The beginning of the end is at the tenth and last station, El Hamah, meaning the Head of the Valley, and we halt here for a cup of coffee. The next place of note is Dummar; here we cross the Barada torrent. This place is, despite its low site and hot and cold air, a favourite for villas; and certain wealthy Damascus usurers have here built large piles, as remarkable for the barbarity of their outer frescoes as for the tawdry decoration of the interior. The witty Damasceines call them “traps,” because they are periodically let to high officials for other considerations than hire. And now, with its slate-coloured stream, garnished with weirs on our right, the valley becomes broader and more important; the upper cliff’s are tunnelled into cut caves, Troglodyte dwellings and sepulchres of the ancients; seven veins at high levels and at low levels branch off from the main artery; and, after passing a natural gateway formed by two shield-like masses of rock, we suspect that Damascus is before us.
The first sight of Damascus was once famous in travel. But then men rode on horseback, and turned, a little beyond Damascus, sharply to the left of the present line. They took what was evidently the old Roman road, and which is still, on account of its being a short cut, affected by muleteers. Now it is nothing but an ugly climb up sheet-rock and
rolling stones, with bars and holes dug by the armed hoof of many a generation. They then passed through El Zaarub (the Spout); this is the old way, sunk some ten feet deep in the rock till it resembles an uncovered tunnel, and polished like glass by the traffic and transit of ages. At its mouth you suddenly turn a corner and see Damascus lying in panorama, a few hundred feet below you. “A flint set in emeralds” is the Damascus citizen’s description of what El Islam calls, and miscalls, the “smile of the Prophet” (Mohammed). Like Stambul, it is beautiful from afar, as it is foul and sore within, morally and physically. The eye at once distinguishes a long head, the northern suburb “El Salituzzah”; a central nucleus, crescent-shaped and fronting the bed of the Barada; and a long tail, or southern suburb, “El Maydan.” These three centres of whitewashed dwellings and skyline, fretted with dome and minaret, are surrounded and backed by a mass of evergreen orchard, whose outlines are sharply defined by irrigation, whilst beyond the scatter of outlying villages, glare the sunburnt yellow and the parched rich brown of the desert, whose light blue hillocks define the eastern horizon.
The prosaic approach by the French road shows little beyond ruins and graveyards: Damascus outside is a mass of graveyards, the “Great” and “Little Camps” of Constantinople, only without their cypresses; whilst within it is all graveyards and ruins, mixed with crowded and steaming bazaars.
This world of graves reminds one of Job’s forlorn man dwelling “in desolate cities, and in houses which no man inhabiteth, which are ready to become heaps.” The Barada in olden times had its stone embankment; the walls are now in ruins. On our right is a ruined bridge once leading to a large coffee-house, both also in ruins. As we advance we pass other ruins. But though it was prophesied that Damascus should be a “ruinous heap,” her position forbids annihilation. The second of Biblical cities, she has been destroyed again and again; her houses have been levelled with the ground, and the Tartar has played hockey with the hearts of her sons. Still she sits upon the eastern folds of the Anti-Libanus and on her gold-rolling river, boldly overlooking the desert at her base. Damascus, not Rome, deserves, if any does, to be entitled the Eternal City.
I passed twenty-three months (October 1st, 1869, to August 20th, 1871), on and off, at this most picturesque and unpleasant of residences. It was then in the transitional state, neither of Asia nor of Europe. To one who had long lived in the outer East, a return to such an ambiguous state of things was utterly disenchanting. Hassan, digging or delving in long beard and long clothes, looks more like an overgrown baby than the romantic being which your fancies paint him. Fatima, with a coloured kerchief (not a nose-bag) over her face, possibly spotted for greater hideousness, with Marseilles gloves and French bottines of yellow satin, trimmed with fringe and
bugles, protruding from the white calico which might be her winding-sheet, is an absurdity: she reminded me of sundry “kings” on the West African shore, whose toilet consists of a bright bandanna and a chimney-pot hat, of the largest dimensions, coloured the liveliest sky-blue.
The first steps to be taken at Damascus were to pay and receive visits, to find a house, to hire servants, to buy horses, and, in fact, to settle ourselves. It proved no easy matter. Certain persons had amused themselves with spreading a report that my pilgrimage to Meccah had aroused Moslem fanaticism, and perhaps might cost me my life. They, as well as I, knew far better, so I was not surprised at the kind and even friendly reception given to me by Emir Abdel Kadir, of Algerine fame, and by the Dean of the great Cathedral el Amahi, the late Shaykh Abdahah el Halati. And I remember with satisfaction that, to the hour of my quitting Damascus, the Moslems never showed for me any but the most cordial feeling.
Other British consuls had been of a stay-at-home disposition, seeing nothing beyond the length of their noses. I was of a roving one, and determined to see all I could, and penetrate to the inner heart of Syria. To be shut up in Damascus was to be in prison; the breath of the desert was liberty. I soon wandered afield. One of my earliest excursions was to Palmyra. Until the spring of 1870 a traveller visiting Syria for the express purpose, perhaps, of
seeing Palmyra, “Tadmor in the Wilderness,” after being kept waiting for months at Damascus, had to return disappointed. Only the rich could afford the large Bedouin escort, for which even six thousand francs and more have been demanded. Add to this the difficulties, hardships, and dangers of the journey, the heat of the arid desert, want of water, chances of attack, the long forced marches by night and hiding by day, ending with a shabby halt of forty-eight hours at a place for which so many sacrifices had been made, and where a fortnight is the minimum required.