In her grander and more impressive features, Nature is in Syria constantly suggestive of the play of occult powers. Earthquake has left its mark in many a split rampart and broken tower, and that of itself is enough to give a peculiarly ghostly tinge to the spirit of any land. The unspeakable loneliness of the desert has its own magic--a melancholy spell which has no parallel in other lands. In the desert, too, the sky conspires with the earth in its bewitchment. The mirage has power to arrest and overawe the spirit with something of the same sense of helplessness as that felt in earthquake. In the one case earth, in the other heaven, are turning ordinary procedure upside down, and the bewildered mortal knows not what is to come next upon him. The writer has had experience of both, though with an interval of several years between them. The mirage he saw to the east of the Great Haj Road in Hauran. For some time the rocky hills of the Lejja had been the horizon, shimmering dimly through the heat-haze. Suddenly, on looking up, he was amazed to find that the hills had disappeared, and in their place had come a long string of camels on the sky-line, with an island, a lake, and a grove of palm-trees floating in the air above them. The sudden apparition recalled on the instant a day in the Antipodes when he felt, though at a great distance, the tremble of the New Zealand earthquakes. Either experience is unearthly enough to explain many superstitions. In most lands the sea would have yielded a larger crop of unearthly imaginations than has been the case in Palestine. For reasons which have been already stated, Israel kept out of touch with the ocean. Yet, all the more on that account, it is the case that almost every thought she has of the sea is fearsome. Its immensity bewilders her with the unhomely distances of the world, and the four winds strive savagely upon it. The roar and surge of the shore are all she needs to remember in order to impress herself with its terror. Now and then she thinks of the Great Deep, and of its horrible inhabitants--leviathan unwieldily sporting there, and other nameless monsters bred of the slime and ooze, and the dead men who are waiting to float up from their places to the Great Judgment, when their time shall come.