Passing eastward from this range of hills, one descends into a gently rolling country that stretches miles away toward the Euphrates. At the eastern foot of the hills one finds oneself in a totally different country, at first quite fertile and dotted with frequent villages of flat-roofed houses. Here practically all the remains of ancient times have been destroyed through ages of building and rebuilding. Beyond this narrow fertile strip the soil grows drier and more barren, until presently another kind of desert is reached, an undulating waste of dead soil. Few walls or towers or arches rise to break the monotony of the unbroken landscape; but the careful explorer will find on closer examination that this region was more thickly populated in antiquity even than the hill country to the west. Every unevenness of the surface marks the site of a town, some of them cities of considerable extent. We may draw certain very definite conclusions as to the former conditions of the country itself. There was soil upon the northern hills where none now exists, for the buildings now show unfinished foundation courses which were not intended to be seen; the soil in depressions without outlets is deeper than it formerly was; there are hundreds of olive and wine presses in localities where no tree or vine could now find footing; and there are hillsides with ruined terrace walls rising one above the other with no sign of earth near them. There was also a large natural water supply. In the north as well as in the south we find the dry beds of rivers, streams, and brooks with sand and pebbles and well-worn rocks but no water in them from one year's end to the other. We find bridges over these dry streams and crudely made washing boards along their banks directly below deserted towns. Many of the bridges span the beds of streams that seldom or never have water in them and give clear evidence of the great climatic changes that have taken place. There are well heads and well houses, and inscriptions referring to springs; but neither wells nor springs exist today except in the rarest instances. Many of the houses had their rock-hewn cisterns, never large enough to have supplied water for more than a brief period, and corresponding to the cisterns which most of our recent forefathers had which were for convenience rather than for dependence. Some of the towns in southern Syria were provided with large public reservoirs, but these are not large enough to have supplied water to their original populations. The high plateaus were of course without irrigation; but there are no signs, even in the lower flatter country, that irrigation was ever practiced; and canals for this purpose could not have completely disappeared.