BOOKS.
THE INNER LIFE IN SYRIA.*
MRS. BURTON arrived in Syria in the beginning of 1870, and remained there till September of the following year. Her hus- band, the well-known traveller, was during that period British Consul at Damascus, and her time was mostly passed in the neighbourhood of that city ; but business and the traveller's im- pulse took Captain Burton a good deal about the country, into parts of it even which are scarcely ever visited, and his wife was his frequent companion in his excursions. She was thus enabled to see something of nearly all the varieties of Syrian life, while, in Damascus, her position as wife of a British Consul with an Eastern reputation, known to have made the pilgrimage to Mecca, and to be the friend and admirer of Moslems and the Moslem faith, gave her as good opportunities as a European could possess —and she seems to have made the most of them—of observing the public bearing and the household ways of people of every rank. A work published not long since, Unexplored Syria, the joint production of husband and wife, contained their account of the more remarkable of the expeditions made by them ; in the volumes before us, as their title purports, Mrs. Burton has under- taken to introduce us to the mysteries of private life in Syria, so far, that is, as the restrictions of confidential intercourse and the taste of the reading public permit. In one sense she is better than her promise, for here, again, we have a good deal of travel- ling, including a pretty long tour among the Holy Places, and get besides detailed accounts of Captain Burton's merits, his maltreatment by the world, and many other matters. We are not so unreasonable as to hold an author to his title-page, or to wonder at people introducing, under whatever heading, the matters which are uppermost in, their minds ; but we foresee that Mrs. Burton will write more books—indeed we hope she will—and it may be permitted just to hint that there is a proportion to be observed as regards the treatment of ex- traneous topics, and that the world is very readily bored. In her account of Syrian domestic life, there is not much that is new— the subject is not exactly a new one—but the observations of so lively and impulsive and withal so shrewd a lady as Mrs. Burton could scarcely fail of interest, and they have been conveyed by no means unskilfully in a very lively, interesting narrative. The book, as a whole, is too long and is deficient in novelty, but it is readable throughout, and persons to whom Eastern travel is new ground will find in it an entertaining picture of Syrian habits and manners.
Mrs. Burton began by hating Damascus, and it must be admitted that her account of it is not calculated to induce English ladies, for whom specially she writes, to desire to
• The inner Ant qf Soria, Palestine, and the Holy Land. By Isabel Burton. 2 yob!. London : Henry B. Mug and Co.
establish themselves in the famous old city.. With its appear- ance, as she first approached it from Beyrout, she was extremely disappointed ; its gardens, so often celebrated for their beauty, in winter-time, and to her English eyes, seemed " mere ugly shrubberies, wood-clumps, and orchards," and the city itself was all dirt and discomfort. It was in returning from a seventeen days' journey in the Desert that she came to understand how the place had been exalted into a paradise :—
" You enter by degrees," she says, "under the trees, the orchards, the gardens ; you smell the water from afar liko a thirsty horse, and you hear its gurgling long before you come amongst the rills and fountains; you scent and then soo the fruit—the limos, figs, citron, and water-melon. You feel a madness to jump into the water, to oat your fill of fruit, to go to sleep under the delicious shade. You forget the bitter wind, the scorching sun, the blistering sand, and you dream away the last two or three hours, wondering if it is true, or if your brain is hurt by the sun, or your blinded eyes see a mirage."
At a later stage of her residence, approaching Damascus from Beyrout, she fell fairly in love with the town, suddenly and unaccountably, she tells us ; and now she talks of it, and of Syria generally, much as Mr. Disraeli did in Tancred. She greedily drank in, while she could, " all the truths which the Desert breathes," and learnt all she could of Oriental mysteries, and now, after three or four years of Europe, she would like to go back " to be regenerated among the Arabs." The " truths which the Desert breathes " have not, so far as we have noticed, been put into her book ; and the people by whom she was surrounded in Syria, as described by her, do not seem improving company, but the phrases we have quoted are like the fond praises of a lover, and perhaps ought not to be closely scanned. The climate of Damascus, except during April and May and part of June, seems to be one of the most abominable in the world. " We are always," Mrs. Burton says, " between the snows of the Anti-Lebanon and the burning heats of the Desert, and they do not combine, like a pair of negatives, to make a pleasant affirmative. Each enforces itself with vigour at separate seasons. The rain and wind begin to be severe in November, and from December to March the cold is bitter. The blasts, rushing down from the mountains and sweeping the plain, charge down upon
us like an express train. At the end of June the heat sets in, and it is cruel to keep anything there that is not native from July to late September." Of the medley of races who in- habit the city, Mrs. Burton thinks the Moslems—the native Mohammedans, that is—the most respectable ; while the Christ- ians, a result, she thinks, of race rather than of bad treatment, are among the most contemptible of the human kind. Of all the races of Syria, the Druzes are first in point of physique ; then come the Affghans, the Kurds, and the Bedawin. Of the last, greatly as she admires them, Mrs. Burton does not seem to have seen much, and what she did see she saw under the most favourable circumstances.
Mrs. Burton's life in Syria, judging by her account of it, ought to have been a rather dismal one ; but tastes differ, and it is clear that she enjoyed it. Riding and shooting, however, are them- selves resources by no means to be despised, and she had her fair share of both. Then as Consul's wife she had a position of in- fluence, was constantly being appealed to by people to aid them, or to settle petty differences ; she had much power of doing good, and seems to have eagerly used it. Doctoring her poor neighbours alone, indeed, was almost enough of occupation for her. The Europeans in Damascus numbered no more than thirty people, and she and her husband were forced upon the native inhabitants for additional society. Men and women, she seems to have liked them all very well, excepting the Jewish usurers, who were always oppressing the poor and intriguing against Captain Burton. Occasionally English visitors came, and it is plain that they were dearly welcome and were most hospitably entertained. She was soon quite at home in the harims of the leading Moslem families ; the women were delighted to be visited by her ; her naked face and unusual attire inspired something like horror, but they never tired of questioning her about the life of women in the West. They were always ignorant and very seldom pretty. "In all the houses of Syria," Mrs. Burton tells us, "I have seen three or four women who would be singled out as beauties in Europe,—and theirs was chiefly la beautd du diable, which withers at the first act of neglect or unkind treatment." They are moral, but their morality is enforced, death being the penalty of error, or even of the suspicion of it. Mrs. Burton does not flatter herself that she converted any of them to a belief in our Western customs as against their own, the received pro- prieties being even more firmly established among them than among us. " Woman's nature," she says, " is much the same all
over the world. The moment the door closed on us, and privacy was restored, our charming hostesses probably indulged in a long titter, and each said to her neighbour, Mashallah, my dear, it is very nice to be a man, but don't you think that, as women, we may perhaps be better as we are ?" That was the query of the young and pretty; whilst the other category would exclaim, ' Istaghfar' Allah ! why this is neither man nor woman, nor any- thing else. Allah preserve us from this pestilence!" Among country-bred women the feeling would have rather been,—" Here comes the bold, bad European woman, with her naked face, to try and take our husband from us." The accounts of harim life present polygamy in a very unattractive light. The Koranic maximum of four wives and two " assistant-wives " (to use Mrs. Burton's phrase) is constantly exceeded by the rich. Take this view of a Moslem interior :-
"The old woman is a relation of her husband. They married very young, and ho has the greatest respect for her. She accompanies him on all his expeditions, veiled, and with the baggage, of course, and she is the only woman who has this privilege. He asks her advice behind the scenes, for she has natural talent and good sense ' • she is the bead wife, but, as you see, she is old ; he constantly invests in a new wife, a Circassian slave, or what not, and the now-corner enjoys a short reign, as the toy of a month, when another succeeds her. She is jealous and miserable, spite her ago, and ho laughs, and cannot think how she can be so foolish as to care, or to suppose it could be otherwise. She alone is bint-el-naas ' (daughter of a good house), the others are all surrayeh' (bought ones). Now notice that other, a thin, brown, plain little woman, who looks about five-and-twenty. There is nothing apparently very attractive, but she has an innate knowledge of the world, she rides, she makes the house comfortable, she receives well, she understands her husband's comforts, she is sympathetic—in a word, she really loves him. When he comes in, notice the gleam of intelli- gence that passes between them. She is the favourite. He will not notice nor speak to her, but will come and sit by us, with a word, per- haps, to No. 1. These two are the principals ; all the rest may be young and good-looking, but they are as nothing Now I will show you that they have the same feelings as ourselves. Go and sit by the old wife. Do you see how pleased and how affectionate she is? After a few minutes, ask to have one of the others brought up to sit at the other side of you. Do you see how her face clouds, and how jealous and vexed she looks? See, she moves away. She descries the ' favourite's ' slippers at the top of the stairs, and she has given them one vicious kick and sent them flying from the top to the bottom. Poor woman! that is only an emblem of her feelings."
It was not without reason that, in the absence of doctors, Mrs. Burton took to practising upon her neighbours. The climate, she says, "is fatally hot, cold, and treacherous." Sudden deaths often occur, chiefly among the natives. "You will hear frequently of persons you saw but yesterday, So-and-so died last night.' ' What did he die of ?" I don't know. He coughed, and he died.' He got a sneezing fit, and he died." He said he felt un- well, and presently he died.' If they had remarked, 'he took a cup of coffee, and he died,' or he smoked a nargileh, and he died,' the answer would be, ' Oh !' as much as to say, 'Now we under- stand." Dysentery and fever are constant enemies ; cholera comes rarely ; ophthalmia is very prevalent. Mrs. Burton in her practice had some curious experiences. On one occasion, a young man came to ask her for " some of that nice white bubbling powder for my grandmother that you gave to Urum Saba the day before yesterday. She is so old, and has been in her bed these three months, and will neither live nor die." People came to her for medicine to make them young again. " Others had spots on their faces, others a sun-burnt patch. Several women wanted me to make them like Sarah of old. I gently reminded them of their ages, and that no medicines, or baths, or doctors would avail."
One of the things which most surprised her on her arrival in Syria was the scarcity of good horses. An occasional half-bred or three-quarter-bred was to be seen, but nearly all the horses were " kaddishes," animals with scarcely a mark of blood about them, though in many cases good and serviceable. Excepting at the setting-out of the Haj or Pilgrims' caravan to Mecca, it was long before she saw a true blood-horse. She found the explana- tion to be that " the famous mares are kept in the Desert, and in seclusion from Turkish eyes." No one, it seems, can afford to keep blood-mares of the three great races ; several men combine to buy one, dividing the profits of the offspring. A blood-horse seldom costs less than 200 or 300 napoleons, " but a mare has no price,—she might be £40,000 in shares, if one of the real old races, and her pedigree beyond dispute." The fine horses are, of course, most dearly tendered by the Arabs. "The mare comes before wife and child." The best mares are never ridden on plundering expeditions. When the Bedawin are thus mounted, " you might shake a handkerchief at them and make them run, but if you see them coming on camels, be frightened." Although cruel treatment of animals is one of the worst of Syrian vices, it is somewhat of a surprise to learn that it is chiefly as money's-worth that the Arab values his horse, and that his treatment of the animal when it is not his own is about as bad as can be conceived of.
Mrs. Burton's book is, for the most part, in the form of a diary, and a necessary consequence of this is that, in addition to what we hear about Syria, we learn a great deal about Mrs. Burton herself. She is not without her little foibles, which she frankly exposes. She is " subject to mesmeric influences," " though not a sybil, there are are times when words will rush to her mouth, and she must say them,"—not an uncommon thing in man or woman, but then Mrs. Burton's words come true. For example, she prophesied the downfall of the Empire in France just a year before the event. Then she sees visions and dreams dreams, and, what is more, she prints them,—the account of one of her dreams occupying fifty pages of this work. This is rather long ; nevertheless, the reader who accompanies her through her book will find her, on the whole, a sensible as well as a kindly and vivacious companion, and will part with her in kindness and not without regret.
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