Olivet, passed through Bethany, and arrived at that mountain wilderness to which Christ was taken forth to be tempted by the Devil. Here some terrible convulsion of nature appears to have shattered and rent in pieces the foundations of the everlasting hills, swallowing up the summits, and thrusting up in their stead the bases and substructions, as it were, of the mighty masses. In the depths of a valley which traversed this "land of desolation, waste and wild," were discovered the ruins of numerous cottages and hermits' cells, many ascetics having formerly retired to this dreary region to waste away their lives in solitary penance. From the top of this mountain, however, the travellers enjoyed a prospect of extraordinary diversity, comprehending the mountains of Arabia, the Dead Sea, and the Plain of Jericho, into the last of which they descended in about five hours from the time of their leaving Jerusalem.
In this plain they saw the fountain of Elisha, shaded by a broad-spreading tree. Jericho itself had dwindled into a small wretched village, inhabited by Arabs; and the plain beyond it, extending to the Jordan, appeared to be blasted by the breath of sterility, producing nothing but a species of samphire, and similar stunted marine plants. Here and there, where thin sheets of water, now evaporated by the rays of the sun, had formerly spread themselves over the marshy soil, a saline efflorescence, white and glittering like a crust of snow, met the eye; and the whole valley of the Jordan, all the way to the Dead Sea, appeared to be impregnated with that mineral. They found this celebrated river, which in old times overflowed its banks, to be a small stream not above twenty yards in breadth, which, to borrow the words of the traveller, seemed to have forgotten its former greatness, there being no sign or probability of its rising, though the time, the 30th of March, was the proper season of the
