XVI.—SOME SPECIMEN TRAVELLERS
IT is to be regretted that some one has not the leisure and the genius for it would require both—to study and to sketch the more peculiar of the travellers who journey during a season in the Orient, to photograph their impressions, and to unravel the motives that have set them wandering. There was at our hotel a countryman whose observations on the East pleased me mightily. I inferred, correctly, from his slow and deliberate manner of speech, that he was from the great West. A gentleman spare in figure and sallow in complexion, you might have mistaken him for a “member” from Tennessee or Illinois. What you specially admired in him was his entire sincerity, and his imperviousness to all the glamour, historical or romantic, which interested parties, like poets and historians, have sought to throw over the Orient. A heap of refuse in the street or an improvident dependant on Allah, in rags, was just as offensive to him in Damascus as it would be in Big Lickopolis. He carried his scales with him; he put into one balance his county-seat and into the other the entire Eastern civilization, and the Orient kicked the beam,—and it was with a mighty, though secret joy that you saw it.
It was not indeed for his own pleasure that he had left the familiar cronies of his own town and come into foreign and uncomfortable parts; you could see that he would much prefer to be again among the “directors” and “stockholders” and operators, exchanging the dry chips of gossip about stocks and rates; but, being a man of “means,” he had yielded to the imperious pressure of our modern society which, insists on travel, and to the natural desire of his family to see the world. Europe had not pleased him, although it was interesting for an old country, and there were a few places, the Grand Hotel in Paris for instance, where one feels a little at home. Buildings, cathedrals? Yes, some of them were very fine, but there was nothing in Europe to equal or approach the Capitol in Washington. And galleries; my wife likes them, and my daughter,—I suppose I have walked through miles and miles of them. It may have been in the nature of a confidential confession, that he was dragged into the East, though he made no concealment of his repugnance to being here. But when he had crossed the Mediterranean, Europe had attractions for him which he had never imagined while he was in it. If he had been left to himself he would have fled back from Cairo as if it were infested with plague; he had gone no farther up the Nile; that miserable hole, Cairo, was sufficient for him.
“They talk,” he was saying, speaking with that deliberate pause and emphasis upon every word which characterizes the conversation of his section of the country,—“they talk about the climate of Egypt; it is all a humbug. Cairo is the most disagreeable city in the world, no sun, nothing but dust and wind. I give you my word that we had only one pleasant day in a week; cold,—you can’t get warm in the hotel; the only decent day we had in Egypt was at Suez. Fruit? What do you get? Some pretend to like those dry dates. The oranges are so sour you can’t eat them, except the Jaffa, which are all peel. Yes, the pyramids are big piles of stone, but when you come to architecture, what is there in Cairo to compare to the Tuileries? The mosque of Mohammed Ali is a fine building; it suits me better than the mosque at Jerusalem. But what a city to live in!”
The farther our friend journeyed in the Orient, the deeper became his disgust. It was extreme in Jerusalem; but it had a pathetic tone of resignation in Damascus; hope was dead within him. The day after we had visited the private houses, some one asked him at table if he was not pleased with Damascus.
“Damascus!” he repeated, “Damascus is the most God-forsaken place I have ever been in. There is nothing to eat, and nothing to see. I had heard about the bazaars of Damascus; my daughter must see the bazaars of Damascus. There is nothing in them; I have been from one end of them to the other,—it is a mess of rubbish. I suppose you were hauled through what they call the private houses? There is a good deal of marble and a good deal of show, but there is n’t a house in Damascus that a respectable American would live in; there is n’t one he could be comfortable in. The old mosque is an interesting place: I like the mosque, and I have been there a couple of times, and should n’t mind going again; but I’ve had enough of Damascus, I don’t intend to go out doors again until my family are ready to leave.”
All these intense dislikes of the Western observer were warmly combated by the ladies present, who found Damascus almost a paradise, and were glowing with enthusiasm over every place and incident of their journey. Having delivered his opinion, our friend let the conversation run on without interference, as it ranged all over Palestine. He sat in silence, as if he were patiently enduring anew the martyrdom of his pleasure-trip, until at length, obeying a seeming necessity of relieving his feelings, he leaned forward and addressed the lady next but one to him, measuring every word with judicial slowness,—
“Madame—I—hate—the—name—of Palestine—and Judæa—and—the Jordan—and—Damascus—and—Jeru-salem.”
It is always refreshing in travel to meet a candid man who is not hindered by any weight of historic consciousness from expressing his opinions; and without exactly knowing why I felt under great obligations to this gentleman,—for gentleman he certainly was, even to an old-fashioned courtesy that shamed the best breeding of the Arabs. And after this wholesale sweep of the Oriental board, I experienced a new pleasure in going about and picking up the fragments of romance and sentiment that one might still admire.
There was another pilgrim at Damascus to whom Palestine was larger than all the world besides, and who magnified its relation to the rest of the earth as much as our more widely travelled friend belittled it. In a waste but damp spot outside the Bab-el-Hadid an incongruous Cook’s Party had pitched its tents,—a camp which swarmed during the day with itinerant merchants and beggars, and at night was the favorite resort of the most dissolute dogs of Damascus. In knowing this party one had an opportunity to observe the various motives that bring people to the Holy Land; there were a divinity student, a college professor, a well-known publisher, some indomitable English ladies, some London cockneys, and a group of young men who made a lark of the pilgrimage, and saw no more significance in the tour than in a jaunt to the Derby or a sail to Margate. I was told that the guide-book most read and disputed over by this party was the graphic itinerary of Mark Twain. The pilgrim to whom I refer, however, scarcely needed any guide in the Holy Land. He was, by his own representation, an illiterate shoemaker from the South of England; of schooling he had never enjoyed a day, nor of education, except such as sprung from his “conversion,” which happened in his twentieth year. At that age he joined the “Primitive Methodists,” and became, without abandoning his bench, an occasional exhorter and field-preacher; his study, to which he gave every moment not demanded by his trade, was the Bible. To exhorting he added the labor on Sunday of teaching, and for nearly forty years, without interruption, he had taken charge of a Sunday-school class. He was very poor, and the incessant labor of six days in the week hardly sufficed to the support of himself and his wife, and the family that began to fill his humble lodging. Nevertheless, at the very time of his conversion he was seized with an intense longing to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. This desire strengthened the more he read the Bible and became interested in the scenes of its prophecies and miracles. He resolved to go; yet to undertake so expensive a journey at the time was impossible, nor could his family spare his daily labor. But, early in his married life, he came to a notable resolution, and that was to lay by something every year, no matter how insignificant the sum, as a fund for his pilgrimage. And he trusted if his life were spared long enough he should be able to see with his own eyes the Promised Land; if that might be granted him, his object in life would be attained, and he should be willing to depart in peace.
Filled with this sole idea he labored at his trade without relaxation, and gave his Sundays and evenings to a most diligent study of the Bible; and at length extended his reading to other books, commentaries and travels, which bore upon his favorite object. Years passed by; his Palestine fund accumulated more slowly than his information about that land, but he was never discouraged; he lost at one time a considerable sum by misplaced confidence in a comrade, but, nothing disheartened, he set to work to hammer out what would replace it. Of course such industry and singleness of purpose were not without result; his business prospered and his fund increased; but with his success new duties opened; his children must be educated, for he was determined that they should have a better chance in England than their father had been given. The expenses of their education and his contributions to the maintenance of the worship of his society interfered sadly with his pilgrimage, and more than thirty years passed before he saw himself in possession of the sum that he could spare for the purchase of a Cook’s ticket to the Holy Land. It was with pardonable pride that he told this story of his life, and added that his business of shoemaking was now prosperous, that he had now a shop of his own and men working under him, and that one of his sons, who would have as good an education as any nobleman in the kingdom, was a student at the college in London.
Of all the party with whom he travelled no one knew the Bible, so well as this shoemaker; he did not need to read it as they explored the historical places, he quoted chapter after chapter of it, without hesitation or consciousness of any great achievement, and he knew almost as well the books of travel that relate to the country. Familiarity with the English of the Bible had not, however, caused him to abandon his primitive speech, and he did not show his respect for the sacred book by adopting its grammatical forms. Such phrases as, “It does I good to see he eat,” in respect to a convalescent comrade, exhibited this peculiarity. Indeed, he preserved his independence, and vindicated the reputation of his craft the world over for a certain obstinacy of opinion, if not philosophic habit of mind, which pounding upon leather seems to promote. He surprised his comrades by a liberality of view and an absence of narrowness which were scarcely to be expected in a man of one idea. I was pained to think that the reality of the Holy Land might a little impair the celestial vision he had cherished of it for forty years; but perhaps it will be only a temporary obscuration; for the imagination is stronger than the memory, as we see so often illustrated in the writings of Oriental travellers; and I have no doubt that now he is again seated on his bench, the kingdoms he beholds are those of Israel and Judah, and not those that Mr. Cook showed him for an hundred pounds.
We should, perhaps, add, that our shoemaker cared for no part of the Orient except Palestine, and for no history except that in the Bible. He told me that he was forwarded from London to Rome, on his way to join Cook’s Pilgrims at Cairo, in the company of a party of Select Baptists (so they were styled in the prospectus of their journey), and that, unexpectedly to himself (for he was a man who could surmount prejudices), he found them very good fellows; but that he was obliged to spend a whole day in Rome greatly against his will; it was an old and dilapidated city, and he did n’t see why so much fuss was made over it. Egypt did not more appeal to his fancy; I think he rather loathed it, both its past and its present, as the seat of a vain heathenism. For ruins or antiquities not mentioned in the Bible he cared nothing, for profane architecture still less; Palestine was his goal, and I doubt if since the first crusade any pilgrim has trod the streets of Jerusalem with such fervor of enthusiasm as this illiterate, Bible-grounded, and spiritual-minded shoemaker.
We rode one afternoon up through the suburb of Salahiyeh to the sheykh’s tomb on the naked hill north of the city, and down along the scarred side of it into the Abana gorge. This much-vaunted ride is most of the way between mud-walls so high that you have a sight of nothing but the sky and the tops of trees, and an occasional peep, through chinks in a rickety gate, into a damp and neglected garden, or a ragged field of grain under trees. But the view from the heights over the vast plain of Damascus, with the city embowered in its green, is superb, both for extent and color, and quite excuses the enthusiasm expended on this perennial city of waters. We had occasional glimpses of the Abana after it leaves the city, and we could trace afar off the course of the Pharpar by its winding ribbon of green. The view was best long before we reached the summit, at the cemetery and the ruined mosque, when the minarets showed against the green beyond. A city needs to be seen from some distance, and from not too high an elevation; looking directly down upon it is always uninteresting.
Somewhere in the side of the mountain, to the right of our course, one of the Moslem legends has located the cave of the Seven Sleepers. Knowing that the cave is really at Ephesus, we did not care to anticipate it.
The skeykh’s tomb is simply a stucco dome on the ridge, and exposed to the draft of air from a valley behind it. The wind blew with such violence that we could scarcely stand there, and we made all our observations with great discomfort. What we saw was the city of Damascus, shaped like an oval dish with a long handle; the handle is the suburb on the street running from the Gate of God that sees the annual procession of pilgrims depart for Mecca. Many brown villages dot the emerald,—there are said to be forty in the whole plain. Towards the east we saw the desert and the gray sand fading into the gray sky of the horizon. That way lies Palmyra; by that route goes the dromedary post to Bagdad. I should like to send a letter by it.
The view of the Abana gorge from the height before we descended was unique. The narrow pass is filled with trees; but through them we could see the white French road, and the Abana divided into five streams, carried at different levels along the sides, in order to convey water widely over the plain. Along the meadow road, as we trotted towards the city, as, indeed, everywhere about the city at this season, we found the ground marshy and vivacious with frogs.
The street called Straight runs the length of the city from east to west, and is straight in its general intention, although it appears to have been laid out by a donkey, whose attention was constantly diverted to one side or the other. It is a totally uninteresting lane. There is no reason, however, to suppose that St. Paul intended to be facetious when he spoke of it. In his day it was a magnificent straight avenue, one hundred feet wide; and two rows of Corinthian colonnades extending a mile from gate to gate divided it lengthwise. This was an architectural fashion of that time; the colonnade at Palmyra, which is seen stalking in a purposeless manner across the desert, was doubtless the ornament of such a street.
The street life of Damascus is that panorama of the mean and the picturesque, the sordid and the rich, of silk and rags, of many costumes and all colors, which so astonishes the Oriental traveller at first, but to which he speedily becomes so accustomed that it passes almost unnoticed. The majority of the women are veiled, but not so scrupulously as those of Cairo. Yet the more we see of the women of the East the more convinced we are that they are exceedingly good-hearted; it is out of consideration for the feelings of the persons they meet in the street that they go veiled. This theory is supported by the fact that the daughters of Bethlehem, who are all comely and many of them handsome, never wear veils.
In lounging through the streets the whole life and traffic of the town is exposed to you: donkeys loaded with panniers of oranges, or with sickly watermelon cut up, stop the way (all the melons of the East that I have tasted are flavorless); men bearing trays of sliced boiled beets cry aloud their deliciousness as if they were some fruit of paradise; boys and women seated on the ground, having spread before them on a paper some sort of uninviting candy; anybody planted by the roadside; dogs by the dozen snoozing in all the paths,—the dogs that wake at night and make Rome howl; the various tradesmen hammering in their open shops; the silk-weavers plying the shuttle; the makers of “sweets” stirring the sticky compounds in their shining copper pots and pans; and what never ceases to excite your admiration is the good-nature of the surging crowd, the indifference to being jostled and run over by horses, donkeys, and camels.
Damascus may be—we have abundant testimony that it is—a good city, if, as I said, one could see it. Arriving, you dive into a hole, and scarcely see daylight again; you never can look many yards before you; you move in a sort of twilight, which is deepened under the heavy timber roofs of the bazaars; winding through endless mazes of lanes with no view except of a slender strip of sky, you occasionally may step through an opening in the wall into a court with a square of sunshine, a tank of water, and a tree or two. The city can be seen only from the hill or from a minaret, and then you look only upon roofs. After a few days the cooping up in this gorgeous Oriental paradise became oppressive.
We drove out of the city very early one morning. I was obliged to the muezzin of the nearest minaret for awakening me at four o’clock. From our window we can see his aerial balcony,—it almost overhangs us; and day and night at his appointed hours we see the turbaned muezzin circling his high pinnacle, and hear him projecting his long call to prayer over the city roofs. When we came out at the west gate, the sun was high enough to color Hermon and the minarets of the west side of the city, and to gleam on the Abana. As we passed the diligence station, a tall Nubian, an employee of the company, stood there in the attitude of seneschal of the city; ugliness had marked him for her own, giving him a large, damaged expanse of face, from which exuded, however, an inexpungible good-nature; he sent us a cheerful salam aloykem,—“the peace of God be with you”; we crossed the shaky bridge, and got away up the swift stream at the rate of ten miles an hour.
Our last view, with the level sun coming over the roofs and spires, and the foreground of rapid water and verdure, gave us Damascus in its loveliest aspect.
XVII.—INTO DAYLIGHT AGAIN.—AN EPISODE OF TURKISH JUSTICE
IT was an immense relief to emerge from Damascus into Bey-rout,—into a city open, cheerful; it was to re-enter the world. How brightly it lies upon its sunny promontory, climbing up the slopes and crowning every eminence with tree-embowered villas! What a varied prospect it commands of sparkling sea and curving shore; of country broken into the most pleasing diversity of hill and vale, woodlands and pastures; of precipices that are draped in foliage; of glens that retain their primitive wildness, strips of dark pine forest, groups of cypresses and of palms, spreading mulberry orchards, and terraces draped by vines; of villages dotting the landscape; of convents clinging to the heights, and the snowy peaks of Lebanon! Bounteous land of silk and wine!
Beyrout is the brightest spot in Syria or Palestine, the only pleasant city that we saw, and the centre of a moral and intellectual impulse the importance of which we cannot overestimate. The mart of the great silk industry of the region, and the seaport of Damascus and of all Upper Syria, the fitful and unintelligent Turkish rule even cannot stifle its exuberant prosperity; but above all the advantages which nature has given it, I should attribute its brightest prospects to the influence of the American Mission, and to the establishment of Beyrout College. For almost thirty years that Mission has sustained here a band of erudite scholars, whose investigations have made the world more familiar with the physical character of Palestine than the people of Connecticut are with the resources of their own State, and of wise managers whose prudence and foresight have laid deep and broad the foundations of a Syrian civilization.
I do not know how many converts have been made in thirty years,—the East has had ample illustration, from the Abyssinians to the Colchians, of “conversion” without knowledge or civilization,—nor do I believe that any “reports” of the workmen themselves to the “Board” can put in visible array adequately the results of the American Mission in Syria. But the transient visitor can see something of them, in the dawning of a better social life, in the beginning of an improvement in the condition of women, in an unmistakable spirit of inquiry, and a recognizable taste for intellectual pursuits. It is not too much to say that the birth of a desire for instruction, for the enjoyment of literature, and, to a certain extent, of science, is due to their schools; and that their admirably conducted press, which has sent out not only translations of the Scriptures, but periodicals of secular literature and information, and elementary geographies, histories, and scientific treatises, has satisfied the want which the schools created. And this new leaven is not confined to a sect, nor limited to a race; it is working, slowly it is true, in the whole of Syrian society.
The press establishment is near the pretty and substantial church of the Mission; it is a busy and well-ordered printing and publishing house; sending out, besides its religious works and school-books, a monthly and a weekly publication and a child’s paper, which has a large and paying circulation, a great number of its subscribers being Moslems. These regenerating agencies—the schools and the press—are happily supplemented by the college, which offers to the young men of the Orient the chance of a high education, and attracts students even from the banks of the Nile. We were accompanied to the college by Dr. Jessup and Dr. Post, and spent an interesting morning in inspecting the buildings and in the enjoyment of the lovely prospect they command. As it is not my desire to enter into details regarding the Mission or the college any further than is necessary to emphasize the supreme importance of this enterprise to the civilization of the Orient, I will only add that the college has already some interesting collections in natural history, a particularly valuable herbarium, and that the medical department is not second in promise to the literary.
It is sometimes observed that a city is like a man, in that it will preserve through all mutations and disasters certain fundamental traits; the character that it obtains at first is never wholly lost, but reappears again and again, asserting its individuality after, it may be, centuries of obscurity. Beyrout was early a seat of learning and a centre of literary influence for nearly three hundred years before its desolation by an earthquake in the middle of the sixth century, and its subsequent devastation by the followers of the Arabian prophet, it was thronged with students from all the East, and its schools of philosophy and law enjoyed the highest renown. We believe that it is gradually resuming its ancient prestige.
While we were waiting day after day the arrival of the Austrian steamboat for Constantinople, we were drawn into a little drama which afforded us alternate vexation and amusement; an outline of it may not be out of place here as an illustration of the vicissitudes of travel in the East, or for other reasons which may appear. I should premise that the American consul who resided here with his family was not in good repute with many of the foreign residents; that he was charged with making personal contributions to himself the condition of the continuance in office of his subagents in Syria; that the character of his dragomans, or at least one of them named Ouardy, was exceedingly bad, and brought the consular office and the American name into contempt; and that these charges had been investigated by an agent sent from the ministerial bureau in Constantinople. The dragomans of the consulate, who act as interpreters, and are executors of the consul’s authority, have no pay, but their position gives them a consideration in the community, and a protection which they turn to pecuniary account. It should be added that the salary of the consul at Beyrout is two thousand dollars,—a sum, in this expensive city, which is insufficient to support a consul, who has a family, in the style of a respectable citizen, and is wholly inadequate to the maintenance of any equality with the representatives of other nations; the government allows no outfit, nor does it provide for the return of its consul; the cost of transporting himself and family home would consume almost half a year’s salary, and the tenure of the office is uncertain. To accept any of several of our Oriental consulships, a man must either have a private fortune or an unscrupulous knack of living by his wits. The English name is almost universally respected in the East, so far as my limited experience goes, in the character of its consuls; the same cannot be said of the American.
The morning after our arrival, descending the steps of the hotel, I found our dragoman in a violent altercation with another dragoman, a Jew, and a resident of Beyrout. There is always a latent enmity between the Egyptian and the Syrian dragomans, a national hostility, as old perhaps as the Shepherds’ invasion, which it needs only an occasion to blow into a flame. The disputants were surrounded by a motley crowd, nearly all of them the adherents of the Syrian. I had seen Antoine Ouardy at Luxor, when he was the dragoman of an English traveller. He was now in Frank dress, wearing a shining hat, an enormous cluster shirt-pin, and a big seal ring; and with his aggressive nose and brazen face he had the appearance of a leading mock-auctioneer in the Bowery. On the Nile, where Abd-el-Atti enjoys the distinction of Sultan among his class, the fellow was his humble servant; but he had now caught the Egyptian away from home, and was disposed to make the most of his advantage. Chancing to meet Ouardy this morning, Abd-el-Atti had asked for the payment of two pounds lent at Luxor; the debt was promptly denied, and when his own due-bill for the money was produced, he declared that he had received the money from Abd-el-Atti in payment for some cigars which he had long ago purchased for him in Alexandria. Of course if this had been true, he would not have given a note for the money; and it happened that I had been present when the sum was borrowed.
The brazen denial exasperated our dragoman, and when I arrived the quarrel had come nearly to blows, all the injurious Arabic epithets having been exhausted. The lie direct had been given back and forth, but the crowning insult was added, in English, when Abd-el-Atti cried,—
“You ‘re a humbug!”
This was more than Ouardy could stand. Bursting with rage, he shook his fist in the Egyptian’s face:—
“You call me humbug; you humbug, yourself. You pay for this, I shall have satisfaction by the law.”
We succeeded in separating and, I hoped, in reducing them to reason, but Antoine went off muttering vengeance, and Abd-el-Atti was determined to bring suit for his money. I represented the hopelessness of a suit in a Turkish court, the delay and the cost of lawyers, and the certainty that Ouardy would produce witnesses to anything he desired to prove.
“What I care for two pound!” exclaimed the heated dragoman. “I go to spend a hundred pound, but I have justice.” Shortly after, as Abd-el-Atti was walking through the bazaars, with one of the ladies of our party, he was set upon by a gang of Ouardy’s friends and knocked down; the old man recovered himself and gave battle like a valiant friend of the Prophet; Ouardy’s brother sallied out from his shop to take a hand in the scrimmage, and happened to get a rough handling from Abd-el-Atti, who was entirely ignorant of his relationship to Antoine. The whole party were then carried off to the seraglio, where Abd-el-Atti, as the party attacked, was presumed to be in the wrong, and was put into custody. In the inscrutable administration of Turkish justice, the man who is knocked down in a quarrel is always arrested. When news was brought to us at the hotel of this mishap, I sent for the American consul, as our dragoman was in the service of an American citizen. The consul sent his son and his dragoman. And the dragoman sent to assist an American, embarrassed by the loss of his servant in a strange city, turned out to be the brother of Antoine Ouardy, and the very fellow that Abd-el-Atti had just beaten. Here was a complication. Dragoman Ouardy showed his wounds, and wanted compensation for his injuries. At the very moment we needed the protection of the American government, its representative appeared as our chief prosecutor.
However, we sent for Abd-el-Atti, and procured his release from the seraglio; and after an hour of conference, in which we had the assistance of some of the most respectable foreign residents of the city, we flattered ourselves that a compromise was made. The injured Ouardy, who was a crafty rogue, was persuaded not to insist upon a suit for damages, which would greatly incommode an American citizen, and Abd-el-Atti seemed willing to drop his suit for the two pounds. Antoine, however, was still menacing.