Once, when we bumped over a shaky culvert and a bushel or two of coal-dust fell from the rusty tender, the engineer stopped the train and his assistant went back with a shovel and piece of sacking to gather up the precious stuff.
There was nothing but squalid villages and ruins, goats and an occasional rare camel to be seen through the window--not a tree anywhere, the German General Staff having attended to that job thoroughly.

There is honey in the country and it's plentiful as well as good, because bees are not easy property to raid and make away with; but the milk is from goats, and as for overflowing, I would hate to have to punish the dugs of a score of the brutes to get a jugful for dinner.
Syria's wealth is of the past and the future.
Long before it grew too dark to watch the landscape we were wholly converted to Grim's argument that Syria was no place for a man of Feisul's calibre.

The Arab owners of the land are plundered to the bone; the men with money are foreigners, whose only care is for a government that will favour this religion and that breed.

To set up a kingdom there would be like preaching a new religion in Hester Street; you could hand out text, soup and blankets, but you'd need a whale's supply of faith to carry on, and the offertories wouldn't begin to meet expenses.
Until that journey finally convinced me, I had been wondering all the while in the back of my head whether Grim wasn't intending an impertinence.

It hasn't been my province hitherto to give advice to kings; for one thing, they haven't asked me for it.