without energy, and nothing remained for me but to
leave Damascus.

Yet, fearful as my rash experiment proved to me, I did not regret having
made it. It revealed to me deeps of rapture and of suffering which my
natural faculties never could have sounded. It has taught me the majesty
of human reason and of human will, even in the weakest, and the awful
peril of tampering with that which assails their integrity. I have here
faithfully and fully written out my experience, on account of the lesson
which it may convey to others. If I have unfortunately failed in my
design, and have but awakened that restless curiosity which I have
endeavored to forestall, let me beg all who are thereby led to repeat the
experiment upon themselves, that they be content to take the portion of
hasheesh which is considered sufficient for one man, and not, like me,
swallow enough for six.

Chapter XI.

A Dissertation on Bathing and Bodies.

"No swan-soft woman, rubbed with lucid oils,
The gift of an enamored god, more fair."

Browning.

We shall not set out from Damascus--we shall not leave the Pearl of the
Orient to glimmer through the seas of foliage wherein it lies
buried--without consecrating a day to the Bath, that material agent of
peace and good-will unto men. We have bathed in the Jordan, like Naaman,
and been made clean; let us now see whether Abana and Pharpar, rivers of
Damascus, are better than the waters of Israel.

The Bath is the "peculiar institution" of the East. Coffee has become
colonized in France and America; the Pipe is a cosmopolite, and his blue,
joyous breath congeals under the Arctic Circle, or melts languidly into
the soft airs of the Polynesian Isles; but the Bath, that sensuous elysium
which cradled the dreams of Plato, and the visions of Zoroaster, and the
solemn meditations of Mahomet, is only to be found under an Oriental sky.
The naked natives of the Torrid Zone are amphibious; they do not bathe,
they live in the water. The European and Anglo-American wash themselves
and think they have bathed; they shudder under cold showers and perform
laborious antics with coarse towels. As for the Hydropathist, the Genius
of the Bath, whose dwelling is in Damascus, would be convulsed with
scornful laughter, could he behold that aqueous Diogenes sitting in his
tub, or stretched out in his wet wrappings, like a sodden mummy, in a
catacomb of blankets and feather beds. As the rose in the East has a rarer