OVER ANCIENT BARYLON
Baghdad sit upon the highway and lament. The train will soon be coming.
Meanwhile, the doctors of the Mohammedan law, the ulema of Islam, will scan their sacred books to see if aught therein is mentioned about the railroad and the aeroplane. And if, after straining their theological faculties, they can not find, expressed or implied, a divine sanction of these inventions, they will forthwith curse them from the pulpit. Yes; this has already been done in Nejd. But the Arabs, though they begin by waylaying the trains to Medina, will soon be laying rails themselves across the Nefud. The genius of this industrial age is destined to world conquest and power. And the Koran, that divine encyclopedia of the Muslem, has an elasticity of phrase that can be made to cover any heresy, ancient or modern, speculative or industrial.
Speaking one day with one of the ulema of Damascus of the extravagance of practical science, I mentioned the Meteorological Bureau at Washington, which has two
[139]
