The christian curiosities of this oldest of inhabited cities, begin with the mosque of peculiar sanctity, once the site of St. John’s Cathedral, whose chamber of relics, containing a pretended head of the Baptist, is inaccessible even to Mussulmen, the priesthood excepted. Six huge Corinthian columns, once a part of its proud portico, are built into houses and stores, so that you get but faint glimpses of their beauty and size until you mount the flat mud-roof of the modern buildings and look down into the vast area of the temple, six hundred and fifty-feet by one hundred and fifty; and there find towering above you these massive, blackened remains of Christian architecture,--significant emblems of the triumph of the Crescent over the Cross,--and yet by their imperishableness a promise of renewed glory in some brighter future. That Islamism is hastening to decay is shown impressively enough in the grand dervish mosque and khan, once quite celebrated as the Syrian enthronement of this advanced guard of Mohammed; now nothing could seem more deserted, one minaret is threatening to fall, the spacious garden is all weed-grown, and few are left to mourn over the reverse: these banner-men of the prophet, no longer warriors, students, and apostles, do but beg their bread and drone their prayers, and exchange the reputation of fanatics for that of hypocrites; they are in fact monks of the mosque, like their brothers in celibacy, changing sadly enough from enthusiasm to formality, from the fervor of first love to the grave-like chillness of an exhausted ritual. St. Paul is of course the great name at Damascus; and your dragoman is very certain always as to the place where he was lowered down the city-wall; then he takes you to the tomb of the soldier who befriended him, close at hand, and to the little underground chapel where the Apostle’s sight was restored. But having passed in turn under the sceptre of Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Jew, Roman, Arabian, Turk, every stone of these buildings could tell a most interesting tale, and every timber of the wall could answer with an experience corresponding to the out-door revolution.