would be found, the city where, if anywhere, the races of the Near East
have mingled--building their courses into her fortress walls from the
polygonal work of the Hittite founders to the battlements that kept out
the Crusaders--and now the half-way point of a railway surveyed along an
immemorially ancient route, but unfinished like the history of Aleppo
herself; Van by its upland lake, overhanging the Mesopotamian lowlands
and with the writing of their culture graven on its cliffs, yet living a
life apart like some Swiss canton and half belonging to the infinite
north; Bagdad, the incarnation for the last millennium of an eternal
city that shifts its site as its rivers shift their beds--from Seleucia
to Bagdad, from Babylon to Seleucia, from Kish to Babylon--but which
always springs up again, like Delhi, within a few parasangs of its last
ruins, in an area that is an irresistible focus of population; Basra
amid its palm-groves, so far down stream that it belongs to the Indian
Ocean--the port from which Sinbad set sail for fairyland, and from which
less mythical Arab seamen spread their religion and civilisation far
over African coasts and Malayan Indies; these, and besides them almost
all the holy cities of mankind: Kerbela, between the Euphrates and the
desert, where, under Sunni rule, the Shias of Persia and India have
still visited the tombs of their saints and buried their dead;
Jerusalem, where Jew and Christian, Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant,
Armenian and Abyssinian, have their common shrines and separate
quarters; Mekka and Medina in the heart of the desert, beyond which
their fame would never have passed but for a well and a mart and a
precinct of idols and the Prophet who overthrew them; and there are the
cities on the Pilgrim Road (linked now by railway with Medina, the
nearer of the _Haramein_): Beirût the port, with its electric trams and
newspapers, the Smyrna of the Arab lands; and Damascus the oasis,
looking out over the desert instead of the sea, and harbour not of ships
but of camel-caravans.