chase one
another and hide among the bushes in some primeval form of "tag" or
"hide-and-seek."

A merry little mob pursues us as we ride through each encampment, with
outstretched hands and half-jesting, half-plaintive cries of
"_Bakhshish! bakhshish!_" They do not really expect anything. It is only
a part of the game. And when the Lady holds out her open hand to them
and smiles as she repeats, "_Bakhshish! bakhshish!_" they take the joke
quickly, and run away, laughing, to their sports.

At one village, in the dusk, there is an open-air wedding: a row of men
dancing; a ring of women and girls looking on; musicians playing the
shepherd's pipe and the drum; maidens running beside us to beg a present
for the invisible bride: a rude charcoal sketch of human society,
primitive, irrepressible, confident, encamped for a moment on the
shadowy border of the fecund and unconquerable marsh.

Thus we traverse the strange country of Bedouinia, travelling all day in
the presence of the Great Sheikh of Mountains, and sleep at night on the
edge of a little village whose name we shall never know. A dozen times
we ask George for the real name of that place, and a dozen times he
repeats it for us with painstaking courtesy; it sounds like a compromise
between a cough and a sneeze.

III

WHERE JORDAN RISES

The Jordan is assembled in the northern end of the basin of Huleh under
a mysterious curtain of tall, tangled water-plants. Into that ancient
and impenetrable place of hiding and blending enter many little springs
and brooks, but the main sources of the river are three.

The first and the longest is the Hasbani, a strong, foaming stream that
comes down with a roar from the western slope of Hermon. We cross it by
the double arch of a dilapidated Saracen bridge, looking down upon
thickets of oleander, willow, tamarisk and woodbine.

The second and largest source springs from the rounded hill of Tel
el-Kadi, the supposed site of the ancient city of Dan, the northern
border of Israel. Here the wandering, landless Danites, finding a
country to their taste, put the too fortunate inhabitants of Leshem to
the sword and took possession. And here King Jereboam set up one of his
idols of the golden calf.

There is no vestige of the city, no trace of the idolatrous shrine, on
the huge mound which rises thirty or forty feet above the plain. But it
is thickly covered with trees: poplars and oaks and wild figs and
acacias and wild olive