Excerpt from The Spell of the Holy Land

There are two kinds of pilgrims to the Holy Land. Some journey to Palestine from religious motives, while others go because by nature they are wanderers over the face of the earth. It seems only fair to my readers to declare at the outset that I belong to the second class. I wanted to see Palestine because I had been assured that I would find there many things that were new, although this seemed to be something of a paradox, for many scientists and archaeologists believe that the northern part of Syria and Palestine possessed a civilization far more ancient than that of Egypt, and that in Baalbek's marble ruins are fragments dating back to the earliest prophets of the Hebrew Bible. Indeed, there is a tradition that the "altar of the Lord," built by the son of Adam and Eve, was the beginning of that holy city. My informants told me that in Baalbek, that hoary city of Baal, I would find a kaleidoscope of colour and novelty which alone would cause enthusiastic impressions of Egyptian Thebes to fade from my mind.

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