he had some good reason. It is well not to ask a wise dragoman all
the questions that you can think of. Tell him where you want to go, and
let him show you how to get there. Certainly we are not inclined to
complain of the longer and steeper route by which he has brought us,
when we sit down at lunch-time among the limestone crags and pinnacles
of the wild upland and look abroad upon a landscape which offers the
grandeur of immense outlines and vast distances, the beauty of a crystal
clearness in all its infinitely varied forms, and the enchantment of
gemlike colours, delicate, translucent, vivid, shifting and playing in
hues of rose and violet and azure and purple and golden brown and bright
green, as if the bosom of Mother Earth were the breast of a dove,
breathing softly in the sunlight.

As we climb toward Rasheiya we find ourselves going back a month or more
into early spring. Here are the flowers that we saw in the Plain of
Sharon on the first of April, gorgeous red anemones, fragrant purple and
white cyclamens, delicate blue irises. The fig-tree is putting forth her
tender leaf. The vines, lying flat on the ground, are bare and dormant.
The springing grain, a few inches long, is in its first flush of almost
dazzling green.

The town, built in terraces on three sides of a rocky hill, 4,100 feet
above the sea, commands an extensive view. Hermon is in full sight;
snow-capped Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon face each other for forty miles;
and the little lake of Kafr Kuk makes a spot of blue light in the
foreground.

We are camped on the threshing-floor, a level meadow beyond and below
the town; and there the Rasheiyan gilded youth come riding their
blooded horses in the afternoon, running races over the smooth turf and
showing off their horsemanship for our benefit.

There is something very attractive about these Arabian horses as you see
them in their own country. They are spirited, fearless, sure-footed, and
yet, as a rule, so docile that they may be ridden with a halter. They
are good for a long journey, or a swift run, or a _fantasia_. The
prevailing colour among them is gray, but you see many bays and sorrels
and a few splendid blacks. An Arabian stallion satisfies the romantic
ideal of how a horse ought to look. His arched neck, small head, large
eyes wide apart, short body, round flanks, delicate pasterns, and little
feet; the way he tosses his mane and cocks his flowing tail when he is
on parade; the swiftness