The carriage road from Jerusalem to Jericho winds around the Mount of Olives and down the eastern side of the Judean hills, past the Apostles' fountain and through the wilderness of Judea. This wilderness is not the waste that we expected to find, but merely a broken and mountainous country, too stony to be cultivated and fit only for grazing. At this season of the year the grass is green and the ground bright with flowers.
A little more than half way down the slope is a rest station called, in honor of the parable, the Good Samaritan Inn. But for the mounted guards who now patrol this road the traveler would even to-day be in danger of falling among thieves.
A little farther on, the road leads near the edge of a wild, deep and rugged canyon at the bottom of which plunges the Brook Cherith. A Greek monastery has been built at the place where Elijah found refuge during the drought.
Jericho is a small village and a half mile from the site of the ancient city of that name. It depends for its support upon the tourists who visit the Jordan valley rather than upon the cultivated area.
The Dead Sea, forty miles long and eight miles in width, covers the deepest portion of this most remarkable of the depressions in the earth's surface. The rent extends from the base of Mount Hermon to the eastern arm of the Red Sea, known as the Gulf of Akabah. For more than one hundred miles this rent or ravine is below the level of the sea, the surface of the Dead Sea being thirteen hundred feet lower than the Mediterranean. As the Dead Sea is in some places thirteen hundred feet deep, the greatest depth of the chasm is, therefore, more than twenty-six hundred feet. The water of the Sea is bitter and contains twenty-six per cent of salt, or about five times as much as the ocean. As we took a bath in the Dead Sea, we can testify that one cannot sink in its waters.
WAILING PLACE OF THE JEWS.
The Jordan is neither as large nor as clear as one would expect from its prominence in Bible history. The banks are slippery, the waters are muddy and the current is swift. It has much the appearance of a creek swollen with rain. We tried its waters also, but did not venture far from the shore. Between the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea the Jordan falls about six hundred feet, or ten feet to the mile. At present but little use is made of this fertile valley, but, in the opinion of some who have investigated the matter, it could, with proper irrigation and under a just government, be made as fruitful as the valley of the Nile. As might be expected, the heat in this deep basin is intense in the summer, but the hills are near enough on each side to provide homes for those who would cultivate the fields.