Damascus is an oval town divided into two unequal portions, the largest to the south, by the river Barada (the ancient Abana). The houses appear to be principally of mud, or sun-dried brick, with wooden frames; but the public buildings and better private dwellings are of stone. The bazaars form the heart of the town, and ramify in various directions. To Europeans there is something very curious in the collection of fifty or sixty small shops, in one street, all selling the same article. Thus, from the meat-market one strolls into a long, covered lane, where red and yellow slippers are sold; thence into the fragrant scent bazaar, or to the grimy silversmiths’ smithies, or to the long rows of shops where silks and embroidered stuffs are sold. Each salesman sits calmly, on the raised floor of the little pigeon-hole, surrounded by shelves on which his goods are packed, smoking his V-shaped water-pipe, or engaged in prayer, and apparently quite indifferent as to custom.
The bazaars are delightfully cool and shady, and the absence of wheeled vehicles makes them very quiet. They are very narrow, and consequently much crowded. Huge camels, loaded with firewood, come rolling by, and oblige you to crouch against the wall to avoid the sweep of the load. Ladies in long veils, white, or checked with blue with embroidered edges, walk by in yellow knee-boots, or slippers with a sort of thick-soled leather golosh drawn over them. Some are mounted on the white donkeys, which have a thick protuberance to the two sides of their necks—a sort of fold running sometimes all along the back. The saddles on which they are perched aloft, with their feet in front over the animal’s neck, are of red morocco and velvet.
The peasants wear blue, baggy trousers, gathered in at the knee. The Maronite women, with rich apple-red cheeks, have a black band bound over the forehead. Among these the fierce Bedawin are mingled, dark and dusky in complexion, gaunt and stealthy in mien. The broad-shouldered and moustachioed Kurds are again quite distinct, and contrast with the ghastly faces and weakly figures of the townsmen born—the fanatical Softas and Ulema, in their long pale gabardines and scanty white turbans, incarnations of narrow bigotry and ignorant hate. The bazaar is roofed in, with openings at intervals, and the ever-changing crowd is dimly visible in the shadow, or lit up by a beam of sunlight from the roof.
The great charm of the scene consists in its unmixed Oriental character. No French fashion or Gothic building destroys the general effect. You walk in the Damascus of the “Thousand Nights and a Night,” and the grim story of the wooden roof-prop at the corner, from which you may chance any day to see a criminal hanging, reminds you of the justice of Haroun-er-Rashid. Here, through a grating, you look in on the tomb of Saladin’s brother, under its green pall; there, into the cool court of a khan, or the outer chamber of a bath. Dark-eyed beauties, who are not ashamed to show their tattooed faces and nose-rings, meet you at every corner; and, if you know the city well, you may penetrate into the recesses of the wicked bath-houses, or visit the slave-market. Damascus is still the scene of intrigue and passion, as of old; the yearly poisonings are incredibly numerous, and the place is one of the chief strongholds of that obstinate fanaticism which refuses to see anything good in the manners and civilisation of the “heathen.”
The great mosque epitomises the history of Damascus. Once a heathen temple, then a Christian church, it is now a Moslem sanctuary. By a covered street with a great fountain beside it, we arrived at the bronze gates, on which the Sacramental cup is twice repeated, with Arabic inscriptions nailed on above. The enclosure is not as large as that of the Jerusalem Sanctuary; the mosque stretches for 800 feet along the south side, and is about 300 wide. The court is paved, with a central fountain beneath a dome, where Moslems wash before prayer. Broad cloisters run round the court, supported on classic columns.
The building itself is divided by columns into a nave and aisles, and the floor covered with carpets. Four mihrabs, or apses, for prayer, are made in the south wall, belonging to various sects, and each is flanked by tall wax torches from Mecca. A long row of worshippers stood before the central mihrab—soldiers and civilians, old and young, facing the wall and praying together, led by a Sheikh with a melodious voice.
An old water-carrier brought us sweet water from the holy well of the Prophet Yahyah (John the Baptist), to the east of the mosque. The whole sanctuary is whitewashed; but patches of the old glass mosaic, which once covered all the walls, are still visible, and the effect must formerly have been very magnificent.
The mosque has three minarets—that of the Bride to the north, a square, blue tower, from the upper gallery of which four stout Muedhens were chanting, in beautiful time and shrill falsetto notes, the call to prayer, a cry which can be heard like a bell over the entire city. The second minaret is that of “Our Lord Jesus”—a slender grey needle, upon the summit of which the Moslems believe that Christ will descend in the last day. We ascended the third minaret, in the south-west corner, by a winding stair of one hundred and ninety steps, leading to a wooden gallery, whilst forty more lead up to a narrow ledge beneath the little dome.
From this point a really characteristic view presented itself. On every side was a flat expanse of mud roofs, only broken here and there by a little whitewashed dome, and set in a dense rich belt of deep green, extending for a mile from the houses on every side. Beyond the gardens were ranges of hills, barren and desolate, brown and white in colour, and terminated by the steep Hermon ridge.
The charm of the view, however, was due to the interiors. Each house was built round an open court, with a cool central fountain, and with green trees, some of great size, overtopping the roof. The courts were paved with marble, and galleries of carved woodwork ran around them; the walls were banded in courses of black and white marble, or coloured blue and red. Above the roofs rose the countless minarets, in endless variety; some blue or green, square and squat; others of beautiful grey stone, with richly ornamented stone pendants, wood lattices, and Arab or Cufic inscriptions; some whitewashed and crowned with a sort of snuffer-shaped roof, others domed. Bristling against the green bed in which the mud city lies, they gave a rich variety of effect, which is lost in the narrow lanes or roofed bazaars.