Especially For A Traveller Who Is In
The Happy Condition Of Being Able To Sing Before Robbers, As Is The
Case With The Writer Of The Present.
A little way out of the land of Goshen we came upon a long stretch
of gardens and vineyards, slanting towards the setting sun, which
illuminated numberless golden clusters of the most delicious
grapes, of which we stopped and partook.
Such grapes were never
before tasted; water so fresh as that which a countryman fetched
for us from a well never sluiced parched throats before. It was
the ride, the sun, and above all Abou Gosh, who made that
refreshment so sweet, and hereby I offer him my best thanks.
Presently, in the midst of a most diabolical ravine, down which our
horses went sliding, we heard the evening gun: it was fired from
Jerusalem. The twilight is brief in this country, and in a few
minutes the landscape was grey round about us, and the sky lighted
up by a hundred thousand stars, which made the night beautiful.
Under this superb canopy we rode for a couple of hours to our
journey's end. The mountains round about us dark, lonely, and sad;
the landscape as we saw it at night (it is not more cheerful in the
daytime), the most solemn and forlorn I have ever seen. The
feelings of almost terror with which, riding through the night, we
approached this awful place, the centre of the world's past and
future history, have no need to be noted down here.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 160 of 240
Words from 43675 to 43932
of 65663
