THERE IT WILL STAY TILL IT ROTS.
CHAPTER XII
AN ADVENTURE
We are late, very late, the moon is rising and I must confess I am just a wee bit uneasy. When we reached Haifa safely last night, coming from Nazareth, and found we couldn't get a steamer till to-morrow it seemed the best thing to drive across the bay and get a look at Acre, that celebrated town which has spent its existence in the turmoil of sieges and assaults. It is a great fort built out into the sea, and nearly everyone who wanted to get possession of the Holy Land has tried first to take Acre as the key to it. One of the most memorable sieges was that of two years in the reign of our own King Richard i., who ended it by arriving with fresh troops and helping his allies the French; but it is reckoned the two countries, between them, lost 100,000 men, one way and another, before they took the stubborn town. After that it remained in English hands for a century.
The Turks held it in much later times against Buonaparte; they were helped by an Englishman, Sir Sydney Smith, and if Acre is celebrated for nothing else it should be celebrated for the fact that it held out for sixty-one days against Buonaparte, who was in the end obliged to give up and go away!
WOMEN WITH BUNDLES, WHICH THEY ALWAYS THINK NECESSARY TO DRAG ABOUT WITH THEM.
We drove this morning, with three horses abreast, across the twelve miles of sandy bay between Haifa and Acre, in one of the ramshackle waggonettes that take the place of omnibuses and carry any passengers who want to go. We came with numbers of natives, chiefly women, and innumerable bundles and bags, which they always think it necessary to drag about with them. We did not get here till midday, and after spending a few hours we had seen all we cared to of the place, and were ready to go back. But in the East things are not done like that. So we waited and waited long after the hour the omnibus was said to return, and when at last the driver did saunter up, the scarecrow horses had to be sought for, and then the harness, of course, had to be mended with string, and that wasn't nearly the end, because, after waiting again a long time for nothing at all that anyone could see, a Turkish woman who was evidently of some consequence, attended by a maid and quantities of baggage, came up, and everyone had to turn out until all her things were stowed away. So it was nearly nightfall before we got off.
The sands are in most places firm and make good going, but a couple of rivers run down across them to the sea; one of these is that "ancient river, the river Kishon," mentioned in Deborah's song of triumph when the Israelites had overcome their enemies. These rivers have to be crossed with care, and, not so long ago, some people got bogged and were set upon by robbers and stripped, and one was drowned by the incoming tide; but I ought not to tell you these things. We are half across now, and the moon is getting high, so we shall have more light presently.