interview mainly consist in the usual strained compliments of such
occasions. In reply to a question, he said that he had lived over twenty
years in Damascus, but it was evident that his long exile had not dulled
his interest in the progress of the world, and that he watched with
intense feeling all movements of peoples in the direction of freedom.
There is no such teacher of democracy as misfortune, but I fancy that
Abd-el-Kader sincerely desires for others the liberty he covets for
himself. He certainly has the courage of his opinions; while he is a
very strict Moslem, he is neither bigoted nor intolerant, as he showed
by his conduct during the massacre of the Christians here, in 1860. His
face lighted up with pleasure when I told him that Americans remembered
with much gratitude his interference in behalf of the Christians at that
time.
The talk drifting to the state of France and Italy, he expressed his
full sympathy with the liberal movement of the Italian government, but
as to France he had no hope of a republic at present, he did not think
the people capable of it.
“But America,” he said with sudden enthusiasm, “that is the
country, in all the world that is the only country, that is the land of
real freedom. I hope,” he added, “that you will have no more trouble
among yourselves.”
We asked him what he thought of the probability of another outburst
of the Druses, which was getting to be so loudly whispered. Nobody, he
said, could tell what the Druses were thinking or doing; he had no doubt
that in the former rising and massacre they were abetted by the Turkish
government. This led him to speak of the condition of Syria; the people
were fearfully ground down, and oppressed with taxation and exactions of
all sorts; in comparison he did not think Egypt was any better off, but
much the same.
In all our conversation we were greatly impressed by the calm and
comprehensive views of the old hero, his philosophical temper, and
his serenity; although it was easy to see that he chafed under the
banishment which kept so eager a soul from participation in the
great movements which he weighed so well and so longed to aid. When
refreshments had been served, we took our leave; but the emir insisted
upon accompanying us through the court and the dirty alleys, even to the
public street where our donkeys awaited us, and bade us farewell with a
profusion of Oriental salutations.
XVI.—SOME SPECIMEN TRAVELLERS.
IT is to be regretted that some one has not the leisure and the genius
for it would require both—to study and to sketch the more peculiar of
the travellers who journey during a season in the Orient, to photograph
their impressions, and to unravel the motives that have set them
wandering. There was at our hotel a countryman whose observations on
the East pleased me mightily. I inferred, correctly, from his slow
and deliberate manner of speech, that he was from the great West. A
gentleman spare in figure and sallow in complexion, you might have
mistaken him for a “member” from Tennessee or Illinois. What
you specially admired in him was his entire sincerity, and his
imperviousness to all the glamour, historical or romantic, which
interested parties, like poets and historians, have sought to throw over
the Orient. A heap of refuse in the street or an improvident dependant
on Allah, in rags, was just as offensive to him in Damascus as it would
be in Big Lickopolis. He carried his scales with him; he put into
one balance his county-seat and into the other the entire Eastern
civilization, and the Orient kicked the beam,—and it was with a
mighty, though secret joy that you saw it.
It was not indeed for his own pleasure that he had left the familiar
cronies of his own town and come into foreign and uncomfortable
parts; you could see that he would much prefer to be again among the
“directors” and “stockholders” and operators, exchanging the dry
chips of gossip about stocks and rates; but, being a man of “means,”
he had yielded to the imperious pressure of our modern society which,
insists on travel, and to the natural desire of his family to see the
world. Europe had not pleased him, although it was interesting for an
old country, and there were a few places, the Grand Hotel in Paris for
instance, where one feels a little at home. Buildings, cathedrals? Yes,
some of them were very fine, but there was nothing in Europe to equal or
approach the Capitol in Washington. And galleries; my wife likes them,
and my daughter,—I suppose I have walked through miles and miles of
them. It may have been in the nature of a confidential confession,
that he was dragged into the East, though he made no concealment of his
repugnance to being here. But when he had crossed the Mediterranean,
Europe had attractions for him which he had never imagined while he was
in it. If he had been left to himself he would have fled back from Cairo
as if it were infested with plague; he had gone no farther up the Nile;
that miserable hole, Cairo, was sufficient for him.
“They talk,” he was saying, speaking with that deliberate pause and
emphasis upon every word which characterizes the conversation of his
section of the country,—“they talk about the climate of Egypt; it is
all a humbug. Cairo is the most disagreeable city in the world, no
sun, nothing but dust and wind. I give you my word that we had only one
pleasant day in a week; cold,—you can't get warm in the hotel; the
only decent day we had in Egypt was at Suez. Fruit? What do you get?
Some pretend to like those dry dates. The oranges are so sour you
can't eat them, except the Jaffa, which are all peel. Yes, the
pyramids are big piles of stone, but when you come to architecture, what
is there in Cairo to compare to the Tuileries? The mosque of Mohammed
Ali is a fine building; it suits me better than the mosque at Jerusalem.
But what a city to live in!”
The farther our friend journeyed in the Orient, the deeper became his
disgust. It was extreme in Jerusalem; but it had a pathetic tone of
resignation in Damascus; hope was dead within him. The day after we had
visited the private houses, some one asked him at table if he was not
pleased with Damascus.
“Damascus!” he repeated, “Damascus is the most God-forsaken place
I have ever been in. There is nothing to eat, and nothing to see. I had
heard about the bazaars of Damascus; my daughter must see the bazaars of
Damascus. There is nothing in them; I have been from one end of them to
the other,—it is a mess of rubbish. I suppose you were hauled through
what they call the private houses? There is a good deal of marble and
a good deal of show, but there is n't a house in Damascus that a
respectable American would live in; there is n't one he could be
comfortable in. The old mosque is an interesting place: I like the
mosque, and I have been there a couple of times, and should n't mind
going again; but I've had enough of Damascus, I don't intend to go
out doors again until my family are ready to leave.”
All these intense dislikes of the Western observer were warmly combated
by the ladies present, who found Damascus almost a paradise, and were
glowing with enthusiasm over every place and incident of their journey.
Having delivered his opinion, our friend let the conversation run
on without interference, as it ranged all over Palestine. He sat in
silence, as if he were patiently enduring anew the martyrdom of his
pleasure-trip, until at length, obeying a seeming necessity of relieving
his feelings, he leaned forward and addressed the lady next but one to
him, measuring every word with judicial slowness,—
“Madame—I—hate—the—name—of Palestine—and
Judæa—and—the Jordan—and—Damascus—and—Jeru-salem.”
It is always refreshing in travel to meet a candid man who is not
hindered by any weight of historic consciousness from expressing his
opinions; and without exactly knowing why I felt under great obligations
to this gentleman,—for gentleman he certainly was, even to an
old-fashioned courtesy that shamed the best breeding of the Arabs. And
after this wholesale sweep of the Oriental board, I experienced a new
pleasure in going about and picking up the fragments of romance and
sentiment that one might still admire.
There was another pilgrim at Damascus to whom Palestine was larger than
all the world besides, and who magnified its relation to the rest of
the earth as much as our more widely travelled friend belittled it. In
a waste but damp spot outside the Bab-el-Hadid an incongruous Cook's
Party had pitched its tents,—a camp which swarmed during the day with
itinerant merchants and beggars, and at night was the favorite resort
of the most dissolute dogs of Damascus. In knowing this party one had an
opportunity to observe the various motives that bring people to the Holy
Land; there were a divinity student, a college professor, a well-known
publisher, some indomitable English ladies, some London cockneys, and
a group of young men who made a lark of the pilgrimage, and saw no
more significance in the tour than in a jaunt to the Derby or a sail to
Margate. I was told that the guide-book most read and disputed over by
this party was the graphic itinerary of Mark Twain. The pilgrim to whom
I refer, however, scarcely needed any guide in the Holy Land. He was,
by his own representation, an illiterate shoemaker from the South of
England; of schooling he had never enjoyed a day, nor of education,
except such as sprung from his “conversion,” which happened in his
twentieth year. At that age he joined the “Primitive Methodists,”
and became, without abandoning his bench, an occasional exhorter and
field-preacher; his study, to which he gave every moment not demanded by
his trade, was the Bible. To exhorting he added the labor on Sunday of
teaching, and for nearly forty years, without interruption, he had taken
charge of a Sunday-school class. He was very poor, and the incessant
labor of six days in the week hardly sufficed to the support of himself
and his wife, and the family that began to fill his humble lodging.
Nevertheless, at the very time of his conversion he was seized with
an intense longing to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. This desire
strengthened the more he read the Bible and became interested in
the scenes of its prophecies and miracles. He resolved to go; yet to
undertake so expensive a journey at the time was impossible, nor could
his family spare his daily labor. But, early in his married life, he
came to a notable resolution, and that was to lay by something every
year, no matter how insignificant the sum, as a fund for his pilgrimage.
And he trusted if his life were spared long enough he should be able to
see with his own eyes the Promised Land; if that might be granted him,
his object in life would be attained, and he should be willing to depart
in peace.
Filled with this sole idea he labored at his trade without relaxation,
and gave his Sundays and evenings to a most diligent study of the Bible;
and at length extended his reading to other books, commentaries and
travels, which bore upon his favorite object. Years passed by; his
Palestine fund accumulated more slowly than his information about that
land, but he was never discouraged; he lost at one time a considerable
sum by misplaced confidence in a comrade, but, nothing disheartened, he
set to work to hammer out what would replace it. Of course such
industry and singleness of purpose were not without result; his business
prospered and his fund increased; but with his success new duties
opened; his children must be educated, for he was determined that they
should have a better chance in England than their father had been given.
The expenses of their education and his contributions to the maintenance
of the worship of his society interfered sadly with his pilgrimage, and
more than thirty years passed before he saw himself in possession of
the sum that he could spare for the purchase of a Cook's ticket to the
Holy Land. It was with pardonable pride that he told this story of his
life, and added that his business of shoemaking was now prosperous, that
he had now a shop of his own and men working under him, and that one
of his sons, who would have as good an education as any nobleman in the
kingdom, was a student at the college in London.
Of all the party with whom he travelled no one knew the Bible, so well
as this shoemaker; he did not need to read it as they explored the
historical places, he quoted chapter after chapter of it, without
hesitation or consciousness of any great achievement, and he knew almost
as well the books of travel that relate to the country. Familiarity with
the English of the Bible had not, however, caused him to abandon his
primitive speech, and he did not show his respect for the sacred book
by adopting its grammatical forms. Such phrases as, “It does I good
to see he eat,” in respect to a convalescent comrade, exhibited this
peculiarity. Indeed, he preserved his independence, and vindicated
the reputation of his craft the world over for a certain obstinacy of
opinion, if not philosophic habit of mind, which pounding upon leather
seems to promote. He surprised his comrades by a liberality of view and
an absence of narrowness which were scarcely to be expected in a man of
one idea. I was pained to think that the reality of the Holy Land might
a little impair the celestial vision he had cherished of it for forty
years; but perhaps it will be only a temporary obscuration; for the
imagination is stronger than the memory, as we see so often illustrated
in the writings of Oriental travellers; and I have no doubt that now
he is again seated on his bench, the kingdoms he beholds are those of
Israel and Judah, and not those that Mr. Cook showed him for an hundred
pounds.
We should, perhaps, add, that our shoemaker cared for no part of the
Orient except Palestine, and for no history except that in the Bible.
He told me that he was forwarded from London to Rome, on his way to join
Cook's Pilgrims at Cairo, in the company of a party of Select Baptists
(so they were styled in the prospectus of their journey), and
that, unexpectedly to himself (for he was a man who could surmount
prejudices), he found them very good fellows; but that he was obliged
to spend a whole day in Rome greatly against his will; it was an old and
dilapidated city, and he did n't see why so much fuss was made over
it. Egypt did not more appeal to his fancy; I think he rather loathed
it, both its past and its present, as the seat of a vain heathenism. For
ruins or antiquities not mentioned in the Bible he cared nothing, for
profane architecture still less; Palestine was his goal, and I doubt if
since the first crusade any pilgrim has trod the streets of Jerusalem
with such fervor of enthusiasm as this illiterate, Bible-grounded, and
spiritual-minded shoemaker.
We rode one afternoon up through the suburb of Salahiyeh to the
sheykh's tomb on the naked hill north of the city, and down along the
scarred side of it into the Abana gorge. This much-vaunted ride is most
of the way between mud-walls so high that you have a sight of nothing
but the sky and the tops of trees, and an occasional peep, through
chinks in a rickety gate, into a damp and neglected garden, or a ragged
field of grain under trees. But the view from the heights over the vast
plain of Damascus, with the city embowered in its green, is superb, both
for extent and color, and quite excuses the enthusiasm expended on this
perennial city of waters. We had occasional glimpses of the Abana
after it leaves the city, and we could trace afar off the course of the
Pharpar by its winding ribbon of green. The view was best long before
we reached the summit, at the cemetery and the ruined mosque, when the
minarets showed against the green beyond. A city needs to be seen from
some distance, and from not too high an elevation; looking directly down
upon it is always uninteresting.
Somewhere in the side of the mountain, to the right of our course,
one of the Moslem legends has located the cave of the Seven Sleepers.
Knowing that the cave is really at Ephesus, we did not care to
anticipate it.
The skeykh's tomb is simply a stucco dome on the ridge, and exposed
to the draft of air from a valley behind it. The wind blew with such
violence that we could scarcely stand there, and we made all our
observations with great discomfort. What we saw was the city of
Damascus, shaped like an oval dish with a long handle; the handle is the
suburb on the street running from the Gate of God that sees the annual
procession of pilgrims depart for Mecca. Many brown villages dot the
emerald,—there are said to be forty in the whole plain. Towards the
east we saw the desert and the gray sand fading into the gray sky of the
horizon. That way lies Palmyra; by that route goes the dromedary post to
Bagdad. I should like to send a letter by it.
The view of the Abana gorge from the height before we descended was
unique. The narrow pass is filled with trees; but through them we could
see the white French road, and the Abana divided into five streams,
carried at different levels along the sides, in order to convey water
widely over the plain. Along the meadow road, as we trotted towards the
city, as, indeed, everywhere about the city at this season, we found the
ground marshy and vivacious with frogs.
The street called Straight runs the length of the city from east to
west, and is straight in its general intention, although it appears to
have been laid out by a donkey, whose attention was constantly diverted
to one side or the other. It is a totally uninteresting lane. There is
no reason, however, to suppose that St. Paul intended to be facetious
when he spoke of it. In his day it was a magnificent straight avenue,
one hundred feet wide; and two rows of Corinthian colonnades extending a
mile from gate to gate divided it lengthwise. This was an architectural
fashion of that time; the colonnade at Palmyra, which is seen stalking
in a purposeless manner across the desert, was doubtless the ornament of
such a street.
The street life of Damascus is that panorama of the mean and the
picturesque, the sordid and the rich, of silk and rags, of many costumes
and all colors, which so astonishes the Oriental traveller at first,
but to which he speedily becomes so accustomed that it passes almost
unnoticed. The majority of the women are veiled, but not so scrupulously
as those of Cairo. Yet the more we see of the women of the East the more
convinced we are that they are exceedingly good-hearted; it is out of
consideration for the feelings of the persons they meet in the street
that they go veiled. This theory is supported by the fact that the
daughters of Bethlehem, who are all comely and many of them handsome,
never wear veils.
In lounging through the streets the whole life and traffic of the town
is exposed to you: donkeys loaded with panniers of oranges, or with
sickly watermelon cut up, stop the way (all the melons of the East that
I have tasted are flavorless); men bearing trays of sliced boiled beets
cry aloud their deliciousness as if they were some fruit of paradise;
boys and women seated on the ground, having spread before them on a
paper some sort of uninviting candy; anybody planted by the roadside;
dogs by the dozen snoozing in all the paths,—the dogs that wake at
night and make Rome howl; the various tradesmen hammering in their open
shops; the silk-weavers plying the shuttle; the makers of “sweets”
stirring the sticky compounds in their shining copper pots and pans; and
what never ceases to excite your admiration is the good-nature of the
surging crowd, the indifference to being jostled and run over by horses,
donkeys, and camels.
Damascus may be—we have abundant testimony that it is—a good city,
if, as I said, one could see it. Arriving, you dive into a hole, and
scarcely see daylight again; you never can look many yards before you;
you move in a sort of twilight, which is deepened under the heavy timber
roofs of the bazaars; winding through endless mazes of lanes with no
view except of a slender strip of sky, you occasionally may step through
an opening in the wall into a court with a square of sunshine, a tank
of water, and a tree or two. The city can be seen only from the hill or
from a minaret, and then you look only upon roofs. After a few days the
cooping up in this gorgeous Oriental paradise became oppressive.
We drove out of the city very early one morning. I was obliged to the
muezzin of the nearest minaret for awakening me at four o'clock. From
our window we can see his aerial balcony,—it almost overhangs us;
and day and night at his appointed hours we see the turbaned muezzin
circling his high pinnacle, and hear him projecting his long call to
prayer over the city roofs. When we came out at the west gate, the sun
was high enough to color Hermon and the minarets of the west side of the
city, and to gleam on the Abana. As we passed the diligence station, a
tall Nubian, an employee of the company, stood there in the attitude of
seneschal of the city; ugliness had marked him for her own, giving him
a large, damaged expanse of face, from which exuded, however, an
inexpungible good-nature; he sent us a cheerful salam aloykem,—“the
peace of God be with you”; we crossed the shaky bridge, and got away
up the swift stream at the rate of ten miles an hour.
Our last view, with the level sun coming over the roofs and spires,
and the foreground of rapid water and verdure, gave us Damascus in its
loveliest aspect.
XVII.—INTO DAYLIGHT AGAIN.—AN EPISODE OF TURKISH JUSTICE.
IT was an immense relief to emerge from Damascus into Bey-rout,—into a
city open, cheerful; it was to re-enter the world. How brightly it lies
upon its sunny promontory, climbing up the slopes and crowning every
eminence with tree-embowered villas! What a varied prospect it commands
of sparkling sea and curving shore; of country broken into the most
pleasing diversity of hill and vale, woodlands and pastures; of
precipices that are draped in foliage; of glens that retain their
primitive wildness, strips of dark pine forest, groups of cypresses and
of palms, spreading mulberry orchards, and terraces draped by vines; of
villages dotting the landscape; of convents clinging to the heights, and
the snowy peaks of Lebanon! Bounteous land of silk and wine!
Beyrout is the brightest spot in Syria or Palestine, the only pleasant
city that we saw, and the centre of a moral and intellectual impulse the
importance of which we cannot overestimate. The mart of the great silk
industry of the region, and the seaport of Damascus and of all Upper
Syria, the fitful and unintelligent Turkish rule even cannot stifle
its exuberant prosperity; but above all the advantages which nature has
given it, I should attribute its brightest prospects to the influence of
the American Mission, and to the establishment of Beyrout College. For
almost thirty years that Mission has sustained here a band of erudite
scholars, whose investigations have made the world more familiar with
the physical character of Palestine than the people of Connecticut
are with the resources of their own State, and of wise managers whose
prudence and foresight have laid deep and broad the foundations of a
Syrian civilization.
I do not know how many converts have been made in thirty years,—the
East has had ample illustration, from the Abyssinians to the Colchians,
of “conversion” without knowledge or civilization,—nor do
I believe that any “reports” of the workmen themselves to the
“Board” can put in visible array adequately the results of the
American Mission in Syria. But the transient visitor can see something
of them, in the dawning of a better social life, in the beginning of
an improvement in the condition of women, in an unmistakable spirit of
inquiry, and a recognizable taste for intellectual pursuits. It is not
too much to say that the birth of a desire for instruction, for the
enjoyment of literature, and, to a certain extent, of science, is due to
their schools; and that their admirably conducted press, which has sent
out not only translations of the Scriptures, but periodicals of secular
literature and information, and elementary geographies, histories, and
scientific treatises, has satisfied the want which the schools created.
And this new leaven is not confined to a sect, nor limited to a race; it
is working, slowly it is true, in the whole of Syrian society.