and prosper and crumble to ruin. She is a type of immortality. She saw

the foundations of Baalbec, and Thebes, and Ephesus laid; she saw these

villages grow into mighty cities, and amaze the world with their

grandeur--and she has lived to see them desolate, deserted, and given

over to the owls and the bats. She saw the Israelitish empire exalted,

and she saw it annihilated. She saw Greece rise, and flourish two

thousand years, and die. In her old age she saw Rome built; she saw it

overshadow the world with its power; she saw it perish. The few hundreds

of years of Genoese and Venetian might and splendor were, to grave old

Damascus, only a trifling scintillation hardly worth remembering.

Damascus has seen all that has ever occurred on earth, and still she

lives. She has looked upon the dry bones of a thousand empires, and will

see the tombs of a thousand more before she dies. Though another claims

the name, old Damascus is by right the Eternal City.

We reached the city gates just at sundown. They do say that one can get

into any walled city of Syria, after night, for bucksheesh, except

Damascus. But Damascus, with its four thousand years of respectability

in the world, has many old fogy notions. There are no street lamps

there, and the law compels all who go abroad at night to carry lanterns,

just as was the case in old days, when heroes and heroines of the Arabian

Nights walked the streets of Damascus, or flew away toward Bagdad on

enchanted carpets.

It was fairly dark a few minutes after we got within the wall, and we

rode long distances through wonderfully crooked streets, eight to ten

517

The Innocents Abroad