The mouth is curious; the prevailing winds blow from the south-west, and the dunes are gradually heaping up and advancing on this side, so that the river is always forming new mouths farther north. The lagoons now existing behind the dunes on the left bank are perhaps results of the former course. The river breaks through the sand and flows to the sea when the wind is from the east; but, even in wet years, a bar is formed whenever the wind is in the west, blowing on shore. Thus I have found it almost impassable in September, before the rains, but quite dry in January, after they had fallen, according to the wind.
Few scenes more picturesque and more thoroughly Oriental are to be found in Palestine than that at the mouth of the Kishon. The palms, which flourish only on the coast, where water and sand occur together and frost is never experienced, are here found all along the dunes and round the lagoons; the banks, some thirty yards apart, are fringed with rushes and a sort of pink, fleshy-leaved plant. Along the sides stand the grey herons, watching for fish, whilst here and there a white egret steps daintily about, and on the sand the Kentish dottrell runs hastily seawards as the waves ebb out, and the red-shanks and sandpipers skim along in large flocks. Behind all rises the dark steep slope of Carmel, with white piles of cloud above, and a foreground of palms sets the scene in an appropriate frame.
The birds are very numerous. Wild-duck and snipe are found in the marshes, the African king-fisher hovers over the stream, and various species of gulls flit along the shore. The crabs swarm along the line of the bay, and occasionally a great number of rays and skates. In the deeper water a porpoise is sometimes to be seen, and many species of good edible fish are caught.
Acre is a walled town, with a single gate on the south-east. Its trade is now much reduced, and the bazaars are deserted; the richest inhabitant is not worth £1000. The ramparts, blown up by the English in 1840, remain in ruins, and the whole place has a desolate appearance. The port was filled up in the seventeenth century, by Fakhr ed Din, and, in the whole space between the walls and the old Crusading pier--a breadth of 700 yards east and west, by 350 north and south--the greatest depth of water is only six feet, the average being two or three. The appearance of the town outside is picturesque; with brown walls, a tower on a rock in the sea, called, from the fourteenth century downwards (and perhaps earlier) El Manâra, yellow stone houses, with two higher buildings, roofed with red tiles, and with green shutters; above all, the large white mosque of Jezzar Pacha, a square building, with a dome and a graceful minaret, surrounded by palms, and with chambers for the students, covered by rows of little round domes; behind this, the modern barrack, on the site of the old Crusading castle.