body.[926] With the latter Richard on June 6 set out early in the morning, and in a few hours was encamped before Blanchegarde.[927] From Blanchegarde three ways into the hill-country lay open. One was the valley of Elah (Wady es Sunt), which runs almost due east from the place where the Crusaders now were. This way was not attractive to invaders, because its continuation on the further side of the central trench was very difficult for troops. North-eastward from Blanchegarde a road ran along the border of the plain past the mouth of the valley of Sorek (Wady es Surar) to Natroun, and thence across the Shephelah to Beit Nuba. The valley of Sorek is the most direct and the easiest of all the natural ways that lead up from the plain to the mountains of Judah; but it had a great disadvantage. For an army advancing through it there was no possible base on the coast nearer than Ascalon or Joppa, both of them more than twenty miles distant from its western end. The only place within easy reach of it that could be called a coast-town was Ibelin-Yebna, and this was not a coast-town in the proper sense; it was four miles from the sea and had no harbour. Of all the roads that led to Jerusalem the best for the Crusaders was unquestionably the one which they had chosen for their first attempt—the Beit Nuba road, where they would have in their rear a safe double line of communication through Ramlah and Lydda with their original base at Joppa and thence, by land and sea, with Acre. On June 9 they advanced to Natroun,[928] and that night they intercepted a score of Turks returning from a plundering raid on Joppa; six escaped, the other fourteen were made prisoners.[929] Next day Richard with the men of his own domains moved on to Castle Arnold,[930] a place whose character is expressed in its modern Arabic name, Khurbet-el-Burj, “ruins of the Bourg,” _burh_ or fortress; it had been built by his great-grandfather, King Fulk, on one of the highest hills in the Shephelah, about three and a half miles north-west of Beit Nuba, and commanded both the “way that goeth to Beth-horon” and the lower road along the foot of the hills, from Lydda by Beit Nuba to Jerusalem. Probably the Turks had dismantled it; Richard pitched his tents “on a high place to the right.” He was joined by the rest of the [Sidenote: _June 10_] army next day, when all together proceeded to Beit Nuba and encamped there to wait for Count Henry and his recruits.[931]