golden crescent above it. Then we find ourselves again beside the main
current of the Barada, running swift and merry in a walled channel
straight across an open common, where soldiers are exercising their
horses, and donkeys and geese are feeding, and children are playing, and
dyers are sprinkling their long strips of blue cotton cloth laid out
upon the turf beside the river. The road begins to look like the
commencement of a street; domes and minarets rise before us; there are
glimpses of gray walls and towers, a few shops and open-air cafes, a
couple of hotel signs. The river dives under a bridge and disappears by
a hundred channels beneath the city, leaving us at the western entrance
of Damascus.
IV
THE CITY THAT A LITTLE RIVER MADE
I cannot tell whether the river, the gardens, and the city would have
seemed so magical and entrancing if we had come upon them in some other
way or seen them in a different setting. You can never detach an
experience from its matrix and weigh it alone. Comparisons with the
environs of Naples or Florence visited in an automobile, or with the
suburbs of Boston seen from a trolley-car, are futile and
unilluminating.
The point about the Barada is that it springs full-born from the barren
sides of the Anti-Lebanon, swiftly creates a paradise as it runs, and
then disappears absolutely in a wide marsh on the edge of the desert.
The point about Damascus is that she flourishes on a secluded plain,
the Ghutah, seventy miles from the sea and twenty-three hundred feet
above it, with no _hinterland_ and no sustaining provinces, no political
leadership, and no special religious sanctity, with nothing, in fact, to
account for her distinction, her splendour, her populous vitality, her
self-sufficing charm, except her mysterious and enduring quality as a
mere city, a hive of men. She is the oldest living city in the world; no
one knows her birthday or her founder's name. She has survived the
empires and kingdoms which conquered her,--Nineveh, Babylon, Samaria,
Greece, Egypt--their capitals are dust, but Damascus still blooms "like
a tree planted by the rivers of water." She has given her name to the
reddest of roses, the sweetest of plums, the richest of metalwork, and
the most lustrous of silks; her streets have bubbled and eddied with the
currents of
the multitudinous folk
That do inhabit her and make her great.
She is the typical city, pure and simple, of the Orient, as New York or
San Francisco is of the Occident: the open port on the edge of the
desert, the trading-booth at the foot of the mountains, the pavilion in
the heart of the blossoming bower,--the wonderful child of a little
river and an immemorial Spirit of Place.
Every time we go into the city, (whether from our tents on the terrace
above an ancient and dilapidated pleasure-garden, or from our red-tiled
rooms in the good Hotel d'Orient, to which we had been driven by a
plague of sand-flies in the camp), we step at once into a chapter of the
"Arabian Nights' Entertainments."
It is true, there are electric lights and there is a trolley-car
crawling around the city; but they no more make it Western and modern
than a bead necklace would change the character of the Venus of Milo.
The driver of the trolley-car looks like one of "The Three Calenders,"
and a gayly dressed little boy beside him blows loudly on an instrument
of discord as the machine tranquilly advances through the crowd. (A man
was run over a few months ago; his friends waited for the car to come
around the next day, pulled the driver from his perch, and stuck a
number of long knives through him in a truly Oriental manner.)
The crowd itself is of the most indescribable and engaging variety and
vivacity. The Turkish soldiers in dark uniform and red fez; the
cheerful, grinning water-carriers with their dripping, bulbous goatskins
on their backs; the white-turbaned Druses with their bold, clean-cut
faces; the bronzed, impassive sons of the desert, with their flowing
mantles and bright head-cloths held on by thick, dark rolls of camel's
hair; the rich merchants in their silken robes of many colours; the
picturesquely ragged beggars; the Moslem pilgrims washing their heads
and feet, with much splashing, at the pools in the marble courtyards of
the mosques; the merry children, running on errands or playing with the
water that gushes from many a spout at the corner of a street or on the
wall of a house; the veiled Mohammedan women slipping silently through
the throng, or bending over the trinkets or fabrics in some open-fronted
shop, lifting the veil for a moment to show an olive-tinted cheek and a
pair of long, liquid brown eyes; the bearded Greek priests in their
black robes and cylinder hats; the Christian women wrapped in their long
white sheets, but with their pretty faces uncovered, and a red rose or a
white jasmine stuck among their smooth, shining black tresses; the
seller of lemonade with his gaily decorated glass vessel on his back and
his clinking brass cups in his hand, shouting, "_A remedy for the
heat_,"--"_Cheer up your hearts_,"--"_Take care of your teeth_;" the boy
peddling bread, with an immense tray of thin, flat loaves on his head,
crying continually to Allah to send him customers; the seller of
turnip-pickle with a huge pink globe upon his shoulder looking like the
inside of a pale watermelon; the donkeys pattering along between fat
burdens of grass or charcoal; a much-bedizened horseman with embroidered
saddle-cloth and glittering bridle, riding silent and haughty through
the crowd as if it did not exist; a victoria dashing along the street at
a trot, with whip cracking like a pack of firecrackers, and shouts of,
"_O boy! Look out for your back! your foot! your side!_"--all these
figures are mingled in a passing show of which we never grow weary.
The long bazaars, covered with a round, wooden archway rising from the
second story of the houses, are filled with a rich brown hue like a
well-coloured meerschaum pipe; and through this mellow, brumous
atmosphere beams of golden sunlight slant vividly from holes in the
roof. An immense number of shops, small and great, shelter themselves in
these bazaars, for the most part opening, without any reserve of a front
wall or a door, in frank invitation to the street. On the earthen
pavement, beaten hard as cement, camels are kneeling, while the
merchants let down their corded bales and display their Persian carpets
or striped silks. The cook-shops show their wares and their processes,
and send up an appetising smell of lamb _kibabs_ and fried fish and
stuffed cucumbers and stewed beans and okra, and many other dainties
preparing on diminutive charcoal grills.
In the larger and richer shops, arranged in semi-European fashion, there
are splendid rugs, and embroideries old and new, and delicately
chiselled brasswork, and furniture of strange patterns lavishly inlaid
with mother-of-pearl; and there I go with the Lady to study the art of
bargaining as practised between the trained skill of the Levant and the
native genius of Walla Walla, Washington. In the smaller and poorer
bazaars the high, arched roofs give place to tattered awnings, and
sometimes to branches of trees; the brown air changes to an atmosphere
of brilliant stripes and patches; the tiny shops, (hardly more than open
booths), are packed and festooned with all kinds of goods, garments and
ornaments: the chafferers conduct their negotiations from the street,
(sidewalk there is none), or squat beside the proprietor on the little
platform of his stall.
[Illustration: A Small Bazaar in Damascus.]
The custom of massing the various trades and manufactures adds to the
picturesque joy of shopping or dawdling in Damascus. It is like passing
through rows of different kinds of strange fruits. There is a region of
dangling slippers, red and yellow, like cherries; a little farther on we
come to a long trellis of clothes, limp and pendulous, like bunches of
grapes; then we pass through a patch of saddles, plain and coloured,
decorated with all sorts of beads and tinsel, velvet and morocco, lying
on the ground or hung on wooden supports, like big, fantastic melons.
In the coppersmiths' bazaar there is an incessant clattering of little
hammers upon hollow metal. The goldsmiths sit silent in their pens
within a vast, dim building, or bend over their miniature furnaces
making gold and silver filigree. Here are the carpenters using their
bare feet in their work almost as deftly as their fingers; and yonder
the dyers festooning their long strips of blue cotton from their windows
and balconies. Down there, on the way to the Great Mosque, the
booksellers hold together: a dwindling tribe, apparently, for of the
thirty or forty shops which were formerly theirs not more than half a
dozen remain true to literature: the rest are full of red and yellow
slippers. Damascus is more inclined to loafing or to dancing than to
reading. It seems to belong to the gay, smiling, easy-going East of
Scheherazade and Aladdin, not to the sombre and reserved Orient of
fierce mystics and fanatical fatalists.
Yet we feel, or imagine that we feel, the hidden presence of passions
and possibilities that belong to the tragic side of life underneath
this laughing mask of comedy. No longer ago than 1860, in the great
Massacre, five thousand Christians perished by fire and shot and dagger
in two days; the streets ran with blood; the churches were piled with
corpses; hundreds of Christian women were dragged away to Moslem harems;
only the brave Abd-el-Kader, with his body-guard of dauntless Algerine
veterans, was able to stay the butchery by flinging himself between the
blood-drunken mob and their helpless victims.
This was the last wholesale assassination of modern times that a great
city has seen, and prosperous, pleasure-loving, insouciant Damascus
seems to have quite forgotten it. Yet there are still enough wild
Kurdish shepherds, and fierce Bedouins of the desert, and riffraff of
camel-drivers and herdsmen and sturdy beggars and homeless men, among
her three hundred thousand people to make dangerous material if the
tiger-madness should break loose again. A gay city is not always a safe
city. The Lady and I saw a man stabbed to death at noon, not fifty feet
away from us, in a street beside the Ottoman Bank.
Nothing is safe until justice and benevolence and tolerance and mutual
respect are diffused in the hearts of men. How far this inward change
has gone in Damascus no one can tell. But that some advance has been
made, by real reforms in the Turkish government, by the spread of
intelligence and the enlightenment of self-interest, by the sense of
next-doorness to Paris and Berlin and London, which telegraphs,
railways, and steamships have produced, above all by the useful work of
missionary hospitals and schools, and by the humanizing process which
has been going on inside of all the creeds, no careful observer can
doubt. I fear that men will still continue to kill each other, for
various causes, privately and publicly. But thank God it is not likely
to be done often, if ever again, in the name of Religion!
The medley of things seen and half understood has left patterns
damascened upon my memory with intricate clearness: immense droves of
camels coming up from the wilderness to be sold in the market; factories
of inlaid woodwork and wrought brasswork in which hundreds of young
children, with beautiful and seeming-merry faces, are hammering and
filing and cutting out the designs traced by the draughtsmen who sit at
their desks like schoolmasters; vast mosques with rows of marble
columns, and floors covered with bright-coloured rugs, and files of men,
sometimes two hundred in a line, with a leader in front of them, making
their concerted genuflections toward Mecca; costly interiors of private
houses which outwardly show bare white-washed walls, but within welcome
the stranger to hospitality of fruits, coffee, and sweetmeats, in
stately rooms ornamented with rich tiles and precious marbles, looking
upon arcaded courtyards fragrant with blossoming orange-trees and
musical with tinkling fountains; tombs of Moslem warriors and
saints,--Saladin, the Sultan Beibars, the Sheikh Arslan, the philosopher
Ibn-el-Arabi, great fighters now quiet, and restless thinkers finally
satisfied; public gardens full of rose-bushes, traversed by clear, swift
streams, where groups of women sit gossiping in the shade of the trees
or in little kiosques, the Mohammedans with their light veils not
altogether hiding their olive faces and languid eyes, the Christians
and Jewesses with bare heads, heavy necklaces of amber, flowers behind
their ears, silken dresses of soft and varied shades; cafes by the
river, where grave and important Turks pose for hours on red velvet
divans, smoking the successive cigarette or the continuous nargileh. Out
of these memory-pictures of Damascus I choose three.
* * * * *
The Lady and I are climbing up from the great Mosque of the Ommayyades
into the Minaret of the Bride, at the hour of 'Asr, or afternoon prayer.
As we tread the worn spiral steps in the darkness we hear, far above,
the chant of the choir of muezzins, high-pitched, long-drawn, infinitely
melancholy, calling the faithful to their devotions.
"_Allah akbar! Allah akbar! Allah is great! I testify there is no God
but Allah, and Mohammed is the prophet of Allah! Come to prayer!_"
The plaintive notes float away over the city toward all four quarters of
the sky, and quaver into silence. We come out from the gloom of the
staircase into the dazzling light of the balcony which runs around the
top of the minaret. For a few moments we can see little; but when the
first bewilderment passes, we are conscious that all the charm and
wonder of Damascus are spread at our feet.
The oval mass of the city lies like a carving of old ivory, faintly
tinged with pink, on a huge table of malachite. The setting of groves
and gardens, luxuriant, interminable, deeply and beautifully green,
covers a circuit of sixty miles. Beyond it, in sharpest contrast, rise
the bare, fawn-coloured mountains, savage, intractable, desolate; away
to the west, the snow-crowned bulk of Hermon; away to the east, the
low-rolling hills and slumbrous haze of the desert. Under these flat
roofs and white domes and long black archways of bazaars three hundred
thousand folk are swarming. And there, half emerging from the huddle of
decrepit modern buildings and partly hidden by the rounded shed of a
bazaar, is the ruined top of a Roman arch of triumph, battered, proud,
and indomitable.
* * * * *
An hour later we are scrambling up a long, shaky ladder to the flat
roofs of the joiners' bazaar, built close against the southern wall of
the Mosque. We walk across the roofs and find the ancient south door of
the Mosque, now filled up with masonry, and almost completely concealed
by the shops above which we are standing. Only the entablature is
visible, richly carved with garlands. Kneeling down, we read upon the
lintel the Greek inscription in uncial letters, cut when the Mosque was
a Christian church. The Moslems who are bowing and kneeling and
stretching out their hands toward Mecca among the marble pillars below,
know nothing of this inscription. Few even of the Christian visitors to
Damascus have ever seen it with their own eyes, for it is difficult to
find and read. But there it still endures and waits, the bravest
inscription in the world: "_Thy kingdom, O Christ, is a kingdom of all
ages, and Thy dominion lasts throughout all generations._"
* * * * *
From this eloquent and forgotten stone my memory turns to the Hospital
of the Edinburgh Medical Mission. I see the lovely garden full of roses,
columbines, lilies, pansies, sweet-peas, strawberries just in bloom. I
see the poor people coming in a steady stream to the neat, orderly
dispensary; the sweet, clean wards with their spotless beds; the
merciful candour and completeness of the operating-room; the patient,
cheerful, vigorous, healing ways of the great Scotch doctor, who limps
around on his broken leg to minister to the needs of other folk. I see
the little group of nurses and physicians gathered on Sunday evening in
the doctor's parlour for an hour of serious, friendly talk, hopeful and
happy. And there, amid the murmur of Abana's rills, and close to the
confused and glittering mystery of the Orient, I hear the music of a
simple hymn:
"Dear Lord and Father of mankind,
Forgive our foolish ways!
Reclothe us in our rightful mind,
In purer lives thy service find,
In deeper reverence, praise.
"O Sabbath rest by Galilee!
O calm of hills above,
Where Jesus knelt to share with Thee
The silence of eternity
Interpreted by love!
"Drop thy still dews of quietness,
Till all our strivings cease;
Take from our souls the strain and stress,
And let our ordered lives confess
The beauty of Thy peace."
* * * * *
Corrections made to printed original.
p. 6, 'Eygpt' corrected to 'Egypt'.
p. 167, 'is is camelet' corrected to 'is it camelet'.
p. 182, 'acqueducts' corrected to 'aqueducts'.
p. 190, added a period after 'generations to build'.
p. 277, added a period after 'immemorial charm about the place'.