112 TKAVEL, ADVENTUKE, AND SPORT. 



crusaders evidently had a stronghold; for there are 

 the remains of a fortress, since turned into a jail, and 

 a fragment of a wall and archway, which may pos- 

 sibly date from a still more -remote epoch. To this 

 strip of land, Abdallah, one of the successors of 

 Sheikh Omar el Zahir, transferred the population of 

 a rebellious village, which he punished by razing 

 their houses to the ground; and on the hill above 

 he put a castle, while he interned the people between 

 it and the sea by means of a wall, thus keeping them, 

 as it were, in prison. This confinement, however, 

 appears not to have lasted very long possibly be- 

 cause it was expensive, probably also because, on the 

 death of Abdallah, the author of the punishment, the 

 political state of the country changed : the walls were 

 allowed to crumble away ; the garrison was removed 

 from the castle, which is already a picturesque ruin ; 

 and the people began to forget their history, and to 

 adapt themselves to the conditions which surrounded 

 them. 



While the sea-coast town of Haifa was undergoing 

 these vicissitudes, there lived in its immediate vicinity 

 a group of men whose fortunes had been as varying 

 as those of the native population, and who had clung 

 with a pertinacity which has since rendered them 

 celebrated throughout the world, to that sacred moun- 

 tain whose venerated lanes they had appropriated at 

 the time of the Crusades, and upon which they had 

 built a monastery more than seven hundred years ago. 



