In The Levant 32

In The Levant 32

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.