curate, for it is naturally one of the very strongest positions I have ever examined. But, notwithstanding this, it was doomed to utter destruction. On the last of September, in the year sixty-nine of our era, the invincible legions of Rome closed around it, never to leave while a living man remained in Gamala. The Fifteenth fortified their camp on that ridge over against us to the east; the Fifth did the same farther round toward the north, as I read Josephus; and the Tenth filled up the ditches on the southeastern part, along that narrow neck which connects this citadel with the main mountain on the south. Strong detachments also watched and hemmed in the devoted city on all sides, so that escape was impossible.

When the ditches were filled, and the way leveled up to a part of the wall that protected the lower city (there on the neck, I suppose), the battering-rams were made to play upon it in three places with such fury that it soon gave way and fell. Through the gap rushed the iron-clad legions, with "mighty sound of trumpets, and noise of armor and shout of soldiers." But despair and phrensy nerved the hearts and arms of the Jews. They threw themselves madly upon their enemies, beat them back by main force, and overwhelmed them from above with darts, stones, and any thing within reach. The Romans, hard pressed, rushed into the houses (that hung one over another along that steep declivity) in such numbers that the foundations gave way, and those above falling on those below, carried all away in their headlong descent, house upon house, in horrible confusion, burying up and crushing to death whole ranks in a moment. Thus it happened that "a great number were ground to powder by those ruins, and a great many of those that got from under them lost some of their limbs, but a still greater number were suffocated by the dust that arose from those ruins." Josephus was then a prisoner in the Roman camp, and witnessed the awful scene from a high point on this overhanging mountain. His description is therefore very minute and graphic; true also, I suppose, for there was no particular temptation to exaggerate or falsify. He says that

CAPTURE AND DESTRUCTION OF GAMALA.

49 the houses which fell with the Romans were low and not firm, and an inspection of the place shows that none but very low houses could have stood there at all, for the face of the mountain is nearly perpendicular. After immense confusion and wild disorder, in which Vespasian himself was in extreme danger of perishing, the Romans retreated to their camps, and the Gamalites celebrated their unexpected victory with the most extravagant rejoicings.

Brief was their triumph. Vespasian comforted and encouraged his army in a set speech. Titus came back from Syria with re-enforcements; a high tower on the wall was undermined, and fell with prodigious noise; the soldiers rushed in again, led on by Titus himself; every thing gave way, and went down before the tenfold fury of the onsetthe outer city first, and then this wonderful citadel itself was taken, and every thing that breathed was put to the sword, even to the women and helpless infants. Five thousand of these most miserable people, seeing escape impossible, destroyed themselves; husbands threw their wives over the walls; parents seized their children and leaped madly from the ramparts, and were crushed into hideous masses in those yawning gulfs below. Look over, if your head is steady enough, and see into what awful depths they must have plunged. So fell Gamala on the 23d of October, A.D. 69, after a siege of twenty-nine days. Of the entire population that thronged this city and citadel, only two women escaped. The next act in the drama of Israel's destruction opens on the hills around Jerusalem, where the long, bloody tragedy winds up with the total overthrow of the city and the holy temple, amid agonies and carnage never seen before, and never to be repeated while the world stands.

Let us now take a walk around the fortifications of old Gamala. You observe that this "hump of the camel" extends from southeast to northwest. The diameter from the eastern gate to the one at the northwestern extremity is seven hundred and sixty-five paces, and a straight and welldefined street ran from gate to gate. The average width was not quite half the length, and the entire shape of the VOL. II.-C

summit approaches an oval. On all sides it is surrounded by deep ravines, except the narrow neck which joins it to the main mountain. This neck is much lower than the hump, and both are several hundred feet lower than the surrounding heights. Indeed, the hump looks as though it had broken away from those gigantic cliffs, pushed out lakewise to the northwest, and sagged down some five hundred feet below its original position, having only this narrow ridge to connect it with the parent mountain. Along this ridge, and particularly the eastern side of it, the exterior city was built, and in such fashion that Josephus says it looked as though it would fall down upon itself. The citadel, or hump, was entirely surrounded by a strong wall, which was carried along the very brink of the precipices, and in some parts arches had to be thrown from cliff to cliff to secure a practicable foundation. Josephus intimates that he built this wall, which is simply absurd; but the man that could build the walls around the top of Tabor in forty days, might possibly construct these of Gamala in some idle moment! The fact is, that in neither case could Josephus have done more than slightly repair works which were already there.

This entire citadel, nearly a mile and a half in circuit, was covered with heavy buildings, and as the material was indestructible basalt, they remain very much as the Romans left them. This tower in the centre appears to have been the largest and highest of all. Near it once stood a temple or splendid synagogue, and another to the northeast of it. Is it not marvelous to see the ground hereabouts thickly strewn with granite columns from Egypt? How did they get them up to this giddy perch? There must have been great wealth in the city, and roads, and machinery, of which the Syrians of this day have no conception. The entire wealth and power of the present generation would be exhausted, and fail in the attempt to carry any one of these columns from Tiberias to the top of this hump of the camel; and here are at least thirty of them in this immediate vicinity, and some of them more than fourteen feet long. On the east of this tower is an immense underground cistern, the vault of which is

GAMALA A HEBREW CITY-WIND-STORM.

51

a fine specimen of the Roman arch. There were also numerous cisterns in every part of the citadel, and necessarily so, because there was no other supply of water. Here are some Corinthian capitals neatly cut in hard black basalt-a curiosity in their way; and these sarcophagi and sepulchral stones are entirely peculiar to this city-at least I have seen nothing like them elsewhere. But what marks it as a genuine Hebrew city is the total absence of inscriptions. There is not a solitary letter in any language.

Josephus incidentally mentions a phenomenon which I happened to verify in my own experience. Speaking of the last assault upon the citadel, when Vespasian brought the whole army to support his son Titus, he says, "Now this upper part of the city was very rocky, and difficult of ascent, and elevated to a vast altitude, and very full of people on all sides, and encompassed with precipices, whereby the Jews cut off those that came up to them,” etc. "However, there arose such a divine storm against them as was instrumental in their destruction. This carried the Roman darts upon them, and made those which they threw return back, and drove them obliquely away from them. Nor could the Jews, indeed, stand upon their precipices by reason of the violence of the wind," etc., etc. Without supposing there was any thing specially divine in the wind which blew down these ravines and over these ruins on my first visit, yet it was so vehement that I could not stand upon the ramparts for half a minute. Indeed, the depths below are so profound, in many parts, that no one can look into them without a shudder even in the calmest weather. It occurred to me at the time that this incidental notice by a contemporary of a furious wind rushing down toward and upon the lake is a happy corroboration of the evangelical narratives, in which similar phenomena are repeatedly mentioned. To say the least, it is in beautiful correspondence with them.

With the single exception of Jerusalem, Gamala furnishes the most remarkable fulfillment on record of those terrible predictions of our Saviour concerning the destruction of the Jews, and in its haggard desolation and utter solitude it is

at this day a much more impressive monument of divine judgment than even the Holy City itself.

We may now return, and thus relieve the real or pretended fears of our guide, who has been impatient of our long ramble. He says that this is a chosen resort of robbers, which, by the way, I do not believe. They rarely frequent such a place as this unless it be in search of hid treasure. When I descended from here to the camp of Mahmood they were extremely suspicious of the purpose of my visit, and no explanations, reasonings, or protestations had the slightest effect in removing their belief that I had gone there to search for gold. When I appealed to the fact that some of their own men were with me, they replied that all I did then was to take a copy of the localities where the treasure was, so that I might come back in the night and carry it away. When asked why they did not take it themselves, they gave two reasons: first, that they had no daleel, or guide to the exact spot; and, secondly, that they had no charm of sufficient potency to subdue the spirits (jin) that keep guard over the treasure. The Bedawîn universally believe in the existence of such guards, and of charms or names which will subdue them. There is no tale on this subject in the "Thousand Nights," however extravagant, but what is to them credible and real. A large part of their conversation is made up of preposterous stories of this kind. They enter into the most minute details of the localities, the caves, rooms, closed doors, slabs with iron rings, etc., etc., ending always with some obstinate door which none of their charms could open; or, if they broke it open by main force, they were beaten back, thrown to the ground, blinded, suffocated with fumes of sulphur, or in some other miraculous way compelled by the guardian spirits to abandon the attempt. Of these creatures, also, they give the most outlandish descriptions, and appear firmly to believe their own stories. Several of the wildest of these romances have their locality in these very ruins of Gamala.

This amazing superstition is not only a source of constant annoyance to the traveler, but in these out-of-the-way parts