Damascus is an oval town divided into two unequal portions, the largest to the south, by the river Barada (the ancient Abana). The houses appear to be principally of mud, or sun-dried brick, with wooden frames; but the public buildings and better private dwellings are of stone. The bazaars form the heart of the town, and ramify in various directions. To Europeans there is something very curious in the collection of fifty or sixty small shops, in one street, all selling the same article. Thus, from the meat-market one strolls into a long, covered lane, where red and yellow slippers are sold; thence into the fragrant scent bazaar, or to the grimy silversmiths' smithies, or to the long rows of shops where silks and embroidered stuffs are sold. Each salesman sits calmly, on the raised floor of the little pigeon-hole, surrounded by shelves on which his goods are packed, smoking his V-shaped water-pipe, or engaged in prayer, and apparently quite indifferent as to custom.
The bazaars are delightfully cool and shady, and the absence of wheeled vehicles makes them very quiet. They are very narrow, and consequently much crowded. Huge camels, loaded with firewood, come rolling by, and oblige you to crouch against the wall to avoid the sweep of the load. Ladies in long veils, white, or checked with blue with embroidered edges, walk by in yellow knee-boots, or slippers with a sort of thick-soled leather golosh drawn over them. Some are mounted on the white donkeys, which have a thick protuberance to the two sides of their necks--a sort of fold running sometimes all along the back. The saddles on which they are perched aloft, with their feet in front over the animal's neck, are of red morocco and velvet.
The peasants wear blue, baggy trousers, gathered in at the knee. The Maronite women, with rich apple-red cheeks, have a black band bound over the forehead. Among these the fierce Bedawin are mingled, dark and dusky in complexion, gaunt and stealthy in mien. The broad-shouldered and moustachioed Kurds are again quite distinct, and contrast with the ghastly faces and weakly figures of the townsmen born--the fanatical Softas and Ulema, in their long pale gabardines and scanty white turbans, incarnations of narrow bigotry and ignorant hate. The bazaar is roofed in, with openings at intervals, and the ever-changing crowd is dimly visible in the shadow, or lit up by a beam of sunlight from the roof.