After he left us I rode round by Ruweiḥā that I might see the famous church by which stands the domed tomb of Bizzos. This church is the most beautiful in the Jebel Zāwiyyeh, with its splendid narthex and carved doorways, its stilted arches and the wide-spanned arcades of its nave--how just was the confidence in his own mastery over his material which encouraged the builder to throw those great arches from pier to pier is proved by the fact that one of them stands to this day. The little tomb of Bizzos is almost as perfect as it was when it was first built. By the doorway an inscription is cut in Greek: "Bizzos son of Pardos. I lived well, I die well and well I rest. Pray for me." The strangest features in all the architecture of North Syria are the half-remembered classical motives that find their way into mouldings that are almost Gothic in their freedom, and the themes of a classical entablature that grace church window or architrave. The scheme of Syrian decoration was primarily a row of circles or wreaths filled with whorls or with the Christian monogram; but as the stone-cutters grew more skilful they ran their circles together into a hundred exquisite and fanciful shapes of acanthus and palm and laurel, making a flowing pattern round church or tomb as varied as the imagination could contrive. The grass beneath their feet, the leaves on the boughs above their heads, inspired them with a wealth of decorative design much as they inspired William Morris twelve hundred years later.
There is another church at Ruweiḥā scarcely less perfect than the Bizzos church, but not so splendid in design. It is remarkable for a monument standing close to the south wall, which has been explained as a bell tower, or a tomb, or a pulpit, or not explained at all. It is constructed of two stories, the lower one consisting of six columns supporting a platform, from the low wall of which rise four corner piers to carry the dome or canopy. The resemblance to some of the North Italian tombs, as, for instance, to the monument of Rolandino, in Bologna, is so striking that the beholder instinctively assigns a similar purpose to the graceful building at Ruweiḥā.
We camped that night at Dāna, a village that boasts a pyramid tomb with a porch of four Corinthian columns, as perfect in execution and in balanced proportion as anything you could wish to see. On our way from Ruweiḥā we passed a mansion which I would take as a type of the domestic architecture of the sixth-century. It stood apart, separated by a mile or two of rolling country from any village, with open balconies facing towards the west and a delightful gabled porch to the north, such a porch as might adorn any English country house of to-day. You could fancy the sixth-century owner sitting on the stone bench within and watching for his friends--he can have feared no enemies, or he would not have built his dwelling far out in the country and guarded it only with a garden palisade. At Ḳaṣr el Banāt, the Maidens' Fortress as the Syrians call it, I was impressed more than at any other place with the high level that social order had reached in the Jebel Zāwiyyeh, for here were security and wealth openly displayed, and leisure wherein to cultivate the arts; and as I rode away I fell to wondering whether civilisation is indeed, as we think it in Europe, a resistless power sweeping forward and carrying upon its crest those who are apt to profit by its advance; or whether it is not rather a tide that ebbs and flows, and in its ceaseless turn and return touches ever at the flood the self-same place upon the shore.