Excerpt from In the Levant, Vol. 1 IN turning over the pages of In the Levant with a view to its revision for the present illustrated edition, I am reminded that it was written seven teen years ago. That is a considerable portion out of an individual life, and indeed in that of a West ern republic, but in the East it is scarcely the space between a sleeping and a waking. Since it was written, the russo-turkish war has been fought; philanthropy and fanaticism have again and again attempted to modernize, or to restore to the ancient ways, the hills and wildernesses of J udea; the English flag has been planted in Cyprus; English law, arms, and manners have encamped in Egypt; the Sultan has been mur dered, the Sultan has been deposed as imbecile, the Sultan still sits in his seraglio, lazily watching his iron-clads in the Golden Horn, in the midst of a civilization that has been steadily decaying for five hundred years, and in adding all the Occidental vices to the Oriental immoralities, and assuming. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.