fragrant herbs. There might
be seen occasionally starting up before the intruding wanderer,
partridges, hares, quails, the wild pigeon, the fox, or even

"The wild gazelle on Judah's hills
Exultingly would bound,"

and escape also, for I carried no gun with me.

Mounting still higher we came upon the _Dahar-es-Salahh_, a mountain
whence the prospect of all Philistia and the coast from almost Gaza to
Carmel expands like a map--no, rather like a thing of still life before
the eye, with the two seas, namely, the Mediterranean and the Dead Sea,
visible at once, with likewise the mountains of Samaria and Gerizim,
besides the Moab country eastward, and Jerusalem and Bethlehem nearer
home.

Close at hand upon the mountain on which we thus stand, are vestiges of a
monastic house and chapel called "Khirbet el Kasees," (the priest's
ruins,) and even more interesting objects still, the remains of older
edifices, distinguished by ponderous rabbeted stones.

On the mountain top is a large oval space, which has been walled round,
fragments of the enclosure are easily traceable, as also some broken
columns, gray and weather-beaten. This has every appearance of having
been one of the many sun-temples devoted to Baal by early Syrians.

By temple I here mean a succession of open-air courts, with a central
altar for sacrifice; a mound actually exists on the highest spot of
elevation, which may well have been the site of the altar.

What a vast prospect does this spot command, not only of landscape in
every direction, but of sky from which the false worshipper might survey
the sun's entire daily course, from its rising out of the vague remote
lands of "the children of the East," and riding in meridian splendour
over the land of Israel's God, till, slowly descending and cloudless to
the very last, it dips behind the blue waters of "the great sea!" Alas!
to think that such a spot as this should ever have been desecrated by
worship of the creature within actual sight of that holy mountain where
the divine glory appeared, more dazzling than the brightest effulgence of
the created sun.

Sloping westwards from the _Dahar-es-Salahh_ were agreeable rides over a
wilderness of green shrubs with occasional pine and karoobah trees, and
rough rocks on the way to _Nahhaleen_ or _Bait Ezkareh_, from which we
catch a view of the valley of Shocoh, the scene of David's triumph over
Goliath, and beyond that the hill of Santa Anna at _