills are the square tomb-towers in which Palmyra buried its dead. The proud merchants seem to have been imbued with two main ideas: the erection of columns in their lifetime and of resting places for their families in death. Many of the towers are over a hundred feet high and consist of five and six stories. The bodies were arranged in tiers in the recesses on either side of a central chamber. Some of these buildings are still nearly perfect, others are practically heaps of ruins. The bones of the proud merchants are mingled with the bones of the wild beasts who have sought refuge there through the long ages.

We turn our backs on the city and ride away through the gap in the hills. The city is hidden from view, but the tomb-towers still stand in silent rows down the valley on either side.

We forget the golden pillars and all the ruined magnificence; we can think of nothing but these ghostly towers seeing us out, as it were, from this city of the dead.

High up on the hill above, in the still morning air, a shepherd boy pipes merrily at them, and flocks of goats and sheep browse unconcernedly at their feet.