Damascus is the city of the Arab tribes who conquered her and set their stamp upon her; Aleppo, standing astride the trade routes of northern Mesopotamia, is a city of merchants quick to defend the wealth that they had gathered afar. So I read the history that is written upon her walls and impressed deep into the character of her adventurous sons.

At Aleppo the current of the imagination is tributary to the Euphrates. With Xenophon, with Julian, with all the armies captained by a dream of empire that dashed and broke against the Ancient East, the thoughts go marching down to the river which was the most famous of all frontier lines. So we turned east, and on a warm and misty February morning we passed under the cypresses of Abu Bekr and took the road to Hierapolis. It was a world of mud through which we journeyed, for the rains had been heavy, and occasionally a shower fell across our path; but rain and mud can neither damp nor clog the spirit of those who are once more upon the road, with faces turned towards the east. The corn was beginning to sprout and there were signs too of another crop, that of the locusts which had swarmed across the Euphrates the year before, and after ravaging the fields had laid their eggs in the shallow earth that lies upon the rocky crest of the ridges between cornland and cornland. Whenever the road climbed up to these low eminences we found a family of peasants engaged, in a desultory fashion, in digging out the eggs from among the stones. Where they lay the ground was pitted like a face scourged with smallpox, but for every square yard cleared a square mile was left undisturbed, and the peasants worked for the immediate small reward which the government paid for each load of eggs, and not with any hope of averting the plague that ultimately overwhelmed their crops. It comes and goes, for what reason no man can tell, lasting in a given district over a term of lean years, and disappearing as unaccountably as it came: perhaps a storm of rain kills the larvæ as they are hatching out, perhaps the breeding season is unfavourable—God knows, said Ḥâjj ’Alî, the zaptieh who accompanied me. The country is set thick with villages, of which Kiepert marks not the tenth part—and even those not always rightly placed. We passed his Sheikh Najar, and at Sheikh Ziyâd I went up to see the ziyârah, the little shrine upon the hill-top, but found there nothing but a small chamber containing the usual clay tomb. We left Serbes on the right—it was hidden behind a ridge—and took a track that passed through the village of Shammar. Not infrequently there were old rock-cut cisterns among the fields and round the mounds whereon villages had once stood. At Tell el Ḥâl, five hours from Aleppo, a modern village lies below the mound, and by the roadside I saw part of the shaft of a column, with a moulded base, while several more fragments of columns were set up as tombstones in the graveyard. An hour before we reached Bâb we caught sight of the high minaret of the ziyârah above it. It is a flourishing little place with a bazaar and several khâns, in one of which I lodged. The heavy rain-clouds that had hung about us all day were closing down as evening approached, but I had time to climb the steep hill to the west of the village, where a cluster of houses surrounds the ziyârah of Nebî Ḥâshil—so I heard the name, but Abu’l Fidâ calls it the Mashhad of ’Aḳil ibn Abî Ṭâlib, brother of the Khalif ’Alî —an old shrine of which the lower part of the walls is built of rusticated stones. The tomb itself was closed, but I went to the top of the minaret and had a fine view of the shallow fruitful valley of the Deheb, which, taking its source near Bâb and the more northerly Tell Batnân, runs down to the salt marshes at the foot of Jebel el Ḥaṣṣ. Across the valley there is a notable big mound with a village at its foot, the Buzâ’â of the Arab geographers, “smaller than a town and larger than a village,” said Ibn Jubeir in the twelfth century. The ancient Bathnæ where Julian rested under “a pleasant grove of cypress trees” is represented by Buzâ’â and its “gate” Bâb. He compares its gardens with those of Daphne, the famous sanctuary of Apollo near Antioch, and though the gardens and cypresses have been replaced by cornfields, it is still regarded by the inhabitants of Aleppo as an agreeable and healthy resort during the hot months of summer. Perhaps we may carry back its history yet earlier and look here for the palace of Belesys, the Persian governor of Syria, at the source of the river Dardes, which Xenophon describes as having “a large and beautiful garden containing all that the seasons produce.” Cyrus laid it waste and burned the palace, after which he marched three days to Thapsacus on the Euphrates; but the Arab geographers place Bâlis (which some have conjectured to have occupied the site of the Persian palace) two days from Aleppo, and the position of Thapsacus has not been determined with any certainty. If it stood at Dibseh, as Moritz surmises, Cyrus could well have reached it in three marches from Bâb, and I am inclined to think that Xenophon’s account identifies the satrap’s pleasaunce with the garden of Bathnæ. In Kiepert’s map the relative distances between Aleppo and Bâb and Bâb and Manbij are not correct. I rode the two stages in almost exactly the same time (seven and a quarter hours), and the caravan took nine hours each day, whereas the map would have the march to Manbij a good two hours longer than the march to Bâb.

A stormy wind, bringing with it splashes of rain, swept us next morning over the wet uplands. About an hour from Bâb we were joined by a Circassian wrapped in a thick black felt cloak, which, with the white woollen hood over an astrachan cap, skirted coat with cartridges ranged across the breast, and high riding-boots, is the invariable costume of these emigrants from the north. His name was Maḥmûd Aghâ. His father had left the Caucasus after the Russians took the country and had gone with all his people to Roumelia, where they settled down and built houses. And then the Russians seized that land also, and again they left all and came to Manbij, and the Sultan gave them fields on his own estates. “But if the Russians were to come here too,” he concluded, with the anxious air of one who faces an ever-present danger, “God knows where we should go.”

“Their frontier is far,” said I reassuringly.

“Please God,” said he.

I asked him about the recent elections and found that he took a lively interest in the politics of the day.