ver, a swift, singing current of gray-blue
water--Nahr ez-Zerka "blue river," the Arabs call it--dashing and
swirling merrily between the thickets of willows and tamaracks and
oleanders that border it. The ford is rather deep, for the spring flood
is on; but our horses splash through gaily, scattering the water around
them in showers which glitter in the sunshine.

Is this the brook beside which a man once met God? Yes--and by many
another brook too.

III

THE RUINS OF GERASA

We are coming now into the region of the Decapolis, the Greek cities
which sprang up along the eastern border of Palestine after the
conquests of Alexander the Great.

They were trading cities, undoubtedly, situated on the great roads which
led from the east across the desert to the Jordan Valley, and so,
converging upon the Plain of Esdraelon, to the Mediterranean Sea and to
Greece and Italy. Their wealth tempted the Jewish princes of the
Hasmonean line to conquer and plunder them; but the Roman general Pompey
restored their civic liberties, B.C. 65, and caused them to be rebuilt
and strengthened. By the beginning of the Christian era, they were once
more rich and flourishing, and a league was formed of ten
municipalities, with certain rights of communal and local government,
under the protection and suzerainty of the Roman Empire.

The ten cities which originally composed this confederacy for mutual
defence and the development of their trade, were Scythopolis, Hippos,
Damascus, Gadara, Raphana, Kanatha, Pella, Dion, Philadelphia and
Gerasa. Their money was stamped with the image of Caesar. Their soldiers
followed the Imperial eagles. Their traditions, their arts, their
literature were Greek. But their strength and their new prosperity were
Roman.

Here in this narrow wadi through which we are climbing up from the Vale
of Jabbok we find the traces of the presence of the Romans in the
fragments of a paved military road and an aqueduct. Presently we
surmount a rocky hill and look down into the broad, shallow basin of
Jerash. Gently sloping, rock-strewn hills surround it; through the
centre flows a stream, with banks bordered by trees; a water-fall is
flashing opposite to us; on a cluster of rounded knolls about the middle
of the valley, on the west bank of the stream, are spread the vast,
incredible, complete ruins of the ancient city of Gerasa.

They rise like a dream in the desolation of the wilderness, columns and
arches and vaults