Bagdad is a city with a romantic name, some fine Arabian architecture, and an impressive western gate whence the Damascus-bound caravans move dustily across the desert; a city fallen from greatness to the date and grain trade, minor bazaars, and the steamer and dhow traffic of the broad-bosomed Tigris; a city redolent of all that Haroun-al-Raschid was and modern Mesopotamia's opportunist sheikhs emphatically are not; a city with a prosperous future, thanks to the British engineers who have irrigated the Tigris-Euphrates basin into the way it should go. Mosul is an unlovely mud city that straggles around the ruins of Nineveh the Magnificent. But Damascus is indescribably a city with an unfathomable soul. In its complex ancestry are the strains of many ancient civilizations. The crooked alleys and decrepit buildings of its oldest quarter, perched on a mountain projection high above Damascus proper, have an origin lost in the conjectural mists of an epoch when the written word was not. Another part of it was co-incident with Baalbek and sun-worship. The plain façade of many a house (purposely plain to divert the cupidity of Turkish pashas) hides a wide, white courtyard soothed by fountains, the plashing of which is coolingly heard in divanned rooms precious with rugs and hangings, and ornamented by minutely detailed designs in fancy arches and miniature cupolas--houses exactly as they were when tenanted by rich merchants who flourished under the greater Arabian caliphs. The Street called Straight, the glass-roofed, unique bazaar and a dozen other city-marks are bafflingly suggestive of contact with a dozen periods of greatness. And last year, when the demoralized Turks marched out of the city under the Arab flag that flew defiantly from the city gate, Arab thinkers began to dream of yet another period of greatness, in which Damascus was to be the centre of a re-united Arabian Empire.... * * * * * My motive in returning to Damascus was threefold--certain minor work at Air Force Headquarters, an unpraiseworthy resolve to buy carpets and knick-knacks before other officers of the Palestine Army chose their pickings from the merchants' war hoards, and a sneakingly benevolent desire to see George, the mongrel interpreter who had been bullied into betraying my escape plans in Baranki Barracks, but who was yet such a pathetic little nondescript. With a passenger I left Ramleh aerodrome in a Bristol Fighter; for with an aeroplane available who would think of travelling by train or automobile over the disordered rails and roads of Syria? It was a sun-shimmery day, pleasantly cool in the early part of a Palestine November. Everything suggested peace as we flew northeastward--the calm cloudlessness, the silent, sparkling countryside, the rhythmic purring of the motor. The ground mosaic was radiant with that acute clearness which makes flying so much more interesting in the East and Middle East than elsewhere.