When it is time to leave in the morning, still the wind blows and the rain pours. Dawn is grey and dreary.

When our saddled horses are brought into the courtyard, which is still full of livestock, our host's numerous children – all of them handsome with their big eyes – gather round at the doors to watch. Afraid of the running water, they are perched on some kind of traditional stone bed, like kittens afraid of getting their paws wet.

As day dawns, in a cold shower of rain, we leave behind the hamlet of Senghel and immediately we are plunged again into the desert-like countryside. Mud, puddles of water and slippery stones. An interminable trudge through wet valleys and mountains in a still-treeless land.

On the way, we encounter several groups of Syrian men and women with their embroidered clothes and pretty faces. They are on horseback like us in spite of the rain, on their way to some pilgrimage.

I should have said at the beginning that our caravan is made up of my friend Leo and me, an Arab guide on horseback like us, two Syrian servants on mules, eight baggage mules carrying our tents and five muleteers.

After seven hours’ march, at the turning of a ravine, Nablus finally appears. It is a large Turkish town with minarets and domes, standing out white at the foot of high mountains covered in olive trees and cacti. Nablus would perhaps be charming without the unrelenting rain and winter clouds. It was the ancient Shechem of Genesis which was involved in all the bloody torments of Israel and which for a time became a rival of Jerusalem after the schism of the ten tribes about a thousand years before Jesus Christ. Later, it was the Flavia Neapolis of Vespasian. Finally, it was during the short period of the kingdom of the Franks an unstable bishopric on a permanent war footing. Today it is a strict Muslim town, inhabited by twenty thousand Turks and about a thousand infidels, as many Christians as Samaritans or Jews. Like

Hebron and Gaza, it dates back almost to legendary times. However, it is an exception in that it has retained a feeling of being alive, surprising in this land of ruins and sepulchres.