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At length we stood on the stop of the col and looked over Palmyra, wrote the British traveller, and archaeologist and poet Gertrude Bell on 20 May 1900. “I wonder if the wide world presents a more singular landscape. It is a mass of columns,ranged into long avenues, grouped into temples, and lying broken on the sand or pointing one long solitary finger to Heaven. Beyond them is the immense Temple of Baal; the contemporary town is built inside it and its rows of columns rise out of a mass of mud roofs. And beyond,all is the desert, sand and white stretches of salt and sand again, and with the dust clouds whirling over it and the Euphrates 5 days absent. It looks like the white skeleton of a town,standing knee deep in the blown sand.”Bell, the so-called Queen of the Desert – whom Nicole Kidman plays in a new film directed by Werner Herzog – was entranced by what she saw. She wrote that the stone used here is a beautiful white limestone that looks like marble and weathers a golden yellow like the Acropolis”. As she rode on a camel into town, or she passed the “famed Palmyrene tombs”,“great stone towers, 4 stories [sic] tall, and some more ruined and some less,standing together in groups or bordering the road … Except Petra, Palmyra is the loveliest thing I occupy seen in this country.Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com