them dated in the earliest years of the fifth century, while fallen church portals are to be found that have inscribed dates of the fourth century. The ancient basilicas of Rome, which belong to the same period, have been rebuilt or altered so many times that very little of their original structure remains in situ. But whatever is left of these Syrian buildings is sure to be of the original builders' work. Many of these edifices have richly ornamented portals and arches carved in fresh and vigorous style, and ranges of stately columns with graceful flowing capitals. A number of them boast of pavements laid in mosaics of varied pattern and rich colors; it takes but a slight touch of imagination to restore them in one's mind to the dignified grace and rich simplicity of their original

estate.

The best preserved of the public baths, though comparatively small, was planned

with all the divisions of the ancient Roman thermæ, with caldarium, tepidarium, frigidarium, and other dependencies. In the great central hall of one bath we found a mosaic pavement showing scarcely a trace of time's rude tread. Its highly colored designs, representing wild beasts in combat, its borders of intricate geometrical and floral patterns, and a fine Greek inscription wrought in black-and-white mosaics within a circle in the center of the pavement, were as bright and fresh when water was applied to them as when Julianus completed the bath in the year 472 A.D., as the inscription tells us.

The ancients in these regions seem to have had two general forms of private residence-one long and low, seldom of more than two stories, and having capacious twostory colonnades or porticos with inclosed courtyards before them; the other of tower form, four or five stories high, with two or

here the inscriptions were carved, and here, doubtless, the leisure hours of the ancient owners were passed. Between the columns of the upper story was a parapet composed of rectangular slabs paneled, molded, and otherwise ornamented. Many of these apparently thin slabs are, in reality, the backs of settles cut in solid stone, with comfortable seats and curving arms. The wooden floors of all colonnades like this have, of course, perished, so that now, when one sits in one of the settles, his feet are necessarily suspended in space; but these seats are an index of the homelike ease and luxury that these ancient people enjoyed in the open loggias of their town residences, when the floors were in place, when a sloping roof afforded welcome shade within the portico, and when clinging vines twined about the pillars of stone.

The bazaars of these ancient towns, which are still recognized as such by the people who live among the ruins, who have no bazaars of their own, but have seen them in Aleppo, consist of long, narrow structures facing directly upon the street; often they occupied both sides of a street of unusual width. The fronts of the shops have two-story porticos of square monolithic piers carrying equally plain architraves. Behind the portico is a building, also of two stories, composed of a series of small rooms which were undoubtedly storerooms in the ground story and living-apart

found within the limits of the cities and towns. One of the most imposing, perhaps, of all these monuments of the past is a Roman military road, built undoubtedly in the reign of the Emperor Trajan, which may be traced eastward from the region of Antioch, around the northern end of the Djebel il-A'la and the Djebel Bārîshā, and across the southern part of the Djebel Halakah. It first appears in a narrow defile where it was cut in the solid rock, and where a Greek inscription carved in the side of the cutting high above the roadway gives us the name of one of the Antonine emperors, having been carved about a hundred years after the road was built. Farther along the road disappears beneath the soil of the plain of Sermedă, which seems to have risen as the hills became bare; but it appears again in the hills to the south, where it ascends the slope in almost unbroken completeness, one of the most perfect monuments of Roman engineering that have been preserved to us, a highway twenty feet wide, built of huge blocks of limestone, many of them four feet square and four feet thick, joined with perfect accuracy, and still so smooth that horses stand with difficulty upon it; for the ancient transverse grooves have been worn away by the tramp of myriads of camels.

At one side of the plain, not far from the opening of the defile described above, the road passes beneath a great arch which

spans the way like a triumphal bow. Stripped of its ornaments and broken at its ends, it still stands in gray solemnity, trying to tell us of some forgotten victory. For more than fifteen hundred years it has watched the tide between the East and the West. In its early history it stood above one of the main channels between Orient and Occident. Countless armies it has seen: armies exultant with hope, pressing toward the riches of the East; armies jubilant with victory, loaded down with spoil; armies dejected and depleted, returning disgraced to a thankless mistress. What worlds of wealth have passed beneath its broad expanse! For, during many centuries, one of the main currents of the commerce of the East passed within the compass of its piers.

Our expedition happened to be encamped at a ruin called Bābiskā when Easter day came. It seemed like Easter, too, for the ground among the ruins was strewn with tulips and narcissus. Our tents were pitched between the two ruined churches, and it seemed fitting that we should observe the day with proper services. When our people had all assembled, sitting in semicircles about the door of our largest tent, a motley congregation of Mohammedans, Druses, and Christians (Orthodox Greeks, Greek Catholics, and Protestants), all of our servants, in fact, except two Roman Catholics who kept discreetly in their tents, -it seemed quite like the apostolic age, so diverse were our tenets; and when Dr. Post, gray-bearded and erect, began, in clear tones, to read, "In the end of the sabbath, as it began to dawn toward the first day of the week, came Mary Magdalene and the other Mary to see the sepulchre," I could not but reflect that this was undoubtedly the first time in thirteen centuries that those familiar words had resounded about the walls of these early abodes of Christianity, and that the Greek language, in which those words had last been repeated here, was now exchanged, first for Arabic and then for English, two languages as foreign to the original as could well be imagined.

Looking westward toward the mountains from the ruins of Babiskā, one may see a solitary building of severe and stately lines, perched upon a sharp spur just below the summit of the Kubbit Babuttā, like a sentinel above a ruined city. This ruin is the temple of Burdj Bāķirḥā. The site is

well worthy of a visit, both for the sake of the temple and for the magnificent view that may be had from this "high place" of the ancient Syrians. Where else in the world could we find a view to match this scene of desolation and death? And this is only a small part of the region of deserted cities in northern central Syria: ten ancient towns, the greater number of them of considerable extent, abandoned and in ruins, with no evidence that they have been inhabited since the beginning of the seventh century! This desolation was not the work of any great physical catastrophe such as that which destroyed the cities beside the Bay of Naples; these conditions cannot have been brought about entirely by invasion, war, and pillage, for conquerors seldom destroy a country, but take it for their own gain.

What, then, can have wrought the change by which a wealthy, populous, and necessarily fertile land was transformed into a rocky wilderness strewn with the remnants of once thriving cities? I believe this to have been due primarily to the cutting of trees. There is every evidence that, for five centuries at least, the inhabitants of these hills drew heavily upon the forests of the region. Every building, large and small, had a wooden roof and intermediate floors of wood, besides doors, shutters, sheds, and other details which must have been of the same material. Such a lavish use of the product of the forest would indicate the presence of extensive woodlands in the immediate vicinity; for importation of materials into these rough mountain districts would have been both difficult and costly. We may believe, then, that the mountainsides were once clothed with forests, which means that there was soil for trees to grow in. There are many other evidences that there was plenty of soil covering the bare ribs of the earth that are now exposed. Wine- and olive-presses may be counted by the hundreds in places where there is not sufficient soil to support a single vine or olive-tree, and there are slopes that were terraced up with a succession of walls; but the walls have fallen down, and there is no remnant of earth behind them.

The desolation, then, we may presume, is the result of the gradual washing away of the soil from the hills, caused primarily by the cutting of the forests. For a time the inhabitants saved their country by the

judicious building of terraces for their vineyards and orchards. Then came the invasions, first, of the Persians who destroyed Antioch in 538, then of the Mohammedans, in the train of the prophet, in 632, and the consequent poverty which made it impossible for the people to keep their terrace walls in repair. After this the work of destruction was rapid, and the winter

rains of thirteen centuries have washed the hills to the gray bareness of their limestone frames, while a continuous series of earthquakes has wrecked the buildings of antiquity, leaving only here and there a wellpreserved example of their former splendor.

No one who looks at these pictures of the Syrian hills can fail to see in them an object-lesson for our day and generation.

M

URCIA is an Arabian-like city among date-palms and orange-trees, in the midst of delicious gardens in a southeast corner of Spain. A journalistic mission took me there. My next mission was to Cadiz, which is due west from Murcia, and naturally I thought the line of railroad running west would get me to Cadiz. The railroad is marked on the map, but I failed to notice that it terminated somewhere in the middle of southern Spain, and did not begin again till a bit farther on.

To get the morning train I rode on a queerly fashioned, two-story tram-car to a little town of sun-baked mud called Alcantarilla. I then learned that I could get a ticket only as far as Baza. I scarcely knew where Baza was beyond the fact that it was on the way to Cadiz. I had some faint recollection of it as the scene of the friar's love-story in "Guzman de Alfarache," and one of the first cities Ferdinand laid siege to in his conquest of Granada.

As I bought my ticket my next discovery was that, beyond a few centimos, my money was all gone. By some mysterious means a portion of my cash had been extracted from my purse, which I finally laid to a clever valet in one of the hotels where I had been stopping.

With my railway-ticket in one hand, my empty purse and a few centimos in the other, I was confused. The train was about to start, and, with my scattered wits half collected, I knew that I was no better off stopping where I was than going on to Baza, which would certainly bring me nearer to my destination. So I climbed into one of the cars and dropped into a corner with a bewildered feeling, wondering what was to become of me.

Hardships inure men to many kinds of discomfort, but of all the discomforts I know, to be stranded in the midst of civilization and plenty is the worst. I imagine I must have looked strangely out of place in that car, knowing that I had no money, and with no prospects of a breakfast or dinner before me. An old peasant, with his brown manta over his broad shoulders, sat opposite me, gazing at me with one eye, which was the only eye he had, and, oddly, a blue one. He may have divined that something was the matter, and to satisfy his curiosity, he began by asking me where I was going. Groutily I answered that I did not know, which, instead of dispelling his curiosity, increased it, and, after a pause, he asked what I was going for. I did not know that either, and the old man