The maritime plain south of Cannel has some general features worth of note. Along the whole seabord runs a broad belt of drift sand, generally flat and wavy, but in places raised up into mounds varying from 50 to 200 feet in height. The mounds and drifts are mostly bare and of a ruddy gray colour ; though here and there they are covered with long why grass and bent. The sand is most destructive, and nothing can stay its progress. It has encircled the ruins of CNsarea with a barren desert ; it is slowly advancing on the orchards of Joppa, threatening them with destruction ; it has drifted far inland to Ramleh and Lydda ; it has almost entirely covered up the city of Ascalon, and is now invading the fields, vineyards, and olive groves of Mejdel, Hamameh, and other neighbour ing villages. From Ascalon southward, the hills are higher than elsewhere ; and at Gaza the sand belt is not less than three miles wide. The aspect of these bare hills, and long reaches of naked drift, is that of utter, terrible desolation.
Another feature of the plain is the depth of its wadys or torrent-beds. At the northern end of Sharon, their banks are comparatively low and sedgy, bordered by tracts of meadow, which, owing to their depression and the accumulation of sand along the coast, are overflowed during the rainy season, and thus converted into pools and morasses, some of which do not entirely dry up during the summer. In Philistia the wadys are deeply cut in the loamy or sandy soil ; their banks are dry, hard, and bare ; their beds too are dry, covered with dust, white pebbles, and flints.
The whole plain is bare and bleak. There are no trees, no bushes, and no fences of any kind, with the exception of one or two small remnants of pine and oak forests in the northern part of Sharon, and the orchards and olive-groves round a few of the principal villages, and the hedges of cactus that encircle them. One can ride on for days to gether without let or hindrance. In summer, all vegetation disappears. The plain stretches out, mile after mile, in easy undulations, like great waves, everywhere of a brownish gray colour, ap pearing as if scathed by lightning. In early spring, however, it is totally different. It does not look like the same country. It is covered with green grass, and, where cultivated, with luxuriant crops of green corn ; it is all spangled with flowers of the brightest colours, and in Sharon with forests of gigantic thistles. The colouring then far sur passes anything ever seen in Europe ; but still the absence of houses, fields, and fences, gives a dreary look. The villages are few, mostly very small, and very poor, and at long intervals. In Sharon, and in the southern section of Philistia, there are stretches of twenty miles and more without a vil lage. The plain is everywhere dotted, however, with low rounded tells—a few of them, as Tell es Safieh, Arak el-Menshiyeh, and others, rising to a height of zoo feet and more--and these are covered with white debris, intermixed with hewn stones and fragments of columns, the remains of primxtral cities. The plain has no good quarries ;
the rock along the coast, and over a great part of the plain, is a soft friable sandstone, not fit for architectural purposes. The ordinary houses, therefore, were built of brick, and soon crumbled away, and are now heaps of dust and rubbish. The remains of a few temples, and of the churches and ramparts erected by the Crusaders at Gaza, Asca lon, Lydda, and Cxsarea, are almost the only relics of antiquity now standing on the maritime plain.
The eastern border of the plain is not very clearly defined. The hills melt into it gradually. In one place an elongated ridge shoots far down into the lowland, such as the ridge at Bethhoron, at Zorah, at Deir Dubban, etc. In other places, broad val leys run far up among the mountains. These ridges and valleys were the border-land of the Israelites and Philistines, and were the scenes of many a wild foray, and many a hard-fought battle. The valleys are exceedingly fertile.
The breadth of this noble plain varies consider ably. At Cassarea on the north, it is not more than eight miles wide ; at Joppa it is about twelve ; while at Gaza, on the south, it is nearly twenty. Its elevation above the level of the sea has not been ascertained by measurement, but from its general appearance it does not seem to have an average of more than too feet.
2. The Central Mountain Range.—The deep narrow ravine of the Litany separates Lebanon proper from Palestine [LEBANoti. The mountain chain on its southern bank, however, is a natural prolongation of that on the northern. Its altitude is not so great, but its course is the same, its geo logical strata and physical features are the same, and when seen from any point, east or west, the ridge appears as one. On the south bank of the river the ridge is broad, reaching from the Jordan valley to the sea, about twenty miles. Its summit is mostly an irregular undulating tableland; having fertile plains of considerable extent intervening between the hill-tops. The outline is varied and picturesque ; the plains are green with corn and grass, and the peaks and ridge backs covered more or less densely with forests of oak, terebinth, maple, and other trees. The trees grow to a larger size than is elsewhere seen in Palestine ; many of them would not disgrace the great forests of Europe (Van de Velde, i. 17o ; ii. 418). The watershed is much nearer the eastern than the western side ; in fact, it is in some places quite close to the eastern brow of the ridge, from which short abrupt glens descend to the Jordan. The valleys on the western slopes are long, winding, and richly wooded ; and among them we have the finest—indeed, it might be said the only really fine scenery in Western Pa lestine. On the lower parts of the declivities, and in the beds of the valleys, are still extensive olive groves, showing how appropriate was Asher's bless ing, ' Let him dip his foot in oil' (Dent. xxxiii.