The first charm of Damascus as a whole city lies in the contrast which those brown sandhills behind it make with the green strip of the Barada Valley. Journeying from Ludd through the monotony of lank, brown growth that straggles to the horizon from the road, you give up hope of ever seeing foliage again, until you pass El Kunneitra. Then you see the green of Barada; and it is the richer for the hills behind it—browner, more desolate by far, than any landscape skirting Galilee or the Jordan. Far up the clay feet of those rocky hills straggles the brown-and-white suburb of Salahiye, all square-built and flat-topped—from the distance like bricks inserted in the clay soil. The line of hills is cleft cleanly by the Pass, the scene of that hideous slaughter by our machine guns. If you climb into the fringe of Salahiye you see the curious shape of Damascus—a jagged comet-form, all the angles and serrations of the brown tail defined with unnatural clearness by the depth of the green about it. In the amorphous head are a few minarets—like jewels. In Cairo there are too many minarets as you look from the Bey’s Leap: they protrude like a porcupine’s quills. In Damascus the city’s flat brownness is just relieved by them. When we came to Damascus it was drought-stricken. Soon afterward, it rained torrentially for a day. Then the sun shone and drew from the city such colour as we never dreamed was there. Nor had we dreamed that the trees were dusty—so green they seemed after the southern country. But, washed, they helped to throw up the wonderful colour of “that great city,” as it is called in Scripture. It is a relief to be delivered from the sight of the everlasting cactus-hedge of the southern towns. The cactus does flourish in Damascus; but so thick is the foliage that it is lost in the mass. You cannot look down on Nazareth without being obsessed by the ubiquitous pest. You can look down on Damascus and be unconscious of it. It straggles about the leafy roads in patches beside the mud walls. That you can bear, because it does not rise above the all-enclosing foliage.