... Just back from Syria, where we went with our old travelling companions . . . . We took wing to Damascus, a vast oriental slum, really, but marvelous all the same, with the biggest and most beautiful mosque I've ever seen. One simply sat at the foot of tremendous pillars, at the heart of hushed acres of carpet, and mooned two hours blissfully away. Then across the desert to Palmyra, a warren of souks with scores of giant waterwheels turned by the green Euphrates. Then to the tangled lanes and caravanserais, sunsets in the desert . . . .
Yes. Huge crusader castles, Krak des Chevaliers, tremendous Greco-Roman theatres (Bosra), the fortress of Jevel Druse. Xan and I went to the Hammam in Aleppo, a great domed building put up in 1200 AD by Nur-ed-Din el Shāhed al Mansūr, Saladin's brother. We were pounded to a pulp in the steam by brawny Moslems, then wrapped in towels and gold hemmed robes, set on divans with cardamon coffee and hookahs, where we reclined, listening to the muezzins wailing next door, and then sallied out into the gloaming, the cleanest men East of the Suez and North of Hejaz, and the Bedouins of the souks followed our fragrant and disembodied progress with black and blazing eyes.
—Patrick Leigh Fermor, in In Tearing Haste: Letters between Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor.
—David