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Updated: June 14, 2025
It is a fair city of large extent, surrounded by walls, with many gardens and plantations, extending over fifteen miles on each side, and no district richer in fruit can be seen in all the world. From Mount Hermon descend the rivers Amana and Pharpar; for the city is situated at the foot of Mount Hermon.
There is an honored old tradition that the immense garden which Damascus stands in was the Garden of Eden, and modern writers have gathered up many chapters of evidence tending to show that it really was the Garden of Eden, and that the rivers Pharpar and Abana are the "two rivers" that watered Adam's Paradise.
I know that my own land is the best land, that the fat babu with his carefully oiled and parted hair and his too-apparent sock-suspenders can't be mentioned in the same breath as the Britisher; that our daffodils and primroses are sweeter far than the heavy-scented blossoms of the East; that the "brain-fever" bird of India is a wretched substitute for the lark and the thrush and others of "God's jocund little fowls"; that Abana and Pharpar and other rivers of Damascus are better than this Jordan all this, I say, I know; but to-night I don't believe it.
Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus, were in flood as usual at that time of year, and the scavenging street curs had to swim from one garbage heap to the next.
It would have been in vain for Naaman the Syrian leper to have bathed in Pharpar and Abana, rivers of Damascus, when it was only the waters of Jordon that were sanctified for the cure." "Well," said the Rector, "we will not enter upon the great debate betwixt our national churches at present.
True, Flanders is not Provence, and the croaking of the frogs, croak they never so amorously, among the willows in the plains below is a poor exchange for the chant of the cigale. But these mills look out over a landscape that is now dearer to me than Abana and Pharpar, for many a gallant friend of mine lies beneath its sod.
The Amana flows through the city, and by means of aqueducts the water is conveyed to the houses of the great people, and into the streets and market-places. The Pharpar flows through their gardens and plantations. It is a place carrying on trade with all countries.
Why should he bathe in the Jordan River, where the water was clay-white and often muddy, when he had his own rivers of Abana the golden and Pharpar the sweet, brimming with the finest water in the world? His friends did not answer him in his wrath; but they soon reached the ford of crossing, and if he would not bathe in the Jordan, he would have to ride through it, for there was no bridge.
At least Theobald was not. She had been, but she was sure she had grown in grace since she had left off eating things strangled and blood this was as the washing in Jordan as against Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus. Her boy should never touch a strangled fowl nor a black pudding that, at any rate, she could see to.
So Naaman dipt in Jordan, a task unto him, a sin in the eyes of his gods, and painful exceedingly to his pride-gorged humor, that would only have Abana and Pharpar, yet only so was his skin made whole again, and soft like an infant's. So also did David the king come into tasting of the bliss of a true repentance by the terrible gateways of shameful adultery and blood-thirst."
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