It was a wonderful hour for our young Australian countrymen. But the long war had made them into reserved men of the world, and the streets of old Damascus were but a stage in the long path of the war. They rode, very dusty and unshaved, their big hats battered and drooping, through the tumultuous populace of the oldest city in the world, with the same easy, casual bearing, and the same quiet self-confidence that are their distinctive characteristic on their country tracks at home. They ate their grapes and smoked their cigars, and missed no pretty eyes at the windows; but they displayed no excitement or elation. They had become true soldiers of fortune. And their long-tailed horses, at home now, like their owners, on any road in any country, saw nothing in the shouting mob or banging rifles, or the narrow ways and many colours of the bazaars, to cause them once to start, shy, or even cock an ear. The 3rd Brigade rode out to a series of ugly, but highly successful, actions with stout rear-guards of German machine gunners. Few men, in any age, have passed through twenty-four more adventurous and gratifying hours than they during this first day around Damascus. BEAUTIFUL DAMASCUS The district of Damascus is an irrigation settlement on a vast scale, set in the midst of comparative desert. So rich and close are the orchards, and so tall the plantations of poplars and other decorative trees, that, looking over the city from the neighbouring hills, all you see of the city of 250,000 people are the stately minarets of its many mosques and the roofs of the larger residences of the rich. Immediately to the west of the town rises the bare, glaring mountain side, and to the east and north and south of the green expanse of gardens you ride out upon the harsh and treeless plain. Damascus owes all its wealth, even its very existence, to the torrential Abana River, which, surging down from Anti-Lebanon, bursts from the mountain gorge on to the plain and, splitting up into several beautiful streams, has made a rural paradise on the edge of the Arabian wilderness. [Illustration: AUSTRALIANS ON THE ROAD TO JERUSALEM ] [Illustration: AN AUSTRALIAN FLYING SQUADRON IN PALESTINE _Photos, in colour by Capt. Frank Hurley_ ]