The Crusaders ran a line of fortresses along that western edge of the Jordan valley where Israel, as we saw, failed to protect the mouths of her gorges. Belvoir, “the Star of the Wind,” guards from its lofty promontory the passes immediately south of the Sea of Galilee. Bethshan itself, where the Canaanites lingered to the standing shame of Israel, shows the well-preserved remains of a crusader bridge and fortress. Not less striking is the sea-board line of castles. Not only in such old localities as Tyre and Sidon, Cæsarea and Joppa, did fortresses arise, but on at least two quite new sites--those of Athlit and Acre. [Illustration: INTERIOR OF THE DOME OF THE CHAIN, LOOKING NORTH.] Athlit is unmentioned in Scripture, and only the eye of seafaring soldiers could have discovered how its little crease in the long straight line of coast might be utilised for defence. Acre is “the Key to Syria”; but it was left for the Crusaders to discover that fact. Yet with all this might and purpose and strategic instinct manifest in every mile of Syria, failure is written broad across the land in these ruins. At two points the sense of it becomes especially acute. One is the battlefield below the very mountain which tradition has assigned to the preaching of the Sermon on the Mount. The horrors of that field were such that even yet it is impossible to look without shuddering upon the flattened top of Hattin, where the black basalt stands out from the green slopes below. The Crusaders were rushed into the open plain, near which Saladin’s cavalry were waiting for them, and they met his assault unfed, unrested, and without even water to quench their thirst. Throughout a long hot day they perished round the banner of the Cross, a final element of horror being added when the Saracens set fire to the scrub, and unhorsed knights were roasted alive in their armour. That was the decisive battle of the Crusades, and Saladin marched after it straight upon Jerusalem. The other point at which the failure of the Crusades has set up its monument is at their own Athlit. The creation of their genius, and for solidity and massive strength perhaps the most characteristic ruin in Syria, it is also the saddest thing of all they have left for a memorial. Near its rocks King Louis IX. of France--most unfortunate and yet most saintly of all crusading kings--was shipwrecked. Here, too, at the end of the thirteenth century, the Knights Templars made their last retreat after the fall of Acre, and it was from its castle that they departed--the last to abandon the last Crusade. Seen from the sea, the compact and rounded promontory of Athlit presents the appearance of a clenched fist menacing and defiant. Its history grimly corroborates the imagination that here through centuries of decay the land as it were gathers itself together, and thrusts out this grim headland in perpetual defiance of the Western world.