de in a cart; but nobody traveled that
way in Palestine. The roads were too rough and narrow for anything but
walking. Donkeys and horses might carry the heavy luggage, but the
people went on foot. There were no bridges, and so the only way to get
from one side of a river to the other was to find a shallow place and
wade across.

It would take two or three days to go from Nazareth to Jerusalem. When
the travelers were tired at night, there was not likely to be any
place to sleep along the road, except under the open sky and the
stars.

There were three stages to their journey. The first was the pleasant
part, through Galilee. When the travelers left Nazareth that day, the
sky was clear and the air was fresh. The fields lay lovely in the
sunlight. The roads were full of people from many countries. There
were always merchants on the road traveling from the East to Greece
and Egypt, and back to the East again. Galilee was beautiful, and
Galilee was busy.

Sooner or later the time must come to leave pleasant Galilee behind.
But which way would they go from there? Should they go straight south
through Samaria? That would have been the shortest and the easiest
way. The only thing against it was that the people of Samaria were not
friendly to Jews. Long years before, Samaria had been the home of many
of the Jewish people. But foreigners came and settled among them. Then
their ways became so different that the people of Jerusalem said they
were not Jewish any more. They were bitter rivals of the Jews, and it
was hardly safe to go among them.

So the travelers chose, for the second stage of their journey, the
long road down the valley of the river Jordan. But they did not find
this very pleasant, either. High above the river stood the banks, and
it seemed as though the river itself were at the bottom of a great,
deep ditch. And down there was the road they had to take. In some
places they came to slime and mud, and dead trees and twisted roots.
But sometimes there were farms and villages. It was hot at the north
end of the Jordan, when first they came to it; and the farther south
the travelers went, the hotter grew the weather.

Very hot, very tired, and very thirsty, they finally reached the last
stretch of the journey--across country from the Jordan to Jerusalem.
They were nearly there. But the last part of the trip was the hardest
of all. Around them stretched a dreary desert. There were bleak hills,
and ugly rocks, an