the depth of the valley is an embroidered sash of bloom
laid across the sackcloth of the desert. And in the centre of this long
verdure runs the parent river, a flood of clear green; rushing, leaping,
curling into white foam; filling its channel of thirty or forty feet
from bank to bank, and making the silver-leafed willows and poplars,
that stand with their feet in the stream, tremble with the swiftness of
its cool, strong current. Truly Naaman the Syrian was right in his
boasting to the prophet Elisha: Abana, the river of Damascus, is better
than all the waters of Israel.

The vale narrows as we descend along the stream, until suddenly we pass
through a gateway of steep cliffs and emerge upon an open plain beset
with mountains on three sides. The river, parting into seven branches,
goes out to water a hundred and fifty square miles of groves and
gardens, and we follow the road through the labyrinth of rich and
luscious green. There are orchards of apricots enclosed with high mud
walls; and open gates through which we catch glimpses of crimson
rose-trees and scarlet pomegranates and little fields of wheat glowing
with blood-red poppies; and hedges of white hawthorn and wild brier; and
trees, trees, trees, everywhere embowering us and shutting us in.

Presently we see, above the leafy tops, a sharp-pointed minaret with a
golden crescent above it. Then we find ourselves again beside the main
current of the Barada, running swift and merry in a walled channel
straight across an open common, where soldiers are exercising their
horses, and donkeys and geese are feeding, and children are playing, and
dyers are sprinkling their long strips of blue cotton cloth laid out
upon the turf beside the river. The road begins to look like the
commencement of a street; domes and minarets rise before us; there are
glimpses of gray walls and towers, a few shops and open-air cafes, a
couple of hotel signs. The river dives under a bridge and disappears by
a hundred channels beneath the city, leaving us at the western entrance
of Damascus.

IV

THE CITY THAT A LITTLE RIVER MADE

I cannot tell whether the river, the gardens, and the city would have
seemed so magical and entrancing if we had come upon them in some other
way or seen them in a different setting. You can never detach an
experience from its matrix and weigh it alone. Comparisons with the
environs of Naples or Florence visited in an automobile, or with the
suburbs of Boston