seen from a trolley-car, are futile and
unilluminating.

The point about the Barada is that it springs full-born from the barren
sides of the Anti-Lebanon, swiftly creates a paradise as it runs, and
then disappears absolutely in a wide marsh on the edge of the desert.

The point about Damascus is that she flourishes on a secluded plain,
the Ghutah, seventy miles from the sea and twenty-three hundred feet
above it, with no _hinterland_ and no sustaining provinces, no political
leadership, and no special religious sanctity, with nothing, in fact, to
account for her distinction, her splendour, her populous vitality, her
self-sufficing charm, except her mysterious and enduring quality as a
mere city, a hive of men. She is the oldest living city in the world; no
one knows her birthday or her founder's name. She has survived the
empires and kingdoms which conquered her,--Nineveh, Babylon, Samaria,
Greece, Egypt--their capitals are dust, but Damascus still blooms "like
a tree planted by the rivers of water." She has given her name to the
reddest of roses, the sweetest of plums, the richest of metalwork, and
the most lustrous of silks; her streets have bubbled and eddied with the
currents of

the multitudinous folk
That do inhabit her and make her great.

She is the typical city, pure and simple, of the Orient, as New York or
San Francisco is of the Occident: the open port on the edge of the
desert, the trading-booth at the foot of the mountains, the pavilion in
the heart of the blossoming bower,--the wonderful child of a little
river and an immemorial Spirit of Place.

Every time we go into the city, (whether from our tents on the terrace
above an ancient and dilapidated pleasure-garden, or from our red-tiled
rooms in the good Hotel d'Orient, to which we had been driven by a
plague of sand-flies in the camp), we step at once into a chapter of the
"Arabian Nights' Entertainments."

It is true, there are electric lights and there is a trolley-car
crawling around the city; but they no more make it Western and modern
than a bead necklace would change the character of the Venus of Milo.
The driver of the trolley-car looks like one of "The Three Calenders,"
and a gayly dressed little boy beside him blows loudly on an instrument
of discord as the machine tranquilly advances through the crowd. (A man
was run over a few months ago; his friends waited for the car to come
around the next day, pulled the driver from