Syrian travel has its interesting features, like travel in any other part of the world, and yet to break your leg or have the cholera adds a welcome variety to it.
We left Damascus at noon and rode across the plain a couple of hours, and then the party stopped a while in the shade of some fig-trees to give me a chance to rest.

It was the hottest day we had seen yet--the sun-flames shot down like the shafts of fire that stream out before a blow-pipe--the rays seemed to fall in a steady deluge on the head and pass downward like rain from a roof.

I imagined I could distinguish between the floods of rays--I thought I could tell when each flood struck my head, when it reached my shoulders, and when the next one came.

It was terrible.

All the desert glared so fiercely that my eyes were swimming in tears all the time.