I almost made up my mind that I would never call on an Emperor again. Like all Mediterranean excursionists, those first pilgrims were insatiable collectors of curios, costumes, and all manner of outlandish things. Dan Slote had the stateroom hung and piled with such gleanings. That fellow will buy a Circassian slave next. It was better camping than that Humboldt journey of six years before, though the horses were not so dissimilar, and altogether it was a hard, nerve-racking experience, climbing the arid hills of Palestine in that torrid summer heat.
Nobody makes that trip in summer-time now.
Tourists hurry out of Syria before the first of April, and they do not go back before November. I imagined I could distinguish between the floods of rays. I thought I could tell when each flood struck my head, when it reached my shoulders, and when the next one came. It was terrible. He tells of this in the book, but he does not mention, either in the book or in his notes, the attack which Dan Slote had some days later.