Dair el Belahh_ of the list;) but this appellation
Dair is often given to any large old edifice of which the origin is
unknown. Here was a loop-holed Moslem tower occupied by twenty men of
the Bashi-bozuk. Such towers are called _Shuneh_ in the singular,
_Shuan_ in the plural.

_Khan Yunas_ is a hamlet of unburnt bricks, dirty and ruinous, which is
not always the case with other villages of that material; the reason of
this being so, I suppose to be, that most of its few houses are inhabited
by Turkish soldiers. This is the last station southwards held by the
sultan's forces, the next, _El Areesh_, being an Egyptian outpost. I was
desirous of visiting that place had time allowed, not only for the
satisfaction of curiosity on the above account, but in order to get some
idea from ocular inspection whether the little winter stream or Wadi
there could ever have been the divinely-appointed boundary of the land
promised to Abraham and his seed for ever. My prepossession is certainly
to the contrary.

However, I rode ten minutes beyond Khan Yunas, and sat to rest in a field
beneath a fig-tree; the day was hot and brilliant, but there was a fine
breeze coming in from the sea. The scene was picturesque enough, for
there was a mosque-minaret and a broken tower rising behind a thick grove
of palm-trees and orchards of fig, vine and pomegranate--a high bank of
yellow sand behind the houses of the village, and the dark blue
Mediterranean behind that.

With respect to the name of the place, there are many such in the
country, and it is a mistake to ridicule the Moslems for believing in all
of them as true sites of the large fish vomiting out Jonah, which they do
not. These are, I believe, merely commemorative stations, and we are not
in the habit of ridiculing Christians for having several churches under
the same appellation; also it is not quite certain that all the Welies
named after Yunas (Jonas) or Moosa (Moses) do refer to the Old Testament
prophets. There have been Mohammedan reputed saints bearing those names.

Near this place is a village called _Beni Seheela_. On the return we
left behind us the old Hadji Ghaneem, with his brown bayonet, and took a
nearer road to Gaza, not so close to the sea as that by which we had left
it. It was an easy pleasant ride, and there were barley crops almost all
the way. We reached the tents in three hours from Khan Yunas.

At sunset, which is the universal dinner time in the eas