The Innocents Abroad — Volume 05 eBook

Then we called at the tomb of Mahomet’s children and at a tomb which purported to be that of St. George who killed the dragon, and so on out to the hollow place under a rock where Paul hid during his flight till his pursuers gave him up; and to the mausoleum of the five thousand Christians who were massacred in Damascus in 1861 by the Turks.  They say those narrow streets ran blood for several days, and that men, women and children were butchered indiscriminately and left to rot by hundreds all through the Christian quarter; they say, further, that the stench was dreadful.  All the Christians who could get away fled from the city, and the Mohammedans would not defile their hands by burying the “infidel dogs.”  The thirst for blood extended to the high lands of Hermon and Anti-Lebanon, and in a short time twenty-five thousand more Christians were massacred and their possessions laid waste.  How they hate a Christian in Damascus!—­and pretty much all over Turkeydom as well.  And how they will pay for it when Russia turns her guns upon them again!

It is soothing to the heart to abuse England and France for interposing to save the Ottoman Empire from the destruction it has so richly deserved for a thousand years.  It hurts my vanity to see these pagans refuse to eat of food that has been cooked for us; or to eat from a dish we have eaten from; or to drink from a goatskin which we have polluted with our Christian lips, except by filtering the water through a rag which they put over the mouth of it or through a sponge!  I never disliked a Chinaman as I do these degraded Turks and Arabs, and when Russia is ready to war with them again, I hope England and France will not find it good breeding or good judgment to interfere.

In Damascus they think there are no such rivers in all the world as their little Abana and Pharpar.  The Damascenes have always thought that way.  In 2 Kings, chapter v., Naaman boasts extravagantly about them.  That was three thousand years ago.  He says:  “Are not Abana and Pharpar rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel?  May I not wash in them and be clean?” But some of my readers have forgotten who Naaman was, long ago.  Naaman was the commander of the Syrian armies.  He was the favorite of the king and lived in great state.  “He was a mighty man of valor, but he was a leper.”  Strangely enough, the house they point out to you now as his, has been turned into a leper hospital, and the inmates expose their horrid deformities and hold up their hands and beg for bucksheesh when a stranger enters.

One can not appreciate the horror of this disease until he looks upon it in all its ghastliness, in Naaman’s ancient dwelling in Damascus.  Bones all twisted out of shape, great knots protruding from face and body, joints decaying and dropping away—­horrible!

CHAPTER XLV.