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.