Embowered in gardens and tinted by the lights that varied every moment, Damascus looked to us as much like an earthly paradise as anything in the Orient. Away to the east was the range of Anti-Lebanon; to the north was the plain, with a strip of desert, and to the south the plain stretched away and broke into the hills in the distance. We could trace out the shape of the city, and follow with the eye the direction of its principal streets; the tall minarets and bright domes of the mosques formed salient features of the landscapes, and altogether the scene was thoroughly Oriental. It was from this hill that Mohammed looked and pronounced Damascus the most beautiful city of the world, and promised the most dutiful of his attendants, that they should be appointed to dwell there.
Thus we looked upon the city which is doubtless the oldest in the world. More than three thousand years it has flourished; more than thirty centuries it has stood there a city--the beautiful city of the plain. Nations have appeared and vanished. Kingdoms and empires and republics have risen and fallen, but Damascus has stood unchanged. Thrones have crumbled, dynasties have come and gone. Statesmen and poets and scholars have lived their brief period of existence, brief and insignificant. In the centuries that have rolled over Damascus Saracen, Roman, Moslem, and Christian have besieged the city; twice it has been the center of empires, and many times it has been the seat of power that was felt far away. Though never formally { 287}occupied by Christians, it was one of the early centers of Christianity, and for nearly three centuries this was the predominant religion. And later in its history the armies of the Mohammedan empire went forth from Damascus, spreading the religion of the Prophet to Spain on the one hand, and to Hindos-tan on the other. Damascus was then the seat of an empire the greatest on the globe, extending from the Himalayas to the Atlantic. Wealth was poured into her coffers, and she became the richest as well as the mightiest capital. Though she has declined she has not fallen, and presents to-day a picture of serene and well-deserved prosperity.
Damascus without the bazaars would be Hamlet without Hamlet. Here you see the Orient in its perfection. Instead of shops scattered through the city, as in the West, all trades, or rather all the persons in one trade, are brought together. The bazaars of Damascus have had a world-wide celebrity for centuries, and there are none in the East better than they. You can buy there anything you want, from a. slave to a cigarette, and from a sewing needle to a _parure_ of diamonds. You can wander for hours and days in the bazaars; in the slipper bazaar, the tobacco bazaar, the seed bazaar, the mercers’ bazaar, the tailors’ bazaar, the clog bazaar, the silversmiths’ bazaar, the spice bazaar, the book bazaar, the old clo’ bazaar, the iron bazaar, the pipe bazaar, and other bazaars to the number of a dozen or more.