By this lower ford, David passed to fight Syria, and afterwards in his flight from Absalom to Mahanaim, east of Jordan. Thither Judah escorted him and we crossed in a ferry boat. Here Elijah and Elisha divided the waters with the prophets’ mantle. At the upper fords Naaman washed off his leprosy. Here too the Syrians fled, when panic-struck by the Lord.
John the Baptist “first” baptized at the lower ford near Jericho, whither all Jerusalem and Judea resorted, being near; where too, our Lord took refuge from Jerusalem, and where many converts joined Him, and from whence He went to Bethany to raise Lazarus. John’s next baptisms were at Bethabara; thither out of Galilee the Lord Jesus and Andrew repaired after the baptisms in the south, and were baptized. His third place of baptism was near Ænon and Salim, still farther to the north, where the water was still deep though it was summer, after the passover, for there was no ford there; he had to go thither, the water being too shallow at the ordinary fords. John moved gradually northwards towards Herod’s province, where ultimately he was beheaded; Jesus, coming from the north southwards, met John half-way.
The overflow of Jordan dislodged the lion from its lair on the wooded banks. Between Merom and Lake Tiberias the banks are so thickly wooded as often to shut out the view of the water.
Four-fifths of Israel, nine tribes and a half, dwelt west, and one-fifth, two and a half, dwelt east of Jordan. The great altar built by the latter was the witness of the oneness of the two sections. Of the six cities of refuge three were east, three west of Jordan at equal distances.
Jordan enters Gennesareth two miles below the ancient city Julias, or Bethsaida, of Gaulonitis on the east bank. It is seventy feet wide at its mouth, a sluggish, turbid stream. The lake of Tiberias is 653 feet below the Mediterranean level. The Dead Sea is 1,316 feet below the Mediterranean, the springs of Hasbeya are 1,700 above the Mediterranean, so that the valley falls more than 3,000 feet in reaching the north end of the Dead Sea. The bottom descends 1,308 feet lower, in all 2,600 below the Mediterranean. The Jordan, well called “the Descender,” descends eleven feet every mile. Its sinuosity is less in its upper course. Besides the Jabbok it receives the Hieromax (_Yarmuk_) below Gennesareth. From Jerusalem to Jordan is only a distance of twenty miles; in that distance the descent is 3,500 feet, one of the greatest chasms in the earth; Jerusalem is 2,581 feet above the Mediterranean.
Bitumen wells are not far from the Hasbeya in the north. Hot springs abound about Tiberias; and other tokens of volcanic action, tufa, etc., occur near the Yarmuk’s mouth and elsewhere. Only on the east border of Lake Huleh, the land is now well cultivated, and yields largely wheat, maize, rice, etc. Horses, cattle, and sheep, and black buffaloes (the “bulls of Bashan”) pasture around. West of Gennesareth are seen corn, palms, vines, figs, melons, and pomegranates. Cultivation is rare along the lower Jordan, but pink oleanders, arbutus, rose hollyhocks, the purple thistle, marigold, and anemone abound. Tracks of tigers and wild boars, flocks of wild ducks, cranes, and pigeons have been seen by various explorers. There are no bridges earlier than the Roman. The Saracens added or restored some. The Roman bridge of ten arches, was on the route from Tiberias to Gadara. In coincidence with Scripture, the American survey sets down three fords: that at Tarichæa, the second at the Jabbok’s confluence with the Jordan, and that at Jericho. The Jordan seldom now overflows its banks; but Lieutenant Lynch noticed sedge and driftwood high up in the overhanging trees on the banks, showing it still at times overflows the plains. The flood never reaches beyond the lower line of the Ghor, which is covered with vegetation. The plain of the Jordan between the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea is generally eight miles broad, but at the north end of the Dead Sea the hills recede so that the width is twelve miles, of which the west part is named “the plains of Jericho.” The upper terrace immediately under the hills is covered with vegetation; under that is the Arabah or desert plain, barren in its southern part except where springs fertilize it, but fertile in its northern part and cultivated by irrigation. Grove remarks of the Jordan: “So rapid that its course is one continued cataract, so crooked that in its whole lower and main course it has hardly a half mile straight, so broken with rapids that no boat can swim any distance continuously, so deep below the adjacent country that it is invisible and can only be with difficulty approached; refusing all communication with the ocean, and ending in a lake where navigation is impossible, unless for irrigation, it is in fact what its Arabic name signifies, nothing but a ‘great watering place,’ _Sheriat el Khebir_.”
THE CONCORD
HENRY D. THOREAU
The Musketaquid, or Grass-ground River, though probably as old as the Nile or Euphrates, did not begin to have a place in civilized history, until the fame of its grassy meadows and its fish attracted settlers out of England in 1635, when it received the other but kindred name of Concord from the first plantation on its banks, which appears to have been commenced in a spirit of peace and harmony. It will be Grass-ground River as long as grass grows and water runs here; it will be Concord River only while men lead peaceable lives on its banks. To an extinct race it was grass-ground, where they hunted and fished, and is still perennial grass-ground to Concord farmers, who own the great meadows, and get the hay from year to year. “One branch of it,” according to the historian of Concord, for I love to quote so good authority, “rises in the south part of Hopkinton, and another from a pond and a large cedar-swamp in Westborough,” and flowing between Hopkinton and Southborough, through Framingham, and between Sudbury and Wayland, where it is sometimes called Sudbury River, it enters Concord at the south part of the town, and after receiving the North or Assabeth River, which has its source a little farther to the north and west, goes out at the north-east angle, and flowing between Bedford and Carlisle, and through Billerica, empties into the Merrimack at Lowell. Between Sudbury and Wayland the meadows acquire their greatest breadth, and when covered with water, they form a handsome chain of shallow vernal lakes, resorted to by numerous gulls and ducks. Just above Sherman’s Bridge, between these towns, is the largest expanse, and when the wind blows freshly in a raw March day, heaving up the surface into dark and sober billows or regular swells, skirted as it is in the distance with alder-swamps and smoke-like maples, it looks like a smaller Lake Huron, and is very pleasant and exciting for a landsman to row or sail over. The farmhouses along the Sudbury shore, which rises gently to a considerable height, command fine water prospects at this season. The shore is more flat on the Wayland side and this town is the greatest loser by the flood. Its farmers tell me that thousands of acres are flooded now, since the dams have been erected, where they remember to have seen the white honeysuckle or clover growing once, and they could go dry with shoes only in summer. Now there is nothing but blue-joint and sedge and cut-grass there, standing in water all the year round. For a long time, they made the most of the driest season to get their hay, working sometimes till nine o’clock at night, sedulously paring with their scythes in the twilight round the hummocks left by the ice; but now it is not worth the getting when they can come at it and they look sadly round to their wood-lots and upland as a last resource.
[Illustration: THE CONCORD]
It is worth the while to make a voyage up this stream, if you go no farther than Sudbury, only to see how much country there is in the rear of us; great hills, and a hundred brooks, and farmhouses, and barns, and haystacks, you never saw before, and men everywhere. Sudbury, that is _Southborough_ men, and Wayland, and Nine-Acre-Corner men, and Bound Rock, where four towns bound on a rock in the river, Lincoln, Wayland, Sudbury, Concord. Many waves are there agitated by the wind, keeping nature fresh, the spray blowing in your face, reeds and rushes waving; ducks by the hundred, all uneasy in the surf, in the raw wind, just ready to rise, and now going off with a clatter and a whistling like riggers straight from Labrador, flying against the stiff gale with reefed wings, or else circling round first, with all their paddles briskly moving, just over the surf, to reconnoitre you before they leave these parts; gulls wheeling overhead, muskrats swimming for dear life, wet and cold, with no fire to warm them by that you know of; their laboured homes rising here and there like haystacks; and countless mice and moles and winged titmice along the sunny, windy shore; cranberries tossed on the waves and heaving up on the beach, their little red skiffs beating about among the alders;--such natural tumult as proves the last day is not yet at hand. And there stands all around the alders, and birches, and oaks, and maples, full of glee and sap, holding in their buds, until the waters subside. You shall perhaps run aground on Cranberry Island, only some spires of last year’s pipe-grass above water, to show where the danger is, and get as good a freezing there as anywhere on the North-west Coast. I never voyaged so far in all my life. You shall see men you never heard of before, whose names you don’t know, going away down through the meadows with long ducking-guns, with watertight boots wading through the fowl-meadow grass, on bleak, wintry, distant shores, with guns at half-cock, and they shall see teal, blue-winged, green-winged, shelldrakes, whistlers, black ducks, ospreys, and many other wild and noble sights before night, such as they who sit in parlours never dream of. You shall see rude and sturdy, experienced men, keeping their castles, or teaming up their summer’s wood, or chopping alone in the woods, men fuller of talk and rare adventure in the sun and wind and rain, than a chestnut is of meat; who were out not only in ’75 and 1812, but have been out every day of their lives; greater men than Homer, or Chaucer, or Shakespeare, only they never got time to say so; they never took to the way of writing. Look at their fields, and imagine what they might write, if ever they should put pen to paper. Or what have they not written on the face of the earth already, clearing, and burning, and scratching, and harrowing, and ploughing, and subsoiling, in and in, and out and out, and over and over, again and again, erasing what they had already written for want of parchment.