An interested group surrounded us that morning at nine o’clock as the car which was to take us down to the Dead Sea and the Jordan drew up to the door of the hotel. I call it a car by courtesy. It had seen hard service. It had a battered running board, a mudguard with many dents, a front seat bending in the middle to the breaking point, no windshield and no horn. We protested, but our guide said it was the best that could be had.

“It is the engine that is important,” he said, “the engine and the brake both are good. As for the horn, no fear—he is a horn with his mouth.” He was a most successful human horn as we found when we passed through the gate into the traffic outside the wall. Our guide was not an enthusiast on the subject of motor vehicles. As we swept around the hairpin curves he was restless. “The Arab is not the temperament for a driver of cars,” he said seriously, “he is the temperament for a horse.” And again after a pause, “It is well to go to Jericho in a carriage. The inn near Elijah’s Spring is a good place for a rest, and three days—it is a good time for the trip.”

There was little traffic passing after we turned onto the long hill—donkeys with panniers loaded with products to be exchanged in the markets of Jerusalem, a boy driving a few sheep slowly up the steep hill, a lone Arab on his horse. The air was still, crisp, and very clear. We were exceedingly thankful for the road built by the Turks in excellent fashion for the visit of the Kaiser twenty-three years before and carefully repaired by the British troops for military service. We passed the rest house built that William Hohenzollern might refresh himself before approaching the Holy City. Lower and lower into the valley we went. The road now had a thin covering of soft gray mud. Suddenly, turning to avoid a huge rock that had rolled down the hillside into the road, the car skidded. A second and the light machine had crashed into the retaining wall of rock and cement. The axle bent, the front wheels turned at an angle, we were thrown back and forth in our shaky seat. The car stopped. We heard the sickening thud of the rocks as they fell to the dry bed of the stream below. Then we climbed down carefully over the loosened mass of cement. “Thank God we are to live!” said the guide reverently. The driver was trying to turn the wheels back. He pushed the car into the road. The engine would still run but the axle looked hopeless. The guide spoke again—“As I have said, a carriage is better for Jericho.” After all our effort, we had failed to impress him with the fact that for us to give three days to the trip was impossible. “Of old,” he continued, “they fell here among the thieves. We have fallen among the rocks.” We could not help smiling at his look of dismay as he walked around the car again and again. He was so proud of his record of over thirty years as guide to whose care was due the fact that no serious mishaps had ever befallen any of his people. We were so grateful that we were not lying down there among the jagged rocks in the dry bed of the stream that our present difficulty seemed slight indeed. We were midway between Jerusalem and Jericho. If no help came we could walk in either direction twelve and a half miles though the prospect was not tempting. While we were discussing it we heard a rumbling, then a horn. It was a British hospital car taking an officer down to Jericho. It was pay day for the soldiers and he was late. The driver of his car felt sure that with a little help the axle might be repaired enough to enable our driver to crawl back to Jerusalem, but the steering gear had been damaged and it would be an uncertain venture. A lorrie was on its way to Jerusalem and was to wait at the Good Samaritan Inn to give a message to the officer. He would leave instructions for them to help our driver back to the city and he could get aid for us. The men in the lorrie which came along according to schedule looked the car over with the air of expert mechanics. They spent a half hour or more on it with the help of our driver and then the little Ford turned and climbed slowly and bravely up the hill, keeping with greatest difficulty close to the safe side of the road. The lorrie was out of sight in a few moments flying along to make up for lost time. It would take word of our trouble and send another car.

There was nothing to do but wait and nothing to see but bare hills. We climbed one great rocky mound only to see more hills with deeper valleys lying between as far as the eye could reach. They reminded us of the hills in the most desolate part of the Mormon trail in our own American desert. The sun rose higher and the heat became almost unbearable. We drew down our hats, put on our dark glasses and sat on the rocks in the dry bed of the stream. There was not a sound, not a bird note, no bleating of sheep. There were caves in the side of the hill. They looked dark, cool, and inviting, they had sheltered many people good and bad during the long centuries, but the guide warned us that they were full of vermin and unclean. There was a tiny boulder half-way up the hill which made on one side a narrow strip of shade and we made ourselves as small as possible and sat there.

Noon came and we ate our chicken and hard boiled eggs, French bread, figs, dates and oranges made ready by the hotel, and drank the water in our thermos bottles sparingly. A group of Arabs clattered past us over on the road. One sang a couplet in a clear, ringing voice and the others joined as in a chorus. They did not see us, or, if they did, made no sign. “When the Turks ruled Palestine,” said our guide, “we could not sit here so safe. There was much danger on this road and no man traveled over it at nightfall.” He told us tales of brigands in league with Turkish high officials with whom they shared their spoil that would have made excellent material for certain types of American motion pictures. Suddenly the simple story that Jesus told to the crowd in answer to the half-mocking question of the keen Jewish lawyer came vividly before us. It was in these hills, in the desperate loneliness of them, that the certain man, stripped of all his goods, beaten and half dead, lay helpless. He might wait for help for many an hour before out of this place of emptiness any would come! How could Priest and Levite pass him by on the other side and leave him in this forsaken spot that their own journey might be undisturbed? To them he was only a man robbed by the bandits. He would die as had many another. It was a common thing, and, inhuman as it seems, they went on to their task of holy worship and to the seat of judgment.

How keen was the mind of Christ! How quickly and unerringly He put his finger upon the very center of sin! It was easy to see, coming down the narrow camel path in the hills, the hated Samaritan with the spirit of justice, mercy, and brotherhood in his soul. He stopped—the man one would least expect to stop—and rescued with generous tenderness the suffering victim of thieves, while the servants of Jehovah and his law passed by on the other side, doing in that day even as, in all the days since, the followers of the letter and not of the spirit of the law have done.

There was only one answer to the question the lawyer had asked of Jesus and he was forced to give it—“He that showed mercy.” I doubt if any who had heard the question, “But who is my neighbor?” ever forgot the answer, or the command that followed it: “Go and do thou likewise.”

I was so lost in a new sense of the significance and sincerity of His wonderful teaching that I did not see our guide make his way toward the road. “A car comes,” he called, but we, lacking his desert-trained senses, heard nothing. Two or three minutes and we could see it coming rapidly along the white road on the farther hillside. The guide was overjoyed when he saw the new driver. “Ah!” he said, “this is the man I wanted. He drives anything that can go. Through the war he drove over hills with no road—always safe! He speaks English, too.” He examined the car. It had both windshield and horn. It had an extra tire and seats that were straight. Hope revived.

“We shall now get quickly back to Jerusalem,” said the guide. “Tomorrow, perhaps, we shall have the carriage.” “To Jerusalem!” we said. “It is only one o’clock. With such a driver we can surely get to the Dead Sea and the Jordan. If it is late we can stay tonight at the Inn near Elijah’s Spring and go back to Jerusalem in the morning. Our time is short and we cannot take another whole day.” Jamil looked at the driver. “They are Americans,” he said, “and when they will go, they will go!” After a moment he added, “The sun has been very hot. Perhaps for you it has dried the roads.”

So we climbed the steep grade, ran along a level strip, then a steeper grade to the Inn of the Good Samaritan where Arab traders and men of the caravans stop for coffee. There was a tank in the yard where one could buy gasoline!

The road before us was down grade now, and the driver more than lived up to his reputation. Once Jamil turned to show us a Mohammedan mosque in ruins in a desolate spot high up in the hills and again to point out a tomb. “It is the tomb of Moses by the word of the Mohammedans,” he said; “but we do not believe it, for no man knoweth where God hath buried him. He never came into the land so we shall not believe it.”

Neither of us who took it will ever forget that ride through the Wilderness. There was no road. Two deep ruts here and there marked our way. We wound through soft ooze turning now into the rut, now out again. On every side were hillocks of soft gray sand. “This is a good place to ride the donkey’s back,” said Jamil as we bounced up and down in the car, but he smiled. We told him we had motored to Germany over the shell-torn roads fording the bridgeless streams and this seemed very simple. Three miles of it and we were on a rough road close by the Dead Sea.

It lay still and calm, a blue gray thing crossed here and there by ribbons of silver where the sun glistened upon it. I should have said it had no motion but for the tiny little ripples that broke on the pebbly beach made frosty with salt deposit. A thousand feet and more below the Mediterranean it lay there. Sitting beside it we were lower than any submarine has ever been. The city of Jerusalem is two thousand five hundred feet above the level of the sea so our descent had been over thirty-five hundred feet since morning. It was very warm. Though the great body of water lay there now so still, Jamil told us that when the Turks were using it to transport supplies, fierce storms swept over it, thunder roared in the hills and over the plains, and giant waves dashed upon the smooth shore. We looked across the fourteen miles of sea to the plateau in the hills of Moab and knew that there was no living thing in it nor on its whole great stretch of fifty miles! Hungrily it swallows up the rivers and the tiny streams, the Jordan alone pouring millions of gallons into it every day, but never, never does it send out even a tiny streamlet. It grants no answer to the plea of the thirsty land that seems to reach down into it hopefully. We put our hands into the water four times as heavy as the Atlantic and they were covered with an oily salty deposit that would not come off until we had scrubbed with hot water. Suddenly we heard a sound—the bleating of a sheep. It was so welcome in that dead silence! Beyond the bend in the shoreline was a tiny house with children and the sheep!

We walked slowly along over the smooth gaily colored little pebbles to the spot, half a mile beyond, where the car was waiting. But we turned to look back again and again. The great silent sea held for us the awful fascination of death.

There was a road of a sort across the plain to the Jordan. When the river is in flood this plain is covered inches deep with ooze, rank vegetable growths spring up, the brown bushes are green, clouds of mosquitoes, scorpions, vipers and all manner of crawling things make their home here for a season; but now there were only long cracks that crossed and recrossed in the dried mud. Twice our wheels spun round in pockets of soft gray clay, but small thick boards, a spade and dry sand helped us out. A turn and we could see the river!

To one who has never studied the geography of Palestine or to whom books of travel are strangers, that first sight of the Jordan must bring far greater disappointment than to one in a way prepared for the dark, muddy stream whose swift current hurries on ceaselessly, gathering silt as it goes. Within its normal banks it is such a narrow stream! We stopped for a moment in the house where sweet Turkish coffee and oranges were served us and where the boats used by fishermen and by tourists who like to row across to touch the land of Moab lay moored to a tiny wharf. The banks were steep here and soft willows bent over them. We sat down in the little boat that swung lazily at its moorings. It seemed the strangest and the most wonderful of rivers, this little muddy stream! Over it the great hosts of Israel passed; along its banks John, coming out of the desert, preached the kingdom of heaven to the multitude; and here came even Jesus Himself to be baptized in the waters His presence made sacred. We dipped our bottles carefully into the stream and filled them with water as all pilgrims do. We listened to the stories of the feast days when pilgrims come down to the river to worship there; we read the story of Naaman and understood why the proud leper of the king’s court, even at the command of the stern prophet, hesitated to bathe in its waters. We lived in another day. Proud armies marched over the plain toward Jericho and we could almost hear Joshua’s ringing commands. We were brought back to our own day suddenly by the sound of a voice, a very American voice, singing in the distance, “Roll, Jordan, Roll.” We looked at each other in amazement. After a moment’s silence the voice rang out again, nearer now:

We climbed out of the boat and up the bank. A man in the early thirties stood there with a sapling, root and all, in his hand. He was an American working with the British under a commission for reforestation. He was most enthusiastic over his work and painted for us a wonderful picture of the hills, now bare and desolate, and the banks of the river, with the low scrubby growth, transformed some future day into valuable fruit and olive orchards, irrigated pastures, great stretches of light timberland. Jamil shook his head. “There is much talk these days about the changes that are coming to this land, but we shall see—we shall see and then we shall believe,” he said. Our friend went into the little house for food and rest and we stood in silence watching the stream which artists for centuries have painted, the river which has always stood for separation, under whose spell poets have written their sad hymns—watched it rushing on pouring more and more water into the Sea that is Dead.

The dunes, yellow and gray, between which we rode on to Jericho were round as though a giant hand had played with them, smoothed them over, and left them there. Twice we passed low stone houses with cisterns of water cut in deep rock hidden below the surface, and there were oranges and green things in the garden in the midst of the desert. It was cooler and the air was soft and balmy. The walls of Jericho—City of Palms—though now there are none, had indeed fallen, but there was no fear upon the faces of the people. The once mighty city is now but an ordinary village of lower class Arabs, with a supply station, a few shops, and the hotel where British officers live. Traces of recent battle over the very ground where the men of Joshua had routed the ancient enemy were all about us. The story of the taking of Jericho from the Turks by British troops when the river at its flood had to be bridged by boats and the temperature ran to 120° and more, is as thrilling, as fascinating, and as triumphant as that of Joshua himself.

Passing through the center of the town, we came to the orange groves. The air was fragrant with the perfume of thousands of jonquils growing wild along the edges of the irrigated section. The children offered two huge bunches for sale and we rejoiced in them. Our driver took twenty bunches for a friend to sell in Jerusalem. He tucked them away neatly in the folded top of the car. We bought delicious oranges and our machine became a chariot of delight. We went out to Elijah’s Spring, whose waters, made sweet and wholesome by the prophet, were responsible for the luxuriant flowers and delicious fruit, past the home of Rahab who had saved the spies in Joshua’s day, stopping for a moment at the spot where the sycamore tree had sheltered the rich publican ZacchÆus when he determined to see Jesus. It was easy to imagine the consternation that filled the city when it became known that Jesus had commanded him to come down because He would be a guest in his house that day—the house of a publican. It was on this road, too, that BartimÆus met Jesus and, despite the demand of the multitude that he be quiet, continued to cry aloud until the Healer saw him, opened his eyes and set his soul on fire with gratitude. How close the multitude must have pressed in those narrow streets, as driven by curiosity and longing for help, they followed Him! How often the body and soul of the Master must have cried out for the shelter of the mountain, the stillness of that waiting desert where in the night God could come very near with a new message and new strength for the coming day! It was at times like these, when half carelessly they pointed out to us the spots where on common days Jesus passed by, changing forever the lives that He touched, that we loved Him.

The sun was creeping on toward the horizon. We must turn back toward Jerusalem. Every foot of the road the driver assured us he knew. He would leave us in the Inn with the guide if we wished and send for us early in the morning, but he would get back to Jerusalem. So would we and he was content. He got all possible speed out of the car. It must climb back over those thirty-five hundred feet we had come down such a short time since.

We stopped a moment to peer at the lonely monastery where monks still live on the Mount of Temptation and pray daily for all who are tempted. The road which had been so lonely in the morning was stirring with life. Groups of Arabs on horses and little swift-footed donkeys moved aside to let us pass. Twice at a signal from a man riding ahead on horseback we stopped to let a great caravan pass us. The leading camels wore gorgeous trappings and tinkling bells. Once a camel without cargo, following in dignified fashion behind two others, stood perfectly still, trembled, then turned and ran ahead of us. We were amazed to see how swiftly he ran. In vain the rider of the other camel shouted and called. Had it not been for a friendly companion, who, coming down the hill, drove his own camel straight across the path, spoke soothingly to the great beast while a man on a donkey grasped his chain, he might have led us a chase all the way to Jerusalem. They did not attempt to take their prisoner past us in the road but turned off into a deep defile. When we looked back from the hilltop they were again on the road moving on toward Jericho. But most of the camels bearing their burdens merely sniffed and passed us by in scorn.

It grew very cold as we reached the heights and the discarded robes and coats were welcome. We could see shepherds and sheep seeking places of shelter. Sometimes we caught glimpses of herds of goats reluctantly following or plunging ahead silhouetted against a soft violet sky. The sun set calmly and we missed the blazing glory. Suddenly it was night. We were glad to be well past the scene of our morning’s mishap and nearing Jerusalem. When we stopped at the door of the hotel, Jamil gave a sigh of relief. “We have had a wonderful day,” we said. “We have had a day of miracles,” was his answer in a solemn, devout tone. Both he and the driver were most happy a moment later when they received their extra fee.

Dinner was over for most of the guests, but we were given a warm corner and more food than it would be possible to eat in many meals. We found that the entire hotel had joined in Jamil’s sigh of relief when we returned. There was a snapping wood fire in the little stove and hot water bottles that made the great curtained beds seem more inviting. The maid wished us “sleep without dreaming.”

But for a long time, lying there in the darkness, I dreamed with my eyes wide open. Dreamed of the forty years wandering in the wilderness while one generation passed and a new one was born. Dreamed of the kings and the prophets, of David hunted like a wild thing through the desolate hills and caves, of captives marching across the sands to Babylon. Dreamed of the Man who, with weary feet, in the heat and the dust walked about the Jordan Valley, through Jericho, walked up the long, long hills even to Jerusalem with men and women following, always seeking, only a few sharing. Dreamed of the demand that He made upon all who did have the courage to share—that they love God—and the challenge that they love their fellow men as He loved them, ... dreamed of the day when the challenge would be answered and the other man’s welfare would become each man’s passion.