In The Levant 37

In The Levant 37

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