This was early rising for us, but when you are in Damascus you must follow the custom of the Damascus blades. If, as the proverb says, the early child has the worms, there must be an immense demand in Damascus for vermifuge and that sort of thing. We couldn’t do any sight-seeing in the evening, for the reason that there was no sight-seeing to see. Shops, cafés, and all other public establishments, were closed at sunset or a little later; there were no street lamps, and the facilities for getting about were very limited. We stayed in the hotel in the evening, and went to bed at an hour we would have been ashamed to acknowledge at home. The people that went to bed at such an inhumanly early hour must rise in good season. They do this not from any expectation of health or wealth, as promised by the old couplet, but simply for the reason that they couldn’t endure to be in bed more than eight or nine hours at a stretch; besides an Arab couch is not the most comfortable thing in the world, and doubtless has something to do with the matutinal habits of the people.
It is said that the eastern shore of the Mediterranean is called the Levant, for the reason that the sun rises there. The natives rise before the sun, and to them rather than to the glorious orb of day is due the name by which the region is known. Promptly at five in the morning Mohammed was at our door and we rose. Day was just beginning to dawn when we emerged from the hotel and started along the narrow streets that led to the bath-house. We kept close to Mohammed’s heels, and narrowly missed stepping on the seat of his trowsers whenever he slackened his pace. The fellow’s “breeks” were about the baggiest pair it was ever my lot to gaze upon; he must have bought them when cloth was cheap and the merchant willing to measure him with a fox-skin without counting the tail as anything. When he stood up, the ample part of his trowsers just missed the ground by an inch or so, and when he walked the depending mass of cloth swung unsteadily like a pendulum that has been on a spree. When he went over any little inequality the garment dragged, and sometimes it caught and held the wearer fast. When he sat down he gathered the trowsers under him and formed a sort of cushion that was comfortable to rest upon. It was then that we realized the design of the artist, and admitted that the inventor of the Turkish trowsers knew what he was about.
A good many people were astir, and more than once we caromed against the plodding Orientals and caused them to utter what sounded like imprecations on the Christian dogs that had ventured to affront them. At length Mohammed brought himself to a halt and said:
“Here, gentlemen, is ze bath; ze best good bath in Damas. You bathe here so good as never was afterward before.”
The building was a low one, of stone, with a roof in which two or three domes were set like enormous kettles inverted. Light was admitted through circular windows, or bull’s-eyes, like the cabin windows of an ocean steamer, let into the dome at intervals none too frequent. In the vestibule we encountered a sort of door-keeper, to whom Mohammed said something in the language of the country, and then passed on to the first room of the bath.
“Here is ze bain beautiful. You shall know soon how he is good.”
With that Mohammed selected a couple of attendants whose entire wardrobe was not worth fifty cents each. It consisted of a small tuft of hair on the crown of the head, the rest of the skull being closely shaven, and of a piece of cloth about the loins.
I fell to the lot of a dark-skinned gentleman any way from twenty-five to forty years old, and with a muscular development about the arms that would have done honor to a pugilist.
