They went down into the Jordan valley and walked southward by the Roman road, following the Jordan River. At one place the mountains on either side came down close to the river, and there was barely room for the road between the foaming stream on one side and the steep rocks on the other. "Look," said Joseph, "this is the place where the waters rose up and stood in a heap when our fathers under Joshua were about to cross the river, thirty miles below." They crossed a brook which fell into the river; and Joseph said, "Do you see this brook? Up there among the mountains was the place where the prophet Elijah was fed by the ravens; for this is the brook Cherith." They came to the place just above Jericho where under Joshua the Israelites walked across the dry bed of the river, the holy ark carried by the priests in front and the people following in a long procession. There the river is very wide and quite shallow, so that people walk across, except in the early spring, when it is swollen by the rains and the melting snow on the high mountains far to the north. [Illustration: The Temple of Herod restored by Fergusson. The covered portico on the left is the royal porch extending along the southern side of the Temple area. The colonnade running from left to right is Solomon's porch extending across the eastern side of the area. The courts were much larger than as here shown.] [Illustration: At last his parents found Jesus in the Temple, the center of a company of learned scholars; he was asking questions of them and they were asking questions of him, while all around were people listening and wondering at this boy's deep knowledge of the truth.] There they would point out across the river Mount Nebo, where Moses stood looking upon the land and then all alone lay down and died. They stopped for a rest at Jericho, where were stories to tell of the walls that fell down when the Israelites marched around them, and the priests blew their ram's-horn trumpets. Perhaps they stopped and drank at the great spring near Jericho where the water was made pure by Elisha the prophet. And after a climb up to the mountains, at the end of six days or a week, they came to Jerusalem, the end of their journey, and the place called by the people "the holy city." And then, there was the splendid Temple of God! How the boy's heart was stirred as he walked over the bridge leading from Mount Zion to Mount Moriah! They went into the great outside court, the court of the Gentiles, the only place in the Temple where foreigners were allowed to enter; and the boy Jesus was shocked to see that it had been turned into a market, where cattle and sheep and doves were sold, and where tables stood around for the men who changed foreign money into Jewish shekels.