, though
the king is; but the Israelites drave not out the Canaanites who dwelt
at Gezer, and in the hands of these it remained till its conquest by
Egypt when Pharaoh gave it, with his daughter, to Solomon and Solomon
rebuilt it. Judas Maccabeus was strategist enough to gird himself
early to the capture of Gezer, and Simon fortified it to cover the way
to the harbour of Joppa and caused John his son, the captain of the
host, to dwell there. It was virtually, therefore, the key of Judea at
a time when Judea's foes came down the coast from the north; and, with
Joppa, it formed part of the Syrian demands upon the Jews. But this is
by no means the last of it. M. Clermont Ganneau, who a number of years
ago discovered the site, has lately identified Gezer with the Mont
Gisart of the Crusades. Mont Gisart was a castle and feif in the
county of Joppa, with an abbey of St. Katharine of Mont Gisart, "whose
prior was one of the five suffragans of the Bishop of Lydda." It was
the scene, on the 24th November 1174, seventeen years before the Third
Crusade, of a victory won by a small army from Jerusalem under the
boy-king, the leper Baldwin IV., against a very much larger army under
Saladin himself, and, in 1192, Saladin encamped upon it during his
negotiations for a truce with Richard.

'Shade of King Horam, what hosts of men have fallen round that citadel
of yours. On what camps and columns has it looked down through the
centuries, since first you saw the strange Hebrews burst with the
sunrise across the hills, and chase your countrymen down Ajalon--that
day when the victors felt the very sun conspiring with them to achieve
the unexampled length of battle. Within sight of every Egyptian and
every Assyrian invasion of the land, Gezer has also seen Alexander
pass by, and the legions of Rome in unusual flight, and the armies of
the Cross struggle, waver and give way, and Napoleon come and go. If
all could rise who have fallen around its base--Ethiopians, Hebrews,
Assyrians, Arabs, Turcomans, Greeks, Romans, Celts, Saxons,
Mongols--what a rehearsal of the Judgment Day it would be. Few of
the travellers who now rush across the plain realise that the first
conspicuous hill they pass in Palestine is also one of the most
thickly haunted--even in that narrow land into which history has so
crowded itself. But upon the ridge of Gezer no sign of all this now
remains, except in the Tel Jezer, and in a sweet hollow to the north,
beside a fount