In a clearing in the forest glades we found a fine palace built of cut stone.
Robur than any other species, forming a thick trunk with spreading base and, when growing in glades or other open places, huge spreading boughs, less twisted and gnarled than those of the English oak, and covered with a whitish bark that gives a marked character to the tree.
The pastures are everywhere luxuriant, and the wooded heights and winding glens, in which the tangled shrubbery is here and there broken up by open glades and flat meadows of green turf, exhibit a beauty of vegetation such as is hardly to be seen in any other district of Palestine.
It is a well-wooded tract, in many places stretching out in charming glades like an English park, but it has a very sparse population and little cultivated land.
In the glades are bunch-grass and a variety of flowering plants; buttercups, daisies, forget-me-nots and other wild flowers may be found near melting snow-banks in August.
