the bounding of the chariots, at the rumbling of their wheels "fathers, in their flight, not looking back to save their children; and thus "baldness," the sign of mourning,1 "had come on Gaza."2 But Alexander's victory had been still more destructive. Gaza had bought Jewish captives as slaves, and had sold them as such to the hated Edomites, and now fire had been sent on its wall and had devoured its palaces, as Amos had long before threatened. Destroyed again and again, its situation had always secured its being rebuilt. The Jews had triumphed over it under David, Hezekiah, and the Maccabees, but they had afterwards seen their sons sold in multitudes by Hadrian in its slave-marts. The Greeks and Romans had held it in their time, and now, for 1,400 years, it had been in the hands of the Arabs and Turks. A strange history on which to look down from the hill-top! The haughty armies that had spread their banners beneath-where were they? How was the tumult of ages stilled down! Infinite pity for dying man filled one's heart! On the south-east lay the track to Beersheba, over the open field; and on the east the mountains of Judæa bounded the view; low tawny hills, with cactus-hedges over their tops, lying close below El-Muntar, and beyond them vast stretches of rolling pasture, ploughed land, wheat, and barley, to the foot of the mountain-range. On the west spread out a vast wood of olive and fig-trees, broken here and there by green fields, and by low, rough hills, reaching to the sand-dunes which were being slowly blown over the cultivated land. Beyond these, the great sea spread out to the horizon, its deep blue contrasting in rich effect with the yellow sand-hills at its edge. North-west lay Gaza, on its long, low hill, embowered in a sea of green, two minarets 1 Micah i. 16. 2 Jer. xlvii. 2-5. Amos i. 7. See also Zeph. ii. 4; Zech. ix. 5. rising from the town itself, and three from its suburb, Sejiyeh, the quarter of the weavers, a place bearing a very bad name. The sand-hills rose close to the town on the west. Cactus-hedges streamed in all directions, over height and hollow, and palms in numbers waved high in the air among the gardens, but not in groves as in Egypt. On the north-east a track over the wide common showed the way to Hebron. CHAPTER IX. ASCALON. ASCALON lies on the sea-shore, about twelve miles north of Gaza. We had two horses already, and hiring two more, and a man as caretaker, at the cost of eight shillings for the day's service of the three, the commissariat for them included, we set off, after an early breakfast, a cavalcade of four-the missionary, his wife, a Levantine who spoke English, and myself for the ruins of the great Crusading fortress. You ride out of the town to the west, through orchards shut in by hedges of prickly pear and mud walls, the reverse of picturesque. These, however, soon end, in this direction, and are succeeded by sand-hills, reaching to the sea three miles off, the journey across them being wearisome in the extreme. One could imagine himself travelling over a sand-ocean; long waves of yellow desolation rising in apparently endless succession, though interrupted here and there by reaches of hard soil quite as barren. Some of these looked specially weird, from the vast quantities of broken pottery-handles, mouths, spouts, and nameless fragments of all sizes and shapes-strewn everywhere over them, like the bones of an old cemetery. They, doubtless, mark the site of former towns or villages, yet not necessarily very ancient ones, since the really old surface of the land must, for the most part, be buried under the sand. How is it that such quantities of potsherds cover the face of so many spots in Palestine? Even at Gerar, on the way to Beersheba, where there has been no settled community for ages, it is the same. At Memphis, in Lower Egypt, the ground is covered for miles with a rain of broken pottery, as if all the broken ware of the region, from the days of Menes, had come to the surface. Their crockery was no doubt as precious to the housewives of the Land of Promise, or of the Nile valley, as to the matrons of other countries, so that there can be only one explanation of the myriads of fragments so often met on ancient sites in the East: they must have accumulated during thousands of years, and the pottery that yielded such a harvest of sherds must have been wondrously brittle. That it is so at present anyone who has tried to bring home samples must have found by sad experience; and the native women and girls have the same lament. "The pitcher broken at the fountain" is a constant sorrow to the poor mothers and maidens; the least want of care in setting even a large jar down on the ground often sufficing to shiver it into a heap of fragments. Job could have found no difficulty in putting his hand on as many potsherds as he wished, when sitting on the town. dust-hill, seeking a rude scraper for his person, in his misery.2 The stalks of grass which had bravely shown themselves for a time gradually disappeared, and so did the small flowers which had bordered the lanes at our starting, yet even among these desolate sand-hills there were oases more or less fertile, whether from the old surface being protected by the conformation of the ground, or as a triumph of industry over the restless sand, which stubbornly advances with every breath of wind. Right and left of us, at a distance, were open plantations of olives, and even some gardens; water, no doubt, being found near them. Passing these, and crossing a sandy tract in which the horses sank to the fetlocks, we reached the low bluffs, forty or fifty feet high, near the shore, and, descending, were on the beach. A hill near was pointed out to me by the missionary as that to which General Gordon. used to retire three times a day to read his Bible and pray, when he and my friend were living together in a tent on the strand. As we walked the horses along, some Arab boys on their knees were busy at one spot scooping out holes in the sand, near the water's edge, for the purpose, it appeared, of getting fresh water for some poor lean cattle, which, at the moment, were scrambling down to it from the bluff as best they could. Such close neighbourhood of the sea and drinkable springs seems strange, but it is easily explained: the water, filtering down from the higher ground behind, in seeking its level comes near the surface just at the edge of the waves. It put me in mind of a plan I once saw adopted by an Indian on Lake Huron for filtering river-water which was black with pine-juice, and thus making it drinkable. He simply scooped a hollow in the bank, so low that the black water found its way into it through the sand, which kept back all impurities. Necessity is ever the mother of invention. I tasted the water in the hollows made by the Arab boys, and found it quite sweet. The low hills or cliffs, varying in height from thirty to sixty feet, ran parallel with the shore as we travelled on; here, only fifty or sixty yards from the water; elsewhere, three or four times as far back; the sand hard and firm near the sea; loose and dry nearer the bluffs. Beds of sea-shells strewed the beach; chiefly those of limpets and clams. Thousands of larger and smaller blue jelly-fish lay near the water, left high and dry by the waves; sand |