I replied that I believed it to be the case, such being the custom in the English army.
"As for us," said Maḥmūd, "our pay is always due to us for half a year, and often out of twelve months' pay we receive but six months'. Wāllah! I have never touched more than eight months' pay for a complete year. Once," he added, "I was in Alexandria--Māsha'llah, the fine city! Houses it has as big as the palaces of kings, and all the roads have paved edges whereon the people walk. And there I saw a cabman who sued a lady for his fare, and the judge gave it to him. By the Truth! the ways of judges are different with us," observed Maḥmūd thoughtfully; and then, with an abrupt transition, he exclaimed: "Look, oh lady! there is Abu Sa'ad."
I looked, and saw Abu Sa'ad walking in the ploughed field, with his white coat as spotless as though he had not just alighted from a journey as long as one of Maḥmūd's, and his black sleeves folded neatly against his sides, and I made haste to welcome the Father of Good Luck, for in Syria the first stork is like the first swallow with us. He cannot, however, any more than the swallow make summer, and we rode that day into Ḳal'at el Mudīk, in drenching rain.
Ḳal'at el Mudīk is the Apamea of the Seleucids. It was founded by Seleucus Nicator, that great town builder who had so many cities for his god-daughters: Seleucia in Pieria, Seleucia on the Calycadnus, Seleucia in Babylonia, and more besides. Though it has been utterly destroyed by earthquakes, enough remains in ruin to prove its ancient splendour, the wide circuit of its walls, the number of its temples and the magnificence of its columned streets. You can trace the main thoroughfares from gate to gate by the heaped masses of the colonnades, and mark the stone bases of statues at the intersections of the ways. Here and there a massive portal opens into vacuity, the palace which it served having been razed to the ground, or an armed horseman decorates the funeral stele on which the living merits of his prototype are recorded. The Christians took up the story where the Seleucid kings had left it, and the ruins of a great church with a courtyard set round with columns lie on the edge of the main street. As I plunged in the soft spring rain through deep grass and flowers and clumps of asphodel, to the discomfiture of the grey owls that sat blinking on the heaps of stones, the history and architecture of the town seemed an epitome of the marvellous fusion between Greece and Asia that came of Alexander's conquests. Here was a Greek king whose capital lay on the Tigris, founding a city on the Orontes and calling it after his Persian wife--what builders raised the colonnades that adorned this and all the Greek-tinged towns of Syria with classic forms used in a spirit of Oriental lavishness? what citizens walked between them, holding out hands to Athens and to Babylon?