The muezzin, or call to prayer from the minaret, is one of the most affecting of all Eastern sounds. Men are chosen for this office with singularly mellow and rich voices; they intone, with a very musical little cadence in a minor key, the first chapter of the Koran, and sometimes other prayers. At the great Mosque of Damascus, a solitary reciter calls from the slender minaret, and is answered from the balcony of the broader one across the court by twenty voices in unison. While the waves of rich sound float out over the city, and are caught and faintly echoed from scores of other minarets, one remembers how that voice has rolled forth already over innumerable villages from Bengal westwards, and men have paused from their labour to pray according to their lights. Islam is usually supposed to have been the “Ishmaelite in church history,” with hand against every man from the first. Really, when it was Arabian, as it remained for four centuries, it was very tolerant, and the Christian pilgrims, priests, and monks were little disturbed. But in 1086 the Seljuk chiefs of wandering Turkish tribes came into possession, and the days of suspicion and that heavy cruelty which is characteristic of the stupid began. There were massacres of monks on Carmel and elsewhere then, and such a state of general tyranny and oppression that the cry reached the West, and the Crusades began. The Crusades, as they dragged their slow length along, did not tend to better understandings; and after Saladin’s conquest of Jerusalem, we read that the walls and pavement of the Mosque of Omar had to be purified with copious showers of water distilled from the fragrant roses of Damascus. The relations between Moslem and Christian in the land to-day are happier, and the intercourse of increasing trade and travel is breaking down old partitions here as elsewhere. Yet little love is lost between the professors of the rival faiths even now. Dr. Andrew Thomson relates how, in recent years, “it had been observed that at a particular period of the day the shadow of the great Mosque of Omar fell upon a certain Christian burying-ground. Even the honour of [Illustration: THE TEMPLE AREA AND THE MOUNT OF OLIVES, FROM MOUNT ZION. The dome on the right is that of the Mosque of El Aksa, and that on the left is the Mosque of Omar. Between these domes, and just below the principal group of cypresses, is the “Wailing Place.” The hills in the background are the Mount of Olives. ]