Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !

Updated: May 8, 2025


The scenery continues of the same fascinating description till the traveller reaches the Nahr el Zerkah, or river Jabbok, the ancient boundary between the Amorites and the Children of Ammon. The banks are thickly clothed with the oleander and plane-tree, the wild olive and almond, and many flowering-shrubs of great variety and elegance.

Serpentine walks, and flowering-shrubs, looked trifling in a grand recess of the rooks, shaded by towering pines. Groves of smaller trees might have been sheltered under them, which would have melted into the landscape, displaying only the art which ought to point out the vicinity of a human abode, furnished with some elegance.

Scattered all around in the open space, are beds containing all manner of medicinal and other plants from all parts of the earth. This part of the garden is to the botanist a very interesting spot. The flowering-shrubs are surrounded by a rail fence, and the level of the ground is sunk beneath that of other parts of the garden.

On one side of their garden, they ascend to a kind of esplanade, which they say was part of the citadel of Cemenelion. They have planted it with cypress-trees, and flowering-shrubs. One of the monks told me, that it is vaulted below, as they can plainly perceive by the sound of their instruments used in houghing the ground. A very small expence would bring the secrets of this cavern to light.

The whole of the country between Tekoa and Hebron is finer and better cultivated than in the neighbourhood of Jerusalem; while the sides of the hills, instead of being naked and dreary, are richly studded with the oak, the arbutus, the Scottish fir, and a variety of flowering-shrubs.

Word Of The Day

fly-sheet

Others Looking