clay tablets bore the cuneiform inscriptions. The road between the two countries ran westward from the Euphrates across the Syrian angle of_the Arabian Desert, past the wells of Palmyra, to Damascus, which was built in the oasis formed by the streams Abana and Pharpar descending from Anti-Lebanon and Hermon. From Damascus there were alternative ways into Egypt; the lower by the coast, and the upper along the edge of the desert plateau east of the Jordan Valley. Aloof, on the rocky ridge of Judea, between these upper and lower ways, was the hill fortress of Jerusalem.
In a monkish map, contemporary with the Crusades, which still hangs in Hereford Cathedral, Jerusalem is marked as at the geometrical centre, the navel, of the world, and on the floor of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem they will show you to this day the precise spot which is the centre. If our study of the geographical realities, as we now know them in their completeness, is leading us to right conclusions, the mediæval ecclesiastics were not far wrong. If the World-Island be inevitably the principal seat of humanity on this Globe, and if Arabia, as the passage-land from Europe to the Indies and from the Northern to the Southern Heartland,
