The dusty bazaars are in semi-darkness; their streets bear a covered roof of iron; they must get protection from rain. In Cairo all is open; for there it rains but rarely. Not only are the bazaar streets in Cairo without roofs that would stop a shower, but the shops, themselves, full of treasures. Here the rain comes in a deluge. From some of the street roofs the enemy had taken the iron for military use. What the state of these roofless streets will be when the rains come is sad to think. They will be flooded all winter.
Except that there is greater diversity of peoples—both buyers and sellers—the bazaars of Damascus are much like those of the Mousky. There are the same well-defined areas for specific commodities; the same little cubicles for shops, where vendors squat and “reach for things”; there is the same voluble haggling—the same conversations carried on in tones that you would first mistake for quarrelsome; there are the same crying, peripatetic vendors of limonade, quoit-shaped cakes and toffee; the shoe-blacks are here, but they are ahead of Cairo, with their gongs to attract the uncleanly-shod. There is a more incessant stream of laden donkeys through the bazaars here. In Cairo the donkeys are chiefly for pleasure riding; here they are mercantile, over-laden with the striped sacks of grain and fabric. There are additions to the bazaars of Cairo in the goldsmiths’ bazaar, the sweets bazaar. The goldsmiths work with their blowpipes and tiny forges and tiny tools, moulding and fashioning. It is curious to see the workshop as part of the sale-shop. The belts, brooches, rings and trays exposed for sale in a showcase were made two yards away by that cunning Oriental fashioner squatting on his haunches. The sweets bazaar tempts you hideously. Eastern nutted sweets and Turkish-delight and toffees look as well as they taste. Mere assorted chocolates—such as you get at Groppi’s—are crude by comparison. There are great serpentine coils of Turkish-delight lurking in icing-sugar—nut toffee that is all nuts—none of your miserable paucity of nuts such as one gets in English almond-rock: nuts form the matrix here.... But enough of that; here, if ever, you are tempted to generate a liver the size of your hat.
Public baths abound in the heart of the bazaars. Fronting the street is the final, open, divaned, cooling-off room—an amphitheatre of couches upholstered with a kind of gay-coloured towelling. A fountain plays in the midst. The bathed sit swaying in the ecstasy of reaction from the steam, with closed eyes. No Roman ever bathed more voluptuously. No one minds your going in nor your penetrating to the bowels of the establishment. Room after room you pass, with swinging doors; each is hotter than the last. In the last, and hottest room, the smell of man is overpowering; you hastily retrace your steps through the series of chambers and regain the comparative sweetness of the bazaars.
Foul as this city may be, there is beauty in every foot of it. The beauty of Cairo lies rather in the view you get of “chunks” of it—the vista of the street, the space of a market-place, the mass of a mosque. Here the beauty lies in little pieces of wall, looked at minutely, in a tiny piece of domestic architecture. It is a beauty in colour rather than in form. Form in Cairo counts for much—in Damascus for almost nothing. Here there is dilapidation in a degree undreamt of in Cairo. But dilapidation does not necessarily make for beauty, though some people think it does. I believe the beauty of colour in Damascus lies in extreme age—in the mellowing of age. After Cairo, the intense antiquity of the older city—of every fragment of it—comes to you impressively. You feel the age of it as you pace every yard of its alleys. Cairo is comparatively modern, and comparatively garish. There is a fine, if filthy, harmony in Damascus.
Intimate in the memory of most Light Horsemen will always be certain features of Damascus. Our men will not forget the Hedjaz Headquarters in the heart of the city, the German Club, the Local Resources Office, the filthy Turkish hospital, the English and French hospitals in the suburb, the littered railway station, the suburban roads, unspeakably rough and muddy, the afternoon perambulations of blatant under-dressed bints in gharries, the guards—on the aerodrome, on the Ottoman Bank, on the captured grain stores, on the captured guns—the plentiful lack of ordnance and canteen stores, the corpses of dogs and horses in open spaces, the multitudinous beggars, the exorbitant prices asked for German razors that cost their vendors nothing, the moderate cost of silver and brass ware, the Hedjaz recruiting processions, the glut of matches, the potency of arak, the cunning of the plausible English-speaking small boys, the puzzling complexity and fluctuation of the currency, the paucity of mails, the liberty and the usefulness of Turkish prisoners, the fitful and lawless discharge of firearms about the city all through the night, the suddenness with which sickness made its descent upon the apparently immune, the daily receipt and despatch to time-table of official mails by air, the dancing lights of Salahiye that burned till dawn....
H. W. D.
Malaria
You, with your winding, creeping course,