Excerpt from Turkey: A Past and a Future Ieucia, from Kish to Babylon - but which always springs up again, like Delhi, within a few parasangs of its last ruins, in an area that 18 an irresistible focus of population; Basra amid its palm-groves, so far down stream that it' belongs to the Indian Ocean the port from which Sinbad set sail for fairyland, and from which less mythical Arab seamen spread their religion and civilisation far over African coasts and Malayan Indies these, and besides them almost all the holy cities of mankind: Kerbela, between the Euphrates and the desert, where, under Sunni rule, the Shias of Persia and India have still visited the tombs of their saints and buried their dead; Jerusalem, where Jew and Christian, Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant, Armenian and Abyssinian, have their common shrines and separate quarters; Mekka and Medina in the heart of the desert, beyond which their fame would never have passed but for a well and a mart and a precinct of idols and the Prophet who overthrew them and there are the cities on the Pilgrim Road (linked now by railway with Medina, the nearer of the Hara mein) Beirut the port, with its electric trams and newspapers, the Smyrna of the Arab lands; and Da mascus the oasis, looking out over the desert instead of the sea, and harbour not of ships but of camel caravans. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.