My motive in returning to Damascus was threefold—certain minor work at Air Force Headquarters, an unpraiseworthy resolve to buy carpets and knick-knacks before other officers of the Palestine Army chose their pickings from the merchants' war hoards, and a sneakingly benevolent desire to see George, the mongrel interpreter who had been bullied into betraying my escape plans in Baranki Barracks, but who was yet such a pathetic little nondescript.
With a passenger I left Ramleh aerodrome in a Bristol Fighter; for with an aeroplane available who would think of travelling by train or automobile over the disordered rails and roads of Syria? It was a sun-shimmery day, pleasantly cool in the early part of a Palestine November. Everything suggested peace as we flew northeastward—the calm cloudlessness, the silent, sparkling countryside, the rhythmic purring of the motor. The ground mosaic was radiant with that acute clearness which makes flying so much more interesting in the East and Middle East than elsewhere.
Far away to the right we could see from our height of 6,000 feet the ghostlike outline of the Dead Sea behind the bleak-ridged hills beyond Jericho. To the left were the shining sea, white-roofed Jaffa, and the lines of sand dunes that curved in and out of the coloured country-side. Ahead and around were brown surfaces of grain land and green blotches of woodland, interspaced with gray-gleaming villages.
Soon the Bristol Fighter droned over what had been the old front of Allenby's left flank, with uneven trenches snaking southeastward from the sand-bordered coast to the Jordan basin. The Jordan itself twisted and writhed through its green-and-gold valley, over which occasional trenchworks zigzagged. Then came the hill desolation of Lower Samaria. Near Shechem I reached out a fur-gloved hand and showed my passenger the approximate spot where, seven months earlier, I was shot down and awoke to find Arab nomads approaching my wrecked machine. Slightly to the west was Nazareth, perched pleasingly on high ground.
The pear-shaped Sea of Galilee flickered with iridescent twinkling in the sunlight. Just north of where the river flows into the lake I picked out the point at which a regiment of the Australian Light Horse, confronted on the far bank by a Turco-German force sent from Damascus to defend the ford, swam their horses across the Jordan and routed the enemy.
The patchwork flatness below changed to more plains of gray-brown grain-country and gray-green orchard land neighboured on the east by the desert that was a populous province in the days when armies of age-old civilizations—Assyrian, Babylonian, Medean, Persian, Macedonian, and Arabian—swept backward and forward in waves of conquest and counter-conquest, to and from Nineveh, Babylon, Ctesiphon, and Old Bagdad, until the Turkish hordes swarmed across from Central Asia and ruined all the lands they conquered.
Small and indistinct at first, then expanding into a vivid clearness as we flew toward it, Damascus came into sight; and of all the views from the air that I remember from flights in Palestine, Egypt, Syria, France, Italy, Bulgaria, Greece, England, and America, this was incomparably the loveliest.
Far away to the west was Mount Lebanon, and from it stretched a line of mountains, growing ever bleaker as they neared the Syrian Desert. The low ground dominated by the heights was a maze of forests, wheat-fields, pasturage, and orchard land, intermingled with patches of sand. Straight ahead was the ancient city of Damascus, a straggling surface of white roofs pierced by the domes and minarets of many mosques, all in a gray whiteness, as if powdered with the dust of its four thousand years of history. Pharpar and Abana, the twin rivers of Damascus, showed up plainly as, converging and diverging, they descended from their sources on the rim of the mountain, and lost themselves in the jig-saw of crooked streets and square-topped houses. The background is the wide, shimmering desert that loses itself on the eastern horizon.
Having, to the roaring accompaniment of a 1918 Hispano-Suiza aero-engine, circled over this city half as old as time, I spiralled down and landed on the aerodrome.