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