A bright morning sun soon made the air agreeable, although the chill of night and the mountains still hovered in the shadows. Travelers became frequent. I met peasant families driving their asses homeward from the morning market, bands of merchants on horseback, and well-to-do natives in clothes that made me think of the unlucky coat of Joseph. Here passed a camel caravan whose drivers would, perhaps, purchase just such a slave of his brothers this very day. There squatted a band of Bedouins at breakfast. Beyond rode a full-bearded sheik who reminded me of Abraham of old.
The road continued downward. The passing crowd became almost a procession. I swung, at last, round a group of hills that had hidden from view an unequaled sight. Two miles away, across a vast level plain, crossed by the sparkling river, and peopled by a battalion of soldiers drilling in the sunlight, the white city of Damascus stood out against a background of dull red hills, the morning sun gleaming on its graceful domes and slender towers. I passed on with the crowd, and was soon swallowed up in “the street called Straight”—which isn’t.
CHAPTER X
CITIES OF OLD
The whistle of the locomotive is now heard in the suburbs of Damascus; for, besides the railway to the coast, a new line brings to the ancient city the produce of the vast and fertile plain beyond Jordan. A few single telegraph wires, too, connect “Shaam” with the outside world, and the whir of the American sewing-machine is heard in her long, tunnel-like streets. But these few modern improvements make the ancient ways of the city seem stranger still.
Here is a man with a stone hammer, beating into shape a vessel of brass on a flat rock. There a father and son are turning a log into wooden shoes with a very old-fashioned buck-saw, the man standing on the log, the boy kneeling on the ground beneath. Beyond them is a strange-looking turning-lathe. The workman squats on the floor of his open shop, facing the street; for no Damascan can carry on his business with his back turned to the sights and sounds made by the passing crowd. With his right hand he holds a sort of Indian bow which has its cord wound once around the stick he is shaping. As he moves this bow back and forth, the stick, whirling almost as rapidly as in a steam lathe, is whittled into shape by a chisel which he holds with his left hand and his bare toes.
Mile after mile through the endless rows of bazaars, such old-fashioned trades are carried on. Every foot of space on either side of the narrow streets is in use. Wherever the overdressed owners of great heaps of silks and rugs have left a pigeonhole between their shops, sits a ragged peddler of sweetmeats and half-inch slices of cocoanut.
Stores selling the same kind of article are found together in one part of the city, and nowhere else. In one section are crowded a hundred manufacturers of the red fez cap of the Mohammedan. In another a colony of brass-workers makes a deafening din. Beyond sounds the squeak of hundreds of saws where huge logs are slowly turned into lumber by hand power. The shopper who wants to buy a pair of slippers may wander from daylight to dusk among shops overflowing with every other imaginable ware, to come at last, when he is ready to give up, into a section where slippers of every size, shape, and color are displayed on either side of the street, as far as he can see.
To try to make headway against the pushing crowd is much like attempting to swim up the gorge of Niagara. Long lines of camels splash through the human stream, caring nothing for the small boys under their feet. Donkeys all but hidden under great bundles of fagots that scrape the building on either side, asses bestraddled by shouting boys who guide the beasts by kicking them behind the ears and urge them on by a queer trilling sound, dash out of darkened and unexpected side streets. Not an inch do they turn aside, not once do they slacken their pace. The faranchee who expects them to do so is sure to receive many a jolt in the ribs from the donkey, or from his load, and to be sent sprawling—if there is room to sprawl—as the beast and his driver glance back at him with a wicked gleam in their eyes.
Hairless, scabby curs, yellow or gray in color, prowl among the legs of the throng, skulking through the byways, devouring the waste matter they find, or lie undisturbed in the puddles that abound in every street. The donkey may knock down a dozen foot travelers an hour; but he takes good care to step over the dogs in his path. Often these beasts gather in bands at busy corners, yelping and snarling, snapping their yellow fangs, and raising a din that puts a stop to bargainings a hundred yards away. If a by-stander wades among them with his stick and drives them off, it is only to have them collect again five minutes after the last yelp has been silenced.
A metleek is only a cent. Yet, as you pass through the streets of Damascus, the constant calling for it sounds like a multitude searching the wilderness for a lost child. “Metleek!” cries the seller of flat loaves, on the ground at your feet. “Metleek!” screams the wandering bartender, jingling his brass disks. The word is shouted commandingly from the peddler whose novelty has attracted a crowd, fiercely from the angry-looking fellow whose stand has been deserted, pleadingly from the crippled beggar, who threads his way with astonishing swiftness through the human whirlpool. Unendingly the word echoes through the openings and windings of the bazaars.