Chapter XX: Damascus--His Third Consulate (5)

"Nous désirons vous exprimer combien leur conduite est méprisable et inexcusable à nos yeux.

"Nous vous avons connu maintenant plus qu'un an; nous vous avons trouvé toujours prêt à assister la cause chrétienne, sans égard pour les differences de la religion et à nous appuyer quand nous aurions été peut-être traités durement.

"Dans les circumstances actuelles de cette année nous aurions beaucoup d'inquiétude s'il y avait une chance même que vous nous quittiez. Nous espérons que vos bons offices seront continués pour nous dans l'avenir comme dans le passé. Nous vous prions de vous servir de notre regard pour vous comme Consul et ami aussi publiquement que possible.

"Daignez agréer, etc., etc.

"(Signé) L'EVÊQUE MACARIOS, Le Vicaire du Patriarcat à Damas. (L.S.)

"GREGOIR JACOB, Archev. Syrien Catholique de Damas. (L.S.)

"Le Vicaire du Patriarcat Maronite à Damas. (L.S.)

"Le Vicaire du Patriarcat Armenian Catholique à Damas. (L.S.).

"A Monsieur R. F. Burton, Consul de S. M. Britannique à Damas.

"Damas, le 13 Décembre, 1870."

[Sidenote: _Jews._]

To conclude: the effect of their conduct in Damascus will fall upon their own heads, and upon their children. Do not purposely misunderstand me, O Israel! Remember, I do not speak of you disparagingly as a nation, or as a faith. As such I love and admire you; but I pick out your usurers from among you, as the goats from the sheep. You are ancient in birth and religion; you are sometimes handsome, always clever, and in many things you far outstrip us Christians in the race of life. Your sins and your faults are, and have been, equally remarkable from all time. Many of you, in Damascus especially, are as foolish and stiff-necked as in the days of old. When the time comes, and it will come, the trampled worm will turn. The Moslem will rise not really against the Christian--he will only be the excuse--but against you. Your quarter will be the one to be burnt down; your people to be exterminated, and all your innocent tribe will suffer for the few guilty.

A Druze of the Haurán once said to me, "I have the greatest temptation to burn down A----'s house. I should be sent to Istambul in chains, but what of that? I should free my village and my people." I begged of him not to think of such a crime. A sinister smile passed over his face, and he muttered low in his beard, "No, not yet! not yet! Not till the next time. And then not much of the Yahúd will be left when we have done with them." I quote this as a specimen of the ill-feeling bred over the interior of Syria by their over-greed of gain. And I only hope that the powerful Israelite Committees and Societies of London and Paris will--and they can if they will--curb the cupidity of their countrymen in Syria.

[Sidenote: _Omar Bey's Fine Mare--Horse-breeding._]

We were present at a very grand review, where a splendid mare, ridden by Omar Bey, was the centre of attraction, and the newspapers afterwards noticed her in the following manner:--

Cutting from the _Boomerang_.

"Lady Burton mentions a very fine mare which Omar Bey, a Turkish brigadier-general at Damascus, bought from some Arabs after a free fight in the desert. She was so handsome that at a grand review, the only one held while Sir Richard Burton was Consul at Damascus, neither Lady Burton nor her husband could look at anything else. Omar Bey was subsequently ordered to leave the district, and sold the mare for £80, being all she would fetch at the time. It does seem a pity that, in a great horse-breeding country like Australia, there are not men to be found patriotic enough to secure specimens of these famous breeds of antiquity. We have plenty of breeders willing and anxious to secure and continue the breed of the English thoroughbred, but although we are possessed of some of the finest areas in the world for horse-breeding, and in a climate analogous in many respects to Mesopotamia, the original home of the horse, we have unfortunately no one among all those who have amassed wealth who will, either for pleasure or profit, take in hand the formation of a pure Arabian stud. There can be no question that in this country, where feed is not a matter of consideration, the Arabian would grow to a very much larger size."

[Sidenote: _The Holy Land._]

We at last determined to thoroughly do Palestine and the Holy Land, and we went down in an awfully rough sea, in a very tiny and dirty little Egyptian steamer, as far as Jaffa. There were great doubts as to whether we could land, but at last boats were put out, and we got in on the top of a truly alarming surf, shooting through a narrow hole in the rocks just wide enough to admit the boat. The plain of Sharon was looking beautiful--meadows of grass land, wild flowers, cultivation, and orange groves all along our forty mile-ride.

I shall not say much about this pilgrimage, because it is too well known, except that we remained long enough to see and learn everything by heart about every place where our Saviour and His followers ever were in Syria, not only with the Bible and "Tancred," but learning all the legends, and the folklore handed from father to son. I have given a very long account of this in my "Inner Life of Syria" (2 vols., 1875), so that I don't want to repeat it again.

With Richard it was a constant matter for thought whether the sites and the tombs were the correct ones; and the sword of Godfrey de Bouillon and the Crusaders' arms, also those of the Knight Templars, were always of immense interest to him. We visited all the Patriarchs, and principally Monseigneur Valerga, a man of brilliant education, with the _savoir faire_ of the diplomat or courtier, blended with religion. We went through all the ceremonies of _all the numerous religions_ during the Holy Week, the Mohammedan as well as the fourteen Christian sects, and Jewish, of which not the least touching thing is the wailing of the Jews outside the wall of the Temple on Fridays, and the Greek fire on Holy Saturday. A Jewish friend took us in for the Passover. We visited all the country of St. John, Bethlehem, Hebron, where Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Jacob, Rebecca, and Leah are buried; to Mar Saba, where is the Convent of Penitent Monks, in a most wonderful ravine. From there we got down to the Dead Sea, and swam in it, and saw fish. It receives daily seven million tons of water, and has no outlet; but its evaporation forms the desert of salt, called the Ghor, all round its southern shore, which fact Richard compares with Tanganyika. From there we went into Moab; we visited Moses' Tomb on the return journey. At Bethábara we bathed, and brought home bottles of the water of the Jordan; thence we went to Jericho, but we took care to visit every spot where tradition and folklore says our Saviour touched at, _off the tracks_ besides. We encamped on the supposed sites of Sodom and Gomorrah, and so on to Bethel, and Hai, the most ancient site in Palestine, the camping-ground of Abraham, where he and Lot parted and divided their flocks; and we gradually made our way to Nablus, which is the boundary between the Damascus and Jerusalem Consular jurisdictions. We ascended Mount Ebal and Mount Gerízim, and stayed with the Samaritans, who then numbered a hundred and thirty-five. We then went to Samaria, and through the plain of Esdraelon; and we camped at ancient Engannin, where Christ cured the ten lepers. From thence to Scythopolis into the Ghor, and to as many sites of the towns of the Decapolis as we could realize. We went to Naim, and Endor, and Tabor, and Nazareth--at Nazareth we were stoned (a little political manœuvre); thence to Cana. About Nazareth Richard wrote in his private journal--

"I rode down the country by the vile Kunayterah road to Tiberias, where the Jews protected by our Government were complaining that the _Wali_ had taken from them and had sold to the Greek Bishop Nifon, at Nazareth, a cemetery and synagogue, which for the last four hundred years had belonged to their faith, and to visit a few men who held British passports, which ought to have been annually changed, but had through carelessness not been renewed since 1850. For these acts, I was destined to the same honour as my Master, namely, being stoned out of Nazareth; and because I did good to the Jews, they also betrayed me to the Authorities, and asked for my recall."

We went up the Mountain of Precipitation to Hattín, and ascended to Tiberias, the second and the middle sea which feeds the Jordan, and we visited the site of the eight towns so much frequented by our Saviour. From thence we went to Sáfed, which is a very fanatical Jewish Holy City, from which we could see the Jaulán and the Haurán stretching right away into the Arabian desert of the ancient kingdom of Báshan; and from here we again made our way to the plain of Huleh, which we remember of old, and the Waters of Merom, where we camped before under difficulties, and so nearly got a bad fever. This time it was black from a recent prairie fire. The best amusement on these occasions is to laugh at one another's miserable, unrecognizable faces, all swollen with bites and stings, like the face one sees in a spoon. After a lot of other places, we got back to Birket er Ram or Lake Phiala, which I remember saying a while ago we determined to revisit. Richard found something that excited his attention about it, so we emptied the water out of all our goat-skins, blew them up with air, strapped them to our camp-table, made a raft, and used the tent-poles for oars. It is supposed to have no bottom, is six hundred yards broad, and about nine hundred wide. We sounded with the lead, and the deepest part proved to be seventeen feet and a half. It has a weed bottom and leeches below, no shells; but the air began to whistle out of the skins, and Richard and Charley Drake only just got back in time to save themselves a swim.

Whilst at Jerusalem and its environs Richard did two very graceful things. He saw a monk conducting a party of Catholics, who wanted to say prayers in the Sepulchre itself at three o'clock on Good Friday. It was invaded by the usual class of tourists. The monk shrunk back with his people, and the particular time for these prayers was slipping away. Richard stepped forward, and, touching his cap, said, "What is the matter, Father?" He said, "The Sepulchre is full of tourists, who are not Catholics. We have no right to turn them out, and we don't like to push in and begin our devotions." Richard said, "Leave that to me." He went in and explained to them, and they came out. Richard then passed the monk and his party in, and he stood guard himself outside the whole time they performed their devotion, and would not let any one pass. These little acts used to win him the heart of everybody.

Another day we were riding in rather a desert place about a mile from a small village; we met a solitary priest and his acolyte. I was about to ride up to speak to him, when he gave me the sign--I mean the sign the priest gives you when he is secretly carrying the Blessed Sacrament. I told it to Richard, who ordered his men to draw up in two lines for the priest to pass through and salute. He jumped down from his own horse, and offered it to the priest, asking to accompany him. The priest declined it, but he blessed him as he passed. I always thought of this afterwards in Austria, when I saw the large picture in the Palace at Innsbrück, of Rudolph the Second of Hapsburg doing the same thing.

At Jerusalem we explored the Mágharat el Kotn; these are enormous quarries, also called the Royal Caverns. The entrance looks like a hole in the wall outside the town, not far from the Gate of Damascus. Creeping in, you find yourself in endless caves and galleries unexplored. We used to use magnesium fusees, and take plenty of ropes to have a clue.

[1] "We were living at the foot of the eastern spur of the Anti-Libanus, upon whose south-eastern slopes lies the large northern suburb of Damascus, El Salahíyyah ('of the Saints'), facetiously changed on account of its Kurdish population into El Talahíyyah ('of the Sinners'). Our friend Bedr Beg was its Chief."--R. F. B.

[2] If any one wants dragomans, let them give preference above all to Melhem Wardi, of Beyrout, and consult his brother Antun.

[3] This was written at the time when the report of Lady Ellenborough's death was generally believed to be true.

[4] Ah, what a beautiful life it would have been!--I. B.

[5] The cave near Affka forms the Orontes, the Jura sends forth the Bárada of Damascus, and Lake Phiala Josephus makes the highest water of the Jordan.

[6] I was not well, and was left at home.--I. B.

[7] This answers something to the Karst above Trieste.

[8] "This is a term used at Damascus to the northern offsets; these are the southern."

[9] Lines by a West African poet.

[10] Most of these descriptive scientific journeys are more for geographers and antiquaries.

[11] Now sixty-four years in 1893.

[12] Now, in 1893, the Sassoons, the Oppenheims, and Bischofheims.

[13] Although a staunch Catholic, I was an ardent disciple of Mr. Disraeli--I do not mean Mr. Disraeli as Prime Minister of England, but the author of "Tancred." I read the book as a young girl in my father's house, and it inspired me with all the ideas, and the yearning for a wild Oriental life, which I have since been able to carry out. I passed two years of my early life, when emerging from the school-room, in my father's garden, and the beautiful woods around us, alone with "Tancred." My family were pained and anxious about me--thought me odd; wished I would play the piano, do worsted work, write notes, read the circulating library--in short, what is generally called improving one's mind; and I was pained because I could not. My uncle used to pat my head, and "hope for better things." I did not know it then, I do now: I was working out the problem of my future life, my after mission. It lived in my saddle-pocket throughout my Eastern life. I almost know it by heart, so that when I came to Bethany, to the Lebanon, and to Mukhtár--when I found myself in a Bedawi camp, or amongst the Maronite and Druze strongholds, or in the society of Fakredeens--nothing surprised me. I felt as if I had lived that life for years. I felt that I went to the tomb of my Redeemer in the proper spirit, and I found what I sought. The presence of God was actually felt, though invisible. The author possesses by descent a knowledge that we Northerners lack (a high privilege reserved to his Semitic blood).--I. B.