CHAPTER XIll
CAMPAIGN IN SYRIA. TAKING OF DAMASCUS
13–14 A.H. 634–635 A.D.
Country east of the Jordan.The country in which the Muslims were now encamped,—"the land beyond Jordan on the east,"—differed from any they had previously known. Away to the south were the pastoral tracts of the Belḳā, and again to the north of these the pasture-lands of Jaulān. Between the two lay the hills and dales of Gilead, with fields of wheat and barley, dotted here and there with clumps of shady oak, olive,and sycamore, and thickets of arbutus, myrtle, and oleander. It was emphatically “a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains of depths that spring out of valleys and hills.” The landscape, diversified with green slopes and glens, is in season gay with carpeting of flowers and melody of birds. From the green high lands above the Yarmuk may be descried the blue waters of the Sea of Galilee sparkling in the west, and away in the north the snow-capped peaks of Lebanon and Hermon;—striking contrast to the endless sands and stony plains of Arabia. Not less marked is the contrast with Chaldea. There the marshy Delta displays a tropical luxuriance, while the plains abound with desolate sites of cities that flourished in early cycles of the world, strewn with fragments of pottery and bricks of strange device, mysterious records of bygone kingdoms. Here the pride of the Byzantine Empire was yet alive. Skirting the Jordan were busy cities founded by the Romans that boasted Church and Theatre and Forum. Even naval contests of the Naumachia might be witnessed in the land of Gilead. The country was populous and flourishing, inhabited by a mongrel race, half Arab, half Syrian, who aspired to the
91
