I followed down a narrow street, and came to a succession of tiny work-shops. It was then I discovered what a man's feet are for--that is, some uses I had not known before. They are to assist the hands in performing mechanical labor. All mechanics work barefooted here. They sit flat on the floor or ground, with their various appliances in front of them, and there is scarcely any operation in which the feet do not take part. I came to a turning-lathe--a whole row of turning-lathes--tiny, crude affairs, down on the ground, of course, driven back and forth with a bow and a string. The workman held the bow in one hand, while the other hand, assisted by the foot, guided the cutting tool. It would never occur to these workmen to put the lathe higher in the air and attach a treadle, leaving both hands free to guide the tool. Their sawing is the crudest process imaginable. They have no trestles or even saw-bucks. They have only a slanting stick stuck in the ground, and against this, with their feet and one hand, they hold the piece to be sawed, while the other hand runs the earliest saw ever made--the kind Noah used when he built the Ark. Sometimes a sawyer has a helper--a boy who pushes and pulls as the saw runs back and forth. I bought a Sunday-morning paper. It does not resemble the sixty-four-page New York Sunday dailies. It consists of four small pages, printed in wriggly animalculæ and other aquaria, and contains news four years old--or four hundred, it does not matter. Possibly it denounces the sultan--it is proper to do that just now--but I think not. That would be too current. I think it is still denouncing Constantine. XXIX DAMASCUS, THE GARDEN BEAUTIFUL Later, we drove to the foot of Mohammed's Hill--the hill from which the Prophet looked down on the Pearl of the East and decided that as he could have only one paradise he would wait for the next. They have built a little tower to mark the spot where he rested, and we thought we would climb up there. We didn't, however. The carriages could only go a little way beyond the city outskirts, and when we started to climb that blistering, barren hillside afoot we changed our minds rapidly. We had permission to go as high as we pleased, but it is of no value. Anybody could give it. Laura and I and a German newspaper man were the only ones who toiled up high enough to look down through the mystical haze on the vision Mohammed saw. Heavens! but it was hot up there! And this is March--early spring! How those _Quaker City_ pilgrims stood it to travel across the Syrian desert in August I cannot imagine. In the _Innocents_ I find this observation: "The sun-flames shot down like shafts of fire that stream out of a blowpipe. The rays seemed to fall in a steady deluge on my head and pass downward like rain from a roof." That is a white-hot description, but not too intense, I think, for Syrian summer-time.