It is one of the world’s greatest battlefields that lies below us, so vast that Waterloo and Gettysburg might be fought in different corners and hardly see the smoke of each other’s cannonading. But no modern conflict has engaged such hosts as were drawn up here in martial array. They came from the desert capital, came up from Palestine and Egypt by way of the Entering In of Hamath, came as we have come, through the narrow pass leading from the Mediterranean. Back at the beginning of wars, the trained armies of Egypt fought the Hittite and the Chaldean here. After Babylonian and Persian, Jew and Syrian and Greek had become mere subjects of imperial Rome, it was here that Zenobia, the beautiful, talented, ambitious queen of Palmyra, received her crushing defeat at the hands of Aurelian. Here, centuries later, Crusader and Saracen battled for the land they both called Holy; here chivalrous Tancred led his armies and valiant Saladin won decisive victories. Two things stand out from the general brownness of the plain. Just below us is the dazzling white acropolis of Homs, and ten miles to the south is the deep blue of the lake once called _Qadesh_, the “Holy,” which was dammed up in its little valley by a long-vanished race and worshiped before history began. We saw the bright reflection from the smooth sides of the mound long before we could distinguish the town lying beneath it, and for a while we were puzzled as to what it was—this huge, symmetrical object rising so abruptly from the great, flat plain, and seeming doubly immense because of the clear air and the absence of any neighboring elevation with which to compare its height. The acropolis is, indeed, no insignificant structure. The people of Homs believe it to be entirely artificial, and its appearance is in favor of such an hypothesis. The circular hill is almost a thousand feet in diameter and its platform stands a hundred feet above the plain. The sides rise so steeply that it would be impossible to scale them without a ladder; and, to make the summit absolutely inaccessible to an enemy, all the outer slope of the mound formerly bore a slippery coating of small, square basalt blocks. At present the platform is reached by a long, winding path; but even this is so steep as to be almost dangerous in places. During the Crusades the fortress of Homs was held alternately by the Christians and the Saracens; and it has suffered from so many assaults that nothing of the old castle now remains save a few fragments of tumbling wall and a ruined gateway.