The days were short, for night comes on in the valley almost an hour earlier than on the hills; but on awaking next morning early, the view from the tents on every side was very fine. To the south we looked out over the long thorn-groves, towards the open plain stretching for eight miles to the Dead Sea, which appeared as a gleaming thread, shut in by long dim ridges of mountain, while the square tower of the modern Erîha or Jericho appeared in mid distance. In the early morning I looked out, and saw the long steel-blue ranges capped with rolling wreaths of cloud, behind which the ruddy streak of dawn ran out, the very light which, morning after morning, used to be watched by the priests in the Temple, gradually spreading towards the Hebron mountains.
West of us rose the steep precipice of K[)u]r[)u]nt[)u]l, or Quarantania, the traditional mountain of Our Lord's forty days of fasting, a cliff a thousand feet high, burrowed with caves, chapels and cells, and crowned with a fortress of the Templars. Northwards the low shelf of gleaming marl hills ran out into a curious cone, called "Raven's Nest,â of which more hereafter; to the east was Jordan, hidden between his banks; and behind rose the fine rounded summit of Mount Nebo, and the Moabitic chain.
The district around us was full of places of interest--Jericho, Gilgal, the Cities of the Plain, Jordan and the Salt Sea. The ruins were also important--Roman and later aqueducts, Crusading monasteries, and rock chapels. The results summed up in the following pages, represent the continuous labour of more than a month, during which I was in the saddle till late every day, and engaged till midnight in writing and drawing, rising before the sun began to appear behind the Moab wall. Twice again in the following years I returned to the valley, and revisited the sites round Jericho.
There is only one natural position for a large town in the plains of Jericho, namely, the neighbourhood of the beautiful fountain called "the Sultan's Spring,â near the foot of the Quarantania precipice. Nothing can well explain the choice of a new position, but the fact that Jericho was cursed by Joshua, and that the curse was fulfilled. Thus it is by the spring that we naturally place the Jericho of Joshua's time, and this view receives confirmation from the account of the flight of the spies "to the mountain;â for if situated in the immediate vicinity of the great crag of K[)u]r[)u]nt[)u]l, the city was so near that the fugitives might easily have crept through the cane jungle and thorn-groves to the shelter of one of the innumerable caverns in the face of its precipices.