True, when you behold Damascus from the Salahiyeh, the last slope of the Anti-Lebanon, it is the realization of all that you have dreamed of Oriental splendor; the world has no picture more dazzling. It is Beauty carried to the Sublime, as I have felt when overlooking some boundless forest of palms within the tropics.
Bayard Taylor (1864). “The Lands of the Saracen, Or, Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain”, p.120
