containing a domed building surmounted by a cross; and in this
historical spot, whose mutations of race, religion, and government would
forbid the most superficial to construct for it any cast-iron scheme
of growth or decay, amid these almost melancholy patches of vegetation
which still hover in the Oriental imagination as the gardens of all
delights, sleeps undisturbed by ambition or by criticism, having at
last, let us hope, solved the theory of “averages,” the brilliant
Henry T. Buckle.
Not far off is the Christian cemetery. “Who is buried here?” I asked
our thick-witted guide.
“O, anybody,” he replied, cheerfully, “Greeks, French, Italians,
anybody you like”; as if I could please myself by interring here any
one I chose.
Among the graves was a group of women, hair dishevelled and garments
loosened in the abandon of mourning, seated about a rough coffin open
its entire length. In it lay the body of a young man who had been
drowned, and recovered from the water after three days. The women lifted
up his dead hands, let them drop heavily, and then wailed and howled,
throwing themselves into attitudes of the most passionate grief. It
was a piteous sight, there under the open sky, in the presence of an
unsympathizing crowd of spectators.
Returning, we went round by the large Moslem cemetery, situated at the
southwest corner of the city. It is, like all Moslem burying-grounds,
a melancholy spectacle,—a mass of small whitewashed mounds of mud or
brick, with an inscribed headstone,—but here rest some of the most
famous men and women of Moslem history. Here is the grave of Ibn'
Asâker, the historian of Damascus; here rests the fierce Moawyeh, the
founder of the dynasty of the Omeiyades; and here are buried three of
the wives of Mohammed, and Fatimeh, his granddaughter, the child of
Ali, whose place of sepulture no man knows. Upon nearly every tomb is a
hollow for water, and in it is a sprig of myrtle, which is renewed every
Friday by the women who come here to mourn and to gossip.
Much of the traveller's time, and perhaps the most enjoyable part of
it, in Damascus, is spent in the bazaars, cheapening scarfs and rugs and
the various silken products of Syrian and Persian looms, picking over
dishes of antique coins, taking impressions of intaglios, hunting for
curious amulets, and searching for the quaintest and most brilliant
Saracenic tiles. The quest of the antique is always exciting, and the
inexperienced is ever hopeful that he will find a gem of value in a heap
of rubbish; this hope never abandons the most blase tourist, though
in time he comes to understand that the sharp-nosed Jew, or the oily
Armenian, or the respectable Turk, who spreads his delusive wares
before him, knows quite as well as the Seeker the value of any bit
of antiquity, not only in Damascus, but in Constantinople, Paris, and
London, and is an adept in all the counterfeits and impositions of the
Orient.
The bazaars of the antique, of old armor, ancient brasses, and of
curiosities generally, and even of the silver and gold smiths, are
disappointing after Cairo; they are generally full of rubbish from
which the choice things seem to have been culled; indeed, the rage for
antiquities is now so great that sharp buyers from Europe range all the
Orient and leave little for the innocent and hopeful tourist, who is
aghast at the prices demanded, and usually finds himself a victim of his
own cleverness when he pays for any article only a fourth of the price
at first asked.
The silk bazaars of Damascus still preserve, however, a sort of
pre-eminence of opportunity, although they are largely supplied by the
fabrics manufactured at Beyrout and in other Syrian towns. Certainly no
place is more tempting than one of the silk khans,—gloomy old courts,
in the galleries of which you find little apartments stuffed full of the
seductions of Eastern looms. For myself, I confess to the fascination of
those stuffs of brilliant dyes, shot with threads of gold and of silver.
I know a tall, oily-tongued Armenian, who has a little chamber full of
shelves, from which he takes down one rich scarf after another, unfolds
it, shakes out its shining hues, and throws it on the heap, until
the room is littered with gorgeous stuffs. He himself is clad in silk
attire, he is tall, suave, insinuating, grave, and overwhelmingly
condescending. I can see him now, when I question the value put upon
a certain article which I hold in my hand and no doubt betray my
admiration of in my eyes,—I can see him now throw back his head, half
close his Eastern eyes, and exclaim, as if he had hot pudding in his
mouth, “Thot is ther larster price.”
I can see Abd-el-Atti now, when we had made up a package of scarfs, and
offered a certain sum for the lot, which the sleek and polite trader
refused, with his eternal, “Thot is ther larster price,” sling the
articles about the room, and depart in rage. And I can see the Armenian
bow us into the corridor with the same sweet courtesy, knowing very
well that the trade is only just begun; that it is, in fact, under good
headway; that the Arab will return, that he will yield a little from the
“larster price,” and that we shall go away loaded with his wares,
leaving him ruined by the transaction, but proud to be our friend.
Our experience in purchasing old Saracenic and Persian tiles is perhaps
worth relating as an illustration of the character of the traders of
Damascus. Tiles were plenty enough, for several ancient houses had
recently been torn down, and the dealers continually acquire them from
ruined mosques or those that are undergoing repairs. The dragoman found
several lots in private houses, and made a bargain for a certain number
at two francs and a half each; and when the bargain was made, I spent
half a day in selecting the specimens we desired.
The next morning, before breakfast, we went to make sure that the lots
we had bought would be at once packed and shipped. But a change had
taken place in twelve hours. There was an Englishman in town who was
also buying tiles; this produced a fever in the market; an impression
went abroad that there was a fortune to be made in tiles, and we found
that our bargain was entirely ignored. The owners supposed that the
tiles we had selected must have some special value; and they demanded
for the thirty-eight which we had chosen—agreeing to pay for them two
francs and a half apiece—thirty pounds. In the house where we had
laid aside seventy-three others at the same price, not a tile was to be
discovered; the old woman who showed us the vacant chamber said she knew
not what had become of them, but she believed they had been sold to an
Englishman.
We returned to the house first mentioned, resolved to devote the day if
necessary to the extraction of the desired tiles from the grip of their
owners. The contest began about eight o'clock in the morning; it was
not finished till three in the afternoon, and it was maintained on our
side with some disadvantage, the only nutriment that sustained us being
a cup of tea which we drank very early in the morning. The scene of the
bargain was the paved court of the house, in which there was a fountain
and a lemon-tree, and some rose-trees trained on espaliers along the
walls. The tempting enamelled tiles were piled up at one side of the
court and spread out in rows in the lewân,—the open recess
where guests are usually received. The owners were two Greeks,
brothers-in-law, polite, cunning, sharp, the one inflexible, the other
yielding,—a combination against which it is almost impossible to trade
with safety, for the yielding one constantly allures you into the
grip of the inflexible. The women of the establishment, comely Greeks,
clattered about the court on their high wooden pattens for a time, and
at length settled down, in an adjoining apartment, to their regular work
of embroidering silken purses and tobacco-pouches, taking time, however,
for an occasional cigarette or a pull at a narghileh, and, in a constant
chatter, keeping a lively eye upon the trade going on in the court. The
handsome children added not a little to the liveliness of the scene, and
their pranks served to soften the asperities of the encounter; although
I could not discover, after repeated experiments, that any affection
lavished upon the children lowered the price of the tiles. The Greek
does not let sentiment interfere with business, and he is much more
difficult to deal with than an Arab, who occasionally has impulses.
Each tile was the subject of a separate bargain and conflict. The dicker
went on in Arabic, Greek, broken English, and dislocated French, and was
participated in not only by the parties most concerned, but by the
young Greek guide and by the donkey-boys. Abd-el-Atti exhibited all the
qualities of his generalship. He was humorous, engaging, astonished,
indignant, serious, playful, threatening, indifferent. Beaten on one
grouping of specimens, he made instantly a new combination; more than
once the transaction was abruptly broken off in mutual rage, obstinacy,
and recriminations; and it was set going again by a timely jocularity or
a seeming concession. I can see now the soft Greek take up a tile which
had painted on it some quaint figure or some lovely flower, dip it in
the fountain to bring out its brilliant color, and then put it in the
sun for our admiration; and I can see the dragoman shake his head in
slow depreciation, and push it one side, when that tile was the one we
had resolved to possess of all others, and was the undeclared centre of
contest in all the combinations for an hour thereafter.
When the day was two thirds spent we had purchased one hundred tiles,
jealously watched the packing of each one, and seen the boxes nailed
and corded. We could not have been more exhausted if we had undergone
an examination for a doctorate of law in a German university. Two boxes,
weighing two hundred pounds each, were hoisted upon the backs of mules
and sent to the French company's station; there does not appear to
be a dray or a burden-cart in Damascus; all freight is carried upon the
back of a mule or a horse, even long logs and whole trunks of trees.
When this transaction was finished, our Greek guide, who had heard me
ask the master of the house for brass trays, told me that a fellow whom
I had noticed hanging about there all the morning had some trays to show
me; in fact, he had at his house “seventeen trays.” I thought this a
rich find, for the beautiful antique brasses of Persia are becoming rare
even in Damascus; and, tired as we were, we rode across the city for a
mile to a secluded private house, and were shown into an upper
chamber. What was our surprise to find spread out there the same
“seventy-three” tiles that we had purchased the day before, and
which had been whisked away from us. By “seventeen tray,” the guide
meant “seventy-three.” We told the honest owner that he was too
late; we had already tiles enough to cover his tomb.
XV.—SOME PRIVATE HOUSES.
THE private houses of Damascus are a theme of wonder and admiration
throughout the Orient. In a land in which a moist spot is called a
garden, and a canal bordered by willows a Paradise, the fancy constructs
a palace of the utmost splendor and luxury out of materials which in a
less glowing country would scarcely satisfy moderate notions of comfort
or of ostentation.
But the East is a region of contrasts as well as of luxury, and it is
difficult to say how much of their reputation the celebrated mansions of
Damascus owe to the wretchedness of the ordinary dwellings, and also to
the raggedness of their surroundings. We spent a day in visiting several
of the richest dwellings, and steeping ourselves in the dazzling luxury
they offer.
The exterior of a private house gives no idea of its interior. Sometimes
its plain mud-wall has a solid handsome street-door, and if it is very
old, perhaps a rich Saracenic portal; but usually you slip from the
gutter, lined with mud-walls, called a street, into an alley, crooked,
probably dirty, pass through a stable-yard and enter a small court,
which may be cheered by a tree and a basin of water. Thence you
wind through a narrow passage into a large court, a parallelogram of
tesselated marble, having a fountain in the centre and about it orange
and lemon trees, and roses and vines. The house, two stories high,
is built about this court, upon which all the rooms open without
communicating with each other. Perhaps the building is of marble, and
carved, or it may be highly ornamented with stucco, and painted in gay
colors. If the establishment belongs to a Moslem, it will have beyond
this court a second, larger and finer, with more fountains, trees, and
flowers, and a house more highly decorated. This is the harem, and the
way to it is a crooked alley, so that by no chance can the slaves or
visitors of the master get a glimpse into the apartments of the women.
The first house we visited was of this kind; all the portion the
gentlemen of the party were admitted into was in a state of shabby
decay; its court in disrepair, its rooms void of comfort,—a condition
of things to which we had become well accustomed in everything
Moslem. But the ladies found the court of the harem beautiful, and
its apartments old and very rich in wood-carving and in arabesques,
something like the best old Saracenic houses in Cairo.
The houses of the rich Jews which we saw are built like those of the
Moslems, about a paved court with a fountain, but totally different in
architecture and decoration.
In speaking of a fountain, in or about Damascus, I always mean a basin
into which water is discharged from a spout. If there are any jets or
upspringing fountains, I was not so fortunate as to see them.
In passing through the streets of the Jews' quarter we encountered at
every step beautiful children, not always clean Sunday-school children,
but ravishingly lovely, the handsomest, as to exquisite complexions,
grace of features, and beauty of eyes, that I have ever seen. And
looking out from the open windows of the balconies which hang over the
street were lovely Jewish women, the mothers of the beautiful children,
and the maidens to whom the humble Christian is grateful that they tire
themselves and look out of windows now as they did in the days of the
prophets.
At the first Jewish house we entered, we were received by the entire
family, old and young, newly married, betrothed, cousins, uncles, and
maiden aunts. They were evidently expecting company about these days,
and not at all averse to exhibiting their gorgeous house and their
rich apparel. Three dumpy, middle-aged women, who would pass for ugly
anywhere, welcomed us at first in the raised recess, or lewân, at
one end of the court; we were seated upon the divans, while the women
squatted upon cushions. Then the rest of the family began to appear.
There were the handsome owner of the house, his younger brother just
married, and the wife of the latter, a tall and pretty woman of the
strictly wax-doll order of beauty, with large, swimming eyes. She wore
a short-waisted gown of blue silk, and diamonds, and, strange to say, a
dark wig; it is the fashion at marriage to shave the head and put on
a wig, a most disenchanting performance for a bride. The numerous
children, very pretty and sweet-mannered, came forward and kissed our
hands. The little girls were attired in white short-waisted dresses, and
all, except the very smallest, wore diamonds. One was a bride of twelve
years, whose marriage was to be concluded the next year. She wore an
orange-wreath, her high corsage of white silk sparkled with diamonds,
and she was sweet and engaging in manner, and spoke French prettily.
The girls evidently had on the family diamonds, and I could imagine that
the bazaar of Moses in the city had been stripped to make a holiday for
his daughters. Surely, we never saw such a display out of the Sultan's
treasure-chamber. The head-dress of one of the cousins of the family,
who was recently married, was a pretty hat, the coronal front of which
was a mass of diamonds. We saw this same style of dress in other houses
afterwards, and were permitted to admire other young women who were
literally plastered with these precious stones, in wreaths on the head,
in brooches and necklaces,—masses of dazzling diamonds, which after
a time came to have no more value in our eyes than glass, so common
and cheap did they seem. If a wicked person could persuade one of these
dazzling creatures to elope with him, he would be in possession of
treasure enough to found a college for the conversion of the Jews.
I could not but be struck with the resemblance of one of the plump,
glowing-cheeked young girls, who was set before us for worship, clad in
white silk and inestimable jewels, to the images of the Madonna, decked
with equal affection and lavish wealth, which one sees in the Italian
churches.
All the women and children of the family walked about upon wooden
pattens, ingeniously inlaid with ivory or pearl, the two supports of
which raise them about three inches from the ground.
They are confined to the foot by a strap across the ball, but being
otherwise loose, they clatter at every step; of course, graceful walking
on these little stilts is impossible, and the women go about like hens
whose toes have been frozen off. When they step up into the lewân, they
leave their pattens on the marble floor, and sit in their stocking-feet.
Our conversation with this hospitable collection of relations consisted
chiefly in inquiries about their connection with each other, and an
effort on their part to understand our relationship, and to know why we
had not brought our entire families. They were also extremely curious to
know about our houses in America, chiefly, it would seem, to enforce the
contrast between our plainness and their luxury. When we had been
served with coffee and cigarettes, they all rose and showed us about the
apartments.
The first one, the salon, will give an idea of the others. It was a
lofty, but not large room, with a highly painted ceiling, and consisted
of two parts; the first, level with the court and paved with marble, had
a marble basin in the centre supported on carved lions; the other two
thirds of the apartment was raised about a foot, carpeted, and furnished
with chairs of wood, inlaid with mother-of-pearl, stiffly set against
the walls. The chairs were not comfortable to sit in, and they were the
sole furniture. The wainscoting was of marble, in screen-work, and most
elaborately carved. High up, near the ceiling, were windows, double
windows in fact, with a space between like a gallery, so that the
lacelike screen-work was exhibited to the utmost advantage. There was
much gilding and color on the marble, and the whole was costly and
gaudy. The sleeping-rooms, in the second story, were also handsome in
this style, but they were literally all windows, on all sides; the space
between the windows was never more than three or four inches. They are
admirable for light and air, but to enter them is almost like stepping
out of doors. They are all en suite, so that it would seem that the
family must retire simultaneously, exchanging the comparative privacy of
the isolated rooms below for the community of these glass apartments.
The salons that we saw in other houses were of the same general style
of the first; some had marble niches in the walls, the arch of which was
supported by slender marble columns, and these recesses, as well as the
walls, were decorated with painting, usually landscapes and cities. The
painting gives you a perfectly accurate idea of the condition of art in
the Orient; it was not only pre-Raphaelite, it was pre-Adamite, worse
than Byzantine, and not so good as Chinese. Money had been freely
lavished in these dwellings, and whatever the Eastern chisel or brush
could do to enrich and ornament them had been done. I was much pleased
by the picture of a city,—it may have been Damascus—freely done upon
the wall. The artist had dotted the plaster with such houses as children
are accustomed to make on a slate, arranging some of them in rows,
and inserting here and there a minaret and a dome. There was not the
slightest attempt at shading or perspective. Yet the owners contemplated
the result with visible satisfaction, and took a simple and undisguised
pleasure in our admiration of the work of art.
“Alas,” I said to the delighted Jew connoisseur who had paid for
this picture, “we have nothing like that in our houses in America, not
even in the Capitol at Washington!”
“But your country is new,” he replied with amiable consideration;
“you will have of it one day.”
In none of these veneered and stuccoed palaces did we find any comfort;
everywhere a profuse expenditure of money in Italian marble, in carving,
in gilding, and glaring color, but no taste, except in some of the
wood-work, cut in Arabesque, and inlaid—a reminiscence of the almost
extinct Saracenic grace and invention. And the construction of all the
buildings and the ornamentation were shabby and cheap in appearance, in
spite of the rich materials; the marbles in the pavement or the walls
were badly joined and raggedly cemented, and by the side of the most
costly work was sure to be something mean and frail.
We supposed at first that we ought to feel a little delicacy about
intruding our bare-faced curiosity into private houses,—perhaps an
unpardonable feeling in a traveller who has been long enough in the
Orient to lose the bloom of Occidental modesty. But we need not have
feared. Our hosts were only too glad that we should see their state
and luxury. There was something almost comical in these Jewish women
arraying themselves in their finest gowns, and loading themselves with
diamonds, so early in the day (for they were ready to receive us at ten
o'clock), and in their naïve enjoyment of our admiration. Surely we
ought not to have thought that comical which was so kindly intended.
I could not but wonder, however, what resource for the rest of the
day could remain to a woman who had begun it by dressing in all her
ornaments, by crowning herself with coronets and sprays of diamonds,
by hanging her neck and arms with glittering gems, as if she had been
a statue set up for idolatry. After this supreme effort of the sex, the
remainder of the day must be intolerably flat. For I think one of the
pleasures of life must be the gradual transformation, the blooming from
the chrysalis of elegant morning déshabille into the perfect flower of
the evening toilet.
These princesses of Turkish diamonds all wore dresses with the classic
short waist, which is the most womanly and becoming, and perhaps their
apparel imparted a graciousness to their manner. We were everywhere
cordially received, and usually offered coffee, or sherbet and
confections.
H. H. the Emir Abd-el-Kader lives in a house suitable to a wealthy
Moslem who has a harem. The old chieftain had expressed his willingness
to receive us, and N. Meshaka, the American consular agent, sent his
kawass to accompany us to his residence at the appointed hour. The old
gentleman met us at the door of his reception-room, which is at one end
of the fountained court. He wore the plain Arab costume, with a white
turban. I had heard so much of the striking, venerable, and even
magnificent appearance of this formidable desert hero, that I
experienced a little disappointment in the reality, and learned anew
that the hero should be seen in action, or through the lenses of
imaginative description which can clothe the body with all the
attributes of the soul. The demigods so seldom come up to their
reputation! Abd-el-Kader may have appeared a gigantic man when on
horseback in the smoke and whirl of an Algerine combat; but he is a man
of medium size and scarcely medium height; his head, if not large, is
finely shaped and intellectual, and his face is open and pleasing. He
wore a beard, trimmed, which I suspect ought to be white, but which
was black, and I fear dyed. You would judge him to be, at least,
seventy-five, and his age begins to show by a little pallor, by a
visible want of bodily force, and by a lack of lustre in those once
fiery and untamable eyes.