When, next day, we sailed upon the lake, coasting along the western shore from north to south, we found ourselves again as far removed from anything we had seen or experienced before. A casual glance showed utter and abject desolation, and a silence that might be heard oppressed the spirit. As the eye grew more accustomed, villages were discerned. But what villages! With the same exception of Tiberias, they were brown slabs of flat-roofed cubical hovels--let into the slope of the shore or the foot-hills. And as we skirted closer along the beach, we descried everywhere traces of ruined architecture. It appeared to form a continuous ring of towers; columns broken and tumbled, but showing elaborately carved capitals; aqueducts and retaining walls; fragments of all sorts, and apparently of widely different styles of architecture. Foliage is scanty, save for the thorn-trees and bamboo canes in which the carved stones are often half buried. Here and there a plantation of orchard trees hides a trim little German garden. At Tiberias a few palm trees lend their graceful suggestion of the Far East. All this impresses one in a quite unique way. You try to reconstruct the past--rebuild the castles and synagogues and palaces, and imagine the life that sent forth its fleets upon the lake in the days of Jesus. Or you more daringly attempt the future landscape, and imagine these hillsides as scientific cultivation and the withdrawal of oppressive government may yet make them. But from it all you are driven back upon the extraordinary present--petrified, uncanny, spectral--a part of the earth on which some spell has fallen, and over which some ghostly influence broods, silencing the daylight, and whispering in the darkness. If, however, this sense of the ghostly be intenser here than elsewhere, it is but an exaggeration of the spirit of the whole land.