Mohammedan Faith.

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appears to read anything, he is well acquainted with both the Bible and the Koran, and has a head like an almanac. I find him this evening away from the muleteers and his camp superintendence. He is not quite well, he says, as he sits at his tent door, smoking the mild Turkish tobacco. So we sit together and chat.

The Koran is, he tells me, a volume of something over a hundred chapters, copied from several revelations made to Mohammed in an unknown tongue, written, for his reading alone, on such singular tablets as palm leaves and the blade bones of sheep. He read these inscriptions to scribes, who wrote from such dictation. The matter of these hundred and odd chapters follows no order, system, or chronology. To others than Mohammedans they are an incoherent jumble of story, fable, philosophy, poetry, and prayer.

In this medley of scraps from the books and ideas of other creeds there is mixed but little or nothing original. The history is of piece a with the chronology and the mythology. The one God whose existence is taught throughout is conceived of as a living, breathing being, and not as a spiritual creative power, or abstract idea. The human senses of hearing and seeing, as also of labial speech, sitting and standing attitudes, and sleep, are accredited to him. Yet with such personal attributes, an impossible power of invisibility, and of being everywhere present at one time, is also mixed up.

A day of judgment is promised by the Koran, in which also the devil appears as one Eblis, described as a fallen angel, who went into rebellion on refusing to worship Adam as the son of God. The existence of angels, and of supernumeraries called genii, is also taught. It is a pretty conceit inculcated by the Koran, and shines as a grain of gold in the dust heap of its dry stuff, that two genii attend every human being upon earth, from the cradle to the grave. A modern poet has told us his dream of two such attendants coming at his birth—

"Two beings of a brighter land adown a moonbeam gently glide Until they halted, hand in hand, my infant couch beside."

That idea of the invisible attendants through life is as old as Socrates, who held a similar faith that he was so attended. The Koran, however, extends their duties beyond life. It makes the office of these ministers that of recorders during existence, and the custodians of the soul after death, and thenceforward until judgment. Very poetical is that idea of our spirits not being left to find their own way to an unknown world when we yield them up, but to be taken care of by those who have hovered around through life, and kept the record of our deeds and our biography as carefully as they will thenceforward keep our souls. The Mohammedans believe that these faithful trustees so act until the final doom be pronounced, and their trusteeship then ended.

The Irish expression, that a man is "all alone with himself and the devil," tends to drive into society those who might wish for solitude. The Mohammedan, however, thus attended by his two angels through life, is, in all senses, "never less alone than when alone," which forces upon one the pleasant thought that so to be always with angels here is a happy preparation to for ever keeping such good company.

CHAPTER XXXI.

ON MOUNT CARMEL.

REPRESENTED by sickness or death, there is a silent and unseen party to all our engagements, and to every agreement that we make. The presence of that "unknown quantity” in all our calculations was asserted at the end of the third week of our pilgrimage. One of our little quartette then broke down, and after a day's deliberation declared himself done up. It was necessary now to diverge from the route as laid down in the travelling contract, and take him to the seaside. As our lots were thrown in together, we went with him, and so found ourselves in our fourth week at the Syrian seaport of Caipha, on our progress northwards to Damascus. Above Caipha (spelled also as Kiaffa) towers magnificent Mount Carmel, crowned with the finest of all existing convents-the home of the historical barefooted and bareheaded Carmelite Friars, or of the monks now representing them.

A general sort of indisposition-the maladie du pays-the disease of the country, begins to affect all of us by this time of our Holy Land travel. We have become by the deadening influences of all around us as solemn as the Arabs, and as little lively as one would feel in a cemetery. Save squabbling about Bible interpretations, and hunting up the marginal references for explanation, we have but little occupation, which is perhaps as well, being suitable to the climate, and it certainly less affects my American friends than it does me. Absence of all news assists our dulness, as it does on long voyages, when the want of newspapers tends to make folks soon run short of

conversable topics. Our mules and horses persist also in filing off as we go along, which also helps to our isolation, and to keeping to ourselves of any ideas either of us may happen to have.

We get gradually careless about half the things that are pointed out to us on the road. They are nothing to the eye, and it would be only a labour of reading and remembrance to hunt up their story and to discuss it. The tiredness we feel at this daily hobbling over the stony sterile land is only refreshed by the thoughts of better things to come. We rightly believe, in this land of all faiths, that we have left the best of it to the last. Jerusalem has been a sore disappointment, and that which has been seen since has required a stoic's endurance to take one through it with a belief that it really interested us. The glory of the East, Damascus, is now to be our reward when we get to it, and so to think is the "will-o'-the-wisp" which turns our eyes to that distant view in which lies our enchantment. We shall see Lebanon also, as to which paradise we perceive Bible-praise to be never ending. These be the thoughts that cheer us, as Bonnivard, in the "Prisoner of Chillon," tells us he cheered his prisoner-brothers with similarly depicted good things that made momentary miseries forgotten.

The highly decent-looking town of Caipha is a well-built and modern place of much respectability. Its prosperity is, we find, due to its being a German settlement of recent date. There is wood and water in abundance about this presentable little town, which shows stone houses, of one and two storeys, standing in well-kept gardens, with neat railings in modern villa style. Our eyes stare with wonder at the made and paved streets and roads, at which we are almost as scared as the desert Bedouins are frightened of entering a city. The "Hotel of Mount Carmel" looks one in the face, and we, who have recently drunk of the waters of the brook Cherith and of Jordan, dismount in quest of bottled British beer-to be expected within where such plain English is to be seen without. Caipha has two thousand inhabitants, and is bidding for the

Caipha.

407 calls of steamers as a seaport. It can be reached by the shore line through ancient ruined Cæsarea from Joppa, and on the other side is but three hours of a beach ride to Acre, here called Akka. The Christians are in the ascendant at Caipha, and the Mohammedans nowhere, which accounts for much of what is seen, though it is by no means so apparent on what industries any of either sect manage to live. To account for how people live in Syria, or why any one lives there under such misrule as that of the Turks, is what I have concluded to give up, and to seek something easier of solution. The Germans who have settled Caipha are like the rest of their nation, philosophers, and believe in that saying of one of their countrymen that "to him to whom God is a father every land is fatherland."

After refreshing at this Western-World-looking town, we go out to ascend Carmel, which is a bulwark to the pleasant little place that nestles at the foot of it, as Hobart Town does at that of Mount Wellington. This verdure-clad, well-wooded Carmel is something like two thousand feet in height, and much of the journey up it is a toilsome one to the short-winded. Those so troubled found good excuse for stopping, in the varying panorama that every ten minutes enlarged to our view. Our escort on this excursion was Antoine, our French-talking cook, and he proved to be the best one we could have taken. For some time of his very much mixed life he had served as cook at the monastery on Carmel's top. No wonder, now and henceforth, that he was such a good cook; but greater wonder why the monks, who know and so cleave to what is good, ever parted with him.

Antoine knew every man whom we met on Carmel's side, and exchanged with them the customary kiss that Frenchmen, or those so brought up, keep for each other. I for one was not sorry for these stoppages and greetings, as it gave one breathing time that was much wanted, as I had come away from Caipha on foot, and the sides of Carmel were steep. Before me rode two very stout Italian ladies, bestriding wretchedly small donkeys. Sympathy for the poor animals was irrepressible, though it was quite evident that their riders could never