aroundworldortra00peebiala-1

CITY OF PROPHETS AND APOSTLES. 343
directed us to such localities as were yet magnetically aflame
with ancient marvels. Not a spoken word of Jesus was
lost ; not a touch dies away into nothingness ; the universe
knows no annihilation. To this, psychometry is a living
witness. While Mr. Knight was conversing with us, this
passage flashed upon my mind like a sunbeam :
—
" Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked with us by the
way, and while he opened to us the scriptures ? " (Luke xxiv. 62.)
MAR SABA AND THE DEAD SEA.
Journeying Jordan-ward, we met crowds, with their
heavily-laden donkeys and camels, on their way to Jerusalem.
The morrow was market-day. Syrian women still
bear burdens upon their heads. Late in the afternoon we
came to our tenting-place in a grassless, shrubless valley,
rimmed around with sharply-defined hills. Near us was
Mar Saba, a weird convent castle. No pen-picture can do
justice to this Oriental edifice, with adjoining gorges, perpendicular
cliffs, and rock-hewn chambers, where monks
nightl}^ mouth their midnight prayers. Within this halfmartial,
half-chiirchal structure are not only numerous small
chapels, covered with old 'pictures and Greek inscriptions,
but St. Saba's sepulcher, and a vault filled with fourteen
thousand skulls of martyred monks.
The country is indescribably rough, ragged, and mountainous
; the results of terrible convulsions are everywhere
visible. Repairing to our tent-apartment from Mar Saba,
just at dark, an Arab lad, nearly naked, brought us specimens
of bituminous rock ; it seemed filled with a species of
petroleum. These dark, dismal, pitchy cliffs, with the bitumen,
sulphur, niter, and phosphoric stones found in all this
region, account for the plains of fire, or the destruction of
the " five cities of the plain," — Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah,
Zeboim, and Zoar, — upon purely natural principles. Having
seen burning -^tna, stood upon sulphurous Vesuvius,
walked upon Solfatara's cooled yet tremulous crater, as well