the news of it.  Go back as far as you will into the vague past, there was always a Damascus.  In the writings of every century for more than four thousand years, its name has been mentioned and its praises sung.  To Damascus, years are only moments, decades are only flitting trifles of time.  She measures time, not by days and months and years, but by the empires she has seen rise, 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 feet wide, and shut in on either side by the high mud-walls of the gardens.  At last we got to where lanterns could be seen flitting about here and there, and knew we were in the midst of the curious old city.  In a little narrow street, crowded with our pack-mules and with a swarm of uncouth Arabs, we alighted, and through a kind of a hole in the wall entered the hotel.  We stood in a great flagged court, with flowers and citron trees about us, and a huge tank in the centre that was receiving the waters of many pipes.  We crossed the court and entered the rooms prepared to receive four of us.  In a large marble-paved recess between the two rooms was a tank of clear, cool water, which was kept running over all the time by the streams that were pouring into it from half a dozen pipes.  Nothing, in this scorching, desolate land could look so refreshing as this pure water flashing in the lamp-light; nothing could look so beautiful, nothing could sound