roofs,
an' 'eaps o' dung so you can't walk between 'em! Any one as
wants my share o' Palestine can 'ave it!"

We bumped on again down a road so lonely that it would have felt
good to see a wild beast, or an armed man lurking in wait for us.
But the British had accomplished the impossible: They had so
laid the fear of law along those roads that, though there might
be murders to the right and left of them, the passer-by who kept
to the road was safe, for the first time since the Romans now and
then imposed a temporary peace.

At last, like two yellow streams glistening in moonlight, the
road forked--one way toward Jericho. The other way appeared
to run more or less parallel with the Dead Sea. At that point
the one-eyed Arab left off singing at last and clutched the
driver's shoulder.

"All right! All right!" he answered impatiently, and stopped.
"Out you get, then!"

He did not expect the tip I gave him. He seemed to think it
placed him under obligation to wait there and talk for a few
minutes. But my one-eyed guide waved him away disgustedly with
the hand that did not hold my bag, and we stood in the road
watching until he vanished up-hill out of sight. Then the guide
plucked my sleeve and I followed him along the righthand road.
We walked half a mile as fast as he could set foot to the ground.

At last we reached a pretense of a village--a little cluster of
half-a-dozen thatched stone huts enclosed within one fence of
thorn and cactus. Everything showed up as clearly in the
moonlight as if painted with phosphorus. The heavy shadows only
made the high lights seem more luminous. A man and two donkeys
were waiting for us outside the thorn hedge. The man made no
remark. My guide and I mounted and rode on.

Presently we turned down a track toward the Dead Sea, riding
among huge shadows cast by the hills on our right hand. The
little jackals they call foxes crossed our path at intervals.
Owls the size of a robin, only vastly fluffier, screamed from the
rocks as we passed them. Otherwise, it was like a soul's last
journey, eerie, lonely and awful, down toward River Styx.

Long before we caught sight of the water again, through a ragged
gap between high limestone rocks, I could smell a village. The
guide approached it cautiously, stopping every minute or so to
listen. When we came on it at last it was down below us in
abysmal darkness, one light shining through a window two feet
square in proof we w