The villages are very brown--“dust-coloured,” as they have been happily called. Seen from a distance they generally look inviting, but it takes the traveller no long time to believe that a near approach will certainly disillusionise him. They have many sorts of charm in the distance. Some of them are set up on the edge of a hill, and these seen from below present all the appearance of fortification, their flat roofs and perpendicular sides giving them an angular and military aspect. Others are surrounded by neatly walled and cultivated olive-yards which give the promise of a well-conditioned village. In the rare instances where trees are planted among the dwellings, the flat brown roofs seem to nestle among the branches in delightful contentment and restfulness. Where trees are absent there is generally a high cactus hedge, serving as an enclosing wall, which sets the village in a pleasant green. Even those hamlets which have about them no green of any kind are not uninviting, especially if they are built on a hill-slope. There is a peculiar formality and neatness given by irregular piles of flat-roofed buildings overlapping each other at different levels. But as you approach, all is disillusionment. The trees seem to detach themselves and stand apart in the untidy paths. The cactus hedge is repulsive, with its spiked pulpy masses and its bare and straggling roots. The brown walls seem to decay before your eyes, and the village seen from within its own street changes to a succession of ruinous heaps of débris, with excavations into the mud of the hillside. If, as at Nain, there be a white-walled church or mosque in the place, it seems to stand alone in a long moraine of ruins. An acrid smell hangs upon the air, for the fuel is dried cakes of dung. These are plastered over the walls of low ovens into which the mud seems to swell in great blisters by the street-side. In some of these ovens crowds of filthy children and tattooed women are sitting, while the men loiter in idle rows along the house walls. When suddenly you say to yourself that this is Shunem, or this Nain, or Magdala, the disappointment is complete.