The Wanderer in Syria

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Chapter I. Grand Cairo

" The camels are ready," said the Commander, our dragoman. And I turned for a last glimpse of Cairo from the lofty window of the hotel over the Uzbeekeeyah, or public garden. The sun was sinking toward the Pyramids, and my eyes, that perceived their faint outline through the warm air, were fascinated for the last time by their grandeur and mystery. I held a letter in my hand. It was dated several weeks before in Berlin, and its incredible tales of cold, thin twilight for day, of leafless trees, and of bitter and blasting winds, were like ice in the sherbet of the oriental scene my eyes were draining. Beneath the balcony was the rounded fulness of acacia groves, and glancing along the lights and shadows of the avenues, I marked the costumes whose picturesqueness is poetry. The glaring B2 white walls of plaster palaces, and the hareems of pachas rose irregularly beyond, cool with dark green blinds, and relieving the slim minarets that played, fountains of grace, in the brilliant air.

It was a great metropolis, but silent as Venice. Only the " ha-ha " of the donkey-boys, the guttural growl of the camels, or the sharp crack of the runner's whip that precedes a carriage, jarred the pensive silence of the sun. I read another passage in the wintry letter I held and remembered Berlin, Europe, and the North, as spirits in paradise recall the glacial limbo of the Inferno. " The camels are ready," said the sententious Commander. " Yes," answered the Howadji, and stepped out upon the balcony. The Arabian poets celebrate the beauty of Cairo, " Mi sr, without an equal, the mother of the world, the superb town, the holy city, the delight of the imagination, greatest among the great, whose splendour and opulence made the Prophet smile." Nor the Prophet only. For even to Frank and Infidel eyes it is the most beautiful of eastern cities.

It is not so purely oriental as Damascus, nor can it rival the splendour of the Syrian capital as seen from a distance ; but, architecturally, Cairo is the triumph of the Arabian genius. It woos the eye and admiration of the stranger with more than Muslim propriety. Damascus is a dream of beauty as you approach it. But the secret charm of that beauty, when you are within the walls, is discovered only by penetrating deeper and farther into its exquisite courts, and gardens, and interiors, as you must strip away the veils and clumsy outer robes to behold the beauty of the Circassian or Georgian slave. Prince Soltikoff, a Russian Sybarite, who winters upon the Nile as Englishmen summer upon the Rhine, agreed that, to the eye of the stranger in its streets, Cairo was unsurpassed. " But Ispahan ?"

I suggested *. for the Prince chats of Persia as men gossip of Paris, and illumi nates his conversation with the glory of the Ganges. " Persia has nothing so fair," replied the Prince. " Leave Ispahan and Teheran un visited save by your imagination, and always take Cairo as the key note of your eastern recollections." It is built upon the edge of the desert, as other cities stand upon the sea-shore. The sand stretches to the walls, girdling " the delight of the imagination" with a. mystery and silence profounder than that of the ocean. • It is impossible not to feel here, as elsewhere in the East, that the national character and manners are influenced by the desert, as those of maritime races by the sea. This fateful repose, this strange stillness, this universal melancholy in men's aspects, and in their voices, as you note them in quiet con versation, or in the musical pathos of the muezzin's cry, — the intent but composed eagerness with which they listen to the wild romances of the desert, for which even the donkey-boy pauses, and stands, leaning upon his arms across his beast, and follow ing in imagination the fortunes of Aboo 'Seyd, or the richer romances of the Thousand and One Nights — all this is of the desert, — this is its silence articulated in Art and Life.

The bazaars and busy streets of Cairo are as much thronged as the quays of Naples. Through the narrow ways swarms a motley multitude, either walking or bestriding donkeys, but the wealthier and official personages upon foot. The shouts of the donkey -boys are incessant ; and when a pacha's coining is announced by the imperative crack of the long whip, flourished by an Arab runner in short white drawers and tarboosh or red cap, the excite ment and confusion in a street, which a carriage almost chokes, becomes frenzied. .The conceited camels groping through the crowd, are jambed and pushed against the horses ; the donkestrians are flattened sideways in the same manner. Pedlars of all kinds crowd to the wall, there is a general quarrelling and scolding, as if every individual were aggrieved that any other should presume to be in the way, while suddenly in the midst, through the lane of all this lazy and cackling life, rumbles the huge carriage, bearing a white-bearded, fat Turk to the council or the hareem.

Only the little donkeys stand then for democracy, and persist in retaining their tails where, for the purposes of honourable obeisance to the dignitary, their heads should be, and receive a slashing cut for their inflexible adherence to principles. Through this restless crowd in the dim, unpaven, high-walled streets of Cairo, strings of camels per petually pass, threading the murmurous city life with the desert silence. They are like the mariners in tarpaulins and pea-jackets, who roll through the streets of sea-ports and assert the sea. For the slow, soft tread of the camel, his long, swaying movement, his amorphous and withered frame, and his level-lidded, unhuman and repulsive eyes, like the eyes of demons, remind the Cairene of the desert, and confirm the mood of melancholy in his mind.

The donkey is the feet and carriage of the Cairene. Old Beppo, the legless beggar of the Spanish steps in Rome, given to fame by Hans Christian Andersen, in his Improvisatore, was oriental' in many ways, but most in the luxury of the Donkey, with which he indulged himself. And practically, the Cairenes might be all legless Beppos. With the huge red slippers dangling at the sides of the tottering little beasts, the toes turned upward in an imbecile manner, and gliding at right-angles with the animal just above the ground, — the sad-eyed, solemn Cairene would hardly enamour the least fastidious of Houris, should he so caracole to the gates of Paradise. The donkeys are like large dogs, and of easy motion. Each is attended by a boy, who batters and punehes him behind. Your cue is resignation. You are only the burthen borne.

Nor is it conso nant with your dignity to treat as a horse an animal that scarcely holds your feet above the ground, and that occasionally tumbles from under you, leaving you standing in a picturesque bazaar, the butt of Muslim youth. And woe to you if on your cockle-shell of a donkey you encounter the full-freighted galleon of a camel. Dismount, stop, fly— or a bale of Aleppo gold-stuffs, or brilliant carpets from Bagdad, surging along upon the camel, will dash you and your donkey — miserable wrecks — against the sides of the bazaar. " The camels are ready." " Tail, taib kateir, good, very good, Commander, but bear a moment longer, while I gaze finally from the balcony, and remember Cairo." You will go daily to the bazaar, because its picturesque suggestions are endless, and because the way leads you by the spacious mosques, broadly striped with red and blue, and because in the shaded silence of the interior you will see the strange spectacle of a house of God made also a house of man.

There congregate the poor and homeless, and ply their trades. At nightfall, as some rich pilgrim turns away, he orders the Sakka, or water-carrier, to distribute the contents of his water-skin among the poor. In the silence, and under the stars, as he pours the water into the wooden bowls of the beggars, the Sakka exclaims, "Hasten, O thirsty, to the ways of God!" — then breaks into a mournful singing — "Paradise and forgiveness be the lot of him who gave you this water." By day and night a fountain plays in the centre of the court, singing and praising God. The children play with it, and sleep upon the marble pavement. The old men crone in the shadow, and B moulder in the sun. The birds flutter and fly, and alight upon the delicate points of the ornaments ; and wheeling, the pavement ripples in their waving shadow.

Five times a day the Muezzin calls from the minaret, " God is great, come to prayer ;" and at midnight, " Prayer is better than sleep ;" and at daybreak, " Blessing and peace be upon thee, O Prophet of God, O Comely of Countenance ! " You pass on to the bazaars. No aspect of life in any city is so exciting to the imagination as the oriental bazaars. They are narrow streets, walled by the lofty houses from whose fronts project elaborate lattices, and on each side is a continuous line of shops, which are small square cells in the houses, entirely open to the street, and raised two or three feet above it. Over the whole, between the house-tops, is stretched a canopy of matting, shutting out the sky. In the little niches, or shops, surrounded by their wares, sit the turbaned merchants, silent or chatting solemnly, smoking and sipping coffee, or bending and muttering in prayer.

A soft mellow shadow permeates the space, or golden glints of sunlight flash through the rents in the matting above. There is no noise but the hushed murmuring of a crowd, sometimes the sharp oath of a donkey driver, or the clear, vibrating call of the Muezzin. As we move slowly through the bazaar, and our donkey-boy shouts imperatively " O old man, depart, depart ! O maiden, fly ! the Howadji comes, he comes, he comes!" — the merchants scan us gravely through the clouds that curl from their chibouques. But the eyes of one among them sparkle graciously. It is a friend of the Commander's, who purposes to take gold from the unbelievers, and at his niche we alight, and the old men and maidens fly no longer. The merchant spreads for us a prayer carpet from Bagdad, or a Persian rug, upon which we seat ourselves, while chibouques are lighted, and a small, soft-eyed Arab boy runs to the neighbouring cafe, and returns with rich sweet coffee.

" The Howadji are Ingleez ? " is the amicable prelude of business. " No. The Howadji are not Ingleez, but Americani. It is a terra incognita to the swarthy Turk, who fancies it is some island in the Red Sea, or a barbaric dependence of Bagdad. The opposite neighbour hails his brother mer chant in an unknown dialect — unknown to the ear, but the suspicious heart interprets its meaning — " Allah is Allah, O my brother ; praise God who has this day delivered goodly fish into thy net." The lazy loiterers gather around the spot. When they are too many, the Commander suddenly swears a vehement oath, and disperses the rabble with his kurbash, or hippopotamus whip. The merchant, gravely courteous, reveals his treasures, little dreaming that they are inestimable to the eyes that contemplate them. His wares make poets of his customers, who are sure that the Eastern Poets must have passed life in an endless round of shopping.

Here are silk stuff's from Damascus and Aleppo. Cambric from the district of Nablous, near the well of Jacob. Gold and silver threads from Mount Lebanon. Keffie, the Bedoueen handkerchiefs from Mecca, and fabrics of delicate device from Damas cus, blend their charm with the Anadolian carpets of gorgeous tissue. The fruits of Hamas hang beyond ; dried fruits and blades from Celo Syria ; pistacchios from Aleppo, and over them strange Persian rugs. The eye feasts upon splendour. The wares are often clumsy, inconvenient, and unshapely. The coarsest linen is embroidered with the finest gold. It is a banquet of the crude elements of beauty, unrefined by taste. It is the pure pigment unworked into the picture. But the contemplation of these articles, of name and association so alluring, and the calm curiosity of the soft eyes, that watch you in the dimness of the bazaar, gradually soothe your mind like sleep, and you sit by the merchant in pleasant reverie.

You buy as long and as much as you can. Have rhymes, and colours, and fancies prices ? The courteous merchant asks fabulous sums for his wares, and you courteously offer a tenth or a twentieth of his demand. He looks grieved, and smokes. You smoke, and look resigned. " Have the Howadji reflected that this delicate linen fabric (it is coarse crash), comes from Bagdad, upon camels, over the desert?" They have, indeed, meditated that fact "Are these opulent strangers aware that the sum they mention would plunge an unhappy merchant into irretrievable ruin?" The thought severs the heart-strings of the opulent strangers. But are their resources rivers, whose sands are gold? And the soft-eyed Arab boy is despatched for fresh coffee. We wear away the day in this delightful traffic. It has been a rhetorical tilt.

We have talked and lived and bought poetry, and at twilight our treasures follow us to the hotel. We discover that we have procured Oriental garments that we cannot wear, which are probably second-hand, and impart a peculiar odour, making us wonder how the plague smells. We have various beautiful caps, that heat our heads — choice Turkish slippers that tumble us down stairs — Damascus blades that break with a little bending — spices and odours of blessed Araby that we surreptitiously eject at back window's — and gold-threaded napkins of Arabian linen, that let our fingers through in the using. Yet for these oriental luxuries we have not paid more than a dozen times their value ; and when, after a surfeit of sentiment, did poets ever awake without the headache ? The solemn pomp of this oriental shopping, however, is no less pathetic than poetic.

The merchant higgles in phrases of exquisite imagery, which may be, with liim, only hackneyed forms of words ; but are the sadder for that reason. It is not difficult to infer the characteristic influences of a people, whose natural speech is poetry. And the pathos is in the constant reference of this style of speech to a corresponding life. Yet the Arabian genius has never attained that life. The Thousand and One Nights are its highest literary, the Kingdom of the Caliphs, its most substantial political, and Islam, its best religious achievement. That genius creates no longer, and for the modern Muslim, only the traditions of these things remain. The poets at the cafes tell the old tales. The splendours of the Caliphat flash, a boreal brilliance, over an unreal past ; and Islam wanes and withers in its sunny mosques.

Thus oriental fife is an echo and a ghost. Even its ludicrousness is relieved and sobered by its necessary sadness. You are pursued by the phantom of unachieved success ; you stumble among ruined opportunities ; it is a sphere unoc cupied, a body uninformed. Strangely and slowly gathers in your mind the conviction that the last inhabitants of the oldest land have thus a mysterious sympathy of similarity with the aborigines of the youngest. For what more are these orientals than sumptuous savages ? As the Indian dwells in primeval forests, whose soil teems with mineral treasure, in whose rocks and trees are latent temples greater than Solomon's and the Parthenon, and statues beyond the Greek ; in whose fruits are the secrets of trade, commerce, and the extremest civilisation, and who yet gets from the trees but a slight canoe, and from the earth but a flint, and from all the infinite sugges tions of nature, nothing but a picturesque speech, — so lives the oriental, the pet of natural luxury, in a golden air, at the fountains of History, and Art, and Religion • and yet the thinnest gleanings of stripped fields would surpass his harvest.

The likeness follows into their speech and manner. The Indian still bears with him the air of silence and grandeur that inheres in his birth place, and in the influences of his life. The sun, and the wind, and the trees have still their part in him, and assert their child. They shine, and blow, and wave through his motions and his words. Like a queen's idiot boy, he has the air of royalty. Nor does the Oriental fail in dignity and repose. His appearance satisfies your imagination no less than your eye. No other race has his beauty of countenance, and grace of costume ; nowhere else is poetry the language of trade. His gravity becomes tragic, then, when it seems to you a vague consciousness of inadequacy to his position, the wise silence of a witless man. We have, then, a common mother, and the silence of the western is kin to that of the eastern sky.

Have we safled so far, Pacha, to stand in the balcony looking over the Arabian metropolis, and smiling with the Prophet at its splendour and opulence, to discover that our musings are the same as in the crest of a primeval pine, or on the solitary mound of a prairie ? " The camels are ready — : " Yes, Commander, and so are the Howadji." The sun was nearing the Pyramids, and doubly beautiful in the afternoon, " the delight of the imagination " lay silent before us, a superb slave, compelling our admiration. I lingered and lingered upon the little balcony. " Ha-ha ! " said the donkey-boys beneath, and I leaned over and saw a Hareem trotting along. The camels lay under the trees, and a turbaned group, like the wise men at the manger, in old pictures, awaited our departure with languid curiosity. The Pacha descended the stairs and I followed him, just as the Commander announced for the twelfth time — "The camels are ready."

Chapter II. Departure

The camels lay patiently under the trees before the door, quietly ruminating. Our caravan con sisted of seven, four of which had been loaded and sent forward with their drivers, and were to halt at a village beyond the city, the other three awaited the pleasure of the Howadji and the Commander. If the mystery of the desert had inspired any terror in our minds, surely the Commander presented at that moment ample consolation. For several days before our departure, the astute Mohammad had indulged in stories of desert dan gers, and when he conceived that our minds were sufficiently exercised, he began his overtures for the purchase of swords, guns, pistols, and weapons of all kinds and calibres, to secure us against the perils of the wilderness. The Pacha had brought DEPARTURE. 19 a gun from Malta, and Nero had bequeathed me a pie-knife, of goodly strength and size, which had done admirable execution upon the pigeon-pasties of the Nile, for which the gun had furnished the material.

This was the sum of our arsenal, and in consideration of the fact that we should hardly be attacked by any force whose numbers would not insure victory, it seemed useless to provide more. But the alarmed Commander having testified that there was but one God and that Mohammed was his Prophet, farther testified that one gun and a pie-knife were flagrantly insufficient against the Bedoueen of the desert. The Howadji therefore yielded, and the Commander having increased my store by a pair of English pocket-pistols, gave me a bag of bullets, which I placed at the bottom of my portmanteau, and a box of percussion-caps, which I requested him to carry. So we descended, armed for the desert. The Pacha carried his gun, and I was girded over the shoulder with a strap holding the pistols ; but it was so inconveniently short, that my left arm could hardly hang straight.

We wore upon our heads wide-awakes, or slouched beavers, wreathed with a heavy fold of linen, which " the opulent strangers " had been assured was the work of Persian looms ; and misgiving that the sun would be more formidable than the Bedoueen, I concealed a pair of blue wire-gauze goggles in my pocket. For the rest we differed little from any gentlemen mounting their horses for an evening ride. But the Commander was a spectacle. He was a walking arsenal. The mild Muslim was swathed in steel bandages of cutlasses, knives of various sanguinary devices, and shining tubes of pistols. The belts of these weapons entangled him in crimson network • and even had the scab bards of the swords and daggers not been cased in leather, and inextricably knotted to their handles, so that in no extremity of peril could he ever have drawn a blade, yet he was so burthened and bound that he could neither have "wielded a weapon nor have run away. .

As the latter was the Com mander's great military movement, I was as much perplexed as concerned at his appearance, until I reflected that he would conduct his retreat and escape with his many machines of war upon the back of his camel. I confess a certain degree of satisfaction in the contemplation of this array of defensive appliances. In a sudden crisis it seemed only necessary that all parties should rush upon the Commander, as roused soldiers to their stacks of arms, and DEPARTURE. 21 liberally furnished from his exhaustless stores, give endless battle to any foe. He was a diamond edition of the Turkish army. It were unfair to suppose that he had not adjusted his means to his conscious power, and what onslaughts and carnage were implied in his appearance ! What unsought Marathons and symbolical sieges of Troy were moving, in his awful accoutrements, around the court of Shep herd's Hotel !

Regarding the air of the movement, you would have sworn a union of Ajax and Achilles; looking in the eye, you would have owned Ulysses ; but surveying the surprising whole, nothing less than impregnable Troy and all catapultic Greece had satisfied your fancy. It was time to mount, and the fareAvells must be spoken. You, Nera, have not forgotten that last Cairene afternoon, nor the sorrow that the charmed even ings of the Nile were not to be renewed upon the desert, nor the warm wishes, that, like gentle gales, should waft your barque to Greece. Neither have the Howadji lost from memory the figure that stood in the great sunny door, waving a slow hand of farewell, nor the eyes that looked, not without haziness and tearful mist, towards the uncertainty of the desert. Addio, Nera ! — With the words trembling upon my tongue, and half looking back and muttering last words, I laid my left hand carelessly upon the back of the recumbent camel to throw myself leisurely into the seat.

I had seen camels constantly for two months, and had condemned them as the slowest and most conceited of brutes. I had supposed an elephan tine languor in every motion, and had anticipated a luxurious cradling over the desert in their rocking gait, for to the exoteric eye their movement is imaged by the lazy swell of summer waves. The saddle is a wooden frame, with a small upright stake, both in front and behind. Between these stakes and upon the frame, are laid the blankets, carpets, and other woollen conveniences for riding. Over all is thrown the brilliant Persian rug. The true method of mounting is to grasp the stakes in each hand, and to swing yourself rapidly and suddenly into the seat, while the camel driver — if you are luxurious and timid — holds his foot upon the bent fore-knee of the camel.

Once in the seat you must cling closely, through the three convulsive spasms of rising and righting, two of which jerk you violently forward and one backward. DEPARTURE. 23 This is a very simple mystery. But I was ignorant, and did not observe that no camel driver was at the head of my beast. In fact, I only observed that the great blue cotton umbrella, covered with white cloth, and the two water jugs dangling from the rear stake of my saddle, were a ludicrous combination of luxury and necessity, and ready to mount, I laid my hand as carelessly and leisurely upon the front stake as if my camel had been a cow. But scarcely had my right foot left the earth on its meditative way to the other side of the saddle, than the camel snorted, threw back its head, and sprang up as nimbly as a colt. I, meanwhile, was left dangling with the blue cotton umbrella, and the water jugs at the side, several feet from the ground, and made an abortive grasp at the rear stake.

But I only clutched the luxuries, and down we fell, Howadji, pocket-pistols, umbrella, and water jugs, in a confused heap. The good Commander arrived at the scene as soon as the arsenal permitted, and swore fiercely at the Arabs from the midst of his net-work of weapons. Then, very blandly, he instructed me in the mystery of camel-climbing, and in a few minutes we were on the way to Jerusalem.

Chapter III. Outskirts

With the first swing of the camel, Egypt and the Nile began to recede. With this shuttle the desert was to be woven into the web of my life. To share that moment's feeling, sympathetic reader, you must recall the change of horses at La Storta, the last post to Rome, and gild the sensation with oriental glory. We paced through the outskirts of the city. The streets were narrow and dirty as we approached the gate, although they wound under beautiful lattices, and palms drooped over the roofs. Sore-eyed children played around the houses. Barbers were shaving men who kneeled, and rested their heads in the barber's lap. Flabby women, in draggling coarse veils, and scant filthy garments, loitered by, with trays of thin cakes upon their heads. Through the grated windows of the Mosque we OUTSKIRTS. 25 saw the silent devotee steeped in the red light of the westering sun, and dreaming in his squalid rags, which the sun's golden finger touched into a gorgeous robe, of the Paradise where " the comely of countenance" should, even so, surfeit his lean soul with bliss.

" For thus," says quaint old Burton of the Saracen, " he fats himself with future joys." We rode superior to the scene, upon our lofty camels. They swayed gently along, and occasionally swung their heads and long necks awkwardly aside to peer through the lattices, and suffer their eyes to browse upon hidden beauty, as the " large, calm eyes" of the sea-snake feed upon the mermaid, in Tennyson's poem. The old silence and sadness whose spell I had constantly felt in Cairo, brooded over " the superb town, the holy city," to the last. As we passed out of the gate into the desert, no hope called after us. The suburbs of " the mother of the world" are tombs. In the desert, death beleaguers the city, and you can well fancy that the melancholy genius of the people seeks to propitiate the awful enemy by these stately and solitary buildings, grouped beyond the walls in the sand.