4

FROM ANCIENT DAYS TO OUR OWN

Since it is our good fortune to have readers sufficiently intelligent to encourage us to write a book in which romance is relegated to the second place, we shall doubtless be permitted to detail not only the modern, but also the ancient history of the places which we visit with our heroes. There is much charm for the poet, the historian, even the dreamer, in treading upon soil composed of the ashes of past generations; and nowhere more than in the region we are now treading do we find traces of those great historical catastrophes which, becoming less substantial and fainter in outline as the years roll past, finally disappear like ruins and the spectres of ruins amid the ever-thickening shadows of the past.

This is true of the city which we have just left, throbbing with shrieks of anguish, overflowing with carnage and blood, with its walls battered to pieces and its houses in flames. The rapid movement of our narrative, and our desire to enter modern Jaffa with our young conqueror, have hitherto prevented us from telling you what manner of place was the Jaffa of olden days.