In The Levant

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.

XVI.—SOME SPECIMEN TRAVELLERS

IT is to be regretted that some one has not the leisure and the genius for it would require both—to study and to sketch the more peculiar of the travellers who journey during a season in the Orient, to photograph their impressions, and to unravel the motives that have set them wandering. There was at our hotel a countryman whose observations on the East pleased me mightily. I inferred, correctly, from his slow and deliberate manner of speech, that he was from the great West. A gentleman spare in figure and sallow in complexion, you might have mistaken him for a “member” from Tennessee or Illinois. What you specially admired in him was his entire sincerity, and his imperviousness to all the glamour, historical or romantic, which interested parties, like poets and historians, have sought to throw over the Orient. A heap of refuse in the street or an improvident dependant on Allah, in rags, was just as offensive to him in Damascus as it would be in Big Lickopolis. He carried his scales with him; he put into one balance his county-seat and into the other the entire Eastern civilization, and the Orient kicked the beam,—and it was with a mighty, though secret joy that you saw it.

It was not indeed for his own pleasure that he had left the familiar cronies of his own town and come into foreign and uncomfortable parts; you could see that he would much prefer to be again among the “directors” and “stockholders” and operators, exchanging the dry chips of gossip about stocks and rates; but, being a man of “means,” he had yielded to the imperious pressure of our modern society which, insists on travel, and to the natural desire of his family to see the world. Europe had not pleased him, although it was interesting for an old country, and there were a few places, the Grand Hotel in Paris for instance, where one feels a little at home. Buildings, cathedrals? Yes, some of them were very fine, but there was nothing in Europe to equal or approach the Capitol in Washington. And galleries; my wife likes them, and my daughter,—I suppose I have walked through miles and miles of them. It may have been in the nature of a confidential confession, that he was dragged into the East, though he made no concealment of his repugnance to being here. But when he had crossed the Mediterranean, Europe had attractions for him which he had never imagined while he was in it. If he had been left to himself he would have fled back from Cairo as if it were infested with plague; he had gone no farther up the Nile; that miserable hole, Cairo, was sufficient for him.

“They talk,” he was saying, speaking with that deliberate pause and emphasis upon every word which characterizes the conversation of his section of the country,—“they talk about the climate of Egypt; it is all a humbug. Cairo is the most disagreeable city in the world, no sun, nothing but dust and wind. I give you my word that we had only one pleasant day in a week; cold,—you can’t get warm in the hotel; the only decent day we had in Egypt was at Suez. Fruit? What do you get? Some pretend to like those dry dates. The oranges are so sour you can’t eat them, except the Jaffa, which are all peel. Yes, the pyramids are big piles of stone, but when you come to architecture, what is there in Cairo to compare to the Tuileries? The mosque of Mohammed Ali is a fine building; it suits me better than the mosque at Jerusalem. But what a city to live in!”

The farther our friend journeyed in the Orient, the deeper became his disgust. It was extreme in Jerusalem; but it had a pathetic tone of resignation in Damascus; hope was dead within him. The day after we had visited the private houses, some one asked him at table if he was not pleased with Damascus.

“Damascus!” he repeated, “Damascus is the most God-forsaken place I have ever been in. There is nothing to eat, and nothing to see. I had heard about the bazaars of Damascus; my daughter must see the bazaars of Damascus. There is nothing in them; I have been from one end of them to the other,—it is a mess of rubbish. I suppose you were hauled through what they call the private houses? There is a good deal of marble and a good deal of show, but there is n’t a house in Damascus that a respectable American would live in; there is n’t one he could be comfortable in. The old mosque is an interesting place: I like the mosque, and I have been there a couple of times, and should n’t mind going again; but I’ve had enough of Damascus, I don’t intend to go out doors again until my family are ready to leave.”

All these intense dislikes of the Western observer were warmly combated by the ladies present, who found Damascus almost a paradise, and were glowing with enthusiasm over every place and incident of their journey. Having delivered his opinion, our friend let the conversation run on without interference, as it ranged all over Palestine. He sat in silence, as if he were patiently enduring anew the martyrdom of his pleasure-trip, until at length, obeying a seeming necessity of relieving his feelings, he leaned forward and addressed the lady next but one to him, measuring every word with judicial slowness,—

“Madame—I—hate—the—name—of Palestine—and Judæa—and—the Jordan—and—Damascus—and—Jeru-salem.”

It is always refreshing in travel to meet a candid man who is not hindered by any weight of historic consciousness from expressing his opinions; and without exactly knowing why I felt under great obligations to this gentleman,—for gentleman he certainly was, even to an old-fashioned courtesy that shamed the best breeding of the Arabs. And after this wholesale sweep of the Oriental board, I experienced a new pleasure in going about and picking up the fragments of romance and sentiment that one might still admire.

There was another pilgrim at Damascus to whom Palestine was larger than all the world besides, and who magnified its relation to the rest of the earth as much as our more widely travelled friend belittled it. In a waste but damp spot outside the Bab-el-Hadid an incongruous Cook’s Party had pitched its tents,—a camp which swarmed during the day with itinerant merchants and beggars, and at night was the favorite resort of the most dissolute dogs of Damascus. In knowing this party one had an opportunity to observe the various motives that bring people to the Holy Land; there were a divinity student, a college professor, a well-known publisher, some indomitable English ladies, some London cockneys, and a group of young men who made a lark of the pilgrimage, and saw no more significance in the tour than in a jaunt to the Derby or a sail to Margate. I was told that the guide-book most read and disputed over by this party was the graphic itinerary of Mark Twain. The pilgrim to whom I refer, however, scarcely needed any guide in the Holy Land. He was, by his own representation, an illiterate shoemaker from the South of England; of schooling he had never enjoyed a day, nor of education, except such as sprung from his “conversion,” which happened in his twentieth year. At that age he joined the “Primitive Methodists,” and became, without abandoning his bench, an occasional exhorter and field-preacher; his study, to which he gave every moment not demanded by his trade, was the Bible. To exhorting he added the labor on Sunday of teaching, and for nearly forty years, without interruption, he had taken charge of a Sunday-school class. He was very poor, and the incessant labor of six days in the week hardly sufficed to the support of himself and his wife, and the family that began to fill his humble lodging. Nevertheless, at the very time of his conversion he was seized with an intense longing to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. This desire strengthened the more he read the Bible and became interested in the scenes of its prophecies and miracles. He resolved to go; yet to undertake so expensive a journey at the time was impossible, nor could his family spare his daily labor. But, early in his married life, he came to a notable resolution, and that was to lay by something every year, no matter how insignificant the sum, as a fund for his pilgrimage. And he trusted if his life were spared long enough he should be able to see with his own eyes the Promised Land; if that might be granted him, his object in life would be attained, and he should be willing to depart in peace.

Filled with this sole idea he labored at his trade without relaxation, and gave his Sundays and evenings to a most diligent study of the Bible; and at length extended his reading to other books, commentaries and travels, which bore upon his favorite object. Years passed by; his Palestine fund accumulated more slowly than his information about that land, but he was never discouraged; he lost at one time a considerable sum by misplaced confidence in a comrade, but, nothing disheartened, he set to work to hammer out what would replace it. Of course such industry and singleness of purpose were not without result; his business prospered and his fund increased; but with his success new duties opened; his children must be educated, for he was determined that they should have a better chance in England than their father had been given. The expenses of their education and his contributions to the maintenance of the worship of his society interfered sadly with his pilgrimage, and more than thirty years passed before he saw himself in possession of the sum that he could spare for the purchase of a Cook’s ticket to the Holy Land. It was with pardonable pride that he told this story of his life, and added that his business of shoemaking was now prosperous, that he had now a shop of his own and men working under him, and that one of his sons, who would have as good an education as any nobleman in the kingdom, was a student at the college in London.

Of all the party with whom he travelled no one knew the Bible, so well as this shoemaker; he did not need to read it as they explored the historical places, he quoted chapter after chapter of it, without hesitation or consciousness of any great achievement, and he knew almost as well the books of travel that relate to the country. Familiarity with the English of the Bible had not, however, caused him to abandon his primitive speech, and he did not show his respect for the sacred book by adopting its grammatical forms. Such phrases as, “It does I good to see he eat,” in respect to a convalescent comrade, exhibited this peculiarity. Indeed, he preserved his independence, and vindicated the reputation of his craft the world over for a certain obstinacy of opinion, if not philosophic habit of mind, which pounding upon leather seems to promote. He surprised his comrades by a liberality of view and an absence of narrowness which were scarcely to be expected in a man of one idea. I was pained to think that the reality of the Holy Land might a little impair the celestial vision he had cherished of it for forty years; but perhaps it will be only a temporary obscuration; for the imagination is stronger than the memory, as we see so often illustrated in the writings of Oriental travellers; and I have no doubt that now he is again seated on his bench, the kingdoms he beholds are those of Israel and Judah, and not those that Mr. Cook showed him for an hundred pounds.

We should, perhaps, add, that our shoemaker cared for no part of the Orient except Palestine, and for no history except that in the Bible. He told me that he was forwarded from London to Rome, on his way to join Cook’s Pilgrims at Cairo, in the company of a party of Select Baptists (so they were styled in the prospectus of their journey), and that, unexpectedly to himself (for he was a man who could surmount prejudices), he found them very good fellows; but that he was obliged to spend a whole day in Rome greatly against his will; it was an old and dilapidated city, and he did n’t see why so much fuss was made over it. Egypt did not more appeal to his fancy; I think he rather loathed it, both its past and its present, as the seat of a vain heathenism. For ruins or antiquities not mentioned in the Bible he cared nothing, for profane architecture still less; Palestine was his goal, and I doubt if since the first crusade any pilgrim has trod the streets of Jerusalem with such fervor of enthusiasm as this illiterate, Bible-grounded, and spiritual-minded shoemaker.

We rode one afternoon up through the suburb of Salahiyeh to the sheykh’s tomb on the naked hill north of the city, and down along the scarred side of it into the Abana gorge. This much-vaunted ride is most of the way between mud-walls so high that you have a sight of nothing but the sky and the tops of trees, and an occasional peep, through chinks in a rickety gate, into a damp and neglected garden, or a ragged field of grain under trees. But the view from the heights over the vast plain of Damascus, with the city embowered in its green, is superb, both for extent and color, and quite excuses the enthusiasm expended on this perennial city of waters. We had occasional glimpses of the Abana after it leaves the city, and we could trace afar off the course of the Pharpar by its winding ribbon of green. The view was best long before we reached the summit, at the cemetery and the ruined mosque, when the minarets showed against the green beyond. A city needs to be seen from some distance, and from not too high an elevation; looking directly down upon it is always uninteresting.

Somewhere in the side of the mountain, to the right of our course, one of the Moslem legends has located the cave of the Seven Sleepers. Knowing that the cave is really at Ephesus, we did not care to anticipate it.

The skeykh’s tomb is simply a stucco dome on the ridge, and exposed to the draft of air from a valley behind it. The wind blew with such violence that we could scarcely stand there, and we made all our observations with great discomfort. What we saw was the city of Damascus, shaped like an oval dish with a long handle; the handle is the suburb on the street running from the Gate of God that sees the annual procession of pilgrims depart for Mecca. Many brown villages dot the emerald,—there are said to be forty in the whole plain. Towards the east we saw the desert and the gray sand fading into the gray sky of the horizon. That way lies Palmyra; by that route goes the dromedary post to Bagdad. I should like to send a letter by it.

The view of the Abana gorge from the height before we descended was unique. The narrow pass is filled with trees; but through them we could see the white French road, and the Abana divided into five streams, carried at different levels along the sides, in order to convey water widely over the plain. Along the meadow road, as we trotted towards the city, as, indeed, everywhere about the city at this season, we found the ground marshy and vivacious with frogs.

The street called Straight runs the length of the city from east to west, and is straight in its general intention, although it appears to have been laid out by a donkey, whose attention was constantly diverted to one side or the other. It is a totally uninteresting lane. There is no reason, however, to suppose that St. Paul intended to be facetious when he spoke of it. In his day it was a magnificent straight avenue, one hundred feet wide; and two rows of Corinthian colonnades extending a mile from gate to gate divided it lengthwise. This was an architectural fashion of that time; the colonnade at Palmyra, which is seen stalking in a purposeless manner across the desert, was doubtless the ornament of such a street.

The street life of Damascus is that panorama of the mean and the picturesque, the sordid and the rich, of silk and rags, of many costumes and all colors, which so astonishes the Oriental traveller at first, but to which he speedily becomes so accustomed that it passes almost unnoticed. The majority of the women are veiled, but not so scrupulously as those of Cairo. Yet the more we see of the women of the East the more convinced we are that they are exceedingly good-hearted; it is out of consideration for the feelings of the persons they meet in the street that they go veiled. This theory is supported by the fact that the daughters of Bethlehem, who are all comely and many of them handsome, never wear veils.

In lounging through the streets the whole life and traffic of the town is exposed to you: donkeys loaded with panniers of oranges, or with sickly watermelon cut up, stop the way (all the melons of the East that I have tasted are flavorless); men bearing trays of sliced boiled beets cry aloud their deliciousness as if they were some fruit of paradise; boys and women seated on the ground, having spread before them on a paper some sort of uninviting candy; anybody planted by the roadside; dogs by the dozen snoozing in all the paths,—the dogs that wake at night and make Rome howl; the various tradesmen hammering in their open shops; the silk-weavers plying the shuttle; the makers of “sweets” stirring the sticky compounds in their shining copper pots and pans; and what never ceases to excite your admiration is the good-nature of the surging crowd, the indifference to being jostled and run over by horses, donkeys, and camels.

Damascus may be—we have abundant testimony that it is—a good city, if, as I said, one could see it. Arriving, you dive into a hole, and scarcely see daylight again; you never can look many yards before you; you move in a sort of twilight, which is deepened under the heavy timber roofs of the bazaars; winding through endless mazes of lanes with no view except of a slender strip of sky, you occasionally may step through an opening in the wall into a court with a square of sunshine, a tank of water, and a tree or two. The city can be seen only from the hill or from a minaret, and then you look only upon roofs. After a few days the cooping up in this gorgeous Oriental paradise became oppressive.

We drove out of the city very early one morning. I was obliged to the muezzin of the nearest minaret for awakening me at four o’clock. From our window we can see his aerial balcony,—it almost overhangs us; and day and night at his appointed hours we see the turbaned muezzin circling his high pinnacle, and hear him projecting his long call to prayer over the city roofs. When we came out at the west gate, the sun was high enough to color Hermon and the minarets of the west side of the city, and to gleam on the Abana. As we passed the diligence station, a tall Nubian, an employee of the company, stood there in the attitude of seneschal of the city; ugliness had marked him for her own, giving him a large, damaged expanse of face, from which exuded, however, an inexpungible good-nature; he sent us a cheerful salam aloykem,—“the peace of God be with you”; we crossed the shaky bridge, and got away up the swift stream at the rate of ten miles an hour.

Our last view, with the level sun coming over the roofs and spires, and the foreground of rapid water and verdure, gave us Damascus in its loveliest aspect.

XVII.—INTO DAYLIGHT AGAIN.—AN EPISODE OF TURKISH JUSTICE

IT was an immense relief to emerge from Damascus into Bey-rout,—into a city open, cheerful; it was to re-enter the world. How brightly it lies upon its sunny promontory, climbing up the slopes and crowning every eminence with tree-embowered villas! What a varied prospect it commands of sparkling sea and curving shore; of country broken into the most pleasing diversity of hill and vale, woodlands and pastures; of precipices that are draped in foliage; of glens that retain their primitive wildness, strips of dark pine forest, groups of cypresses and of palms, spreading mulberry orchards, and terraces draped by vines; of villages dotting the landscape; of convents clinging to the heights, and the snowy peaks of Lebanon! Bounteous land of silk and wine!

Beyrout is the brightest spot in Syria or Palestine, the only pleasant city that we saw, and the centre of a moral and intellectual impulse the importance of which we cannot overestimate. The mart of the great silk industry of the region, and the seaport of Damascus and of all Upper Syria, the fitful and unintelligent Turkish rule even cannot stifle its exuberant prosperity; but above all the advantages which nature has given it, I should attribute its brightest prospects to the influence of the American Mission, and to the establishment of Beyrout College. For almost thirty years that Mission has sustained here a band of erudite scholars, whose investigations have made the world more familiar with the physical character of Palestine than the people of Connecticut are with the resources of their own State, and of wise managers whose prudence and foresight have laid deep and broad the foundations of a Syrian civilization.

I do not know how many converts have been made in thirty years,—the East has had ample illustration, from the Abyssinians to the Colchians, of “conversion” without knowledge or civilization,—nor do I believe that any “reports” of the workmen themselves to the “Board” can put in visible array adequately the results of the American Mission in Syria. But the transient visitor can see something of them, in the dawning of a better social life, in the beginning of an improvement in the condition of women, in an unmistakable spirit of inquiry, and a recognizable taste for intellectual pursuits. It is not too much to say that the birth of a desire for instruction, for the enjoyment of literature, and, to a certain extent, of science, is due to their schools; and that their admirably conducted press, which has sent out not only translations of the Scriptures, but periodicals of secular literature and information, and elementary geographies, histories, and scientific treatises, has satisfied the want which the schools created. And this new leaven is not confined to a sect, nor limited to a race; it is working, slowly it is true, in the whole of Syrian society.

The press establishment is near the pretty and substantial church of the Mission; it is a busy and well-ordered printing and publishing house; sending out, besides its religious works and school-books, a monthly and a weekly publication and a child’s paper, which has a large and paying circulation, a great number of its subscribers being Moslems. These regenerating agencies—the schools and the press—are happily supplemented by the college, which offers to the young men of the Orient the chance of a high education, and attracts students even from the banks of the Nile. We were accompanied to the college by Dr. Jessup and Dr. Post, and spent an interesting morning in inspecting the buildings and in the enjoyment of the lovely prospect they command. As it is not my desire to enter into details regarding the Mission or the college any further than is necessary to emphasize the supreme importance of this enterprise to the civilization of the Orient, I will only add that the college has already some interesting collections in natural history, a particularly valuable herbarium, and that the medical department is not second in promise to the literary.

It is sometimes observed that a city is like a man, in that it will preserve through all mutations and disasters certain fundamental traits; the character that it obtains at first is never wholly lost, but reappears again and again, asserting its individuality after, it may be, centuries of obscurity. Beyrout was early a seat of learning and a centre of literary influence for nearly three hundred years before its desolation by an earthquake in the middle of the sixth century, and its subsequent devastation by the followers of the Arabian prophet, it was thronged with students from all the East, and its schools of philosophy and law enjoyed the highest renown. We believe that it is gradually resuming its ancient prestige.