Our course was now nearly due east. We had a very steep descent to make on the eastern side of Olivet. We found some cultivated ground, and a few olive and fig trees. Among the limestone on the surface we saw many masses of silex, much of it of a variegated and fine kind, which had the appearance of the coarser kinds of agate. We passed from the Mount of Olives into a deep hollow, which runs east towards the valley of the Jordan. Near the head of this hollow is a spring of water, with a ruin in the vicinity, which appears to be a great stopping-place for those who are passing to and from Jerusalem and Jericho. We found there a company of Arabs and muleteers. Our road led us down the valley. The hills on both sides were steep, and the valley narrow. From this place there is a change in the character of the rock, and a corresponding one in the character of the soil and the aspect of the country. The rock becomes a friable limestone of the softest kind. This continues most of the way to the valley of the Jordan. It is easily disintegrated, and of course but little of it appears on the surface. A fine-looking soil covers the face of the country, the hills are rounded over, and but few rocks are seen projecting out. Those veins of silex, which I have mentioned, form an exception; and there are several of them, one above another, at a greater or less distance. They vary from two or three to twelve or eighteen inches in thickness; and, in some places, form a kind of cord-like appearance round the hills. While, however, the land looks more favourable for tillage, it does not show the evidences of it--far otherwise--we saw less and less of its surface under the care and cultivation of man, and fewer traces of a resident population; no villages, no houses, no vineyards nor olive trees, and but occasionally a spot that had been made to yield grain. About half-way from Mount Olivet to the plain of Jordan, we passed a district that exhibited rather a singular aspect. The rock on both sides of the narrow valley down which we were passing, was thrown much out of the horizontal position, which is the general state of the rock in this district, and forced up in the middle, a rod or two it may be, and made to have much the appearance of a regularly-formed arch. It was manifest especially in the siliceous stratum before-mentioned. In some places you might count many of these arches along the side of the hill, on both sides of the valley, and in part corresponding with each other. They had all the appearance of having been formed by the action of some great force from below, acting partially on small locations. I noticed the same, but on a more extended scale, on the road by which I returned from the Dead Sea, which lay considerably to the south of this. It was, however, as far as I could judge, about the same distance from the valley of the Jordan. It is, indeed, the same district, and may possibly exhibit a similar appearance both north and south to a much