The Arabs come here at certain seasons to gather the dates, weave mats from the reeds, and harvest the crops of the slopes behind, which were now all waving with young grain. During that time they live in mud hovels, partly excavated in the ground, which were now deserted. There was only one inhabitant, and he ran a small mill, picturesquely situated under some date-trees, which was turned by a stream of hot sulphur water issuing from a copious spring, with a temperature of 112°. The Yarmuk, which flows beneath a cliff of black basalt three hundred feet high, half encircles this unique spot, and I regretted that I had not time to explore it thoroughly; but the jungle was so impenetrable that it was impossible to make any impression upon it without an axe, and then it would have been a work of time. We now followed a track which approached the river bank. The hills, fortunately, on our side sloped back gradually. Midway up the sheer face of the cliff opposite we saw here and there caves, which, from their regular shape, appear at one time to have been inhabited, but if so, the only approach could have been from above, by baskets lowered to the mouths, similar to the method used by the robbers who inhabited the Wady Hamam, behind the plain of Gennesareth, in days of old. Now, instead of robbers in baskets, we saw immense eagles sailing in front of the cliff, in the crevices of which they had placed their nests. Crossing a spur which jutted into the river from the mountains on our right, and which prevented our following it closely, we obtained a splendid view of its course for some miles. To our left were basalt and limestone cliffs, and above them steep, sloping grass lands, now carpeted with wild flowers. Above them again were more crags and cliffs, and then the rim which marked the edge of the plateau, fifteen hundred feet above us. To the right the hills sloped back more slowly, cleft here and there by wild, rocky valleys, while their summits were fringed with oak forests. Here and there the river foamed between precipices on both sides, and we began to perceive that the task of exploration was by no means easy. But it was perhaps all the more interesting. We made our horses scramble where only goats had been before, now along the base of the cliff over huge boulders, now half-way up its precipitous side, when prudence suggested that horse and rider should separate, and each be responsible for his own life and limbs. Now we forced our way through tangled thickets of flowering shrubs that clung to the rocky sides where they were less steep, and now, utterly baffled, diverging from the river and toiling up a steep grassy slope, only to slip and scramble down it again on the other side so as to regain the margin of the stream.