Goldsboro semi-weekly argus. [volume] (Goldsboro, N.C.) 1909-19??, 1909-07-14

sitting in groups. smoking thei
warghilehs or slipping. their Turkish
coffee, which is at times varied will
a liquid resembling lemonade. Ye
one thing must be said in their favor
and that is that they don't take any
alcoholic drinks. In all my travels in
the East / have not seen drunken
man. The Moslem religion prohibits
strong drink. A little more fresh wa
ter externally used would be quite an
advantage to these people. l have nc
doubt many of them seldom use any
}except when they enter mosque, and
in these, baths are generally provid-
ed The chief industry here is the
manufacture of hammered brass YES
sells, in which work they seem to be
| experts. They also manufacture
swords and firearms, rather crudely,
not of the famous Damascus steel, but
of a poor article imported from Ger
many. They also manufacture inlaid
furniture, of which I have seen some
beautiful specimens. The bazaars or
shops are quite interesting and very
much on the order of those we saw in
Constantinople and Smyrna. They
be seen here in their purely Oriental
setting.
We visit some of the mosques, of
which there are a great number here,
the principal one being the Mosque of
Amayade, and the finest next to the
Mosque of St. Sophia at Constantine
pie, and the one in jerusalem; it is an
immense building, 43O feet long and
130 feet wide, the floor of which is
covered with Oriental rugs, the walls
are of pretty mosaics. From the min
aret of this mosque we get fine view
of the city and wide area of the sur
rounding country, even as far as Mt.
Hermon.
We also visit the outer wall of the
city and are shown the window where
St, Paul was let down in a basket also
the street that is called straight"
which dates from before Paul's time.
The house of Ananias, the good one,
is also shown us by our dragoman.
Just outside the Mosque of Amayada
we visit the tomb of Saladin, the
great Moslem conqueror who almost
annihilated the Knights of the Cru
sade, which marked the end of the
crusades and made Palestine a Turk
ish province to this day. We make
a most interesting visit to a syna-
gogue, a structure standing about
/ 500 years, and the services there
conducted vary probably little from |
the time of it's first dedication. The
ladies there still worship in the court |
yard, which has beautiful mosaic |
floor, while the men worship inside |
the building. We are also shown the |
house of Naaman, the leper, yet
would not vOuch for it's authenticity.
Our dragoman asks us to go to a |
theatre in the evening. About ten of
our company accompany him, but af- |
ter staying about fifteen minutes we
got tired of the performance; two
women sing and play some crude in
The medley was anything
but euphonious. l offered to re-em-
burse our dragoman for the tickets he
purchased and to my surprise he said
he did not pay anything for our party:
he had made arrangement with the
management that if we did not stay
there was no pay.
There are three distinct quarters in
Damascus, the Jewish, the Christian
and the Moslem; this applies to the
residential part of the city, and it
seems queer to see many of the shops
in the bazaars closed on Friday, Sat
urday and Sunday, the respective
sabbaths of the Moslems, the Jews and
the Christians.
The dwelling houses make a very
plain appearance from the street: inI
fact, are built more like fortressesj
with small barred windows, yet many
of them are comfortably and even
luxuriantly furnished. In one in
stance we partook of the Eastern hos
pitality at an afternoon tea and if our
treatment was a fair specimen of
entertaining strangers, we could
scarcely improve on their custom and
very little on their civilization.
After spending five days in a very
interesting manner at Damascus, we
took the train back to Beyreut to our
steamer and are now heading for
Palestine.