Slept all night. ― Wrote. Flies! ― Breakfast. ― Gibbs & Turner, Prince Roman “Sgorouski” (?) ― Mr. Wilson & his Aunt. Returned to room ― showed drawings to G. & T. ― &c. &c. ― & at 1 lunch. After which went out to draw, & sat near the Little Café. ― The whole scene is hardly satisfactory ― so modern the foreground, ― so pointless the distance. ― The people here however, be it said, are very civilized indeed, & do not molest one at all: & they are always bathing ― & thereby clean. While drawing, lo! Dr. & Mrs. Kilgour, Mr. & Mrs. Woodberry & daughter: & greetings. ― Abdel being gone to see about his new tent, G. & I walked up the hill to the Pasha’s palace, & I tried to draw, but it was not possible διὰ τὰ παιδιά.1 So we came down ― & at the Corner of the rocks & Cafe, I stayed again. At this hour, the Lebanon is white & pink & recedes ― & you see all the multitude wrinkles & villages in the nearer hills. ― All the foreground is gray & cadmium, & dark. Cologne earth.2 By sunset, reached the Hotel. Dinner. (Abdel’s new tent is very amazingly gay.) The Kilgours’s & Woodberrys: ― Mrs. W. is a regular Anglo-saxon also. ― Both the husbands are more or less bores ―. Pipe in the Gallery. Wilson the traveller ― a queer youth. Guns ― reverberate ― one of the grandest semicircles of sound I ever heard. The Kilgours’s have come (with guards) safe over Esdraelon,3 & through the Nablous country. Au contraire Wilson says, 3 parties with guards have been attacked on Esdraelon. And, 3dly, an American party, going just south of Carmel have lost everything.

[Transcribed by Marco Graziosi from Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS Eng. 797.3.]

  1. “For the children” (D. Harvey). [↩]
  2. An earth of a deep brown color. [↩]
  3. Lowland in northern Israel, dividing the hilly areas of Galilee in the north and Samaria (in the Israeli-occupied West Bank) in the south. Esdraelon is the Greek derivation of the Hebrew Yizreʿel, meaning “God will sow” or “May God make fruitful,” an allusion to the fertility of the area. “Plain of Esdraelon.” Encyclopædia Britannica. 2008. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 23 Sep. 2008 <http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/192431/Plain-of-Esdraelon>. [↩]