Before I arrived in Damascus, I did not imagine a bright, laughing, open, oriental, Muslim town – and it will soon know the superior delight of a railway. There is still a charming quaintness in the maze of little streets, the size of a capital city in the midst of the oasis. The hotel quarter where we dismounted on our arrival and which was such a disappointing sight is just an unimportant way in at the convergence of the road which links the town to the large European port of Beirut. Immediately after, the Orient reclaims its rightful place and the past takes hold of you once again.

As in every Muslim town, life centres on the bazaar, outside of which stretch only narrow covered alleyways, garden and palace walls and primitive outskirts built in rose-coloured clay, giving one the feeling that the desert is close by.

The bazaar is a huge area where one can easily get lost in the uniform semi-darkness of the vaults. There are avenues a thousand metres long, flanked by countless stalls where oriental objects sparkle: arms, tilework, furniture, painted or encrusted with mother of pearl, copper, finely engraved like lace, costumes of rare colours, wonderful calico of many colours, worn by society people, the fine silks of Bursa, those of Damascus and of Aleppo which are peppered with white flecks on exquisitely coloured backgrounds.

Like back home in the Middle Ages, the merchants are grouped in categories: in the ancient dark maze, there are the quarters of the clothiers, the gunsmiths, the goldsmiths and the rag merchants. The saddlers’ quarter is in the open air, and here and there are fountains and giant plane trees. It contains every Arab fantasy for horses, mules, donkeys and camels. There is everything which is used to rig out animals between Damascus and Baghdad: velvet saddles bedecked with gold or made of panther skin, pearl and shell embroidery, plumed hats for camels, absurd tasselled headgear, adorned with little bells and mirrors to reflect the sunlight as they go along.

From five hundred leagues all around, from the depths of the deserts, they get their supplies from this massive bazaar. It is a real tower of Babel of conversations and a museum of faces and costumes. There are bedouins, Syrians, Druze and Turks in silk robes of all colours, noble emirs entirely dressed in Indian cashmere. There are distant faces, dark mysterious eyes and disturbing heads, enormous under the turbans or veils with which they are covered.