st. john of damascus (676-749 - Cristo Raul

"
The
"
DAMASCUS. 5
enmity. In July, 1860, taking advantage of the war
between the Druses and Maronites, and encouraged
also by the Turkish authorities, they suddenly rose
against the poor defenceless Christians, massacred
about six thousand of them in cold blood, and left
their whole quarter in ashes." "Such is the last act,"
he adds,
"in the history of Damascus."
Though
still the largest city of Asiatic Turkey, with a popula
of Damascus
tion in 1859 of 150,000, the prosperity
is on the wane. The opening of the Suez Canal in
1870 dealt it a heavy blow, by diverting much of the
traffic that had hitherto passed through it by cara
vans. It is a somewhat strange retribution that the
opening of a new water-way
should thus undo the
prosperity that Damascus has so long owed to its
own fertilising streams.
For it is not too much to say that to its streams
of water this ancient city has owed ;
not only
its
prosperity, but its very existence. "Are not Abana
and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus, better than all the
waters of Israel?" was a question that Naaman
might well ask, as he turned indignantly from the
prophet
s door. Travellers have vied with one an
other in describing the unrivalled beauty of those
streams.
juice of her life," says one wellknown
writer, is the gushing and ice-cold
1
torrent
that tumbles from the snowy sides
Close along on the river s edge, through
of Anti-Lebanon.
seven sweet
of the dreadful scenes of 1860 will be found in Francois
"
Lenormant s Histoire des Massacres de Syrie en 1860."
Paris, 1861. The French religious houses especially suffered.
1
Serjeant Kinglake : "Eothen," 1854, p. 237.