escapes, not, as some shallow reasoners would have it, because we rejoice
at the misfortunes of another, but because our sympathies can be awakened
by nothing but manifestations of intellectual energy and virtue, which
shine forth most gloriously, not on the calm waves of enjoyment, but amid
the storms and tempests of human affairs.
We therefore snatch our traveller from the rural parties and cool valleys
of Tripoli, in order to expose him to toil and the spears of the Arabs.
The week of pleasure being expired, the party set forward towards the
south, and proceeding for five hours along the coast, arrived at a high
rocky promontory, intersecting the road, and looking with a smooth,
towering, and almost perpendicular face upon the sea. This appears to
be the promontory called by Strabo, but wherefore is not known, τὸ του
Θεου Προσώπον, or the Face of God. Near this strangely-named spot they
encamped for the night under the shade of a cluster of olive-trees.
Surmounting this steep and difficult barrier in the morning, they pursued
their way along the shore until they arrived at Gabail, the ancient
Byblus, a place once famous for the birth and worship of Adonis. In this
place they made little or no stay, pushing hastily forward to the Nahr
Ibrahim, the river Adonis of antiquity, the shadows of Grecian fable
crowding thicker and thicker upon their minds as they advanced, and
bringing along with them sweet schoolboy recollections, sunny dreams,
which the colder phenomena of real life never wholly expel from ardent
and imaginative minds. Here they pitched their tent, on the banks of the
stream, and prepared to pass the night amid those fields where of old the
virgins of the country assembled to unite with the goddess of beauty, in
lamentations for Adonis,
Whose annual wound in Lebanon allured
The Syrian damsels to lament his fate
In amorous ditties all a summer’s day,
While smooth Adonis from his native rock
Ran purple to the sea, supposed with blood
Of Thammuz yearly wounded: the love-tale
Infected Sion’s daughters with like heat,
Whose wanton passions in the sacred porch
Ezekiel saw, when by the vision led
His eye surveyed the dark idolatries
Of alienated Judah.
The night was rainy and tempestuous, and when they looked out in the
morning the _Nahr Ibrahim_ had assumed that sanguine hue, which,
according to Lucian, always distinguishes it at that season of the year
in which the festival of Adonis was celebrated. Nay, the stream not only
“ran purple to the sea,” but had actually, as they observed in travelling
along, communicated its bloody colour to the waves of the Mediterranean
to a considerable distance from the land, just as the Nile discolours
them at the time of the inundation along the whole coast of the Delta.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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