The people of the town are remarkable for the gay colouring of their dresses, and the Christian women for their beauty. Many a charming bit of colour, many a shapely figure set off by picturesque costume, many a dark eye and ruddy cheek, have I seen in the streets or by the spring. This beauty is peculiar to the Christians of Bethlehem and Nazareth, and various reasons are given which agree, however, in supposing a mixture of European blood. As to the dress, the causes are manifest; the costume is that commonly worn by Christians, and is only striking by contrast because the villagers of the neighbouring places are Moslem; the townsmen are also richer, and can afford better dress, and this partly accounts for the superior beauty of the better-fed women when contrasted with the worn faces of the overworked and half-starved peasant women of the surrounding poor hamlets.
A more special description of the people, their dress, customs, and religion, must, however, be reserved until they can be treated with the rest of the natives in a future chapter: suffice it here to notice that they present a far more pleasing and picturesque appearance than most of the inhabitants of Syrian towns. Leaving the question for the present, we may next turn attention to the two sacred places of Nazareth--the Grotto of the Annunciation and the Virgin's Spring.
The site of the Holy House was shown, as noticed above, as early as 700 A.D. in a rock-cut grotto. The pillars of the Crusading church built round it were still visible in 1620 A.D., but the new building erected in 1730 A.D. with the rest of the present monastery, has no connection with the plan of the former, the foundations of which still exist beneath. The modern church is a whitewashed, square structure, seventy feet long and fifty broad, directed north and south. The high altar above the sacred grotto is reached by a flight of stairs, from each side of the seventeen marble steps which lead down to the vestibule, called the Chapel of the Angel, where left and right are the altars of St. Joachim and the angel Gabriel. Behind the high altar is the choir, dark and roomy like that at Bethlehem. Descending into the grotto and passing through the vestibule, the old Franciscan led me into the little rock-cut chamber, with marble floor, and an altar on the north wall. This is the outer half of the grotto, and a wall of separation divides it from the inner half. The outer is called Grotto of the Annunciation, the inner that of St. Joseph. From the roof of the former, which measures twenty feet across and seven feet in depth, hangs pendant near the west side the shaft of a red granite pillar, apparently a column of the old chapel in the grotto, and believed to be miraculously suspended over the very place where the angel stood when bringing the message to Mary. Lighting the little taper on the altar, and kneeling for a moment in prayer, the monk drew the veil from before an Italian picture of the Annunciation, soft and mellow in colour, with a sweet Virgin face, and tawdry silver crown and nimbus sewn on above her head and that of Gabriel.