If the natural features of Syria thus tempt men towards the ghastly side of things, her history suggests plenty of material for superstition to work upon. If the legend were true that no dew nor rain would moisten the spot where a man had been murdered, Syria would be no longer an oasis, but the driest of deserts. In a spiritual sense the legend is truer than it seems. When, in his _Laughing Mill_, Julian Hawthorne works out the idea of a mystic sympathy in Nature with crimes that have been done by man, he is reminding us of something which every one of sensitive spirit has more or less clearly felt. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s subtler tales the same idea is worked out in a fashion still more convincing. There are times and places when it is difficult to resist the conviction that the material world, in its dumb, unconscious way, is yet burdened with the weight of man’s evil deeds. In Syria one can almost hear “the groaning and travailing of the whole creation.” It seems to be a land waiting the hour of its release, and meanwhile shrouded in deeper mystery than any other land. Something has happened here, you feel, which never happened elsewhere; something is going to happen here again, when the time shall come. Nothing could better attest this fact than the extraordinary wealth of legend in Syria. Fragments of Bible story, changed and often distorted by those who have retold them, are met with every day. Sometimes a story has passed from Jews to Christians and from Christians to Mohammedans, increasing steadily in marvellousness and decreasing in verisimilitude as it passed. Samson, Goliath, and the prophet Jonah are notable cases in point. A Mohammedan weli marks the spot where the latter was thrown ashore; but the inventors of this legend have been inconsiderate. The weli stands at the bend of a shallow sandy beach, where the whale must either have itself come ashore to deposit the prophet, or have projected him a distance of at least a hundred yards. A very curious instance of a similar kind is that of the fall of Jericho as narrated in Joshua vi. Conder gives two legends, both of which are obviously elaborated forms of that account. One of these is a Samaritan story of iron walls, and the other a Mohammedan one of a city of brass whose walls fell after Aly, the son-in-law of Mohammed, had ridden seven times round them.[53] Still more curious is a legend related by the same author, which looks like a Mohammedan version of the Wandering Jew. It tells how, at Abila, Cain was allowed to lay down the corpse of his brother Abel after carrying it for a hundred years. The whole story of the Herods has infested the region of their crimes with the ghosts of their victims. In Samaria the murdered Mariamne still seems to dwell in her honey, and Herod and his servants to call her by name and force the pretence that [Illustration: THE VALLEY OF HINNOM WITH THE HILL OF OFFENCE