In the Levant / Twenty Fifth Impression

by Charles Dudley Warner

“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.