His next visit abroad, two years later, was to Italy, and the change from St. Petersburg to Venice is marked in the finer tone of the record. ‘We went in our gondolas about nine at night beneath the bridge of the Rialto.... Palaces and churches were steeped in the calm brilliancy of the southern night. There was a silence such as could not reign in any other city on earth. A whisper, one’s very breathing might be heard. Every palace was visible as in daylight, and, except for the forms of dark gondolas which glided past, or a few lights that like fireflies darted amid the darkness of the mysterious water-streets which opened into the Grand Canal, the city seemed as if dead.’
In February 1865, accompanied by his brother Donald and the publisher of _Good Words_, Alexander Strahan, he set out for Palestine. Soon after leaving Marseilles they encountered a terrific hurricane, which in all its fury Norman witnessed from the deck. Landed at Malta, he wandered about in the moonlight till three in the morning, and, what with forts, streets, palaces, batteries, bright almost as day, it was like a dream. From Malta onward the voyage was just what the traveller loved, calm and restful, far beyond the postman’s knock, which seemed a portent created by fever. According to his custom when on shipboard, he preached in the forecastle, everything free and easy, the men sitting about or lying in their hammocks. Alexandria was a new world, the mysterious East, full of charm and fascination. Whether in coffee-room or bazaar, all was as a fancy fair got up for the amusement of strangers. His wonder and awe in sight of the Pyramids may be taken for granted. He thought to climb to the top, but twenty steps sufficed; he would not risk a vacancy in the Barony by going one yard further; so there he sat, getting ‘a whiff of the inexhaustible past,’ as he looked towards Ethiopia and the sources of the Nile. During the sail to Jaffa he sat upon a Moslem, taking him for the fore jib, and much he admired the man’s patience under the pressure of the event. Once in Palestine, and beholding the abundance of the orange, what a paradise, he thought, for Sunday school children! See him on the road (a horse under him) rejoicing that ‘from felt hat downwards he has no trace of the ecclesiastic.’ He had taken with him (instead of powder and shot) a musical snuff-box, and when the tent was pitched near a village, it was great fun to spring the miracle upon the crowd. Listening first with fear, they took courage by degrees, and ‘it was truly delightful to see the revolution which those beautiful notes, as they sounded clear and loud through the Arab skull, produced upon the features of the listener. The anxious brow was smoothed, the black eye lighted up, the lips were parted in a broad smile, which revealed the ivory teeth, and the whole man seemed to become humanised as he murmured with delight, “Tayēeb, tayēeb” (good, good).’ But his staple resource for the amusement of the natives was fireworks. Nothing could exceed their surprise as the squib went whizzing up into the starry night. On the top of Neby Samwil, ‘every face was turned towards Jerusalem. The eye and heart caught it at once, as they would a parent’s bier in the empty chamber of death. The round hill, dotted with trees, the dome beneath, the few minarets near it,--there were Olivet and Jerusalem! No words were spoken, no exclamations heard; nor are any explanations needed to enable the reader to understand our feelings when seeing, for the first time, the city of the Great King.’ Again, of his entering in, ‘I took off my hat and blessed God in my heart as my horse’s hoofs clattered through the gate.’ Both within and without he went exploring, Bible in hand. The party saw Jordan and the Dead Sea, from Bethlehem proceeded through Damascus to Samaria, and broke up at Beyrout.