he had rescued,
provided he paid at least a part of his lodging in advance.

We eat our luncheon in one of the three big, disorderly rooms of the
inn, and go on, in the cool of the afternoon, toward Jericho. The road
still descends steeply, among ragged and wrinkled hills. On our left we
look down into the Wadi el-Kelt, a gloomy gorge five or six hundred feet
deep, with a stream of living water singing between its prison walls.
Tradition calls this the Brook Cherith, where Elijah hid himself from
Ahab, and was fed by Arabs of a tribe called "the Ravens." But the
prophet's hiding-place was certainly on the other side of the Jordan,
and this Wadi is probably the Valley of Achor, spoken of in the Book of
Joshua. On the opposite side of the canyon, half-way down the face of the
precipice, clings the monastery of Saint George, one of the pious
penitentiaries to which the Greek Church assigns unruly and criminal
monks.

[Illustration: Great Monastery of St. George.]

As we emerge from the narrow valley a great view opens before us: to the
right, the blue waters of the Dead Sea, like a mirror of burnished
steel; in front, the immense plain of the Jordan, with the dark-green
ribbon of the river-jungle winding through its length and the purple
mountains of Gilead and Moab towering beyond it; to the left, the
furrowed gray and yellow ridges and peaks of the northern "wilderness"
of Judea, the wild country into which Jesus retired alone after the
baptism by John in the Jordan.

One of these peaks, the Quarantana, is supposed to be the "high
mountain" from which the Tempter showed Jesus the "kingdoms of the
world." In the foreground of that view, sweeping from the snowy summits
of Hermon in the north, past the Greek cities of Pella and Scythopolis,
down the vast valley with its wealth of palms and balsams, must have
stood the Roman city of Jericho, with its imperial farms and the
palaces, baths and theatres of Herod the Great,--a visible image of what
Christ might have won for Himself if He had yielded to the temptation
and turned from the pathway of spiritual light to follow the shadows of
earthly power and glory.

Herod's Jericho has vanished; there is nothing left of it but the
outline of one of the great pools which he built to irrigate his
gardens. The modern Jericho is an unhappy little adobe village, lying a
mile or so farther to the east. A mile to the north, near a copious
fountain of pure water, called the Sultan's