estine.
This is precisely what has happened touching that central figure,
round which the monster and the champion are alike only
ornamental symbols; and by the right of whose tragedy even
St. George's Cross does not belong to St. George. It is not likely
to be true of the desert duel between George and the Dragon;
but it is already true of the desert duel between Jesus and the Devil.
St. George is but a servant and the Dragon is but a symbol,
but it is precisely about the central reality, the mystery of Christ
and His mastery of the powers of darkness, that this very paradox
has proved itself a fact.

Going down from Jerusalem to Jericho I was more than once
moved by a flippant and possibly profane memory of the swine
that rushed down a steep place into the sea. I do not insist on
the personal parallel; for whatever my points of resemblance to a pig
I am not a flying pig, a pig with wings of speed and precipitancy;
and if I am possessed of a devil, it is not the blue devil of suicide.
But the phrase came back into my mind because going down to
the Dead Sea does really involve rushing down a steep place.
Indeed it gives a strange impression that the whole of Palestine
is one single steep place. It is as if all other countries lay
flat under the sky, but this one country had been tilted sideways.
This gigantic gesture of geography or geology, this sweep
as of a universal landslide, is the sort of thing that is never
conveyed by any maps or books or even pictures. All the pictures
of Palestine I have seen are descriptive details, groups of costume
or corners of architecture, at most views of famous places;
they cannot give the bottomless vision of this long descent.
We went in a little rocking Ford car down steep and jagged roads
among ribbed and columned cliffs; but the roads below soon failed
us altogether; and the car had to tumble like a tank over rocky
banks and into empty river-beds, long before it came to the sinister
and discoloured landscapes of the Dead Sea. And the distance looks
far enough on the map, and seems long enough in the motor journey,
to make a man feel he has come to another part of the world;
yet so much is it all a single fall of land that even when he gets
out beyond Jordan in the wild country of the Shereef he can still
look back and see, small and faint as if in the clouds, the spire
of the Russian church (I fancy) upon the hill of the Ascension.
And though the story of the swine is att