the days are getting short, and I did not reach the proper spot till just after sunset; not too late, however, to enjoy the marvellous prospect before me, and to feel that it is worthy of all that has been said in its praise. It is impossible to conceive anything more startling than the suddenness with which, emerging from a narrow and absolutely barren cleft in the rock, you see spread before your eyes and at your feet a dense mass of exuberant trees spreading for miles on to the plain which looks towards Palmyra, and, rising white in the midst of it, the Damascus of the thousand and one nights. It is a great and a rare thing for an old traveller not to be disappointed, and I am grateful that it has been so with me this time. About the town _itself_--as seen, I mean, _from within_--I have a mixed feeling. In some respects it equals all my hopes, or at least in one respect; in others it falls short of them. I have remarked that to be prepared for disappointment never in the slightest degree deadens the blow, and, accordingly, although I have both read and been told to my heart's content that I should find the streets unpicturesque and without character, relatively of course (relatively say, to Cairo, not to Baker Street), I was, nevertheless, depressed and in a way surprised to find them so. Of course, there are, as in every Eastern town, numberless delightful bits, and those ennobled as regularly as the day comes by a right royal sun and canopy of blue, yet in the main, Cairo and, in a very different way, Algiers, are far more brilliant, and by-the-bye although you see here an extraordinary variety of costumes from the remotest corners of the East (I have met Indians in the streets), a group of Algerine Bedouins in their stately white robes is worth a whole bazaar full of the peasants and pilgrims that throng Damascus. Then in architecture, Damascus falls far behind Cairo, both for abundance and beauty of its specimens. Its background, too, Antilebanon, is unsatisfactory, humpy and without power of character or beauty of line, such as makes the Red Mountains on the skirt of the Cairene desert so delightful. Here then are the shortcomings; but I have my compensation in the houses, the old houses of which some few are standing, though grey and perishing, and which are still lovely to enchantment. I can't hope to convey to you in writing any idea of this loveliness, and it is not within the scope of sketching (though I am doing one or two little corners), but I am having three or four photographs made (for there are none!) from which you will be able to gather something of their charm. They cannot, however, give you the splendour of the light, and the fanciful delicacy of the colour in the open courts, or the intense and fantastic gorgeousness of the interior.