WE were entertained at the house of the Rev. Mr. Wood, who accompanied us the next day to Ba'albek, his mission territory including that ancient seat of splendid paganism. Some sort of religious fête in the neighborhood had absorbed the best saddle-beasts, and we were indifferently mounted on the refuse of donkeys and horses, Abdallah, our most shining possession, riding, as usual, on the top of a pile of baggage. The inhabitants were very civil as we passed along; we did not know whether to attribute it to the influence of the missionaries or to the rarity of travellers, but the word “backsheesh” we heard not once in Zahleh.
After we had emerged from Mu'allakah upon the open plain, we passed on our left hand the Moslem village of Kerah Nun, which is distinguished as the burial-place of the prophet Noah; but we contented ourselves with a sight of the dome. The mariner lies there in a grave seventy feet long, or seventy yards, some scoffers say; but this, whatever it is, is not the measure of the patriarch. The grave proved too short, and Noah is buried with his knees bent, and his feet extending downward in the ground.
The plain of Bukâ'. is some ninety miles long, and in this portion of it about ten miles broad; it is well watered, and though the red soil is stuffed with small stones, it is very fertile, and would yield abundantly if cultivated; but it is mostly an abandoned waste of weeds. The ground rises gradually all the way to Ba'albek, starting from an elevation of three thousand feet; the plain is rolling, and the streams which rush down from the near mountains are very swift. Nothing could be lovelier than the snowy ranges of mountains on either hand, in contrast with the browns and reds of the slopes,—like our own autumn foliage,—and the green and brown plain, now sprinkled with wild-flowers of many varieties.
The sky was covered with clouds, great masses floating about; the wind from the hills was cold, and at length drove us to our wraps; then a fine rain ensued, but it did not last long, for the rainy season was over. We crossed the plain diagonally, and lunched at a little khan, half house and half stable, raised above a stream, with a group of young poplars in front. We sat on a raised divan in the covered court, and looked out through the arched doorway over a lovely expanse of plain and hills. It was difficult to tell which part of the house was devoted to the stable and which to the family; from the door of the room which I selected as the neatest came the braying of a donkey. The landlord and his wife, a young woman and rather pretty, who had a baby in her arms, furnished pipes and tobacco, and the travellers or idlers—they are one—sat on the ground smoking narghilelis. A squad of ruffianly Metâwileh, a sect of Moslems who follow the Koran strictly, and reject the traditions,—perhaps like those who call themselves Bible Christians in distinction from theological Christians,—came from the field, deposited their ploughs, which they carried on their shoulders, on the platform outside, and, seating themselves in a row in the khan, looked at us stolidly. And we, having the opportunity of saying so, looked at them intelligently.
We went on obliquely across the plain, rising a little through a region rich, but only half cultivated, crossing streams and floundering in mud-holes for three hours, on a walk, the wind growing stronger from the snow mountains, and the cold becoming almost unendurable. It was in vain that Abd-el-Atti spun hour after hour an Arab romance; not even the warm colors of the Oriental imagination could soften the piteous blast. At length, when patience was nearly gone, in a depression in the plain, close to the foot-hills of Anti-Lebanon, behold the great Ba'albek, that is to say, a Moslem village of three thousand to four thousand inhabitants, fairly clean and sightly, and the ruins just on the edge of it, the six well-known gigantic Corinthian pillars standing out against the gray sky. Never was sight more welcome.
Ba'albek, like Zahleh, has no inn, and we lodged in a private house near the ruins. The house was one story; it consisted of four large rooms in a row, looking upon the stone-wall enclosure, each with its door, and with no communication between them. The kitchen was in a separate building. These rooms had high ceilings of beams supporting the flat roof, windows with shutters but without glass, divans along one side, and in one corner a fireplace and chimney. Each room had a niche extending from the floor almost to the ceiling, in which the beds are piled in the daytime; at night they are made up on the divans or on the floor. This is the common pattern of a Syrian house, and when we got a fire blazing in the big chimney-place and began to thaw out our stiff limbs, and Abd-el-Atti brought in something from the kitchen that was hot and red in color and may have had spice on the top of it, we found this the most comfortable residence in the world.
It is the business of a dragoman to produce the improbable in impossible places. Abd-el-Atti rubbed his lamp and converted this establishment into a tolerable inn, with a prolific kitchen and an abundant table. While he was performing this revolution we went to see the ruins, the most noble portions of which have survived the religion and almost the memory of the builders.
The remains of the temples of Ba'albek, or Hieropolis, are only elevated as they stand upon an artificial platform; they are in the depression of the valley, and in fact a considerable stream flows all about the walls and penetrates the subterranean passages. This water comes from a fountain which bursts out of the Anti-Lebanon hills about half a mile above Ba'albek, in an immense volume, falls into a great basin, and flows away in a small river. These instantaneously born rivers are a peculiarity of Syria; and they often disappear as suddenly as they come. The water of this Ba'albek fountain is cold, pure, and sweet; it deserves to be called a “beverage,” and is, so far as my experience goes, the most agreeable water in the world. The Moslems have a proverb which expresses its unique worth: “The water of Ba'albek never leaves its home.” It rushes past the village almost a river in size, and then disappears in the plain below as suddenly as it came to the light above.
We made our way across the stream and along aqueducts and over heaps of shattered walls and columns to the west end of the group of ruins. This end is defended by a battlemented wall some fifty feet high, which was built by the Saracens out of incongruous materials from older constructions. The northeast corner of this new wall rests upon the ancient Phoenician wall, which sustained the original platform of the sacred buildings; and at this corner are found the three famous stones which at one time gave a name, “The Three-Stoned,” to the great temple. As I do not intend to enter into the details of these often described ruins, I will say here, that this ancient Phoenician wall appears on the north side of the platform detached, showing that the most ancient temple occupied a larger area than the Greek and Roman buildings.
There are many stones in the old platform wall which are thirty feet long; but the three large ones, which are elevated twenty feet above the ground, and are in a line, are respectively 64 feet long, 63 feet 8 inches, and 63 feet, and about 13 feet in height and in depth. When I measured the first stone, I made it 128 feet long, which I knew was an error, but it was only by careful inspection that I discovered the joint of the two stones which I had taken for one. I thought this a practical test of the close fit of these blocks, which, laid without mortar, come together as if the ends had been polished. A stone larger than either of these lies in the neighboring quarry, hewn out but not detached.
These massive constructions, when first rediscovered, were the subject of a great deal of wonder and speculation, and were referred to a remote and misty if not fabulous period. I believe it is now agreed that they were the work of the Phoenicians, or Canaanites, and that they are to be referred to a period subsequent to the conquest of Egypt, or at least of the Delta of Egypt, by the Hittites, when the Egyptian influence was felt in Syria; and that this Temple of the Sun was at least suggested, as well as the worship of the Sun god here, by the Temple of the Sun at Heliopolis on the Nile. There is, to be sure, no record of the great city of Ba'albek, but it may safely be referred to the period of the greatest prosperity of the Phoenician nation.
Much as we had read of the splendor of these ruins, and familiar as we were with photographs of them, we were struck with surprise when we climbed up into the great court, that is, to the platform of the temples. The platform extends over eight hundred feet from east to west, an elevated theatre for the display of some of the richest architecture in the world. The general view is broad, impressive, inspiring beyond anything else in Egypt or Syria; and when we look at details, the ruins charm us with their beauty. Round three sides of the great court runs a wall, the interior of which, recessed and niched, was once adorned with the most elaborate carving in designs more graceful than you would suppose stone could lend itself to, with a frieze of garlands of vines, flowers, and fruits. Of the so-called great Temple of Baal at the west end of the platform, only six splendid Corinthian columns remain. The so-called Temple of the Sun or Jupiter, to the south of the other and on a lower level, larger than the Parthenon, exists still in nearly its original form, although some of the exterior columns have fallen, and time and the art-hating Moslems have defaced some of its finest sculpture. The ceiling between the outer row of columns and the wall of this temple is, or was, one of the most exquisite pieces of stone-carving ever executed; the figures carved in the medallions seem to have anticipated the Gothic genius, and the exquisite patterns in stone to have suggested the subsequent Saracenic invention. The composite capitals of the columns offer an endless study; stone roses stand out upon their stems, fruit and flowers hang and bloom in the freedom of nature; the carving is all bold and spirited, and the invention endless. This is no doubt work of the Roman period after the Christian era, but it is pervaded by Greek feeling, and would seem to have been executed by Greek artists.
In the centre of the great court (there is a small six-sided court to the east of the larger one, which was once approached by a great flight of steps from below) are remains of a Christian basilica, referred to the reign of Theodosius. Underneath the platform are enormous vaults, which may have served the successive occupants for store-houses. The Saracens converted this position into a fortress, and this military impress the ruins still bear. We have therefore four ages in these ruins: the Phoenician, the Greek and Roman, the Christian, and the Saracenic. The remains of the first are most enduring. The old builders had no other method of perpetuating their memory except by these cyclopean constructions.
We saw the sunset on Ba'albek. The clouds broke away and lay in great rosy masses over Lebanon; the white snow ridge for forty miles sparkled under them. The peak of Lebanon, over ten thousand feet above us, was revealed in all its purity. There was a red light on the columns and on the walls, and the hills of Anti-Lebanon, red as a dull garnet, were speckled with snow patches. The imagination could conceive nothing more beautiful than the rose-color of the ruins, the flaming sky, and the immaculate snow peaks, apparently so close to us.
On our return we stopped at the beautiful circular temple of Venus, which would be a wonder in any other neighborhood. Dinner awaited us, and was marked by only one novelty,—what we at first took to be brown napkins, fantastically folded and laid at each plate, a touch of elegance for which we were not prepared. But the napkins proved to be bread. It is made of coarse dark wheat, baked in circular cakes as thin as brown paper, and when folded its resemblance to a napkin is complete. We found it tolerably palatable, if one could get rid of the notion that he was eating a limp rag. The people had been advertised of our arrival, and men, women, and boys swarmed about us to sell copper coins; most of them Roman, which they find in the ruins. Few are found of the Greeks'. the Romans literally sowed the ground with copper money wherever they went in the Orient. The inhabitants are Moslems, and rather decent in appearance, and the women incline to good looks, though not so modest in dress as Moslem women usually are; they are all persistent beggars, and bring babies in their arms, borrowing for that purpose all the infants in the neighborhood, to incite us to charity.
We yielded to the average sentiment of Christendom, and sallied out in the cold night to see the ruins under the light of a full moon; one of the party going simply that he might avoid the reproach of other travellers,—“It is a pity you did not see Ba'albek by moonlight.” And it must be confessed that these ruins stand the dim light of the moon better than most ruins; they are so broad and distinct that they show themselves even in this disadvantage, which those of Karnak do not. The six isolated columns seemed to float in the sky; between them snowy Lebanon showed itself.
The next morning was clear and sparkling; the sky was almost as blue as it is in Nubia. We were awakened by the drumming of a Moslem procession. It was the great annual fête day, upon which was to be performed the miracle of riding over the bodies of the devout. The ceremony took place a couple of miles away upon the hill, and we saw on all the paths leading thither files of men and women in white garments. The sheykh, mounted on horseback, rides over the prostrate bodies of all who throw themselves before him, and the number includes young men as well as darwishes. As they lie packed close together and the horse treads upon their spinal columns, their escape from death is called miraculous. The Christians tried the experiment here a year or two ago, several young fellows submitting to let a horseman trample over them, in order to show the Moslems that they also possessed a religion which could stand horses' hoofs.
The ruins, under the intense blue sky, and in the splendid sunlight, were more impressive than in the dull gray of the day before, or even in the rosy sunset; their imperial dignity is not impaired by the excessive wealth of ornamentation. When upon this platform there stood fifty-eight of these noble columns, instead of six, conspicuous from afar, and the sunlight poured into this superb court, adorned by the genius of Athens and the wealth of Rome, this must have been one of the most resplendent temples in existence, rivalling the group upon the Acropolis itself!
Nothing more marks the contrast between the religions of the Greeks and Romans and of the Egyptians, or rather between the genius of the two civilizations, than their treatment of sacred edifices. And it is all the more to be noted, because the more modern nations accepted without reserve any god or object of veneration or mystery in the Egyptian pantheon. The Roman occupants of the temple of Philæ sacrificed without scruple upon the altars of Osiris, and the voluptuous Græco-Romans of Pompeii built a temple to Isis. Yet always and everywhere the Grecians and the Romans sought conspicuous situations for the temples of the gods; they felt, as did our Pilgrim Fathers, who planted their meeting-houses on the windiest hills of New England, that the deity was most honored when the house of his worship was most visible to men; but the Egyptians, on the contrary, buried the magnificence of their temples within wall around wall, and permitted not a hint of their splendor to the world outside. It is worth while to notice also that the Assyrians did not share the contemporary reticence of the Egyptians, but built their altars and temples high above the plain in pyramidal stages; and if we may judge by this platform at Ba'albek, the Phoenicians did not imitate the exclusive spirit of the Pharaonic worshippers.
We lingered, called again and again by the impatient dragoman, in this fascinating spot, amid the visible monuments of so many great races, bearing the marks of so many religious revolutions, and turned away with slow and reluctant steps, as those who abandon an illusion or have not yet thought out some suggestion of the imagination. We turned also with reluctance from a real illusion of the senses. In the clear atmosphere the ridge of Lebanon was startlingly near to us; the snow summit appeared to overhang Ba'albek as Vesuvius does Pompeii; and yet it is half a day's journey across the plain to the base of the mountain, and a whole day's journey from these ruins to the summit. But although this illusion of distance did not continue as we rode down the valley, we had on either hand the snow ranges all day, making by contrast with the brilliant colors of the plain a lovely picture.
THE station at Stoura is a big stable and a dirty little inn, which has the kitchen in one shanty, the dining-room in another, and the beds in a third; a swift mountain stream runs behind it, and a grove of poplars on the banks moans and rustles in the wind that draws down the Lebanon gorge. It was after dark when we arrived, but whether our coming put the establishment into a fluster, I doubt; it seems to be in a chronic state of excitement. The inn was kept by Italians, who have a genius for this sort of hotel; the landlord was Andrea, but I suspect the real authority resided in his plump, bright, vivacious wife. They had an heir, however, a boy of eight, who proved to be the tyrant of the house when he appeared upon the scene. The servants were a tall slender Syrian girl, an active and irresponsible boy, and a dark-eyed little maid, in the limp and dirty single garment which orphans always wear on the stage, and who in fact was an orphan, and appeared to take the full benefit of her neglected and jolly life. The whole establishment was on a lark, and in a perpetual giggle, and communicated its overflowing good-humor even to tired travellers. The well-favored little wife, who exhibited the extremes of fortune in a diamond ring and a torn and draggled calico gown, sputtered alternately French and Italian like a magpie, laughed with a contagious merriment, and actually made the cheerless accommodations she offered us appear desirable. The whole family waited on us, or rather kept us waiting on them, at table, bringing us a dish now and then as if its production were a joke, talking all the while among themselves in Arabic, and apparently about us, and laughing at their own observations, until we, even, came to conceive ourselves as a party in a most comical light; and so amusing did we grow that the slim girl and the sorry orphan were forced to rush into a corner every few minutes and laugh it out.
I spent a pleasant hour in the kitchen,—an isolated, smoke-dried room with an earth floor,—endeavoring to warm my feet at the little fires of charcoal kindled in holes on top of a bank of earth and stone, and watching the pranks of this merry and industrious family. The little heir amused himself by pounding the orphan, kicking the shins of the boy, and dashing water in the face of the slim girl,—treatment which the servants dared not resent, since the father laughed over it as an exhibition of bravery and vivacity. Fragrant steam came from a pot, in which quail were stewing for the passengers by the night mail, and each person who appeared in the kitchen, in turn, gave this pot a stir; the lively boy pounded coffee in a big mortar, put charcoal on the fire, had a tussle with the heir, threw a handspring, doing nothing a minute at a time; the orphan slid in with a bucket of water, slopping it in all directions; the heir set up a howl and kicked his father because he was not allowed to kick the orphan any more; the little wife came in like a breeze, whisking everybody one side, and sympathized with dear little Hobby, whose cruel and ugly papa was holding the love from barking his father's shins. You do not often see a family that enjoys itself so much as this.
It was late next morning when we tore ourselves from this enchanting household, and went at a good pace over the fertile plain, straight towards Anti-Lebanon, having a glimpse of the snow of Mount Hermon,—a long ridge peering over the hills to the? southeast, and crossing in turn the Litany and the deep Anjar, which bursts forth from a single fountain about a mile to the north. On our left we saw some remains of what was once a capital city, Chalcis, of unknown origin, but an old city before it was possessed by the Ptolemies, or by Mark Antony, and once the luxurious residence of the Herod family. At Medjel, a village scattered at the foot of small tells rising in the plain, we turned into the hills, leaving unvisited a conspicuous Roman temple on a peak above the town. The road winds gradually up a wady. As we left the plain, and looked back across it to Lebanon, the colors of Bukâ'. and the mountain gave us a new surprise; they were brilliant and yet soft, as gay and splendid as the rocks of the Yellowstone, and yet exquisitely blended as in a Persian rug.
The hill-country was almost uninhabited; except the stations and an occasional Bedaween camp there was small sign of occupation; the ground was uncultivated; peasants in rags were grubbing up the roots of cedars for fuel. We met Druses with trains of mules, Moslems with camels and mules, and long processions of white-topped wagons,—like the Western “prairie schooner”—drawn each by three mules tandem. Thirty and forty of these freight vehicles travel in company, and we were continually meeting or passing them; their number is an indication of the large trade that Damascus has with Beyrout and the Mediterranean. There is plenty of color in the people and in their costume. We were told that we could distinguish the Druses by their furtive and bad countenances; but for this information I should not have seen that they differed much from the Maronites; but I endeavored to see the treacherous villain in them. I have noticed in Syria that the Catholic travellers have a good opinion of the Maronites and hate the Druses, that the American residents think little of the Maronites, and that the English have a lenient side for the Druses. The Moslems consistently despise all of them. The Druse has been a puzzle. There are the same horrible stories current about him that were believed of the early Christians; the Moslem believes that infants are slain and eaten in his midnight assemblies, and that once a year the Druse community meets in a cavern at midnight, the lights are extinguished, and the sexes mingling by chance in the license of darkness choose companions for the year. But the Druse creed, long a secret, is now known; they are the disciples of Hâkim, a Khalif of the Fatimite dynasty; they believe in the unity of God and his latest manifestation in Hakim; they are as much a political as a religious society; they are accomplished hypocrites, cunning in plotting and bold in action; they profess to possess “the truth,” and having this, they are indifferent to externals, and are willing to be Moslems with the Moslems and Christians with the Christians, while inwardly feeling a contempt for both. They are the most supercilious of all the Eastern sects. What they are about to do is always the subject of anxiety in the Lebanon regions.
At the stations of the road we found usually a wretched family or two dwelling in a shanty, half stable and half café, always a woman with a baby in her arms, and the superabundant fountains for nourishing it displayed to all the world; generally some slatternly girls, and groups of rough muleteers and drivers smoking. At one, I remember a Jew who sold antique gems, rings, and coins, with a shocking face, which not only suggested the first fall of his race, but all the advantages he has since taken of his innocent fellows, by reason of his preoccupation of his position of knowledge and depravity.
We made always, except in the steep ascents, about ten miles an hour. The management of the route is the perfection of French system and bureaucracy. We travel with a way-bill of numbered details, as if we were a royal mail. At every station we change one horse, so that we always have a fresh animal. The way-bill is at every station signed by the agent, and the minute of arrival and departure exactly noted; each horse has its number, and the number of the one taken and the one left is entered. All is life and promptness at the stations; changes are quickly made. The way-bill would show the company the exact time between stations; but I noticed that our driver continually set his watch backwards and forwards, and I found that he and the dragoman had a private understanding to conceal our delays for lunch, for traffic with Jews, or for the enjoyment of scenery.
After we had crossed the summit of the first ridge we dashed down the gate of a magnificent canyon, the rocks heaved up in perpendicular strata, overhanging, craggy, crumbled, wild. We crossed then a dreary and nearly arid basin; climbed, by curves and zigzags, another ridge, and then went rapidly down until we struck the wild and narrow gorge of the sacred Abana. Immediately luxuriant vegetable life began. The air was sweet with the blossoms of the mish-mish (apricot), and splendid walnuts and poplars overshadowed us. The river, swollen and rushing amid the trees on its hanks, was frightfully rapid. The valley winds sharply, and gives room only for the river and the road, and sometimes only for one of them. Sometimes the river is taken out of its bed and carried along one bank or the other; sometimes the road crosses it, and again pursues its way between its divided streams. We were excited by its rush and volume, and by the rich vegetation along its sides. We came to fantastic Saracenic country-seats, to arcaded and latticed houses set high up over the river, to evidences of wealth and of proximity to a great city.
Suddenly, for we seemed to have become a part of the rushing torrent and to share its rapidity, we burst out of the gorge, and saw the river, overpassing its narrow banks, flowing straight on before us, and beyond, on a level, the minarets and domes of Damascus! All along the river, on both banks of it, and along the high wall by the roadside, were crowds of men in Turkish costume, of women in pure white, of Arabs sitting quietly by the stream smoking the narghileh, squatting in rows along the wall and along the water, all pulling at the water-pipe. There were tents and booths erected by the river. In a further reach of it men and boys were bathing. Hanks and groups of veiled women and children crouched on the damp soil close to the flood, or sat immovable on some sandy point. It is a delicious holiday for two or three women to sit the livelong day by water, running or stagnant, to sit there with their veils drawn over their heads, as rooted as water-plants, and as inanimate as bags of flour. It was a striking Oriental picture, played on by the sun, enlivened by the swift current, which dashes full into the city.
As we spun on, the crowd thickened,—soldiers, grave Turks on caparisoned horses or white donkeys, Jews, blacks, Persians. We crossed a trembling bridge, and rattled into town over stony pavements, forced our way with difficulty into streets narrow and broken by sharp turns, the carriage-wheels scarcely missing men and children stretched on the ground, who refused, on the theory of their occupation of the soil prior to the invention of wheels, to draw in even a leg; and, in a confused whirl of novel sights and discordant yells, barks, and objurgations, we came to Dimitri's hotel. The carriage stopped in the narrow street; a small door in the wall, a couple of feet above the pavement, opened, and we stepped through into a little court occupied by a fountain and an orange-tree loaded with golden fruit. Thence we passed into a large court, the centre of the hotel, where the Abana pours a generous supply into a vast marble basin, and trees and shrubs offer shelter to singing birds. About us was a wilderness of balconies, staircases, and corridors, the sun flooding it all; and Dimitri himself, sleek, hospitable, stood bowing, in a red fez, silk gown, and long gold chain.
IT is a popular opinion that there is nothing of man's work older than Damascus; there is certainly nothing newer. The city preserves its personal identity as a man keeps his from youth to age, through the constant change of substance. The man has in his body not an atom of the boy; but if the boy incurred scars, they are perpetuated in the man. Damascus has some scars. We say of other ancient cities, “This part is old, that part is new.” We say of Damascus, its life is that of a tree, decayed at heart, dropping branches, casting leaves, but always renewing itself.
How old is Damascus? Or, rather, how long has a city of that name existed here on the banks of the Abana? According to Jewish tradition, which we have no reason to doubt, it was founded by Uz, the son of Aram, the son of Shem. By the same tradition it was a great city when a remarkable man, of the tenth generation from the Deluge,—a person of great sagacity, not mistaken in his opinions, skilful in the celestial science, compelled to leave Chaldea when he was seventy-five years old, on account of his religious opinions, since he ventured to publish the notion that there was but one God, the Creator of the Universe,—came with an army of dependants and “reigned” in the city of Uz. After some time Abraham removed into Canaan, which was already occupied by the Canaanites, who had come from the Persian Gulf, established themselves in wall-towns in the hills, built Sidon on the coast, and carried their conquests into Egypt. It was doubtless during the reign of the Hittites, or Shepherd Kings, that Abraham visited Egypt. Those usurpers occupied the throne of the Pharaohs for something like five hundred years, and it was during their occupancy that the Jews settled in the Delta.
Now, if we can at all fix the date of the reign of the Shepherd Kings, we can approximate to the date of the foundation of Damascus, for Uz was the third generation from Noah, and Abraham was the tenth. We do not know how to reckon a generation in those days, when a life-lease was such a valuable estate, but if we should assume it to be a century, we should have about seven hundred years between the foundation of Damascus and the visit of Abraham to Egypt, a very liberal margin. But by the chronology of Mariette Bey, the approximate date of the Shepherds' invasion is 2300 B.C. to 2200 B. C., and somewhat later than that time Abraham was in Damascus. If Damascus was then seven hundred years old, the date of its foundation would be about 3000 B.C. to 2900 B.C.
Assuming that Damascus has this positive old age, how old is it comparatively? When we regard it in this light, we are obliged to confess that it is a modern city. When Uz and his friends wandered out of the prolific East, and pitched their tents by the Abana, there was already on the banks of the Nile a civilized, polished race, which had nearly completed a cycle of national existence much longer than the duration of the Roman Empire. It was about the eleventh dynasty of the Egyptian kingdom, the Great Pyramid had been built more than a thousand years, and the already degenerate Egyptians of the “Old Empire” had forgotten the noble art which adorned and still renders illustrious the reigns of the pyramid-builders..
But if Damascus cannot claim the highest antiquity, it has outlived all its rivals on the earth, and has flourished in a freshness as perennial as the fountain to which it owes its life, through all the revolutions of the Orient. As a necessary commercial capital it has pursued a pretty uniform tenor under all its various masters. Tiglath-Pileser attempted to destroy it; it was a Babylonian and then a Persian satrapy for centuries; it was a Greek city; it was the capital of a Roman province for seven hundred years; it was a Christian city and reared a great temple to John the Baptist; it was the capital of the Saracenic Empire, in which resided the ruler who gave laws to all the lands from India to Spain; it was ravaged by Tamerlane; it now suffers the blight of Turkish imbecility. From of old it was a caravan station and a mart of exchange, a camp by a stream; it is to-day a commercial hive, swarming with an hundred and fifty thousand people, a city without monuments of its past or ambition for its future.
If one could see Damascus, perhaps he could invent a phrase that would describe it; but when you have groped and stumbled about in it for a couple of weeks, endeavoring in vain to get a view of more than a few rods of it at a time, you are utterly at a loss how to convey an impression of it to others.
If Egypt is the gift of the Nile, the river Abana is the life of Damascus; its water is carried into the city on a dozen different levels, making it literally one of fountains and running water. Sometimes the town is flooded; the water had only just subsided from the hotel when we arrived. This inundation makes the city damp for a long time. Indeed, it is at all times rather soaked with water, and is—with all respect to Uz and Abraham and the dynasty of the Omeiyades—a sort of habitable frog-pond on a grand scale. At night the noise of frogs, even at our hotel, is the chief music, the gentle twilight song, broken, it is true, by the incessant howling and yelping of savage dogs, packs of which roam the city like wolves all night. They are mangy yellow curs, without a single good quality, except that they sleep all the daytime. In every quarter of the city you see ranks and rows of them asleep in the sun, occupying half the street and nestling in all the heaps of rubbish. But much as has been said of the dogs here, I think the frogs are the feature of the town; they are as numerous as in the marshes of Ravenna.
Still the water could not be spared. It gives sparkle, life, verdure. In walking you constantly get glimpses through heavy doorways of fountains, marble tanks of running water, of a blooming tree or a rose-trellis in a marble court, of a garden of flowers. The crooked, twisted, narrow streets, mere lanes of mud-walls, would be scarcely endurable but for these occasional glimpses, and the sight now and then of the paved, pillared court of a gayly painted mosque.
One ought not to complain when the Arab barber who trims his hair gives him a narghileh to smoke during the operation; but Damascus is not so Oriental as Cairo, the predominant Turkish element is not so picturesque as the Egyptian. And this must be said in the face of the universal use of the narghileh, which more than any other one thing imparts an Oriental, luxurious tone to the city. The pipe of Egypt is the chibouk, a stem of cherry five feet long with a small clay bowl; however richly it may be ornamented, furnished with a costly amber mouthpiece, wound with wire of gold, and studded, as it often is, with diamonds and other stones of price, it is, at the best, a stiff affair; and even this pipe is more and more displaced by the cigar, just as in Germany the meerschaum has yielded to the cigar as the Germans have become accessible to foreign influences. But in Damascus the picturesque narghileh, encourager of idleness, is still the universal medium of smoke. The management of the narghileh requires that a person should give his undivided mind to it; in return for that, it gives him peace. The simplest narghileh is a cocoanut-shell, with a flexible stem attached, and an open metal bowl on top for the tobacco. The smoke is drawn through the water which the shell contains. Other narghilehs have a glass standard and water-bowl, and a flexible stem two or three yards in length. The smoker, seated cross-legged before this graceful object, appears to be worshipping his idol. The mild Persian tobacco is kept alight by a slowly burning piece of dried refuse which is kindly furnished by the camel for fuel; and the smoke is inhaled into the lungs, and slowly expelled from the nostrils and the mouth. Although the hastily rolled cigarette is the resort of the poor in Egypt, and is somewhat used here, it must be a very abandoned wretch who cannot afford a pull at a narghileh in Damascus. Its universality must excuse the long paragraph I have devoted to this pipe. You see men smoking it in all the cafés, in all the shops, by the roadside, seated in the streets, in every garden, and on the house-tops. The visible occupation of Damascus is sucking this pipe.
Our first walk in the city was on Sunday to the church of the Presbyterian mission; on our way we threaded a wilderness of bazaars, nearly all of them roofed over, most of them sombre and gloomy. Only in the glaring heat of summer could they be agreeable places of refuge. The roofing of these tortuous streets and lanes is not so much to exclude the sun, I imagine, as to keep out the snow, and the roofs are consequently substantial; for Damascus has an experience of winter, being twenty-two hundred feet above the sea-level, nearly as high as Jerusalem. These bazaars, so much vaunted all through the Orient, disappointed us, not in extent, for they are interminable, but in wanting the picturesqueness, oddity, and richness of those of Cairo. And this, like the general appearance of the city, is a disappointment hard to be borne, for we have been taught to believe that Damascus is a Paradise on earth, and that here, if anywhere, we should come into that region of enchantment which the poets of the Arabian Nights' tales have imposed upon us as the actual Orient. Should we have recognized, in the low and partially flooded strip of grassland through which we drove from the mouth of the Abana gorge to the western gate of the city, the green Merj of the Arabian poets, that gem of the earth? The fame of it has gone abroad throughout the world, as if it were a unique gift of Allah to his favorites. Why, every Occidental land has a million glades, watered, green-sodded, tree-embowered, more lovely than this, that no poet has thought it worth while to celebrate.
We found a little handful of worshippers at the mission church, and among them—Heaven forgive us for looking at her on Sunday!—an eccentric and somewhat notorious English lady of title, who shares the bed and board of an Arab sheykh in his harem outside the walls. It makes me blush for the attractiveness of my own country, and the slighted fascination of the noble red man in his paint and shoddy blanket, when I see a lady, sated with the tame civilization of England, throw herself into the arms of one of these coarse bigamists of the desert. Has he no reputation in the Mother country, our noble, chivalrous Walk-Under-the-Ground?
We saw something of the missionaries of Damascus, but as I was not of the established religion at the court of Washington at the time of my departure from home, and had no commission to report to the government, either upon the condition of consulates or of religion abroad, I am not prepared to remark much upon the state of either in this city. I should say, however, that not many direct converts were made either from Moslemism or from other Christian beliefs, but that incalculable good is accomplished by the schools which the missionaries conduct. The influence of these, in encouraging a disposition to read, and to inquire into the truth and into the conditions of a better civilization, is not to be overestimated. What impressed me most, however, in the fortune of these able, faithful servants of the propagandism of Christian civilization, was their pathetic isolation. A gentleman and his wife of this mission had been thirty years absent from the United States. The friends who cheered or regretted their departure, who cried over them, and prayed over them, and followed them with tender messages, had passed away, or become so much absorbed in the ever-exciting life at home as to have almost forgotten those who had gone away to the heathen a generation ago. The Mission Board that personally knew them and lovingly cared for them is now composed of strangers to them. They were, in fact, expatriated, lost sight of. And yet they had gained no country nor any sympathies to supply the place of those lost. They must always be, to a great degree, strangers in this fierce, barbarous city.
We wandered down through the Christian quarter of the town: few shops are here; we were most of the time walking between mud-walls, which have a door now and then. This quarter is new; it was entirely burned by the Moslems and Druses in 1860, when no less than twenty-five hundred adult male Christians, heads of families, were slaughtered, and thousands more perished of wounds and famine consequent upon the total destruction of their property. That the Druses were incited to this persecution by the Turkish rulers is generally believed. We went out of the city by the eastern gate, called Bab Shurky, which name profanely suggested the irrelevant colored image of Bob Sharkey, and found ourselves in the presence of huge mounds of rubbish, the accumulations of refuse carted out of the city during many centuries, which entirely concealed from view the country beyond. We skirted these for a while, with the crumbling city wall on the left hand, passed through the hard, gray, desolate Turkish cemetery, and came at length into what might be called country. Not that we could see any country, however; we were always between high mud-walls, and could see nothing beyond them, except the sky, unless we stepped through an open door into a garden.
Into one of these gardens, a public one, and one of the most celebrated in the rhapsodies of travellers and by the inventive poets, we finally turned. When you are walking for pleasure in your native land, and indulging a rural feeling, would you voluntarily go into a damp swale, and sit on a moist sod under a willow? This garden is low, considerably lower than the city, which has gradually elevated itself on its own decay, and is cut by little canals or sluiceways fed by the Abana, which run with a good current. The ground is well covered with coarse grass, of the vivid green that one finds usually in low ground, and is liberally sprinkled with a growth of willows and poplars. In this garden of the Hesperides, in which there are few if any flowers, and no promise of fruit, there is a rough wooden shed, rickety and decaying, having, if I remember rightly, a balcony,—it must have a balcony,—and there pipes, poor lemonade, and poorer ice cream are served to customers. An Arab band of four persons, one of them of course blind of an eye, seated cross-legged on a sort of bedstead, was picking and thumping a monotonous, never-ending tune out of the usual instruments. You could not deny that the vivid greenery, and the gayly apparelled groups, sitting about under the trees and on the water's edge, made a lively scene. In another garden, farther on around the wall, the shanty of entertainment is a many-galleried shaky construction, or a series of platforms and terraces of wood, overhanging the swift Abana. In the daytime it is but a shabby sight; but at night, when a thousand colored globes light it without revealing its poverty, and the lights dance in the water, and hundreds of turbaned, gowned narghileh-smokers and coffee-drinkers lounge in the galleries, or gracefully take their ease by the sparkling current, and the faint thump of the darabouka is heard, and some gesticulating story-teller, mounted upon a bench, is reeling off to an attentive audience an interminable Arabian tale, you might fancy that the romance of the Orient is not all invented.
Of other and private gardens and enclosures we had glimpses, on our walk, through open gates, and occasionally over the walls; we could imagine what a fragrance and color would greet the senses when the apricots are in bloom, and the oranges and lemons in flower, and how beautiful the view might be if the ugly walls did not conceal it. We returned by the saddlers' bazaar, and by a famous plane-tree, which may be as old as the Moslem religion; its gnarled limbs are like the stems of ordinary trees, and its trunk is forty feet around.
The remark that Damascus is without monuments of its past needs qualification; it was made with reference to its existence before the Christian era, and in comparison with other capitals of antiquity. Remains may, indeed, be met in its exterior walls, and in a broken column here and there built into a modern house, of Roman workmanship, and its Great Mosque is an historical monument of great interest, if not of the highest antiquity. In its structure it represents three religions and three periods of art; like the mosque of St. Sophia at Constantinople, it was for centuries a Christian cathedral; like the Dome of the Rock at Jerusalem, it is built upon a spot consecrated by the most ancient religious rites. Situated in the midst of the most densely peopled part of the city, and pressed on all sides by its most crowded bazaars, occupying a quadrangle nearly five hundred feet one way by over three hundred the other, the wanderer among the shops is constantly coming to one side or another of it, and getting glimpses through the spacious portals of the colonnaded court within. Hemmed in as it is, it is only by diving into many alleys and pushing one's way into the rear of dirty shops and climbing upon the roofs of houses, that one can get any idea of the exterior of the mosque. It is, indeed, only from an eminence that you can see its three beautiful minarets.
It does not appear that Chosroes, the Persian who encamped his army in the delicious gardens of Damascus, in the year 614, when he was on his way to the destruction of Jerusalem and the massacre of its Christian inhabitants, disturbed the church of John the Baptist in this city. But twenty years later it fell into the hands of the Saracens, who for a few years were content to share it with the Christian worshippers. It is said that when Khâled, the most redoubtable of the Friends of the Prophet, whose deeds entitled him to the sobriquet of The Sword of God, entered this old church, he asked to be conducted into the sacred vault (which is now beneath the kubbeh of the mosque), and that he was there shown the head of John the Baptist in a gold casket, which had in Greek this inscription: “This casket contains the head of John the Baptist, son of Zachariah.”
The building had been then for over three centuries a Christian church. And already, when Constantine dedicated it to Christian use, it had for over three hundred years witnessed the worship of pagan deities. The present edifice is much shorn of its original splendor and proportions, but sufficient remains to show that it was a worthy rival of the temples of Ba'albek, Palmyra, and Jerusalem. No part of the building is older than the Roman occupation, but the antiquarians are agreed to think that this was the site of the old Syrian temple, in which Ahaz saw the beautiful altar which he reproduced in the temple at Jerusalem.
Pieces of superb carving, recalling the temple of the Sun at Ba'albek, may still be found in some of the gateways, and the noble Corinthian columns of the interior are to be referred to Roman or Greek workmen. Christian art is represented in the building in some part of the walls and in the round-topped windows; and the Moslems have superimposed upon all minarets, a dome, and the gay decorations of colored marbles and flaring inscriptions.
The Moslems have either been too ignorant or too careless to efface all the evidences of Christian occupation. The doors of the eastern gate are embossed with brass, and among the emblems is the Christian sacramental cup. Over an arch, which can only be seen from the roof of the silversmiths' bazaar, is this inscription in Greek: “Thy kingdom, O Christ, is an everlasting kingdom, and thy dominion endureth throughout all generations.”
It required a special permit to admit us to the mosque, but when we were within the sacred precincts and shod with slippers, lest our infidel shoes should touch the pavement, we were followed by a crowd of attendants who for the moment overcame their repugnance to our faith in expectation of our backsheesh. The interior view is impressive by reason of the elegant minarets and the fine colonnaded open court. Upon one of the minarets Jesus will descend when he comes to judge the world. The spacious mosque, occupying one side of the court, and open on that side to its roof, is divided in its length by two rows of Corinthian columns, and has a certain cheerfulness and hospitality. The tesselated marble pavement of the interior is much worn, and is nearly all covered with carpets of Persia and of Smyrna. The only tomb in the mosque is that of St. John the Baptist, which is draped in a richly embroidered cloth.
We were anew impressed by the home-like, democratic character of the great mosques. This, opening by its four gates into the busiest bazaars, as we said, is much frequented at all hours. At the seasons of prayer you may see great numbers prostrating themselves in devotion, and at all other times this cool retreat is a refuge for the poor and the weary. The fountains of running water in the court attract people,—those who desire only to sit there and rest, as well as those who wash and pray. About the fountains and in the mosque were seated groups of women, eating their noonday bread, or resting in that dumb attitude under which Eastern women disguise their discontent or their intrigues. This is, at any rate, a haven of rest for all, and it is a goodly sight to see all classes, rich and poor, flocking in here, leaving their shoes at the door or carrying them in their hands.
The view from the minaret which we ascended is peculiar. On the horizon we saw the tops of hills and mountains, snowy Hermon among them. Far over the plain we could not look, for the city is beset by a thicket of slender trees, which were just then in fresh leafage. Withdrawing our gaze from the environs, we looked down upon the wide-spread oval-shaped city. Most conspicuous were the minarets, then a few domes, and then thousands of dome-shaped roofs. You see the top of a covered city, but not the city. In fact, it scarcely looks like a city; you see no streets, and few roofs proper, for we have to look twice to convince ourselves that the flat spaces covered with earth and often green with vegetation (gardens in the air) are actually roofs of houses. The streets are either roofed over or are so narrow that we cannot see them from this height. Damascus is a sort of rabbit-burrow.
Not far from the Great Mosque is the tomb of Saladin. We looked from the street through a grated window, to the bars of which the faithful have tied innumerable rags and strings (pious offerings, which it is supposed will bring them good luck) into a painted enclosure, and saw a large catafalque, or sarcophagus; covered with a green mantle. The tomb is near a mosque, and beside a busy cotton-bazaar; it is in the midst of traffic and travel, among activities and the full rush of life,—just where a man would like to be buried in order to be kept in remembrance.
In going about the streets we notice the prevalence of color in portals, in the interior courts of houses, and in the baths; there is a fondness for decorating with broad gay stripes of red, yellow, and white. Even the white pet sheep which are led about by children have their wool stained with dabs of brilliant color,—perhaps in honor of the Greek Easter.
The baths of Damascus are many and very good, not so severe and violent as those of New York, nor so thorough as those of Cairo, but, the best of them, clean and agreeable. We push aside a gay curtain from the street and descend by steps into a square apartment. It has a dome like a mosque. Under the dome is a large marble basin into which water is running; the floor is tesselated with colored marbles. Each side is a recess with a halfdome, and in the recesses are elevated divans piled with cushions for reclining. The walls are painted in stripes of blue, yellow, and red, and the room is bright with various Oriental stuffs. There are turbaned and silken-attired attendants, whose gentle faces might make them mistaken for ministers of religion as well as of cleanliness, and upon the divans recline those who have come from the bath, enjoying kief, with pipes and coffee. There is an atmosphere of perfect contentment in the place, and I can imagine how an effeminate ruler might see, almost without a sigh, the empire of the world slip from his grasp while he surrendered himself to this delicious influence.
We undressed, were towelled, shod with wooden clogs, and led through marble paved passages and several rooms into an inner, long chamber, which has a domed roof pierced by bulls'-eyes of party-colored glass. The floor, of colored marbles, was slippery with water running from the overflowing fountains, or dashed about by the attendants. Out of this room open several smaller chambers, into which an unsocial person might retire. We sat down on the floor by a marble basin into which both hot and cold water poured. After a little time spent in contemplating the humidity of the world, and reflecting on the equality of all men before the law without clothes, an attendant approached, and began to deluge us with buckets of hot water, dashing them over us with a jocular enjoyment and as much indifference to our personality as if we had been statues. I should like to know how life looks to a man who passes his days in this dimly illumined chamber of steam, and is permitted to treat his fellow-men with every mark of disrespect. When we were sufficiently drenched, the agile Arab who had selected me as his mine of backsheesh, knelt down and began to scrub me with hair mittens, with a great show of energy, uttering jocose exclamations in his own language, and practising the half-dozen English words he had mastered, one of them being “dam,” which he addressed to me both affirmatively and interrogatively, as if under the impression that it conveyed the same meaning as tyeb in his vocabulary. I suppose he had often heard wicked Englishmen, who were under his hands, use it, and he took it for an expression of profound satisfaction. He continued this operation for some time, putting me in a sitting position, turning me over, telling me to “sleep” when he desired me to lie down, encouraging me by various barbarous cries, and slapping his hand from time to time to make up by noise for his economical expenditure of muscular force.
After my hilarious bather had finished this process, he lathered me thoroughly, drenched me from head to heels in suds, and then let me put the crowning touch to my happiness by entering one of the little rooms, and sliding into a tank of water hot enough to take the skin off. It is easy enough to make all this process read like a martyrdom, but it is, on the contrary, so delightful that you do not wonder that the ancients spent so much time in the bath, and that next to the amphitheatre the emperors and tyrants lavished most money upon these establishments, of which the people were so extravagantly fond.
Fresh towels were wound round us, turbans were put on our heads, and we were led back to the room first entered, where we were re-enveloped in cloths and towels, and left to recline upon the cushioned divans; pipes and coffee were brought, and we enjoyed a delicious sense of repose and bodily lightness, looking dimly at the grave figures about us, and recognizing in them not men but dreamy images of a physical paradise. No rude voices or sharp movements broke the repose of the chamber. It was as in a dream that I watched a handsome boy, who, with a long pole, was handling the washed towels, and admired the unerring skill that tossed the strips of cloth high in the air and caused them to catch and hang squarely upon the cords stretched across the recesses. The mind was equal to the observation, but not to the comprehension, of this feat. When we were sufficiently cooled, we were assisted to dress, the various articles of Frank apparel affording great amusement to the Orientals. The charge for the whole entertainment was two francs each, probably about four times what a native would have paid.