Of course, you have heard of the Garden of Eden, haven’t you? When-I-was-a-boy I thought that when I was old enough to travel I should like to go and see it for myself. I shouldlike to see whether or not the angels with fiery swords were still there. So I asked my Sunday school teacher where the Garden of Eden was. “It’s in the Bible,” said she. That didn’t help me much. But grown-up people have been looking for the Garden of Eden for a great many years and some say they have found it, or rather that they have found the place where it once was, for it does not look like a garden now, much less likea Paradise.
If you were in Damascus and asked a man on the street, “How do you get to the Garden of Eden?” he might think you were crazy, or maybe he might say, “I’m a stranger here myself.” But if he did know the way, he would point to the east and say, “You cross the desert and keep going straight ahead toward the rising sun. In about a month, if you are going by camel, or in a couple of days, if you are going by automobile, you will come to a muddy river. This river is called the Euphrates. Cross the Euphrates and go on a short distance and you will come to a second muddy river. This second muddy river is called the Tigris. These two rivers flow into each other, and near the place where the two rivers join, there you’ll find the Garden of Eden. Youcan’t miss it.”
There is no garden there now and you may wonder how there ever could have been a garden there, for most of it is now mud, and, when there has been no rain for a long time, just baked mud ground, which looks as littl like a Garden of Eden as you could possibly imagine.