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explaining that she meant to go her own way, but Hakki’s obvious disappointment made her relent.
    Graham—after first making sure I would be on the tour—informed Hakki that he, too, would join us.
    â€œIt is urgent that we keep together,” Hakki said, leading us into the hotel parlor. He pulled the chairs together, transforming the parlor into a little classroom.
    Edith placed herself firmly in the middle of the circleand folded her arms as if prepared to challenge anything Hakki said. Graham, with an amused expression that suggested an adult about to tolerate a child’s clumsy recitation, settled down next to me, resting his arm casually over the edge of my chair. Monsieur Louvois chose a chair on the edge of the group. He was elegantly turned out in a tan linen suit, miraculously uncreased. A paisley silk cravat was knotted about his neck. His white curls were still damp and grooved from their morning combing. In his hands he clasped chamois gloves, a white Panama hat, and a walking stick with a silver handle in the shape of a dog’s head.
    â€œI am going to tell you all about this city you are now visiting.” Hakki flashed us an eager smile. “Damascus!” he announced, as though we might have thought ourselves in Bombay or Rome. “It is said Damascus is the oldest city in which people have always been living. If you recall your Genesis, you will remember that Abraham, who is our Ibrahim, and his servants pursued their enemy into ‘Hobah, which is on the left hand of Damascus.’ In your New Testament your Paul ‘preached boldly at Damascus,’ and here in this city he was let down over the wall in a basket to make his escape. Already one of our own little group, Mr. Hamilton, has made his escape. Ha-ha.”
    I was sleepy and distracted by Graham, whose hand hadslipped from the back of the chair onto my shoulder. Hakki’s droning voice came and went in my head. At first the words were pleasant: Damascus was an oasis to the desert people; a city of streams and canals; a vision of the heaven pictured in the Koran, Islam’s holy text; the home of the great princes of Arabia. But soon the voice became the voice of doom—the devastation of the city by Tamerlane, the burning of the Christian quarter. At last, with relief, I heard Hakki deliver a more immediate warning about the drinking water, and then he was leading us into the streets.
    I looked longingly at the lively bazaars, sorry to pass them by, for in the life that lay ahead of me there was unlikely to be another opportunity. Hakki hurried us along to the Umayyad Mosque, which turned out to be not unlike the mosque I had seen with Graham in Beirut, only much larger and more ornate than seemed necessary. Hakki carried a long black umbrella, which he used as a pointer to catch our attention or as a standard to muster us when we strayed. “What you are looking at,” Hakki told us with obvious pride, “was once a heathen temple over which was constructed the Church of St. John the Baptist. Indeed, it is believed by some Christians that the head of St. John once rested here. A mosque was then built in the church. For many years both Christians and Muslims entered by thesame door and worshiped together, but for the last thousand years it has been Muslims only.” The latter fact was produced as a recent bulletin and in an apologetic tone.
    While Hakki pointed his umbrella here and there and told the story of the Muslim conqueror Musa ibn Nuair’s triumphal march into the mosque with his four hundred Visigoth princes, crowned and girdled in gold, Monsieur Louvois slipped away from time to time to examine the pattern of a mosaic or the color of a tile. He did not seem able to keep his hands away from any object that caught his interest.
    While he worried Hakki by playing truant, Edith bullied Hakki with questions of a morbid nature. “What do you mean by ‘John the Baptist’s