Some little Syrian girls beset Laura on the way back to the hotel and tried to sell her some bead embroidery which it seems they make in a mission-school established here by the English. One of them--a little brown madonna of about ten--could speak English quite well. Laura asked her name.
She trotted along silently, thinking; then said:
Sure enough, we had forgotten. The first Mary had indeed been Syrian, and I imagined her, now, a child--brown, barefoot and beautiful, like this Mary, with the same pathetic eyes. Laura--young, fair-skinned and pink-cheeked--was a marvel to these children. They followed her to the door, and when she could not buy all their stock in trade they insisted on making her presents, and one of them--little Mary--begged to be taken to America.
We saw the celebrated "big stones" next morning. Several of them are built into the lower tiers of the enclosing temple wall, and three of these--the largest ones--measure each from sixty-two to sixty-four feet long and are thirteen feet thick! They rest upon stones somewhat thicker, but shorter--stones about the size of a two-story cottage--and these in turn rest on masonry still less gigantic. Evidently it was the intention of the builders to increase the size of their material as they went higher, and the big block still in the quarry carries out that idea.
Authorities differ as to when these big stones were laid, and how. Some claim that they were put here by the Romans, because they find Greek axe-marks on the ones below them. But then I found American jack-knife marks on them too, and the names of certain of my countrymen, which proves nothing except that these puny people had been there and left their measurement. If these monster stones had been laid by the Romans only two thousand years ago, we should have had some knowledge of the means by which they were transported and lifted into place. There is no such record, and nowhere else at least did the Romans ever attempt structure of such gigantic proportions. That is precisely the word, "gigantic," for there were giants in the days when these stones were laid--stones that could have been there six thousand years as well as two thousand, being of such material as forms the foundations of the world.