_Lo, the lords of the city have disappeared into darkness; The ancient wilderness hath swallowed up all their work._ _There is nothing left of the city but a heap of fragments; The bones of a carcass that a wild beast hath devoured._ _Behold the desert waiteth hungrily for man's dwellings; Surely the tide of desolation returneth upon his toil._ _All that he hath painfully lifted up is shaken down in a moment; The memory of his glory is buried beneath the billows of sand._ _Then a voice said, Look again upon the ruins; These broken arches have taught generations to build._ _Moreover the name of this city shall be remembered; Here a poor man spoke a word that shall not die._ _This is the glory that is stronger than the desert; For God hath given eternity to the thought of man._ IX THE MOUNTAINS OF SAMARIA I JORDAN FERRY Look down from these tranquil heights of Jebel Osha, above the noiseful, squalid little city of Es Salt, and you see what Moses saw when he climbed Mount Pisgah and looked upon the Promised Land which he was never to enter. "Could we but climb where Moses stood, And view the landscape o'er, Not Jordan's stream, nor death's cold flood, Should fright us from the shore." Pisgah was probably a few miles south of the place where we are now standing, but the main features of the view are the same. These broad mountain-shoulders, falling steeply away to the west, clad in the emerald robe of early spring; this immense gulf at our feet, four thousand feet below us, a huge trough of gray and yellow, through which the dark-green ribbon of the Jordan jungle, touched with a few silvery gleams of water, winds to the blue basin of the Dead Sea; those scarred and wrinkled hills rising on the other side, the knotted brow of Quarantana, the sharp cone of Sartoba, the distant peak of Mizpeh, the long line of Judean, Samarian, and Galilean summits, Olivet, and Ebal, and Gerizim, and Gilboa, and Tabor, rolling away to the northward, growing ever fairer with the promise of fertile valleys between them and rich plains beyond them, and fading at last into the azure vagueness of the highlands round the Lake of Galilee. Why does that country toward which we are looking and travelling seem to us so much more familiar and real, so much more a part of the actual world, than this region of forgotten Greek and Roman glory, from which we are returning like those who awake from sleep? The ruined splendours of Jerash fade behind us like a dream. Samaria and Galilee, crowded with memories and associations which have been woven into our minds by the wonderful Bible story, draw us to them with the convincing touch of reality. Yet even while we recognise this strange difference between our feelings toward the Holy Land and those toward other parts of the ancient world, we know that it is not altogether true.