azaar, where all the
richest stuffs of Europe and the East were displayed in the shops. We rode
slowly along through the cool twilight, crossed here and there by long
pencils of white light, falling through apertures in the roof, and
illuminating the gay turbans and silk caftans of the lazy merchants. But
out of this bazaar, at intervals, opened the grand gate of a khan, giving
us a view of its marble court, its fountains, and the dark arches of its
storerooms; or the door of a mosque, with its mosaic floor and pillared
corridor. The interminable lines of bazaars, with their atmospheres of
spice and fruit and fragrant tobacco, the hushed tread of the slippered
crowds; the plash of falling fountains and the bubbling of innumerable
narghilehs; the picturesque merchants and their customers, no longer in
the big trowsers of Egypt, but the long caftans and abas of Syria; the
absence of Frank faces and dresses--in all these there was the true spirit
of the Orient, and so far, we were charmed with Damascus.

At the hotel in the Soog el-Harab, or Frank quarter, the illusion was not
dissipated. It had once been the house of some rich merchant. The court
into which we were ushered is paved with marble, with a great stone basin,
surrounded with vases of flowering plants, in the centre. Two large lemon
trees shade the entrance, and a vine, climbing to the top of the house,
makes a leafy arbor over the flat roof. The walls of the house are painted
in horizontal bars of blue, white, orange and white--a gay grotesqueness
of style which does not offend the eye under an eastern sun. On the
southern side of the court is the _liwan_, an arrangement for which the
houses of Damascus are noted. It is a vaulted apartment, twenty feet high,
entirely open towards the court, except a fine pointed arch at the top,
decorated with encaustic ornaments of the most brilliant colors. In front,
a tesselated pavement of marble leads to the doors of the chambers on each
side. Beyond this is a raised floor covered with matting, and along the
farther end a divan, whose piled cushions are the most tempting trap ever
set to catch a lazy man. Although not naturally indolent, I find it
impossible to resist the fascination of this lounge. Leaning back,
cross-legged, against the cushions, with the inseparable pipe in one's
hand, the view of the court, the water-basin, the flowers and lemon trees,
the servants and dragomen going back and forth, or smoking their
nar