The journey to Rasheiya is like that of the preceding day, except that the bridle-paths are rougher and more precipitous, and the views wider and more splendid. We have crossed the Hasbani again, and leaving the Druses' valley, the Wadi et-Teim, behind us, have climbed the high table-land to the west. We did not know why George Cavalcanty led us away from the path marked in our Baedeker, but we took it for granted that he had some good reason. It is well not to ask a wise dragoman all the questions that you can think of. Tell him where you want to go, and let him show you how to get there. Certainly we are not inclined to complain of the longer and steeper route by which he has brought us, when we sit down at lunch-time among the limestone crags and pinnacles of the wild upland and look abroad upon a landscape which offers the grandeur of immense outlines and vast distances, the beauty of a crystal clearness in all its infinitely varied forms, and the enchantment of gemlike colours, delicate, translucent, vivid, shifting and playing in hues of rose and violet and azure and purple and golden brown and bright green, as if the bosom of Mother Earth were the breast of a dove, breathing softly in the sunlight. As we climb toward Rasheiya we find ourselves going back a month or more into early spring. Here are the flowers that we saw in the Plain of Sharon on the first of April, gorgeous red anemones, fragrant purple and white cyclamens, delicate blue irises. The fig-tree is putting forth her tender leaf. The vines, lying flat on the ground, are bare and dormant. The springing grain, a few inches long, is in its first flush of almost dazzling green. The town, built in terraces on three sides of a rocky hill, 4,100 feet above the sea, commands an extensive view. Hermon is in full sight; snow-capped Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon face each other for forty miles; and the little lake of Kafr Kuk makes a spot of blue light in the foreground. We are camped on the threshing-floor, a level meadow beyond and below the town; and there the Rasheiyan gilded youth come riding their blooded horses in the afternoon, running races over the smooth turf and showing off their horsemanship for our benefit.