CHAPTER XXI--SYRIAN LIFE--DEALERS IN HUMAN FLESH--WE TRY “ZE LUXURIES OF ZE BATH.

_In the Slave-Market--A Dealer in Human Flesh--A Stealthy Trade--Examining Female Slaves--Serfdom in Syria--Inside Views of a Syrian Household--Jewish Houses--An Oriental Song--Smoking with the Ladies--Syrian Customs--A famous Arab Chief--Visiting Abd-el-Kader’s house--The City of the Caliphs--Taking a Bath--Mohammed and his Trowsers--A new Species of Cushion--The Bath-house--Disrobing--Securing our Valuables--Moslem Honesty--Sitting down in a Hot Place--Gustave’s Misadventure--Undergoing a Shampoo--Rubbed to a Jelly--The Couch of Repose--A Delicious Sensation--“All ze luxuries.”_

WHILE we were walking through the bazaars, the guide casually pointed out the slave-market, and of course we entered. Our way led into a court yard, with a fountain in the center and a mosque at our side; off at one corner was the entrance to the slave-dealers’ apartments.

The merchant, a mild-mannered Moslem, was in the court yard, and had with him a black boy, a eunuch, for which he wanted thirty pounds. We followed the dealer up a narrow staircase to a locked room which he opened.

Four negro women were there, two sitting and two lying upon the floor, which was spread with rugs and blankets; the youngest may have been sixteen and the oldest thirty. The dealer said something in Arabic, whereupon the women rose and stood in a row facing us, where they were joined by the boy. All kept their heads turned away, but now and then darted furtive glances at us. We did not buy, and after giving the dealer a couple of francs as “backsheesh,” we returned to the street. {291}In Damascus the slave trade is open. In Cairo and Constantinople it flourishes by stealth. In neither of the last two cities are strangers permitted to see it, but in Damascus there is no such concealment. The trade is not extensive, and is mainly confined to supplying servants for private houses. The traffic in beautiful women for the harems is nearly a thing of the past, and so is the general trade in slaves for heavy labor in large numbers.

As far as I can learn, there was never a slave trade and slave employment half as extensive in the Orient as that which flourished in the United States less than twenty years ago.

Slaves in the East are a family possession, and are not reckoned as a specific item of wealth.

We had been told not to fail to see some of the private houses of Damascus, as they are specially famous for their elegance. To wander about the city you would not suppose that it has many rich interiors, but you find on investigation that mud walls frequently lead to something rich inside. Judge not by appearances in Damascus. We entered some of the Moslem court yards, but were not allowed to see the inside of the houses. We saw some Christian houses richly adorned and decorated, but they will all come within the general description at the beginning of the preceding chapter. {292}There were many luxurious houses of Christian natives destroyed in 1860, and few of these have been built. The Christian quarter still bears the marks of Moslem hate, in the large areas that lie in ruins. The whole Christian quarter was burned, and about two thousand five hundred Christians were massacred.

Despite the protection now extended to them by foreign powers, the Christians of Damascus do not feel safe, and are constantly dreading a fresh outbreak of hostilities.

Two Jewish houses that we visited had evidently cost a great deal of money; the dining room of one is finished in marble carving around the entire wall, and the cost of this one apartment was said to be ten thousand pounds.

In one of the Jewish houses, the hostess invited us to seats in the room where herself, the ladies of her household, and a couple of visitors were squatted on divans and smoking nargilehs. They were much surprised that the lady of our party didn’t smoke, and they wanted to stain her nails with henna and paint her eye-lashes.

One of the lady visitors was a cantatrice, the Patti or Nilsson of Damascus, and at the request of the hostess we were favored with a song. Her voice was a sort of rough falsetto, and there was little melody or rhythm about the song when considered from a European point of view. How tastes differ! Such a song would not be listened to in Europe or America, except from curiosity; and the song of Patti would, doubtless, be of no consequence in Damascus. Our guide told us that this lady has sung herself rich, and that she frequently receives twenty or thirty pounds for an evening’s entertainment.

We passed a very pleasant hour in this house, and shall long hold it in remembrance. I don’t believe we should have enjoyed it half as well if the master had been at home, as I have a strong suspicion that we should not have been invited to drink coffee and smoke with the ladies.

We wished to visit the house of the famous Abd-el-Kader, but found it impossible. Twenty years ago, this man filled a prominent place in history, but he is now nearly forgotten. He was born in 1807 in Algeria; he was descended from a long line of Emirs; his father was noted for the wisdom and liberality of his rule over the Algerian province of Oran. {293}When the French occupied Algiers, Abd-el-Kader was one of their fiercest opponents, and from 1831 to 1847 he maintained an active warfare, interrupted by a few brief truces. In the last mentioned year he was captured and taken to France, but was soon released, on condition that he should not return to Algiers, nor take arms in any way against the French. The terms of the contract have been faithfully kept, and he has ever since been on the best terms with France.

He resided for some years in Constantinople, and then moved to Damascus, where he spends the greater part of his time. He continues to wear the Algerian dress, and his dark hair and beard make a striking contrast to his snow-white garments.

Those who have met him say that he is a thoroughly courteous and highly polished gentleman, and in looks and bearing he is “every inch a king.”

Damascus is the most thoroughly Oriental in character of all the cities now in easy reach of the traveler. Constantinople and Cairo have each a large foreign population, and can number their Franks by thousands, but Damascus has less than a hundred of them, including missionaries, merchants, and nondescript Occidentals, who have wandered there by chance. The houses, bazaars, mosques and baths are to-day what they were five hundred years ago, and the Moslem is so averse to progress, that there is no great probability of any important change for five hundred years to come.

As you wander through the streets of Damascus or stand in {294}its crowded market places, you are carried back to the days of Haroun-al-Raschid, and gaze upon the pictures that became familiar to you in your boyhood perusal of the Arabian Nights. You forget the Present, you are living in the Past, and, full of bewilderment, you scan the title page of your note-book to make sure that you really tread the earth in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

I had missed the Turkish bath in Constantinople; I could have taken one any morning and therefore postponed it until too late. In Damascus I determined not to be so negligent, and accordingly arranged to try the Oriental bath on the second day of my stay. Gustave agreed to go with me, and we consulted our guide about the time and place. Imagine our astonishment when Mohammed informed us:

“You must get up at five o’clock in ze morning and I takes you to ze bestest bath in Damas. Ze bath shut up at seven o’clock, and you get no bath then afterwards.”

This was early rising for us, but when you are in Damascus you must follow the custom of the Damascus blades. If, as the proverb says, the early child has the worms, there must be an immense demand in Damascus for vermifuge and that sort of thing. We couldn’t do any sight-seeing in the evening, for the reason that there was no sight-seeing to see. Shops, _cafés_, and all other public establishments, were closed at sunset or a little later; there were no street lamps, and the facilities for getting about were very limited. We stayed in the hotel in the evening, and went to bed at an hour we would have been ashamed to acknowledge at home. The people that went to bed at such an inhumanly early hour must rise in good season. They do this not from any expectation of health or wealth, as promised by the old couplet, but simply for the reason that they couldn’t endure to be in bed more than eight or nine hours at a stretch; besides an Arab couch is not the most comfortable thing in the world, and doubtless has something to do with the matutinal habits of the people.

It is said that the eastern shore of the Mediterranean is called the Levant, for the reason that the sun rises there. The natives rise before the sun, and to them rather than to the glorious orb of day is due the name by which the region is known. {295}Promptly at five in the morning Mohammed was at our door and we rose. Day was just beginning to dawn when we emerged from the hotel and started along the narrow streets that led to the bath-house. We kept close to Mohammed’s heels, and narrowly missed stepping on the seat of his trowsers whenever he slackened his pace. The fellow’s “breeks” were about the baggiest pair it was ever my lot to gaze upon; he must have bought them when cloth was cheap and the merchant willing to measure him with a fox-skin without counting the tail as anything. When he stood up, the ample part of his trowsers just missed the ground by an inch or so, and when he walked the depending mass of cloth swung unsteadily like a pendulum that has been on a spree. When he went over any little inequality the garment dragged, and sometimes it caught and held the wearer fast. When he sat down he gathered the trowsers under him and formed a sort of cushion that was comfortable to rest upon. It was then that we realized the design of the artist, and admitted that the inventor of the Turkish trowsers knew what he was about.

A good many people were astir, and more than once we caromed against the plodding Orientals and caused them to utter what sounded like imprecations on the Christian dogs that had ventured to affront them. At length Mohammed brought himself to a halt and said:

“Here, gentlemen, is ze bath; ze best good bath in Damas. You bathe here so good as never was afterward before.”

The building was a low one, of stone, with a roof in which two or three domes were set like enormous kettles inverted. Light was admitted through circular windows, or bull’s-eyes, like the cabin windows of an ocean steamer, let into the dome at intervals none too frequent. In the vestibule we encountered a sort of door-keeper, to whom Mohammed said something in the language of the country, and then passed on to the first room of the bath.

“Here is ze bain beautiful. You shall know soon how he is good.”

With that Mohammed selected a couple of attendants whose entire wardrobe was not worth fifty cents each. It consisted of {296}a small tuft of hair on the crown of the head, the rest of the skull being closely shaven, and of a piece of cloth about the loins.

I fell to the lot of a dark-skinned gentleman any way from twenty-five to forty years old, and with a muscular development about the arms that would have done honor to a pugilist.

He assisted me to disrobe, but was not very expert about it, being unfamiliar with the wardrobe of the Occident.

“You will have ze bain avec all ze luxuries,--ze café, ze chibook, ze everyting,” said Mohammed in a tone of inquiry. “Certainly, mon cher descendant of the Prophet,” I replied, “and you will do us the honor to go through the _moulin_ with us. Order baths for three, and you yourself disencumber your corporosity of those habiliments and show us how to Orientalize.”

“Pardon, gentlemens, but I no speak German; only English, French, Italian, Greek, Turk, and Arab. I no understand what you says. Speak ze English, please.”

“Well then; peel--strip off your clothes and go in.”

“Ah! zat is bono,” replied Mohammed, and beckoning to a third attendant, he was soon in the costume of the Apollo Belvidere. My attendant, as soon as he had stripped me, folded my clothes into a bundle, tied them up in a small sheet, and laid the package away on a divan at the side of the room.

“You will have all ze luxuries.”

{297}I asked Mohammed if everything was safe, as we had our watches and some, though not much, money.

We had given our letters of credit and the most of our coin to our friends before retiring the night previous, as we thought some accident might happen if we left things around loose in the bath-house.

“All tings is safe here,” explained our guide. “Zare is no Christians but you in ze house. All ze rest is Moslem, and all tings is safe.”

Thus reassured, we submitted to the situation.

When they had removed our clothing they dressed us in towels around the loins and wrapped wet cloths about our heads. Then they mounted us on wooden clogs that were difficult to keep in place, and which I kicked off in the next room whither my attendant led me. The place was gloomy and full of steam, and the temperature anything but agreeable. It was heated by a furnace under the floor, and the heat was carried around and made even by means of pipes and flues in the wall. While we stood uncertain what to do, two or three buckets of water were dashed over us. I was not expecting it, and the shock of the water striking me in the breast was sufficient to knock me down, I fell against Mohammed and he against his attendant, and we {298}all went into a heap. Mohammed was fat and rather flabby, so that he broke my fall in the most satisfactory manner.

It hurt him somewhat, but that made no difference, as we hired him by the day and paid his expenses.

In one corner a lot of fellows were sitting on the floor and softening the asperities of the bath by singing an Arab air. Mohammed said they were soldiers, but there wasn’t one of them with any more uniform than we wore, and certainly ours was very scanty. We looked and listened, perspired and waited, and just as the place began to seem comfortable the attendants led us into another room compared to which the first was a refrigerator. It was frightfully hot and took away the breath, and if I had considered myself a free moral agent I would have backed out.

Gustave thought he would sit down, and seeing a block of marble through the steamy atmosphere, he went for it. Before the attendant knew what he was about Gustave had taken a seat.

My duty to the moral and religious public requires the omission of the remarks of my friend immediately subsequent to his assumption of the sitting posture. They were made in German, English, and French, and were brief and emphatic. {299}What he supposed to be a block of stone proved to be a marble tub filled with water. The temperature was sufficiently elevated to cause him to howl with pain, but it did no real damage.

We squatted in a group on the floor after lifting Gustave from his tub, and there we sat puffing and perspiring for some ten minutes or more. Then my attendant laid me on a stone bench and put me through what is called the “shampoo.” He squeezed, and rubbed and pulled and pounded till I was as limp as a boned turkey and possessed as much consistency as a jelly fish. I expected to spread out and run over the sides of the bench and I took a glance downward to see if there was danger of running off through the waste pipes. I called faintly to Mohammed, and heard a husky “Monsieur” in response.

“Have the goodness,” I said, “to ask this gentleman to put me in a sack if he wants to rub me any more. Any sack with small meshes will do, but I want it tight enough to keep me together.

“And Mohammed,” I added, “if there is a rolling mill or a wire-drawing establishment handy he could facilitate matters by running me through it, and then”--

A bucket of hot water was poured over me, and some of it entering my mouth put an end to my appeals for mercy. I was soon let off and taken into the first room, where several buckets of water each cooler than its predecessor were thrown over me. Then I was wiped dry, and a cool dry turban was wrapped around my head, and I was clothed in a white garment, and laid away on a divan. Blankets were wrapped around me, and coffee and a chibook were brought. Gustave was similarly mummified and placed near me, and Mohammed was stowed away on the opposite side of the room. We reclined there smoking and sipping coffee, sipping coffee and smoking, talking and drowsing, drowsing and talking, for nearly an hour. Coffee was never more delicious than then, and I solemnly aver that I never had more enjoyment of a pipe. The long stem of the chibook allows the smoke to cool before it reaches the mouth, and there was a delicate flavor to the tobacco that adapted it to the listless condition of mind and limp condition of body which follows the bath.

We dressed, paid our “backsheesh,” and departed happy in mind and body over “ze bestest good bath in Damas.”

{300}