[Illustration: The children are what we like best in the Holy Land, even though they have generally learned from their elders the habit of begging for _backsheesh_] [Illustration: The ass of this sheeted Balaam opens his mouth but only a bray comes forth. The roads are so fearful that many places may not be reached by wheeled vehicles and the sure-footed donkey is usually the best mount] The Palestine Exploration Fund is not a religious body, but rather a scientific and historical society. It has spent about fourteen thousand dollars a year on such work, most of the sums being collected in amounts of five dollars or less from English and Americans all over the world. The Fund has made great discoveries in Jerusalem. It has surveyed and mapped a great part of Palestine and has added many Bible sites to those already known. CHAPTER V FROM DAN TO BEERSHEBA The size of Palestine is surprising to every visitor. You know it is small, but you cannot appreciate how small it is until you have travelled over it. Then you see why it has been called “the least of all lands.” The whole country does not average more than fifty miles wide, and it is only about a hundred and forty miles long. You could lose it in many of the counties of Texas, and on some of its mountains you can look from one side of it to the other. Standing on the Mount of Olives, just outside of Jerusalem, I could see the Mediterranean on the west and on the east the Dead Sea and the River Jordan. From Dan to Beersheba is not as far as from New York to Washington, and the “stormy banks” of the Jordan inclose a stream across many parts of which you can easily throw a stone, and which though it winds in and out like a corkscrew, is not over two hundred miles long. The Mount of Olives, upon which Jesus was taken by the Devil, is described as “an exceeding high mountain,” but it is only about twenty-seven hundred feet high and would be no more than a hill in the Rockies. “All the kingdoms of the world” which Satan showed him consisted of a few half-barren hills and some fertile plains, which together would not make more than a good-sized Western county. With an aeroplane we could fly across the whole of Palestine in less than an hour. Including Syria, which takes in the mountains of Lebanon and much other country in addition to Palestine proper, it is not as long as from New York to Pittsburgh. It begins at the boundary of the French Mandate of Syria on the north, and extends from there southward along the line of the Mediterranean Sea until it is lost in the sands of Arabia.