a large square tower, between eighty and ninety feet in height.  We rode up to it through an orchard of ancient olive trees, and over a field of beans.  The tower is evidently a minaret, as it is built in the purest Saracenic style, and is surrounded by the ruins of a mosque.  I have rarely seen anything more graceful than the ornamental arches of the upper portions.  Over the door is a lintel of white marble, with an Arabic inscription.  The mosque to which the tower is attached is almost entirely destroyed, and only part of the arches of a corridor around three sides of a court-yard, with the fountain in the centre, still remain.  The subterranean cisterns, under the court-yard, amazed me with their extent and magnitude.  They are no less than twenty-four feet deep, and covered by twenty-four vaulted ceilings, each twelve feet square, and resting on massive pillars.  The mosque, when entire, must have been one of the finest in Syria.

We clambered over the broken stones cumbering the entrance, and mounted the steps to the very summit.  The view reached from Jaffa and the sea to the mountains near Jerusalem, and southward to the plain of Ascalon—­a great expanse of grain and grazing land, all blossoming as the rose, and dotted, especially near the mountains, with dark, luxuriant olive-groves.  The landscape had something of the green, pastoral beauty of England, except the mountains, which were wholly of Palestine.  The shadows of fleecy clouds, drifting slowly from east to west, moved across the landscape, which became every moment softer and fairer in the light of the declining sun.

I did not tarry in Ramleh.  The streets are narrow, crooked, and filthy as only an Oriental town can be.  The houses have either flat roofs or domes, out of the crevices in which springs a plentiful crop of weeds.  Some yellow dogs barked at us as we passed, children in tattered garments stared, and old turbaned heads were raised from the pipe, to guess who the two brown individuals might be, and why they were attended by such a fierce cawass.  Passing through the eastern gate, we were gladdened by the sight of our tents, already pitched in the meadow beside the cistern.  Dervish had arrived an hour before us, and had everything ready for the sweet lounge of an hour, to which we treat ourselves after a day’s ride.  I watched the evening fade away over the blue hills before us, and tried to convince myself that I should reach Jerusalem on the morrow.  Reason said:  “You certainly will!”—–­but to Faith the Holy City was as far off as ever.  Was it possible that I was in Judea?  Was this the Holy Land of the Crusades, the soil hallowed by the feet of Christ and his Apostles?  I must believe it.  Yet it seemed once that if I ever trod that earth, then beneath my feet, there would be thenceforth a consecration in my life, a holy essence, a purer inspiration on the lips, a surer faith in the heart.  And because I was not other than I had been, I half doubted whether it was the Palestine of my dreams.