The plain of Esdraelon—­“the battle-field of the nations”—­only sets one to dreaming of Joshua, and Benhadad, and Saul, and Gideon; Tamerlane, Tancred, Coeur de Lion, and Saladin; the warrior Kings of Persia, Egypt’s heroes, and Napoleon—­for they all fought here.  If the magic of the moonlight could summon from the graves of forgotten centuries and many lands the countless myriads that have battled on this wide, far-reaching floor, and array them in the thousand strange Costumes of their hundred nationalities, and send the vast host sweeping down the plain, splendid with plumes and banners and glittering lances, I could stay here an age to see the phantom pageant.  But the magic of the moonlight is a vanity and a fraud; and whoso putteth his trust in it shall suffer sorrow and disappointment.

Down at the foot of Tabor, and just at the edge of the storied Plain of Esdraelon, is the insignificant village of Deburieh, where Deborah, prophetess of Israel, lived.  It is just like Magdala.

CHAPTER L.

We descended from Mount Tabor, crossed a deep ravine, followed a hilly, rocky road to Nazareth—­distant two hours.  All distances in the East are measured by hours, not miles.  A good horse will walk three miles an hour over nearly any kind of a road; therefore, an hour, here, always stands for three miles.  This method of computation is bothersome and annoying; and until one gets thoroughly accustomed to it, it carries no intelligence to his mind until he has stopped and translated the pagan hours into Christian miles, just as people do with the spoken words of a foreign language they are acquainted with, but not familiarly enough to catch the meaning in a moment.  Distances traveled by human feet are also estimated by hours and minutes, though I do not know what the base of the calculation is.  In Constantinople you ask, “How far is it to the Consulate?” and they answer, “About ten minutes.”  “How far is it to the Lloyds’ Agency?” “Quarter of an hour.”  “How far is it to the lower bridge?” “Four minutes.”  I can not be positive about it, but I think that there, when a man orders a pair of pantaloons, he says he wants them a quarter of a minute in the legs and nine seconds around the waist.

Two hours from Tabor to Nazareth—­and as it was an uncommonly narrow, crooked trail, we necessarily met all the camel trains and jackass caravans between Jericho and Jacksonville in that particular place and nowhere else.  The donkeys do not matter so much, because they are so small that you can jump your horse over them if he is an animal of spirit, but a camel is not jumpable.  A camel is as tall as any ordinary dwelling-house in Syria—­which is to say a camel is from one to two, and sometimes nearly three feet taller than a good-sized man.  In this part of the country his load is oftenest in the shape of colossal sacks—­one on each side.  He and his cargo take up as much room as a carriage.