Azar's Middle Eastern Journeys
" There is an honored old tradition that
the immense gardens in which Damascus stands
was the Garden of Eden...
haji walks the grand bazaar of damascus ©azar
...Damascus measures time not by days
and months and years,
but by the empires she has seen rise
and prosper
and crumble to ruin.
She is a type of immortality.
She saw the foundation of Baalbeck, and Thebes and Ephesus laid:
she saw these villages
grow into mighty cities,
and amaze the world
with their grandeur -
and she has lived to see them desolate,
deserted ,
and given over
to the owls and the bats.
She saw the Israelitish empire exalted,
and she saw it annihilated.
She saw Greece rise,
and flourish two thousand years,
and die.
In her old age
she saw Rome built;
she saw it overshadow the world
with its power;
she saw it perish.
The few hundred years of
Genoese and Venetian might and splendor
were,
to grave old Damascus,
only a trifling scintillation
hardly worth remembering.
Damascus has seen all that has ever occurred on earth,
and still she lives.
She has looked upon the dry bones of a thousand empires,
and
will see the tombs of a thousand more
before she dies.
Though another claims the name,
old Damascus
is by right,
the Eternal City. "
Mark Twain
The Innocents Abroad / 1869