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We commence our ride from Jaffa by a two days journey across the plains of Sharon and Esdraelon to Nazareth. This route, being very open to the attacks of predatory Bedouins, is never attempted by travellers, the all but trackless paths over the vast plains being but little known even to the native.

We engage a picturesque Bedouin Sheik (“as mild a looking man as ever cut a throat”) for a guard and guide; two other Arabs join us for company or safety’s sake. This force a small party of Bedouins would not care to face, and a large party would not attempt it, as they would be discovered by their numbers, and vengeance would soon follow, so we pass the Bedouin camps without any interference.

The ride from Jaffa to Nazareth, viâ Jerusalem, is reckoned three good days; but by our new route we only take two, and pushing briskly forward run it in about eighteen hours—hard work rather to begin with, and the Sirocco blowing hot and dry from the Syrian desert into the bargain. We vary the monotony of the journey over the dusty plains with several little races with our Bedouin guard, who does his best to ride us down; but fails to do so, much to the delight of our old Shikarri (muleteer), whose face, by-the-bye, was of such an Assyrian type that he seemed to have started out from the has reliefs of Birs Nimroud. But á route we ride across the Plain of Sharon, passing many hills crowned with villages and capped with ruined churches and fortresses mostly mediæval or Saracenic. It was in this plain that Richard Cœur-de-Lion gained a great victory over Saladin.