Hhamdan, Shaikh of the Ta'amra, with about a dozen of his men, escorted me and one kawwas in that direction. Instead of proceeding to Jericho or Elisha's fountain, we turned aside into the wildest of wildernesses for passing the night. Traversing the length of an extremely narrow ridge, something like the back of a knife, we descended to a great depth below; but the risk being judged too great for conveying the tent and bed over there by the mule, these were left spread upon the ground for the night under the canopy of heaven; while the men carried our food for us to make the evening meal. Crawling or sliding, and leading the horses gently, we got to the bottom, and then followed up a very narrow glen, winding in and out, and round about between extraordinary precipices rising to enormous heights, till all at once the men halted, shouted, and sang, and stripped themselves to bathe in small pools formed in holes of the rock by settlements of rain-water. This was our halting-place, but the scene beggars all power of description. We were shut into a contracted glen by a maze of tortuous windings, between mountains of yellow marl on either side; but broken, rugged, naked of all vegetation,--referring one's imagination to the period when the earth was yet "without form and void," or to the subsiding of the deluge from which Noah was delivered. Looking upwards to a great height we could just see the tops of the imprisoning hills gilded awhile by the setting sun, and a small space of blue making up the interval between the precipices. Those precipices were not, however, entirely yellow, but variegated with occasional red or somewhat of brown ochre. So fantastic in position or shape were the masses hurled or piled about, and the place so utterly removed "from humanity's reach," that it might be imagined suitable to mould the genius of Martin into the most extravagant conceptions of chaos, or to suggest the colouring of Turner without his indistinctness of outline. The echoes of the men's voices and bursts of laughter (the latter so uncommon among Arabs) when splashing in the water, were reverberated from hill to hill and back again; but there were no wild birds among the rocks to scream in rejoinder as at Petra.