“Syria!” says Francis, somewhat surprised.
“Syria,” I agree, “where is everybody?” “Gone”.
“Gone. But gone where?”
“Israeli bomb,” he replies, gesturing an explosion with his cheeks and hands. But I don’t think so. There’s no record of bombing near Sirghaya in accounts of the 2006 war. One thing is for sure, we are indeed in Syria, but without an entry stamp we can’t get an exit stamp. We need to backtrack towards Baalbek, then head east to Menaa and do it properly. Leaning through the car windows half a dozen smiling, well cared for Syrian children hustle baksheesh, alternating between looks of hunger when we look at them and happiness when we don’t. Francis is enjoying it too and gives one of the girls a thousand Lebanese lire note - less than a pound, a euro or a dollar and they all shriek in delight. I do the same, more shrieks, more delight. Francis pulls away slowly, smiles and shrieks all round, and we head north through the dust back into terra recognita.
***
Before reaching Damascus, by now early on the Saturday evening, a thoroughly out of sorts Twain and the caravanserai stopped at Mohammed’s Lookout Perch. This in on the final hill as one approaches Damascus from the north. The legend is, and legend it is, that when the Prophet Mohammed... well, best let Mark Twain tell the tale: “when Mahomet was a simple camel-driver he reached this point and looked down upon Damascus for the first time, and then made a certain renowned remark. He said man could enter only one paradise; he preferred to go to the one above. So he sat down there and feasted his eyes upon the earthly paradise of Damascus, and then went away without entering its gates. They have erected a tower on the hill to mark the spot where he stood.”
***
They have, but unfortunately they have now also sealed it off and made it into a no-go area with razor wire and guards. Francis thought it was because the Israelis had tried to vandalize it “many years ago”; it was needed for protection “from Islam’s enemies, against the Muslims’ most sacred site.” Of course the prophet had never actually ventured this far north, and an even better view of Damascus is on the higher hill just behind it. We drive up to enjoy the vista and not to enjoy a particularly stagnant Turkish coffee.
What is so striking about the view - and it is a spectacular scene laid out across the valley below - is how little Damascus has grown from Mark Twain’s time. Unlike his three most recently visited cities, Athens, Istanbul or Beirut, the size of Damascus has expanded rather than exploded. One can clearly see the Old City east of the center, that walled-in part of Damascus that was the entire city until the early twentieth century, and see how the New City has blossomed around it. Blossomed comes to mind because it is remarkably green, much greener from on high than from in its midst. Even the exhausted and thoroughly jaundiced Twain couldn’t help agreeing that from above “Damascus is beautiful from the mountain. It is beautiful even to foreigners accustomed to luxuriant vegetation, and I can easily under- stand how unspeakably beautiful it must be to eyes that are only used to the God-forsaken barrenness and desolation of Syria. I should think a Syrian would go wild with ecstasy when such a picture bursts upon him for the first time. And when you think of the leagues of blighted, blasted, sandy, rocky, sun-burnt, ugly, dreary, infamous country you have ridden over to get here, you think it is the most beautiful, beautiful picture that ever human eyes rested upon in all the broad universe!”
Later, having spent two days there, he added a typical Twain “snapper”: “If I were to go to Damascus again, I would camp on Mahomet’s hill about a week, and then go away. There is no need to go inside the walls. The Prophet was wise without knowing it when he decided not to go down into the paradise of Damascus.”
***
But that Saturday night, 14 September 1867, with the untapped Sabbath intact, they left Mohammed’s Perch and entered the city through the Bab-as- Salaam, the Gate of Welcome. They were now not only in the walled city but in the Christian Quarter, each quarter having its own locked gates at night. It was exotic enough to cheer Mark Twain up a bit: “There are no street lamps there, and the law compels all who go abroad at night to carry lanterns, just as was the case in old days, when heroes and heroines of the Arabian Nights walked the streets of Damascus, or flew away toward Baghdad on enchanted carpets. At last we got to where lanterns could be seen flitting about here and there, and knew we were in the midst of the curious old city.”
They had arrived - exhausted, depleted, out of sorts, saddle sore, the New Pilgrims feeling saintly, Mark Twain feeling pain and Paine, but in spite of it all firmly in Damascus.
4 The French are the connecting link between man and the monkey. Whatever is trivial to another man is important to a Frenchman. It is this that makes the French the most artificially polite society. Notes & Journals
5 Man is kind enough when he is not excited by religion. A Horse’s Tale
6 What God lacks is convictions - stability of character. He ought to be a Presbyterian or a Catholic or something, - not try to be everything. Mark Twain’s Notebook
7 Camels are not beautiful. They have immense, flat, forked cushions of feet, that make a track in the dust like a pie with a slice cut out of it. They are not particular about their diet. They would eat a tombstone if they could bite it. A thistle grows about here which has needles on it that would pierce through leather, I think; if one touches you, you can find relief in nothing but profanity. The camels eat these. marktwainquotes.com
8 In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language. The Innocents Abroad
9 Nobody but a farmer could have designed such a thing, for such a purpose. Mark Twain’s Notebook
10 The two Testaments are interesting, each in its own way. The Old one gives us a picture of these people’s Deity as he was before he got religion, the other one gives us a picture of him as he appeared afterward. Letters from the Earth
11 Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime. Innocents Abroad
12 I cannot see how a man of any large degree of humorous perception can ever be religious - except he purposely shut the eyes of his mind and keep the, shut by force. Notes & Journals
13 Man was made at the end of the week’s work when God was tired. Mark Twain’s Notebook
3: Damascus
If you were to read the Lonely Planet guide to Syria and Lebanon, you will find the Damascus chapter opens with this Mark Twain quote:
“... no recorded event has occurred in the world but Damascus was in existence to receive the news of it. Go back as far as you will into the vague past, there was always a Damascus... She has looked upon the dry bones of a thousand empires, and will see the tombs of a thousand more before she dies.”
The full paragraph sees Twain in full flow and is worth repeating:
Damascus dates back anterior to the days of Abraham, and is the oldest city in the world. It was founded by Uz, the grandson of Noah. “The early history of Damascus is shrouded in the mists of a hoary antiquity.” Leave the matters written of in the first eleven chapters of the Old Testament out, and no recorded event has occurred in the world but Damascus was in existence to receive the news of it. Go back as far as you will into the vague past, there was always a Damascus. In the writings of every century for more than four thousand years, its name has been mentioned and its praises sung. To Damascus, years are only moments, decades are only flitting trifles of time. She measures time, not by days and months and years, but by the empires she has seen rise, and prosper and crumble to ruin. She is a type of immortality. She saw the foun
dations of Baalbec, and Thebes, and Ephesus laid; she saw these villages grow into mighty cities, and amaze the world with their grandeur - and she has lived to see them desolate, deserted, and given over to the owls and the bats. She saw the Israelitish empire exalted, and she saw it annihilated. She saw Greece rise, and flourish two thousand years, and die. In her old age she saw Rome built; she saw it overshadow the world with its power; she saw it perish. The few hundreds of years of Genoese and Venetian might and splendor were, to grave old Damascus, only a trifling scintillation hardly worth remembering. Damascus has seen all that has ever occurred on earth, and still she lives. She has looked upon the dry bones of a thousand empires, and will see the tombs of a thousand more before she dies. Though another claims the name, old Damascus is by right the Eternal City.
There is no way of knowing exactly where the eight Excursionists stayed in Damascus but trying to track it down is a fine way to explore the nooks and crannies that make up the timeless Old City. We have a few clues. It must have been in the Christian Quarter and near one of the northern gates. Then there are Mark Twain’s own clues: “In a little narrow street, crowded with our pack- mules and with a swarm of uncouth Arabs, we alighted, and through a kind of a hole in the wall entered the hotel” - that one not too helpful as every house starts with a “hole in the wall”. Then he says: “We stood in a great flagged court, with flowers and citron trees about us, and a huge tank in the center that was receiving the waters of many pipes. We crossed the court and entered the rooms prepared to receive us” - that narrows it down to three hotels extant in the Christian Quarter, then we have: “In a large marble-paved recess between the two rooms was a tank of clear, cool water” - we are down to just two now, then we learn: “Our rooms were large, comfortably furnished, and even had their floors clothed with soft, cheerful-tinted carpets. There were great looking-glasses and marble-top tables.” Found it! At least an identical one: the Hotel Dar Al-Yasmin. Luckily they have a double room for a couple of weeks, and I retrieve our bags and books from Seif & Shety’s Internet Café in a “cramped and crooked lane” nearby and set up shop in the Dar Al-Yasmin, Old City, Damascus.
The exhausted Excursionists bathed and dined and then lay on the divans and smoked narghiles.
I was wondering how long it would take Mark Twain to get stuck into the narghiles, the long piped hubble-bubble, or hookah smoked throughout Greater Syria then and now; in fact now more than ever. I pick one up myself after dinner that night too.
The ceremony attached to smoking a narghile is as important as the smoking itself. First, they bring you a menu. The tobacco has three grades of strength and is then subdivided into flavors. The flavors are all fruit-based and there are as many flavors as there are fruits, but the most common are apple, grape, date and pear. Mango is fashionable just now. I chose grape. (I suspect Mark Twain would have chosen apple - just a hunch.) Next the contraption arrives and is set down beside the table and the bowl of tobacco, a chillum the size of a small coffee cup, is placed on top of the water bottle.
Next a heavy-duty perforated aluminum foil is stretched over the bowl. Now a stoker-wallah comes by swinging a low-slung brazier full of hot charcoal, swinging it to keep the charcoal well breezed and glowing hot. He then puts three bits of the charcoal on top of the foil and puffs up a mighty fug. Lastly he takes off his own mouthpiece, inserts a new one and hands you the pipe.
You draw on the pipe. Nothing happens. Late at night in full party mode I occasionally borrow a Marlboro Lite; one just has to look at one of those and it’s up and running. The narghile is no Marlboro Lite and needs some serious suction to produce even a haze of smoke. There is enough in the bowl to last an hour, and as the tobacco wears down and your technique improves you are soon puffing away like a good old steam engine. The water is hubbling and bubbling, the tobacco is cool, the fruit is just on the tongue and the feeling of being an eastern potentate is there for the taking.
I am in the company of a practiced and expert smoker. “What I do know is all about smoking. I began to smoke immoderately when I was eight years old - that is, I began with one hundred cigars a month, and by the time I was twenty I had increased my allowance to two hundred a month. Now I’m thirty, I have increased it to three hundred a month.”
Twain didn’t believe in spending good money on good cigars: “With cigars I judge by the price only; if it costs above five cents, I know it to be either foreign or unsmokable.” He wasn’t too fussy about the make either: “I do not know what the brand of the cigar was. It was probably not choice, or the previous smoker would not have thrown it away so soon.” He did, however, like to smoke modestly: “I have made it a rule never to smoke more than one cigar at a time. I never smoke when asleep and never refrain when awake.”
But for now, this evening in Damascus, he wrote, “After the dreadful ride of the day, I know now what I have sometimes known before - that it is worth-while to get tired out, because one so enjoys resting afterward.”
***
The next morning, the famous Sabbath that had been the Excursionists’ target, Mark Twain went on strike. In his notebook he wrote: “4 AM Damascus. Taken very sick.” In his Daily Alta California article he wrote: “I lay prostrate with a violent attack of cholera, or cholera morbus, and therefore had a good chance and a good excuse to lie there on that wide divan and take an honest rest. I had nothing to do but listen to the pattering of the fountains and take medicine and throw it up again. It was dangerous recreation, but it was pleasanter than traveling in Syria. I enjoyed myself very well. Syrian travel has its interesting features, like travel in any other part of the world, and yet to break your leg or have the cholera adds a welcome variety to it.”
***
I suspect he had nothing of the sort, and certainly not cholera, or he’d hardly have been able to jump out of bed the next morning. Methinks that the prospect of a day of church-going with the New Pilgrims in the rabidly religious hothouse that was Damascus was the last thing on his mind. I reckon he said to himself: “Sam, my boy, you’ve ridden yourself and your beasts half to death to get here by the Sabbath, and if these religious maniacs want to scour the Christian quarter for their new mission and pray14 there all Sunday morning and debate there all Sunday afternoon then they are on their own. It’s the long divan, a smooth narghile and some running water for me today.” Mark Twain makes no mention of the New Pilgrims’ churchgoing that Sunday - he was after all supposed to be hors de combat - but it’s impossible not to believe they did not visit the Presbyterian church that had opened just two streets away the year before. It’s almost as impossible to believe that there actually was a new Presbyterian church that had opened a year before considering the horrific Christian massacres that had occurred right there only five years before it opened. Mark Twain touched on the massacre when he wrote: “five thousand Christians were massacred in Damascus in 1860 by the Turks. They say those narrow streets ran blood for several days, and that men, women and children were butchered indiscriminately and left to rot by hundreds all through the Christian quarter; they say, further, that the stench was dreadful. All the Christians who could get away fled from the city, and the Mohammedans would not defile their hands by burying the ‘infidel dogs’. The thirst for blood extended to the high lands of Hermon and Anti-Lebanon, and in a short time twenty-five thousand more Christians were massacred and their possessions laid waste. How they hate a Christian in Damascus! – and pretty much all over Turkeydom as well.”
Whole books, whole shelves, have been written about the Christian massacres in Greater Syria. In a paragraph we can see the bare bones of how resentment spread from slow burn to fast flash: the Ottoman Empire was in advanced decline and treated its Syrian subjects as tax fodder and serfs, albeit fellow Muslim serfs; the European powers were snapping around the Greater Syrian edges, France favoring the trading Maronite Christians, Britain as France’s enemy favoring the Maronites’ enemy, the Druze; the C
hristians were better educated and more worldly than the Koran-restricted Muslims; the Christians therefore held Ottoman administration positions, causing further resentment; an attempt to divide what would become Lebanon into Christian and Druze areas backfired as both sides felt cheated; low level bloodshed started; at British and French prompting the Ottomans introduced religious reforms, further provoking the Muslims; when the Ottomans overlaid a new army surplus tax on the Syrians the Christians refused to pay on the grounds of non-conscription but still collected the Muslims’ tax; the Syrian Muslim army began to mutiny against the Christian quislings; the Ottoman Muslim army looked on, detached; false rumors that France and Britain were about to invade Turkey inflamed the Muslim mob; some Turkish troops were withdrawn to defend the homeland, leaving Syrian Muslim soldiers somewhat in control; meanwhile in Beirut Maronite mavericks had shot dead three Druze at prayer; the Druze retaliating ferociously: the massacres had begun; news of the massacres and the Turkish soldiers’ detachment spread to Damascus; a blood stained Druze mob arrived in Damascus; the Turkish mayor arrested angry young Muslims for incitement; the mob became even more highly charged, forcibly released the arrested youths and went on the rampage. Thus the Damascus massacre had started. The only good news is that it did not spread to the neighboring Jewish quarter, largely because the Jews had paid their taxes and were seen to be self-contained - and as far as the Muslims were concerned had merely condemned a prophet and not murdered the Saviour.
Innocence and War Page 10