stance, is occasionally seen a grove of olive-trees,
casting a shade over the arid side of the mountain--the
mouldering walls and towers of the city appearing from afar on
the summit of Mount Sion. Such is the general character of the
country. The sky is ever pure, bright, and cloudless; never
does even the slightest film of mist obscure the purple tint of
evening and morning. On the side of Arabia, a wide gulf opens
amidst the black ridges, and presents a vista of the shining
surface of the Dead Sea, and the violet summits of the
mountains of Moab. Rarely is a breath of air heard to murmur,
in the fissures of the rocks, or among the branches of the aged
olives; not a bird sings, nor an insect chirps in the waterless
furrows. Silence reigns universally, in the city, in the roads,
in the fields. Such was Jerusalem during all the time that we
spent within its walls. Not a sound ever met our ears, but the
neighing of the horses, who grew impatient under the burning
rays of the sun, or who furrowed the earth with their feet, as
they stood picketed round our camp, mingled occasionally with
the crying of the hour from the minarets, or the mournful
cadences of the Turks as they accompanied the dead to their
cemeteries. Jerusalem, to which the world hastens to visit a
sepulchre, is itself a vast tomb of a people; but it is a tomb
without cypresses, without inscriptions, without monuments, of
which they have broken the gravestones, and the ashes of which
appear to cover the earth which surrounds it with mourning,
silence, and sterility. We cast our eyes back frequently from
the top of every hill which we passed on this mournful and
desolate region, and at length we saw for the last time, the
crown of olives which surmounts the Mount of the same name, and
which long rises above the horizon after you have lost sight of
the town itself. At length it also sank beneath the rocky
screen, and disappeared like the chaplets of flowers which we
throw on a sepulchre."--(II. 275-276.)

From Jerusalem he made an expedition to Balbec in the desert, which
produced the same impression upon him that it does upon all other
travellers:--

"We rose with the sun, the first rays of which struck on the
temples of Balbec, and gave to those mysterious ruins that
_eclat_ which hi