So it's no use asking me what the country looks like between Ludd and
Haifa. I didn't even wake up to see the Lake of Tiberias, Sea of
Galilee, or Bahr Tubariya, as it is variously called. A rather common
sickness is what Sir Richard Burton called Holylanditis and I've had it,
as well as the croup and measles in my youth. Some folk never recover
from it, and to them a rather ordinary sheet of water and ugly modern
villages built on ruins look like the pictures that an opium smoker
sees.

The ruins and the history do interest me, but you can't see them from
the train, and after a night without sleep there seemed to me something
more profitable in view than to hang from a window and buy fish that
undoubtedly had once swum in Galilee water, but that cost a most
unrighteous price and stank as if straight from a garbage heap.

The whole train reeked of putrid fish when we reached Haifa in the
evening, in time to watch the sun go down across the really glorious Bay
of Acre.




CHAPTER IX

"The rest will be simple!"


Haifa was crowded with Syrians of all sorts, and there were two or three
staff officers in the uniform of Feisul's army lounging on the platform,
who conned new arrivals with a sort of childlike solicitude, as if by