The smells of Damascus you will remember for ever. Cairo is clean by comparison: the alleys of Cairo are not foul. The stinks of Damascus are literally overpowering. There is offal, refuse, foul puddles in every street of the Bazaars. The Abana is a foul river. “Are not Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel”? The answer is: Certainly not. There is an ill-kemptness about the place that carries Oriental slackness a bit too far. In the streets that thread the heart of the city are ruts and holes that break the springs of M.T. every day. The tramline protrudes eight inches. This gives rise to deadlocks in traffic that hold up movement for an hour. Incredibly narrow and tortuous are the highways of the city. The only decent road is that which skirts the fountained promenade near the Hedjaz Station. I am sure the Damascans look on this bit of orderliness as a Western intrusion; just as I am sure that if they found themselves in an English town guileless of smells they would call it insipid.... In the bazaars there is a baffling complexity of colour, of race, of wares. The Mousky is less heterogeneous. In the Square, in the street which is called Strait, in the gold bazaar, grain bazaar, sweets bazaar, silk bazaar, you have all the various colour of tarbooshed Cairo, and more. Here the soldiers of the King of the Hedjaz throng; there is endless variety in their clothes and their flowing head-dress. The Moslem women, who veil their faces, affect far more variety than the Mohamedan women of Cairo, with their yashmaks. The French are here. The Australian hat and plume is everywhere. I never saw so great a number of Australian soldiers moving at random in any city. There is great jostling in these narrow streets, more than the normal jostling you get in any crowd. The dusty bazaars are in semi-darkness; their streets bear a covered roof of iron; they must get protection from rain. In Cairo all is open; for there it rains but rarely. Not only are the bazaar streets in Cairo without roofs that would stop a shower, but the shops, themselves, full of treasures. Here the rain comes in a deluge. From some of the street roofs the enemy had taken the iron for military use. What the state of these roofless streets will be when the rains come is sad to think. They will be flooded all winter.