them off. This systematic begging is apt to harden one’s heart, especially when you find it impossible to satisfy the demands of an applicant. The government would do a charitable work if it would assemble the beggars of Ramleh into a close room and asphyxiate them over a charcoal fire. They have been suppressed two or three times, but are sure to spring up again.
We were up early, and for three hours had a road very much like that of the day before. This ride brought us to the Bab-el-Wady, or Gate of the Glen, where there is a sort of hotel which furnishes everything for the traveller, except food, drink, and lodging, and there is a room where you can sit at a rickety table in a rickety chair, and eat the provisions you have brought along.
From this so-called hotel we moved up a glen or valley with the rocks on both sides of us, and the road making a steady ascent. We were now among the rugged mountains that extend to and beyond Jerusalem, a dreary and almost sterile waste, whose every aspect is forbidding.
I know of no mountain ride more dreary than that from Babel-Wady to Jerusalem. In nearly all other mountain chains I have ever seen, you have frequent glimpses of scenery that would partly reward for your toil, but here there is nothing of the kind. It is a succession of rough and rounded summits, too rocky for cultivation, and not broken enough to be picturesque. A few villages nestle in the glens, and there are occasional patches of olive trees, but the general aspect is one of unredeemed sterility.
The road from Jaffa to Jerusalem is about thirty-six miles in length: travellers generally divide it by going to Ramleh—nine miles—the first day, and to Jerusalem the next. The ordinary time for a party unused to travel is twelve hours; going up we made it in ten hours, and coming back we did it in seven and a half, which was very fair speed.
We wound along the mountain road, and four hours after leaving Bab-el-Wady, the foremost of our cortege swung his hat from one of the rounded summits. “Jerusalem,” said the dragoman, and at the word we pressed forward.
There lay the Holy City, as it lay when the Crusaders came hither to wrest it from the hands of the Moslem, and as it has greeted the eyes of many a pious pilgrim in more modern days. Its towers and walls rose before us, while around were the everlasting hills of Israel. Tasso’s lines describing the first view of the city by the Crusaders came involuntarily to my mind.