Damascus
The first charm of Damascus as a whole city lies in the contrast which those brown sandhills behind it make with the green strip of the Barada Valley. Journeying from Ludd through the monotony of lank, brown growth that straggles to the horizon from the road, you give up hope of ever seeing foliage again, until you pass El Kunneitra. Then you see the green of Barada; and it is the richer for the hills behind it—browner, more desolate by far, than any landscape skirting Galilee or the Jordan. Far up the clay feet of those rocky hills straggles the brown-and-white suburb of Salahiye, all square-built and flat-topped—from the distance like bricks inserted in the clay soil. The line of hills is cleft cleanly by the Pass, the scene of that hideous slaughter by our machine guns. If you climb into the fringe of Salahiye you see the curious shape of Damascus—a jagged comet-form, all the angles and serrations of the brown tail defined with unnatural clearness by the depth of the green about it. In the amorphous head are a few minarets—like jewels. In Cairo there are too many minarets as you look from the Bey’s Leap: they protrude like a porcupine’s quills. In Damascus the city’s flat brownness is just relieved by them. When we came to Damascus it was drought-stricken. Soon afterward, it rained torrentially for a day. Then the sun shone and drew from the city such colour as we never dreamed was there. Nor had we dreamed that the trees were dusty—so green they seemed after the southern country. But, washed, they helped to throw up the wonderful colour of “that great city,” as it is called in Scripture.
It is a relief to be delivered from the sight of the everlasting cactus-hedge of the southern towns. The cactus does flourish in Damascus; but so thick is the foliage that it is lost in the mass. You cannot look down on Nazareth without being obsessed by the ubiquitous pest. You can look down on Damascus and be unconscious of it. It straggles about the leafy roads in patches beside the mud walls. That you can bear, because it does not rise above the all-enclosing foliage.
The smells of Damascus you will remember for ever. Cairo is clean by comparison: the alleys of Cairo are not foul. The stinks of Damascus areliterally overpowering. There is offal, refuse, foul puddles in every street of the Bazaars. The Abana is a foul river. “Are not Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel”? The answer is: Certainly not. There is an ill-kemptness about the place that carries Oriental slackness a bit too far. In the streets that thread the heart of the city are ruts and holes that break the springs of M.T. every day. The tramline protrudes eight inches. This gives rise to deadlocks in traffic that hold up movement for an hour. Incredibly narrow and tortuous are the highways of the city. The only decent road is that which skirts the fountained promenade near the Hedjaz Station. I am sure the Damascans look on this bit of orderliness as a Western intrusion; just as I am sure that if they found themselves in an English town guileless of smells they would call it insipid....
In the bazaars there is a baffling complexity of colour, of race, of wares. The Mousky is less heterogeneous. In the Square, in the street which is called Strait, in the gold bazaar, grain bazaar, sweets bazaar, silk bazaar, you have all the various colour of tarbooshed Cairo, and more. Here the soldiers of the King of the Hedjaz throng; there is endless variety in their clothes and their flowing head-dress. The Moslem women, who veil their faces, affect far more variety than the Mohamedan women of Cairo, with their yashmaks. The French are here. The Australian hat and plume is everywhere. I never saw so great a number of Australian soldiers moving at random in any city. There is great jostling in these narrow streets, more than the normal jostling you get in any crowd.
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 vendorsoflimonade, 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 everyfragment 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....
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