CHAPTER XVIII. ACRE. WE came to Acre, a little, dull, ruined old town on the very edge of the sea, which dashed against it in foaming breakers, that day. It has been battered in all kinds of wars. In 1281 the Saracens thundered at its gates with sixty thousand cavalry, and a hundred and sixty thousand infantry. Richard Cœur de Lion reduced it. Ibrahim Pacha carried it by assault, and in 1840 it was destroyed by the explosion of its own magazine while the British fleet lay before it, bombarding. It has been taken many times,although Napoleon could not take it, and looks no longer worth the taking. The sea dashes upon it as upon an old hulk, which it would gladly utterly destroy. But still in Acre is an exquisite mosque, the mosque of Sultan Djezzar, a mosaic of fine marbles rising from cypresses and palms. Its dome is ruined. by much bombarding; but a fountained kiosk upon a pavement shadowed by palms, and the airy arcade, which surrounds the inclosure, like the gallery of a cloister, except that this breathes of pleasure and not of meditation,-give Memory still a nucleus in Acre. As we stroll about the ruined fortifications in the still noon, and look across the water to the misty headland which, braving the sea at the farther extremity of the crescent beach, nine miles away— Golden Sleeve tells us is Mount Carmel, we listen to the tradition which quaint Henry Maundrell tells of the convent of Acre. When, after that turbulent thundering at the gates, the Saracens entered the city, the lady abbess of the nunnery, fearing for herself and nuns the fate of Houris, summoned them together as the enemy approached, and exhorted them to cut and mangle their faces, thus to quench in their own blood the lust of the conquerors. As she spoke she set them the example, and all the nuns, inspired by her lofty courage, did likewise. And while they still stood bleeding and mangled, the soldiers burst into the convent, and mad with disappointment, immediately slew them all,-" thus restoring them, as in charity we may suppose," says the grave and sweet chronicler, "to a inviolable beauty." new and Another quaint old legend of Acre has the flavour of pure Stoicism. In the days of St. Louis, one of the monks encountered an old woman threading the streets of Acre with a cruse of water and a pan of coals. He asked her why she carried them. The water to extinguish Hell, said she, and the fire to burn up Paradise, that then the selfishness of man may be subdued, and he may love God for himself alone. The bazaars were busy in Acre. The life of the town was concentrated around the shops, which are called as gay as those of Aleppo, and the turbaned gossips, with the slouching soldiery, criticised the Howadji as they rode slowly through out of the ruined little town. The beach between Acre and Mount Carmel is not surpassed in my memory. Certainly none so spacious connects two points so variously famous.. The sea smoothed the crescent shore, and polished a black marble pavement for our going. The brilliant day was melting into the tenderness of evening light, but was still so soft and glowing that I could well fancy Palestine once more beloved of the Lord. All day we had seen Mount Carmel from Acre, hazy in the distance; and it was hard to feel, as we looked at it, galloping over the beach, that it was Elijah's mount, and that the sparkling sea was the same over which the boy saw the cloud of a hand's size gathering. It was hard to feel this, because the Mediterranean had invaded the gravity of the Syrian journey, and the serious thoughts which it is impossible to escape among the hills of Galilee, were smothered in the flowers of Zabulon. The sea brought the vision and remembrance of other lands which it laved. The austere imagery of prophetic times melted in the glad day. Zabulon whispered-" Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these," and the vision of solemneyed prophets faded. Moreover, the landscape of all famous stories has a character which the eye can never see. Even when you have stood upon Marathon, and have seen the mountains which look down upon it, imagination, despite memory, will still marshal the resounding hosts upon another plain than that. Herodotus, Josephus, Thucydides, Xenophon, first mould the images of their story in the plastic imagination of the boy, and no visible and possible landscape is vast enough to hold them. The great councils of Rome, the triumphs, the processions, and the fiery words which time has not chilled, these were not held, and seen, and spoken in the Forum whose ruins you have seen, but in some fair and eternal Forum of the imagination. What Bermuda voyager has ever seen the "still vext Bermoothes" -or who ever felt the gray old olive grove on the shore of the Brook Kedron, to be the true Gethsemane ? And because Solomon's Song had been the proem and the poem of the day, it was difficult to see in the hazy headland, like a point in Nicholas Poussin's landscapes, the Carmel of grim history. We spurred along the beach upon the full run. Golden Sleeve dropped chibouque and kurbash scrambled off his horse and on, and gave galloping chase. The Arabs swarmed after, wide-flying-as Homer would have sung-on the shore of the loud-sounding sea. The Pacha and I dashed ahead of the turbaned crew, Cœur de Lion and Philip Augustus before Salah-ed-deen, the Crusaders before the Saracens. Or Julian and Maddalo, rather, who ran along the Lido shore of the same sea, "For the winds drove The living spray along the sunny air, Into our faces: the blue heavens were bare, Stripped to their depths by the awakening North, And from the waves sounds like delight broke forth Into our hearts aerial merriment." I leaned over the neck of my horse, straining ahead. But in an instant I rolled upon the sand. The stirrup in which I was thoughtlessly hanging |