It was here, in 1880, that Laurence Oliphant, the gifted English
traveller and mystic, proposed to establish his fine scheme for the
beginning of the restoration of the Jews to Palestine. A territory
extending from the brook of Jabbok on the north to the brook of Arnon on
the south, from the Jordan Valley on the west to the Arabian desert on
the east; railways running up from the sea at Haifa, and down from
Damascus, and southward to the Gulf of Akabah, and across to Ismailia on
the Suez Canal; a government of local autonomy guaranteed and protected
by the Sublime Porte; sufficient capital supplied by the Jewish bankers
of London and Paris and Berlin and Vienna; and the outcasts of Israel
gathered from all the countries where they are oppressed, to dwell
together in peace and plenty, tending sheep and cattle, raising fruit
and grain, pressing out wine and oil, and supplying the world with the
balm of Gilead--such was Oliphant's beautiful dream.

But it did not come true; because Russia did not like it, because Turkey
was afraid of it, because the rest of Europe did not care for it,--and
perhaps because the Jews themselves were not generally enthusiastic over
it. Perhaps the majority of them would rather stay where they are.
Perhaps they do not yearn passionately for Palestine and the simple
life.

But it is not of these things that we are thinking, I must confess, as
the ruddy sun slowly drops toward the heights of Pennel, and we stroll
out in the evening glow, along the edge of the wild ravine into which
our little stream plunges, and look down into the deep, grand valley of
the Brook Jabbok.

Yonder, on the other side of the great gulf of heliotrope shadow,
stretches the long bulk of the Jebel Ajlun, shaggy with oak-trees. It
was somewhere on the slopes of that wooded mountain that one of the most
tragic battles of the world was fought. For there the army of Absalom
went out to meet the army of his father David. "And the battle was
spread over the face of all the country, and the forest devoured more
people that day than the sword devoured." It was there that the young
man Absalom rode furiously upon his mule, "and the mule went under the
thick boughs of a great oak, and his head caught hold of the oak, and he
was taken up between heaven and earth." And a man came and told Joab,
the captain of David's host, "Behold I saw Absalom hanging in the midst
of an oak." Then Joab made haste; "and he took three darts in h