"The waste land that smoketh" is a touch of autopic description which one remembers when, towards sunset, great wreaths of white mist lie low in the mountain hollows, as nowhere else in Judæa. Eastward, the horizon is bounded by the long chain of the mountains of Moab, which, ever since our arrival in the country, have seemed a sort of mysterious dreamland, a limit of knowledge, the gate of fairyland, the nightly stage of the great pageant gilded and painted by the sunset. How often have we longed, like the youngest brother of the fairy tale, to ride across the wide plain, and to wander forth for a year and a day into that dim Unknown! We could hardly realise that at last the time had come and we were stepping eastward.
Below us, in the great plain, a meandering green track shows where the banks of the Jordan are offering shade and refreshment. In the nearer foreground the scanty hovels and many hotels of modern Jericho lie, embowered in tropical vegetation, and we remember with an added interest that, within even the next day or two, we shall pass through districts of three distinct flora and fauna, and, leaving behind the oaks and pines, the familiar sparrows and starlings of our Jerusalem environment, we shall rest to-night among palms and bananas, we shall hear the cry of the jackal, and smell the tracks of the hyæna, and again, in a couple of days, find ourselves in desert surroundings, the nursery of the camel and home of the gazelle, with the scanty herbage and stalkless flora of an Alpine world.
Looking down upon the Jericho plain we note various points of interest. We distinguish the sites of three Jerichos.
First we notice, to the south, the kraal-like village of to-day, on the site of a castle and church of the Crusaders, afterwards a flourishing Moslem town, plundered by Egyptian soldiers in 1840, and subsequently destroyed by fire in 1871. It seems unlikely that it will ever recover its former position; for, apart from apparent absence of all ability for initiation on the part of the Arabs, the climate seems to have a degenerating effect upon the inhabitants, Even German perseverance, which has made habitable spots in the low maritime plains of Judæa where all other colonists had failed, could not suffice to render life here endurable, and an agricultural settlement organised within the last few years has literally _died_ out. The Latins—or, as we say in England, the Roman Catholics—have also failed to establish themselves, and the Russian and Greek settlements find existence possible only under conditions of frequent change, and the stimulus of the profits to be made out of the thousands of Russian pilgrims who come, every year, at Epiphany, for baptism in the Jordan. Last year, however, the Jordan was held to have acquired so large a proportion of cholera bacilli on its way from Tiberias, where there was a great outbreak of disease, that approach was justly forbidden by the authorities. To the west lie the remains of the Jericho of Bible history, of which, from earliest childhood, most of us have had a mental picture—the great town enclosed by walls enwreathed with vegetation, "that ancient city of palm-trees," few of which still remain, though they were abundant as late as the seventh century; and in Jewish amulets, and marriage or divorce documents, which are commonly decorated with allegorical pictures, Jericho is still represented by a group of palms. South of the Israelitish town, and west of modern Jericho, are the remains of the Roman Jericho, which, it is interesting to remember, was presented by Anthony to Cleopatra, who, characteristically, promptly sold it to Herod for a winter home. He made of it a beautiful city, adorned with palms and gardens, and scented with the balsams for which it was long famous as an article of commerce, but which are no longer to be found in Syria, and where, in the time of Christ, the roadsides were shaded with sycamores—not the _pseudo-platanus_ with which we are familiar, and which is not a syc_o_more at all, but the _ficus sycomorus_, the mulberry fig, which, often attaining the proportions of a handsome forest tree, still yields its wholesome and refreshing fruit among the humbler surroundings of to-day. The remains of a pool, five hundred and sixty-four feet long, part of an immense system of conduits still visible, which was the immediate cause of the fertility and beauty of the Roman Jericho, is said to indicate the whereabouts of Herod's palace.