Just back of the entrance to the garden is a ledge of limestone where the disciples are said to have slept during the night of the agony, and perhaps one hundred feet farther away stands a column which tradition says marks the spot where Judas betrayed Christ with a kiss. Both of these places have been worn smooth by the lips of thousands of pilgrims. [Illustration: The source of the Jordan at Banias is one of the largest springs in the world. The Jordan is rightly named the “down-comer,” for in its winding course of two hundred and forty miles it drops from the mountains to the Dead Sea, nearly thirteen hundred feet below sea-level] [Illustration: We need an escort for the trip over the barren wastes to the River Jordan, for Bedouin brigands still occasionally relieve the unwary tourist of his valuables] CHAPTER XVII THE DEAD SEA AND THE JORDAN The Jordan! How shall I make you see it as it winds its way through this great gash in the thirsty face of old Mother Earth? All day long I have been travelling upon its banks in the lower part of its course. I have visited the ford where Joshua crossed with his army of Jews when he took possession of Canaan; have stood on the spot where it is said that Jesus was baptized of John, and have gone over the place where the waters were parted by the cloak of Elijah. Here at Jericho I am within a short gallop of the Dead Sea, into which the Jordan flows, and sitting on the steps of my hotel I can see Mount Nebo, where Moses stood when he viewed the Promised Land, which he was not to enter. In former travels I have seen the Jordan, near the Sea of Galilee, and have been not far from its source in the Lebanon Mountains. The Jordan Valley is the cellar of the world. It is a great trench, which begins a thousand or more feet above the sea in the Lebanon Mountains, and within a distance of one hundred and sixty miles, as the crow flies, cuts its way down to thirteen hundred feet below sea level, where it ends in the Dead Sea. The bottom of that sea is a half mile below the surface of the Mediterranean, and in Jericho, where I am writing, we are almost four thousand feet below the highest point in Jerusalem. There is no other part of the earth uncovered by water where for an equal distance the land is sunken even two hundred feet below the level of the ocean. This is the strangest trough of the world. Though often associated with the idea of going to heaven, the Valley of the Jordan is emblematic of hell. Most of it is as parched as the dry sands of the Sahara, and just now its heat is as torrid as Tophet. The plain over which I rode to-day on my way to the river was covered with thorn bushes. The only green I saw after leaving the irrigated farms about Jericho was that bordering the gully through which the Jordan runs. For the rest, the alkaline earth cut up by the floods into castles and mounds, makes bare gullies and hills of all sizes and shapes.