Thinking it became him to act with vigour, lest a local disturbance in Galilee should grow into an Arab rising, and finding that my aged but not venerable friend had been one of the busiest in resisting the royal hatt, Suraya despatched a company of Bashi Bazouks, instructed to ride swiftly and secretly to their post; to suffer no man to pass them on the road; to come upon the black tents in the night; to invite the sheikh, together with his sons and nephews, to a parley at the Serai; to use violence only in the last resort; but in any case, freely or by force, to bring the sheikhs to Suraya's residence on the Temple hill. A part of their work had been promptly done. Surrounded in the night, surprised by a message which he could neither evade not resist, the old Arab had thought it best to obey cheerily, as though he suspected no evil and went along of his own good-will. He asked the captain on duty for his pass. When a Bedouin sheikh is called up from the country into a garrison town, it is usual for the Pashah to send him a safe-conduct, which, for the Arab's satisfaction, is commonly signed by a foreign consul or the prior of a convent; the signature of an English agent being the one most eagerly sought and most thoroughly esteemed. The officer had only Suraya's pass to show; a circumstance highly suspicious in the Arab's eyes; but seeing himself hemmed round by troops, unable either to escape or to resist, the old man pretended that the pass was enough to assure him of the Pasha's good faith.

The sheikhs were allowed to keep their arms,

and to ride their own mares; they were only asked to make haste. So soon as they were mounted the horsemen closed around them, as an escort or a guard, and while the darkness of night still hung over the tents, the company wheeled round some houses and gardens and began their march towards Jerusalem, which city they might have reasonably hoped to reach about noon. Some dogs awakened by the clatter of hoofs on the road, set up a cry, in which other dogs joined them, until the whole country seemed to be rousing itself into a dismal howl. The sheikhs took heart at the sound, for they knew that the Arab camps would soon be astir; that news of their seizure would spread: that their friends would muster and give chase. To gain a little time was to gain a fair chance of rescue. A jerk of the rein brought the old man's horse to its knees, and the cavalcade to a pause. A few moments were gained; but the Bashi Bazouks, seeing that the stumble was a feint to gain time, drew closer round the sheikhs, whom they now began to treat as prisoners rather than as guests.

Arabs, though they ride fast and well, take a long while to muster, and the sheikhs, though as well armed and mounted as the Bashi Bazouks, pay them the compliment of seldom assailing them under an advantage of ten to one; but in the bottom of a deep glen, called the Wady Ariub, among fragments of rock and stones, the troops were suddenly beset by a cloud of men in the dark night, when their loose line was broken, and before they could rally and form, the enemy was gone. Not a shot had

The Holy Land. I.

7

been fired, not a thrust had been made. Eight or ten men had been rolled over by the shock, but no bones had been broken in the fray. When they had again fallen into line, to resume their march, three saddles were found empty, and three of their five prisoners had disappeared. Hopeless of recovering their lost sheikhs, and certain that the Bedaween would return on finding that in the darkness and confusion of the night they had left two of their sheikhs and three of their mares behind, the Bashi Bazouks, drawing their swords and closing their ranks, rode faster and faster as the day began to dawn. The Arab youths, now hugged in their midst, felt sure of the doom awaiting them in Jerusalem; the resistance and the rescue adding heavy weight to their previous sins; and they attempted, once too often, to arrest the pace at which they were being hurried to a shameful end. Then, a little above Etam, on the wild and lonely hill-top, had occurred a sharp and sanguinary deed a throat had been jobbed through with steel, a bosom had been pierced with lead, and two swarthy young Bedaween had been tumbled from their saddles into the Hebron road.

CHAPTER XII.

Bethlehem.

RETURNING from Hebron by the way of Solomon's Pools, we rest for a while at the Latin convent near Bethlehem; an hospice which has replaced in that village the more ancient Hebrew khan.

save

From the guest-room of this convent you look out upon the ridge and shoulder of the hill on which Ephrath, which is Bethlehem, stands. This hill holds no high place among the hills of Judah; it is, in fact, narrow and depressed. Gedor, Gibeah, and Mar Elias, close it round on every side only that which falls away into the Wady Cedron, towards the deep chasm of the Dead Sea. The Mount of Paradise looks down upon it from the south, and Neby Samuel soars above it to the north. From all these prouder and more lonely heights, the eye can sweep, either, on one hand, down to the Jordan banks, or on the other hand, across the plain of Sharon, past Gath and Lydda, into the lustrous bays of Ascalon and Joppa. Bethlehem has no such range to boast. On every side but one, some peak or spur obstructs the view: Mar Elias and the Greek convent on its crest hiding the one view which every eye most seeks the road to Zion and the Mount of Olives. A string of gardens, a few steep fields, much crossing of white

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roads, so many that the point of junction may be called the Place of Paths, a glen which drops by leaps and steps to the great Cedron valley, make the landscape. Yet the slope which is thus bound in by higher tops and more barren crests has a winning beauty of its own, a joyous promise of bread and fruit, which puts it first among the chosen places of Judea. Nor can it be truly said that all this beauty is borrowed from either the pastorals of Rachel, Ruth, and David, or from the epical events of that night when the shepherds in yon fields were startled by hearing the angelic psalm. Some part of the attraction springs, no doubt, from holy associations, from that abiding poetry on which our youth is fed. Who, in truth, could gaze unmoved upon the fields in which Boaz reaped his corn, the slopes on which David kept his sheep, the road along which the Virgin and her husband toiled, the country in which the shepherds held their watch by night? But even to those who came to Ephrath in the earliest times, like Jacob on his way from Bethel, like Saul on going down to Engedi, this lovely and fruitful slope, with its springs of sweet water and its ample rows of oak, must have offered an abiding charm.

Facing to the south and east, its gardens glow in the heat of noon, and its white stone houses seem ablaze with light. The vines, the fig trees, and the olive trees, love the soil; the grapes have a strong, sweet pulp, of an aromatic taste; and the green figs of Bethlehem, have a flavour which they who have eaten them will remember as an Egyptian is said to