ade into cloudlike shadows. The depths below
us seem to sink unfathomably. Nablus is buried in the gulf. On the
summit of Gerizim, a Mohammedan _weli_, shining like a flake of mica,
marks the plateau where the Samaritan Temple stood. Hilltop towns,
Asiret, Talluza, Yasid, emerge like islands from the misty sea. In that
great shadowy hollow to the west lie the ruins of the city of Samaria,
which Caesar Augustus renamed Sebaste, in honour of his wife Augusta. If
she could see the village of Sebastiyeh now she would not be proud of
her namesake town. It is there that we are going to make our midday
camp.

King Omri acted as a wise man when he moved the capital of Israel from
Shechem, an indefensible site, commanded by overhanging mountains and
approached by two easy vales, to Shomron, the "watch-hill" which stands
in the centre of the broad Vale of Barley.

As we ride across the smiling corn-fields toward the isolated eminence,
we see its strength as well as its beauty. It rises steeply from the
valley to a height of more than three hundred feet. The encircling
mountains are too far away to dominate it under the ancient conditions
of warfare without cannons, and a good wall must have made it, as its
name implied, an impregnable "stronghold," watching over a region of
immense fertility.

What pomps and splendours, what revels and massacres, what joys of
victory and horrors of defeat, that round hill rising from the Vale of
Barley has seen. Now there is nothing left of its crown of pride, but
the broken pillars of the marble colonnade a mile long with which Herod
the Great girdled the hill, and a few indistinguishable ruins of the
temple which he built in honour of the divine Augustus and of the
hippodrome which he erected for the people. We climb the terraces and
ride through the olive-groves and ploughed fields where the street of
columns once ran. A few of them are standing upright; others leaning or
fallen, half sunken in the ground; fragments of others built into the
stone walls which divide the fields. There are many hewn and carven
stones imbedded in the miserable little modern village which crouches on
the north end of the hill, and the mosque into which the Crusaders'
Church of Saint John has been transformed is said to contain the tombs
of Elisha, Obadiah and John the Baptist. This rumour does not concern us
deeply and we will leave its truth uninvestigated.

Let us tie our horses among Herod's pillars, and spr