The christian curiosities of this oldest of inhabited cities, begin with the mosque of peculiar sanctity, once the site of St. John’s Cathedral, whose chamber of relics, containing a pretended head of the Baptist, is inaccessible even to Mussulmen, the priesthood excepted. Six huge Corinthian columns, once a part of its proud portico, are built into houses and stores, so that you get but faint glimpses of their beauty and size until you mount the flat mud-roof of the modern buildings and look down into the vast area of the temple, six hundred and fifty-feet by one hundred and fifty; and there find towering above you these massive, blackened remains of Christian architecture,—significant emblems of the triumph of the Crescent over the Cross,—and yet by their imperishableness a promise of renewed glory in some brighter future. That Islamism is hastening to decay is shown impressively enough in the grand dervish mosque and khan, once quite celebrated as the Syrian enthronement of this advanced guard of Mohammed; now nothing could seem more deserted, one minaret is threatening to fall, the spacious garden is all weed-grown, and few are left to mourn over the reverse: these banner-men of the prophet, no longer warriors, students, and apostles, do but beg their bread and drone their prayers, and exchange the reputation of fanatics for that of hypocrites; they are in fact monks of the mosque, like their brothers in celibacy, changing sadly enough from enthusiasm to formality, from the fervor of first love to the grave-like chillness of an exhausted ritual.
St. Paul is of course the great name at Damascus; and your dragoman is very certain always as to the place where he was lowered down the city-wall; then he takes you to the tomb of the soldier who befriended him, close at hand, and to the little underground chapel where the Apostle’s sight was restored. But having passed in turn under the sceptre of Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Jew, Roman, Arabian, Turk, every stone of these buildings could tell a most interesting tale, and every timber of the wall could answer with an experience corresponding to the out-door revolution.
But the grand attractions in this “Flower of the Levant and Florence of Turkey” are the coffee-houses, and the palaces of the rich. The writer of Eothen, I think it is, says, “there is one coffee-house at Damascus capable of containing a hundred persons:” a Damascus friend, a resident clergyman, carried me into one where he had himself seen, three thousand people on a gala-day, and several where hundreds of visitors would not make a crowd. This great necessity of Turkish life, this deliverance from the loneliness of an oriental home, this luxurious substitute for the daily newspaper, is carried to perfection here. First of all, comes the lofty dome-covered hall, surrounded by couches like beds, enlivened on all festivals by the Arabian Improvisator with his song and his tale; back of this are a number of rude arbors interlaced with noble shade-trees, and watered profusely by nimble brooks, the whole lighted every night by little pale lamps. These are the gossiping places for the Damascene gentlemen; where the fragrant tchébouque, the cool narghilch, or water-pipe, the delicious coffee, the indolent game at dominos, (I never saw chess played at the east,) is relieved by such domestic anecdotes as, according to my American friend, brand the domestic life of the city with beastly sensuality.
One would fain hope that these are the prejudices of an earnest missionary,—but until the residence of years had given familiarity with the language, any opinions of a visitor would be erroneous as well as presuming. Nothing, however, can bring back so powerfully the Arabian tales of enchantment as the interior of the wealthier Damascus houses. The outside is always mean and forbidding. You have sometimes to stoop under the rude, low gate; and the first court, surrounded only by servants’ rooms, has nothing of interest. But the second and third quadrangles become more and more spacious, and are always of variegated marble, containing a perpetually playing fountain, overhung by the orange, the citron, and the vine, whose fragrance floats dreamily on the moist air, lulling the senses to repose. The grand saloon I found to be always arranged pretty much the same. A lower part of the pavement near the door, is the place of deposit for slippers, shoes, and the pattens which Damascus women use so much in the winter, articles all of them never intended for ornament, and never fitted to the foot, but worn as loose as possible, and never within the sitting-room, but simply as a protection from out-door wet and soil. The lower portion of the room and its rug-strewn floor are of variegated marbles, then comes curiously carved woods, then painted stucco, decorated with mirrors rising to the distant gay-colored roof. The immense loftiness, the moist coolness, the gorgeous hues, the emblazoned texts from the Koran, the sweet murmur of the various fountains, the fragrance of the orange groves, succeed to the out-door dreariness like a dream of Haroun Al Raschid to the wearied pilgrim on desert sands. The divan, or wide sofa, on three sides of this hall, is far more agreeable in this enervating climate than any European furniture; only, in winter, as the ground underneath is permeated by leaky clay tubes bearing the waters of the Barrady, and there is no other heating apparatus save a brazer of charcoal, one is sometimes very chilly, and is tempted to exchange this tomblike dampness for a cozy corner near some friendly stove or familiar fire-place.
But the general impression which unintelligent strangers carries from Damascus is, that the people have what they want, and have gone wisely to work to realize their idea of earthly blessedness,—an indolent, sensual, dreamy one to you, but in their eyes no faint type of the Mussulman’s heaven.
F W Holland
Cambridge, Mass.