The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton, vol 2 | Page 5

you come to the _sudarium_, the
hottest room of all. First they lather you, then they wash you with a lif
and soap, then they douche you with tubs of hot water, then they
shampoo you with fresh layers of soap, and then douche again. They
give you iced sherbet, and tie towels dipped in cold water round your
head, which prevent you fainting and make you perspire. They scrub
your feet with pumice- stone, and move you back through all the rooms
gradually, douche you with water, and shampoo you with towels. You

now return to the large hall where you first undressed, wrap in woollen
shawls, and recline on a divan. The place is all strewn with flowers,
incense is burned around, and a cup of hot coffee is handed and a
narghileh placed in your mouth. A woman advances and kneads you as
though you were bread, until you fall asleep under the process, as
though mesmerized. When you wake up, you find music and dancing,
the girls chasing one another, eating sweetmeats, and enjoying all sorts
of fun. Moslem women go through a good deal more of the
performance than I have described. For instance, they have their hair
hennaed and their eyebrows plucked. You can also have your hands
and feet hennaed, and, if you like it, be tattooed. The whole operation
takes about four hours. It is often said by the ignorant that people can
get as good a hammam in London or Paris as in the East. I have tried
all, and they bear about as much relation to one another as a puddle of
dirty water does to a pellucid lake. And the pellucid lake is in the East.
Then the harims. I often spent an evening in them, and I found them
very pleasant; only at first the women used to ask me such a lot of
inconvenient questions that I became quite confused. They were always
puzzled because I had no children. One cannot generalize on the
subject of harims; they differ in degree just as much as families in
London. A first-class harim at Constantinople is one thing, at
Damascus one of the same rank is another, while those of the middle
and lower classes are different still. As a rule I met with nothing but
courtesy in the harims, and much hospitality, cordiality, and refinement.
I only twice met with bad manners, and that was in a middle-class
harim. Twice only the conversation displeased me, and that was
amongst the lower class. One of the first harims I visited in Damascus
was that of the famous Abd el Kadir (of whom more anon), which of
course was one of the best class. He had five wives: one of them was
very pretty. I asked them how they could bear to live together and pet
each other's children. I told them that in England, if a woman thought
her husband had another wife or mistress, she would be ready to kill
her and strangle the children if they were not her own. They all laughed
heartily at me, and seemed to think it a great joke. I am afraid that Abd
el Kadir was a bit of a Tartar in his harim, for they were very prim and
pious.

So much for the city of Damascus.
In the environs there were many beautiful little roads, leading through
gardens and orchards, by bubbling water, and under the shady fig and
vine, pomegranate and walnut. You emerged from these shady avenues
on to the soft yellow sand of the desert, where you could gallop as hard
as you pleased. There were no boundary-lines, no sign-posts, nothing to
check one's spirits or one's energy. The breath of the desert is liberty.

CHAPTER XII
. EARLY DAYS AT DAMASCUS. (1870).
Though old as history itself, thou art fresh as breath of spring,
blooming as thine own rosebud, as fragrant as thine own orange flower,
O Damascus, Pearl of the East!
As soon as we had settled in our house I had to accustom myself to the
honours of my position, which at first were rather irksome to me; but as
they were part of the business I had to put up with them. I found my
position as the wife of the British Consul in Damascus very different
from what it had been in Brazil. A consul in the East as envoye of a
Great Power is a big man, and he ranks almost as high as a Minister
would in Europe. Nearer home a consul is often hardly considered to be
a gentleman, while in many countries he is not allowed to go to Court.
In the East, however, the Consular service was, at the time I write, an
honoured profession, and the