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These mountains were given to Gad in the allotment of Joshua and Eleazar. Surely at that time the prospect must have been much more pleasing than at present, or the Gadites would not have been so anxious to receive this district as a permanent possession. True, even now, a few narrow valleys, or wadies, show signs of great fertility, but the greater part is quite uninviting.

I travelled on horseback by way of the Snake River canyon, and arrived early one morning in Jackson's Hole. I can tell you it was a gloomy place, as barren and deserted as some of those Arabian wadies that you have been describing to me. The railroad had long ago been abandoned, and the site of the military camp could scarcely be recognized. An immense cavity with ragged walls showed where Dr.

The support companies were removed from the wadies round Hill 230, as it was plain that the Turks had these most accurately registered, and moved up under shelter of the Mansura cliffs, where they were free from direct observation though bothered by 5.9s neatly dropped just over the edge. Parties took tools out to the advanced companies, Sergt.

The proportion of surface covered by sand and absorbent earth, in Arabia Petraea and the neighboring countries, is small, and the mountains drain themselves rapidly into the wadies or ravines where the torrents are formed; but the beds of earth and disintegrated rock at the bottom of the valleys are of so loose and porous texture, that a great quantity of water is absorbed in saturating them before a visible current is formed on their surface.

Just before this the Battalion, which had been lent to the 155th Brigade, began its devious march across the exposed Kurd Valley, taking advantage of the winding wadies till it reached the el Sireh ridge and lay up in a nullah running up into Kurd Hill, being passed by the rear waves of the K.O.S.B. and R.S.F. advancing to their gallant but ill-fated assault on Outpost Hill.

To join his column with all honor to himself, he had to work back over the wadies he had crossed and circle the gardens that stood in his way. But a hedge pressed too close upon the space he must pass, between it and the enemy, before he could return to his men. An ax glanced beside his ear; he wavered in his saddle.

The bold, sure line of a Roman road divided it, cutting tyrannically through the cowed hovels of the town as an arrow drives through a flock of pigeons. On either side were the dim shapes of great rocks and semi-recumbent cedars. Retiring into shadow were the darker outlines of the surrounding circle of hills, rived by intervals of black night where wadies entered.

The mountain sides were so steep in some places that we were barely able to climb them; many of the wadies, washed by winter torrents, were next to being impassable; and when our way led along the sides of precipitous slopes I shuddered to think of the consequences of a misstep upon the part of my horse.

The Arab has impressed his language upon everything south and east of Judea, so, in his tongue, the old Jebel is the parent of numberless wadies which, intersecting the Roman road now a dim suggestion of what once it was, a dusty path for Syrian pilgrims to and from Mecca run their furrows, deepening as they go, to pass the torrents of the rainy season into the Jordan, or their last receptacle, the Dead Sea.

In the latter case, indeed, river sediment might be very useful as a manure, but it could hardly be needed as a soil; for the growth of vegetation in the wadies of the Sinaitic Peninsula shows that the disintegrated rock of its mountains requires only water to stimulate it to considerable productiveness.