Meanwhile, in the middle spaces, she fought her continuous battle with the desert and the sun for her daily bread. It is said that in Malta, where every possible spot is cultivated, the earth has been all imported, and that the Knights of Malta allowed no vessel to enter the harbour without paying dues in soil. The denuded hill-sides of Palestine, with their ruined heaps of stones that once built up terraces for cultivation, tell a similar story. On some hillsides the remains of sixty or even eighty such terraces may still be traced. In many places the valleys are rich in an altogether superfluous depth of fertile soil. But this did not suffice the inhabitants, and they built up the terraces along the southward slopes, in many places quite to the walls of their mountain villages. On not a few of these slopes labour must have actually created land, and men’s hearts grown strong within them as they changed the rocks into gardens and the slopes of shingle into harvest fields. CHAPTER IV THE WATERS OF ISRAEL Keeping in mind our view of Palestine as an oasis, we naturally turn at once to the thought of the waters that have retrieved it from the desert. By far the most conspicuous of these is the Jordan, flowing down a long course to its deep-dug grave in the Dead Sea. At whatever point we approach that great valley the eye is inevitably led along it northward to the white Hermon, whose great “breastplate” shines over all the land. That mountain, and the Lebanons of which it is the southern outpost, are the real makers of Palestine. There was a beautiful poetry of Hermon which from earliest times made it a sacrament of sweet thoughts to Israel. Perhaps the sweetest thought it gave her was that of dew. In every part of that land of clear skies, a heavy dew lies upon the ground at sunrise. Poetic feeling, undertaking the work of science, interpreted this dew as Hermon’s gift, so that “the dew that descended on the mountains of Zion” was “the dew of Hermon” (Psalm cxxxiii. 3). The meteorology is faulty, but the larger idea is true. The cool and glistening snow-field, more than a hundred miles away from Zion, does indeed send out and receive again the waters that refresh the land in an endless round. “The Abana dies in the marsh of Ateibeh, yielding its spirit to the sun, as Jordan dies in the Dead Sea, and, rising into clouds again, both of them wafted to the snow-peaks where they were born, they pour down their old waters in a current ever new, in that circuit of life and death which God has ordained for all.”[8]