[Illustration: THE CHURCH OF THE NATIVITY.] Leaving Bethlehem on the east, the road winds down a rocky slope, past fields of wheat and barley and terraced vineyards. Innumerable sheep and goats are seen on the hills around as in the days of Boaz and David. At the foot a level plain is reached, affording good pasturage, and dotted over with clumps of olive trees. This is called the Shepherds’ Field, from the tradition that here they were keeping their flocks by night when the angels appeared to them. Soon the scenery becomes wild and desolate. In no part of the world have I seen anything with which to compare it. If the chalk-downs of the South of England were denuded of grass, were heaved up and tossed about in the throes of an earthquake, and the sides of the hills thus formed were cut into ravines by the fury of winter torrents, it would afford some illustration of the weird desolation of this Wilderness of Judea. The gorge of the Kedron runs steeply down from Jerusalem to the Dead Sea, a descent of nearly four thousand feet. The wadies which seam the mountain-sides are dry in the summer, but in the winter form the beds of roaring torrents. Now and then a glimpse of the Dead Sea is gained—the deep blue of its waters gaining an additional intensity from the red or purple of the mountains of Moab, which form the background of the landscape. The black tents of the Bedouin, their flocks and herds feeding on the mountain-sides, an Arab horseman, or a string of camels with their noiseless tread, are the only signs of life in this region of sterility.