In The Principal Streets Of Damascus There Is A Path For Foot-
Passengers, Which Is Raised, I Think, A Foot Or Two Above The
Bridle-Road.
Until the arrival of the British consul-general none
but a Mussulman had been permitted to walk upon the upper way.
Mr.
Farren would not, of course, suffer that the humiliation of any
such exclusion should be submitted to by an Englishman, and I
always walked upon the raised path as free and unmolested as if I
had been in Pall Mall. The old usage was, however, maintained with
as much strictness as ever against the Christian Rayahs and Jews:
not one of them could have set his foot upon the privileged path
without endangering his life.
I was lounging one day, I remember, along "the paths of the
faithful," when a Christian Rayah from the bridle-road below
saluted me with such earnestness, and craved so anxiously to speak
and be spoken to, that he soon brought me to a halt. He had
nothing to tell, except only the glory and exultation with which he
saw a fellow-Christian stand level with the imperious Mussulmans.
Perhaps he had been absent from the place for some time, for
otherwise I hardly know how it could have happened that my
exaltation was the first instance he had seen. His joy was great.
So strong and strenuous was England (Lord Palmerston reigned in
those days), that it was a pride and delight for a Syrian Christian
to look up and say that the Englishman's faith was his too. If I
was vexed at all that I could not give the man a lift and shake
hands with him on level ground, there was no alloy to his pleasure.
He followed me on, not looking to his own path, but keeping his
eyes on me. He saw, as he thought, and said (for he came with me
on to my quarters), the period of the Mahometan's absolute
ascendency, the beginning of the Christian's. He had so closely
associated the insulting privilege of the path with actual
dominion, that seeing it now in one instance abandoned, he looked
for the quick coming of European troops. His lips only whispered,
and that tremulously, but his fiery eyes spoke out their triumph in
long and loud hurrahs: "I, too, am a Christian. My foes are the
foes of the English. We are all one people, and Christ is our
King."
If I poorly deserved, yet I liked this claim of brotherhood. Not
all the warnings which I heard against their rascality could hinder
me from feeling kindly towards my fellow-Christians in the East.
English travellers, from a habit perhaps of depreciating sectarians
in their own country, are apt to look down upon the Oriental
Christians as being "dissenters" from the established religion of a
Mahometan empire. I never did thus. By a natural perversity of
disposition, which my nursemaids called contrariness, I felt the
more strongly for my creed when I saw it despised among men.
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