var quotes=new Array() quotes[0]='\'Straddling a pile of rubble, binoculars glued to his eyes, the tall broad-shouldered Captain Martel assessed the artillery barrage. He fired an elaborate string of curses at the fumbling soldiers then turned his displeasure in the direction of the waiting policeman. He examined Faroun with fierce, quick blue eyes. The policeman felt as if he was being sized up for a brawl.

Night Falls on Damascus' quotes[1]='\'Before we came here, though, we were in Morocco. I loved Morocco.\' She lifted the glass to her lips and a little of the wine spilled over the rim. \'That is to say I loved Moroccan men. I even made love to a Tuareg warrior once. A young Legionnaire had a crush on me and so I persuaded him to arrange a meeting with one of their bandit chiefs in the desert. We rode out to his camp. While my legionnaire waited outside by the campfire, the sheik and I had--coffee. He was a ferocious coffee drinker, fabulously thirsty, and he never took off his veil the whole time.\'

Night Falls on Damascus' quotes[2]='\'Are you trying a shake down, Inspector?\'

\'A shake down, Monsieur Sezgin? That\'s a frightful term to use for a policeman who is just trying to do his duty.\'

\'Now I see you are a real player,\' Sezgin said irritably. He pulled another tray of chips from his desk and slid it next to the other.

\'Two bribes in the space of five minutes,\' said Faroun. \'That must be something of a record, Monsieur. Even for you.\'\'

Night Falls on Damascus' quotes[3]='\'Damascus was a metropolis of memory, of ancient gates and monuments, tombs and catacombs. The squalid tenements of the living crowded precariously against the sumptuous memorials, vying with the dead for a little light and space. Some of these monuments were, like the Great Mosque, wonders built by a loftier race, spilling into ornate gardens, and others were merely foul cells at the end of a lane.\'

Night Falls on Damascus' quotes[4]='\'Behind the thirty foot long bar, a mural of the river Nile greeted the eye, from the Valley of the Kings to Luxor, as it may have appeared in the time of the Ramessids. A royal procession bearing Pharaoh in a golden litter traveled down the causeway that led to the Sphinx, while farmers, wearing red and white linen caps, planted grain in the rich alluvial mud of the river, the very body of the risen Osiris.\'

Night Falls on Damascus' quotes[5]='\'Most of his countrymen held him in contempt, he well knew. He was a hireling and a traitor and his father had been a Christian. This dissatisfaction was mutual; Faroun despised the parochialism of the mob, their ignorance, their flair for fanaticism as a way of settling the score. He was among them but not of them. He often longed to be somewhere else.\'

Night Falls on Damascus' quotes[6]='\'Legend had named the Barada as one of the four streams flowing out of paradise. This last river of Eden was now an oily fetid stream that stank in summer and rolled turgidly on carrying the refuse of the city. Bodies turned up in it quite regularly too.\'

Night Falls on Damascus' quotes[7]='\'Faroun had a well-formed nose, a Boyar nose, as his father had called it, alluding to his mother\'s ancestry. Unfortunately, it had been broken a couple of times; once in a Paris bistro during the war. On the other occasion, the lady had simply jumped to conclusions; he had been completely faithful to her, at the time. \'

Night Falls on Damascus' quotes[8]='\'Mansour had studied in Paris and had adopted certain Parisian attitudes, an urbane and mordant humor, for one thing. A penchant for nihilism was another and a passion for the avant garde of the Twenties, which meant he was a bit out of touch. He affected black velvet cravats. He took offense at the word \'morgue\'. His surgery was \'Studio Bleu\', an oblique allusion to the Picasso period of grieving women and grim acrobats on the beach. \'

Night Falls on Damascus' quotes[9]='\'Vera Tamiri had, for awhile, the favor of the gods and though the animating breath was gone from her, beauty lingered. That beauty was a flowering of a city that had been the crossroads of East and West for thousands of years. The Egyptians had made her, and the Amorites, and the Assyrians, the Romans, Crusader and Turk, and the restless Bedu of the desert. Some envied that beauty and some admired--and one, at least, hated her enough to destroy it. \'

Night Falls on Damascus' quotes[10]='\'The Syrians would be delighted to see my husband\'s head carried on a pike through the streets of Damascus. Mine too, for that matter,\' she remarked with an ironic smile, fine lines at the corners of her mouth and her eyes. Faroun saw a staunch Marie Antoinette being wheeled in a tumbrel to the Place de la Concorde as the bloodthirsty crowd danced and jeered and the guillotine loomed.\'

Night Falls on Damascus' quotes[11]='\'They were animals,\' he said morosely. \'I will make them pay for what they did.\'

Abdullah did not like the ominous tone. \'Get it out of your head. You didn\'t see anything. And you didn\'t hear anything. And you don\'t say--anything! That\'s it, brother. Just like the three wise monkeys.\' \'

Night Falls on Damascus' quotes[12]='\'Abel\'s Tomb held a far deeper truth, as Nikolai Faroun\'s father had pointed out so long ago. Murder began here and it had caught on.\'

Night Falls on Damascus' quotes[13]='\'You are Prefect of the Damascus Police, are you not? I told her I would only speak to the man on the top.\' She smiled blandly. \'At the top.\'

\'I am Inspector Faroun.\'

\'The title on the door says you are the Prefect.\'

\'I am both actually,\' said Faroun with good humor. \'I prefer Inspector because I like to keep in the field as much as I can.\'

Night Falls on Damascus' quotes[14]='\'The street called straight is straighter than the corkscrew, but not as straight as a rainbow. St Luke is careful not to commit himself- he does not say it is the street which is straight, but \'the street which is called straight.\' It is the only facetious remark in the Bible, I believe.\'

Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad' var whichquote=Math.floor(Math.random()*(quotes.length)) document.write(quotes[whichquote])