There is the Lake of Galilee as you see it from Gadara, with the hills of Naphtali above it, and Hermon filling all the north. There is the perspective of the Jordan Valley as you look up from over Jericho, between the bare ranges of Gilead and Ephraim, with the winding ribbon of the river's jungle, and the top of Hermon like a white cloud in the infinite distance. There is the forest of Gilead, where you ride, two thousand feet high, under the boughs of great trees creaking and rustling in the wind, with all Western Palestine before you. There is the moonlight view out of the bush on the northern flank of Tabor, the leap of the sun over the edge of Bashan, summer morning in the Shephelah, and sunset over the Mediterranean, when you see it from the gateway of the ruins on Samaria down the glistening Vale of Barley. Even in the barest provinces you get many a little picture that lives with you for life—a chocolate-coloured bank with red poppies against the green of the prickly pear hedge above it, and a yellow lizard darting across; a river-bed of pink oleanders flush with the plain; a gorge in Judaea, where you look up between limestone walls picked out with tufts of grass and black-and-tan goats cropping at them, and deep blue sky over all. . . .
There is the view from the Mount of Olives, down twenty miles of desert hill-tops to the deep blue waters, with the wall of Moab glowing on the further side like burnished copper, and staining the blue sea red with its light. There is the view of the Dead Sea through the hazy afternoon, when across the yellow foreground of Jeshimon the white Lisan rises like a pack of Greenland ice from the blue waters, and beyond it the Moab range, misty, silent, and weird. . . . And, above all, there is the view from Engedi under the full moon, when the sea is bridged with gold, and the eastern mountains are black with a border of opal. But, whether there be beauty or not, there is always on all the heights that sense of space and distance which comes from Palestine's high position between the great desert and the great sea.
—From "The Historical Geography of the Holy Land"
