We went in a little rocking Ford car down steep and jagged roads
among ribbed and columned cliffs; but the roads below soon failed
us altogether; and the car had to tumble like a tank over rocky
banks and into empty river-beds, long before it came to the sinister
and discoloured landscapes of the Dead Sea. And the distance looks
far enough on the map, and seems long enough in the motor journey,
to make a man feel he has come to another part of the world;
yet so much is it all a single fall of land that even when he gets
out beyond Jordan in the wild country of the Shereef he can still
look back and see, small and faint as if in the clouds, the spire
of the Russian church (I fancy) upon the hill of the Ascension.
And though the story of the swine is attached in truth to another place,
I was still haunted with its fanciful appropriateness to this one,
because of the very steepness of this larger slope and the mystery
of that larger sea. I even had the fancy that one might fish
for them and find them in such a sea, turned into monsters;
sea-swine or four-legged fishes, swollen and with evil eyes,
grown over with sea-grass for bristles; the ghosts of Gadara.
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