The thing most characteristic of Syrian colour is its faintness and delicacy. Pierre Loti, who in this matter is a witness worthy of all regard, is constantly ending the colour adjectives in his Syrian books with _-atre_--“yellowish,” “bluish,” “greenish,” etc. The general impression is of dim and faded tints, put on, as it were, in thin washes. In the stoniest regions there seems to be no colour at all, as if the sun had bleached them. The curious colouring of the Judean valleys, which has been described, is never aggressive, and it takes some carefulness of observation to see anything in them more than a blue green in the sparsely-planted olive-groves fading into faint greenish grey above. The valleys of ripe sesame and vetch are washed into the picture in pale yellow or yellow ochre. Where tilled earth appears it is generally a variegated expanse of light brown, or pink, or terra-cotta. The eastern slopes of Hermon, below the snow, shew vertical stripes like those of the haircloth and jute garments of the peasants, washed out with rain and sun; or they are spread upon the roots of the mountain like some vast Indian shawl cunningly and minutely interwoven with red and green threads, but worn almost threadbare. As you approach a village in strong sunlight, you see it as a dark brown mass shaded angularly with black; but it seems to float above a mist of the airiest purple sheen, where the thinly-planted iris-flowers stand among the graves before the walls. The Sea of Galilee, as we saw it, was light blue; the Dead Sea was light green, with a haze of evaporation rendering it even fainter in the distance. If this be true of the near, it is doubly so of the distant, landscape. In a country so mountainous and so sheer-cleft as Palestine, distant views are seen for the most part as vistas, the “land that is very far off” revealing itself at the end of some =V=-shaped gorge or towering over some intermediate mountain range. Of course distant views are faint in all lands, but in Palestine the clear air keeps them distinct with clean-cut edge, however faint they are. Thus there is perhaps nothing more delicate and _spirituel_ in the world than those faint dreamlike mountains in the extreme distance of Syrian vistas--the hills east of Jordan grey, with a mere suspicion of blue in them, or the lilac and heliotrope mountains of the desert which form the magic background of Damascus looking eastward.