Joppa, or Jaffa.
This is one of the most ancient seaports in the world. It is situated on a fine plain, on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, forty-five miles west of Jerusalem. It is believed to have existed before the deluge; to be the city where Noah built his ark; whence Jonah embarked from Tarshish, where he was thrown overboard and swallowed by a whale. It was the port used by Solomon to receive timber from Tyre for the building of the temple. It is now much reduced in importance, being only a small Turkish town on the shores of the Mediterranean, built on a little eminence projecting into the sea, and containing a population of from ten to fifteen thousand Turks, Arabs, Jews, and Christians. It has a fine climate, and a fine country around it, and the orange gardens are the finest on the shores of the Mediterranean. Although it is the seaport of Jerusalem, its harbor has always been bad, and the vessels that anchor there are often wrecked in the storms.
The modern city has nothing in its history to interest the traveller. He must stand on the shore, and fill the little harbor with the Tarshish; or, imagine Noah entering the ark with his family, by whom the earth was to be repeopled; or wander through the narrow streets to seek for the house of Tabitha, whom Peter raised from the dead, or that of Simon, the tanner, where Peter tarried many days.
Mount Carmel.
Mount Carmel is a tall promontory forming the termination of a range of hills, in the northern part of Palestine, and towards the sea. It is fifteen hundred feet high, and is famous for its caverns, which are said to be more than a thousand in number. Most of them are in the western part of it. Here also was the cave of the prophet Elijah. Both Elijah and Elisha used to resort to this mountain, and here it was that the former opposed the prophet of Baal with such success. Here it was, too, that this prophet went up, when he told his servant to look forth toward the sea yet seven times, and the seventh time he saw a cloud coming from the sea “like a man’s hand”—when the prophet knew the promised rain was at hand, and girded up his loins and ran before Ahab’s chariot even to the gates of Jezreel. (See 1 Kings xviii. 4-46.)