ore reaching the landing-place of
Suediah--two or three uninhabited stone huts, with three or four small
Turkish craft, and a health officer. The town lies a mile or two inland,
scattered along the hill-side amid gardens so luxuriant as almost to
conceal it from view.

This part of the coast is ignorant of travellers, and we were obliged to
wait half a day before we could find a sufficient number of horses to take
us to Antioch, twenty miles distant. When they came, they were solid
farmers' horses, with the rudest gear imaginable. I was obliged to mount
astride of a broad pack-saddle, with my legs suspended in coils of rope.
Leaving the meadows, we entered a lane of the wildest, richest and
loveliest bloom and foliage. Our way was overhung with hedges of
pomegranate, myrtle, oleander, and white rose, in blossom, and
occasionally with quince, fig, and carob trees, laced together with grape
vines in fragrant bloom. Sometimes this wilderness of color and odor met
above our heads and made a twilight; then it opened into long, dazzling,
sun-bright vistas, where the hues of the oleander, pomegranate and white
rose made the eye wink with their gorgeous profusion. The mountains we
crossed were covered with thickets of myrtle, mastic, daphne, and arbutus,
and all the valleys and sloping meads waved with fig, mulberry, and olive
trees. Looking towards the sea, the valley broadened out between mountain
ranges whose summits were lost in the clouds. Though the soil was not so
rich as in Palestine, the general aspect of the country was much wilder
and more luxuriant.

So, by this glorious lane, over the myrtled hills and down into valleys,
whose bed was one hue of rose from the blossoming oleanders, we travelled
for five hours, crossing the low ranges of hills through which the Orontes
forces his way to the sea. At last we reached a height overlooking the
valley of the river, and saw in the east, at the foot of the mountain
chain, the long lines of barracks built by Ibrahim Pasha for the defence
of Antioch. Behind them the ancient wall of the city clomb the mountains,
whose crest it followed to the last peak of the chain, From the next hill
we saw the city--a large extent of one-story houses with tiled roofs,
surrounded with gardens, and half buried in the foliage of sycamores. It
extends from the River Orontes, which washes its walls, up the slope of
the mountain to the crags of gray rock which overhang it. We crossed the
river by