tch, along the Eastern border of Galilee and
Samaria and Judea, as if it wished to cut them off completely. There are
no pleasant places along its course, no breezy forelands where a man
might build a house with a fair outlook over flowing water, no rich and
tranquil coves where the cattle would love to graze, or stand knee-deep
in the quiet stream. There is no sense of leisure, of refreshment, of
kind companionship and friendly music about the Jordan. It is in a hurry
and a secret rage. Yet there is something powerful, self-reliant,
inevitable about it. In thousands of years it has changed less than any
river in the world. It is a flowing, everlasting symbol of division, of
separation: a river of solemn meetings and partings like that of Elijah
and Elisha, of Jesus and John the Baptist: a type of the narrow stream
of death. It seems to say to man, "Cross me if you will, if you can; and
then go your way."

The road that leads us from Jericho toward the river is pleasant enough,
at first, for the early sunlight is gentle and caressing, and there is a
cool breeze moving across the plain. It is hard to believe that we are
eight hundred feet below the sea this morning, and still travelling
downward. The lush fields of barley, watered by many channels from the
brook Kelt, are waving and glistening around us. Quails are running
along the edge of the road, appearing and disappearing among the thick
grain-stalks. The bulbuls warble from the thorn-bushes, and a crested
hoopoo croons in a jujube-tree. Larks are on the wing, scattering music.

We are on the upper edge of that great belt of sunken land between the
mountains of Gilead and the mountains of Ephraim and Judah, which
reaches from the Lake of Galilee to the Dead Sea, and which the Arabs
call _El-Ghor_, the "Rift." It is a huge trench, from three to fourteen
miles wide, sinking from six hundred feet below the level of the
Mediterranean, at the northern end, to thirteen hundred feet below, at
the southern end. The surface is fairly level, sloping gently from each
side toward the middle, and the soil is of an inexhaustible fertility,
yielding abundant crops wherever it is patiently irrigated from the
streams which flow out of the mountains east and west, but elsewhere
lying baked and arid under the heavy, close, feverous air. No strong
race has ever inhabited this trench as a home; no great cities have ever
grown here, and its civilization, such as it had, was a hot-bed pro