A gaunt cur wandered in at our heels. The native drove him off, spread the mat on the ground and brought from the house a pan of live coals. I called for food. When he returned with several bread-sheets, I drew out my handkerchief and began to untie it. My host shook his head fiercely, made the sign of the cross and pointed several times at the ceiling, implying, evidently, that he was a convert of the Catholic missionaries and that the Allah of the Christians would pay my bill.
Barely had the native disappeared when the dog poked his ugly head through the half-open door and snarled viciously at me. He was a wolfish animal of the yellow mongrel variety so common in Syria, and in his eye gleamed a rascality that gave him a startling resemblance to the thieving nomads that infect that drear land. I drove him off and made the door fast, built a roaring fire of twigs, and rolling up in the mat, lay down beside the blaze. I awoke from a half-conscious nap to find that irrepressible cur sniffing at me and displaying his ugly fangs within six inches of my face. A dozen times I fastened the door against him in vain. Had he merely bayed the moon all night it would have mattered little, for with a fire to tend I had small chance to sleep; but his silent skulking and muffled snarls kept me wide-eyed with apprehension until the grey of dawn peeped in at the ragged window.
The village was named Hemeh—a station of the railway from the coast not far beyond told me as much. The dreary ranges of the day before fell quickly away. The highway descended a narrow, fertile valley in close company with a small river, on the banks of which grew willows and poplars in profusion.
A bright morning sun soon made the air grateful, though the chill of night and the mountains still hovered in the shadows. Travelers became frequent; peasant families driving their asses homeward from the morning market, bands of merchants on horseback, well-to-do natives in a garb that recalled the ill-omened 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 and their eating was as ceremonial as any meal among the ancient Jews. Beyond rode a full-bearded sheik who was surely as much a patriarch in appearance as Abraham of old.
The road continued its descent, the passing throng became almost a procession, and I swung at last round a mountain spur that had hidden from view an unequaled sight. Two miles away, across a vast, level plain, traversed by the sparkling river, and peopled by a battalion of soldiers in manœuvre, the white city of Damascus stood out against a background of dull-red hills, the morning sun gleaming on graceful domes and minarets of superb Saracenic architecture. It was an ultra-Oriental panorama before which that first quatrain of Omar sprang unbidden to the lips. I passed on with the throng and was soon swallowed up in the multitude that surged through “the Street called Straight”—which isn’t.
CHAPTER VII
THE CITIES OF OLD
More successfully than all other cities of its age and fame, Damascus has repulsed the advance of Western civilization and invention. To be sure, the whistle of the locomotive is heard now in her suburbs; for besides the railway to the coast, a new line brings to the ancient city the produce of the vast and fertile Hauran 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, vaulted bazaars. But these things make the prehistoric way of the city the stranger by comparison, and serve to remind the traveler that he is not on another sphere, but merely far removed from the progressive and prosaic West.
Here is a man, with a hammer that might have existed in the stone age, beating into shape a vessel of brass on a flat rock. There a father and son are turning a log into wooden clogs with a primitive bucksaw, the man standing on the log, the boy kneeling on the ground beneath. Beyond them is a turning lathe such as the workmen of Solomon may have used in the building of his temple. The operator squats on the floor of his open booth, facing the street—for no Damascan can carry on his business with his back turned to the sights and sounds of the ever-changing multitude. With one hand he draws back and forth a sort of Indian bow, the cord wound once round the stick, which, whirling almost as rapidly as in a steam lathe, is fashioned into the desired shape by a chisel held with the left hand and the bare toes of the artisan. Mile after mile through the endless rows of bazaars such prehistoric trades are plied. Not a foot of space on either side of the narrow streets is unoccupied. Where the overdressed owners of great heaps of silks and rugs have left a pigeon-hole between their booths, sits the ragged vendor of sweetmeats and half-inch slices of cocoanut. The Damascan does not set up his business as far as possible from his competitors. In one quarter are crowded a hundred manufacturers of the red fez of Islam. In another a colony of brass workers make a deafening din. Beyond, sounds the squeak of innumerable saws where huge logs are slowly turned into lumber by hand power. The shopper in quest of a pair of slippers may wander from daylight to dusk among booths overflowing with every other imaginable ware, to come at last, when he is ready to purchase the first thing bearing the remotest resemblance to footwear, into a section where slippers of every size, shape, and quality are displayed in such superabundance as to make him forget from very bewilderment what he came for.
To endeavor to make headway against the surging multitude is much like attempting to swim up the gorge of Niagara. Long lines of camels splash through the human stream, utterly indifferent to the urchins under their feet. Donkeys all but hidden under enormous bundles of fagots that scrape the buildings on either side, asses bestraddled by foul-mouthed boys who guide the beasts by kicking them behind either ear and urge them on by a sound peculiar to the Arab—a disgusting trilling of the soft palate—dash with set teeth out of obscure and unexpected side streets. Not an inch do they swerve from their course, 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 asinine shoulders or some unwieldy cargo and to be sent sprawling, if there is room to sprawl, as the beast and his driver glance back at his discomfiture with a diabolical gleam in their eyes. Hairless, scabby mongrel curs, yellow or grey in color, prowl among the legs of the throng, skulk through the byways devouring the refuse, or lie undisturbed in the puddles that abound in every street. The donkey may knock down a dozen pedestrians an hour, but he takes good care to step over the pariah dogs in his path. Periodically the mongrels gather in bands at busy corners, yelping and snarling, snapping their yellow fangs, and raising an infernal din that impedes bargainings a hundred yards away. If a bystander 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.
