No city has been more variously described than Damascus, because none has more contrasted features. A spruce Yankee, hearing “Silk Buckingham’s” description of his “Paradise,” and seeing merely narrow, half-paved, mat-covered streets, and dirty, mud-walled buildings, would prefer his native “Slabtown” to the “most refreshing scene in all our travels.” 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.

In antiquity it has no rival. Nineveh, Babylon, Palmyra, its contemporaries, have wholly perished; while this oldest inhabited place has lost none of its population, yielded none of its local preËminence, abandoned but one of the arts for which it was so renowned, and taken not a tinge of European thought, worship, life. It numbers not far from one hundred and fifty thousand souls, of whom twenty thousand may be Greek and Armenian Christians. It lies in an exquisite garden at the foot of Anti-Lebanon, in a plain of inexhaustible fertility, watered by innumerable brooklets from those ancient streams “Abana and Pharphar,” and shut in by vast groves of walnut and poplar, a “verdurous wall of Paradise,” which are all that the traveller sees for hours as he draws near the city of “Abraham’s steward.”

Originally the seat of a renowned kingdom, and once the capital of the Saracen empire, it is now the centre of an Ottoman Pashalik, but virtually the metropolis of Syria, as it was in the earliest time. Miss Martineau and some others carelessly give it a length of seven miles; but the real extent of the city-walls in any one direction is not more than two. The gardens and groves around, however, take the same name, and are over twenty miles in circuit, of a studied, picturesque wildness, shaded lanes, running side by side with merry brooks, the whole overshadowed by the deepest forest, and forming delicious relief from the sunburnt plains of Syria. Besides the walnut, so much prized for its fruit all through the East, and the poplar, the main dependence for building, the famous damson, or Damascene plum, abounds the citron, orange, and pomegranate spread their fruit around the vine is everywhere seen, and only three miles off stands the forest of damask rose-trees whence the most delicious attar is made. But a genuine American will prefer the walnut-tree to all others, because of its freedom of growth, massiveness of trunk, depth of shade, and impressive reminiscence of home. These trees, together with the mulberry, do very much for the commerce of the city. But, indeed, Damascus is the chief depot of manufactures for Syria. Silk goods cannot be bought to such advantage elsewhere, nor of such antique patterns, nor of genuine “damask” colors. The business has suffered somewhat of late, because Turkish husbands discovering that English prints are so much cheaper, and their wives fancying the flowing calicoes to be so much prettier than the patterns which their grandmothers wore, foreign goods are supplanting the domestic; and a macadamized road is contemplated from the city to its seaport Beiroot, whose effect would be to make British and French manufactures still more common, but, at the same time, to give free circulation to the handicraft of Damascus. As at Constantinople, Cairo, and elsewhere, each trade occupies its own quarter, the jewellers, pipe-makers, silk-dealers, grocers, saddlers, having each their exclusive neighborhood; none of the Bazars are such noble edifices as cluster around the mosque of St. Sophia; and in the rainy season (that is, during their winter) the pavement is so wretched and slippery, and such a mass of mud and water oozes down from the rotten awnings, that one does no justice to the unequalled richness of some of the fabrics and the grandeur of some of the khans. One traveller informs the public that there is a grand “Bazar for wholesale business” of variegated black and white marble, “surmounted by an ample dome,” with a lively fountain in the centre. There are thirty-one such buildings, which we should call Exchanges, bearing each the name of the Sultan who erected them. Those that I visited were contiguous to the only street which wears a name in the East, and that name, familiar to us in the book of Acts, “Strait,” Dritto, as your guide mumbles the word, a long avenue containing the only hotel in the city.

An oriental peculiarity which makes the large towns exceedingly interesting is, that every occupation is carried on out of doors, and right under your eyes as you stroll along. Here the silk web is stretched upon the outside wall of some extended building; here the butcher is dressing the meat, perhaps for your dinner, right upon the sidewalk; and here a sort of extempore sausage is cooking, so that one might almost eat it as he walks, a capital idea for hasty eaters, and a very nice article in its way. There is no other part of the world where so much cooking is to be seen all the while, and such loads of sweetmeats gladden the eyes of childhood, and such luscious compounds, scented with attar, spread temptation before every sense. The business of “El-Shans” might almost be headed by the five hundred public bakers, though the silk is still the principal manufacture, and there are reported to be seven hundred and forty-eight dealers in damask, thirty-four silk-winders, one hundred silk dyers, and one hundred and forty-three weavers of the same article.

The famous Damascus blades are nothing but an “antiquity” now,—they are uniformly called so by the people, were offered to our purchase in very small quantities by persons who knew nothing of their manufacture, at exorbitant prices, and in very uncouth forms. They appeared to be curiosities to them, as they certainly were to us, and are said to be sometimes manufactured in England. A mace, offered for sale among these scimetars of wavy steel, smacked of the Crusaders’ time, and was richly inlaid with gold; the fire-arms, or blunderbusses, were grotesque and unwieldy, richly mounted, and gorgeously ornamented.

An attempt is making in certain quarters to persuade the civilized world that Turkey has still some military power. Of this almost imperial city the citadel is but a mass of ruins. Count Guyon, a confederate general with Kossuth, and now a Turkish Pasha and drill-officer, assured us it would be repaired and strengthened; but the city-walls offer no defence against a modern army; and the Turkish soldier, notwithstanding his courage and endurance, cannot be bastinadoed into military science; neither have educated Christian officers, like Guyon, any real influence. I frequently saw the sentinels asleep while upon duty, and recent experience has proved them incapable of standing before a far smaller amount of really trained troops. Some of the barracks at Damascus are rather the finest which the Sultan possesses, and among the best in the world,—some, too, of the military exercises are pursued with a creditable zeal,—but, on the whole, a more slatternly corps of men was never seen, nor one less confident in themselves.

The christian curiosities of this oldest of inhabited cities, begin with the mosque of peculiar sanctity, once the site of St. John’s Cathedral, whose chamber of relics, containing a pretended head of the Baptist, is inaccessible even to Mussulmen, the priesthood excepted. Six huge Corinthian columns, once a part of its proud portico, are built into houses and stores, so that you get but faint glimpses of their beauty and size until you mount the flat mud-roof of the modern buildings and look down into the vast area of the temple, six hundred and fifty-feet by one hundred and fifty; and there find towering above you these massive, blackened remains of Christian architecture,—significant emblems of the triumph of the Crescent over the Cross,—and yet by their imperishableness a promise of renewed glory in some brighter future. That Islamism is hastening to decay is shown impressively enough in the grand dervish mosque and khan, once quite celebrated as the Syrian enthronement of this advanced guard of Mohammed; now nothing could seem more deserted, one minaret is threatening to fall, the spacious garden is all weed-grown, and few are left to mourn over the reverse: these banner-men of the prophet, no longer warriors, students, and apostles, do but beg their bread and drone their prayers, and exchange the reputation of fanatics for that of hypocrites; they are in fact monks of the mosque, like their brothers in celibacy, changing sadly enough from enthusiasm to formality, from the fervor of first love to the grave-like chillness of an exhausted ritual.

St. Paul is of course the great name at Damascus; and your dragoman is very certain always as to the place where he was lowered down the city-wall; then he takes you to the tomb of the soldier who befriended him, close at hand, and to the little underground chapel where the Apostle’s sight was restored. But having passed in turn under the sceptre of Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Jew, Roman, Arabian, Turk, every stone of these buildings could tell a most interesting tale, and every timber of the wall could answer with an experience corresponding to the out-door revolution.

But the grand attractions in this “Flower of the Levant and Florence of Turkey” are the coffee-houses, and the palaces of the rich. The writer of Eothen, I think it is, says, “there is one coffee-house at Damascus capable of containing a hundred persons:” a Damascus friend, a resident clergyman, carried me into one where he had himself seen, three thousand people on a gala-day, and several where hundreds of visitors would not make a crowd. This great necessity of Turkish life, this deliverance from the loneliness of an oriental home, this luxurious substitute for the daily newspaper, is carried to perfection here. First of all, comes the lofty dome-covered hall, surrounded by couches like beds, enlivened on all festivals by the Arabian Improvisator with his song and his tale; back of this are a number of rude arbors interlaced with noble shade-trees, and watered profusely by nimble brooks, the whole lighted every night by little pale lamps. These are the gossiping places for the Damascene gentlemen; where the fragrant tchÉbouque, the cool narghilch, or water-pipe, the delicious coffee, the indolent game at dominos, (I never saw chess played at the east,) is relieved by such domestic anecdotes as, according to my American friend, brand the domestic life of the city with beastly sensuality.

One would fain hope that these are the prejudices of an earnest missionary,—but until the residence of years had given familiarity with the language, any opinions of a visitor would be erroneous as well as presuming. Nothing, however, can bring back so powerfully the Arabian tales of enchantment as the interior of the wealthier Damascus houses. The outside is always mean and forbidding. You have sometimes to stoop under the rude, low gate; and the first court, surrounded only by servants’ rooms, has nothing of interest. But the second and third quadrangles become more and more spacious, and are always of variegated marble, containing a perpetually playing fountain, overhung by the orange, the citron, and the vine, whose fragrance floats dreamily on the moist air, lulling the senses to repose. The grand saloon I found to be always arranged pretty much the same. A lower part of the pavement near the door, is the place of deposit for slippers, shoes, and the pattens which Damascus women use so much in the winter, articles all of them never intended for ornament, and never fitted to the foot, but worn as loose as possible, and never within the sitting-room, but simply as a protection from out-door wet and soil. The lower portion of the room and its rug-strewn floor are of variegated marbles, then comes curiously carved woods, then painted stucco, decorated with mirrors rising to the distant gay-colored roof. The immense loftiness, the moist coolness, the gorgeous hues, the emblazoned texts from the Koran, the sweet murmur of the various fountains, the fragrance of the orange groves, succeed to the out-door dreariness like a dream of Haroun Al Raschid to the wearied pilgrim on desert sands. The divan, or wide sofa, on three sides of this hall, is far more agreeable in this enervating climate than any European furniture; only, in winter, as the ground underneath is permeated by leaky clay tubes bearing the waters of the Barrady, and there is no other heating apparatus save a brazer of charcoal, one is sometimes very chilly, and is tempted to exchange this tomblike dampness for a cozy corner near some friendly stove or familiar fire-place.But the general impression which unintelligent strangers carries from Damascus is, that the people have what they want, and have gone wisely to work to realize their idea of earthly blessedness,—an indolent, sensual, dreamy one to you, but in their eyes no faint type of the Mussulman’s heaven.

Cambridge, Mass.