“My Batman.”
Fount of all wisdom without doubt
who knows just what we are about
but very seldom lets it out.
The General’s Batman.
Damascus
The first charm of Damascus as a whole city lies in the contrast which those brown sandhills behind it make with the green strip of the Barada Valley. Journeying from Ludd through the monotony of lank, brown growth that straggles to the horizon from the road, you give up hope of ever seeing foliage again, until you pass El Kunneitra. Then you see the green of Barada; and it is the richer for the hills behind it—browner, more desolate by far, than any landscape skirting Galilee or the Jordan. Far up the clay feet of those rocky hills straggles the brown-and-white suburb of Salahiye, all square-built and flat-topped—from the distance like bricks inserted in the clay soil. The line of hills is cleft cleanly by the Pass, the scene of that hideous slaughter by our machine guns. If you climb into the fringe of Salahiye you see the curious shape of Damascus—a jagged comet-form, all the angles and serrations of the brown tail defined with unnatural clearness by the depth of the green about it. In the amorphous head are a few minarets—like jewels. In Cairo there are too many minarets as you look from the Bey’s Leap: they protrude like a porcupine’s quills. In Damascus the city’s flat brownness is just relieved by them. When we came to Damascus it was drought-stricken. Soon afterward, it rained torrentially for a day. Then the sun shone and drew from the city such colour as we never dreamed was there. Nor had we dreamed that the trees were dusty—so green they seemed after the southern country. But, washed, they helped to throw up the wonderful colour of “that great city,” as it is called in Scripture.
It is a relief to be delivered from the sight of the everlasting cactus-hedge of the southern towns. The cactus does flourish in Damascus; but so thick is the foliage that it is lost in the mass. You cannot look down on Nazareth without being obsessed by the ubiquitous pest. You can look down on Damascus and be unconscious of it. It straggles about the leafy roads in patches beside the mud walls. That you can bear, because it does not rise above the all-enclosing foliage.
The smells of Damascus you will remember for ever. Cairo is clean by comparison: the alleys of Cairo are not foul. The stinks of Damascus are literally overpowering. There is offal, refuse, foul puddles in every street of the Bazaars. The Abana is a foul river. “Are not Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel”? The answer is: Certainly not. There is an ill-kemptness about the place that carries Oriental slackness a bit too far. In the streets that thread the heart of the city are ruts and holes that break the springs of M.T. every day. The tramline protrudes eight inches. This gives rise to deadlocks in traffic that hold up movement for an hour. Incredibly narrow and tortuous are the highways of the city. The only decent road is that which skirts the fountained promenade near the Hedjaz Station. I am sure the Damascans look on this bit of orderliness as a Western intrusion; just as I am sure that if they found themselves in an English town guileless of smells they would call it insipid....
In the bazaars there is a baffling complexity of colour, of race, of wares. The Mousky is less heterogeneous. In the Square, in the street which is called Strait, in the gold bazaar, grain bazaar, sweets bazaar, silk bazaar, you have all the various colour of tarbooshed Cairo, and more. Here the soldiers of the King of the Hedjaz throng; there is endless variety in their clothes and their flowing head-dress. The Moslem women, who veil their faces, affect far more variety than the Mohamedan women of Cairo, with their yashmaks. The French are here. The Australian hat and plume is everywhere. I never saw so great a number of Australian soldiers moving at random in any city. There is great jostling in these narrow streets, more than the normal jostling you get in any crowd.