St. George is but a servant and the Dragon is but a symbol,
but it is precisely about the central reality, the mystery of Christ
and His mastery of the powers of darkness, that this very paradox
has proved itself a fact.
Going down from Jerusalem to Jericho I was more than once
moved by a flippant and possibly profane memory of the swine
that rushed down a steep place into the sea. I do not insist on
the personal parallel; for whatever my points of resemblance to a pig
I am not a flying pig, a pig with wings of speed and precipitancy;
and if I am possessed of a devil, it is not the blue devil of suicide.
But the phrase came back into my mind because going down to
the Dead Sea does really involve rushing down a steep place.
Indeed it gives a strange impression that the whole of Palestine
is one single steep place. It is as if all other countries lay
flat under the sky, but this one country had been tilted sideways.
This gigantic gesture of geography or geology, this sweep
as of a universal landslide, is the sort of thing that is never
conveyed by any maps or books or even pictures. All the pictures
of Palestine I have seen are descriptive details, groups of costume
or corners of architecture, at most views of famous places;
they cannot give the bottomless vision of this long descent.
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