IV
THE CITY THAT A LITTLE RIVER
MADE
I cannot tell whether the river, the gardens, and the city would have seemed so magical and entrancing if we had come upon them in some other way or seen them in a different setting. You can never detach an experience from its matrix and weigh it alone. Comparisons with the environs of Naples or Florence visited in an automobile, or with the suburbs of Boston seen from a trolley-car, are futile and unilluminating.
The point about the Baradâ is that it springs full-born from the barren sides of the Anti-Lebanon, swiftly creates a paradise as it runs, and then disappears absolutely in a wide marsh on the edge of the desert.
The point about Damascus is that she flourishes
on a secluded plain, the Ghûtah, seventy miles from the sea and twenty-three hundred feet above it, with no hinterland and no sustaining provinces, no political leadership, and no special religious sanctity, with nothing, in fact, to account for her distinction, her splendour, her populous vitality, her self-sufficing charm, except her mysterious and enduring quality as a mere city, a hive of men. She is the oldest living city in the world; no one knows her birthday or her founder's name. She has survived the empires and kingdoms which conquered her,—Nineveh, Babylon, Samaria, Greece, Egypt—their capitals are dust, but Damascus still blooms "like a tree planted by the rivers of water." She has given her name to the reddest of roses, the sweetest of plums, the richest of metalwork, and the most lustrous of silks; her streets have bubbled and eddied with the currents of
the multitudinous folk
That do inhabit her and make her great.
She is the typical city, pure and simple, of the Orient, as New York or San Francisco is of the
Occident: the open port on the edge of the desert, the trading-booth at the foot of the mountains, the pavilion in the heart of the blossoming bower,—the wonderful child of a little river and an immemorial Spirit of Place.
Every time we go into the city, (whether from our tents on the terrace above an ancient and dilapidated pleasure-garden, or from our red-tiled rooms in the good Hôtel d'Orient, to which we had been driven by a plague of sand-flies in the camp), we step at once into a chapter of the "Arabian Nights' Entertainments."
It is true, there are electric lights and there is a trolley-car crawling around the city; but they no more make it Western and modern than a bead necklace would change the character of the Venus of Milo. The driver of the trolley-car looks like one of "The Three Calenders," and a gayly dressed little boy beside him blows loudly on an instrument of discord as the machine tranquilly advances through the crowd. (A man was run over a few months ago; his friends waited for the car to come around the next day, pulled the driver from his
perch, and stuck a number of long knives through him in a truly Oriental manner.)