drew back again, called in its solemn bass:  “Where are the ships of Tyre? where are the ships of Tyre?” I looked back on the city, which stood advanced far into the sea, her feet bathed in thunderous spray.  By and by the clouds cleared away, the sun came out bold and bright, and our road left the beach for a meadowy plain, crossed by fresh streams, and sown with an inexhaustible wealth of flowers.  Through thickets of myrtle and mastic, around which the rue and lavender grew in dense clusters, we reached the foot of the mountain, and began ascending the celebrated Ladder of Tyre.  The road is so steep as to resemble a staircase, and climbs along the side of the promontory, hanging over precipices of naked white rock, in some places three hundred feet in height.  The mountain is a mass of magnesian limestone, with occasional beds of marble.  The surf has worn 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.