In the morning, a splendid pink sun rises for us alone over a wilderness of reeds. We went to sleep with a feeling that thousands of men wearing black crowns were moving around us and we are surprised to wake up in the middle of a sea of vegetation which appears undisturbed, as at the beginning of the world. All the bedouin tents, given away by their fires, seem to have vanished in the full light of day; hidden away as they are now under the rushes and the fennel, they have become once again as insignificant as insects’ or birds’ nests. There are large pools covered with water-lilies, areas of yellow flowers like golden marbling on the green of the open country and curtains of papyri whose slight tufts can be seen trembling in the wind. Human life is hiding and silent, while untethered mares, trotting round with their foals, amuse themselves around our tethered, rearing, neighing horses. The fullness and intoxication of these wild mornings are what those sunrises over the quaternary marches of pre-historic springtime must have been like.

On we go for two or three hours in grassy terrain, at the foot of the western mountains of the Jordan valley, along muddy plains and pools veiled in high grasses where the river is lost from view. Twice we are in distress, as our horses sink up to their chests in mud.

Trees begin to appear along our route, the first since we left Jerusalem. Here and there, right on the edge of the water, there are groups of nomadic fishermen's dwellings, built in rush wattle, exactly like little lake villages. There are also black encampments, in the middle of which lances are driven into the ground indicating the shaikh's tent. Buffalo herds, rare at the beginning of our stage, become frequent, then countless.

Before us, down below, the ‘Great Snow Shaikh’ still glitters, Hermon, with his white cloak; we have already been travelling towards him for more than two days.