Assuming that Damascus has this positive old age, how old is it comparatively? When we regard it in this light, we are obliged to confess that it is a modern city. When Uz and his friends wandered out of the prolific East, and pitched their tents by the Abana, there was already on the banks of the Nile a civilized, polished race, which had nearly completed a cycle of national existence much longer than the duration of the Roman Empire. It was about the eleventh dynasty of the Egyptian kingdom, the Great Pyramid had been built more than a thousand years, and the already degenerate Egyptians of the “Old Empire” had forgotten the noble art which adorned and still renders illustrious the reigns of the pyramid-builders..
But if Damascus cannot claim the highest antiquity, it has outlived all its rivals on the earth, and has flourished in a freshness as perennial as the fountain to which it owes its life, through all the revolutions of the Orient. As a necessary commercial capital it has pursued a pretty uniform tenor under all its various masters. Tiglath-Pileser attempted to destroy it; it was a Babylonian and then a Persian satrapy for centuries; it was a Greek city; it was the capital of a Roman province for seven hundred years; it was a Christian city and reared a great temple to John the Baptist; it was the capital of the Saracenic Empire, in which resided the ruler who gave laws to all the lands from India to Spain; it was ravaged by Tamerlane; it now suffers the blight of Turkish imbecility. From of old it was a caravan station and a mart of exchange, a camp by a stream; it is to-day a commercial hive, swarming with an hundred and fifty thousand people, a city without monuments of its past or ambition for its future.
If one could see Damascus, perhaps he could invent a phrase that would describe it; but when you have groped and stumbled about in it for a couple of weeks, endeavoring in vain to get a view of more than a few rods of it at a time, you are utterly at a loss how to convey an impression of it to others.
If Egypt is the gift of the Nile, the river Abana is the life of Damascus; its water is carried into the city on a dozen different levels, making it literally one of fountains and running water. Sometimes the town is flooded; the water had only just subsided from the hotel when we arrived. This inundation makes the city damp for a long time. Indeed, it is at all times rather soaked with water, and is—with all respect to Uz and Abraham and the dynasty of the Omeiyades—a sort of habitable frog-pond on a grand scale. At night the noise of frogs, even at our hotel, is the chief music, the gentle twilight song, broken, it is true, by the incessant howling and yelping of savage dogs, packs of which roam the city like wolves all night. They are mangy yellow curs, without a single good quality, except that they sleep all the daytime. In every quarter of the city you see ranks and rows of them asleep in the sun, occupying half the street and nestling in all the heaps of rubbish. But much as has been said of the dogs here, I think the frogs are the feature of the town; they are as numerous as in the marshes of Ravenna.