Page:On the Desert - Recent Events in Egypt.djvu/330

 reclaiming this waste, and explained how, by the use of an American invention, the swift-rushing Jordan could be made to lift itself up in volume sufficient to water the whole plain. With this it would be a paradise of beauty, for the depression of the basin of the Jordan and the Dead Sea is such as to give it a tropical climate, and with a supply of water it would have a tropical vegetation. What it might become is shown by what it now is on that side of the valley where water reaches it, for as we come nigh unto Jericho, the springs which burst out of the hills, and flow through natural and artificial channels, cause all the products of the earth to flourish luxuriantly. We rode through gardens and orchards, whose abundant growth gave assurance of what the country might again become with proper cultivation.

The name of Jericho (City of Palms) is pleasantly suggestive of its ancient beauty. Irrigated and cultivated as its environs then were, it may well have been embowered in palms, which would not grow in the Hill Country around Jerusalem. Alas! not a palm grows here now! And yet the region around it retains its natural fertility, and if "well watered" might again be what it once was, "as the garden of the Lord."

But Jericho is a place, like so many others in the East, where

It is hardly possible to imagine the poverty and wretchedness of the inhabitants, whose filth and squalor are in keeping with the mud-huts in which they live. This must be the Jericho to which we sometimes dismiss "friends" whose presence we do not absolutely require. How often have I wished one and another of my acquaintances — I will not say my enemies — "in Jericho"! It is the general limbo to which we consign all bores and