The Lady and I are climbing up from the great Mosque of the Ommayyades into the Minaret of the Bride, at the hour of 'Asr, or afternoon prayer. As we tread the worn spiral steps in the darkness we hear, far above, the chant of the choir of muezzins, high-pitched, long-drawn, infinitely melancholy, calling the faithful to their devotions.
"Allah akbar! Allah akbar! Allah is great! I testify there is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is the prophet of Allah! Come to prayer!"
The plaintive notes float away over the city toward all four quarters of the sky, and quaver into silence. We come out from the gloom of the staircase into the dazzling light of the balcony which runs around the top of the minaret. For a few
moments we can see little; but when the first bewilderment passes, we are conscious that all the charm and wonder of Damascus are spread at our feet.
The oval mass of the city lies like a carving of old ivory, faintly tinged with pink, on a huge table of malachite. The setting of groves and gardens, luxuriant, interminable, deeply and beautifully green, covers a circuit of sixty miles. Beyond it, in sharpest contrast, rise the bare, fawn-coloured mountains, savage, intractable, desolate; away to the west, the snow-crowned bulk of Hermon; away to the east, the low-rolling hills and slumbrous haze of the desert. Under these flat roofs and white domes and long black archways of bazaars three hundred thousand folk are swarming. And there, half emerging from the huddle of decrepit modern buildings and partly hidden by the rounded shed of a bazaar, is the ruined top of a Roman arch of triumph, battered, proud, and indomitable.
An hour later we are scrambling up a long, shaky ladder to the flat roofs of the joiners' bazaar, built close against the southern wall of the Mosque. We
walk across the roofs and find the ancient south door of the Mosque, now filled up with masonry, and almost completely concealed by the shops above which we are standing. Only the entablature is visible, richly carved with garlands. Kneeling down, we read upon the lintel the Greek inscription in uncial letters, cut when the Mosque was a Christian church. The Moslems who are bowing and kneeling and stretching out their hands toward Mecca among the marble pillars below, know nothing of this inscription. Few even of the Christian visitors to Damascus have ever seen it with their own eyes, for it is difficult to find and read. But there it still endures and waits, the bravest inscription in the world: "Thy kingdom, O Christ, is a kingdom of all ages, and Thy dominion lasts throughout all generations."
From this eloquent and forgotten stone my memory turns to the Hospital of the Edinburgh Medical Mission. I see the lovely garden full of roses, columbines, lilies, pansies, sweet-peas, strawberries just in bloom. I see the poor people coming in a