But he had a no less keen eye for the modern Damascus, with its motley population, its narrow streets and thronged bazaars, all full of strange Eastern life and habits. “The mean, dirty thoroughfares, worse,” as he says, “than an Old Town Edinburgh close, run between low, shabby-looking houses; and nothing surprised me more than when I was taken through a long dark passage, to suddenly find that the shabby street-front concealed a beautiful court, laid out in garden fashion, with a fine fountain in the centre, and flower-beds and orange trees, and round this the chambers, brightly furnished with cushions and matting, etc., all opening on to it, like a scene from the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments.” Nevertheless the predominant thought in his mind was the Damascus of Roman and New Testament times; the city to which Saul the persecutor was journeying when he was arrested on the way, and commissioned to go far hence to proclaim the gospel of glad tidings to the Gentile world. Having gratified his intelligent curiosity, in seeking to discover the ancient localities of Damascus associated with Scripture history, he proceeded by way of Lebanon to Jerusalem. The associations of the city of Zion, of Nazareth, the Jordan, the Syrian desert, and the Dead Sea, were replete with interest to a mind trained from earliest childhood in devout familiarity with every incident of sacred story. The novel scenes of Eastern life were, moreover, explored with peculiar zest in this his first escape from the restraints of homely Western civilization into that strange old East where the customs and ideas of an ancient past still survive. In referring to this visit to Jerusalem he remarks:--“I was there before any guide-book was written; and so I had to consult my Bible, and occasionally Josephus, on a point of history. After these I found Robinson’s ‘Biblical Researches’ the most thorough and useful. Robinson seemed to me to write, and study, and investigate as a scholar. Perhaps he paid rather too little regard to tradition; but this was natural in a place like Jerusalem, which absolutely swarms with the most absurd legends. He lays down on the whole a firm basis of biblical and historical facts; then he leads one on in a logical and critical manner to the truth regarding the exact sites of the great events of the Gospel narrative: the site of the Temple, of the Palace of David, of the Hall of Judgment in which Pilate sat, of the old walls and gates of the Holy City, etc. Then Robinson seemed to me to prove that the Holy Sepulchre could not have been where it is now located.”