While the missionary journey is to Melek, it is not clear if there is a city of Melek; rather, it seems to be a rural “land” of hamlets and villages without a centralizing city. The candidates for baptism are people from the “land,” and probably from the more distant countryside represented by the “borders of the land which was by the wilderness side.”
Variant: In the printer’s manuscript and the 1830 edition the second sentence also began with “And it came to pass that.… ”