Foul as this city may be, there is beauty in every foot of it. The beauty of Cairo lies rather in the view you get of “chunks” of it—the vista of the street, the space of a market-place, the mass of a mosque. Here the beauty lies in little pieces of wall, looked at minutely, in a tiny piece of domestic architecture. It is a beauty in colour rather than in form. Form in Cairo counts for much—in Damascus for almost nothing. Here there is dilapidation in a degree undreamt of in Cairo. But dilapidation does not necessarily make for beauty, though some people think it does. I believe the beauty of colour in Damascus lies in extreme age—in the mellowing of age. After Cairo, the intense antiquity of the older city—of every fragment of it—comes to you impressively. You feel the age of it as you pace every yard of its alleys. Cairo is comparatively modern, and comparatively garish. There is a fine, if filthy, harmony in Damascus. Intimate in the memory of most Light Horsemen will always be certain features of Damascus. Our men will not forget the Hedjaz Headquarters in the heart of the city, the German Club, the Local Resources Office, the filthy Turkish hospital, the English and French hospitals in the suburb, the littered railway station, the suburban roads, unspeakably rough and muddy, the afternoon perambulations of blatant under-dressed bints in gharries, the guards—on the aerodrome, on the Ottoman Bank, on the captured grain stores, on the captured guns—the plentiful lack of ordnance and canteen stores, the corpses of dogs and horses in open spaces, the multitudinous beggars, the exorbitant prices asked for German razors that cost their vendors nothing, the moderate cost of silver and brass ware, the Hedjaz recruiting processions, the glut of matches, the potency of arak, the cunning of the plausible English-speaking small boys, the puzzling complexity and fluctuation of the currency, the paucity of mails, the liberty and the usefulness of Turkish prisoners, the fitful and lawless discharge of firearms about the city all through the night, the suddenness with which sickness made its descent upon the apparently immune, the daily receipt and despatch to time-table of official mails by air, the dancing lights of Salahiye that burned till dawn.... H. W. D. [Illustration] Malaria