XIV.—OTHER SIGHTS IN DAMASCUS.

DAY after day we continued, like the mourners, to go about the streets, in the tangle of the bazaars, under the dark roofs, endeavoring to see Damascus. When we emerged from the city gate, the view was not much less limited. I made the circuit of the wall on the north, in lanes, by running streams, canals, enclosed gardens, seeing everywhere hundreds of patient, summer-loving men and women squatting on the brink of every rivulet, by every damp spot, in idle and perfect repose.

We stumbled about also on the south side of the town, and saw the reputed place of St. Paul's escape, which has been lately changed. It is a ruined Saracenic tower in the wall, under which is Bab Kisan, a gate that has been walled up for seven hundred years. The window does not any more exist from which the apostle was let down in a basket, but it used to be pointed out with confidence, and I am told that the basket is still shown, but we did not see it. There are still some houses on this south wall, and a few of them have projecting windows from which a person might easily be lowered. It was in such a house that the harlot of Jericho lived, who contrived the escape of the spies of Joshua. And we see how thick and substantial the town walls of that city must have been to support human habitations. But they were blown down.

Turning southward into the country, we came to the tomb of the porter who assisted Paul's escape, and who now sleeps here under the weight of the sobriquet of St. George. A little farther out on the same road is located the spot of Said's conversion.

Near it is the English cemetery, a small high-walled enclosure, containing a domed building surmounted by a cross; and in this historical spot, whose mutations of race, religion, and government would forbid the most superficial to construct for it any cast-iron scheme of growth or decay, amid these almost melancholy patches of vegetation which still hover in the Oriental imagination as the gardens of all delights, sleeps undisturbed by ambition or by criticism, having at last, let us hope, solved the theory of "averages," the brilliant Henry T. Buckle.

Not far off is the Christian cemetery. "Who is buried here?" I asked our thick-witted guide.

"O, anybody," he replied, cheerfully, "Greeks, French, Italians, anybody you like"; as if I could please myself by interring here any one I chose.

Among the graves was a group of women, hair dishevelled and garments loosened in the abandon of mourning, seated about a rough coffin open its entire length. In it lay the body of a young man who had been drowned, and recovered from the water after three days. The women lifted up his dead hands, let them drop heavily, and then wailed and howled, throwing themselves into attitudes of the most passionate grief. It was a piteous sight, there under the open sky, in the presence of an unsympathizing crowd of spectators.

Returning, we went round by the large Moslem cemetery, situated at the southwest corner of the city. It is, like all Moslem burying-grounds, a melancholy spectacle,—a mass of small whitewashed mounds of mud or brick, with an inscribed headstone,—but here rest some of the most famous men and women of Moslem history. Here is the grave of Ibn' As鈑er, the historian of Damascus; here rests the fierce Moawyeh, the founder of the dynasty of the Omeiyades; and here are buried three of the wives of Mohammed, and Fatimeh, his granddaughter, the child of Ali, whose place of sepulture no man knows. Upon nearly every tomb is a hollow for water, and in it is a sprig of myrtle, which is renewed every Friday by the women who come here to mourn and to gossip.

Much of the traveller's time, and perhaps the most enjoyable part of it, in Damascus, is spent in the bazaars, cheapening scarfs and rugs and the various silken products of Syrian and Persian looms, picking over dishes of antique coins, taking impressions of intaglios, hunting for curious amulets, and searching for the quaintest and most brilliant Saracenic tiles. The quest of the antique is always exciting, and the inexperienced is ever hopeful that he will find a gem of value in a heap of rubbish; this hope never abandons the most blase tourist, though in time he comes to understand that the sharp-nosed Jew, or the oily Armenian, or the respectable Turk, who spreads his delusive wares before him, knows quite as well as the Seeker the value of any bit of antiquity, not only in Damascus, but in Constantinople, Paris, and London, and is an adept in all the counterfeits and impositions of the Orient.

The bazaars of the antique, of old armor, ancient brasses, and of curiosities generally, and even of the silver and gold smiths, are disappointing after Cairo; they are generally full of rubbish from which the choice things seem to have been culled; indeed, the rage for antiquities is now so great that sharp buyers from Europe range all the Orient and leave little for the innocent and hopeful tourist, who is aghast at the prices demanded, and usually finds himself a victim of his own cleverness when he pays for any article only a fourth of the price at first asked.

The silk bazaars of Damascus still preserve, however, a sort of pre-eminence of opportunity, although they are largely supplied by the fabrics manufactured at Beyrout and in other Syrian towns. Certainly no place is more tempting than one of the silk khans,—gloomy old courts, in the galleries of which you find little apartments stuffed full of the seductions of Eastern looms. For myself, I confess to the fascination of those stuffs of brilliant dyes, shot with threads of gold and of silver. I know a tall, oily-tongued Armenian, who has a little chamber full of shelves, from which he takes down one rich scarf after another, unfolds it, shakes out its shining hues, and throws it on the heap, until the room is littered with gorgeous stuffs. He himself is clad in silk attire, he is tall, suave, insinuating, grave, and overwhelmingly condescending. I can see him now, when I question the value put upon a certain article which I hold in my hand and no doubt betray my admiration of in my eyes,—I can see him now throw back his head, half close his Eastern eyes, and exclaim, as if he had hot pudding in his mouth, "Thot is ther larster price."

I can see Abd-el-Atti now, when we had made up a package of scarfs, and offered a certain sum for the lot, which the sleek and polite trader refused, with his eternal, "Thot is ther larster price," sling the articles about the room, and depart in rage. And I can see the Armenian bow us into the corridor with the same sweet courtesy, knowing very well that the trade is only just begun; that it is, in fact, under good headway; that the Arab will return, that he will yield a little from the "larster price," and that we shall go away loaded with his wares, leaving him ruined by the transaction, but proud to be our friend.

Our experience in purchasing old Saracenic and Persian tiles is perhaps worth relating as an illustration of the character of the traders of Damascus. Tiles were plenty enough, for several ancient houses had recently been torn down, and the dealers continually acquire them from ruined mosques or those that are undergoing repairs. The dragoman found several lots in private houses, and made a bargain for a certain number at two francs and a half each; and when the bargain was made, I spent half a day in selecting the specimens we desired.

The next morning, before breakfast, we went to make sure that the lots we had bought would be at once packed and shipped. But a change had taken place in twelve hours. There was an Englishman in town who was also buying tiles; this produced a fever in the market; an impression went abroad that there was a fortune to be made in tiles, and we found that our bargain was entirely ignored. The owners supposed that the tiles we had selected must have some special value; and they demanded for the thirty-eight which we had chosen—agreeing to pay for them two francs and a half apiece—thirty pounds. In the house where we had laid aside seventy-three others at the same price, not a tile was to be discovered; the old woman who showed us the vacant chamber said she knew not what had become of them, but she believed they had been sold to an Englishman.

We returned to the house first mentioned, resolved to devote the day if necessary to the extraction of the desired tiles from the grip of their owners. The contest began about eight o'clock in the morning; it was not finished till three in the afternoon, and it was maintained on our side with some disadvantage, the only nutriment that sustained us being a cup of tea which we drank very early in the morning. The scene of the bargain was the paved court of the house, in which there was a fountain and a lemon-tree, and some rose-trees trained on espaliers along the walls. The tempting enamelled tiles were piled up at one side of the court and spread out in rows in the lew鈔,—the open recess where guests are usually received. The owners were two Greeks, brothers-in-law, polite, cunning, sharp, the one inflexible, the other yielding,—a combination against which it is almost impossible to trade with safety, for the yielding one constantly allures you into the grip of the inflexible. The women of the establishment, comely Greeks, clattered about the court on their high wooden pattens for a time, and at length settled down, in an adjoining apartment, to their regular work of embroidering silken purses and tobacco-pouches, taking time, however, for an occasional cigarette or a pull at a narghileh, and, in a constant chatter, keeping a lively eye upon the trade going on in the court. The handsome children added not a little to the liveliness of the scene, and their pranks served to soften the asperities of the encounter; although I could not discover, after repeated experiments, that any affection lavished upon the children lowered the price of the tiles. The Greek does not let sentiment interfere with business, and he is much more difficult to deal with than an Arab, who occasionally has impulses.

Each tile was the subject of a separate bargain and conflict. The dicker went on in Arabic, Greek, broken English, and dislocated French, and was participated in not only by the parties most concerned, but by the young Greek guide and by the donkey-boys. Abd-el-Atti exhibited all the qualities of his generalship. He was humorous, engaging, astonished, indignant, serious, playful, threatening, indifferent. Beaten on one grouping of specimens, he made instantly a new combination; more than once the transaction was abruptly broken off in mutual rage, obstinacy, and recriminations; and it was set going again by a timely jocularity or a seeming concession. I can see now the soft Greek take up a tile which had painted on it some quaint figure or some lovely flower, dip it in the fountain to bring out its brilliant color, and then put it in the sun for our admiration; and I can see the dragoman shake his head in slow depreciation, and push it one side, when that tile was the one we had resolved to possess of all others, and was the undeclared centre of contest in all the combinations for an hour thereafter.

When the day was two thirds spent we had purchased one hundred tiles, jealously watched the packing of each one, and seen the boxes nailed and corded. We could not have been more exhausted if we had undergone an examination for a doctorate of law in a German university. Two boxes, weighing two hundred pounds each, were hoisted upon the backs of mules and sent to the French company's station; there does not appear to be a dray or a burden-cart in Damascus; all freight is carried upon the back of a mule or a horse, even long logs and whole trunks of trees.

When this transaction was finished, our Greek guide, who had heard me ask the master of the house for brass trays, told me that a fellow whom I had noticed hanging about there all the morning had some trays to show me; in fact, he had at his house "seventeen trays." I thought this a rich find, for the beautiful antique brasses of Persia are becoming rare even in Damascus; and, tired as we were, we rode across the city for a mile to a secluded private house, and were shown into an upper chamber. What was our surprise to find spread out there the same "seventy-three" tiles that we had purchased the day before, and which had been whisked away from us. By "seventeen tray," the guide meant "seventy-three." We told the honest owner that he was too late; we had already tiles enough to cover his tomb.