orn its foot into hollow caverns, into which the sea rushes with a dull,
heavy boom, like distant thunder. The sides are covered with thickets of
broom, myrtle, arbutus, ilex, mastic and laurel, overgrown with woodbine,
and interspersed with patches of sage, lavender, hyssop, wild thyme, and
rue. The whole mountain is a heap of balm; a bundle of sweet spices.

Our horses' hoofs clattered up and down the rounds of the ladder, and we
looked our last on Tyre, fading away behind the white hem of the breakers,
as we turned the point of the promontory. Another cove of the
mountain-coast followed, terminated by the Cape of Nakhura, the northern
point of the Bay of Acre. We rode along a stony way between fields of
wheat and barley, blotted almost out of sight by showers of scarlet
poppies and yellow chrysanthemums. There were frequent ruins: fragments of
sarcophagi, foundations of houses, and about half way between the two
capes, the mounds of Alexandro-Schoenae. We stopped at a khan, and
breakfasted under a magnificent olive tree, while two boys tended our
horses to see that they ate only the edges of the wheat field. Below the
house were two large cypresses, and on a little tongue of land the ruins
of one of those square towers of the corsairs, which line all this coast.
The intense blue of the sea, seen close at hand over a broad field of
goldening wheat, formed a dazzling and superb contrast of color. Early in
the afternoon we climbed the Ras Nakhura, not so bold and grand, though
quite as flowery a steep as the Promontorium Album. We had been jogging
half an hour over its uneven summit, when the side suddenly fell away
below us, and we saw the whole of the great gulf and plain of Acre, backed
by the long ridge of Mount Carmel. Behind the sea, which makes a deep
indentation in the line of the coast, extended the plain, bounded on the
east, at two leagues' distance, by a range of hills covered with luxuriant
olive groves, and still higher, by the distant mountains of Galilee. The
fortifications of Acre were visible on a slight promontory near the middle
of the Gulf. From our feet the line of foamy surf extended for miles along
the red sand-beach, till it finally became like a chalk-mark on the edge
of the field of blue.

We rode down the mountain and continued our journey over the plain of
Esdraelon--a picture of summer luxuriance and bloom. The waves of wheat
and barley rolled away from our path to the distant olive orchards