" added my informer, "how handsome
she looked!"

Having visited Uriconium, the English Pompeii, the Burtons made for
Vichy, where they met Mr. Swinburne, (Sir) Frederick Leighton and Mrs.
Sartoris. His companions on this journey, as on so many others, were two
books--one being the anodynous Camoens, the other a volume consisting of
the Bible, Shakespeare and Euclid bound together, which looked, with its
three large clasps, like a congested Church Service. Mrs. Burton then
returned to England "to pay and pack," while Burton, "being ignorant" as
they say in the Nights, "of what lurked for him in the secret purpose
of God," proceeded to Damascus, with two bull-terriers, descendants, no
doubt, of the Oxford beauty.

57. 3rd Consulate, Damascus.

Mrs. Burton followed in December, with her entire fortune--a modest L300
in gold, and life promised to be all labdanum. Disliking the houses in
Damascus itself, the Burtons took one in the suburb El Salahiyyah; and
here for two years they lived among white domes and tapering minarets,
palms and apricot trees. Midmost the court, with its orange and lemon
trees, fell all day the cool waters of a fountain. The principal
apartments were the reception room, furnished with rich Eastern webs,
and a large dining room, while a terrace forming part of the upper
storey served as "a pleasant housetop in the cool evenings." The garden,
with its roses, jessamine, vines, citron, orange and lemon trees,
extended to that ancient river, the jewel-blue Chyrsorrhoa. There was
excellent stabling, and Mrs. Burton kept horses, donkeys, a camel,
turkeys, bull-terriers, street dogs, ducks, leopards, lambs, pigeons,
goats, and, to use Burton's favourite expression, "other notions." They
required much patient training, but the result was satisfactory, for
when most of them had eaten one another they became a really harmonious
family.

If Mrs. Burton went abroad to the bazaar or elsewhere she was
accompanied by four Kawwasses in full dress of scarlet and gold, and on
her reception day these gorgeous attendants kept guard. Her visitors
sat on the divans cross-legged or not according to their nation, smoked,
drank sherbet and coffee, and ate sweetmeats.

For Ra'shid Pasha, the Wali or Governor-General of Syria, both Burton
and his wife conceived from the first a pronounced antipathy. He was fat
and indolent, with pin-point eyes, wore furs, walked on his toes, purred
and looked like "a well-fed cat.