ght creeping slowly down the opposite slope
of houses. Before the sunbeams have fairly reached the bottom of the
valley we are in the saddle, ready to leave Es Salt without further
exploration.

There is a general monotony about this riding through Palestine which
yet leaves room for a particular variety of the most entrancing kind.
Every day is like every other in its main outline, but the details are
infinitely uncertain--always there is something new, some touch of a
distinct and memorable charm.

To-day it is the sense of being in the country of the nomads, the
tent-dwellers, the masters of innumerable flocks and herds, whose wealth
goes wandering from pasture to pasture, bleating and lowing and browsing
and multiplying over the open moorland beneath the blue sky. This is the
prevailing impression of this day: and the symbol of it is the thin,
quavering music of the pastoral pipe, following us wherever we go,
drifting tremulously and plaintively down from some rock on the
hillside, or floating up softly from some hidden valley, where a brown
shepherd or goatherd is minding his flock with music.

What quaint and rustic melodies are these! Wild and unfamiliar to our
ears; yet doubtless the same wandering airs that were played by the sons
and servants of Jacob when he returned from his twenty years of
profitable exile in Haran with his rich wages of sheep and goats and
cattle and wives and maid-servants, the fruit of his hard labour and
shrewd bargaining with his father-in-law Laban, and passed cautiously
through Gilead on his way to the Promised Land.

On the highland to the east of Es Salt we see a fine herd of horses,
brood-mares and foals. A little farther on, we come to a muddy pond or
tank at which a drove of asses are drinking. A steep and winding path,
full of loose stones, leads us down into a grassy, oval plain, a great
cup of green, eight or ten miles long and five or six miles wide,
rimmed with bare hills from five to eight hundred feet high. This, we
conjecture, is the fertile basin of El Buchaia, or Bekaa.

Bedouin farmers are ploughing the rich, reddish soil. Their black
tent-villages are tucked away against the feet of the surrounding hills.
The broad plain itself is without sign of human dwelling, except that
near each focus of the ellipse there is a pile of shattered ruins with a
crumbling, solitary tower, where a shepherd sits piping to his lop-eared
flock.

In one place we pass through a bree