As we enter Judea, we find the land, as it were, gathering itself up on almost continuous heights. The lesser valleys are shallow, and the hilltops swell from the lofty plateau in colossal domes or cupolas. So high is the general level that when we come to Jerusalem we look in vain for the mountains we had understood to be round about her. No peaks cleave the sky--only smooth and gentle hills, which have never been in any way her defence, but have made excellent platforms for the siege-engines of her enemies, and have grown wood for the crosses of her inhabitants. The lateral gorges of Judea, both east and west, cut into her high tableland in angular zigzags, and as you descend these in either direction you realise what is really meant by “the mountains round about Jerusalem.” She does not see them, lying secure upon the height to which they have exalted her. But he who approaches her must come by their gorges, where for many miles his sky will be but a strip seen between sheer heights of cliff and scaur.[6] The rugged sharpness of outline reaches its climax on the eastern side, where the range, split in the wildest gorges, falls in fragmentary masses between their mouths down to the Jordan valley. Nothing in the land has a more bare and savage grandeur than the square-chiselled mountain blocks of Quarantana, seen from below at Jericho in black angular silhouette against the sunset. South of Jerusalem the Kidron gorge, cleaving the intruding desert, exaggerates the wildness of the north, but as you climb past Bethlehem to Hebron you are in a region liker to Samaria, with its deeper and more rounded valleys and its richer pasture and cultivation. South of Hebron the range spreads fanwise and gradually sinks to the desert.