Chapter XI.

A Dissertation on Bathing and Bodies.


"No swan-soft woman, rubbed with lucid oils,
The gift of an enamored god, more fair."

Browning.


We shall not set out from Damascus--we shall not leave the Pearl of the
Orient to glimmer through the seas of foliage wherein it lies
buried--without consecrating a day to the Bath, that material agent of
peace and good-will unto men. We have bathed in the Jordan, like Naaman,
and been made clean; let us now see whether Abana and Pharpar, rivers of
Damascus, are better than the waters of Israel.

The Bath is the "peculiar institution" of the East. Coffee has become
colonized in France and America; the Pipe is a cosmopolite, and his blue,
joyous breath congeals under the Arctic Circle, or melts languidly into
the soft airs of the Polynesian Isles; but the Bath, that sensuous elysium
which cradled the dreams of Plato, and the visions of Zoroaster, and the
solemn meditations of Mahomet, is only to be found under an Oriental sky.
The naked natives of the Torrid Zone are amphibious; they do not bathe,
they live in the water. The European and Anglo-American wash themselves
and think they have bathed; they shudder under cold showers and perform
laborious antics with coarse towels. As for the Hydropathist, the Genius
of the Bath, whose dwelling is in Damascus, would be convulsed with