Part 17

I spent a pleasant hour in the kitchen,—an isolated, smoke-dried room with an earth floor,—endeavoring to warm my feet at the little fires of charcoal kindled in holes on top of a bank of earth and stone, and watching the pranks of this merry and industrious family. The little heir amused himself by pounding the orphan, kicking the shins of the boy, and dashing water in the face of the slim girl,—treatment which the servants dared not resent, since the father laughed over it as an exhibition of bravery and vivacity. Fragrant steam came from a pot, in which quail were stewing for the passengers by the night mail, and each person who appeared in the kitchen, in turn, gave this pot a stir; the lively boy pounded coffee in a big mortar, put charcoal on the fire, had a tussle with the heir, threw a handspring, doing nothing a minute at a time; the orphan slid in with a bucket of water, slopping it in all directions; the heir set up a howl and kicked his father because he was not allowed to kick the orphan any more; the little wife came in like a breeze, whisking everybody one side, and sympathized with dear little Hobby, whose cruel and ugly papa was holding the love from barking his father's shins. You do not often see a family that enjoys itself so much as this.

It was late next morning when we tore ourselves from this enchanting household, and went at a good pace over the fertile plain, straight towards Anti-Lebanon, having a glimpse of the snow of Mount Hermon,—a long ridge peering over the hills to the? southeast, and crossing in turn the Litany and the deep Anjar, which bursts forth from a single fountain about a mile to the north. On our left we saw some remains of what was once a capital city, Chalcis, of unknown origin, but an old city before it was possessed by the Ptolemies, or by Mark Antony, and once the luxurious residence of the Herod family. At Medjel, a village scattered at the foot of small tells rising in the plain, we turned into the hills, leaving unvisited a conspicuous Roman temple on a peak above the town. The road winds gradually up a wady. As we left the plain, and looked back across it to Lebanon, the colors of Bukâ'. and the mountain gave us a new surprise; they were brilliant and yet soft, as gay and splendid as the rocks of the Yellowstone, and yet exquisitely blended as in a Persian rug.

The hill-country was almost uninhabited; except the stations and an occasional Bedaween camp there was small sign of occupation; the ground was uncultivated; peasants in rags were grubbing up the roots of cedars for fuel. We met Druses with trains of mules, Moslems with camels and mules, and long processions of white-topped wagons,—like the Western “prairie schooner”—drawn each by three mules tandem. Thirty and forty of these freight vehicles travel in company, and we were continually meeting or passing them; their number is an indication of the large trade that Damascus has with Beyrout and the Mediterranean. There is plenty of color in the people and in their costume. We were told that we could distinguish the Druses by their furtive and bad countenances; but for this information I should not have seen that they differed much from the Maronites; but I endeavored to see the treacherous villain in them. I have noticed in Syria that the Catholic travellers have a good opinion of the Maronites and hate the Druses, that the American residents think little of the Maronites, and that the English have a lenient side for the Druses. The Moslems consistently despise all of them. The Druse has been a puzzle. There are the same horrible stories current about him that were believed of the early Christians; the Moslem believes that infants are slain and eaten in his midnight assemblies, and that once a year the Druse community meets in a cavern at midnight, the lights are extinguished, and the sexes mingling by chance in the license of darkness choose companions for the year. But the Druse creed, long a secret, is now known; they are the disciples of Hâkim, a Khalif of the Fatimite dynasty; they believe in the unity of God and his latest manifestation in Hakim; they are as much a political as a religious society; they are accomplished hypocrites, cunning in plotting and bold in action; they profess to possess “the truth,” and having this, they are indifferent to externals, and are willing to be Moslems with the Moslems and Christians with the Christians, while inwardly feeling a contempt for both. They are the most supercilious of all the Eastern sects. What they are about to do is always the subject of anxiety in the Lebanon regions.

At the stations of the road we found usually a wretched family or two dwelling in a shanty, half stable and half café, always a woman with a baby in her arms, and the superabundant fountains for nourishing it displayed to all the world; generally some slatternly girls, and groups of rough muleteers and drivers smoking. At one, I remember a Jew who sold antique gems, rings, and coins, with a shocking face, which not only suggested the first fall of his race, but all the advantages he has since taken of his innocent fellows, by reason of his preoccupation of his position of knowledge and depravity.

We made always, except in the steep ascents, about ten miles an hour. The management of the route is the perfection of French system and bureaucracy. We travel with a way-bill of numbered details, as if we were a royal mail. At every station we change one horse, so that we always have a fresh animal. The way-bill is at every station signed by the agent, and the minute of arrival and departure exactly noted; each horse has its number, and the number of the one taken and the one left is entered. All is life and promptness at the stations; changes are quickly made. The way-bill would show the company the exact time between stations; but I noticed that our driver continually set his watch backwards and forwards, and I found that he and the dragoman had a private understanding to conceal our delays for lunch, for traffic with Jews, or for the enjoyment of scenery.

After we had crossed the summit of the first ridge we dashed down the gate of a magnificent canyon, the rocks heaved up in perpendicular strata, overhanging, craggy, crumbled, wild. We crossed then a dreary and nearly arid basin; climbed, by curves and zigzags, another ridge, and then went rapidly down until we struck the wild and narrow gorge of the sacred Abana. Immediately luxuriant vegetable life began. The air was sweet with the blossoms of the mish-mish (apricot), and splendid walnuts and poplars overshadowed us. The river, swollen and rushing amid the trees on its hanks, was frightfully rapid. The valley winds sharply, and gives room only for the river and the road, and sometimes only for one of them. Sometimes the river is taken out of its bed and carried along one bank or the other; sometimes the road crosses it, and again pursues its way between its divided streams. We were excited by its rush and volume, and by the rich vegetation along its sides. We came to fantastic Saracenic country-seats, to arcaded and latticed houses set high up over the river, to evidences of wealth and of proximity to a great city.

Suddenly, for we seemed to have become a part of the rushing torrent and to share its rapidity, we burst out of the gorge, and saw the river, overpassing its narrow banks, flowing straight on before us, and beyond, on a level, the minarets and domes of Damascus! All along the river, on both banks of it, and along the high wall by the roadside, were crowds of men in Turkish costume, of women in pure white, of Arabs sitting quietly by the stream smoking the narghileh, squatting in rows along the wall and along the water, all pulling at the water-pipe. There were tents and booths erected by the river. In a further reach of it men and boys were bathing. Hanks and groups of veiled women and children crouched on the damp soil close to the flood, or sat immovable on some sandy point. It is a delicious holiday for two or three women to sit the livelong day by water, running or stagnant, to sit there with their veils drawn over their heads, as rooted as water-plants, and as inanimate as bags of flour. It was a striking Oriental picture, played on by the sun, enlivened by the swift current, which dashes full into the city.

As we spun on, the crowd thickened,—soldiers, grave Turks on caparisoned horses or white donkeys, Jews, blacks, Persians. We crossed a trembling bridge, and rattled into town over stony pavements, forced our way with difficulty into streets narrow and broken by sharp turns, the carriage-wheels scarcely missing men and children stretched on the ground, who refused, on the theory of their occupation of the soil prior to the invention of wheels, to draw in even a leg; and, in a confused whirl of novel sights and discordant yells, barks, and objurgations, we came to Dimitri's hotel. The carriage stopped in the narrow street; a small door in the wall, a couple of feet above the pavement, opened, and we stepped through into a little court occupied by a fountain and an orange-tree loaded with golden fruit. Thence we passed into a large court, the centre of the hotel, where the Abana pours a generous supply into a vast marble basin, and trees and shrubs offer shelter to singing birds. About us was a wilderness of balconies, staircases, and corridors, the sun flooding it all; and Dimitri himself, sleek, hospitable, stood bowing, in a red fez, silk gown, and long gold chain.

XIII.—THE OLDEST OF CITIES.

IT is a popular opinion that there is nothing of man's work older than Damascus; there is certainly nothing newer. The city preserves its personal identity as a man keeps his from youth to age, through the constant change of substance. The man has in his body not an atom of the boy; but if the boy incurred scars, they are perpetuated in the man. Damascus has some scars. We say of other ancient cities, “This part is old, that part is new.” We say of Damascus, its life is that of a tree, decayed at heart, dropping branches, casting leaves, but always renewing itself.

How old is Damascus? Or, rather, how long has a city of that name existed here on the banks of the Abana? According to Jewish tradition, which we have no reason to doubt, it was founded by Uz, the son of Aram, the son of Shem. By the same tradition it was a great city when a remarkable man, of the tenth generation from the Deluge,—a person of great sagacity, not mistaken in his opinions, skilful in the celestial science, compelled to leave Chaldea when he was seventy-five years old, on account of his religious opinions, since he ventured to publish the notion that there was but one God, the Creator of the Universe,—came with an army of dependants and “reigned” in the city of Uz. After some time Abraham removed into Canaan, which was already occupied by the Canaanites, who had come from the Persian Gulf, established themselves in wall-towns in the hills, built Sidon on the coast, and carried their conquests into Egypt. It was doubtless during the reign of the Hittites, or Shepherd Kings, that Abraham visited Egypt. Those usurpers occupied the throne of the Pharaohs for something like five hundred years, and it was during their occupancy that the Jews settled in the Delta.

Now, if we can at all fix the date of the reign of the Shepherd Kings, we can approximate to the date of the foundation of Damascus, for Uz was the third generation from Noah, and Abraham was the tenth. We do not know how to reckon a generation in those days, when a life-lease was such a valuable estate, but if we should assume it to be a century, we should have about seven hundred years between the foundation of Damascus and the visit of Abraham to Egypt, a very liberal margin. But by the chronology of Mariette Bey, the approximate date of the Shepherds' invasion is 2300 B.C. to 2200 B. C., and somewhat later than that time Abraham was in Damascus. If Damascus was then seven hundred years old, the date of its foundation would be about 3000 B.C. to 2900 B.C.

Assuming that Damascus has this positive old age, how old is it comparatively? When we regard it in this light, we are obliged to confess that it is a modern city. When Uz and his friends wandered out of the prolific East, and pitched their tents by the Abana, there was already on the banks of the Nile a civilized, polished race, which had nearly completed a cycle of national existence much longer than the duration of the Roman Empire. It was about the eleventh dynasty of the Egyptian kingdom, the Great Pyramid had been built more than a thousand years, and the already degenerate Egyptians of the “Old Empire” had forgotten the noble art which adorned and still renders illustrious the reigns of the pyramid-builders..

But if Damascus cannot claim the highest antiquity, it has outlived all its rivals on the earth, and has flourished in a freshness as perennial as the fountain to which it owes its life, through all the revolutions of the Orient. As a necessary commercial capital it has pursued a pretty uniform tenor under all its various masters. Tiglath-Pileser attempted to destroy it; it was a Babylonian and then a Persian satrapy for centuries; it was a Greek city; it was the capital of a Roman province for seven hundred years; it was a Christian city and reared a great temple to John the Baptist; it was the capital of the Saracenic Empire, in which resided the ruler who gave laws to all the lands from India to Spain; it was ravaged by Tamerlane; it now suffers the blight of Turkish imbecility. From of old it was a caravan station and a mart of exchange, a camp by a stream; it is to-day a commercial hive, swarming with an hundred and fifty thousand people, a city without monuments of its past or ambition for its future.

If one could see Damascus, perhaps he could invent a phrase that would describe it; but when you have groped and stumbled about in it for a couple of weeks, endeavoring in vain to get a view of more than a few rods of it at a time, you are utterly at a loss how to convey an impression of it to others.

If Egypt is the gift of the Nile, the river Abana is the life of Damascus; its water is carried into the city on a dozen different levels, making it literally one of fountains and running water. Sometimes the town is flooded; the water had only just subsided from the hotel when we arrived. This inundation makes the city damp for a long time. Indeed, it is at all times rather soaked with water, and is—with all respect to Uz and Abraham and the dynasty of the Omeiyades—a sort of habitable frog-pond on a grand scale. At night the noise of frogs, even at our hotel, is the chief music, the gentle twilight song, broken, it is true, by the incessant howling and yelping of savage dogs, packs of which roam the city like wolves all night. They are mangy yellow curs, without a single good quality, except that they sleep all the daytime. In every quarter of the city you see ranks and rows of them asleep in the sun, occupying half the street and nestling in all the heaps of rubbish. But much as has been said of the dogs here, I think the frogs are the feature of the town; they are as numerous as in the marshes of Ravenna.

Still the water could not be spared. It gives sparkle, life, verdure. In walking you constantly get glimpses through heavy doorways of fountains, marble tanks of running water, of a blooming tree or a rose-trellis in a marble court, of a garden of flowers. The crooked, twisted, narrow streets, mere lanes of mud-walls, would be scarcely endurable but for these occasional glimpses, and the sight now and then of the paved, pillared court of a gayly painted mosque.

One ought not to complain when the Arab barber who trims his hair gives him a narghileh to smoke during the operation; but Damascus is not so Oriental as Cairo, the predominant Turkish element is not so picturesque as the Egyptian. And this must be said in the face of the universal use of the narghileh, which more than any other one thing imparts an Oriental, luxurious tone to the city. The pipe of Egypt is the chibouk, a stem of cherry five feet long with a small clay bowl; however richly it may be ornamented, furnished with a costly amber mouthpiece, wound with wire of gold, and studded, as it often is, with diamonds and other stones of price, it is, at the best, a stiff affair; and even this pipe is more and more displaced by the cigar, just as in Germany the meerschaum has yielded to the cigar as the Germans have become accessible to foreign influences. But in Damascus the picturesque narghileh, encourager of idleness, is still the universal medium of smoke. The management of the narghileh requires that a person should give his undivided mind to it; in return for that, it gives him peace. The simplest narghileh is a cocoanut-shell, with a flexible stem attached, and an open metal bowl on top for the tobacco. The smoke is drawn through the water which the shell contains. Other narghilehs have a glass standard and water-bowl, and a flexible stem two or three yards in length. The smoker, seated cross-legged before this graceful object, appears to be worshipping his idol. The mild Persian tobacco is kept alight by a slowly burning piece of dried refuse which is kindly furnished by the camel for fuel; and the smoke is inhaled into the lungs, and slowly expelled from the nostrils and the mouth. Although the hastily rolled cigarette is the resort of the poor in Egypt, and is somewhat used here, it must be a very abandoned wretch who cannot afford a pull at a narghileh in Damascus. Its universality must excuse the long paragraph I have devoted to this pipe. You see men smoking it in all the cafés, in all the shops, by the roadside, seated in the streets, in every garden, and on the house-tops. The visible occupation of Damascus is sucking this pipe.

Our first walk in the city was on Sunday to the church of the Presbyterian mission; on our way we threaded a wilderness of bazaars, nearly all of them roofed over, most of them sombre and gloomy. Only in the glaring heat of summer could they be agreeable places of refuge. The roofing of these tortuous streets and lanes is not so much to exclude the sun, I imagine, as to keep out the snow, and the roofs are consequently substantial; for Damascus has an experience of winter, being twenty-two hundred feet above the sea-level, nearly as high as Jerusalem. These bazaars, so much vaunted all through the Orient, disappointed us, not in extent, for they are interminable, but in wanting the picturesqueness, oddity, and richness of those of Cairo. And this, like the general appearance of the city, is a disappointment hard to be borne, for we have been taught to believe that Damascus is a Paradise on earth, and that here, if anywhere, we should come into that region of enchantment which the poets of the Arabian Nights' tales have imposed upon us as the actual Orient. Should we have recognized, in the low and partially flooded strip of grassland through which we drove from the mouth of the Abana gorge to the western gate of the city, the green Merj of the Arabian poets, that gem of the earth? The fame of it has gone abroad throughout the world, as if it were a unique gift of Allah to his favorites. Why, every Occidental land has a million glades, watered, green-sodded, tree-embowered, more lovely than this, that no poet has thought it worth while to celebrate.

We found a little handful of worshippers at the mission church, and among them—Heaven forgive us for looking at her on Sunday!—an eccentric and somewhat notorious English lady of title, who shares the bed and board of an Arab sheykh in his harem outside the walls. It makes me blush for the attractiveness of my own country, and the slighted fascination of the noble red man in his paint and shoddy blanket, when I see a lady, sated with the tame civilization of England, throw herself into the arms of one of these coarse bigamists of the desert. Has he no reputation in the Mother country, our noble, chivalrous Walk-Under-the-Ground?

We saw something of the missionaries of Damascus, but as I was not of the established religion at the court of Washington at the time of my departure from home, and had no commission to report to the government, either upon the condition of consulates or of religion abroad, I am not prepared to remark much upon the state of either in this city. I should say, however, that not many direct converts were made either from Moslemism or from other Christian beliefs, but that incalculable good is accomplished by the schools which the missionaries conduct. The influence of these, in encouraging a disposition to read, and to inquire into the truth and into the conditions of a better civilization, is not to be overestimated. What impressed me most, however, in the fortune of these able, faithful servants of the propagandism of Christian civilization, was their pathetic isolation. A gentleman and his wife of this mission had been thirty years absent from the United States. The friends who cheered or regretted their departure, who cried over them, and prayed over them, and followed them with tender messages, had passed away, or become so much absorbed in the ever-exciting life at home as to have almost forgotten those who had gone away to the heathen a generation ago. The Mission Board that personally knew them and lovingly cared for them is now composed of strangers to them. They were, in fact, expatriated, lost sight of. And yet they had gained no country nor any sympathies to supply the place of those lost. They must always be, to a great degree, strangers in this fierce, barbarous city.

We wandered down through the Christian quarter of the town: few shops are here; we were most of the time walking between mud-walls, which have a door now and then. This quarter is new; it was entirely burned by the Moslems and Druses in 1860, when no less than twenty-five hundred adult male Christians, heads of families, were slaughtered, and thousands more perished of wounds and famine consequent upon the total destruction of their property. That the Druses were incited to this persecution by the Turkish rulers is generally believed. We went out of the city by the eastern gate, called Bab Shurky, which name profanely suggested the irrelevant colored image of Bob Sharkey, and found ourselves in the presence of huge mounds of rubbish, the accumulations of refuse carted out of the city during many centuries, which entirely concealed from view the country beyond. We skirted these for a while, with the crumbling city wall on the left hand, passed through the hard, gray, desolate Turkish cemetery, and came at length into what might be called country. Not that we could see any country, however; we were always between high mud-walls, and could see nothing beyond them, except the sky, unless we stepped through an open door into a garden.