Wadi Qelt is a desert gorge running from the hills of Jerusalem down to Jericho, in the West Bank of Palestine, where the footpath is a Roman aqueduct two thousand years old and a monastery of blue domes hangs from the cliff halfway down, the route of the road in the parable of the Good Samaritan, walked in a few hours from the spring at the top to the oasis at the bottom. An aqueduct works only if it falls at a steady, gentle gradient, which is why the channel doubles as a footpath, running along the wall of the gorge without climbing or dropping, with the streambed below, dry stone most of the year and brown floodwater after the winter rain; midway up the wadi the spring of Ein Fawwar does not flow steadily but beats, surging and falling back on a siphon in the rock. The monastery of St George of Choziba is built into a natural cave in the cliff, founded in the fifth century by monks who followed the hermits into the desert, and behind its blue domes are cool stone rooms still home to a small Greek Orthodox community, with a skull chapel of the monks killed by the Persians in 614 and the rock face above pitted with the dark openings of hermit cells reached by ladders.
By long tradition this is the brook Cherith, where the ravens brought the hiding prophet Elijah bread and meat each morning and evening, and the road in the parable was a real one with a real bandit problem, which is the point of the story. The gorge is a flyway in spring and autumn, when steppe buzzards, black kites and short-toed snake eagles ride the thermals over the cliffs. The walk ends at Jericho, the lowest town on Earth, and the road from Jerusalem passes the monastery lookout for those who do not walk. Wadi Qelt is a canyon with a water channel for a path, and the monks are still in the cliff.