“Majestic, mysterious, beautiful is the side of the East. She is beautiful everywhere: in India, under the gigantic palm trees of the Ganges and Barrumputer, in the quicksand of Arabia, in the rose gardens of Persia, in the snowy mountains of the Caucasus; and in the marketplace of tribes and peoples, in that part of Asia where at every step you see a fragment of the tomb of the past, where every cliff and hillock is an excerpt from a page of the long past! Here they, the peoples of the East, flocked, each with the banner of their faith, with the sign of their destiny on their foreheads..."