(M162) The association of Hercules with hot springs was not confined to Greece itself. Greek influence extended it to Sicily,(641) Italy,(642) and even to Dacia.(643) Why the hero should have been chosen as the patron of thermal waters, it is hard to say. Yet it is worth while, perhaps, to remember that such springs combine in a manner the twofold and seemingly discordant principles of water and fire,(644) of fertility and destruction, and that the death of Hercules in the flames seems to connect him with the fiery element. Further, the apparent conflict of the two principles is by no means as absolute as at first sight we might be tempted to suppose; for heat is as necessary as moisture to the support of animal and vegetable life. Even volcanic fires have their beneficent aspect, since their products lend a more generous flavour to the juice of the grape. The ancients themselves, as we have seen, perceived the connexion between good wine and volcanic soil, and proposed more or less seriously to interpret the vine-god Dionysus as a child of the fire.(645) As a patron of hot springs Hercules combined the genial elements of heat and moisture, and may therefore have stood, in one of his many aspects, for the principle of fertility. (M163) In Syria childless women still resort to hot springs in order to procure offspring from the saint or the jinnee of the waters.(646) This, for example, they do at the famous hot springs in the land of Moab which flow through a wild gorge into the Dead Sea. In antiquity the springs went by the Greek name of Callirrhoe, the Fair-flowing. It was to them that the dying Herod, weighed down by a complication of disorders which the pious Jews traced to God’s vengeance, repaired in the vain hope of arresting or mitigating the fatal progress of disease. The healing waters brought no alleviation of his sufferings, and he retired to Jericho to die.(647) The hot springs burst in various places from the sides of a deep romantic ravine to form a large and rapid stream of lukewarm water, which rushes down the depths of the lynn, dashing and foaming over boulders, under the dense shade of tamarisk-trees and cane-brakes, the rocks on either bank draped with an emerald fringe of maidenhair fern. One of the springs falls from a high rocky shelf over the face of a cliff which is tinted bright yellow by the sulphurous water. The lofty crags which shut in the narrow chasm are bold and imposing in outline and varied in colour, for they range from red sandstone through white and yellow limestone to black basalt. The waters issue from the line where the sandstone and limestone meet. Their temperature is high, and from great clefts in the mountain-sides you may see clouds of steam rising and hear the rumbling of the running waters. The bottom of the glen is clothed and half choked with rank vegetation; for, situated far below the level of the sea, the hot ravine is almost African in climate and flora. Here grow dense thickets of