We have a long stage to travel today, so we must be on our way at the crack of dawn. Firstly, we journey along goat tracks which climb very steep hairpin bends. We climb for two hours to the sound of birds singing in a landscape of trees, interrupted by springs and clear streams.

On a mountain to our left are massive grim ruins: this is Qalaat Banyas, an old fortress of almost superhuman proportions, the like of which men of today no longer have the time to build. So many times it was taken and retaken in the time of the crusades by both Franks and Saracens, since it dominates the route between Damascus and Jerusalem. It has been abandoned for centuries, though it is said that today it is inhabited by brigands. It takes up as much space as a whole town. Oaks and turpentine trees grow from the top of its black towers which now watch over only wilderness. From the highest point, we glimpse for the last time the marshlands of the Upper Jordan, the humid region of water-lilies and papyri. It is endlessly distant beneath our feet; it is like the blurred outline of an ocean seen from the top of some gigantic cliff top.

We are at a high altitude and the air has become cold and dry.

Suddenly, there are no more trees, no more vegetation, no more flowers, as once again we enter a rocky region, a sad bare region, and, as we turn a corner, suddenly the ‘Grand Shaikh’, ‘Hermon with his white cloak’, appears, unexpected and thrilling above our heads, standing out in hard outline against the sky. There he is close by, he who for three days has seemed to be fleeing from us. As soon as he appeared, the air turned icy and he can be heard everywhere like the sound of the sea: his sparkling white cloak is melting in the sun, dissolving into countless cascades which disappear into the marshland below, and, after playing great symphonies on the way, causing the Jordan to flow more swiftly around Caesarea and so many ancient ruins.