130 TRAVEL, ADVENTURE, AND SPORT. 



land has been let to Arab tenants, who cultivate it on 

 shares. The people of El Tireh are notorious for 

 their bad character all through the country. They 

 are fanatical Moslems, and sufficiently wealthy, when 

 they commit acts of depredation, to bribe the autho- 

 rities to condone their offence ; so they are a terror to 

 their poorer and less influential neighbours. Their 

 village is worth visiting, however, on account of the 

 ruins of an old crusading castle, now converted into a 

 mosque, and of the numerous caverns and ancient 

 rock-hewn cisterns with which the hillside and glens 

 that run back into the mountain abound. I had 

 only time to stay long enough to see that the place 

 was worth another visit ; and notwithstanding their 

 evil reputation, I was treated with much civility by 

 the villagers. Once more striking across the plain 

 from the base of the range to the sea, we arrive in 

 little more than half an hour at a low limestone 

 ridge which separates the plain from the beach. The 

 formation of the country here is very peculiar. The 

 plain, which had sloped from the mountains gently 

 towards the sea, now almost takes an opposite incline, 

 so that the winter streams from Carmel, not finding a 

 natural slope seaward, are apt to stagnate in marshes 

 at the base of the range, thus rendering the country 

 to the south of Tireh during the early summer months 

 very feverish. As if still further to render the drain- 

 age difficult, there extends parallel with the sea, and 

 a few hundred yards from it, a range of limestone 



