Barada

This is decline made visible in cracked roads and unpaid garrisons and provincial governors who treat their postings as opportunities for private enrichment rather than public service.

He arrives in Damascus in the heat of a Levantine spring, the city rising from the plain in a haze of minarets and orchards fed by the Barada River, ancient beyond the memory of any empire that has claimed it, Ottoman and Mamluk and Umayyad and Roman before that, layers of conquest pressed one atop another like sediment.

He takes up his post with the 30th Cavalry Brigade attached to the 5th Army.

And he throws himself into the work with the same ferocious discipline that carried him through the War Academy.

Damascus, in the late 1140s, is one of the great cities of the Islamic world, and it announces itself to any traveler approaching from the north long before its walls come into view.

The Ghouta, the vast oasis of orchards and irrigated gardens fed by the waters of the Barada River, spreads out around the city in a green expanse that seems almost impossible after the dry hills of the surrounding countryside.

And it is through this fertile ring that the family makes its final approach, the noise and dust and color of a major urban center growing steadily louder and closer with every mile.

Inside the walls, Damascus in this period is a city of considerable wealth and considerable learning, its markets thick with goods brought from across the Islamic world and beyond, its mosques and madrasas drawing scholars and students from distant provinces, its streets a dense, layered maze of stone houses, covered souks, and public baths that would have overwhelmed a boy accustomed to the more modest scale of Baalbek.

Chapter two: Apprentice of the Levant, 1152 to 1163.

The city of Damascus wakes before its people do.

Long before the muezzins climb into their minarets to send the call across the rooftops, the irrigation channels of the Barada River are already murmuring through the orchards that ring the city like a green collar around a throat of stone.

Mist gathers low over the Ghouta, that vast belt of gardens and walnut groves and apricot trees which travelers for centuries have called one of the four paradises of the earth, and in the half-light before dawn, a boy of some fifteen years walks along a raised stone path between two irrigation ditches, listening to the water.

At the present time the greater part of the country between the Orontes and the Euphrates is nothing but a rocky tableland ridged with low hills and dotted over with some impoverished oases, excepting at the foot of Anti-Lebanon where two rivers fed by innumerable streams have served to create a garden of marvelous beauty.

The Barada, dashing from cascade to cascade, flows for some distance through gorges before emerging on the plain.

Scarcely has it reached level ground than it widens again, divides, and forms around Damascus a miniature delta, into which a thousand interlacing channels carry refreshment and fertility.

Below the town these streams rejoin the river, which, after having flowed merrily along for a day's journey, is swallowed up in a kind of elongated chasm from whence it never again emerges.