ed, or timber is required for
domestic purposes, it has to be imported from America, and carried into
the interior on the backs of animals. There remain trees enough in some
places to lend beauty to the landscape, and to show what the country may
once have been, as well as to suggest what it may again become; but
there are no forests to attract labour or capital.

The few manufactories of wool and cotton and soap and leather are
chiefly limited to local want. Besides these there are the silk-spinning
factories in the Lebanon, managed by Frenchmen and natives, and a
manufactory of cotton thread on one of the rivers of Damascus.

The popular accounts of the agricultural resources of Syria and
Palestine are very different. As instances of extremes:--Mark Twain
tells us he saw the goats eating stones in Syria, and he assures us that
he could not have been mistaken, for they had nothing else to eat; while
Mr. Laurence Oliphant saw even in the Dead Sea "a vast source of wealth"
for his English Company. We read in his "Land of Gilead" these words:
"There can be little doubt, in fact, that the Dead Sea is a mine of
unexplored wealth which only needs the application of capital and
enterprise to make it a most lucrative property."[56]

The tourists who traverse the country in spring, immediately after the
latter rains, when there is some vegetation in the barest places, and
when their horses are up to the fetlocks in flowers, never forget the
beauty of the landscape. Others, who have been picturing to themselves a
land flowing with milk and honey, hills waving with golden grain, and
green meadows dappled with browsing flocks, and who pass through the
land in autumn, find themselves bitterly disappointed. As they trudge
along the white glaring pathways, and through the roadless and flinty
wilderness, breasting the hot beating waves of a Syrian noonday, with
only an ashy chocolate-coloured landscape around them, scorched as if by
the breath of a furnace, they get an impression of dreary and blasted
desolation which time can never efface. They looked for the garden of
the Lord, and they find only the "burning marl." It was my fate, during
a long residence in Syria, to hear autumn tourists criticize books
written by spring tourists, and spring tourists criticize books written
by autumn tourists, and generally in a manner by no means complimentary
to the authors' veracity;--the fact being that the writers had given
their impression