nd Mohammed is the prophet of Allah! Come to prayer!_"

The plaintive notes float away over the city toward all four quarters of
the sky, and quaver into silence. We come out from the gloom of the
staircase into the dazzling light of the balcony which runs around the
top of the minaret. For a few moments we can see little; but when the
first bewilderment passes, we are conscious that all the charm and
wonder of Damascus are spread at our feet.

The oval mass of the city lies like a carving of old ivory, faintly
tinged with pink, on a huge table of malachite. The setting of groves
and gardens, luxuriant, interminable, deeply and beautifully green,
covers a circuit of sixty miles. Beyond it, in sharpest contrast, rise
the bare, fawn-coloured mountains, savage, intractable, desolate; away
to the west, the snow-crowned bulk of Hermon; away to the east, the
low-rolling hills and slumbrous haze of the desert. Under these flat
roofs and white domes and long black archways of bazaars three hundred
thousand folk are swarming. And there, half emerging from the huddle of
decrepit modern buildings and partly hidden by the rounded shed of a
bazaar, is the ruined top of a Roman arch of triumph, battered, proud,
and indomitable.

* * * * *

An hour later we are scrambling up a long, shaky ladder to the flat
roofs of the joiners' bazaar, built close against the southern wall of
the Mosque. We walk across the roofs and find the ancient south door of
the Mosque, now filled up with masonry, and almost completely concealed
by the shops above which we are standing. Only the entablature is
visible, richly carved with garlands. Kneeling down, we read upon the
lintel the Greek inscription in uncial letters, cut when the Mosque was
a Christian church. The Moslems who are bowing and kneeling and
stretching out their hands toward Mecca among the marble pillars below,
know nothing of this inscription. Few even of the Christian visitors to
Damascus have ever seen it with their own eyes, for it is difficult to
find and read. But there it still endures and waits, the bravest
inscription in the world: "_Thy kingdom, O Christ, is a kingdom of all
ages, and Thy dominion lasts throughout all generations._"

* * * * *

From this eloquent and forgotten stone my memory turns to the Hospital
of the Edinburgh Medical Mission. I see the lovely garden full of roses,
columbines, lilies, pansies,