Damascus. “The street called Straight—which isn’t”
A wood-turner of Damascus. He watches the ever-passing throng, turning the stick with a bow and a loose string, and holding the chisel with his toes
Where in the Western world does the pursuit of dollars raise such a hubbub as the scramble for metleeks in the streets of Damascus? A dollar, after all, is a dollar and under certain conditions worth shouting for; but a metleek is only a cent and the incessant calling after it, like a multitude searching the wilderness for a lost child, sounds penurious. “Metleek!” cries the seller of flat loaves, on the ground at your feet. “Metleek!” roars the gruff-voiced nut vendor, fighting his way through the rabble, basket on arm. “Metleek!” screams the wandering bartender, jingling his brass disks. Unendingly the word echoes through the recesses and windings of the bazaars; commandingly from the hawker whose novelty has attracted the ever-susceptible multitude, threateningly from the sturdy fellow whose stand has been deserted, pleadingly from the crippled beggar who threads his way miraculously through the human whirlpool. A great, discordant symphony of “Metleek!” rises over the land, wherein are blended even the voices of the pasha in his palace, the mullah in his mosque, and His Impuissant Majesty in far-off “Stamboul.” Lives there a man in all the realm who would accept a larger coin even under compulsion?
One figure stands out as the most miserable in all the teeming life of Damascus—the Turkish soldier. The burden of conscription falls only on the Mohammedan, for none but the followers of the prophet of Medina may be enrolled under the Sick Man’s banners. The recruit receives a uniform of the shoddiest material once a year, and an allowance of about two cents a day. What the allowance will not cover, he pays for out of his meager rations. His tobacco, his amusements, the very patches on his miserable uniform, he reckons in terms of the flabby biscuits that are served out to him. Every morning there sallies forth from the tumble-down barracks an unkempt private, hopeless weariness of the petty things of life stamped on his coarse features, his garb a crazy quilt of awkward patches, who, holding before him a sack of soggy gkebis contributed by his fellow-conscripts, wanders through the market places, adding his long-drawn wail to the chorus of “Metleek.” Individually, he is a gaunt scarecrow; on parade he bears far more resemblance to a band of Bowery bootblacks than to a military company. In outward forms he is as devoutly religious as his taskmaster at Stamboul, or the bejewelled merchant who picks his way with effeminate tread through the reeking streets to his mosque. Five times each day he halts for his prayers wherever the voice of the muezzin finds him. Not even his racial dread of water deters him from performing the ablutions required by the Koran. In spite of his poverty he finds means to stain his nails with henna, and to tattoo the knuckles or the backs of his hands with grotesque figures that assist materially, no doubt, in the ultimate salvation of his soul; and he snarls angrily at the dog of an unbeliever who would transfix his image on photographic paper.
On the Sunday afternoon of my arrival in Damascus a surging multitude swept me through the entrance to the parade ground opposite the barracks. A sea of upturned faces surrounded a ragged band that was perpetrating a concert of German and Italian airs. For a time I hung on the tail of the crowd. When endurance failed, I withdrew to the only seat in evidence—a stone pile in a far corner—to change the film in my kodak. Almost before I had begun, a steady flow of humanity set in towards me. In a twinkling I was the center of a jostling throng of Damascans, each one screaming and pushing for a view of the strange machine; and the players struggled on despairingly with only themselves as audience. Distressed at having unintentionally set up a counter attraction, I closed the apparatus and turned away. The move but aggravated the difficulty. For a moment the Damascans gazed hesitatingly from the deserted band stand to my retreating figure, swelled with curiosity, and surged pell-mell after me. My reputation as a self-sacrificing member of society was at stake. Bravely I turned and marched back to the struggling musicians—the adjective, at least, is used advisedly—and held the kodak in plain sight. An unprecedented audience of music-lovers quickly gathered and for a time the concert moved with great gusto. But the players were merely human, and only Arabian humans at that. One by one they caught sight of the “queer machine” below them. The technique faltered; the trombones lost the key—or found it, which was quite as disconcerting; the fifers paused; the cornetists lost their pucker; the leader turned to stare, open-mouthed as the rest, and an air that had suggested, here and there, the triumphal march from Aïda died a lingering, agonizing death.
This, surely, was the psychological moment for a photograph! I opened the kodak. A hoarse murmur rose from the multitude. At last they recognized the nefarious instrument! I pointed it at the leader. He screamed like a pin-pricked infant, a man beside me snatched at the kodak, another thumped me viciously in the ribs, a third tore at my hair, and the frenzied population of Damascus swept down upon me, bent on wreaking summary vengeance on a defiler of their religious superstitions. I left them entangled in their own legs and darted under the band stand towards the gate. A guard bellowed at me. I squirmed through his arms and sped far away through the half-deserted streets of the music-loving metropolis.
Darkness was falling when I caught breath in some unknown corner of the city. Long lines of merchants were setting up the board-shutters before their booths. Hardly a straggler remained of the maudlin, daytime multitude. Dismally I wandered through the labyrinth so animate at noonday, shut in on either side by endless, high board fences. It mattered not in what European language I inquired for an inn from belated citizens; each one muttered “m’abarafshee,” and hurried on. I sat down before a lighted tobacco booth and feigned sleep. The proprietor came out to drive off the curs sniffing at my feet and led the way to a neighboring khan, in which the keeper spread me a bed of blankets on the cobblestone floor.
I ventured next day into the “Hotel Stamboul,” a proud hostelry facing the stable that serves Damascus as post office, with little hope either of making known my wants or of finding the rate within my means. The proprietor, strange to say, mutilated a little French and, stranger still, assigned me to a room at eight cents a day. The cost of living was thereby reduced to a mere nothing. The Arab has a great abhorrence of eating his fill at definite hours and prefers to nibble, nibble all day long as if in constant fear of losing the use of his jaws by a moment’s inactivity. Countless shops in Damascus cater to this nibbling trade. For a copper or two they serve a well-filled dish of fruit, nuts, sweetmeats, pastry, puddings, ragoût, syrups, or a variety of indigenous products and messes which no Westerner could identify. They are savory portions, too, for the Arab cook, however much he may differ in methods from the Occidental chef, knows his profession. Like the street hawker who sells a quart of raisins for a cent—the Mohammedan makes no wine—his prices seem scarcely worth the collecting; and be his customer Frank or Mussulman, they never vary. In the seaports of the Orient the whiteman must expect to be “done.” The ignorance and asininity of generations of tourists have turned seaside merchants into commercial vultures. In untutored Damascus not a shopkeeper attempted to cheat me out of the fraction of a copper.
Four days I had passed in Damascus before I turned to the problem of how to get out of it. I had planned to strike southwestward through the country to Nazareth. On the map the trip seemed easy. The journey from the coast had proved, however, that the sketches of the gazetteer were little to be trusted in this mysterious country. The highway from the coast, moreover, is one of the few roads in all the land between Smyrna and the Red Sea. Across the Bedouin-infected wilderness between Damascus and Nazareth lay only a vaguely marked route, traversed in springtime by a great concourse of pilgrims. In this late December the rainy season was at hand. Several violent downpours, that would have convinced the most skeptical of the literal truth of the Biblical account of the deluge, had already burst over Damascus, storms that were sure to have reduced Palestine to a soggy marsh and turned its summer brooks into roaring torrents.