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GRAND HOTEL VICTORIA

Damas, le 11th June, 1908.
(Syrie)

Dear Colonel Hecker,

Palestine seems one great cemetery and while I left behind many things undone, I feel that in hurrying on to Syria I saved myself certain sad reflections.

This is my sixth day in Syria and my first sight of a land whose art made its first real impression upon me about six years ago.  I am glad to be here now.  Had I come sooner the beautiful in art would not have offset the filth and slime, morally and politically, in which I find myself.  Had I come later certain opportunities to enrich my collection and increase my little store of esthetic information would have gone.

The field is rich, and, generally speaking, almost unknown.  I feel that I am here early enough to perhaps obtain something as important in aesthetic art as the biblical mss. of last year's acquirement, i.e. in ecclesiastic love.  Don't deem me over-sanguine when I write such dreams.  I know that certain superb things of which even museums know little, are hidden between where I now write and the Euphrates river.  They, and their history as fully as it can be obtained is my present hurried quest.  This quest encourage me to face the discomfort and perhaps some physical danger of a couple of weeks in this sweltering vortex of Arabs and on to that home of boils Aleppo.  I have already learned how inaccurate much of that which has been heretofore said about the potteries of Damascus and the vast field north and east of here.  This information alone is worth more to my present collection than I had dared dream.  The stone cutting and carving of the best Greek period, as done behind these great mountains too, seems to have escaped attention in a manner quite like the neglect shown the Racca potteries.  Some heads, done 600 B.C. have fallen almost upon my head and have captured my flirtatious heart.  If the hellish Turkish officials, who are thicker and filthier than flies, do not confiscate my purchases and keep the bakhshish as well, I