though the horses were not so dissimilar, and altogether it was a hard, nerve-racking experience, climbing the arid hills of Palestine in that torrid summer heat.  Nobody makes that trip in summer-time now.  Tourists hurry out of Syria before the first of April, and they do not go back before November.  One brief quotation from Mark Twain’s book gives us an idea of what that early party of pilgrims had to undergo: 

We left Damascus at noon and rode across the plain a couple of hours, and then the party stopped a while in the shade of some fig- trees to give me a chance to rest.  It was the hottest day we had seen yet—­the sun-flames shot down like the shafts of fire that stream out before a blow-pipe; the rays seemed to fall in a deluge on the head and pass downward like rain from a roof.  I imagined I could distinguish between the floods of rays.  I thought I could tell when each flood struck my head, when it reached my shoulders, and when the next one came.  It was terrible.

He had been ill with cholera at Damascus, a light attack; but any attack of that dread disease is serious enough.  He tells of this in the book, but he does not mention, either in the book or in his notes, the attack which Dan Slote had some days later.  It remained for William F. Church, of the party, to relate that incident, for it was the kind of thing that Mark Twain was not likely to record, or even to remember.  Doctor Church was a deacon with orthodox views and did not approve of Mark Twain; he thought him sinful, irreverent, profane.

“He was the worst man I ever knew,” Church said; then he added, “And the best.”

What happened was this:  At the end of a terrible day of heat, when the party had camped on the edge of a squalid Syrian village, Dan was taken suddenly ill.  It was cholera, beyond doubt.  Dan could not go on—­he might never go on.  The chances were that way.  It was a serious matter all around.  To wait with Dan meant to upset their travel schedule—­it might mean to miss the ship.  Consultation was held and a resolution passed (the pilgrims were always passing resolutions) to provide for Dan as well as possible, and leave him behind.  Clemens, who had remained with Dan, suddenly appeared and said: 

“Gentlemen, I understand that you are going to leave Dan Slote here alone.  I’ll be d—–­d if I do!”

And he didn’t.  He stayed there and brought Dan into Jerusalem, a few days late, but convalescent.

Perhaps most of them were not always reverent during that Holy Land trip.  It was a trying journey, and after fierce days of desert hills the reaction might not always spare even the holiest memories.  Jack was particularly sinful.  When they learned the price for a boat on Galilee, and the deacons who had traveled nearly half around the world to sail on that sacred water were confounded by the charge, Jack said: 

“Well, Denny, do you wonder now that Christ walked?”