Our first walk in the city was on Sunday to the church of the Presbyterian mission; on our way we threaded a wilderness of bazaars, nearly all of them roofed over, most of them sombre and gloomy. Only in the glaring heat of summer could they be agreeable places of refuge. The roofing of these tortuous streets and lanes is not so much to exclude the sun, I imagine, as to keep out the snow, and the roofs are consequently substantial; for Damascus has an experience of winter, being twenty-two hundred feet above the sea-level, nearly as high as Jerusalem. These bazaars, so much vaunted all through the Orient, disappointed us, not in extent, for they are interminable, but in wanting the picturesqueness, oddity, and richness of those of Cairo. And this, like the general appearance of the city, is a disappointment hard to be borne, for we have been taught to believe that Damascus is a Paradise on earth, and that here, if anywhere, we should come into that region of enchantment which the poets of the Arabian Nights' tales have imposed upon us as the actual Orient. Should we have recognized, in the low and partially flooded strip of grassland through which we drove from the mouth of the Abana gorge to the western gate of the city, the green Merj of the Arabian poets, that gem of the earth? The fame of it has gone abroad throughout the world, as if it were a unique gift of Allah to his favorites. Why, every Occidental land has a million glades, watered, green-sodded, tree-embowered, more lovely than this, that no poet has thought it worth while to celebrate.
We found a little handful of worshippers at the mission church, and among them—Heaven forgive us for looking at her on Sunday!—an eccentric and somewhat notorious English lady of title, who shares the bed and board of an Arab sheykh in his harem outside the walls. It makes me blush for the attractiveness of my own country, and the slighted fascination of the noble red man in his paint and shoddy blanket, when I see a lady, sated with the tame civilization of England, throw herself into the arms of one of these coarse bigamists of the desert. Has he no reputation in the Mother country, our noble, chivalrous Walk-Under-the-Ground?