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After going to Galad and Salkah, which are two days' journey from Damascus, Benjamin reached Baalbec, the Heliopolis of the Greeks and Romans, built by Solomon, in the valley of the Libanus, then to Tadmor, which is Palmyra, also built entirely of great stones.
There, in that Tadmor of the wilderness, Palmyra, the capital of her empire, which embraced a large part of Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt, she had cultivated the learning of the Greeks, and the Oriental tongues of the countries she ruled, excelling equally in the chase and in war, the most truly accomplished woman of antiquity,—sprung, like Cleopatra, from the Greek kings of Egypt.
From Constantinople, Benjamin continued his journey to Tyre, Jerusalem, and the Holy Land, and thence to Damascus, Balbeck, and Palmyra, which he calls Tadmor, and in which, he says, there then were 2000 Jews. He next gives an account of Bagdat, the court of the caliph, and the condition of the Jews there.
The telephone operator at Phoneton said that from his window in the station he had seen a bridge one mile north of Dayton collapse and another bridge crossing the river at Tadmor, eleven miles north of Dayton, was expected to give way at any moment.
Richard had wished ever since he came to Damascus to visit Palmyra, or Tadmor, in the wilderness. It is about one hundred and fifty miles distant in the open desert. His main reason for going there was his private wish to explore, but it was also his official duty to open up the country, now infested with hordes of wild Bedawin tribes, who attacked, robbed, and killed right and left.
Solomon gave proof of his wisdom and made his kingdom great by seizing the lines of the trade-routes from Tadmor in the desert and Damascus in the north to the upper waters of the Red Sea on the south.
To lie still over the Flats, where the waters are shallow, and see the crabs crawling and the sculpins gliding busily and silently beneath the boat, to rustle in through the long harsh grass that leads up some tranquil creek, to take shelter from the sunbeams under one of the thousand-footed bridges, and look down its interminable colonnades, crusted with green and oozy growths, studded with minute barnacles, and belted with rings of dark muscles, while overhead streams and thunders that other river whose every wave is a human soul flowing to eternity as the river below flows to the ocean, lying there moored unseen, in loneliness so profound that the columns of Tadmor in the Desert could not seem more remote from life, the cool breeze on one's forehead, the stream whispering against the half-sunken pillars, why should I tell of these things, that I should live to see my beloved haunts invaded and the waves blackened with boats as with a swarm of water-beetles?
To facilitate the commerce which was carried on by this route, Solomon is supposed to have built Tadmor in the wilderness, or Palmyra: the situation of this place, which, though in the midst of barren sands, is plentifully supplied with water, and has immediately round it a fertile soil, was peculiarly favorable; as it was only 85 miles from the Euphrates, and about 117 from the nearest part of the Mediterranean.
He was a dry, hard old man, with a scrubby white beard, a narrow wrinkled forehead, and an obstinate lipless mouth; fitted neither by age nor temperament to be the intimate friend of any of his younger brethren among the Community. But, at that saddest time of his life, the heart of Amelius warmed to any one who reminded him of his tranquil and happy days at Tadmor.
Revolts broke out in Edom and the north. Garrisons, indeed, were planted in Zobah, which secured the caravan road through Tadmor or Palmyra to the Euphrates; but Damascus was lost, and became in a few years a formidable adversary of Israel. The death of Solomon was the signal for a revolt in Palestine itself.
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