o away from the town an
incomparable view is spread before your eyes. On every hand stretch the
orange groves, great splashes of white and green, the scent from which is
almost overpoweringly sweet. Here and there you see the darker green of the
olive and the blazing scarlet of the pomegranate blossom, divided into
patches by hedges of prickly pear; and scattered about promiscuously are
oleanders, cypresses, and the stately sycamores. In the midst of it all
lies Jaffa the Beautiful, almost virginal in its whiteness, and beyond, in
almost incredible harmony of colour, the purple waters of the
Mediterranean.

Across the southern end of the Plain of Sharon the road leads through
cultivated fields, past vineyards and orchards, as far as Ramleh, where the
somewhat monotonous beauty of the plain ends abruptly. Some miles beyond,
the road, at the time the infantry advance was made, had degenerated into a
cart-track from the battering it had received from Turkish traffic.

About ten miles from Ramleh was Latron, a malaria-haunted swamp in the
rainy season and a plague-spot of flies in summer, and from here onwards
the road became increasingly difficult and dismal. You could see the
imprint of the oppressor in the very land itself, for though there are a
few patches of cultivation, the greater part of the countryside is
abandoned to a stony barrenness. The first check to the infantry came at
Bab el Wad, a rocky, desolate pass, which, had the Turks been allowed time
properly to fortify it, would have held up the advance and delayed the fall
of Jerusalem probably for months. As it was they fought desperately hard to
retain it, but having come so far in their pilgrimage, the infantry did not
allow this obstacle to stand in their way and carried the pass at the point
of the bayonet. After which spirited effort they proceeded onwards as far
as Enab, the "Hill of Grapes," a beautiful little place some six miles from
Jerusalem where later a Desert Corps Rest Camp was established. Here the
advance for the moment ended.

In the midst of the hills and valleys between the position of the infantry
and that of the cavalry near Beth-Horon towered the hill called Nebi
Samwil, the highest point in Palestine. This was a great serried mass of
rock rising by sharp degrees to a height of nearly 3000 feet, where the
infantry in some places had to sling their rifles and pull themselves up by
their hands, during their successful attack on the ridge.