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 advance guard of Mahommed; 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 fervour 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 arbours, 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 coal narghilch, or water-pipe, the delicious coffee, the indolent game at dominoes (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.