Nor did our misadventures end here; for, just before we entered the town of Moudania, a gentleman, who was riding along with my father and myself, fell back a few paces to discharge his travelling pistols, when one of them burst in his hand nearly the whole length of the barrel, but fortunately without doing him any injury. During our journey across the principal plain, we came in contact with a caravan, which had made a temporary halt by the wayside. It consisted of between forty and fifty camels, attended by their drivers, and accompanied by half a dozen formidable-looking dogs. I never encountered anything more picturesque. Some of the animals were browsing on the young shoots of the dwarf oak; others were standing lazily with their long necks bent downwards, and their eyes closed; while the more weary among them were lying on the earth, as though sinking under the weight of their burthens. Their drivers, a wild, ferocious-looking horde, were resting beneath the shade of some cloaks which they had stretched across the bushes, and smoking their chibouks; leaving the care of the drove to their watchful dogs. We uttered the brief but earnest salutation of the wilderness as we passed; and, then urging on our horses, the halt of the caravan was soon a distant object in the landscape. A violent storm had been slowly gathering throughout the day; and we had scarcely taken possession of the house which had been secured for us at Moudania, when it burst over the town. The mountains of the opposite coast were covered with dense vapours, the sea beat violently against the houses that fringed the shore, the thunder rattled in long continued peals among the heights, the lightning danced along the foam-crested billows, and the narrow street became the channel of a torrent. The rain had only partially abated when a priest was announced, who bore to my father and myself an invitation from the Archbishop, to whom our arrival had been already made known; and, weary as we were, we resolved to avail ourselves of it, accompanied by a gentleman and lady of the party, who were kind enough to offer themselves as interpreters. The old palace, with its noble flights of marble stairs, and paintings in arabesque, delighted me; and there was a solemn twilight throughout the whole suite of apartments along which we passed, lined with serious-looking papas in attendance on His Holiness, that pleased me far better, travel-worn and weary as I was, than the gaud and glitter so usual in the residences of high personages in the East.