Crusades, Ramleh was an important town, under
whose walls bloody battles were fought.

As a general rule in Syria, if you wish to
start with the dawn, you must announce your
departure for midnight. Railway officials have
not yet communicated their pitiless punctuality
to the Syrian moucres. You force yourself out
of a sleep, still heavy with the fatigues of the
preceding day, and grumbling at the enjoyments
of a pleasure trip; you dress yourself hurriedly,
rubbing your eyes, in order to cause no delay;
and when you go down stairs to jump into
your saddle, nothing is wanted but—the horses.
After two or three messages sent to the khan
where they have passed the night, you give a
sigh of relief on hearing them approach in file,
although with a sleepy step. But have a little
patience; they must be saddled, harnessed,
and caparisoned. Last night, you were obliged
to send them naked to their lodging, because
you set a little store by your saddle. In one
single night passed in a khan, a European saddle
suffers a sad metamorphosis. Everything that
was strap, turns to cord: buckles change to
knots. Then comes the item of baggage: a
man alone cannot load a mule and properly
balance its double burden; the moucre, therefore,
runs in search of some one to help him,
whom he must find, wake, shake, push, and drag,
unless the caravan numbers several moucres;
and then it is ten times worse: while one
wakes, the other falls asleep, the luggage
remains on the ground, the travellers kick their
heels, and time passes. It is a great feat to get
up at three and to be off by five in the morning.

An hour and a half from Ramleh, you leave,
a few hundred yards off to the right of the road,
on the other side of the brook, the modern
village of Berrié (the desert), which has no
recollections connected with it. An hour further,
you reach an undulation of the ground,
surrounded with a cactus hedge, on whose slope to
the left lies a considerable village, but disgustingly
filthy in its appearance. A note of
interrogation, addressed to Hadji Moustapha, draws
out the name and history of this delightful
residence.

"It is called Kebab (the roasted), from a
far distant epoch. The prophet Solomon, health
be to him! had reason to complain of the
inhabitants who, notwithstanding the immense
multitude of their flocks and herds, refused for
several years to pay the eleemosynary tithe of
their oxen, their sheep, and their goats. The
prophet having decided that every proprietor of
forty sheep and of thirty oxen should be
subject to the tithe, these sons of sin made a secret
agreement amongst themselves to elude the law,
dividing their flocks, and making women, girls,
and infants pass for proprietors, so that nobody
owned to owning more than twenty-nine oxen
and thirty-nine sheep or goats. Who got angry
at this cunning trick? It was the Great
Solomon, when he found himself, the ruler of
genii, cheated by the astuteness of vulgar
peasants. He resolved to punish them. At his
command the genii came down to the plain in
the form of gaunt tawny wolves, who vomited
from their mouths devouring flames and ran in a
circle around the cultivated land. The harvest
was ripe, and the fire spread rapidly, driving
towards the centre all the flocks dispersed over
the country. The poor brutes, overcome by
terror, all congregated on the spot where Kebab
now stands, and were there destroyed by fire.
The remains of their bodies formed that hill,
and the name of Kebab remains as an eternal
monument of the prophet's vengeance. That
is what I have always heard tell; Allah only
knows the truth."

The legend is clearly a corrupt version of
Samson's revenge on the Philistines. But how
wonderful is the tenacity of the Hebrew traditions,
as if no Greek or Roman period had
intervened to break the thread! We have seen
how the name Lud pushed the usurper Diospolis
aside. Here is another similar instance. To the
right of Latroun, about half an hour from the
road and beyond the brook, is a shapeless heap
of rubbish which is called Emmoas. Formerly
it was Nicopolis, the town of victory, destroyed
by an earthquake in 131, and rebuilt a hundred
years afterwards by Alexander, the son of Mammea,
the Syrian woman. It was several times
taken and retaken in the supreme struggle in
which the Jewish nationality was extinguished.
When Judas Maccabæus conquered Georgias,
the lieutenant of Nicanor, it bore the name of
Emmaüs; and it is this national name which
has risen to the surface after the lapse of twenty
centuries, transformed into Emmoas, whilst there
remains not a trace of the haughty foreigner
Nicopolis. This spot must not be confounded
with the other Emmaüs, where the disciples
met their Lord after his resurrection. Emmaüs
was a very common name in Palestine, like
Rama, Magdal, and many others. This
increases the difficulty of tracing the topography
of Scripture.

Latroun, a village that has been deserted for
the last twenty years, and completely in ruins,
derives its name from Vicus Latronum, the
village of thieves, or of the thieves. The legend
tells that Dimas, the good thief, dwelt there.
One day, the Holy Family, passing through it
on their flight to Egypt, were stopped by him
and his associate, with a demand for a ransom.
Dimas, touched by the grace of the divine infant,
protected him from the brutality of his accomplice.
To this good inspiration he owed the
favour of his conversion on the cross, whilst the
other thief died in final impenitence.

Close to a fountain of excellent water at the
entrance of the village of Abou-Gosch, rises
the nave—still entire but very much injured—of
a church built during the Crusades in honour of
the prophet Jeremiah. It is now used as a stable,
and is encumbered with filth. About a hundred
and fifty years ago, several Franciscan monks
fell victims to the fanatic cruelty of an Abou-
Gosch, the great-grandfather and predecessor of
the present man, who stifled them to death in
an oven. The remembrance of this lamentable
event invests this village with a painful