The forces of the Israelites were posted on the side of Mount Tabor. At a signal from Deborah they rushed down the slope and attacked the foe. At that moment a terrible storm from the east sent sleet and hail full into the face of the enemy. They turned and fled along a line at the base of the northern hills, where a chain of pools and springs, fringed with reeds and rushes, marks, even in the dry season, the course of the Kishon. The rain converted the volcanic dust of the plain into mud, and clogged the wheels of the chariots. The water pouring down from the hills swelled the stream, and “the river of Kishon swept them away, that ancient river the river Kishon.” The remainder fled to Harosheth, now only a miserable village (_El Harathiyeh_), named from the beautiful woods above the Kishon at the point where, through a narrow gorge, the stream, hidden among oleander bushes, enters the Plain of Acre. The flight of Sisera himself was in an opposite direction--to the Plain of Zaanaim, or rather Bitzaanaim, “the marshes,” _i.e._, the marshy springs east of Tabor--the neighbourhood of _Bessum_. The Kedesh of the passage is probably a site so called south of Tiberias; and the tent of Heber the Kenite would thus have been spread on the open plateau within 10 miles of the site of the battle. The next great struggle in this plain was one upon which the Survey of Palestine has thrown some new light, enabling us to follow the fugitives in their retreat, and to fix some sites which are named in the narrative. The fruitfulness of the Great Plain has been, in our own times and all through the ages, an irresistible attraction to the Bedouin from the east of Jordan. Pressed by war or famine, they have crossed the Jordan at the fords near Beisan, poured up the Valley of Jezreel, and covered the plain with their tents and camels. The peaceful husbandmen have laboured, only to be periodically plundered and oppressed. Thus in 1870 only about a sixth part of the beautiful corn land was tilled, and the plain was black with Arab “houses of hair.” But the Turks wrought a great and sudden change; they armed their cavalry with the Remington breech-loading rifle, and the Bedouin disappeared as if by magic. In 1872 nine-tenths of the plain was cultivated, nearly half with corn, the rest with millet, sesame, cotton, tobacco, and the castor-oil plant. It was, of course, to be expected that when external troubles had weakened the Government, the lawless Nomads would again encroach and levy toll as before. Accordingly, in 1877, Fendi el Fais and the Sukr Arabs once more invaded the plain and levied blackmail on the luckless peasantry. Thus it has ever been; for the history of Palestine seems constantly to repeat itself from the earliest period recorded, in a recurring struggle between the settled population and the Nomads.