ABSTRACT
Palestine has always been a land of tribes, its boundaries have altered, its very names have changed with its overlords, its various component parts have stretched out and shrunk into themselves like so many pieces of elastic; but one great natural division has always remained to separate one part of the country from the rest, to act as a spiritual as well as a physical barrier. That barrier is, of course, that extraordinary Ghor, which is a fault in the earth's surface and which dips down as low as twelve hundred and ninety-two feet below sea level at the shore of the Dead Sea, the bottom of which is, in places, thirteen hundred feet lower still. The Rift (as the Arabs call it) is one hundred and sixty miles long; it starts at the foot of Hermon and in its bed are contained the lakes of Huleh and Tiberias, the river Jordan, the Down-runner, to use an expressive word, which rushes down until its unquiet waters with their zigzag current lose themselves in the Dead Sea, and the Dead Sea itself. This strange hollow, unique in the world, leaves the Dead Sea, rising as it goes along, and we have just seen it as it sweeps round beyond and beneath Petra on its way to the Gulf of Akaba.
