UNEXPLORED SYRIA.*

WE must say that Captain Burton's literary industry, which is

very great, would be more commendable were a portion of it expended in pruning and arranging his manuscript collections. Here we have an omnium-gatherum of materials, valuable as illustrating the little-known regions of Northern Syria, but thrown together in such a way as to render the two bulky volumes they constitute almost unreadable. The discursive and not very relev- ant prefatory remarks of the Captain are succeeded by a closely- packed chapter of geographical details, written by Mrs. Burton, who, as a writer, is the very opposite to her husband. While he pokes his fun at enthusiasts who suffer from a complaint that he calls "Holy Land on the brain," and "for the reasonable enjoy- ment of life prefers to Lebanon Highgate's grassy steep, the com- fort of Spitalfields, the ease of the Seven Dials, and the society of Southwark," the lady gives the measurement not only of the "pregnant stone" left for centuries half-quarried at Heliopolis, but the mythical stature of Seth, Noah, and Ham, whose tombs are traditionally represented to be among the limestone rocks overlooking the valley of Damascus. The most interesting part a Mrs. Burton's chapter,—the account of a visit to Palmyra, has been in print before. Palmyra, beautiful in death, though 210Vt

"a skeleton Whose shell but serves to tesselate the air,"

excites little warmth of admiration in Mrs. Burton's mind. "If you ask me," she writes, "whether Palmyra be worth the trouble, I will reply' Yes' and 'No.' 'No,' if you merely go and come,

especially after the splendours of Baalbek; not for the broken Grand Colonnade, nor for the Temple of the Sun (the fredoine of a Roman Emperor). 'Yes,' if you would examine the site, the neighbourhood, and the old Palmyrene tomb-towers, which here represent the Pyramids. But who can pretend to do this in two

days? We could not in five ; it requires twelve or thirteen at least." The proud city "where once Zenobia, Queen of all the East, drove in her chariot, girt with flaming swords, and dark adoring faces of her lovers," is now, says Mrs. Burton, a place where "the water is detestable, the climate unhealthy, and the people ugly, dirty, poor, ragged, and ophthalmic." So much for the glory of Solomon, whose slaves the genii are said to have poised the stupendous blocks upon which are based the columns of Tadmor's Temple of the Sun I

Captain Burton's anthropological notes on the Pal my ren es, placed in the appendix to Vol. II. of the work before us, are interesting and instructive. The frontispiece to the same volume represents a hand-

some though mutilated female bast in M. Peretie's collection at Bayrut, which it is suggested may stand for Zenobia. Mr. Carter Blake's anatomical observations on the human remains brought from Palmyra are opposed to the notion that the people thus disinterred belonged to the Hebrew race. The dry school-book tone of Mrs. Burton's narrative is departed from at page 78, where she de- scribes the panorama that lay outstretched before her as she atanda upon the Cedar Col, 7,700 feet above the level of the sea :—

0 The whole formed an epitome cf Syria and Palestine, which have been said to epitomise the habitable world. Here we saw at a glance all the gradations of climate, from the tropical to the polar. We were viewing from Alpine heights the plains of the temperate zone falling * Unexplored Spria.—Visits to the Lamm, the 7'uldt-e1-SaM, Me eterti-Libartus, the Northern Libanus, and the 'Ala& By Richard F. Burton and Charles F. Tyrwhitt Drake. 2 vols. London: TItudey Brothers. 1872. into the torrid about Tiberias. Our range embraced every form of ground, coasting scenery and inland, volcanio and sedimental, mountain and hill, fertile plain, rich valley and garden land, oasis and desert, rook and precipice, fountain and spring, sweet arid mineral river, rivulet and torrent, swamp and lakelet, and sea. There were all varieties of vege- tation, from the mushroom to the truffle ; from liquorice to rhubarb and sumach ; from the daisy, the buttercup, and the bilberry, to the mul- berry, the grape vine, and the fig; from the pine, the walnut, and the potato, to the palm, the plantain, and the jujube. A fair range of pro- ducts—coal, bitumen (Indaicum), and lignite, iron, copper, and pyrites, with perhaps other metals still unexplored—lies beneath its surface, expecting the vivifying touch of modern science ; whilst its gypsum, syenite, porphyry, padding-stone, and building material, have been worked since the dawn of history. Thus the country was directly fitted for the three chief forms of human society—the pastoral, the agricultural, and the commercial, represented by the tent the cottage, and the city on the shore. In its palmy days the land must in many places have appeared to be one continuous town; whilst even at the pre- sent time there is no country of proportional area which can show so many and such contrasts of races. Syria and Palestine, I may safely prophesy, still await the hour when the home of a free, a striving, and an energetic people, it will again pour forth corn and oil, it will flow with milk and honey, and it will bear, with proper culture, almost all the good things that have been given to man."

This high opinion of the capabilities of Syria is shared by Mr. Tyrwhitt Drake, who asks if England will ever look upon Syria

as anything else than a land for tourists to amuse themselves in? Will she ever see that a pied-h-terre there would secure her not only an uninterrupted passage to India, but wealth incal-

culable in mineral and agricultural produce? Both, he adds, may yet be drawn from this fertile land, whose soil needs no manure, and whose mountains teem with ores. We fear that Mr. Drake is filled with the old mananion that betrayed Englishmen of yore into the love of conquest, annexation, and aggrandisement. He must learn the catechism of non-interference, and leave the Syrians to themselves. He is somewhat heterodox, too, on another point, in declaring the Moslem population of the Anti- Libanus to be a finer set of men than the Christian natives.

On entering a Christian village, he missed the ready dignified courtesy and evident wish to please which he had encountered among the Moslems. "All the Christians that I have ever beep among in this country are equally bad, insolent, greedy, disobliging, with the exception of the Jacobites of Sadad, who are even more brave and dignified, more hospitable and courteous than the generality of Moslems." Speculating on the cause of the churlishness of his co-religionists, Mr. Drake advances some cogent reasons for believ- ing it to be due to the degraded kind of Christianity in which they have been nurtured. Priest -ridden and steeped in superstition, the people during long years of oppression have become cringing hypo- crites, bearing secretly the bitterest hatred, not only to Moslems, but to every sect that differs from their own.

As a narrator we like Mr. Drake better than either of his coad- jutors. He knows how to relieve the dry statement of topographical details with incidents of the journey that help to keep the reader's flagging interest alive. Captain and Mrs. Burton seem to be always addressing the Geographical, or the Anthropological, or the Geological Society, and it is hard work for the unlearned to follow them. The excursion described by Mrs. Burton in the first volume took place in July and August, 1870, while another trip at the same date in the following year is described by Captain Burton in the second volume. To destroy illusions and criticise previous writers on the subject seems to be the task most con- genial to the Captain. Mrs. Burton indeed robs the cedar of Lebanon of its antique glory. "These exaggerated Christmas trees," she says, "which look from afar like the corner of a fir plantation, when near prove so mean and ragged that an English country gentleman would refuse them admittance into his park."

Upon the whole, the book must be pronounced to be valuable for its information, if not as agreeable as it might have been made by a better style. The prints and numerous woodcuts are good.

The transcript of the inscriptions on the Hamah Stones, first mentioned by Burckhardt in 1810, and now lithographed quarter- size by Captain Burton, add to the value of the book. The inter- pretation of these inscriptions is a task still reserved for the learned, among whom the notes of Captain Burton and Mr. Hyde Clarke will excite their due share of interest. The personal adventures of Captain Burton in Syria and Palestine, his contests with Moham- med Rashid and with Tahir Pasha, and the account of prayers offered up for him by thousands in the Mosque at Damascus, will form the substance of another book, which Messrs. Tinsley have under- taken to bring out in their own good time. We look forward to its appearance, and if a comparison may be made of the known with the unknown, of that work with this, we will quote the ninety-ninth of the Syrian proverbs given in this book, and say, "May the sound of the big drum drown the flute !"