If You Had, I Could Easily Show You The Interior Of A
Damascene House By Referring You To The Alhambra Or Alcanzar Of
Seville.
The lofty rooms are adorned with a rich inlaying of many
colours and illuminated writing on the walls.
The floors are of
marble. One side of any room intended for noonday retirement is
generally laid open to a quadrangle, in the centre of which there
dances the jet of a fountain. There is no furniture that can
interfere with the cool, palace-like emptiness of the apartments.
A divan (which is a low and doubly broad sofa) runs round the three
walled sides of the room. A few Persian carpets (which ought to be
called Persian rugs, for that is the word which indicates their
shape and dimensions) are sometimes thrown about near the divan;
they are placed without order, the one partly lapping over the
other, and thus disposed, they give to the room an appearance of
uncaring luxury; except these (of which I saw few, for the time was
summer, and fiercely hot), there is nothing to obstruct the welcome
air, and the whole of the marble floor from one divan to the other,
and from the head of the chamber across to the murmuring fountain,
is thoroughly open and free.
So simple as this is Asiatic luxury! The Oriental is not a
contriving animal; there is nothing intricate in his magnificence.
The impossibility of handing down property from father to son for
any long period consecutively seems to prevent the existence of
those traditions by which, with us, the refined modes of applying
wealth are made known to its inheritors. We know that in England a
newly-made rich man cannot, by taking thought and spending money,
obtain even the same-looking furniture as a gentleman. The
complicated character of an English establishment allows room for
subtle distinctions between that which is comme il faut, and that
which is not. All such refinements are unknown in the East; the
Pasha and the peasant have the same tastes. The broad cold marble
floor, the simple couch, the air freshly waving through a shady
chamber, a verse of the Koran emblazoned on the wall, the sight and
the sound of falling water, the cold fragrant smoke of the
narghile, and a small collection of wives and children in the inner
apartments - these, the utmost enjoyments of the grandee, are yet
such as to be appreciable by the humblest Mussulman in the empire.
But its gardens are the delight, the delight and the pride of
Damascus. They are not the formal parterres which you might expect
from the Oriental taste; they rather bring back to your mind the
memory of some dark old shrubbery in our northern isle, that has
been charmingly un - "kept up" for many and many a day. When you
see a rich wilderness of wood in decent England, it is like enough
that you see it with some soft regrets. The puzzled old woman at
the lodge can give small account of "the family." She thinks it is
"Italy" that has made the whole circle of her world so gloomy and
sad.
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