"During our halt one of our party read the account of this interesting event while the rest listened. It was not at all difficult for us to imagine the scene when the Israelites came down from their camp in the hills of Moab, and took their position on the banks of the Jordan. Here they halted for the night, and on the next day, when all was ready, the ark of the covenant, borne on the shoulders of the priests, was advanced to the edge of the river; as the feet of the bearers touched the water it receded, and in a few minutes the bed of the stream was dry. Then the ark was carried to the middle of the channel, and it remained there in charge of the priests till the whole host had gone over. "When the last of the procession had passed, Joshua called to the priests to bring the ark from the bed of the river, and they did so. The waters at once resumed their course, and the Jordan flowed on as before. Of course the monuments of stones which were erected by the Israelites to commemorate their crossing disappeared hundreds of years ago, and we have only the geographical localities to guide us; but, as we heard the description of the event, and looked around us, we felt certain that the spot where the Israelites crossed over Jordan, after their escape from Egypt, and their wanderings in the wilderness, could not be far away. [Illustration] "Before we go on to Jericho let me say something about the famous river we have just visited. "The Jordan is about a hundred miles long in a direct line, but its course is so crooked that the actual length of the stream is a great deal more; nobody has ever measured it accurately, and therefore I can't say how much it winds about. One authority says it is sixty-four miles in a direct line from the Dead Sea to the Lake of Tiberias, and two hundred miles by the windings of the river. The head-spring of the Hasbany (the parent of the Jordan) is seventeen hundred feet above the level of the Mediterranean; the mouth of the Jordan, where it enters the Dead Sea, is, therefore, about three thousand feet lower than its source, so the Jordan has a great fall for so short a river.