The Ship Dwellers Part 21

"You always interest me," he said. "I don't know whether it's your shape or your mental habitudes. Both are so peculiar."

After which we left the Apostle--that is, we stood from under and went in to dinner.

The Apostle is a good traveller, however--all the Reprobates are. They take things as they find them, which cannot be said for all of our people. One wonders what some of them expected in Damascus--probably steamer fare and New York hotel accommodations. I judge this from their remarks.

As a matter of fact, we are at the best hotel in Damascus, and the hotel people are racking their bodies and risking their souls to give us the best they know. A traveller cannot get better than the best--even in heaven. Travelling alone in any strange land, he is more likely to get the worst. Yet the real traveller will make the best of what he finds, and do better when he finds he can. But these malcontents of ours have been pampered and spoiled by that steamer until they expect nothing short of perfection--_their_ kind of perfection--wherever they set foot.

They are so disturbed over the fact that the bill-of-fare is unusual and not adjusted to their tastes that they are not enjoying the sights, and want to clear out, forthwith. They have been in Damascus a little more than a day; they want to go now. This old race has stood it five thousand years or more. These s.h.i.+p-dwellers can't stand it two days without complaint. I don't want to be severe, but such travellers tire me. I suppose the bill-of-fare in heaven won't please them. I hope not, if I'm invited to remain there--any length of time, I mean.

The rest of us are having great enjoyment. We like everything, and we eat most of it. There are any number of dried fruits and nuts and fine juicy oranges always on the table, strung down the centre--its full length. And even if the meats are a bit queer, they are by no means bad.

We whoop up the bill-of-fare, and go through it forward and backward and diagonally, working from both ends toward the centre, and back again if we feel like it. We have fruit and nuts piled by our plates and on our plates all through the meal. _We_ don't get tired of Damascus. We could stay here and start a famine. What _will_ these grumblers do in heaven, where very likely there isn't a single dish they ever heard of before?

In the matter of wines, however, I am conservative. You see, Mohammed forbade the use of spirituous beverages by the faithful, and liquor forms no part of their long, symphonic rhyme. They don't drink it themselves; they only make it for visitors.

It would require no command of the Prophet to make me abstain from it. I have tried their vintage. I tried one brand called the "Wine of Ephesus." The name conjured visions; so did the wine, but they were not the same visions. The name suggested banquets in marble halls, where gentlemen and ladies of the old days reclined on rich divans and were served by slaves on bended knee. The wine itself--the taste of it, I mean--suggested a combination of hard cider and kerosene, with a hurry call for the doctor.

I was coy about the wines of the East after that, but by-and-by I tried another brand--a different color with a different name. This time it was "Nectar of Heliopolis." They had curious ideas of nectar in Heliopolis.

Still, it was better than the Wine of Ephesus. Hair-oil is always better than kerosene in a mixture like that--but not much better. The flavor did not invite debauch.

This is Sunday (the Christian Sunday), and I have been out for an early morning walk. I took the trolley that starts near the hotel. I did not care for a trolley excursion, but I wanted to see what a Damascus trolley is like and where it went. It isn't like anything in particular, and it didn't go anywhere--not while I was on it.

I noticed that it was divided into three sections, and I climbed into the front one. The conductor motioned to me, and I understood that I had made a wrong selection, somehow. A woman, veiled and bangled, climbed aboard just then, and I understood. I was in the women's section--a thing not allowed in Damascus. So I got back into the rear section, but that wouldn't do, either. The conductor was motioning again.

I comprehended at length. The rear compartment was second cla.s.s. He wanted me to go in style. So I got into the middle compartment and gave him a tin medal, and got two or three similar ones in change, and sat there waiting for the procession to move. I waited a good while. There was an Arabic inscription on the back of the seats in front of me--in the place where, in America, it says, "Wait for the car to stop." I suppose it says, "Wait for the car to start" in Damascus. We did that.

The conductor dozed.

Now and then somebody climbed on, but the arrivals were infrequent. I wondered if we were waiting for a load. It would take a week to fill up, at that rate. I looked at my watch now and then. The others went to sleep. That is about the difference between the East and the West. The West counts the time; for the East it has no existence. Moments, hours, months mean nothing to the East. The word hurry is not of her language.

She drives her horses fast, but merely for pleasure, not haste. She has constructed this trolley, but merely for style. It doesn't really serve any useful purpose.

We moved a little by-and-by, and I had hopes. They were premature. We crawled up in front of a coffee-house where a lot of turbans and fezzes were gathered outside, over tiny cups and hubble-bubble pipes; then we stopped. Our conductor and motorman got off and leaned against an almond-tree and began gossiping with friends. Finally coffee came out to them, and pipes, and they squatted down to smoke.

I finished my ride then; I shall always wonder where those other pa.s.sengers thought they were going, and if they ever got there.

I followed down a narrow street, and came to a succession of tiny work-shops. It was then I discovered what a man's feet are for--that is, some uses I had not known before. They are to a.s.sist the hands in performing mechanical labor. All mechanics work barefooted here. They sit flat on the floor or ground, with their various appliances in front of them, and there is scarcely any operation in which the feet do not take part. I came to a turning-lathe--a whole row of turning-lathes--tiny, crude affairs, down on the ground, of course, driven back and forth with a bow and a string. The workman held the bow in one hand, while the other hand, a.s.sisted by the foot, guided the cutting tool. It would never occur to these workmen to put the lathe higher in the air and attach a treadle, leaving both hands free to guide the tool.

Their sawing is the crudest process imaginable. They have no trestles or even saw-bucks. They have only a slanting stick stuck in the ground, and against this, with their feet and one hand, they hold the piece to be sawed, while the other hand runs the earliest saw ever made--the kind Noah used when he built the Ark. Sometimes a sawyer has a helper--a boy who pushes and pulls as the saw runs back and forth.

I bought a Sunday-morning paper. It does not resemble the sixty-four-page New York Sunday dailies. It consists of four small pages, printed in wriggly animalculae and other aquaria, and contains news four years old--or four hundred, it does not matter. Possibly it denounces the sultan--it is proper to do that just now--but I think not.

That would be too current. I think it is still denouncing Constantine.

XXIX

DAMASCUS, THE GARDEN BEAUTIFUL

Later, we drove to the foot of Mohammed's Hill--the hill from which the Prophet looked down on the Pearl of the East and decided that as he could have only one paradise he would wait for the next. They have built a little tower to mark the spot where he rested, and we thought we would climb up there.

We didn't, however. The carriages could only go a little way beyond the city outskirts, and when we started to climb that blistering, barren hillside afoot we changed our minds rapidly. We had permission to go as high as we pleased, but it is of no value. Anybody could give it. Laura and I and a German newspaper man were the only ones who toiled up high enough to look down through the mystical haze on the vision Mohammed saw. Heavens! but it was hot up there! And this is March--early spring!

How those _Quaker City_ pilgrims stood it to travel across the Syrian desert in August I cannot imagine. In the _Innocents_ I find this observation:

"The sun-flames shot down like shafts of fire that stream out of a blowpipe. The rays seemed to fall in a steady deluge on my head and pa.s.s downward like rain from a roof."

That is a white-hot description, but not too intense, I think, for Syrian summer-time.

Another thing we noticed up there: Damascus is growing--in that direction at least. Older than history, the place is actually having a boom. All the houses out that way are new--mud-walled, but some of them quite pretentious. They have pushed out far beyond the gardens, across the barren plain, and they are climbing the still more barren slope.

They stand there in the baking sun, unshaded as yet by any living thing.

One pities the women shut up behind those tiny barred windows. These places will have gardens about them some day. Already their owners are scratching the earth with their crooked sticks, and they will plant and water and make the desert bloom.

Being free in the afternoon, Laura and I engaged Habib and a carriage and went adventuring on our own account. We let Habib manage the excursion, and I shall always remember it as a sweet, restful experience.

We visited a Moslem burying-ground first, and the tomb of Fatima--the original Fatima--Mohammed's beautiful daughter, who married a rival prophet, Ali, yet sleeps to-day with honor in a little mosque-like tomb.

We pa.s.sed a tree said to have been planted by the Mohammedan conqueror of Damascus nearly thirteen hundred years ago--an enormous tree, ten feet through or more--on one side a hollow which would hold a dozen men, standing.

Then at last we came to the gardens of Damascus, and got out and walked among the olive-trees and the peach and almond and apricot--most of them in riotous bloom. Summer cultivation had only just begun, and few workmen were about. Later the gardens will swarm with them, and they will be digging and irrigating, and afterward gathering the fruit, preserving and drying it, and sending it to market. Habib showed us the primitive methods of doing these things.

How sweet and quiet and fragrant it was there among the flowering trees!

In one place a little group of Syrian Christians were recreating (it being Sunday), playing some curious dulcimer instrument and singing a weird hymn.

We crossed the garden, and sat on the gra.s.s under the peach-bloom while Habib went for the carriage. Sitting there, we realized that the guide-book had been only fair to Damascus.

"For miles around it is a wilderness of gardens--gardens with roses among the tangled shrubberies, and with fruit on the branches overhead. Everywhere among the trees the murmur of unseen rivulets is heard."

That sounds like fairyland, but it is only Damascus--Damascus in June, when the fruit is ripening and the water-ways are full.

We drove out of Damascus altogether--far out across a fertile plain, to the slopes of the West Lebanon hills. Then turning, we watched the sun slip down the sky while Habib told us many things. Whatever there is to know, Habib knows, and to localities and landmarks he fitted stories and traditions which brought back all the old atmosphere and made this Damascus the Damascus of fable and dreams.

Habib pointed out landmarks near and far--minarets of the great mosque, the direction of Jerusalem, of Mecca; he showed us where the waters of Damascus rise and where they waste into the desert sands. To the westward was Mount Hermon; southward came the lands of Naphtali, and Bashan where the giant Og once reigned. All below us lay Palestine; Mount Hermon was the watch-tower, Damascus the capital of the North.

Damascus in the sunset, its domes and minarets lifting above the lacing green! There is no more beautiful picture in the world than that. We turned to it again and again when every other interest had waned--the jewel, the "pearl set in emeralds," on the desert's edge. Laura and I will always remember that Sunday evening vision of the old city, the things that Habib told us, and the drive home.

Next to the city itself I think the desert interested us. It begins just a little beyond Damascus, Habib said, and stretches the length of the Red Sea and to the Persian Gulf. A thousand miles down its length lies Mecca, to which pilgrims have journeyed for ages--a horde of them every year. There is a railway, now, as far as Tebook, but Mecca is still six hundred miles beyond. The great annual pilgrimages, made up of the faithful from all over Asia and portions of Europe and Africa, depart from Damascus, and those that survive it return after long months of wasting desert travel. Habib said that a great pilgrimage was returning now; the city was full of holy men.

Then he told us about the dromedary mail that crosses the desert from Damascus to Bagdad, like a through express. It is about five hundred miles across as the stork flies, but the dromedary is not disturbed by distance. He destroys it at the rate of fifteen miles an hour, and capers in fresh and smiling at the other end. Habib did not advise dromedary travel. It is very rough, he said. Nothing but an Arab trained to the business could stand it. Once an Englishman wanted to go through by the dromedary mail, and did go, though they implored him to travel in the regular way. He got through all right, but his liver and his heart had changed places, and it took three doctors seven days to rearrange his works.

A mult.i.tude was pouring out of the city when we reached the gates--dwellers in the lands about. We entered and turned aside into quiet streets, the twilight gathering about mysterious doorways and in dim shops and stalls, where were bowed, turbaned men who never seemed to sell anything, or to want to sell anything--who barely noticed us as we pa.s.sed through the Grand Bazaar, where it was getting dark, and all the drowsy merchants of all the drowsy merchandise were like still shadows that only moved a little to let us pa.s.s. Out again into streets that were full of dusk, and dim flitting figures and subdued sounds.

All at once I caught sight of a black stone jar hanging at the door of a very small and dusky booth. It was such a jar as is used in Damascus to-day for water--was used there in the time of Abraham.

"Habib!"

I had wanted one of the pots from the first. The carriage stops instantly.

"Habib! That black water-jar--a small one!"

I had meant to bargain for it myself, but Habib is ahead of me. He scorns to bargain for such a trifle, and with such a merchant. He merely seizes the jar, says a guttural word or two in whatever tongue the man knows, flings him a paltry coin, and is back in the carriage, directing our course along the darkening, narrow way.