grace and lightness the more celebrated dome of the Rock.

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The wide pathway running below this minaret is the great caravan road from Cairo to Damascus, along which all the overland commerce of Egypt and Persia has to pass on camels. It is not much of a road, having no pavement, hedge, and ditch; but a king's highway is unknown to the East. In our English Bible the word "road" occurs only once, and then it is used in the sense of raid road. We hear of paths, of ways; never of roads, which must be regal works, the offspring of art and the production of a settled peace. A Greek, a Roman made roads; an Arab, a Jew, never. A dweller in tents (and whether he lodge in a house, or sleep under a tree, the spirit of a Syrian is still that of a dweller in tents) detests a path so easy that wheels can roll and cannon may be drawn along it. To such a man a great road seems a great peril. "Why smooth the rocks from Jaffa to Jerusalem?" asks Suraya, "that the Russians may send their siege guns to Mount Zion?" An Oriental feels no want of roads, for he never dreams of riding in araba, coach and cart. It is true that these flints would kill a good horse, but a native of Syria never rides such a thing. We hear so much of the Arabian mares, and we know so well about the Bedaween's flights, that we are apt to consider these Orientals as a nation of horsemen. It is all a dream. The Bedaween rides, for his safety in the desert depends on his speed; but the Arab of towns and of settled life never mounts a horse. When he does not care

to walk, he bestrides an ass. Indeed, the common Oriental feels a respect for the noble beast which prevents him from associating it freely with his daily doings; and if we may judge from the wall paintings of Egypt, the warriors of Pharaoh, though they yoked their horses to chariots, never got upon their backs. And now, as in the days of Pharaoh, a horse is considered as an engine of war, not a beast of burden; a proud plaything of caliphs, not a creature to be ridden by farmers and citizens in their upstart pride. Priests ride on donkeys, pashas on mules. I met the Seraskier of Damascus riding through the desert on a mule. Ibrahim of Egypt, the dashing cavalry officer, rode from Cairo to Konieh on an ass. While, therefore, his homely beast trots nimbly over the broken stones, what call has an Oriental to mend his road? If he can pick his way along it, all is well; but to do so his eye must be sure; for even this road from Cairo to Damascus, though it follows the plain and the sea, may be lost by a careless rider in the blaze of noon.

Returning to the convent, in waking the wild dogs you rouse an officer of customs, who, pipe in mouth, and sword in hand, starts up from a doze and motions you to halt. The den out of which he darts is a scoop in the wall of thorns, such as in England we should cut in our laurel trees and box. The gaudy and dirty fellow carries a bunch of pistols in his belt, at once for ostentation and defence. His office is to stop all caravans and traders on the road; to examine their wares; and to collect from them all

duties which have been laid by the Sultan and the Pasha. But his interruption is only another form of demanding tip. Pay it and pass on; a piastre, with a pinch of jebilé, will satisfy this turbaned officer of your being an honest man.

Like the women of every part of Syria, those of Ramleh wear trousers, while their husbands and sons wear skirts; but the ladies of this noble plain have another habit of dress, which may sometimes put a Saxon to the blush. In the doorways, in the streets, on the flat roofs of Ramleh, young and pretty damsels may be seen with their faces covered to the eyes, and their bosoms naked to the waist. The yelek, a vest, is worn by these ladies open at the front. A girl, it is true, wears a chemisette beneath her yelek; but among the roses of Sharon it is the fashion to cut this chemisette away from the bust, so that when the yelek is left open, as it is always left by the ladies of Ramleh and Jaffa, the graces of the feminine bosom are abundantly exposed. The sight is not always lovely. As a rule, a Syrian's bust has little of that height, that roundness of line, which the Prophet of Islam is said to have loved in the sex, and which the Arabian story-tellers extol in Safie. Rarely are the breasts small and round, like two pomegranates of equal size; in truth, they hang loose and long, and appear to the eye of every beholder veined and coarse. Exposure to heat and dust soon dyes the original gold of a peasant's skin to the darkness of a Bedaween's cheek; and as to shape and fulness, it is

said that a young mother on a journey never stops to give her child the breast, but tosses the teat over her shoulder for the babe to suck.

A mixed and voluble society sits down to dinner in the cool dim convent room, most of the men being ecclesiastics, papas and padres, monks and friars, with appetites which Angelo, kindly and overfed, smiles unctuously to see. That dear old man has not carried his serge gown, his rope belt and cowl, through a dozen miles of sun. Some of us have ridden from Jaffa, some from Jerusalem, and some from Gaza since the morning dawned; so that each has either a fear to communicate or a tale to tell. English and Arabic, Russian and Romaic, Armenian and Italian, rattle round the board, while the handy fathers are serving up the stewed olives and fowls, the green figs and cheese, the roast eggs and water melons; everyone talking, no one listening; the riot growing louder when our hosts have replaced the poor thin fluid on the table by a strong aromatic Cyprus wine. Akeel Aga, the Galilee sheikh, is either the hero or the inspiration of every tale.

A date merchant from Egypt tells how, in riding past El Mejdal and Beit Dùrâs, near Gaza and the sea, he had seen a good many black tents along the sand, from which he inferred that a signal has been given to the tribes, and that Akeel is retiring to the south. A Jew from Nabulus reports of robberies and murders in every hamlet of Ephraim. A monk from Mar Saba says the wadies of the wilderness are unsafe, and the tribes beyond Jordan

are astir. An Armenian pedlar, fresh from Mount Zion, says the holy city is alarmed, and Suraya is about to proclaim it in a state of siege. But our best story-teller, as becomes his age, his office, and his country, is a Greek Prior, who left his convent near the Holy Sepulchre at dawn, going on a sad errand to Jaffa and Stamboul. The physician of his convent has been robbed and killed; and the Greek Prior is going to Constantinople in search of a Frank successor to the murdered man.

This Frank doctor, a man of gentle bearing and of eminent skill, having lived his twenty years in Palestine, and being known to its people far and wide, could not be made to understand why a quarrel in Galilee between Cabouli and Akeel should frighten him from going a few miles into the country to see a friend. When told to take care, the old gentleman smiled, put on his hat, and rode away toward Nabulus through the Damascus Gate; to be found at that gate in the morning bruised and spent, his pulse at the last throb, the only garments left on his body being the crushed hat on his head and a loose rag round his loins.

Hailed in a lonely track by a dozen strange men, and told he must stop and strip, he had begun to urge on the rough fellows that he was a doctor and a Frank. But the Arabs had no time for talk. To Bedaween thieves the art of robbery has never been one of the fine arts, and knowing nothing of the history of Claude du Val, they have acquired no taste for the more delicate doings of the highway. They never touch their hats to a lady whom