duct,
soon ripe and quickly rotten.

We have passed beyond the region of greenness already; the little
water-brooks have ceased to gleam through the grain: the wild grasses
and weeds have a parched and yellow look: the freshness of the early
morning has vanished, and we are descending through a desolate land of
sour and leprous hills of clay and marl, eroded by the floods into
fantastic shapes, furrowed and scarred and scabbed with mineral refuse.
The gullies are steep and narrow: the heat settles on them like a curse.

Through this battered and crippled region, the centre of the Jordan
Valley, runs the Jordan Bed, twisting like a big green serpent. A dense
half-tropical jungle, haunted by wild beasts and poisonous reptiles and
insects, conceals, almost at every point, the down-rushing, swirling,
yellow flood.

It has torn and desolated its own shores with sudden spates. The feet of
the pilgrims who bathe in it sink into the mud as they wade out
waist-deep, and if they venture beyond the shelter of the bank the
whirling eddies threaten to sweep them away. The fords are treacherous,
with shifting bottom and changing currents. The poets and prophets of
the Old Testament give us a true idea of this uninhabitable and
unlovable river-bed when they speak of "the pride of Jordan," "the
swellings of Jordan," where the lion hides among the reeds in his secret
lair, a "refuge of lies," which the "overflowing scourge" shall sweep
away.

No, it was not because the Jordan was beautiful that John the Baptist
chose it as the scene of his preaching and ministry, but because it was
wild and rude, an emblem of violent and sudden change, of irrevocable
parting, of death itself, and because in its one gift of copious and
unfailing water, he found the necessary element for his deep baptism of
repentance, in which the sinful past of the crowd who followed him was
to be symbolically immersed and buried and washed away.

At the place where we reach the water there is an open bit of ground; a
miserable hovel gives shelter to two or three Turkish soldiers; an
ungainly latticed bridge, stilted on piles of wood, straddles the river
with a single span. The toll is three piastres, (about twelve cents,)
for a man and horse.

The only place from which I can take a photograph of the river is the
bridge itself, so I thrust the camera through one of the diamond-shaped
openings on the lattice-work and try to make a truthful record of the
lower Jor