he Sun rises at the western end of this terrace, facing
the dawn. The huge columns of the portico, forty-five feet high and five
feet in diameter, with rich Corinthian capitals, are of rosy-yellow
limestone, which seems to be saturated with the sunshine of a thousand
years. Behind them are the walls of the Cella, or inner shrine, with its
vaulted apse for the image of the god, and its secret stairs and
passages in the rear wall for the coming and going of the priests, and
the ascent to the roof for the first salutation of the sunrise over the
eastern hills.

Spreading our cloth between two pillars of the portico we celebrate the
feast of noontide, and looking out over the wrecked magnificence of the
city we try to reconstruct the past.

[Illustration: Ruins of Jerash, Looking West. Propylaeum and Temple
terrace.]

It was in the days of Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius, in the latter
part of the second century after Christ, that these temples and palaces
and theatres were rising. Those were the palmy days of Graeco-Roman
civilisation in Syria; then the shops along the Colonnade were filled
with rich goods, the Forum listened to the voice of world-famous orators
and teachers, and proud lords and ladies assembled in the Naumachia to
watch the sham battles of the miniature galleys. A little later the new
religion of Christianity found a foothold here, (see, these are the
ruined outlines of a Christian church below us to the south, and the
foundation of a great Basilica), and by the fifth century the pagan
worship was dying out, and the Bishop of Gerasa had a seat in the
Council of Chalcedon. It was no longer with the comparative merits of
Stoicism and Epicureanism and Neo-Platonism, or with the rival literary
fame of their own Ariston and Kerykos as against Meleager and Menippus
and Theodorus of Gadara, that the Gerasenes concerned themselves. They
were busy now with the controversies about Homoiousia and Homoousia,
with the rivalry of the Eutychians and the Nestorians, with the
conflicting, not to say combative, claims of such saints as Dioscurus of
Alexandria and Theodoret of Cyrus. But trade continued brisk, and the
city was as rich and as proud as ever. In the seventh century an Arabian
chronicler named it among the great towns of Palestine, and a poet
praised its fertile territory and its copious spring.

Then what happened? Earthquake, pestilence, conflagration, pillage,
devastation--who knows? A Mohammedan writ