They must have crossed the whole of Turkey by rail, down to Adana, and gone on from there to Aleppo and Beirut, and seem to have spent the best part of a fortnight in the Lebanon, for it is not till the 21st of November that “passage to Jaffa” is entered. The day they arrived in Jaffa, through an agent at Franks Hotel, Dr Immanuel Benzinger, they hired two hroses at a cost of 15 francs each for the twelve-hour ride up from the coast to Jerusalem. The luggage went ahead by rail. Early on the morning of the 25th, Cosmo and Ambros were on their way through the orange groves and on, in a southeasterly direction, across the plain of Sharon and towards the mountains of Judaea. Through the Holy Land, writes Ambros, often far off the track. The rocks all around radiantly white in the light. For long stretches not a tree, not a shrub, scarcely so much as a meagre clump of weeds. Cosmo very taciturn. Darkened sky. Great clouds of dust rolling through the air. Terrible desolation and emptiness. Late in the afternoon it cleared once more. A rosy glow lay upon the valley…

W. G. Sebald, The Emigrants