DAMASCUS
FOR a part of two days I wound under the base of the snow-crowned Djibel
el Sheik, and then entered upon a vast and desolate plain, rarely pierced
at intervals by some sort of withered stem. The earth in its length and
its breadth and all the deep universe of sky was steeped in light and
heat. On I rode through the fire, but long before evening came there
were straining eyes that saw, and joyful voices that announced, the sight
of Shaum Shereef—the “holy,” the “blessed” Damascus.
But that which at last I reached with my longing eyes was not a speck in
the horizon, gradually expanding to a group of roofs and walls, but a
long, low line of blackest green, that ran right across in the distance
from east to west. And this, as I approached, grew deeper, grew wavy in
its outline. Soon forest trees shot up before my eyes, and robed their
broad shoulders so freshly, that all the throngs of olives as they rose
into view looked sad in their proper dimness. There were even now no
houses to see, but only the minarets peered out from the midst of shade
into the glowing sky, and bravely touched the sun. There seemed to be
here no mere city, but rather a province wide and rich, that bounded the
torrid waste.
Until about a year, or two years, before the time of my going there
Damascus had kept up so much of the old bigot zeal against Christians, or
rather, against Europeans, that no one dressed as a Frank could have
dared to show himself in the streets; but the firmness and temper of Mr.
Farren, who hoisted his flag in the city as consul-general for the
district, had soon put an end to all intolerance of Englishmen. Damascus
was safer than Oxford. {283} When I entered the city in my usual dress
there was but one poor fellow that wagged his tongue, and him, in the
open streets, Dthemetri horsewhipped. During my stay I went wherever I
chose, and attended the public baths without molestation. Indeed, my
relations with the pleasanter portion of the Mahometan population were
upon a much better footing here than at most other places.
In the principal streets of Damascus there is a path for foot-passengers,
which is raised, I think, a foot or two above the bridle-road. Until the
arrival of the British consul-general none but a Mussulman had been
permitted to walk upon the upper way. Mr. Farren would not, of course,
suffer that the humiliation of any such exclusion should be submitted to
by an Englishman, and I always walked upon the raised path as free and
unmolested as if I had been in Pall Mall. The old usage was, however,
maintained with as much strictness as ever against the Christian Rayahs
and Jews: not one of them could have set his foot upon the privileged
path without endangering his life.
I was lounging one day, I remember, along “the paths of the faithful,”
when a Christian Rayah from the bridle-road below saluted me with such
earnestness, and craved so anxiously to speak and be spoken to, that he
soon brought me to a halt. He had nothing to tell, except only the glory
and exultation with which he saw a fellow-Christian stand level with the
imperious Mussulmans. Perhaps he had been absent from the place for some
time, for otherwise I hardly know how it could have happened that my
exaltation was the first instance he had seen. His joy was great. So
strong and strenuous was England (Lord Palmerston reigned in those days),
that it was a pride and delight for a Syrian Christian to look up and say
that the Englishman’s faith was his too. If I was vexed at all that I
could not give the man a lift and shake hands with him on level ground,
there was no alloy to _his_ pleasure. He followed me on, not looking to
his own path, but keeping his eyes on me. He saw, as he thought, and
said (for he came with me on to my quarters), the period of the
Mahometan’s absolute ascendency, the beginning of the Christian’s. He
had so closely associated the insulting privilege of the path with actual
dominion, that seeing it now in one instance abandoned, he looked for the
quick coming of European troops. His lips only whispered, and that
tremulously, but his fiery eyes spoke out their triumph in long and loud
hurrahs: “I, too, am a Christian. My foes are the foes of the English.
We are all one people, and Christ is our King.”
If I poorly deserved, yet I liked this claim of brotherhood. Not all the
warnings which I heard against their rascality could hinder me from
feeling kindly towards my fellow-Christians in the East. English
travellers, from a habit perhaps of depreciating sectarians in their own
country, are apt to look down upon the Oriental Christians as being
“dissenters” from the established religion of a Mahometan empire. I
never did thus. By a natural perversity of disposition, which my
nursemaids called contr_ai_riness, I felt the more strongly for my creed
when I saw it despised among men. I quite tolerated the Christianity of
Mahometan countries, notwithstanding its humble aspect and the damaged
character of its followers. I went further, and extended some sympathy
towards those who, with all the claims of superior intellect, learning,
and industry, were kept down under the heel of the Mussulmans by reason
of their having _our_ faith. I heard, as I fancied, the faint echo of an
old Crusader’s conscience, that whispered and said, “Common cause!” The
impulse was, as you may suppose, much too feeble to bring me into
trouble; it merely influenced my actions in a way thoroughly
characteristic of this poor sluggish century, that is, by making me speak
almost as civilly to the followers of Christ as I did to their Mahometan
foes.
This “holy” Damascus, this “earthly paradise” of the Prophet, so fair to
the eyes that he dared not trust himself to tarry in her blissful shades,
she is a city of hidden palaces, of copses and gardens, and fountains and
bubbling streams. The juice of her life is the gushing and ice-cold
torrent that tumbles from the snowy sides of Anti-Lebanon. Close along
on the river’s edge, through seven sweet miles of rustling boughs and
deepest shade, the city spreads out her whole length. As a man falls
flat, face forward on the brook, that he may drink and drink again, so
Damascus, thirsting for ever, lies down with her lips to the stream and
clings to its rushing waters.
The chief places of public amusement, or rather, of public relaxation,
are the baths and the great café; this last, which is frequented at night
by most of the wealthy men, and by many of the humbler sort, consists of
a number of sheds, very simply framed and built in a labyrinth of running
streams, which foam and roar on every side. The place is lit up in the
simplest manner by numbers of small pale lamps strung upon loose cords,
and so suspended from branch to branch, that the light, though it looks
so quiet amongst the darkening foliage, yet leaps and brightly flashes as
it falls upon the troubled waters. All around, and chiefly upon the very
edge of the torrents, groups of people are tranquilly seated. They all
drink coffee, and inhale the cold fumes of the _narghile_; they talk
rather gently the one to the other, or else are silent. A father will
sometimes have two or three of his boys around him; but the joyousness of
an Oriental child is all of the sober sort, and never disturbs the
reigning calm of the land.
It has been generally understood, I believe, that the houses of Damascus
are more sumptuous than those of any other city in the East. Some of
these, said to be the most magnificent in the place, I had an opportunity
of seeing.
Every rich man’s house stands detached from its neighbours at the side of
a garden, and it is from this cause no doubt that the city (severely
menaced by prophecy) has hitherto escaped destruction. You know some
parts of Spain, but you have never, I think, been in Andalusia: if you
had, I could easily show you the interior of a Damascene house by
referring you to the Alhambra or Alcanzar of Seville. The lofty rooms
are adorned with a rich inlaying of many colours and illuminated writing
on the walls. The floors are of marble. One side of any room intended
for noonday retirement is generally laid open to a quadrangle, in the
centre of which there dances the jet of a fountain. There is no
furniture that can interfere with the cool, palace-like emptiness of the
apartments. A divan (which is a low and doubly broad sofa) runs round
the three walled sides of the room. A few Persian carpets (which ought
to be called Persian rugs, for that is the word which indicates their
shape and dimensions) are sometimes thrown about near the divan; they are
placed without order, the one partly lapping over the other, and thus
disposed, they give to the room an appearance of uncaring luxury; except
these (of which I saw few, for the time was summer, and fiercely hot),
there is nothing to obstruct the welcome air, and the whole of the marble
floor from one divan to the other, and from the head of the chamber
across to the murmuring fountain, is thoroughly open and free.
So simple as this is Asiatic luxury! The Oriental is not a contriving
animal; there is nothing intricate in his magnificence. The
impossibility of handing down property from father to son for any long
period consecutively seems to prevent the existence of those traditions
by which, with us, the refined modes of applying wealth are made known to
its inheritors. We know that in England a newly-made rich man cannot, by
taking thought and spending money, obtain even the same-looking furniture
as a gentleman. The complicated character of an English establishment
allows room for subtle distinctions between that which is _comme il
faut_, and that which is not. All such refinements are unknown in the
East; the Pasha and the peasant have the same tastes. The broad cold
marble floor, the simple couch, the air freshly waving through a shady
chamber, a verse of the Koran emblazoned on the wall, the sight and the
sound of falling water, the cold fragrant smoke of the _narghile_, and a
small collection of wives and children in the inner apartments—all these,
the utmost enjoyments of the grandee, are yet such as to be appreciable
by the humblest Mussulman in the empire.
But its gardens are the delight, the delight and the pride of Damascus.
They are not the formal parterres which you might expect from the
Oriental taste; they rather bring back to your mind the memory of some
dark old shrubbery in our northern isle, that has been charmingly
_un_-“kept up” for many and many a day. When you see a rich wilderness
of wood in decent England, it is like enough that you see it with some
soft regrets. The puzzled old woman at the lodge can give small account
of “the family.” She thinks it is “Italy” that has made the whole circle
of her world so gloomy and sad. You avoid the house in lively dread of a
lone housekeeper, but you make your way on by the stables; you remember
that gable with all its neatly nailed trophies of fitchets and hawks and
owls, now slowly falling to pieces; you remember that stable, and
that—but the doors are all fastened that used to be standing ajar, the
paint of things painted is blistered and cracked, grass grows in the
yard; just there, in October mornings, the keeper would wait with the
dogs and the guns—no keeper now; you hurry away, and gain the small
wicket that used to open to the touch of a lightsome hand—it is fastened
with a padlock (the only new looking thing), and is stained with thick,
green damp; you climb it, and bury yourself in the deep shade, and strive
but lazily with the tangling briars, and stop for long minutes to judge
and determine whether you will creep beneath the long boughs and make
them your archway, or whether perhaps you will lift your heel and tread
them down under foot. Long doubt, and scarcely to be ended till you wake
from the memory of those days when the path was clear, and chase that
phantom of a muslin sleeve that once weighed warm upon your arm.
Wild as that, the nighest woodland of a deserted home in England, but
without its sweet sadness, is the sumptuous garden of Damascus. Forest
trees, tall and stately enough if you could see their lofty crests, yet
lead a tussling life of it below, with their branches struggling against
strong numbers of bushes and wilful shrubs. The shade upon the earth is
black as night. High, high above your head, and on every side all down
to the ground, the thicket is hemmed in and choked up by the interlacing
boughs that droop with the weight of roses, and load the slow air with
their damask breath. {292} There are no other flowers. Here and there,
there are patches of ground made clear from the cover, and these are
either carelessly planted with some common and useful vegetable, or else
are left free to the wayward ways of Nature, and bear rank weeds,
moist-looking and cool to the eyes, and freshening the sense with their
earthy and bitter fragrance. There is a lane opened through the thicket,
so broad in some places that you can pass along side by side; in some so
narrow (the shrubs are for ever encroaching) that you ought, if you can,
to go on the first and hold back the bough of the rose-tree. And through
this wilderness there tumbles a loud rushing stream, which is halted at
last in the lowest corner of the garden, and there tossed up in a
fountain by the side of the simple alcove. This is all.
Never for an instant will the people of Damascus attempt to separate the
idea of bliss from these wild gardens and rushing waters. Even where
your best affections are concerned, and you, prudent preachers, “hold
hard” and turn aside when they come near the mysteries of the happy
state, and we (prudent preachers too), we will hush our voices, and never
reveal to finite beings the joys of the “earthly paradise.”