We rode up to a French monastery, conducted by the Latin Church, and there we put up for the night. Richardson and I sat at the long dining table with a dozen monks and ate a simple but good meal and drank our share of wine. It was almost impossible to incite these old fellows to speech and our dinner was as silent as a religious retreat. Our bedroom was as well furnished and as comfortable as in an American home.
We made an early start in the morning. We soon came to Samaria, which is now nothing but a small unsanitary village surrounded by a cactus hedge and half in ruins. We reached the summit of a hill and, before us, stretched the Plain of Esdraelon, and the mountains of Tabor and Carmel stood in the distance like huge monuments. There was nothing beautiful about the scene.
Riding along quietly we were startled by the sudden appearance over a hill of two Bedouins on horseback. These men, with their head-dress of white cloth and a double coil of goat's hair, their hard faces and guns over their shoulders, were a treacherous-looking pair. They stared at us, exchanged a few words with our guide and passed on. Many a Christian has been robbed and killed by Bedouins in the vicinity of the River Jordan. Our guide must have told them that we were poor men, for we were never disturbed.
Our stopping place for the second night was a small settlement called Jenin. We obtained accommodations in a tiny hotel. On leaving we had a row with the proprietor who demanded more money than he had agreed upon the evening before. We refused to pay and he followed us for a mile out of the town, wrangling with us over the matter.
We spent the morning crawling across the Plain of Esdraelon and, about noon, began ascending the hill to Nazareth. It was a long winding climb over a road which had never seen a grader. Nazareth is situated on a sort of plateau. It is a town of about ten thousand people and has several substantial school buildings and hospitals erected by various churches. Here are found many places venerated for their Biblical associations. The Church of the Annunciation is supposed to be erected on the site of Mary's house and the scene of the annunciation. In the Moslem quarter of the town the Latin Church has possession of the "Workshop of Joseph" and the "Table of Christ" upon which he dined with his disciples before and after the resurrection. The Mount of Precipitation, where the people sought to cast Christ down, is plainly visible from Nazareth and on its summit is a Latin church.
We left Nazareth at four o'clock in the morning. We recrossed the Plain of Esdraelon and arrived at Afuleh where we missed our train—the only one that day—for Damascus. Turkish trains run on peculiar schedules. This train is supposed to leave Haifa for Damascus each day at sun rise. Occasionally the conductor—or some one—decides to start an hour or more earlier. This is done without any notice to the public. Such was evidently the case on the morning we tried to catch the train, for we arrived on time at Afuleh only to find that we were too late.
We dismissed our guide, who returned to Jerusalem with the two horses and pack-mule. It looked as though we were doomed to spend a day and a night at Afuleh, a station and a native shop—and nothing more. A Syrian lace merchant and a young New York Jew, a commercial traveller, were also left behind. We telegraphed the director of the railroad and obtained his permission to go by freight train to Damascus. We declined this route, however, when the freight conductor consigned us to an open car exposed to a steady down-pour of rain.
Our Start for Nazareth