The ten cities which originally composed this confederacy
for mutual defence and the development of their trade, were Scythopolis, Hippos, Damascus, Gadara, Raphana, Kanatha, Pella, Dion, Philadelphia and Gerasa. Their money was stamped with the image of Cæsar. Their soldiers followed the Imperial eagles. Their traditions, their arts, their literature were Greek. But their strength and their new prosperity were Roman.
Here in this narrow wâdi through which we are climbing up from the Vale of Jabbok we find the traces of the presence of the Romans in the fragments of a paved military road and an aqueduct. Presently we surmount a rocky hill and look down into the broad, shallow basin of Jerash. Gently sloping, rock-strewn hills surround it; through the centre flows a stream, with banks bordered by trees; a water-fall is flashing opposite to us; on a cluster of rounded knolls about the middle of the valley, on the west bank of the stream, are spread the vast, incredible, complete ruins of the ancient city of Gerasa.
They rise like a dream in the desolation of the wilderness, columns and arches and vaults and
amphitheatres and temples, suddenly appearing in the bare and lonely landscape as if by enchantment.
How came these monuments of splendour and permanence into this country of simplicity and transience, this land of shifting shepherds and drovers, this empire of the black tent, this immemorial region that has slept away the centuries under the spell of the pastoral pipe? What magical music of another kind, strong, stately and sonorous, music of brazen trumpets and shawms, of silver harps and cymbals, evoked this proud and potent city on the border of the desert, and maintained for centuries, amid the sweeping, turbulent floods of untamable tribes of rebels and robbers, this lofty landmark of
"the glory that was Greece
And the grandeur that was Rome"?
What sudden storm of discord and disaster shook it all down again, loosened the sinews of majesty and power, stripped away the garments of beauty and luxury, dissolved the lovely body of living joy, and left this skeleton of dead splendour diffused upon the solitary ground?
Who can solve these mysteries? It is all unaccountable, unbelievable,—the ghost of the dream of a dream,—yet here it is, surrounded by the green hills, flooded with the frank light of noon, neighboured by a dirty, noisy little village of Arabs and Circassians on the east bank of the stream, and with real goats and lean, black cattle grazing between the carved columns and under the broken architraves of Gerasa the Golden.