s. A pair of enormous veterans, a valonia oak and
a terebinth, make a broad bower of shade above the tomb of an unknown
Mohammedan saint, and there we eat our midday meal, with the murmur of
running waters all around us, a clear rivulet singing at our feet, and
the chant of innumerable birds filling the vault of foliage above our
heads.

After lunch, instead of sleeping, two of us wander into the dense grove
that spreads over the mound. Tiny streams of water trickle through it:
blackberry-vines and wild grapes are twisted in the undergrowth; ferns
and flowery nettles and mint grow waist-high. The main spring is at the
western base of the mound. The water comes bubbling and whirling out
from under a screen of wild figs and vines, forming a pool of palest,
clearest blue, a hundred feet in diameter. Out of this pool the new-born
river rushes, foaming and shouting down the hillside, through lines of
flowering styrax and hawthorn and willows trembling over its wild joy.

The third and most impressive of the sources of Jordan is at Baniyas, on
one of the foothills of Hermon. Our path thither leads us up from Dan,
through high green meadows, shaded by oak-trees, sprinkled with
innumerable blossoming shrubs and bushes, and looking down upon the
lower fields blue with lupins and vetches, or golden with yellow
chrysanthemums beneath which the red glow of the clover is dimly burning
like a secret fire.

Presently we come, by way of a broad, natural terrace where the white
encampment of the Moslem dead lies gleaming beneath the shade of mighty
oaks and terebinths, and past the friendly olive-grove where our own
tents are standing, to a deep ravine filled to the brim with luxuriant
verdure of trees and vines and ferns. Into this green cleft a little
river, dancing and singing, suddenly plunges and disappears, and from
beneath the veil of moist and trembling leaves we hear the sound of its
wild joy, a fracas of leaping, laughing waters.

[Illustration: The Approach to Baniyas.]

An old Roman bridge spans the stream on the brink of its downward
leap. Crossing over, we ride through the ruined gateway of the town of
Baniyas, turn to right and left among its dirty, narrow streets, pass
into a leafy lane, and come out in front of a cliff of ruddy limestone,
with niches and shrines carved on its face, and a huge, dark cavern
gaping in the centre.

A tumbled mass of broken rocks lies below the mouth of the cave. From
this slope of de