The Brides of Solomon Read Free

beg you to understand that there is not all the difference you would think between Ferjeyn
and a mountain village of France. I was happier there than I have ever been. True, I was ravished by my little Helena, but ravishment is not necessarily content. I will try to tell you how I could
be content, and still remain a Frenchman.
    Where there is stone for wall and paving, one is not wholly a barbarian. My house was well above the commune, and three hundred metres below the top of the mountain. In a hard winter the lowest
tongues of snow felt for the limit of my land and melted into the stone channels that irrigated my terraces. When the sluices were open, the water ran on an even slope, quite silent and without
foam; but the rush was so fast and smooth that a leaf falling into the channel vanished to eternity as swiftly as a human life.
    When you looked up from the plain of the Duck’s Bill towards Ferjeyn, you saw nothing but stone, and strips of green. Terrace rose over terrace, and above each was the bare rock from which
the earth had been stripped, and packed into the narrow fields that girdled the mountain. But when you looked down from my house over the grey walls and flat roofs of Ferjeyn, there were only green
tops, falling in steps, of orchard and vineyard and olive and wheat. I find that civilised, M. le Consul.
    The life—well, it was a little primitive but not unfamiliar. We had our group of village notables, and the café where we gathered at the end of the day’s work. True, when I
first knew it, our café was nothing but a hole in a ruin furnished with bench and counter. So I set into the pavement three tables which I had made with my own hands, and planted a vine to
give shade. There we played our games and drank our wine and araq—as good fathers of families, of course—and watched the life of the commune on the flagstones of the little square.
There were John Douaihy and his brother Boulos, and the priest, the saddler, the grocer and myself.
    The square was my delight. On the north side was an ancient, tumbledown colonnade with a roof of red tiles supported by slender pillars of stone. It had been built by a Greek architect exiled
from Constantinople to our remote province. In your travels for France, M. le Consul, you must often have lived in some alien and melancholy spot which, all the same, became a home for you because
of an avenue of trees or the satisfying proportions of a single house or perhaps a garden. You will know then what I felt for our square. It was the link with my civilisation.
    I cannot say that outside the square the streets resembled those of France. To tell you the truth, they did not exist. The houses were separated by mud in winter and dust in summer. As an old
sergeant-major with a taste for tidiness, I did my best for proper streets, but without success. All the same, I persuaded Ferjeyn to establish a rubbish dump and pay a collector and a cart. That
was a triumph. Admittedly he was the village idiot, but he was the only garbage man within a hundred miles.
    You will have gathered, M. le Consul, that my advice was respected. I gave it rarely. If there were anything I wished to change, I was well content to spend a patient year in changing it.
Peace—that was all I asked. Peace for my Helena and myself.
    After Syria was given her independence, the first thought of the simple Moslem peasants around us was to raid the Christians. A sort of celebration. It was very natural. Had the Christians been
in the majority, they would have endeavoured to raid the Moslems. But the government, in those early days, was determined to be as efficient as the French. They strengthened the garrison at
Hassetche, and they reminded the fanatics that Syria was a land of many religions, all with the same rights of citizenship. A massacre—even though a little one and carried out for pure
sport—could not be permitted.
    Then, as you know, the honeymoon ended and the politicians returned