which he sent this last rejoinder Saladin again retired from Ramlah to the neighbourhood of Natroun[827]; and shortly afterwards the Christian host advanced from its encampment between the two restored Casals into the plain between Ramlah and Lydda. Here they pitched their tents and waited for reinforcements and supplies.[828] [Sidenote: _Nov. 15-22_] The rank and file were naturally puzzled and scandalized by Richard’s diplomatic dealings with the Infidels, which seemed to them unlawful, and of which they neither understood the purpose nor knew the real character. The Frank chroniclers excuse him as a simple-minded Christian duped by the cunning of the Saracens. He cleared himself in the eyes of his accusers in a fashion of his own. “Right and left the enemies came swarming about the camp; and the king met them and gave practical proof of his loyalty to God and Christendom, for several times he shewed in the host the many Turks’ heads that he had cut off.”[829] Besides the enemy, the Crusaders had now another obstacle to contend with—the climate. The “former rains,” or heavy showers which open the agricultural year in Palestine, would begin about the time when the host left Joppa, at the end of October, and continue through November; these would be followed by a season of constantly increasing rainfall lasting throughout the next three months. This great rain “pursued the soldiers of the Cross,” as one of them says, till it drove them to take what shelter they could find within the ruins of Ramlah and Lydda.[830] Here they remained “in great discomfort and difficulties”[831] till the end of December or beginning of January. Saladin held them in check by remaining in his camp near Natroun till December 12; then he withdrew to Jerusalem and disbanded his army[832] for the rest of the winter, trusting for the defence of Judea to the guerilla troops who still remained among the hills, to the weather, and above all, to the physical character of the country. The Christian host was now on the edge of the Shephelah, or Lowlands of Judea, so called in distinction from the “Hills” proper, the loftier central range, or ridge, which forms the backbone of the land, and on whose eastern side lie Jerusalem and Bethlehem. The low, soft chalk-hills of the Shephelah are not a range; they lie in groups and clusters interspersed with level spaces and valleys opening into the plain on the west, and falling on the east into the long, deep trench which runs between the “Lowlands” and the “Highlands” like—as a modern writer says—“a great fosse planted along the ramparts of Judea.” At the mouth of the northernmost of these cross-valleys—Joshua’s Valley of Ajalon—Lydda and Ramlah were frontier towns of the Shephelah and the maritime plain. Along this vale or over the low hills on each side of it, and through the narrow defiles which at its other end penetrate the central range, ran the most direct lines of communication between the Holy City and the coast.