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Inexorable, passionless though hope and fear may pray, 'Sun! stand thou still on Gibeon; and thou moon! in the valley of Ajalon, the tramp of the hours goes on. The poets paint them as a linked chorus of rosy forms, garlanded, and clasping hands as they dance onwards. So they may be to some of us at some moments.
The Moslems, in 637, first captured Damascus; subsequently they approached Jerusalem across the Jordan. The First Crusaders came through Asia Minor and won a decisive victory at Antioch; thence they came southward along the coast, through Ramleh, and up the Valley of Ajalon, their advance through the mountains being unopposed.
Slowly the ecstatic lady continued to circulate, the assembly stood at gaze "like Joshua's moon in Ajalon," and presently she was in the vertical position of a swimmer, the phenomenon concluding by her restoration to terra firma. This wonder was accomplished by the magic power of a diabolical Rose which the lady carried in her bodice.
Squirrels in a cage! He's going twice as fast as us. Just you wait a few years, my shining friend, and we'll take steps that will amaze you. We'll Joshua you!" Yes, that is our dream: to turn all earth into the Yale of Ajalon at our pleasure. So far, we can drag out the dawn to twice its normal length in these latitudes.
'Shade of King Horam, what hosts of men have fallen round that citadel of yours. On what camps and columns has it looked down through the centuries, since first you saw the strange Hebrews burst with the sunrise across the hills, and chase your countrymen down Ajalon that day when the victors felt the very sun conspiring with them to achieve the unexampled length of battle.
Like Joshua, in the vale of Ajalon, Don Ferdinand was supposed to have commanded the sun to stand still for a season, and to have been obeyed. Otherwise, how could the passage of the river, which was only concluded at six in the evening, and the complete overthrow of the Protestant forces, have all been accomplished within the narrow space of an April twilight?
Then the women sang "Who is the King of Glory?" and the rich bass of the men's voices answered "The Lord strong and mighty!" Ever and again they sang, until Jerusalem lay dark and the red fires in the valleys had burned out. "The night is far spent for one who hath come the way from Ajalon," Lazarus said at last. "Bearing orange boughs," Joel added.
This had the effect of making the future railhead at Ludd. Situate at the cross-roads where the Valley of Ajalon debouches upon the Plain, and the ancient route from Jerusalem to Jaffa crosses the yet more ancient route from Egypt and Gaza to Acre and Damascus, the neighbourhood of Ramleh and Ludd has for many centuries been the site of an important town.
Why not, according to the astronomical ignorance of those days, let her sail away, unconsorted by the sun, far beyond the valley of Ajalon? There was a reason, here, of secret, unobtruded science: if the sun stopped, the moon must stop too; that is to say, both apparently: the fact being that the earth must, for the while, rest on its axis.
How many of our superficial thinkers have been staggered at the great miracle recorded of Joshua; and how few, even of the deeper sort, comparatively, may have discerned its aptness, its science, and its anterior likelihood: "Sun! stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, moon, in the valley of Ajalon."
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