When Saul and the oxen were once fairly started, they plodded on steadily.

The track lay some way from the river and above it, through the gap in the hills.

Little of the hills did Saul see for he was moving under trees all the way, and when, before noon, he descended into the plain on the other side, he was still for a short time under a canopy of interlacing boughs.

There was no road; the trees were notched to show the track.

In such forests there is little obstruction of brushwood, and over knoll and hollow, between the trunks, the oxen laboured on.