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\Third Millennium Library

THE LIFE OF SALADIN AND THE FALL OF THE KINGDOM OF JERUSALEM

CHAPTER XII.
DAMASCUS.
1183-1186.

1184] Damascus.

Saladin, meanwhile, made the most of his leisure to set the affairs of his realm in order. Once more Damascus had become the seat of sovereignty. Saladin used to say that Syria was the Root and Basis of Empire: Julian had called Damascus the Eye of the East. Before the beginning of history Damascus was a city. From the time when Abram took his servant Eliezar from among its citizens the ancient Syrian capital has been renowned. In the days of Ezekiel its commerce was famous, and to the port of Tyre it was written : “Damascus was thy merchant in the multitude of the wares of thy making, for the multitude of all riches”. In all the ancient empires of the East, Damascus has played its part, as the natural metropolis of its region, the meeting place of the people. Through its busy markets passed the trade of Babylonia and Persia and furthest India, borne from immemorial days by endless caravans, journeying from the Euphrates by Palmyra or Aleppo, and carrying their precious bales onward to the Mediterranean ports, or turning south to Egypt and Arabia. To Damascus came the wandering nation of the Bedouins in their countless tribes, who grazed their flocks in spring and winter on the light fodder of the desert, roaming every year between Arabia and the Great River along the familiar chains of wells ; a race of cattle-dealers and camel-drivers, carriers of other men's wealth and sellers of their own pastoral produce in exchange for the goods of the merchants.

Rich and populous, Damascus owed all to its central situation and its natural advantages. The Greeks called it “Most Beauteous”, and the Arabs named it “The Bride of the Earth”, “The Garden of the World”. And looking down upon the ancient city from the Dome of Victory which crowns the near range of Antilibanus on the west, one understands the pride of the Damascene in his earthly Paradise. The famed level plain, the Ghuta, richly fertile, though it forms part of the high Syrian plateau rising two thousand feet above the sea, gains in beauty by contrast with the brown desert and the girdling rocky hills, through which the Barada, well- named “Gold-streaming” by the Greeks, forces its path, and spreading in seven streams over the plain gives it abundant life. A great green field stretches for miles from the mountains to the desert, and in its midst, in an emerald girdle of gardens and orchards, of orange and citron and jessamine, in a babel of gurgling brooks, rise the old Roman walls of the city, the yellow sea of its clay houses, a forest of minarets, and the great dome of the Omayyad Mosque, once the Church of St. John the Baptist, and before that, perhaps, the House of Rimmon. “Though old as history itself, thou art fresh as the breath of Spring, blooming as thine own rosebud, fragrant as thine own orange flower, O Damascus, Pearl of the East!”