It is the morning angelus bells, not the muezzins, which awake us here. As our mules move off in advance on the road to Tiberias, we go down into Nazareth to seek out a carpenter who can make us a chest for the antique vases bought from the merchants yesterday evening.

Along the narrow streets of the Arab quarter in the small cube-shaped houses which cannot have changed since the time of Christ, there are several of these small-time workmen working in front of their door to the sound of the swallows in the bright cheerful oriental morning. They are mainly making ploughs of a very ancient style and their very posture is ancient: legs outstretched, they support the piece of wood they are cutting with their bare toes. Saint Joseph's workshop must have been just like theirs.

We mount our horses near the Fountain of the Virgin at this cool hour as the women of Nazareth are assembled to draw the day's water. As this is the one and only fountain that has supplied the town from time immemorial, it is probable that Jesus came there with his mother and that scene, the morning group of times gone by, must have been very similar to what we see now. The women, who bend forward with a slow litheness in the sunlight in front of the ancient stone arch covering the fountain, have the grace of Tanagra figurines1 as they draw themselves up to place their jars full of water on their shoulders. Their clay jars are identical to those found preserved for two or three thousand years in the ground. The women are nearly all beautiful, of the same beauty as the women of Nazareth which was already wellknown among the crusading knights, and which in their time was considered as a gift from the virgin Mary to the young women of the town.

Nazareth disappears immediately behind us, for we are going down the other side of the mountains, following the probable route which Jesus took when he was driven from his home and when he left to seek refuge in Capernaum. Before us, a new landscape unfolds of very gentle melancholy, a land of rocks, olive trees, scrub, shapeless ruins, and, so distant as to be no longer very clear, a mountain covered in snow appears with a strange white brilliancy: Mount Hermon, towards which we shall be making our way now for about four days. French blood has on more than one occasion been spilt in this region, which is today so still and completely deserted. Firstly, the crusaders waged war here for a long time; then, scarcely a hundred years ago, Kleber and Junot were involved in heroic, almost supernatural battles here.