Such are the thoughts with which we fall asleep in our tents beside the murmuring brook of Er Rumman. Early the next morning we go down, and down, and down, by ledge and terrace and grassy slope, into the Vale of Jabbok. It is sixty miles long, beginning on the edge of the mountain of Moab, and curving eastward, northward, westward, south-westward, between Gilead and Ajlun, until it opens into the Jordan Valley. Here is the famous little river, a swift, singing current of gray-blue water--Nahr ez-Zerka "blue river," the Arabs call it--dashing and swirling merrily between the thickets of willows and tamaracks and oleanders that border it. The ford is rather deep, for the spring flood is on; but our horses splash through gaily, scattering the water around them in showers which glitter in the sunshine. Is this the brook beside which a man once met God? Yes--and by many another brook too. III THE RUINS OF GERASA We are coming now into the region of the Decapolis, the Greek cities which sprang up along the eastern border of Palestine after the conquests of Alexander the Great. They were trading cities, undoubtedly, situated on the great roads which led from the east across the desert to the Jordan Valley, and so, converging upon the Plain of Esdraelon, to the Mediterranean Sea and to Greece and Italy. Their wealth tempted the Jewish princes of the Hasmonean line to conquer and plunder them; but the Roman general Pompey restored their civic liberties, B.C. 65, and caused them to be rebuilt and strengthened. By the beginning of the Christian era, they were once more rich and flourishing, and a league was formed of ten municipalities, with certain rights of communal and local government, under the protection and suzerainty of the Roman Empire. The ten cities which originally composed this confederacy for mutual defence and the development of their trade, were Scythopolis, Hippos, Damascus, Gadara, Raphana, Kanatha, Pella, Dion, Philadelphia and Gerasa. Their money was stamped with the image of Caesar. Their soldiers followed the Imperial eagles. Their traditions, their arts, their literature were Greek. But their strength and their new prosperity were Roman. Here in this narrow wadi through which we are climbing up from the Vale of Jabbok we find the traces of the presence of the Romans in the fragments of a paved military road and an aqueduct. Presently we surmount a rocky hill and look down into the broad, shallow basin of Jerash. Gently sloping, rock-strewn hills surround it; through the centre flows a stream, with banks bordered by trees; a water-fall is flashing opposite to us; on a cluster of rounded knolls about the middle of the valley, on the west bank of the stream, are spread the vast, incredible, complete ruins of the ancient city of Gerasa.