They were gazelles, of "soft-eyed" notoriety.

They looked like very young kids, but they annihilated distance like an express train.

I have not seen animals that moved faster, unless I might say it of the antelopes of our own great plains.
At nine or ten in the morning we reached the Plain of the Shepherds, and stood in a walled garden of olives where the shepherds were watching their flocks by night, eighteen centuries ago, when the multitude of angels brought them the tidings that the Saviour was born.

A quarter of a mile away was Bethlehem of Judea, and the pilgrims took some of the stone wall and hurried on.
The Plain of the Shepherds is a desert, paved with loose stones, void of vegetation, glaring in the fierce sun.

Only the music of the angels it knew once could charm its shrubs and flowers to life again and restore its vanished beauty.