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different places: this occupied me two full hours; after which I determined to examine the monuments to the west of the citadel. I knew that in this quarter the tomb of Leonidas must be situated. We wandered from ruin to ruin, the Janissary following me, and leading the

so that I had beheld him commence and finish his course on the ruins of Lacedæmon. It was three thousand five hundred and forty-three years, since he first rose and set over this infant city.

horses by the bridle. We were the Description of the Dead Sea, in Pa

only living human beings among such numbers of illustrious dead: both of us were barbarians, strangers to each other, as well as to Greece; sprung from the forests of Gaul, and the rocks of Caucasus; we had met at the extremity of the Peloponnese, the one to pass over, the other to live upon, tombs which were not those of our forefathers.

In vain I examined the smallest stones to discover the spot where the ashes of Leonidas were deposit ed. For a moment I had hopes of succeeding. Near the edifice, resembling a tower, which I have described as standing to the west of the citadel, I found fragments of sculpture, which I took to be those of a lion. We are informed by Herodotus, that there was a lion of stone on the tomb of Leonidas; a circumstance not recorded by Pausanias. I continued my researches with increased ardour, but all my efforts proved fruitless. I know not whether this was the spot where the Abbé Fourmont discovered three curious monuments. One of them was a cippus, on which was engraven the name of Jerusalem; perhaps a memorial of that alliance between the Jews and the Lacedæmonians, which is mentioned in the Maccabees. The two others were the sepulchral inscriptions of Lysander and Agesilaus.

Night drew on apace, when I reluctantly quitted these renowned ruins, the shade of Lycurgus, the recollection of Thermopylae, and all the fictions of fable and history. The sun sunk behind the Taygetus,

lestine.

(From the same.)

As we advanced, the aspect of

the mountains still continued the same, that is white, dusty, without shade, without tree, without herbage, without moss. At halfpast four we descended from the lofty chain of these mountains to another less elevated. We proceeded for fifty minutes over a level plain, and at length arrived at the last range of hills that form the western border of the valley of the Jordan and the Dead Sea. The sun was near setting, we alighted to give a little rest to our horses, and I contemplated at leisure the lake, the valley, and the river.

When we hear of a valley, we figure to ourselves a valley either cultivated or uncultivated; if the former, it is covered with crops of various kinds, vineyards, villages, and cattle; if the latter, it presents herbage and woods. It is watered by a river, this river has windings in its course; and the hills which bound this valley have themselves undulations which form a prospect agreeable to the eye. Here nothing of the kind is to be found. Conceive two long chains of mountains running in a parallel direction from north to south, without breaks and without undulations. The eastern chain, called the mountains of Arabia, is the highest; when seen at the distance of eight or ten leagues, you would suppose it a prodigious perpendicular wall, perfectly resembling Jura in its form and a

zure

zure colour. Not one summit, not the smallest peak can be distinguished; you merely perceive slight inflections here and there, as if the hand of the painter who drew this horizontal line along the sky, had sometimes tiembled.

The western range belongs to the mountains of Judea. Less lofty and more unequal than the eastern chain, it differs from the other in its nature also it exhibits heaps of chalk and sand, whose form bears some resemblance to piles of arms, waving standards, or the tents of a camp seated on the border of a plain. On the Arabian side, on the contrary, nothing is to be seen but black perpendicular rocks, which throw their lengthened shadows over the waters of the Dead Sea. The smallest bird of heaven would not find among these rocks a blade of grass for its sustenance; every thing announces the country of a reprobate people, and seems to breathe the horror and incest whence sprung Animon and Moab. The valley, bounded by these two chains of mountains, displays a soil resembling the bottom of a sea that has long retired from its bed, a beach covered with salt, dry mud, and moving sands, furrowed, as it were, by the waves. Here and there stunted shrubs with difficulty vegetate upon this inanimate tract; their leaves are covered with salt, which has nourished them, and their bark Iras a smoky smell and taste. Instead of villages you perceive the ruins of a few towers. Through the middle of this valley flows a

Such is the scene famous for the benedictions and the curses of heaven. ven. This river is the Jordan; this lake is the Dead Sea; it appears brilliant, but the guilty cities entombed in its bosom seem to have poisoned its waters. Its solitary abysses cannot afford nourishment to any living creature: never did vessel cut its waves; its shores are without birds, trees, or verdure; its waters are excessively bitter, and so heavy, that the most impetuous winds can scarcely ruffle their surface.

When you travel in Judea, the heart is at first filled with profound disgust; but, when passing from solitude to solitude, boundless space opens before you, this disgust wears off by degrees, and you feel a secret awe, which, so far from depressing the soul, impar life, and elevates the genius. Extraordinary appearances every-where proclaim a land teeming with miracles: the burning sun, the towering eagle, the barren fig-trec, all the poetry, all the pictures of Scripture, are here. Every name commemorates a mystery; every grot proclaims the future; every hill re-echoes the accents of a prophet. God himself has spoken in these regions: dried up rivers, riven rocks, half-open sepulchres, attest the prodigy: the desert still appears mute with terror, and you would imagine that it had never presumed to interrupt the silence since it heard the awful voice of the Eternal.

discoloured river, which reluctantly Account of the Inhabitants of Jeru

creeps towards the pestilential lake by which it is engulphed. Its course through the sands can be distinguished only by the willows and the reeds that border it; and the Arab lies in ambush among these reeds to attack the traveller, and to plunder the pilgrim.

salem.

(From the same.)

THE street of the Bazar is the

principal street, and the best quarter of Jerusalem. But what wretchedness, what desolation! We did not meet with a creature, for

most

most of the inhabitants had fled to the mountains on the Pacha's arrival. The doors of some forsaken shops stood open; through these we perceived small rooms, seven or eight feet square, where the master, then a fugitive, cats, lies, and sleeps, on the single mat that composes his

whole stock of furniture.

On the right of the Bazar, between the Temple and the foot of Mount Sion, we entered the Jews' quarter. Fortified by their indigence, these had withstood the attack of the Pacha. Here they appeared covered with rags, seated in the dust of Sion, seeking the vermin which devoured them, and keeping their eyes fixed on the Temple. The Drogman took me into a kind of school: I would have purchased the Hebrew Pentateuch, in which a rabbi was teaching a child to read; but he refused to dispose of the book. It has been observed that the foreign Jews, who fix their residence at Jerusalem, live but a short time. As to those of Palestine, they are so poor as to be obliged to send every year to raise contributions among their brethren in Egypt and Barbary.

From the Jews' quarter we repaired to Pilate's house, to view the mosque of the Temple through one of the windows; all Christians being prohibited, on pain of death, from entering the court that surrounds this mosque. The description of it I shall reserve till 1 come to treat of the buildings of Jerusalem. At some distance from the prætorium of Pilate, we found the pool of Bethesda, and Herod's palace. This last is a ruin, the foundations of which belong to antiquity.

We went towards the gate of Sion, when Ali Aga invited me to mount with him upon the walls; the Drogman durst not venture to follow us. I found some old twen

ty-four pounders fixed upon carriages without wheels, and placed at the embrasures of a Gothic bastion.

In this heap of rubbish, denominated a city, the people of the country have thought fit to give the appellation of streets to certain desert

passages.

Jerusalem is comprehended in the pachalik of Damascus, for what reason I know not, unless it be a result of that destructive system which is naturally, and, as it were, instinctively, pursued by the Turks. Cut off from Damascus by mountains, and still more by the Arabs, who infest the deserts, Jerusalem cannot always prefer its complaints to the Pacha, when oppressed by its governors. It would be much more natural to make it dependent on the pachalik of Acre, which lies near it; the Franks and the Latin fathers might then place themselves under the protection of the consuls residing in the ports of Syria; and the Greeks and Turks would be able to make known their grievances. But this is the very thing that their governors are desirous of preventing; they would have a mute slavery, and not insolent wretches who dare complain of the hand that oppresses them.

Jerusalem is therefore at the mercy of an almost independent governor; he may do with impunity all the mischief he pleases, if he be not afterwards called to account for it by the Pacha. It is well known that, in Turkey, every superior has a right to delegate his authority to an inferior; and this authority extends both to property and life. For a few purses a Janissary may become a petty Aga, and this Aga may, at his good pleasure, either take away your life or permit you to redeem it. Thus executioners are multiplied in every town of Judea. The only thing

ever heard in this country, the only justice ever thought of, is-Let him pay ten, twenty, thirty, purses-Give him five hundred strokes of the bastrado-Cut off his head. One act of injustice renders it necessary to commit a still greater. If one of these petty tyrants plunders a peasant, he is absolutely obliged to plunder his neighbour also; for, to escape the hypocritical integrity of the Pacha, he must procure by a second crime, sufficient to purchase impunity for the first.

It may perhaps be imagined that the Pacha, when he visits his government, corrects these evils and avenges the wrongs of the people. So far from this, however, the Pacha is himself the greatest scourge of the inhabitants of Jerusalem. His coming is dreaded like that of a hostile chief. The shops are shut up; the people conceal themselves in cellars; they feign to be at the point of death on their mats, or withdraw to the mountains.

The truth of these facts I am able to attest, since I happened to be at Jerusalem at the time of the Pacha's visit. Abdallah is sordidly avaricious, like almost all the Musselmans: in the capacity of commander of the caravan of Mecca, and under the pretext of raising money for the better protection of the pilgrims, he thinks he has a right to multiply his extortions; and he is always devising new ways of fleecing the people. One of the methods which he most frequently employs is, to fix a very low maximum for all kinds of provisions. The people are delighted, but the dealers shut up their shops. A scarcity commences; the Pacha enters into a secret negociation with the shop-keepers, and, for a certain number of purses, grants them permission to sell at any price they please. These men are of course desirous to recover the sums which they have given the Pacha: they

raise the price of necessaries to an extraordinary height, and the people, dying a second time for want, are obliged to part with their last rag to keep themselves from starving.

I have seen this same Abdallah practise a still more ingenious vexation. I have observed that he sent his cavalry to pillage the Arabian farmers beyond the Jordan. These poor people, who had paid the miri, and who knew that they were not at war, were surprised in the midst of their tents and of their flocks. They were robbed of two thousand two hundred sheep and goats, ninety-four calves, a thousand asses, and six mares of the purest blood; the camels alone escaped, having followed a shiek who called them at a distance. These faithful children of the desert carried their milk to their masters in the mountains, as if they had known that these masters were bereft of every other species of nourishment.

An European could scarcely guess what the Pacha did with his booty. He put more than twice as high a price upon an animal as it was worth, rating each goat and sheep at twenty piastres, and each calf at eighty. The beasts, thus appraised, were sent to the butchers and different persons in Jerusalem, and to the chiefs of the neighbouring villages, who were obliged to take them and pay for them at the Pacha's price, upon pain of death. I must confess that, had I not been an-eye-witness of this double iniquity, I should have thought it absolutely incredible. As to the asses and horses, they became the property of the soldiers; for, according to a singular convention between these robbers, all the beasts with a cloven hoof taken in such expeditions belong to the Pacha, and all the other animals fall to the share of the troops.

Having

Having exhausted Jerusalem, the pacha departs; but, in order to save the pay of the city guards, and to strengthen the escort of the caravan of Mecca, he takes the soldiers along with him. The governor is left behind with about a dozen men, who are insufficient for the police of the city, much more for that of the adjacent country. The year before my visit, he was obliged to conceal himself in his house, to escape the pursuit of a band of robbers who entered Jerusalem, and were on the point of plundering the city.

No sooner is the pacha gone, than another evil, the consequence of his oppression, begins to be felt. Insurrections take place in the plundered villages; they attack each other, mutually intent on wreaking hereditary revenge. All communication is interrupted; agriculture perishes; and the peasant sallies forth at night to pillage his enemy's vine, and to cut down his olive-tree. The pacha returns the following year; he demands the same tribute from a country whose population is diminished. In order to raise it, he is obliged to redouble his oppressions and to exterminate whole tribes. The desert gradually extends; nothing is to be seen but here and there habitations in ruins, and near them cemeteries which are continually increasing succeeding year witnesses the destruction of a house, the extinction of a family, and soon nothing is left but this cemetery to mark the spot where once stood a village.

each

Biographical Sketch of General
Mack.

(From "Biographie Moderne"

(ACK (the Baron de) an Aus

graviate of Anspach; he nevertheless received a good education, began life as a soldier, became a quarter-master in a regiment of cavalry, and during the war, belonged to the staff of the army, a post in which he drew the attention of field-marshal Lascy, who made him a captain.

The sentiments of esteem for his benefactor, which were fixed in the heart of Mack, displeased his successor Laudon, who one day said something very warm about the creatures of Lascy, keeping his eyes fixed on Mack. Mack returned, "I must inform you, sir, that I here serve neither M. de Lascy nor you, but his Imperial Majesty, to whom my life is consecrated.' Two days after, Mack distinguished himself by the following action: M. de Laudon hesitated whether he should attack Lissa, ten miles from which town his camp was posted, believing it to be defended by 30,000 men. Mack, who wished to make him determine on the assault, left him at nine o'clock in the evening, crossed the Danube with one hussar, made his way into a suburb of Lissa, took a Turkish officer prisoner, and the next morning, at seven o'clock, presented him to the general, who learnt from him that the garrison consisted of only 6000 men. The marshal then addressed him in flattering terms, made him his aid-de-camp, and requested that he would never leave him. Laudon before his death presented his young favourite to the einperor, saying to him, "I leave you a Laudon who will serve you better than have done: I mean major Mack." Thus, having obtained some degree of celebrity, he served in 1793 under M. de Cobourg as quarter-master-general, and in this capacity directed the early operations of the campaign,

MACK Band, de) born of the Yasnge of the Roer, the delive

a poor and mean family in the marFebruary 1812

rance of Maestricht, and the bat

tles

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