Festivals where they were importuned to buy by bevies
of lovely young ladies. Transform those houris
into dusky hags and ragged savages, and replace their
rounded forms with shrunken and knotted distortions,
their soft hands with scarred and hideous deformities,
and the persuasive music of their voices with the
discordant din of a hated language, and then see how
much lingering reluctance to leave could be mustered.
No, it is the neat thing to say you were reluctant,
and then append the profound thoughts that “struggled
for utterance,” in your brain; but it is the
true thing to say you were not reluctant, and found
it impossible to think at all—though in
good sooth it is not respectable to say it, and not
poetical, either.
We do not think, in the holy places; we think in bed,
afterwards, when the glare, and the noise, and the
confusion are gone, and in fancy we revisit alone,
the solemn monuments of the past, and summon the phantom
pageants of an age that has passed away.
We visited all the holy places about Jerusalem which
we had left unvisited when we journeyed to the Jordan
and then, about three o’clock one afternoon,
we fell into procession and marched out at the stately
Damascus gate, and the walls of Jerusalem shut us out
forever. We paused on the summit of a distant
hill and took a final look and made a final farewell
to the venerable city which had been such a good home
to us.
For about four hours we traveled down hill constantly.
We followed a narrow bridle-path which traversed
the beds of the mountain gorges, and when we could
we got out of the way of the long trains of laden camels
and asses, and when we could not we suffered the misery
of being mashed up against perpendicular walls of
rock and having our legs bruised by the passing freight.
Jack was caught two or three times, and Dan and Moult
as often. One horse had a heavy fall on the slippery
rocks, and the others had narrow escapes. However,
this was as good a road as we had found in Palestine,
and possibly even the best, and so there was not much
grumbling.
Sometimes, in the glens, we came upon luxuriant orchards
of figs, apricots, pomegranates, and such things,
but oftener the scenery was rugged, mountainous, verdureless
and forbidding. Here and there, towers were
perched high up on acclivities which seemed almost
inaccessible. This fashion is as old as Palestine
itself and was adopted in ancient times for security
against enemies.
We crossed the brook which furnished David the stone
that killed Goliah, and no doubt we looked upon the
very ground whereon that noted battle was fought.
We passed by a picturesque old gothic ruin whose stone
pavements had rung to the armed heels of many a valorous
Crusader, and we rode through a piece of country which
we were told once knew Samson as a citizen.
