In concluding this introductory sketch, I should wish to point out that the Palestine of 1889 is not the Palestine which I entered in 1872. Partly on account of the work of the Palestine Exploration Fund, partly because of political changes, the number of travellers has enormously increased. In 1873 it was possible to visit villages where the face of a Frank had never been seen, but now even the Arabs beyond Jordan are often brought in contact with Europeans. Such a chance of studying the archaic manners of the peasantry and the natural condition of the nomadic Arabs as we enjoyed cannot now recur. For six years I lived entirely among the peasantry, but since then war, cruel taxation, and the rapacity of usurers has broken up and ruined the peasant society as it existed fifteen years ago. In 1882 I saw only too plainly the change that had come over the land. The Palestine of the early years of the Survey hardly now exists. The country is a Levantine land, where Western fabrics, Western ideas, and even Western languages, meet the traveller at every point. In the present pages I have attempted to give some idea of the country as it was in the last years of its truly Oriental condition, with a peasantry as yet hardly quite tamed by the Turk, and regions as yet hardly traversed by the European explorer. CHAPTER I. _EXPLORATIONS IN JUDEA._ Nearly every tourist in Palestine lands at Jaffa, and thence travels to Jerusalem. The open roadstead, the yellow dunes, the distant shadowy mountains, the brown town on its hillock, the palms, the orange-gardens and the picturesque crowd are familiar to very many of my readers. So are the paths over the plain, the mud villages and cactus hedges, the great minaret tower of Ramleh, and the rough mountains, with scattered copses of mastic and oak, with stone hamlets and terraced olive groves, through which lies the way to the Holy City. When first I traversed this road in July 1872, it was less frequented than it is now. The long rows of Jewish cottages which first meet the eye on reaching the plateau west of the city were not then built, and Mr. Cook’s signboard was not fixed to the ancient walls of Jerusalem. The increase of the population by the arrival of 15,000 European Jews had not commenced, and what has now been gained in prosperity has been lost in picturesque antiquity of appearance. Jerusalem was then still an Oriental, but has now become what is known as a Levantine town.