"You speak as if I had gone to school in 'old Jericho,' " said my father, laughing. "I have the vaguest idea, Daisy, that such a city existed. That is all."
"Sit down, papa, while breakfast is getting ready, and let me mend your knowledge."
So we read the story there, on the stone by the spring. Mr. Dinwiddie joined us; and it was presently decided that we should spend the morning in examining the ground in our neighbourhood and the old sites of what had passed away. So after breakfast we sat out upon a walk over the territory of old Jericho.
"But it is strange," said papa, "if the city was here, that there are no architectural remains to testify as much."
"We rarely find them, sir, but in connection with Roman or Saracenic work. Shapeless mounds, and broken pottery, as you have it here, are all that generally mark our Palestine ruins."
"But Herod?" said papa. "He was a builder."
"Herod's Jericho was a mile and a half away, to the east. And moreover, if anything had been remaining here that could be made of use, the Saracens or Crusaders would have pulled it to pieces to help make their sugar mills up yonder, or their aqueducts."
"There is no sugar cane here now?"
"Not a trace of it. Nor a palm tree; though Jericho was a city of palms; nor a root of the balsam, though great gain was derived to Judea in ancient times from the balsam gardens here."
We mounted our horses and rode down to the site of Herod's Jericho, on the banks of the little stream that issues from the gorge of the Wady Kelt. How lovely, and how desolate, it was. The stream overhung with trees and bordered with oleanders and shrubs of which I have forgotten the names, and crossed by old arches still; and around, the desolate tokens of what once was. Foundation lines, and ruined aqueducts. Mr. Dinwiddie made us remark the pavement of the road leading up to the Kelt, the old road to Jerusalem, the road by which Jesus went when the blind men called him, and over which, somewhere on its way, stretched the sycamore tree into which Zaccheus climbed. Ah how barren and empty the way looked now! - with Him no longer here. For a moment, so looked my own path before me, - the dusty, hot road; the desolate pass; the barren mountain top. It was only a freak of fancy; I do not know what brought it. I had not felt so a moment before, and I did not a moment after.