JOURNEY TO NAZARETH. 
327 
upon the air. All living things fled, hut they knew not 
where to flee. The plains opened in smoking fissures, and 
the mountains were cleft asunder by a hand that man hath 
never seen, and great rocks rolled crashing down into the 
depths below. Shrieks of terror mingled with the crash, and 
smoking masses of earth were upheaved, and buried beneath 
them houses and temples, and all that stood upon its sod. Men 
rushed from their abodes and smote their breasts, crying, Woe ! 
woe ! a judgment hath fallen upon Safed! Women fled shriek¬ 
ing with their children into the dark caverns. But there was 
death in the noonday light, and there was death in the dark¬ 
ness ; all was desolation and death; wherever they fled, des¬ 
olation and death. Crushed beneath the falling masses, they 
lay buried in a sepulchre of ruins. The dread doom had come; 
there were no sounds but the sounds of woe. Woe to the highest 
and the lowest; woe, woe to Safed ; woe to all that were there 
that fatal day. The living were buried, and the dead were 
cast up from their graves, and the living and the dead were 
entombed in the convulsed earth to moulder henceforth to¬ 
gether. Days after, putrid corpses were dragged from the 
ruins : strong men, crushed and maimed, grasping masses of 
ruin in their clenched hands as they died; the corpses of 
mothers, with their skeleton arms still twined around their 
babes; blackened and bleeding, some were dragged out to 
drink in the light of heaven once more, and die raving mad. 
0 happy fate for them that were crushed to rise no more ! 
For days after, the living lay maimed in the sad chaos, and 
smothered cries were heard when Safed was no more—wail¬ 
ing for the lost that were never to be seen again ; for the dead 
that never more could know the bitterness of life. 
The dream was ended : I turned and rode on toward the 
plain of Hatim. 
On the ridge, as we left Tiberias, we had a fine view of 
Mount Tabor, which, from its regular outline, standing alone 
on the plain of Esdraelon, is easily distinguished from the 
neighboring mountains. We passed some rich spots of ground 
on our way this morning, and saw the Arabs at work scratch¬ 
ing it up for the spring crops with their rude wooden plows 
