BSY_FB_28-049

February Saturday 18 1905

Damascus. Temp not recorded but it was very cold 44 °F.
inside the Hotel Victoria which by the way is an excellent
hotel. Tried to get my shoes shined but could not because it
was the Jews Sabbath and nobody but the Jews shined shoes.
The day before was? Friday, the Moslem Sabbath and most of
the banks and shops closed. Tomorrow will be the Christian
Sabbath and another holiday. In fact in Syria it is next to
impossible to do any business from Thursday until Monday.

We called on the bankers and were offered coffee and
cigarettes and treated very nicely. Then we called on the Amer
consular agent, a native Christian Damascene and were given
manuscripts and an? the literary attainments of his dead
father who wrote several books of which he is very proud.
It was very hard to switch him off and we therefore stayed longer
than we intended. Most of his father's library was burned in
the massacre of 1860, when some 12000 Christians were slain
and the Christian quarter of the city burned to the ground.

In Arabic, the more a thought is complicated and hidden
beneath a heap of flowery language the finer is the quality of
the literary result. L. stopped on the way home at the place of
a custom house brokers and obtained a book which had been
sent to him from America. I think the charges which were to
supposed to have been prepared in America, were something like $3.00
and the itemized bill from the brokers was a work of art. One item
plainly writen? was for bribe to censur? to prevent confiscation.