All around the highland country of Western Palestine are mellow plains and fertile valleys. Up and down the western border between the highlands and the Mediterranean is the Maritime Plain, from eight to fifteen miles wide. Along the eastern edge is the great depression of the Ghôr, the low fertile basin that separates Western from Eastern Palestine and provides a bed for the plunging current of the Jordan and a sink for the Dead Sea. These two fertile strips are barely connected toward the north by an arm of the Ghôr, formerly called the Valley of Jezreel, that reaches to the site of ancient Jezreel, and a succession of plains formerly called the Plain of Esdraelon, that touch the Maritime Plain around the nose of Carmel. The highland country is pierced by many a cut called, in the language of the country, _wâd_, or _wâdy_, the equivalent ordinarily of our _valley_, though the climate of Palestine is such as to make it almost always the case that a wâdy is a brook in the rainy weather of winter and a dry gully during the rest of the year.[2] Some of these wâdys are of considerable breadth and offer arable lands; others are narrow, deep gorges. Into some of these gorges the débris from the hillsides has tumbled so as to make it impossible to use the valley bed as a road even in dry weather. ----- ----- Many of the passes mentioned in the literature of Palestine are really highland paths. Valleys must often be avoided as impassable during the winter rains and as stiflingly hot in summer. Invading armies would seldom risk using narrow valleys for their approach, as they would be easily assailable from the hillsides.