A former missionary in Palestine[691] says: “Digging through the wall is the common method pursued by housebreakers in Palestine, and, save in the cities, the operation is not one of great difficulty. Windows, in our sense, do not exist in the houses of the villagers; ... but the walls, built of roughly broken stones and mud, are easily, and by a skilled hand almost noiselessly, penetrated. One night, about midnight, I was driven from my resting-place under a stunted olive-tree in the plain of Sharon by a terrific thunderstorm, and took refuge in the miserable fellahy village of Kalansaweh. A good woman unbarred her door and admitted me to a single apartment, in which, on the ground level, were several sheep and cattle, with an ass, and on the higher level a pretty large family asleep, all dimly discerned by the light of a little oil lamp stuck in a crevice of the wall. The atmosphere was awful. I asked why they did not have a window or opening in the wall. The woman held up her hands in amazement. ‘What!’ she exclaimed, ‘and assist the robbers [“thieves”]?’... The robbers [‘thieves’], she explained, were the Arabs in the plain. Greater rascals do not exist. They were great experts, she explained, in ‘digging through’ the houses; to put a window in the wall would only tempt them, and facilitate their work.” Now, as of old, among the more primitive pastoral people of Palestine, “He that entereth not by the door into the fold of the sheep, but climbeth up some other way, the same is a thief and a robber.... The thief cometh not, but that he may steal, and kill, and destroy.”[692] I remember now, what I did not realize the meaning of at the time, that while I was journeying in Arabia we did not set a watch before the entrance of our tents, when we were near a village; but the guards were at the rear of the tents, to watch against thieves, who would crawl underneath the canvas to steal what they might. It seems to have been a custom in medieval times, and probably earlier, for the besiegers in war time to endeavor to enter a city which they would sack through a breach in the walls, or by scaling the walls, rather than by entering the gates. On the other hand, if a conqueror would protect the inhabitants of a captured city, he would pass in through the opened gates. To deliver up the keys of the city gates to a hostile commander was equivalent to capitulating or making formal terms of surrender. In the military museum at Berlin are preserved the keys of cities captured by the emperors of Germany at various times along the centuries.