Mr. Taylor made a sketch of himself as he appeared in his Eastern costume, while seated on an eminence that afternoon, overlooking the most ancient city in the world. In one of the rooms of Mr. Taylor’s lovely home of Cedarcroft there hangs a large painting, of considerable merit, and said to be an excellent portrait, which was executed by a friend from that sketch. It represents Mr. Taylor sitting in Oriental posture, on the mountain-side, with the domes, minarets, and embowered walls of Damascus on the distant plain. He always held that painting to be a treasure, connecting him, as it did, with those scenes of early travel, and with the friend who made the painting, and with those who admired it.
He was delighted with Damascus. It was placed in the centre of a plain whereon grew in the greatest abundance all the fruits and all the varieties of leaf and blossom known to the tropic zone. No other spot yet explored can boast such beautiful trees; such a profusion of roses; such blossoms of jessamine and pomegranate; such loads of walnuts, figs, olives, apricots; such luxuriant grasses, and such productive fields, as that land which has been cultivated by man the longest. Nature has set the crown upon Damascus and blessed it with a superabundance of vegetable life. But what is given to verdure seems to be taken from humanity, for, regarded as a whole, he found the people of the city to be a rather bad lot. Yet there, as elsewhere, he found agreeable companions and warm friends. He made himself so much at home that he soon appeared like a native, and all the labyrinths of bazars and alleys were as familiar to him after a few days’ stay as they seemed to be to the oldest resident. He liked their life so well that he soon learned to enjoy to its full the physical comfort and mental rest of the Turkish bath. He ever after referred to the bath at Damascus as the acme of bodily satisfaction. The fact that so many travellers have been disappointed in the enjoyment of the bath does not show Mr. Taylor’s account to be so much overdrawn, as it shows the difference between the pleasure to be derived from the pastimes of any people by those who adhere more or less to their own tastes and customs, and those who, like Mr. Taylor, fall wholly and heartily into the ways and thoughts of the native. When in Damascus, he not only did as they do outwardly, but he set his mind in the same channel, and knew what it was to be a Turk in aspirations as well as in dress. No other traveller known to literature ever entered so completely into the experience and social companionship of the people whom he visited.
In order that he might leave no habit untried which came within his reach, he took a potion of hashish, to test its strength and effects. The drug did not begin to intoxicate him quite as soon as he expected, and he doubled the dose, thus taking six times as much as would intoxicate an ordinary Turk. It made him terribly ill; and it was almost miraculous that he survived the shock to his system. He did not try the strength of that drug again. Among the friends he made, and whose home he visited at Damascus, was a family of Maronite Christians, who, eight years later, were heinously butchered by the Moslems during the great massacre following the Druses’ and Marnoites’ dispute in 1860.
CHAPTER XXI.
Leaving Damascus.—Arrival at Beyrout.—Trip to Aleppo.—Enters Asia Minor.—The Scenery and People.—The Hills of Lebanon.—Beautiful Scenes about Brousa.—Enters Constantinople.—A Prophesy.—Return to Smyrna.—Again in Italy.—Visits his German Friend at Gotha.—The Home of his Second Love.—Goes to London.—Visits Gibraltar.—Cadiz.—Seville.—Spanish History.
“Upon the glittering pageantries
Of gay Damascus streets I look
As idly as a babe, that sees