It is worthy of the notice of intending travellers in Palestine next season that they can now drive the whole way, if they wish, in wagons belonging to the German colonists, from Jerusalem to Nazareth, in four easy days, instead of having to ride, and camp in tents as heretofore. There are excellent hotels at Jaffa. The next stopping-place would, now that accommodation is promised there, be Cæsarea, the next day to Haifa, where the hotel is being enlarged and put on a thoroughly comfortable and European basis, and the next day to Nazareth, where good quarters can be obtained at the convent, but where, if this route comes to be adopted, a hotel will doubtless shortly be built. As soon as travellers give up their present expensive habit of travelling through Palestine with tents, the hotel accommodation will be increased, and the existing carriage roads, as well as the vehicles which traverse them, be improved. The government has recently determined to construct a carriage road along the coast from Acre to Beyrout and Tripoli, which, if it is carried out, will alter all the existing conditions of travel.
The most striking features of the ruins of Cæsarea are the Crusading castle and the old Roman mole. The former is built upon a long, narrow reef or breakwater, partly artificial, which runs out into the sea for one hundred and sixty yards, forming the southern side of the harbour, while the northern side is formed by a sort of mole or jetty more than two hundred feet long, which is composed of some sixty or seventy prostrate columns lying side by side in the water like rows of stranded logs. They are from five to twenty feet in length, and average about eighteen inches in diameter. I never in my life before saw such an array of granite pillars so closely piled together or used for such a purpose. Indeed, to judge by those which remain, Cæsarea must have been a city of columns. The crusaders used them to thorough-bind their walls, from which the butts project like rows of cannon from the side of a man-of-war. They must have built many hundreds of old Roman columns thus into their fortification.
The Crusading wall enclosing the town rises from a moat which is about forty feet wide, but, being much filled in with rubbish, is not more than five or six feet deep. The wall itself is about nine feet thick, with buttresses at intervals which are from thirty to fifty feet long and project from twenty to twenty-six feet; but it is especially in the castle and donjon, which is built out into the sea on the projecting reef, that the columns are used as thorough-bonds. Some of these are of red granite, others of gray. The Bosnian colonists are perching a _café_ on the ruins of the old donjon, immediately above two magnificent prostrate columns of red granite, nine feet long and four in diameter. I observed here also a finely polished block of red granite over six feet square and three feet six inches thick. There is also a curious double tessellated pavement, evidently of two periods, as the upper tesseræ are at least six inches above the lower ones. I am afraid, as the masons are working immediately above them, they will soon disappear, as will also a beautiful carved capital in white marble. I scrambled up to the top of this picturesque ruin, where the rib of the groined roof of the upper chamber still remains supported on a corbel in the form of a human head, and looked out of the pointed, arched window sheer down seventy feet on the sea, beating against the base of the sea wall. The mouth of the small artificial harbour is about two hundred yards across, but the latter is too much exposed and too small ever to be of much value.