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THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE 



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sible for the Cairo-to-Calcutta express to 

 beat the fastest sea route by several days. 



by DE luxe Express from table moun- 

 tain TO THE GREAT WALL 



Slowly but surely the iron rails arc 

 reaching out to bind Cape Town to Cairo 

 and Suez to Shanghai by way of Persia. 

 India, Burma, and the Yangtse Valley. 

 The path of empire in the future will not 

 alone be traced by the wakes of passing 

 steamers, but also by bold bands of shin- 

 ing steel. The supreme strategy of a rail- 

 way that will connect the valleys of the 

 Xile, the Tigris and the Euphrates, the 

 Indus, the Ganges, the Irriwaddy, and the 

 Yangtse lies in the fact that it will be 

 flanked by the most thickly settled por- 

 tions of the world's surface and can, from 

 the first, have commercial as well as 

 strategic value. 



Syria is the hub of the Afro-Eurasian 

 continents, and with every railway that 

 reaches out to Bremen, Baku, Bokhara, 

 Burma, or Bloemfontein the central re- 

 gion of the world's greatest land-mass 

 achieves new significance. 



Aside from its importance as a trade 

 route, Syria will find its greatest future 

 as an agricultural nation, and has exten- 

 sive regions which can be' made to pro- 

 duce large crops. The Hauran, south of 

 Damascus, has long been a granary and 

 the massive ruins of Baalbek dominate a 

 plain whose fertility was once sufficient to 

 make possible lavish local expenditures 

 and at the same time return large taxes 

 to imperial Rome, which used Syria not 

 as a sinking place for public funds, but as 

 a source of revenue for the treasury on 

 the Tiber. When Rome ruled, this re- 

 mote province had enough and to spare ; 

 but not for long did golden eggs from 

 Syria enrich the greedy Turk. 



SYRIAN ART THREATENED BY EFFICIENCY 

 AND SPEED 



As an industrial land, Syria faces two 

 possibilities. The co-operation between 

 different parts of the country, which 

 good government will make possible and 

 which good communications will foster, 

 will tend toward an expansion of in- 

 dustry and the establishment of factories 

 to take the place of the household pro- 

 duction which has hitherto b^en the rule. 



