Ananias of Damascus

“ She saw the Israelitish empire exalted, and she saw it annihilated. She saw Greece rise, and flourish two thousand years, and die. In her old age she saw Rome built; she saw it overshadow the world with its power; she saw it perish. The few hundreds of years of Genoese and Venetian might and splendor were, to grave old Damascus, only a trifling scintillation hardly worth remembering. Damascus has seen all that has ever occurred on earth, and still she lives. She has looked upon the dry bones of a thousand empires, and will see the tombs of a thousand more before she dies. ”

“ Behold, Damascus is taken away from being a city, And it shall be a ruinous heap. 2The cities of Aroer are forsaken; They shall be for flocks, Which shall lie down, and none shall make them afraid. 3The fortress also shall cease from Ephraim, And the kingdom from Damascus; And the remnant of Aram shall be as the glory of the children of Israel, Saith the Lord of hosts.
4And it shall come to pass in that day, That the glory of Jacob shall be made thin, And the fatness of his flesh shall wax lean. ”

“ Dark-eyed beauties, who are not ashamed to show their tattooed faces and nose-rings, meet you at every corner; and, if you know the city well, you may penetrate into the recesses of the wicked bath-houses, or visit the slave-market. Damascus is still the scene of intrigue and passion, as of old; the yearly poisonings are incredibly numerous, and the place is one of the chief strongholds of that obstinate fanaticism which refuses to see anything good in the manners and civilisation of the “heathen.” ”

“ Farther below is Damascus itself—a maze of flat buildings, squat mosques, and minaret spires, all in gray-white, as if sprinkled with the powder of time, and now smudged with faint rose by the sinking sunlight. Eastward and southeastward stretches the great desert that leads to the sites of Babylon and Nineveh, to Bagdad, to Persia, to the beginnings of human history.
In Damascus, as I knew from intelligence officers of the Palestine army, were many friends of the British. Nearly all the population, in fact, were secretly anti-Turk and anti-German. ”

“ Any where else we would have been assailed by a clamorous army of donkey-drivers, guides, peddlers and beggars—but in Damascus they so hate the very sight of a foreign Christian that they want no intercourse whatever with him; only a year or two ago, his person was not always safe in Damascus streets. It is the most fanatical Mohammedan purgatory out of Arabia. Where you see one green turban of a Hadji elsewhere (the honored sign that my lord has made the pilgrimage to Mecca,) I think you will see a dozen in Damascus. The Damascenes are the ugliest, wickedest looking villains we have seen. ”

“ To Damascus, years are only moments, decades are only flitting trifles of time. She measures time, not by days and months and years, but by the empires she has seen rise, and prosper and crumble to ruin. She is a type of immortality. She saw the foundations of Baalbec, and Thebes, and Ephesus laid; she saw these villages grow into mighty cities, and amaze the world with their grandeur—and she has lived to see them desolate, deserted, and given over to the owls and the bats. ”

“ Whilst the army which was to sweep the invaders out of the bounds of the Empire was being organised, to Baanes the Armenian was committed the task of constantly harassing the Arabs, and so preventing, above all, the fall of Damascus. He is said to have driven back the Muslims from Emesa upon Damascus, and pitched his camp on the banks of the River of Damascus—the often-mentioned Baradà, the Abana of the Old Testament, within sight of the City—only, however, to retire again upon Emesa. ”

“ More than three thousand years it has flourished; more than thirty centuries it has stood there a city—the beautiful city of the plain. Nations have appeared and vanished. Kingdoms and empires and republics have risen and fallen, but Damascus has stood unchanged. Thrones have crumbled, dynasties have come and gone. Statesmen and poets and scholars have lived their brief period of existence, brief and insignificant. In the centuries that have rolled over Damascus Saracen, Roman, Moslem, and Christian have besieged the city ”

“ It was conquered by David after a protracted struggle, but recovered its independence in the reign of Solomon. It was subsequently subdued by the Assyrians. Rome may call itself, Damascus is the Eternal City, founded probably soon after the flood by a Semitic grandson of Noah. Damascus has never ceased to exist as a great city, and from its unique position, probably never will. The prey of every ambitious conqueror, it has seen the rise and survived the fall of every great empire. ”

“ Assyrian, Persian, Greek, Roman, Crusader and Saracen, each in turn have dominated the garden city—and died—but Damascus still lives and has out-lived all its rivals of every age. Sidon, Tyre, Antioch and Tarsus survive only as uninteresting towns, Babylon, Palmyra and Nineveh are no more, but Damascus is still the 32“Head of Syria” as it was in the days of Abraham—Damascus a green island in the midst of a golden sea of sand, bounded by the desert, surrounded by its rivers, has always been and must for ever remain the mother city of the world. ”

“ Lying between Mosul and Jerusalem, and important both strategically 532 and from its position on the great route of commerce from the Euphrates to Egypt, Damascus became the arbiter of Syrian politics. During the greater part of the period between 1130 and 1154 the policy of Damascus was guided by the vizier Muin-eddin Anar, who ruled on behalf of the descendants of the atabeg Tughtigin. He saw the importance of finding an ally against the ambition of Zengi, who had already attacked Damascus in 1130. The natural ally was Jerusalem. ”

“ Erelong, within the walls of Acre, the three crusading kings, the monarchs of Germany, of France, and of Jerusa [Pg 91] lem, resolved to strike a sudden and terrible blow at Saracen supremacy, and to win glory by an entirely new conquest, full of danger and honor—the storming of the city of Damascus. Oldest and fairest of Syrian cities, Damascus, called by the old Roman emperors the "eye of all the East," rises from the midst of orchards and gardens, flowering vines, green meadows, and waving palms ”

“ In 732, when Arab expansion was checked at the Loire just a century after the death of Muhammad, the Umayyad caliphs ruled an empire extending from the Bay of Biscay to the Indus and the confines of China and from the Aral Sea to the cataracts of the Nile. The capital of this huge domain was Damascus, the oldest living city, set like a pearl in an emerald girdle of gardens watered by snow-fed brooks. ”

“ And Damascus herself has remained unchanged. Other cities have risen and prospered and perished even from memory. They did not matter to Damascus. Nothing matters to Damascus. It may have altered its appearance a trifle now and then, but not materially. It is the same Damascus that Abraham knew and that David conquered. I can see both of these old fellows any time I look out of my hotel window; also, the three hundred and eighteen servants born in Abraham's household—all the tableau of the ancient city that has remained forever young. ”

“ But this is what makes the demi-semi-fashionable of Beyrout hate Damascus, with a spice of fear, knowing nothing of her attractions; whilst she, on her side, lazily despises the effeminate and, to her, luxurious and feeble Beyroutine. Damascus, I have said, is the heart and capital of Syria, the residence of the Wali and his entourage, who rule Syria, who fear the strong and who oppress the weak, who persecute Christians, who starve the people, and who fill their own pockets. ”

“ 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 [Pg 258] 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. ”

“ Standing on the utmost edge of fertility, on the shore of the much-voyaged desert, Damascus is indispensable alike to civilization and to the nomads. Moreover, she is the city of the Mediterranean world which lies nearest to the far East, and Islam has made her the western port of Mecca. ”

“ It is at the place where the traveller from Tiberias gets his first view of Damascus, with its domes and minarets rising from the fertile plain—dotted with villages set in rich orchards, and gardens watered by the Pharpar and Abana, flowing down from the mountains which guard them. The life-giving power of water is seen nowhere in all Syria to better advantage than from this point, and it is no wonder that Naaman exclaimed, "Are not Pharpar and Abana, rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel?" ”

“ Five hundred years after Abraham, Thothmes III. thought it worth while to cross over from Egypt to conquer Damascus, and after still another five hundred years King David ravaged the country round about and set up a garrison here. Those were not frequent changes. Damascus does not do things frequently or without reflection. I believe the Medes came next, and after them the Romans, and then, quite recently—recently for Damascus, I mean—only thirteen hundred years ago—the Mohammedans took the place and have held it ever since. ”

“ Meanwhile the Amorites had been overthrown, and Qodshû, ruined by the Asiatic invasion, soon became little more than an obscure third-rate town;** the Aramaeans made themselves masters of Damascus about the XIIth century, and in their hands it continued to be, just as in the preceding epochs, a town without ambitions and of no great renown. ”

“ Justice, not at all blind here, is continually looking out for the dollars. But to return to Damascus. The plain in which it is situated is surrounded on three sides by mountains, Lebanon, Anti-Lebanon and Hermon; on the east it is bounded by the Syrian desert, in the midst of which is the city of palm trees, Palmyra, the ancient Tadmor, the city of Zenobia, the Boadicea of the Syrians. ”

“ And yet Damascus is one of the wonders of the world, unrivalled in what is peculiarly its own, admitting no comparison with any existing city, revelling in a beauty and a splendor belonging to Islamism more than Christianity, characterizing the age of the Caliphs rather than of the Crystal Palace. ”

“ But it is never quiet in Damascus. Most Orientals go to bed very early Jerusalem is like a city of the dead by half-past eight in the evening. The Damascenes, however, seem to need no sleep, and the noises of the streets never cease. The only noticeable change in their volume is that, when the shops close, just before sunset, the tumult suddenly increases. ”

“ The fear inspired by Damascus naturally explains the attitude adopted by the Hittite states towards the invader, and the precautions taken by the latter to restrict his operations within somewhat narrow limits. Having accepted the complimentary presents of the Phoenicians, the king again took his way northwards—making a slight detour in order to ascend the Amanos for the purpose of erecting there a stele commemorating his exploits, and of cutting pines, cedars, and larches for his buildings—and then returned to Nineveh amid the acclamations of his people. ”

“ Environs of Damascus.
The Environs of Damascus.
The small rides and excursions round Damascus are innumerable and beautiful; they lead through garden and orchard with bubbling water, under the shady fig and vine, pomegranate and walnut. You emerge on the soft yellow sand, and you throw off your superfluous strength, by galloping as hard as you will. There is no one to check your spirits; the breath of the desert is liberty. There is Mizzeh, a village placed exactly on the borders of the green and yellow; one side looks into trees and verdure, and the other side in the bare sand. ”

“ At its mouth you suddenly turn a corner and see Damascus lying in panorama, a few hundred feet below you. “A flint set in emeralds” is the Damascus citizen’s description of what El Islam calls, and miscalls, the “smile of the Prophet” (Mohammed) . Like Stambul, it is beautiful from afar, as it is foul and sore within, morally and physically. The eye at once distinguishes a long head, the northern suburb “El Salituzzah” ”

“ And Welîd especially suffers at their hands; for it was under him that Hajjâj [602] made the assault upon the Holy City—a ‘sacrilege’ which still rankles in the Believer’s soul; and, moreover, during whose twenty years’ splendid vice-royalty in the East, Kûfa and Bussorah were both bathed in blood; and hence some part of the hatred against the tyrant has come to be reflected upon the name of his Master also. It [448] is too true, indeed, that at Damascus, as in other great cities of the empire, there was now rapidly supervening a shameless laxity of manners ”

“ Running water from the Abana flows through all the best houses. The public buildings and barracks built during the Egyptian occupation are very good for a Turkish city, and the citadel, an old mediæval castle, is interesting, but access is not allowed to it. Abdel-Kader, who so long kept the French at bay in North Africa, lived in Damascus, and had a quarter allotted to him and his Algerian fellow exiles. Damascus is not the dirty city it once was. ”