The country around them, ‘the land beyond Jordan on the east,’ differed from any they had previously known. To the south was the undulating pasture-ground of the Belcâa, and again to the north of the Yermûk the pasture-lands of Jaulân.[226] Between these two pastoral tracts lay the hills and dales of Gilead, with their fields of wheat and barley, dotted every here and there with clumps of the shady oak, olive, and sycamore, and thickets of arbutus, myrtle, and oleander. It was emphatically ‘a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and depths that spring out of valleys and hills.’ The landscape, diversified with green slopes and glens, is in season gay with carpeting of flowers and melody of birds. From heights not far north of the Yermûk, beyond the green expanse around, might be descried the blue waters of the Sea of Galilee sparkling in the west, and still farther the snow-capped peaks of the Lebanon and Hermon--a strange contrast to the endless sands and stony plains of the peninsula.[227] Not less marked was the contrast with the land of Chaldæa. There the marshy delta of the Euphrates displays an almost tropical luxuriance; while above it the plains of Mesopotamia, with its network of canals, were covered by vast mounds, the site of cities teeming with life in the early cycles of the world, and strewn with fragments of pottery and bricks stamped with strange devices--mysterious records of bygone kingdoms. Here, on the contrary, the pride of the Byzantine empire was yet alive. From the Jordan to the desert were colonial cities founded by the Romans, boasting their churches, theatres, and forum. Even the naval contests of the naumachia might be witnessed in the land of Gilead. The country was populous and flourishing, inhabited by a mongrel race half Arab and half Syrian, who aspired to the privileges and aped the luxurious habits, without the chivalry and manliness, of the Roman citizen. It was altogether a civilisation of forced and exotic growth. No sooner was the western prop removed than the people returned to their Bedouin life, true sons of the desert; the chariot and waggon were banished for the camel; and nothing left of Roman rule but columns and peristyles, causeways and aqueducts--great masses of ruined masonry which still startle the traveller as if belonging to another world. But, at the time we write of, the age of so-called civilisation was still dominant there. [Sidenote: Highway between Syria and Arabia.] Such was the beautiful country, strange to the peninsular Arab, both in its natural features and in its busy urban life, which was now traversed by the Moslem armies, and soon became the beaten highway between Syria and Arabia. [Sidenote: Abu Obeida succeeds Khâlid. A.H. XIII. Sept. A.D. 634.]