Just outside of Damascus, also, is a sad house of “life more terrible than death.” It was once, they say, the residence of proud Naaman, and it is still tenanted by lepers who, alas, have known no Elisha and washed in no healing Jordan. My Syrian friends were afraid even to enter its court, but I talked with eight of the thirty or forty inmates. Some were voiceless and shapeless—grotesque, horrible caricatures of humanity. But there was still a “little maid” in the House of Naaman. Miriam was a pretty, slender girl, just beginning to burst into the bloom of early Eastern adolescence. She seemed the very incarnation of health and youthful joy, and could hardly stop laughing long enough for me to take her photograph. Yet I could not laugh with her; for on the rich brown of her cheek was a tiny pinkish swelling, and close beside her graceful form crouched an awful figure, loathsome, unsmiling and unwomanly, like which she would some day be. Over the now closed Kisan Gate at the southeast corner of the city wall is a small, bricked-up window, through which tradition says that St. Paul was let down in a basket. Unfortunately for the story, this part of the fortification dates from the Turkish occupation. The bend of the wall includes, however, as it probably has always done, the Jewish Quarter. The Hebrews of Damascus are unique among their coreligionists of Palestine and Syria in that they are not comparatively recent immigrants drawn back to the land of their fathers by Zionist ideals, but are descended from ancestors who settled here in very ancient times.[37] Some of them bear family names which can be read in the earliest census lists of the Old Testament. Many of them are very estimable people; but I cannot describe the quarter where they live, further than to state that it is the most filthy and malodorous place I have yet visited. I am not especially squeamish; I have often, for the sake of the human interest found there, traveled in Mediterranean steerages and lived in the slums of great capitals; but after a brief glimpse of the Jewish Quarter of Damascus, I beat an ignominious retreat. There are said to be houses there whose interiors are wonderfully beautiful; but I am not going back to see them.