t as deftly as their fingers; and yonder
the dyers festooning their long strips of blue cotton from their windows
and balconies. Down there, on the way to the Great Mosque, the
booksellers hold together: a dwindling tribe, apparently, for of the
thirty or forty shops which were formerly theirs not more than half a
dozen remain true to literature: the rest are full of red and yellow
slippers. Damascus is more inclined to loafing or to dancing than to
reading. It seems to belong to the gay, smiling, easy-going East of
Scheherazade and Aladdin, not to the sombre and reserved Orient of
fierce mystics and fanatical fatalists.

Yet we feel, or imagine that we feel, the hidden presence of passions
and possibilities that belong to the tragic side of life underneath
this laughing mask of comedy. No longer ago than 1860, in the great
Massacre, five thousand Christians perished by fire and shot and dagger
in two days; the streets ran with blood; the churches were piled with
corpses; hundreds of Christian women were dragged away to Moslem harems;
only the brave Abd-el-Kader, with his body-guard of dauntless Algerine
veterans, was able to stay the butchery by flinging himself between the
blood-drunken mob and their helpless victims.

This was the last wholesale assassination of modern times that a great
city has seen, and prosperous, pleasure-loving, insouciant Damascus
seems to have quite forgotten it. Yet there are still enough wild
Kurdish shepherds, and fierce Bedouins of the desert, and riffraff of
camel-drivers and herdsmen and sturdy beggars and homeless men, among
her three hundred thousand people to make dangerous material if the
tiger-madness should break loose again. A gay city is not always a safe
city. The Lady and I saw a man stabbed to death at noon, not fifty feet
away from us, in a street beside the Ottoman Bank.

Nothing is safe until justice and benevolence and tolerance and mutual
respect are diffused in the hearts of men. How far this inward change
has gone in Damascus no one can tell. But that some advance has been
made, by real reforms in the Turkish government, by the spread of
intelligence and the enlightenment of self-interest, by the sense of
next-doorness to Paris and Berlin and London, which telegraphs,
railways, and steamships have produced, above all by the useful work of
missionary hospitals and schools, and by the humanizing process which
has been going on inside of all the creeds, no careful obser