DAMASCUS AND ITS PEOPLE.

Hokitika Guardian, 18 January 1926, Page 4

DAMASCUS AND ITS PEOPLE.

Damascus, where the French and the Druses are now. in conflict, is known to the Arabs as Esh-Shams, the City of the West, for long before Rome was born it was a mighty capital and a melting-pot of trade at the farthest extremity of the then known world. Trade, routes do not change, and today in its bazaars and streets you may see, haggling and bartering wares of Central Asia and the Farthest East, the very types that thronged them when King David’s armies eiitered it in triumph’ writes David Neville in the London “Daily Mail.”

Cutting right through the city is the “ Street Called Straight,” where St. Paul was healed of his blindness. The corrugated iron roofs are new. but the white, almost windowless walls are as they were in his day. And everywhere is running water. The River Barada, tumbling down through the steep ravines and gorges of the Lebanon, the

home of the Druses, that overhangs the city, is split artificially into five channels so age-old that it is only by an effort that one realises that they are canals and not natural rivers. And through the heart of the city there flows to-day “ Abanay river of Damascus,’’ which Naamnn, the Syrian, praised,? ■ Thesilk, looms- that gave , damasks its name are. whirling.still:.hut'tho-armour-ers who forged the famed Damascus blades are rq more,. .Whea JamerJatie

and his Tartar hordes .overwhelmed the city he carried off to his own capital at Samarkland every swordsmith. In Damascus Moslem and Jew, Greek and Maronite, Frank and Turk, jostle one another in narrow alleys, where bleak walls guard from prying eyes palaces of Arabian Nights splendour. Here and there you may see a Druse, aloof and tolerant, for the rigid secrecy of his own strange faith permits of an easy acceptance of the outward observance of others. But he is a sojourner only. His place is in the mountain fastnesses, where the wliite-turbaned “ Akkul ” or initiates conduct the my-.,stei:io.us.j-.ites. of Jus faith. . .. . .

Every where, about the city lies tho “Garden of God,” an oasis of incredible fertility where apricots and mulberries, grapes and pomegranates, weigh down the trees. It- is no trifling prize, this city of a quarter of a million inhabitants. David, Alexander, Snladin and Napoleon 111. have all held it, and to-day, though electric tramway cars clang through its streets and telephone wires stretch overhead, it is still the city that saw tho Saracen walls built on Roman foundations or tho Emmayad mosque reared on the ruins of the Church of St. John, and the buried fragments of the Temple of the Sun.