and yelled furiously. The riding
was cruel, reckless, superb; loose reins and loose stirrups on the
headlong gallop; then the sharp curb brought the horse up suddenly, the
rein on his neck turned him as if on a pivot, and the pressure of the
heel sent him flying back over the course.

Presently there was a sound of singing and clapping hands behind the
high cactus-hedges to our left, and from a little lane the bridal
procession walked up to take the high-road to the village. There were a
dozen men in front, firing guns and shouting, then came the women, with
light veils of gauze over their faces, singing shrilly, and in the midst
of them, in gay attire, but half-concealed with long, dark mantles, the
bride and "the virgins, her companions, in raiment of needlework."

As they saw the photographic camera pointed at them they laughed, and
crowded closer together, and drew the ends of their dark mantles over
their heads. So they passed up the road, their shrill song broken a
little by their laughter; and the company of horsemen, the bridegroom
and his friends, wheeled into line, two by two, and trotted after them
into the village.

This was all that we saw of the wedding at Kafr Kenna--just a vivid,
mysterious flash of human figures, drawn together by the primal impulse
and longing of our common nature, garbed and ordered by the social
customs which make different lands and ages seem strange to each other,
and moving across the narrow stage of Time into the dimness of that Arab
village, where Jesus and His mother and His disciples were guests at a
wedding long ago.

IV

TIBERIAS

It is one of the ironies of fate that the lake which saw the greater
part of the ministry of Jesus, should take its modern name from a city
built by Herod Antipas, and called after one of the most infamous of the
Roman Emperors,--"the Sea of Tiberias."

Our road to this city of decadence leads gradually downward, through a
broad, sinking moorland, covered with weeds and wild flowers--rich,
monotonous, desolate. The broidery of pink flax and yellow
chrysanthemums and white marguerites still follows us; but now the wider
stretches of thistles and burdocks and daturas and cockleburs and
water-plantains seem to be more important. The landscape saddens around
us, under the deepening haze of the desert-wind, the sombre Sherkiyeh.
There are no golden sunbeams, no cool cloud-shadows, only a gray and
melancholy illumination growing ever fainter