[Illustration: THE ROCK-CUT TOMBS OF THE VALLEY OF JEHOSHAPHAT. These tombs are opn the eastern side of the alley facing the East Wall of the Temple Area.] have kept the human side of the compact, are fertile. The labour would indeed require to be hard and unremitting. Many of the streams are so deep sunk in their channels that extraordinary enterprise would be needed to raise their waters for irrigation or to conduct them from higher levels in long conduits. Yet every remaining arch of an old aqueduct, and every watermill whose wheel thuds round in its heavy way, shew that such enterprise is possible. Each of those grooved and checkered valleys where men with their naked feet open and close the little gates of clay, and water the fat crops of onion and tomato, shews how sure is the reward of enterprise. Similarly the terracing reminds us that soil is as precious as water. Both must be laboured for and fought for. It is the desert that naturally claims the land and sets the normal point of view for its inhabitants. Syria is an oasis by the grace of God and the toil of man. This alone would suffice to make Palestine an ideal training-ground for a nation to learn righteousness. The whole theory of Providence which dominates the earlier Old Testament, and lingers on in popular belief through the New, is apparent on every mile of these valleys. That theory was that even in the present life the sin of man will be immediately punished by adversity, and his righteousness rewarded by prosperity. It was a theory which had to be abandoned, and the whole marvellous story of Job shews us the process of the nation’s discarding it. To us it seems wonderful that it should have been able to survive at all in face of the inexplicable and at times apparently irrational facts of all human experience. But the fact that in Syria nature’s rewards and punishments are so certain and so immediate goes far to explain both its origin and its persistence. Such thoughts as these regarding Syria inevitably lead towards one goal. There is but one symbol in the world which expresses all that depth of pain which we have found in the history of this sorely-tried land, and at the same time forces on even the most thoughtless its moral significance. That symbol is the Cross of Christ. It is still to be seen very frequently in Syria, generally in its Greek form ([Illustration: cross]). In this form it is more impressive than in the other. The oblique lower bar represents a board nailed across the shaft for the feet of the sufferer to rest on. The realistic effect of this is surprising, for it brings home to one’s imagination in a quite new way the terrible fact that men have actually been crucified.