No longer did the fragrant fumes of Laodicea[31] cunningly mixed with spices and apple paste curl up out of the bubbling _narghilehs_ scenting the air. The long-stemmed _chibouques_, with their jewelled amber mouth-pieces, were no more seen, and the _chibouqueji’s_ occupation was gone. As in Bond Street, so also in “the Street which is called Straight,”[32] the cigarette ruled supreme. When the Muezzin—blind lest, as happened to King David, his impious eyes should fall upon the unveiled mysteries of an adjoining harem—called the faithful to prayer from his high minaret, it was but a mean, commonplace, tatterdemalion crowd that assembled to his cry. The prose of the Giaour had banished colour and romance out of the true believer’s life. I gazed upon the old buildings and upon the holy places, trying to call up once more the feelings that they had awakened in bygone days. But it was all in vain; the charm was broken and the spell was gone. The mystic halo which of yore hovered so hauntingly over the ancient walls had vanished like a ghost into thin air, and the glory of Damascus had departed. Of those remarkable people who had given such an interest to my first visit, not one remained. The Burtons were dead, Lady Ellenborough dead, Abd el Kader dead, and laid with his fathers, far away in Algeria. All dead! as dead as Abraham and Eliezer of Damascus himself. I felt inclined to cry with Jeremiah, “Damascus is waxed feeble.... How is the city of praise not left, the city of my joy!” (Jeremiah, xlix., 24). Sadly I left the gates, turning the horses’ heads westward towards the Lebanon range, hoping to spend an hour dreaming over the past among the stately ruins of Baalbek. But there too the sacrilegious profanity of the nineteenth century had been at work: the Temple of the Sun was strewn with sandwich papers, empty bottles bearing the scarlet pyramid which is the sign manual of Bass, oily sardine-tins, fragments of biscuits, half-smoked cigarettes; all the ugly litter of Ascot Heath on the Saturday after the race week. I am an old man now, and my travelling days are over; but I bless my stars that most of my wanderings were accomplished while the East was still the East. I am happy to have seen the eternal Sphinx and the Great Pyramid—now mere trysting-places for picnics and flirtations—when they were still wrapped in the mystery of the Pharaohs: when men still trembled at the very mention of the Afrits and Jins who mounted guard over the buried secrets of King Solomon; when men by black arts sought to raise the dead and even to summon Shaitan himself, robed in all the majesty of terror. It is another East that “calls” now. A thick varnish of sham Western civilization has besmirched the picture; its poetry has been wiped out, and I am content to sit by my fireside, humbly cultivating prose, like Monsieur Jourdain. CHAPTER XXXI 1872 GARIBALDI