JERUSALEM.

From the traditional spot on the Mount of Olives where Christ wept over the city.

THE
HOLY LAND
PAINTED BY
JOHN FULLEYLOVE, R.I.
DESCRIBED BY
JOHN KELMAN, D.D.
A&C BLACK L^TD
4.5.6 SOHO SQUARE, LONDON, W.1.

Printed in Great Britain by R. & R. Clark, Limited, Edinburgh.
First Edition, with 93 illustrations, published in October 1902
Reprinted in 1904 and 1912
Second Edition, revised, with 32 illustrations, published in 1923

Preface

The secrets of satisfactory travel are mainly two—to have certain questions ready to ask; and to detach oneself from preconceptions, so as to find not what one expects, or desires to find, but what is there. These rules I endeavoured to follow while in the Holy Land. As to this book, I have tried to write it “with my eye on the object”—to describe things as they were seen, and to see them again while describing them. The extent to which this ideal has been reached, or missed, will be the measure of the book’s success or failure.

No attempt has been made to add anything original to the scientific knowledge of Palestine. For that task I am not qualified either by sufficient travel or by expert study of the subject. On the other hand, this is not merely an itinerary, or journal of experiences and adventures of the road. I have freely introduced notes from my journal in illustration of characteristics of the country and its life, and have claimed the privilege of digressing in various directions. But the main object has been to give a record of impressions rather than of incidents.

These impressions are arranged in three parts, as they bear upon the geography, the history, and the spirit of Syria. They have been corrected and amplified by as wide reading as the short time at my disposal allowed. A few of the books read or consulted are referred to in footnotes, but many others have helped me. To append a list of them to so small a contribution to the subject as this, would be but to remind the reader of the old fable, Nascetur ridiculus mus. I must, however, acknowledge with much gratitude my obligation to two volumes above all others—Major (now Colonel) Conder’s Tent Work in Palestine, and Professor George Adam Smith’s Historical Geography of the Holy Land. To these every chapter is indebted more or less, some chapters very deeply. Among the pleasures which this task has brought with it, none is greater than the intimate acquaintance with these two works which it entailed.

With Professor Smith I have a more personal bond of obligation than the invaluable help I have had from his book. Last year we rode and camped together from Hebron to Damascus, back over the eastern spurs of Hermon to the coast, and north by Tyre and Sidon to Beyrout. All who were in that party know, as no words can express, how much insight and suggestion we owed to the leader who interpreted the land for us so brilliantly and with such kindness. For my own part I feel that at times it has been difficult to distinguish between impressions of my own and those which have been unconsciously borrowed from him. If I have borrowed freely, I am sure he will allow me to count that among the many privileges of our long acquaintance, and as a token of my admiration for his genius and gratitude for his friendship.

JOHN KELMAN.

Edinburgh, 1902.

PUBLISHERS’ NOTE

For the purposes of this reissue the author has revised the work and slightly abridged it, but no attempt has been made to describe the changed conditions consequent on the War.

September 1923.

Contents

List of Illustrations

SKETCH-MAP OF PALESTINE.

PART I
THE LAND

A journey through the Holy Land may reasonably be expected to be in some sort a sacramental event in a man’s life. Spiritual things are always near us, and we feel that we have a heritage in them; yet they constantly elude us, and need help from the senses to make them real and commanding. Such sacramental help must surely be given by anything that brings vividly to our realisation those scenes and that life in the midst of which the Word was made flesh. The more clearly we can gain the impression of places and events in Syria, the more reasonable and convincing will Christian faith become.

Everything which revives the long past has power to quicken the imagination, and site-hunters and relic-hunters in any field have much to say for themselves. Now, apart altogether from the Christian story, Syria has the spell of a very ancient land. The mounds that break the level on the plain of Esdraelon represent six hundred years of buried history for every thirty feet of their height. Among the first objects pointed out to us in Palestine was a perforated stone which serves now as ventilator for a Christian meeting-house in Lebanon, but which was formerly a section of Zenobia’s aqueduct. In Syria the realisation of the past is continual, and the centuries mingle in a solemn confusion. Its modern life seems of little account, and is in no way the rival of the ancient. In London, or even in Rome, the new world jostles the old; in Palestine the old is so supreme as to seem hardly conscious of the new.

All this reaches its keenest point in connection with men’s worship; and what a long succession of worshippers have left their traces here! The primitive rock-hewn altar, the Jewish synagogue, the Greek temple, the Christian church, the Mohammedan mosque—all have stood in their turn on the same site. His must be a dull soul surely who can feel no sympathy with the Moslem, or even with the heathen worship. These religions too had human hearts beating in them, and wistful souls trying by their help to search eternity. To the wise these dead faiths are full of meaning. Through all their clashing voices there sounds the cry of man to his God—a cry more often heard and answered than we in our self-complacency are sometimes apt to think.

The sacramental quality of the Holy Land is of course felt most by those who seek especially for memories and realisations of Jesus Christ. Within the pale of Christianity there are several different ways of regarding the land as holy, and most of them lead to disappointment. The Greek and Roman Catholic Churches vie with one another in their passion for sites and relics there, and seem to lose all sense of the distinction between the sublime and the grotesque in their eagerness for identifications. A Protestant counterpart to this mistaken zeal is that of the huntsmen of the fields of prophecy, who cannot see a bat fluttering about a ruin or a mole turning up the earth without turning ecstatically to Hebrew prophetic books,—as if these were not the habits of bats and moles all the world over. Apart from either of these, there are others less orthodox but equally superstitious who have some vague notion of occult and magic qualities which differentiate this from all other regions of the earth. Benjamin Disraeli and Pierre Loti are representatives of this point of view. The former is persuaded that the land “must be endowed with marvellous and peculiar qualities”; and the hero of his Tancred seeks and finds there supernatural communications from the unseen world. The latter tells in his Jérusalem how he went to Palestine with the hope that some experience might be given him which would revive his lost faith in Christianity. He returned, a disappointed sentimentalist. The saddening and yet fascinating narrative reaches its climax in Gethsemane, where, beating his brow in the darkness against an olive tree, he waited (as he himself confesses) for he knows not what. His words are: “Non, rien: personne ne me voit, personne ne m’écoute, personne ne me répond.”

The belief in miracle is always difficult: nowhere is it so difficult as on the traditional site. The earth is just earth there as elsewhere; and the sky seems almost farther above it. The rock is solid rock; the water, air, trees, hills are uncompromising terrestrial realities. It is wiser to abandon the attempt at forcing the supernatural to reveal itself, and to turn to the human side of things as the surest way of ultimately arriving at the divine. When that has been deliberately done the reward is indeed magnificent. An unexpected and overwhelming sense of reality comes upon the sacred narrative. These places and the life that inhabited them are actualities, and not merely items in an ancient book or the poetic background of a religious experience. More particularly when you look upward to the hills, you find that your help still cometh from them. Their great sky-lines are unchanged, and the long vistas and clear-cut edges which you see are the same which filled the eyes of prophets and apostles, and of Jesus Christ Himself.

It is this, especially as it regards the Saviour of mankind, that is the most precious gain of Syrian travel. Now and again it comes on one with overpowering force. Sailing up the coast, this impression haunted the long hours. As we gazed on the mountains, and the image of them sank deeper and deeper, the thought grew clear in all its wonder that somewhere among these heights He had wandered with His disciples, and sat down by the sides of wells to rest. In camp at Jericho we were confronted by an uncouth, blunt-topped mountain mass, thrusting itself aggressively up on the Judean side, in itself a very rugged and memorable mountain-edge. Not till the light was fading, and the bold outline struck blacker and blacker against the sky, did the fact suddenly surprise us that this was Quarantana, the Mountain of Temptation. Then we understood that wilderness story in all its unprotected loneliness, and we almost saw the form of the Son of Man.

Thus, as day after day he rides through the country, the traveller finds new meaning in the words, “I have glorified Thee on the earth.” An inexpressible sense possesses him of the reality of Jesus Christ. These pathways were, indeed, once trodden by His feet; through these valleys He carried the lamp of life; under these stars He prayed; through this sunshine He lay in a rock-hewn grave. To a man’s dying day he will be nearer Christ for this. The chief sorrow of the Christian life for most of us is the difficulty of realisation. At times we have all had to flog up our imagination to the “realising sense” of Christ. After this journey that necessity is gone. It is almost as if in long past years we had seen Him there, and heard Him speak. The divine mystery of Christ is all the more commanding when the human fact of Jesus has become almost a memory rather than a belief.

CHAPTER I
THE COLOUR OF THE LAND

Every land has a scheme of colour of its own, and while form and outline are the first, they are not the most permanent nor the deepest impressions which a region makes upon its travellers. It is the colour of the land which slowly and almost unconsciously sinks in upon the beholder day by day. We observe the outlines of a scene; we remember its colouring.

This is especially true of Palestine. Nothing about it is more distinctive than its colour-scheme; and nothing is perhaps less familiar to those who have not actually seen it. Syria may be treated as if it were Italy, or even Egypt—in hard intense colouring; or it may be treated as if it were England, in strong tones but with a certain homely softening of edge. Neither of these modes is true to Syria. Its edge-lines are sharp, but they are traced in such faint shades as to produce an effect very difficult either to reproduce or to describe, and yet impossible to forget.

The colours are manifold, and they vary considerably with the seasons of the year. Yet the bare hill-sides (which form the greater masses of colour in most landscapes), the desert, and the distant mountain ranges, are ever the same. Most travellers make their first acquaintance with Palestine in Judea, entering it from Jaffa. When the plains are behind you, and you are in among the valleys up which the road climbs to Jerusalem, you at once recognise the fact that a new and surprising world of colour has been entered. In the valley-bottom there may be but a dry watercourse, or perhaps a rusty strip of cultivated land; but above you there is sure to be the outcrop of white and grey limestone. In some places it appears in characterless and irregular blotches whose grotesque intrusion seems to confuse and caricature the mountain side. This is, however, only occasional, and the usual and characteristic appearance is that of long and flowing lines of striation which generally follow pretty closely the curve of the sky-line. The colours of these strata are many. You have rich brown bands, dark red, purple, yellow, and black ones; but these are toned down by the dominant grey of the broader bands, and the general effect is an indistinct grey with a bluish tinge, to which the coloured bands give a curiously artificial and decorative appearance. As a work of Art Judea is most interesting; as part of Nature it is almost incredible.

In the northern district, near Bethel, everything yields to stone, and the brighter colours disappear. The mountain slopes shew great naked ribs and bars—the gigantic stairs of Jacob’s dream. On the heights your horse slips and picks his way over long stretches of

THE MOUNT OF TEMPTATION, FROM JERICHO.

The Mount of Temptation is one of the spurs of the mountains which overlook the deep valley of the Jordan on its western side. The central peak is the traditional site of the Temptation of Christ.

smooth white rock; in the valleys the soil is buried under innumerable boulders and fragments of broken rock.

The whole land is stony, but Judea shews this at its worst. It is an immense stone wedge thrust into Palestine from east to west. South of it lie the fertile valleys of Hebron, with their wealth of orchard and plantation. North of it open the “fat valleys” of Samaria, winding among rounded hills planted to the top with olives, or terraced for vines. Over these, here and there, a red cliff may hang, or the irrigation ditches may furrow and interline a vale of dove-coloured clay. But while the green of Judea is for the most part but the thinnest veil of sombre olive-green, a mere setting for the rocks, Samaria is a really green land, variegated by stone.

In the north of Samaria the land sinks gradually upon the Plain of Esdraelon. As we saw it first it was covered by a yellow mist through which nothing could be seen distinctly. But afterwards, viewed in its whole expanse from the top of Tabor in clear sunlight, the great battlefield of the Eastern world appeared in characteristic garb—“red in its apparel,” with the very colour of the blood which has so often drenched it.

Galilee repeats the limestone outcrop of Judea, but in far gentler fashion, the undergrowth and trees softening almost every landscape, and the mountains leading the eye along bold sky-lines to rest on that form of beauty and of light which masters and watches over the whole land—the white Hermon. Hermon is always white. But sometimes when clouds are forming rapidly around its summit, it is a wonder of brightness. On no other mountain, surely, was it that “a bright cloud overshadowed” Jesus and his three friends. Even now, on many a summer day, Hermon is lost in a changing glory of frosted silver, when the sun strikes upon its cloudwork, and the long trails of snow in the corries stream towards the plain below.

The limestone runs on into Phœnicia, and seems to grow whiter there. Nothing could be finer than the valleys east of Tyre at harvest time, when the fields of ripe grain wave below cliffs white as marble, and the whole scene, with its foreground of brilliantly robed reapers, is a study in white and gold. But in the higher valleys of Phœnicia the rock breaks through a rich red soil, which in parts is gemmed with the curious and beautiful “Adonis stones”—little egg-shaped bits of sandstone, dyed to the heart of them with deep crimson, as if they had been steeped in newly shed blood. Little wonder if the women of old days “wept for Tammuz” at the sight of them.

The thing most characteristic of Syrian colour is its faintness and delicacy. Pierre Loti, who in this matter is a witness worthy of all regard, is constantly ending the colour adjectives in his Syrian books with -atre—“yellowish,” “bluish,” “greenish,” etc. The general impression is of dim and faded tints, put on, as it were, in thin washes. In the stoniest regions there seems to be no colour at all, as if the sun had bleached them. The curious colouring of the Judean valleys, which has been described, is never aggressive, and it takes some carefulness of observation to see anything in them more than a blue green in the sparsely-planted olive-groves fading into faint greenish grey above. The valleys of ripe sesame and vetch are washed into the picture in pale yellow or yellow ochre. Where tilled earth appears it is generally a variegated expanse of light brown, or pink, or terra-cotta. The eastern slopes of Hermon, below the snow, shew vertical stripes like those of the haircloth and jute garments of the peasants, washed out with rain and sun; or they are spread upon the roots of the mountain like some vast Indian shawl cunningly and minutely interwoven with red and green threads, but worn almost threadbare. As you approach a village in strong sunlight, you see it as a dark brown mass shaded angularly with black; but it seems to float above a mist of the airiest purple sheen, where the thinly-planted iris-flowers stand among the graves before the walls. The Sea of Galilee, as we saw it, was light blue; the Dead Sea was light green, with a haze of evaporation rendering it even fainter in the distance.

If this be true of the near, it is doubly so of the distant, landscape. In a country so mountainous and so sheer-cleft as Palestine, distant views are seen for the most part as vistas, the “land that is very far off” revealing itself at the end of some V-shaped gorge or towering over some intermediate mountain range. Of course distant views are faint in all lands, but in Palestine the clear air keeps them distinct with clean-cut edge, however faint they are. Thus there is perhaps nothing more delicate and spirituel in the world than those faint dreamlike mountains in the extreme distance of Syrian vistas—the hills east of Jordan grey, with a mere suspicion of blue in them, or the lilac and heliotrope mountains of the desert which form the magic background of Damascus looking eastward.

Reference has been made to the irises (the “lilies of the field”) near villages. These are but typical of the general sheen of that carpet of wild flowers which every spring-time spreads over the land. They are of every colour. There are scarlet poppies and crimson anemones, blue dwarf cornflowers, yellow marigolds, white narcissus (said to be the Rose of Sharon); but here they seldom grow in patches of strong hue. Each flower blooms apart, and the sheen of them is delicate and suggestive rather than gorgeous. They seem to share the reticence and shyness of the land, and tinge rather than paint it. Even the animal life conforms to this dainty rule; lizards are everywhere, but their colouring is that of their environment, now stone-grey, now wine-red, now straw-coloured. Chameleons are anything you please—green in growing corn, black among basalt rocks. Tortoises are blue at the sulphur springs, brown or slate in the muddy banks of streams.

This faintness is, however, but half the truth of the colour of Syria. Everywhere it is rendered emphatic by certain vivid splashes of the most daring brilliance. Wherever springs are found you have instances of this contrast, and Palestine is essentially the land of bright foregrounds thrown up against dim backgrounds.

The Jordan valley is the greatest example, running south along its whole length, “a green serpent” between the pale mountains of the east and the faint mosaic of the western land. Its jungle is uncompromisingly distinct throughout the entire course, and its colour is living green, with a white flash of broken water or a quiet flow of brown bursting here and there through the verdure. Other streams are similarly marked, with luxurious undergrowth of reeds, varied by clumps of hollyhock or edged with winding ribbons of magenta oleander. But the most striking oases of this kind are the valley of Shechem and the city of Damascus. There is a hill seldom visited by tourists, but well worth climbing, set in the broad vale of Makhna, right opposite Jacob’s Well. North and south past the foot of this hill runs the broad valley. It is edged on the western side by the continuous line of the central mountain range of Samaria—continuous except for one great gash, where, as if a giant’s sword had cleft the range, the valley of Shechem enters that of Makhna at right angles. The whole landscape is in dim colour except for that valley of Shechem. Ebal and Gerizim guard its eastern end, dull and rocky both. But the valley which they guard is fed by countless springs and intersected by rivulets, so that below the shingle of their slopes there spreads a fan-shaped expanse of intensely vivid green, like a carpet flung out from Nablus between the mountains. The lower edge of the green is broken by the white wall of the enclosure of Jacob’s Well, and the cupola of Joseph’s tomb. Damascus—surely the most bewitching of cities—owes its witchery to the same cause. The river Abana spends itself upon the city. As you approach it from the south it discloses itself as a mass of bold outline and high colour in the midst of a great field of verdure, flanked on the west by precipitous hills of sand and rock—sheer tilted desert. When you climb those hills you see the white city, jewelled with her minarets of many hues, resting on a cloth of dark green velvet whose edge is sharply defined. Immediately beyond that edge the sand begins, stretching into the farther desert through paler and paler shades of rose and yellow to the lilac hills in the eastern distance.

It is not only the water-springs, however, that provide the land with vivid foregrounds. Loti describes a little sand-hill in the desert “all bespangled with mica,” which “sets itself out, shining like a silver tumulus.” Such bold and detached features are by no means uncommon even on the west of the Jordan. The name of the cliff “Bozez” in Michmash means “shining,” and there are many shining rocks in these valleys—either masses of smooth limestone, or dark basalt rocks, from whose dripping surface the sun is reflected in blinding splendour after rain. Even without such reflection the sudden intrusion of black rock will often give character to an otherwise neutral landscape.

But the sun is the magician of Syria, who bleaches her and then throws up against his handiwork the boldest contrasts of strong light and shade. No one who has seen the crimson flush of sunset on the olives, or the sudden change of a grey Judean hill-side to rich orange, or the whole eastern cliffs of the Sea of Galilee turned to the likeness of flesh-coloured marble, will be likely to forget the picture. Loti’s wonderful description of desert sunsets—“incandescent violet, and the red of burning coals”—is not overdrawn. Shadows will transform the poorest into the richest colouring. The tawny desert changes to the luscious dark of lengthening indigo at the foot of a great rock; and the shadows of clouds float across Esdraelon, changing the red plain to deep wine-colour as they pass. Silhouettes are of daily occurrence in that crisp air. One scene in particular made an indelible impression. It was a village on terraced heights, thrown black against a gold and heliotrope sunset. The figures of Arabs standing or sitting statuesque upon the sky-line were magnified to the appearance of giant guardians of the walls, and the miserable little hamlet might have been an impregnable fortress.

The inhabitants have entered with full sympathy into the spirit of this play of foreground. They are spectacular if they are anything. Their religion forbids them all practice of the graphic arts, and most of the Western pictures which are to be seen in churches are execrable enough to reconcile them to the restriction. But they obey the law in small things only to break it by transforming themselves and their surroundings into one great picture. Their clothing, their buildings, and their handiwork are a brilliant foil to the dull background. From them Venice learned her bright colouring, and there are few English homes which have not borrowed something from them.

In part, this is thrust upon them by the sun. The interiors of houses are all Rembrandt work, as Conder has happily remarked. The rooms are dark, and the windows very small. But when the sun shines through the apertures, their rich brown rafters and red pottery gleam out of the shadow. One such interior is especially memorable, where a bar of intense sunlight lit up the skin and many-coloured garments of children sitting in the window-sill, while through the open door the green grass of the courtyard shone. Still more wonderful is the effect when one opens the door of a silk-winding room in sunlight, and sees the colours wound on the great spindles, or when one enters the dark archways of the bazaars where long shafts of light striking down slantwise upon a shining patch below turn the brown shadow of the arch to indigo. The natives see this, and love the lusciousness of it. They build minarets cased with emerald tiles, or domes of copper which will soon be coated with verdigris. Of late years a further touch has been added in the red-tiled roofs which are already so popular in the towns.

In proof of the genius of the Easterns for colour, nothing need be mentioned but their carpets and their glass. The glass of old windows in mosques beggars all description. It is an experience rather than a spectacle. The panes are so minute, and so destitute of picture or of pattern, that they are unnoticed in

CANA OF GALILEE.

This is the village of Kafr Kenná, believed to be the Cana of the New Testament, where our Lord performed His first miracle at the marriage feast.

detail, and the general effect is that of a religious atmosphere in which all one’s ordinary thoughts and feelings are lost in the overpowering sense of “something rich and strange.” After the magic of that light, with its blended purple and amber and ruby, the finest Western work seems harsh. It is hardly light; it is illuminated shadow. The rugs and carpets, with their intricate colouring, are more familiar and need not be described. The finest of them are of silk, and their delicacy of shade is marvellous. The patterns constantly elude the eye, promising and just almost reaching some recognisable figure, only to lose themselves in a bright maze. It is said that they were suggested by the meadows of variegated flowers; but they are intenser and more passionate—as if their designers had felt that their task was to supply an even stronger counterpart to the faint landscape.

The gay clothing of the East is proverbial. Even the poorest peasants are resplendent. “Fine linen” is still the mark of the rich man, but Lazarus can match him for “scarlet.” In certain parts the men are clad in coats of sheepskin, the wool being inside, and protruding like a heavy fringe along the edges. Almost everybody’s shoes are bright red. In one place we saw a shepherd whose sheepskin coat had met with an accident, and the patch which filled the vacant space in the raw brown back of him was of an elaborate tartan cloth. In another village all the men wore crimson aprons. When our camp-servants were on the march they seemed to be in sackcloth, or in thick grey felt which suggested fire-proof apparel; but when they reached a town they blossomed out into a rainbow. Children playing in a village street, women at the wells, statuesque shepherds standing solitary in the fields, all seemed arranged as for a tableau. Everybody official—the railway guard, the escort, even the mourner at a funeral—is immensely conscious of his dignity; and on him descends the spirit of Solomon in all his glory. The man you hire to guide you for a walk of half a dozen miles will disappear into his house and emerge in gorgeous array. One of our guides decked himself in flowing yellow robes and marched before us ostentatiously carrying in front of him a weapon which appeared to be a cross between a carving-knife and a reaping-hook, through a land peaceful as an infant school. A procession marching to some sacred place across a plain lights the whole scene as with a string of coloured lanterns. Even where the natives have adopted European dress the fez is retained, and a crowd of men, seen from above, is always ruddy.

The delight in strong colour goes even one step farther. The rich hues of the flesh in sunny lands seem to suit the landscape, and one soon learns to sympathise with the native preference for dusky and brown complexions. To them a fair skin appears leprous, though bright flaxen or auburn hair are regarded with great admiration. Not satisfied, however, with their natural beauty, the Syrians paint and tattoo their flesh in the most appalling manner, and redden their finger-nails with henna. Fashionable ladies, and in some places men also, paint their eyebrows to meet, and touch in their eyelids with antimony, whose blue shadow is supposed to convey the impression of irresistible eyelashes. In towns where “the Paris modes” are the sign of smartness, some of the girls paint their faces pink and white—faces painted with a vengeance, with a thick and shining enamel which transforms the wearers into animated wax dolls of the weirdest appearance. But that which shocks the unsophisticated traveller most is the tattooing of many of the women. Some of them are marked with small arrow-head blue patches on forehead, cheeks, and chin; others are lined and scored like South Sea Islanders, and their lower lips transformed entirely from red to blue.

All this is savage enough, but it illustrates in its own crude way that delight in strong colour which transforms the human life of the East into such a vivid foreground to the faint landscape. In the dress there is artistic instinct as well as barbaric splendour, and in the carpets, the mosaics, and the glass there is brilliant and matchless artistry. As to the general principle which has been stated in regard to natural colouring, this is as it always must have been. These were the quiet hues of the land, and these the brilliant points of strong light in it which Christ’s eyes saw, and which gave their colour to the Gospels.

CHAPTER II
THE DESERT

Environment counts for much in national life. A country knows itself, and asserts itself, as in contrast with what is immediately over its border; or it retains connection with the neighbouring life, and is what it is partly because the region next it overflows into its life. At any rate, to understand anything more than the colour of a land—indeed even to understand that, as we shall see—it is necessary to begin outside it and know something of its surroundings. For Palestine, environment means sea and desert—sea along a straight line for the most part unbroken by any crease or wrinkle of coast-edge which might serve for a harbour, and desert thrown round all the rest, except the mountainous north. Palestine is a great oasis—a fertile resting-place for travellers making the grand journey from Egypt to Mesopotamia; between which kingdoms she was ever also the buffer state in war and politics. These nations were her visitors, her guests, her terrors, but they never were her neighbours. Her neighbours are the sea and the desert.

The sea she never took for a friend. With no harbour, nor any visible island to tempt her to adventure, and no sailor blood in her veins, she hated and feared the sea, and thought of it with ill-will. There is little of the wistfulness of romance in her thought of the dwellers in its uttermost parts; little of the sense of beauty in her poetry of the breaking waves. She views the Phœnician trader who does business on the ocean as a person to be astonished at rather than to be counted heroic. She exults in the fact that God has his path on the great waters, but has no wish to make any journey there herself. Her angels plant their feet upon the sea, and she looks forward almost triumphantly to the time when it will be dried up and disappear. Meanwhile its inaccessible huge depth is for her poets a sort of Gehenna—a fit place for throwing off evil things beyond the chance of their reappearing. Sins are to be cast into it, and offenders, with millstones at their necks.

The desert was Israel’s real neighbour. South-east from her it stretched for a thousand miles. From N.N.E. round through E. and S. to W. it hemmed her in. To a Briton, watching the departure of the Bagdad dromedary post from Damascus, the desert seems infinitely more appalling and unnatural than the sea. For ten days these uncanny beasts and men will travel, marching (it is said) twenty hours out of every twenty-four. The stretch of dreariness which opens to the Western imagination, as you watch the lessening specks in the tawny distance, is indescribable. To the Eastern it is not so, and it never was so. He knows its horrors, and yet he loves it. The modern Arab calls it Nefud (i.e. “exhausted,” “spent”), and, according to Palgrave, there are in the Arabian desert sands no less than 600 feet in depth. Yet with all its horrors it is after all his home.

The desert is not all consecrated to death. Besides the occasional oases which dot its barren expanse, there are many regions where grass and herbage may be had continually so long as the flocks keep wandering. Accordingly the long low black tent, with its obliquely pitched tent-ropes and skilfully driven pegs, takes the place of such substantial building as might create a city. It has been so for countless generations, until now the desert Arab fears walls and will not be persuaded to enter them. Kinglake gives a remarkable instance of this, telling of a journey to Gaza on which his Arabs actually abandoned their camels rather than accompany them within the gates.[1]

Colonel Conder insists that the Arabs are entirely distinct from the Fellahin of the Syrian villages; yet he and other writers call attention to the borderland east of Jordan where the boundaries of the rival races swing to and fro with the varying successes or failures of the years. In places where the land lies open, as at the Plain of Esdraelon, the east invades the west. No one who travels in Palestine can fail to be impressed—most will probably be surprised—by the frequency with which those black hair-cloth tents are seen, sprawling like the skin of some wild-cat pegged out along the ground. If the question be asked what becomes of them, the day’s journey will likely enough supply the answer. In the market-place of a town you may see their inhabitants trading their desert ware for city produce. But even such slight contact of city with desert evidently has its temptations. In the valley below, the tent is pitched on the edge of a field rudely cultivated. The nomad here has already yielded to the agriculturist. Descend to the Jordan valley, and you shall see the hair-cloth covering a hut whose sides are of woven reeds from the river, and a little farther on the covering itself will be exchanged for a roof of reeds. Finally, you may look from the road that runs between the two main sources of the Jordan, and see in the southern distance, shining out against the lush verdure of the Huleh morass, the red-tiled roof of a two-storey villa—the house of the Sheikh of the local tribe of Arabs![2] This immigration has gone on from time immemorial, and it was some such process by which Palestine received all her earlier inhabitants. Once fixed in cities and settled down to the cultivation of the fields, their character and way of life so changed that the desert and its folk became their enemies. Yet a deeper loyalty remained through all such alienation; and, in spite of dangers and even hostilities, the desert was still their former home.

It is not only by its neighbourhood, however, that the desert has influenced Palestine. Nature has done her best to shut it off from the land, from the eastern side at least, by the tremendous barrier of the Jordan valley. Not even the angel of the wilderness, one would think, might cross that defence. Yet even that barrier has been crossed, and a bird’s-eye view of Palestine shews a land bitten into by great tracts of real desert west of Jordan. In a modified degree, the whole of Judea—that great stone wedge to which reference was made in Chapter I.—exemplifies this. Half the Judean territory is wilderness, and the other half is only kept back from the desert by sheer force of industry. Even on the western side this is strikingly seen. As viewed from the ocean, the desolate sand and scrub of the coast seems to clutch at the land, stretching here and there far inland from the shore. But the desert of Judah, in the south-east of the country, is the great intrusion of the desert upon Palestine. The sea-board of Palestine is perhaps the smoothest and most unbroken of any country in the world. But if a coast-line of the desert were sketched in the same way as a sea-coast is shewn on maps, the edge would show an outline almost as broken as that of the Greek coast, with many a bay and creek. The desert is the sea of Syria, and its inthrust is like that of great fingers feeling their way through the pastures to the very gates of her cities, and at one place reaching a point within a mile or two of her capital. Disraeli describes graphically the transition from Canaan to

ON THE ROAD FROM JERUSALEM TO BETHANY.

stony Arabia—the first sandy patches; the herbage gradually disappearing till all that is left of it is shrubs tufting the ridges of low undulating sand-hills; then the sand becoming stony, with no plant-life remaining but an occasional thorn, until plains of sand end in dull ranges of mountains covered with loose flints. In the journey from Bethlehem to the Dead Sea the transition is even more abrupt. Hardly have you left the “fields of the shepherds” when you perceive that the herbs, though still plentiful among the stones, are parched. In a mile or two there is nothing round you but wild greyish-yellow sand and rock. You thread your way precariously along the sides of gorges till you reach that sheer yellow cleft down which Kidron is slicing its way with the air of a suicide to the sea. Then you come up to a lofty ridge from which are seen the dreary towers of Mar Saba, like the “blind squat turret” of Childe Roland’s adventure, “with low grey rocks girt round, chin upon hand, to see the game at bay.” So you journey on, feeling at times that this is not scenery, it is being buried alive in great stone chambers beneath the surface; at other times welcoming the sight of a broom bush like that under which Elijah lay down and prayed that he might die. The carcase of a horse or the skeleton of a camel are almost welcome, breaking the monotonous emptiness of this land of death.

The physical influence of the desert on the land is evident in many ways. Greece and Britain are not more truly children of the sea than is Syria the desert’s child. Even those who have had no experience of the desert proper, but have only made the regulation tour in Palestine, will have memories of what they saw recalled to them in every page of a book descriptive of the desert. The land throughout has ominously much in common with its desolate neighbour—so much so as to suggest a territory rescued from the desert and kept from reverting only by strenuous handling.

Many things go to confirm this impression. The winds that blow from east or south have crossed the sand before they reach the mountains. When they are cool, they are pure and fresh, unbreathed before, “virgin air.” The evening breeze of Syria is “the respiration of the desert” after its breathless heat of day. When the wind is hot, it is terrible as only wind can be that comes off burning sand. The shirky, or sirocco, interprets the desert in a fashion which the traveller is not likely to forget. We rode against it half the length of the Plain of Esdraelon, when the thermometer registered 104° in the shade, until the steel of our coloured eye-glasses became so hot that we were glad to remove them, and endure the glare by preference.

The plant-life of the desert has its counterpart in the land. Loti describes it with his usual vividness. There is the furze dusted with fine sand; there are the strange sand-flowers of yellow or violet colours, the spikes shot out of the soil without leafage, the balls of thorn which wound the feet, the occasional palm-tree, the white edible manna plant. And there is the exquisite scent of these after rain, so strong that one might think a jar of perfume had been broken at the tent door—a perfume in which one distinguishes the scents of resin, lemon, geranium, and myrrh. All this the Palestine traveller seems to recognise; in that curious but familiar flora, and that pungent aromatic smell, we have the intrusion of the desert again.

The colour of the land has already been described, and here again we have the touch of the wilderness. The colouring is no doubt partly due to the quality of the air, dry and crisp as nothing but those miles of sand could make it. Having absolutely no concerns of its own, as wooded or grassy lands have, the desert abandons itself to the sun. It takes and gives the sunlight wholly, making itself a mere reflector for the light and heat. “Everything in this desert is of one colour—a tawny yellow. The rocks, the partridges, the camels, the foxes, the ibex, are all of this shade.”[3] Yet this absolutely neutral region, just because of its neutrality, catches the sunrise and the sunset in a brilliance that is all its own, and deepens its shadows to liquid depths of indigo and violet. In this we see the extreme and untempered form of that interplay of faint background with intense foreground which is the characteristic feature of the colour-scheme of Syria.

It is the same as regards form. The two towers of Mar Saba are among the most impressive of all the Syrian spectacles. Pitilessly unsuggestive, they are the most unhomely things one ever saw, like the mere skeletons of habitations. But part of this impression comes from the shape of the surrounding hills. Ranged in a wide semicircle, their fronts eaten out with land-slips and torrents, they are polished and smooth like gigantic sculptures. In some parts the regularity of their cones and tables suggests the work of purposeless but mighty builders. In other parts the rocks are twisted as if by tormentors, or tumbled in utter confusion. This too, as we shall see, has its modified counterpart in the land.

If the desert has thus produced a strong physical effect upon the land, its moral effects are even more apparent. We have seen how to the dwellers west of Jordan it was at once an abiding enemy and an ancient home. Shut out from it by the huge trench of the Jordan valley and the barricade of the eastern mountains, the Syrian still feels enough of the desert’s fiery touch to fear it as an enemy. Its wind blasts his crops and its heat drives him from his valleys to the hill country for the breath of life. Every traveller speaks of the “positive weight” of heat that makes men bend low in their saddles. Others besides the Persians are constrained, as Kinglake puts it, to bow down before the sun, whose “fierce will” is most terribly felt in those tracts of the land which the desert has claimed for its own. In the desert there are the same conditions which are to be found in the land, only in extreme forms and without mitigation. It is the place of tempests, fires, and reptiles. These visit the land at times, but they abide in that weird country into whose distances the Syrian may peer from most of his mountain tops. There, too, abide those dark and occult powers of evil in which every Eastern man believes. The magic of the desert—its treacherous mirage, its genii (by no means difficult to imagine in the forms of sandy whirlwinds whose march is strewn with corpses), and its infinite unexplored possibilities of terror—all this is very real to the native imagination. Its inhabitants, too, are uncanny to think of. The true Arabian, whom perhaps they may have met on a journey, with his jade-handled jewelled sword and his shrunken skin; the lunatics who have wandered to its congenial wildness; the anchorites and ascetics whom, like the scapegoat of ancient times, sin has driven forth to its unwalled prison-house,—all these fill in for Syrians the ghastly picture, and its tales of wars and massacres add the last touch of horror.

Nothing proves and exemplifies all this more strikingly than the apparently unreasonable view of the fertility, beauty, and general perfection of Palestine which its inhabitants have always cherished. Visitors from the West are often disappointed, and as they move from place to place their wonder grows as they recall the Biblical descriptions of the land flowing with milk and honey. Allowing for the many centuries of misrule and deterioration, it still remains obvious that Palestine never can have been that dreamland of natural delight which piety has imagined. But the inhabitant views it, as Dr. Smith has pointed out, not in contrast with the West, but in contrast with the desert. We have to remember how “its eastern forests, its immense wheat-fields, its streams, the oases round its perennial fountains, the pride of Jordan, impress the immigrant nomad.” This contrast exaggerates all his blessings in a heat of appreciation. Coming in from the desert, a man sees trees and fountains not as they are in themselves, but as they are in contrast with burning sand: he welcomes them as the gift of God’s grace. The sound of wind among the leaves or of flowing water is to him truly the speech of a god.[4] To many a wayfarer the poorest outskirts of the Syrian land have meant salvation from imminent death, and so appreciation enlarges to optimism, and the very barrenness of the desert becomes a challenge to hope and faith. Streams will break forth there, as in his happy experience they have already broken forth, until the whole barren waste shall blossom as the rose. It is by such hope and faith that the tribes of Palestine have lived. There is a magnificent indomitableness in the spectacle of Jews after two thousand years of exile still celebrating their vintage festival in the slums of great cities, or in the “squalid quarter of some bleak northern town where there is never a sun that can at any rate ripen grapes.” One seems to find the key to this in that tradition of the Arabs that certain ruins near the Dead Sea are the remains of ancient vineyards. The Syrian land can never be seen but as a miracle of life and beauty rescued from the desert, and that appreciation becomes the incentive for a larger hope.

Yet it is not as an enemy, however wonderfully conquered or strenuously held at bay, that the desert appeals most to the Syrian. As he looks eastward to the hills of Moab and dreams of what lies beyond them, there is perhaps more of wistfulness than of terror in his heart. The melancholy note of his music, heard by every camp-fire in the long evenings, is infinitely suggestive as well as pathetic. Where was that note learned if not in black tents pitched in the boundless waste, where man’s littleness, in contrast with the great powers of Nature, oppressed him into prone fatalism, or revealed to him the infinite refuge and comfort of the Everlasting Arms? He whose fathers have sung such songs will not satisfy his soul with the bustle of towns. He will need the desert for retreat, that his confused mind may calm itself down to order and find new revelations of truth. And when the Syrian retreats to the desert he seems rather to be going home than abroad. David and Elijah, Paul and Mohammed, for various reasons, but with the same urgency, betook themselves to the solitude. Jesus Christ himself was driven of the Spirit into the wilderness. If temptation waited them there, and the sense of exile and desertion, it was there also that angels ministered to them; and ancient prophecies were fulfilled in those “streams of spiritual originality which broke forth in the deserts of moral routine” of their times. To their spirit, and to the spirit of all dwellers in the land, the desert is not enemy only, it is home.

This fact is abundantly borne out by many traits of character which are the survivals of a desert ancestry. There is nothing in Syria which can explain the fact that the most skilful dragoman cannot understand a map, nor guide you to your destination by geographical directions. On unknown ground a Syrian is of little use as guide. On one occasion some of us set out on a journey of five or six miles in Hauran under the guidance of an excellent lad who started with the air of a Napoleon Bonaparte. His directions were to go straight from Muzerib to Sheikh Miskin—two stations on the railway south of Damascus, between which the railway line runs in a wide curve. Our route was the bow-string, while the line was the bent bow. For a little way he boldly marched forward, but soon began to edge towards the rails, and finally lost his head altogether, crossed the line, and set out on a route whose only apparent destination was Persia! This was too much for us, and we mutinied and reversed the direction, arriving at Sheikh Miskin in less than an hour, with our guide under a cloud. There could not have been a better illustration of a Syrian’s helplessness on ground without familiar landmarks. He finds his way partly by a nomad instinct, very difficult to account for; partly by the habit of noticing minute features of the road which entirely escape the ordinary observer. A story is told of a thief in a certain town in Palestine who entered a house and stole nothing. He simply went out and claimed the house before the judge. When the case came to trial, the thief challenged the owner to tell how many steps were in the stair, how many panes of glass in the windows and a long catalogue of other such

THE HILLS ROUND NAZARETH, FROM THE PLAIN OF ESDRAELON.

The village of Nazareth shows out white in the dip between the hills.

details. This the owner could not do, and when the thief gave the numbers correctly, the house was at once given to him as its obvious possessor. The tale at once recalls the Arab of our childhood who described the route of the strayed camel.

The Syrian character is nothing if not complex, a mass of paradox whose contradictory elements it seems hopeless to attempt to reconcile. The politest and the most ruffianly of men, the most effusively frank and the most impenetrably wary, the most silent and the most voluble, the gayest in laughter and the most melancholy in song, is the Syrian. He will bully you so long as he has the majority, and he will beg for the privilege of tying your shoe’s latchet if the majority is with you. He will row a boat or drive a donkey under a noonday sun with a violence which threatens apoplexy; he will suddenly subside into a repose which no surrounding bustle can disturb. The captain of the Rob Roy tells how in the Huleh region a native boy running alongside pointed his long gun at him at least twenty times with the cry of bakhshish, so close that he once knocked the barrel aside with his paddle; and yet in the tent that evening this same youngster “was my greatest favourite from his lively laugh and eyes like diamonds, and his quick perception of all I explained.” In a note on page 39 an adventure of our own is told which illustrates sufficiently the rapidity of change in the mood of the native. He is a civilised barbarian, a scrupulous fraud, an aged little child. No doubt so complex a character is traceable to many causes, but in the main it is the work of the desert. There the extreme conditions—the long hunger and the occasional surfeit, the great silence and the shrill speech in which that silence unburdens itself, the demand for desperate exertion and the long deep rest—these call forth the most opposite qualities, each in exaggerated degree.

Perhaps the most important contributions of the desert to the Syrian character have been two. There is a certain hardiness and strenuous carelessness of comfort, which produces a rather bleak impression on European travellers, but which nevertheless has counted for a great deal in national life. It has told in opposite ways. Judea’s success has been undoubtedly due to the fact that it had to be fought for against such bitter odds. On the other hand, this same independence of fate has led the nation to settle down in a too easy contentment. Defeat, and even oppression, sit more lightly on people who are indifferent to circumstances; and if the artificial demands for luxury have been the ruin of some nations, they have been the saving of others, keeping alive in them their vigour and whetting their ambition. The other contribution is the instinctive kindliness and hospitality which are well known as characteristic of the desert tribes. Where life is so precarious, it inevitably comes to be regarded as an inviolable trust by the man on whose mercy it is cast. Accordingly the wandering Arab has but to draw in the sand a circle round his laden camel in order to secure every scrap of his possessions from robbery; and the bitterest enemies are sure of safety so long as they abide in each other’s tents. A little incident which occurred to ourselves brought home to us vividly the real kindliness of the Eastern sense of guest-right. It was in Damascus, and after nightfall. Some of us, wishing to see how the city amused itself, set out for a ramble through the streets. It was only nine o’clock, yet everything was shut up and the bazaars and thoroughfares silent and deserted. At last we found a little café still doing business at the end of the high black vault of a bazaar. Seats were placed in the open air in front of it, while from within came the rattle of dice and the voices of one or two gamblers. Sitting down on the outside bench, we asked for coffee, which was immediately brought. A stylishly dressed Moslem, in an indescribable flow of robes, took his seat silently opposite us and sat smoking his nargileh. When we rose to go we found that he had paid for us all, and when we would have thanked him he would have none of it, satisfied with the consciousness of having shewn hospitality to strangers sojourning in his land. We could not help wondering how long our friend might have continued making the circuit of London restaurants before a similar experience would have fallen his way! There is a tale of a scoundrel who acts as guide to English travellers, and presents to each of them a certificate from a former victim, which invariably makes them laugh. The writing is, “I was a stranger and ye took me in.” It was pleasing to find that this testimony need not always be ironical.

EXTRACT FROM JOURNAL

One of the horses had been stolen in the night. It was the last on the line, and beyond it Harun was sleeping on the ground. At 11.30 all was right, but by 12.30 it had disappeared. By 1 A.M. the village had been roused, and the head men were coming in to the camp offering us one of their mares in compensation. The mares, which were wretched skeletons of beasts, were refused, and the horse demanded. Nothing could persuade them to bring him back, or to acknowledge any cognisance of him whatever. They said that passing robbers had taken him, and begged us not to report the affair. Our dragoman, however, took another view. He wrote a letter, long and circumstantial, describing us as “Hawajas” (merchants, gentlemen), travelling for information under tescera from the Sultan. The touch of genius in the letter was its insistence upon the seriousness of this affair on the ground that we were travelling under three flags, the Union Jack, the Turkish flag, and the Stars and Stripes. This letter was sent, by one of our men on horseback, to the Kaimakham, governor of the district, at a place some distance from where we were. The Kaimakham passed him on to the Mudir at another village, a person of terrible reputation, of whom everybody in the neighbourhood was afraid. The upshot of it all was that Mohammed, the messenger, returned to camp accompanied by two soldiers, powerful and intelligent young fellows, but savage-looking and rather ragged. The taller of the two, named Nimr (the leopard), was armed with bayonet, rifle, and revolver, while a double belt of cartridges added to the effect. His orders were to take the thirteen leading men of Banias in irons, and march them off “shoulder-tight” to prison at Mejdel. During the day a great meeting was held in the dragoman’s tent, the soldiers on one side, the “leading men” on the other. One of the latter protested that this was unfair—they had expected the dragoman to grow cooler, but although he had been hot at first, he was getting hotter instead of cooler. The reply was—(may it be forgiven!)—that he had meant to get cooler, but the Hawajas were getting hotter steadily, owing to the three flags aforesaid. After a long parley it was arranged that they should send to another village for a horse worth £20, the value of the stolen one. They stoutly maintained that a stranger, and none of themselves, had committed the robbery, and that it was a bitter day when the Hawajas had pitched their tents among them. Nimr the soldier sat frowning and beating the ground savagely with a stick between his wide open legs. He repeated several times, with gusto, the aphorism, “Better to touch fire and scorpions than the property of Hawajas,” to which the rueful answer of the Sheikh was that it would be better! All was gloom, and when at last a messenger was sent off to procure a horse worth £20, the grandees went to their houses with the air of men doomed. Next morning the horse was brought, and was to be seen at the end of the line kicking and biting viciously. Its worth was only £15, but the balance was condoned. We expected that this would draw forth gratitude and even some gladness; but instead it brought them all to tears, and drew from them many assurances of the miserable poverty of their condition, and the inevitable ruin that awaited them if we actually accepted this horse which they had brought. To these pleadings the dragoman was deaf, insisting that we must now at least let things take their course. When they saw that this was the final position of affairs, they ceased from wailing. Within five minutes our own original horse was led into the camp, and their new one removed! Their game had been played to its very last turn, and having failed was laid aside. During the rest of our sojourn there these same men lingered in the camp, manifesting neither regret nor shame, but smoking, chatting, and laughing with our company in the highest possible good-humour.

CHAPTER III
THE LIE OF THE LAND

Every writer about Palestine speaks of the smallness and concentration of the land, yet these take the best informed by surprise. It is “the least of all lands” indeed, when one thinks how much has happened in it. Leaving Jaffa at 10 A.M., the steamer reaches Beyrout at 6 P.M. The passengers in that short sail have seen the whole of Palestine. National life there is a miniature rather than a picture. In a stretch of country equal to that between Aberdeen and Dundee you cover the whole central ground of the Bible, from the Sea of Galilee to Jerusalem. In a ride equal to the distance from London to Windsor there may be seen enough to interpret many centuries of the world’s supreme history. The Dead Sea is but 50 miles from the Mediterranean, the Sea of Galilee about 25 miles; while the distance in miles between the two seas is only 55. Yet in that little land there is every kind of soil, from mere sand and broken limestone to rich red and chocolate loam. It is a mountainous country throughout, and its inhabitants are a race of Highlanders. So numerous are its mountain spurs that you may pass up and down the centre of the country for scores of miles, and yet never catch sight of the sea, though you constantly feel it in the breeze. Everything is there—the gorge, the wide sweeping valley, the great plain, the rolling tableland. It is, indeed, a land in miniature, the multum in parvo of lands. Its history and religion, like its natural features, are crushed together and compact. The epigram is the only form of speech that can express it.

This idea of smallness and compression, however, is by no means the only possible view which may be taken. All depends on what it is with which one compares Palestine. Thinking of it as a field of history, one inevitably has other fields in mind. If we think of Britain, Palestine is but the size of Wales; if of France and Germany, it is the equivalent of Alsace. But a more primitive point of view is gained when you regard it as a reclaimed tract of the desert. Just as Egypt is a huge river-meadow, and Venice a glorified harbour in the sea, so Syria is the largest oasis in the world. Its whole geographical character is that of desert, more or less modified by water. The sculptured hills are here, the rock and the shingle and the sand. Dry up its rivers and arrest its rainfall, and you will have a continuation of the peninsula of Sinai, except that instead of granite it will be of limestone. It is this, as we have seen, that has led its inhabitants to regard it with a rare appreciation, an extraordinary sense of its preciousness, and a tendency to exaggerate both its beauty and its fertility.

Nothing illustrates this loving appreciation of their land better than the play of imagination which has created the place-names of Palestine. Hebrews, Arabs, and Crusaders vie with each other in the poetic beauty of their nomenclature. It is a little land, but there is much witchery in it. For its inhabitants it lives personified, and its masses of mountain scenery are often named from parts of the human body. There are “the shoulder,” “the side,” “the thigh,” “the rib,” “the back.” The “head” of Pisgah looks down upon the “face” of the wilderness.[5] There is a “hollow hearth”—homeliest of names to a Semite. In other names poetry has reached its utmost of epigrammatic beauty—“the dance of the whirls,” “the star of the wind,” “the diamond of the desert.” Yet sacred and beautiful as its scenery was to Israel, she had a dearer bond with her land than that. She was kept from nature-worship by a spiritual faith which created such names as “Bethel” (the house of God), and many others of similar significance. These claim the land in all its length and breadth for the God of Israel. Every green spot was for the Semites the dwelling-place of some divinity; this whole oasis of hers was for Israel the house of her God of peace and blessing. To the ancient Greek “God was the view”; to the Hebrew, God was the inhabitant of the view—He Himself was Righteousness. And because the land was His—rescued by Him from the desert with His waters, and given to the people in His love—it was tenfold more dear to them. Down every vista which shewed them a land that was very far off, their eyes caught sight also of some vision of the King in His beauty; every high hill was a veritable mountain of the Lord’s house.

Let us try to get, as it were, a bird’s-eye view of this fascinating country, noticing in their right perspective and significance its outstanding natural features. Dr. Smith’s Historical Geography has perhaps rendered no service higher than the aid towards this which is afforded by its epitome and map (pp. 49, 50, 51). These divide Palestine into five parallel strips running north and south. Cutting across these strips in a straight line westwards from the desert to the sea, we first traverse the range of the eastern mountains; then dip to the immense gulf of the Jordan valley, far below the Mediterranean level; then climb by precipitous ascents to the summit of the central range; then descend through the foot-hills; and finally land on the maritime plain. To grasp thoroughly the lie of these five longitudinal regions is the first necessity for understanding the geography of Palestine. Its general impression is one of extraordinary brokenness of contour, and Zangwill points out the important fact that a land with so much hill surface has in reality a very much larger superficial area than that estimated by multiplying its length by its breadth.

By far the most remarkable feature in the whole

JERUSALEM—THE POOL OF HEZEKIAH.

territory is the Jordan valley. Rising from springs at the western roots of Hermon, high above sea level, it sinks by rapid stages till at the Dead Sea it reaches bottom nearly 1300 feet below the Mediterranean. Down its extraordinary gully flows the one great river of Palestine. There are other perennial streams, but none to compare with Jordan either for volume or for associations. It is this mass of flowing water which stands as the heart and soul of the Syrian oasis. Its mighty stream has overcome the desert, and claimed the western land for greenness and for life. It is this huge cleft that has isolated the Holy Land for the purposes of its God.

The only clear opening from the Jordan to the Mediterranean is the Plain of Esdraelon. Standing on Jordan’s bank below Bethshan and looking westward, you see before you a valley whose farther end shows nothing but sky. Many streams cut their way down its slopes beside a green morass, and hold in their embrace the ruins of a strong city. You must follow them up westwards for some ten miles before you reach sea level, and soon after that you cross the watershed in a wide valley with mountains rising to north and south. Jezreel stands above you on a protruding tongue of high cultivated land to the south. At a level of about 200 feet above the sea, you suddenly emerge upon a great triangular plain, with Carmel at its apex, 15 miles to the west. This is the Plain of Esdraelon. The one really large level space in Syria, its rich soil, even surface, and plentiful water-supply make it a famous piece of cultivated ground. But it is also the natural battlefield of the East, and its chief associations are not with agriculture but with war.

Esdraelon, however, is but an incident in the geographical fact of Syria, though an important and large incident. It is but the largest of those open spaces into which Syrian valleys swell out. There are three or four of them in the Jordan valley, and several of smaller size are scattered here and there throughout the country. The really essential feature of the land—that, indeed, which historically is the land—is the mountain range that sweeps from Lebanon to Hebron and beyond. It was on the mountains that Israel lived. The Plain of Esdraelon, being the ganglion of the natural main routes of traffic and of war, was but a doubtful possession, precariously held at best, and often changing owners. The strong city of Bethshan at the eastern mouth of its main valley was held by Israel’s enemies during almost the whole of her history; and, until a year or two ago, the Arabs made yearly raids upon the Plain. Again, the sea-coast was largely in the hands of enemies; while the Jordan valley, with its insupportable heat and malaria, was thinly peopled, and its population swiftly degenerated from national as well as from moral loyalties. Thus he who would know the Holy Land must, in every sense of the words, “lift up his eyes unto the hills.”

It was our good fortune to have this view at its very best for our first sight of Palestine. We should have landed at Jaffa, but a rather doubtful case of plague at Alexandria inflicted a two days’ quarantine on all ships coming out of Egypt. So we looked at Jaffa from under the yellow flag, and sailed off in the morning sunlight northward to Beyrout. All day long we lay on deck, with maps spread out before us. The quarantine had cost us the sight of the Greek Easter ceremony at Jerusalem, but it gave us in exchange the rare experience of a daylight sail along the Syrian coast. The day was marvellously clear, and every object on the shore was seen in photographic outline, while the various distances were preserved in fading colours, back to the thin transparency against the sky which stood for the furthest mountain ranges. The shore was barren: a low belt of tawny sand, broken by dark olive-green scrub, and very desolate. One solitary house was all we saw for the first two hours, and in another place a column of smoke, apparently rising from some invisible camp. Beyond this the foot-hills east of the plain were seen, lifting towards the great central ridge of the mountain range. Though broken here and there by an occasional point, or overlooked by a peak that rose very high beyond, the crest of the range was remarkably level, with wavy outline. Until we passed Carmel it shewed as a unity—“the mountain” of Ephraim and Judah. North from that there was a bolder sky-line, much nearer to the sea, which led on eventually to the magnificent heights of Lebanon, beautiful as they are mighty.

Let us suppose ourselves to land at Beyrout and journey from north to south well inland. At first we climb eastwards among bold bare hills, in whose recesses mulberry gardens nestle and on whose heights innumerable villages perch. Cedars are conspicuous by their absence, but there are plenty of humbler trees. Soon we come to realise the large-scale meaning and contour of the district. We have been crossing Lebanon, whose highest peaks have revealed themselves now and then far to the north. Some twenty miles from the coast we find ourselves in the valley of the Litany (Leontes). This whole region is easily understood. It consists of the magnificent ranges of Lebanon and Antilebanon and the spacious valley between them, running in ample curves parallel with the shore.

Mighty though these are, however, it is neither of them that has received the name of Jebel-es-Sheikh—“the patriarch of mountains.” That honour is reserved for Hermon, the range and summit which Antilebanon thrusts south from it into Galilee, just opposite Damascus. It is happily named “the sheikh.” Go where you will in Palestine, Hermon seems to lie at the end of some vista or other. For many miles around it, Hermon commands everything. Its mass tilts the plain and sends out innumerable spurs of rich and fertile land; its snow shines far and gives character to the view; its eastern waters redeem the wilderness through many a mile of Hauran; and from its western roots spring all the fountains of the Jordan. This is the king of Syria, by whose beneficent might the desert has become oasis.

While the southern continuation of Hermon holds up the high tableland of Bashan and runs it on into the mountains of Gilead and Moab east of Jordan, the thrust of Lebanon into Western Galilee ends curiously in a succession of hills divided by valleys running east and west, like great waves of mountain rolling south to break along the northern edge of the Plain of Esdraelon. There is a quiet regularity about these Galilean Highlands, which gives the impression of a region made to plan. The eastern end of Esdraelon is blocked by the group of Tabor and “Little Hermon,” while the feature of the western end is the long lonely ridge of Carmel.

Crossing the plain we enter Samaria, whose deep rounded valleys, rich in corn, send their sweeping curves in all directions. Here there is neither the dominant north-and-south trend of Lebanon, nor the horizontal ripple of Galilee, but an intricate network of curving valleys, which leave the mountains everywhere more individual and distinct, and which frequently expand into wide meadows or fields. Yet the general rise of the region is from west, sloping up to east. The watershed is perhaps 10 to 15 miles from Jordan, while it is more than 30 miles from the sea. But Jordan here is well-nigh 1000 feet below sea-level, so that the eastern slope is immensely steeper than the western.

As we enter Judea, we find the land, as it were, gathering itself up on almost continuous heights. The lesser valleys are shallow, and the hilltops swell from the lofty plateau in colossal domes or cupolas. So high is the general level that when we come to Jerusalem we look in vain for the mountains we had understood to be round about her. No peaks cleave the sky—only smooth and gentle hills, which have never been in any way her defence, but have made excellent platforms for the siege-engines of her enemies, and have grown wood for the crosses of her inhabitants. The lateral gorges of Judea, both east and west, cut into her high tableland in angular zigzags, and as you descend these in either direction you realise what is really meant by “the mountains round about Jerusalem.” She does not see them, lying secure upon the height to which they have exalted her. But he who approaches her must come by their gorges, where for many miles his sky will be but a strip seen between sheer heights of cliff and scaur.[6] The rugged sharpness of outline reaches its climax on the eastern side, where the range, split in the wildest gorges, falls in fragmentary masses between their mouths down to the Jordan valley. Nothing in the land has a more bare and savage grandeur than the square-chiselled mountain blocks of Quarantana, seen from below at Jericho in black angular silhouette against the sunset. South of Jerusalem the Kidron gorge, cleaving the intruding desert, exaggerates the wildness of the north, but as you climb past Bethlehem to Hebron you are in a region liker to Samaria, with its deeper and more rounded valleys and its richer pasture and cultivation. South of Hebron the range spreads fanwise and gradually sinks to the desert.

The most impressive memories of the land, so far as its form and contour go, are two—the gorges cleft through the Judean mountain, and certain isolated conical hills thrown up from the Samaritan valleys. Judea is mountain, emphasised by gorge; Samaria is valley, diversified by hill. The gorges are uncompromising. When we read, for instance, the third verse of the seventh chapter of Joshua, we think of an ordinary march—“The men went up and viewed Ai. And they returned to Joshua, and said unto him, Let not all the people go up; but let about two or three thousand men go up and smite Ai; and make not all the people to labour thither.” But he who has himself “gone up” from Jericho to Ai puts feeling into his reading of the words “to labour thither.” That is the only way of going up. The recollection is of several hours of precipitous riding, with beasts stumbling and riders pitched ahead. When the climb is over you turn aside to the south, and view the gully of Michmash along whose northern edge you have scrambled inland. It looks not like a valley, but a crack in rocks, hundreds of feet deep. The valley of Achor, next to the south of Michmash, presents an almost more dramatic appearance as you view its entrance from the Jordan foot-hills. It gapes on the plain, like the open mouth of some petrified monster.

The isolated hills of the northern territory are in their way as memorable as the gorges of the south. In Judea you cannot see the mountains for “the mountain.” The whole land is one great elevated range, and the noticeable features of the district are the gorges that cut across it. Samaria, on the other hand, is a place of valleys and of plains, and its mountains are seen as mountains. This fact finds its most striking instance in certain “Gilgals,” or isolated cones standing free in the midst of plain, or cut off by circular valleys round their bases. The most perfect of these is that which bears the name of Gilgal, rising detached in the wide valley to the south-east of Jacob’s Well.[7] It is in shape an almost perfect cone, whose gradual curve renders it very easy of ascent. The Hill of Samaria itself is another such “Gilgal,” the centre of a splendid circular panorama of hills. Sanur, in the country of Judith and Holophernes, is a third, on a smaller scale, but with even wider panorama. North of Esdraelon, again a long ripple of mountains sweeps round at least one such Gilgal, leaving Sepphoris isolated on the peak of it. And Tabor itself might plausibly be counted in this class—Tabor the irrelevant, whose cone seems always to be peeping over the shoulder of some lower ridge, unlike any other landmark, commanding all the views eastward from the heights of Nazareth. These curious cones are in Palestine to some extent what the Righi is in Switzerland. With the exception of Tabor, they are but lesser heights; yet they give the widest mountain views, and seem to shape the land into a succession of circles, of which their summits are the centre-points.

The mountains of Israel are the characteristic features of her history as of her geography. In every part of Syria they are the companions of the journey. Great

MOUNT HERMON, FROM THE SLOPES OF TABOR.

The lofty mountain in the extreme distance is Mount Hermon.

distant masses, or near crests of them, seem to accompany you as you move. And as you travel through the history of the land it is in the same companionship. The Jordan valley lies along the western side of the mountain range, a place of luxury and temptation. But Israel abides on the hills, sending down to it only the most degenerate of her children. It is a very striking fact that Jesus was tempted to sin for bread on the mountain almost within sight of Jericho, where the Herodians were sinning with surfeits of wine and rich meats. All that is truest to Israel and most characteristic of her at her best is on the hills. They are the places of her war and of her worship. The Gilgals have almost all stood siege. All, or at least the most of them, have been fortified. On some of them the rude remains of ancient sacred circles, or the decayed steps of altars cut in the rock, may still be traced. Her enemies found by bitter experience that “her gods are gods of the hills.” Her ark had its abode on the tableland at Shiloh or on the hill of Zion. Its history on the low ground was but a story of calamity; it had to be sent up again to Kirjath-Jearim among the hills. Yet the heights of Israel stand for more than this blend of war and worship; they were her home. All her greater towns nestle among them somewhere; most of them stand on the summits, or just below them. It was a race of Highlanders that gave us our Bible—men whose home was on the heights.

Her wars, indeed, were everywhere, for it is a blood-drenched land. Many of her battles were fought at the edge of the mountain-land, on the kopjes that run along the southern border of Esdraelon, or among the foot-hills near the mouth of the western gorges. There, or on the great plain, she met her invaders. But the heights were the scenes of battles in the last resort, and the gorges are associated with the advance and retreat of armed hosts, the rush of the invader and the headlong retreat of armies that had been surprised and routed from above.

Meanwhile, in the middle spaces, she fought her continuous battle with the desert and the sun for her daily bread. It is said that in Malta, where every possible spot is cultivated, the earth has been all imported, and that the Knights of Malta allowed no vessel to enter the harbour without paying dues in soil. The denuded hill-sides of Palestine, with their ruined heaps of stones that once built up terraces for cultivation, tell a similar story. On some hillsides the remains of sixty or even eighty such terraces may still be traced. In many places the valleys are rich in an altogether superfluous depth of fertile soil. But this did not suffice the inhabitants, and they built up the terraces along the southward slopes, in many places quite to the walls of their mountain villages. On not a few of these slopes labour must have actually created land, and men’s hearts grown strong within them as they changed the rocks into gardens and the slopes of shingle into harvest fields.

CHAPTER IV
THE WATERS OF ISRAEL

Keeping in mind our view of Palestine as an oasis, we naturally turn at once to the thought of the waters that have retrieved it from the desert. By far the most conspicuous of these is the Jordan, flowing down a long course to its deep-dug grave in the Dead Sea. At whatever point we approach that great valley the eye is inevitably led along it northward to the white Hermon, whose great “breastplate” shines over all the land. That mountain, and the Lebanons of which it is the southern outpost, are the real makers of Palestine.

There was a beautiful poetry of Hermon which from earliest times made it a sacrament of sweet thoughts to Israel. Perhaps the sweetest thought it gave her was that of dew. In every part of that land of clear skies, a heavy dew lies upon the ground at sunrise. Poetic feeling, undertaking the work of science, interpreted this dew as Hermon’s gift, so that “the dew that descended on the mountains of Zion” was “the dew of Hermon” (Psalm cxxxiii. 3). The meteorology is faulty, but the larger idea is true. The cool and glistening snow-field, more than a hundred miles away from Zion, does indeed send out and receive again the waters that refresh the land in an endless round. “The Abana dies in the marsh of Ateibeh, yielding its spirit to the sun, as Jordan dies in the Dead Sea, and, rising into clouds again, both of them wafted to the snow-peaks where they were born, they pour down their old waters in a current ever new, in that circuit of life and death which God has ordained for all.”[8]

So conspicuous are these two rivers that we almost need to remind ourselves that they are not the only waters of Israel. There are several perennial streams in Syria, of which something will be said presently; but the list of these by no means exhausts the stores of water in the land. Great stretches of the country are apparently waterless, especially in the south, and yet water is almost everywhere, underground. In many parts the soil and surface-rock are soft, lying on a hard bed-rock at various depths below. Accordingly we find that one of the most mysterious and characteristic features of the south country is its underground waters.[9] Springs and streamlets find their way through fissures or filter through porous stone to the harder rock below, and flow along subterranean channels there. Zangwill quotes an older authority for the somewhat startling statement that “the entire plain of Sharon seems to cover a vast subterranean river, and this inexhaustible source of wealth underlies the whole territory of the Philistines.” Putting the ear to any crack in the sunburnt clay of the surface, in certain parts, one may hear the subdued growl and murmur of the waters underneath. Trees flourish in places where there is no water apparent, their roots bathing in unseen streams, and drawing life and freshness from them. One can well understand the feelings of awe with which primitive people regarded these mysterious nether springs. They did not connect them with the idea of rain from above, as modern science does, but believed that they had forced their way up from “the Great Deep,” which was supposed to underlie the earth, and into which the roots of the mountains were thrust far down like gigantic anchors of the world. Some of the rivers of Damascus are also underground, “and may often be seen and heard through holes in the surface.”[10] Jerusalem is a waterless city, whose famous pools are tanks for rain-water. Its one spring is that strange intermittent one which overflows from the Well of the Virgin through Hezekiah’s aqueduct to the Pool of Siloam. Yet there are legends that beneath the sacred rock which the mosque of Omar covers there is a subterranean torrent; and that the rushing of hidden waters has been heard at times below the massive stones of the Damascus Gate of the city.

These underground waters have given to Palestine a still more interesting feature at the points where her greatest rivers rise. This is the sudden emergence of full-bodied streams from the ground. These rivers have, so to speak, no infancy. Their springs are not little toy fountains with trickling rivulets. They bound into the world full-grown, with a rush and fury which is perhaps unparalleled in any other land. This inspiring and suggestive phenomenon has not been without its effect on the national thought and imagination. In the midst of one of the most gloriously forceful passages of Isaiah (chap. xxxv.) the vigour and impetuousness of the prophecy finds its climax in the sudden leap of waters which “break out” in the wilderness, and which are described in the same breath as the first glad leap of the restored lame man, leaping “as an hart.” When Moses in his blessing of the tribes speaks of Dan “leaping from Bashan,” he refers to that wonderful spot where Jordan, in the tribe of Dan, leaps up from below Hermon. Matthew Arnold, had he chanced to think of it, might have seen in his delight in full and rushing streams another link connecting him with the Hebrew race with which he so quaintly claims affinity.

The south country keeps its rivers for the most part below ground, though even there considerable streams suddenly break out. Conder describes deep blue pools of fresh water near Antipatris which “well up close beneath the hillock surrounded by tall canes and willows, rushes and grass.”[11] Yet the greatest outbursts are in the north. One traveller describes a river-source in Lebanon as an abyss of seething black waters, into which he rolled large stones, only to see them presently reappear, flung up like corks from the depths. At one of its sources the Abana bursts from the masonry of some ancient temples “a pure and copious river, rushing into light at once as if free.”

It is at Hermon that we find the true centre of the water supply of Palestine. Parts of it are under snow all the year round, and it gives off some thirty streams flowing in every direction. Not one of these streams reaches the Mediterranean. They flow forth only to evaporate sooner or later in some inland morass or sea, and to return in vapour that will be condensed again by the snows of Hermon. Conder describes one of these in the north, whose water “rushes out suddenly with a roaring noise from a cavern” in winter, and transforms the plain below into a lake. But the great work of Hermon is the Jordan, two of whose three sources leap up from its roots. The most striking of these is that of Banias, which Jewish tradition names as one of the three springs of Palestine which “remained not closed up after the Flood.” On the crest of a spur of Hermon stands the ruined castle of Subeibeh, one of the noblest ruins in the world. From the castle you descend 1400 feet to the village of Banias, the ancient Caesarea Philippi. The descent, over basalt boulders whose interstices are filled for the most part with thorn-bushes, is said in the guide-books to be practicable for horses. One wonders how long the horses are supposed to survive the journey! The view across and down the Jordan valley is indescribably grand. Near the foot the path curves round the top of a precipice and doubles back on a lower level to a white-washed Mohammedan weli, or praying-house. Just below, as you look down from the weli, a large cavern is seen, with niches beautifully carved in the rocks beside it. On one of these niches is the inscription “To Pan and the Nymphs,” and on another the names “Augustus and Augustina.” Here, most likely on the site of a prehistoric holy place of the Semites, stood the Roman temple which Herod built in honour of Augustus. Nor is it wonderful that these and so many other faiths have counted this a sacred place; for Jordan used to pour forth from that cavern, clear and full-bodied. Now the old cave-channel is choked up with debris, and Jordan forces its way to light in many smaller fountains among the stones and earth of the open space below, which is coloured by long trails of slime. Within a few yards the streams unite in a rich green pool, with reeds and luxuriant water-growth. The second source of Jordan is even more impressive. It is at Tell-el-Kadi, some two miles west from Banias. On the western side of this Tell, on which there are traces and ruins of an ancient city, there is a thicket of rank undergrowth, from beneath whose lowest branches and creepers the river suddenly appears, spreads immediately into a wide pool, and within a hundred yards is racing violently south in foaming rapids. The pool was reported to be bottomless, but the irrepressible little canoe Rob Roy was launched upon its boiling waters, and the depth proved to be but five feet!

Jordan is a river worth much study, interesting from

THE GOLDEN, OR BEAUTIFUL, GATE, FROM THE GARDEN OF GETHSEMANE.

The well is in the upper part of the Garden of Gethsemane.

every point of view—geographical, historical, religious.[12] Changing in colour, as the floods wash down their various soils to it, it tumbles and rushes south through a stretch of some 137 miles without a single cascade till it sweeps, with strong and level current, into the Dead Sea. At Banias its height above the Mediterranean is about 1000 feet, but the extraordinary valley is chiselled on a running slope down to the depths of the earth. Clouds have been seen sweeping above its bed 500 feet below the level of the ocean. The Dead Sea level is 1290 feet below the Mediterranean; its bottom, at the deepest part, is as deep again. Spanned by a few bridges, of which only one or two are now entire, the river’s course is for the most part through solitudes without inhabitants, or tenanted but by a few half-savage people. The valley is alternately wide and narrow, swelling out in five broad expanses, of which the two northern are lakes, and the other three are plains. From Banias to the last confluence of the different head-streams is a distance of some seven miles through green land. Soon after that point the river loses itself in a vast forest of impenetrable papyrus canes growing in shallow water, from which it emerges in a little lake or clear space half a mile lower. Then it flows, a solemn and glassy stream, for some three miles and a half down a sharp-edged lane whose perpendicular banks are tall papyrus canes, till it glides silently out, a hundred feet in breadth, into Lake Huleh. From Huleh to the Sea of Galilee is ten miles, along the greater part of which the river tears through a narrow gorge. Emerging clear and broad from the Sea of Galilee it soon begins its innumerable windings. A few streams flow into it perennially from east and west, and countless torrents after rain. In the north it quickens a poisonous soil into rank vegetation, and spreads its superfluous waters on steaming swamps, full of malaria. Opposite Shechem its clay is good for moulding, and the mounds which break the level are for the most part apparently the remains of old brickfields or brass foundries. As it descends to the broadest of its plains at Jericho the valley falls into three distinct levels. From the hills a flat expanse of desolation spreads towards the river, till it falls in steep banks of 150 to 200 feet to the lower level of the “trench” down which the river flows in flood. Finally, in the centre of this lies the ordinary channel, at whose banks the trees and undergrowth seem to crouch and kneel over the sullen brown stream.

There are other perennial rivers in Syria, but their courses are short. The Litany (Leontes) rises between the Lebanons a short distance north of the highest springs of Jordan. For many miles the two flow in parallel courses, divided only by the little ridge of Jebel-es-Zoar. But before Jordan has passed its new springs at Banias, the Litany has swept to the west in a sharp right angle, to pour itself into the ocean north of Tyre. It is a fine stream, yellow with rich loam, but its bed is in the sharp angle of valleys whose sides remind one of the Screes of Wastwater. Its descent is so rapid that even if there were meadows in the bottoms of its gorges, it would hurry past them to pour its treasure of water and of soil alike into the thankless sea. The Abana, rising in the same region as the springs of the other two, has a course of only some fifty miles. Kishon, which waters the Plain of Esdraelon, is certainly the most generous in the matter of cultivated fields, but it is also the most treacherous. Its fords are never certain, for great masses of sand and mud are shifted to and fro in the most unaccountable manner. The rest of the perennial rivers are either tributaries of the Jordan, companions of the Abana in its eastern course, or streams from Carmel or the central mountain range, whose short course to the Mediterranean is of little account.

As we think of these rivers flowing through a land which so sorely needs their help, we cannot but feel oppressed by a sense of waste that is almost tragic. There is no boat plying on any of them. Most are, indeed, far too rapid for that, but not everywhere. The guide-book speaks of a steamer plying on the lower reaches of Jordan; and the local story of oppression there—every district has its particular grievance—is of two boats that had been brought for the service of the monastery, and then confiscated by Government. The only boats of any kind we saw on fresh water between Hebron and Damascus were two on the Sea of Galilee, manned by Syrians in red jerseys, on which the magic letters were inscribed, “COOK.” In the old days it must have been very different. There is mention of a ferry-boat on the Jordan in 2 Sam. xix. 18, and in Christ’s time there must have been a considerable fishing fleet on the lake. The trireme on the coins of Gadara reminds us of Roman vessels which sailed there for warlike purposes, and here and there you find a valley dammed across its breadth for the construction of an artificial lake, on which a naumachia or naval fight might add piquancy to the games. There is an island in the Dead Sea itself on which what are supposed to be ruins of a landing-stage are still visible, showing that long ago even these uncanny waters were not without their sailors. There used to be a wrecked boat in the Ateibeh marsh from which three men had been drowned. The wreck of another boat was still visible some years ago under the surface of Lake Huleh. These wrecks are but too truthfully symbolic of the fate of men’s attempts to utilise the waters of Israel. The Abana, indeed, is utilised. Never was river so wholly taken possession of by a city as Abana by Damascus. She flows into it—right into the heart of it—and disappears underground; she is led captive into a thousand fountains in public streets and the courts of private houses; she is sent in a thousand little channels to irrigate the gardens which surround it. All the more pitiful is her ending in that wild and haunted morass of Ateibeh, where she yields up her waters to the desert and the sun.

The fate of Jordan seems still more tragic. In the far north his waters are indeed utilised to some small extent for irrigation, but for the vastly longer part of his course he does nothing but flee through the wilderness to the bitter sea in the south. Dr. Ross has strikingly summed up Jordan’s career in the words: “So, in a valley which is thirsting for water, the Jordan rushes along to an inglorious end.” Yet that is only one aspect of the matter. Jordan gave Israel her last story of Elijah and her first of Christ’s ministry. Neither association is of the kindly sort which a nation’s sentiment usually gathers round its rivers. There is, as it were, the glitter of fire from the prophet’s departure for ever lending to these brown waters a sort of unearthly grandeur. Those fiery horses which bathed their feet here take the place of the gentle memories of generations of lovers or little children. Yet that is true to the spirit of the river. To Israel it stood for a very forceful and practical fact. Their first crossing of Jordan began their national life in Palestine and cut them off from the desert. So, to the end, the Jordan stood for this to them, and that was much. Jordan created no great city as Abana created Damascus; but it streamed down the side of the east, flinging, as it were, a great arm round the land, claiming it from the desert, and proclaiming this to be oasis and the home of men. Disraeli characteristically writes: “All the great things have been done by the little nations. It is the Jordan and the Ilyssus that have civilised the modern races.” And truly it is the Jordan that is in great part responsible for the Hebrew share in that civilisation—not by his material gifts, indeed, which were ever ungenerously given and carelessly gathered, but by his sentiment of isolation and aloofness from the rest of the Eastern world, to which we owe much that is best in our inheritance from Israel.

For the homelier uses and gentler thoughts of Israel’s waters we must turn to the lesser fountains and streams. There is, it is true, much disillusionment for the sentimentalist even here. Remembering the sweet music in which they have been sung—the “Song of the Well” (“Spring up, O Well, sing ye unto it!”) or the “gently flowing waters” of the 23rd Psalm—one expects the perfection of purity and freshness. Early tradition has pictured the angel Gabriel meeting with Mary at the village spring of Nazareth; nor is that the only Syrian fountain by which the footsteps of angels have been traced. All the more trying is the reality. Hideously tattooed women squat by the sweetest springs, fling filthy garments into them, and beat them with stones till the stream flows brown below them; or they toil wearily a mile or two away from their villages to fill the heavy water-pots, beasts of burden rather than mothers in Israel. Of cleanliness the natives have not the remotest idea. We used to see them filling their vessels from a stream where our horses were being washed down after their day’s ride, and they seemed on principle to choose a spot just below that where the horse was standing. Often the water seemed calculated to assuage hunger rather than thirst. The natives drank it freely when it was mere mud in solution; and even when it was clear, the glass bottles on the table sometimes presented the appearance of lively and well-stocked aquariums. Our squeamishness was unintelligible even to our camp-servants, who drank in defiance large draughts of the water we refused. The landmarks of the hot journey are the pools where one may bathe, and the first sight of Elisha’s Fountain and the Well of Harod is refreshing to remember still. But one touch of the bottom mud sufficed to bring to the surface a gas which sent us posthaste to our stores of quinine—and yet the deliciousness of the plunge was worth the risk!

The spell of the fountains remains in spite of all, and no traveller wonders that the ancient men revered them as sacred places. Israel exulted in the forcefulness of her larger rivers, but hardly knew their kindlier resources. Her affection was kept for those wells and streamlets which flowed past her doors and made glad her cities. It is a land of dried-up torrent-beds, and no river made glad any City of God except at the seasons when God had filled it with His rain. In such a land a wayside well like Jacob’s counts for more than our Western imagination can realise. Property in water was an older institution than property in land. These wayside wells and “sealed fountains” refreshed men from time immemorial in the very presence of their enemies. They were the choicest riches of their owners. The journey from south to north leads one ever more frequently in among such springs, but many towns of the south are built at places where there is abundance of them. Hebron has twelve little fountains; Gaza fifteen. In Samaria they burst forth in every valley, and the vale of Nablus is a net-work of rivulets, springing, it is said, from no fewer than eighty sources. In Galilee they are still more abundant. At Khan Minyeh, supposed by many to be the site of the ancient Capernaum, the ruins are mostly those of aqueducts, and springs break forth and stream in little rivers everywhere.

The beauty and refreshing coolness of such fountains is very great. The dripping walls of the Khan Minyeh aqueducts are covered with magnificent bunches of maidenhair, whose fronds were the broadest we had ever seen. The Well of Harod, close by the stream where Gideon tested his soldiers, is one of the loveliest spots imaginable. There is a little cave, where the pebbles shine up blue through the shallow water; ferns grow in its crannies, and at the side a clear spring, two feet broad and five inches deep, splashes into the pool from a recess entirely hidden by hanging maidenhair. Nor is the natural beauty of these springs their only charm. When one remembers the days of old through which they flowed, and the men who stooped to drink of them so along ago, all that was most sacred and most heroic to one’s childhood lives again, and speaks to the heart. Ay! and to the conscience too; for these were the springs that gave to Bible men their metaphors of a fountain opened for sin and for uncleanness; this is the land in which it sprang up and from which it has flowed forth with cleansing and refreshment for the whole earth.

THE LAKE OF GALILEE, LOOKING NORTH FROM TIBERIAS.

The road at the left of the picture is the main road to the north from Tiberias.

CHAPTER V
BROWN VILLAGES, WHITE TOWNS, AND A GREY CITY

Nothing could better illustrate the completeness of the change through which Israel passed when she exchanged a nomadic for a settled life than the great importance which the idea of the city has in the Bible. Kinglake describes the Jordan as “a boundary between the people living under roofs and the tented tribes that wander on the farther side.” The very name of “city,” applied to these grotesque little hamlets, shews how seriously they took themselves, and compels an amused respect for so mighty a little self-importance, for a “King” of that time might be compared with a chairman of parish council to-day. The idea of the city became more and more part of the religion of Israel as Jerusalem rose to religious as well as civil importance. To them God was a city-dweller, and there is an eastern saying about lonely wanderers journeying homeless towards the sunset, that they are “going to God’s gate.”

The changing history of the land has passed it through many phases, and no doubt there are far wider differences between the centuries in respect of men’s dwellings than in respect of those natural features of the land which we have been studying in the preceding pages. This chapter will describe present conditions. And yet in spite of changes the aspect of things must be pretty much what it always was. Men gathered into cities on some strongly fortified hill for purposes of war, or around some holy place for worship, or in some fertile valley for safe agriculture; and the sites thus chosen are retained for the most part. With the exception of the wandering tents, which are occasionally seen throughout the land, there is hardly a solitary dwelling in Palestine which is not a ruin. And the want of good roads, together with the uncertain government, seems still to keep the village communities more apart than they are in most countries. Each village has a character and a reputation of its own, and cherishes views regarding its neighbours which it is not slow to impart either to them or to foreigners. The colour of these townships divides them into the three classes of our title. Damascus and Beyrout are beyond the scope of the present description—Damascus, the greyest city in the world so far as age is concerned; and Beyrout, the over-grown white town upon which the ends of the world are come, leaving it little individual character of its own. Keeping to the south of these, we have the clearly marked division, with little overlapping. A brown village may indeed have a white church or mosque gleaming from its bosom, and the walls of some towns besides Jerusalem are grey; yet in the main it is a land of brown villages, white towns, and one grey city.

The villages are very brown—“dust-coloured,” as they have been happily called. Seen from a distance they generally look inviting, but it takes the traveller no long time to believe that a near approach will certainly disillusionise him. They have many sorts of charm in the distance. Some of them are set up on the edge of a hill, and these seen from below present all the appearance of fortification, their flat roofs and perpendicular sides giving them an angular and military aspect. Others are surrounded by neatly walled and cultivated olive-yards which give the promise of a well-conditioned village. In the rare instances where trees are planted among the dwellings, the flat brown roofs seem to nestle among the branches in delightful contentment and restfulness. Where trees are absent there is generally a high cactus hedge, serving as an enclosing wall, which sets the village in a pleasant green. Even those hamlets which have about them no green of any kind are not uninviting, especially if they are built on a hill-slope. There is a peculiar formality and neatness given by irregular piles of flat-roofed buildings overlapping each other at different levels. But as you approach, all is disillusionment. The trees seem to detach themselves and stand apart in the untidy paths. The cactus hedge is repulsive, with its spiked pulpy masses and its bare and straggling roots. The brown walls seem to decay before your eyes, and the village seen from within its own street changes to a succession of ruinous heaps of débris, with excavations into the mud of the hillside. If, as at Nain, there be a white-walled church or mosque in the place, it seems to stand alone in a long moraine of ruins. An acrid smell hangs upon the air, for the fuel is dried cakes of dung. These are plastered over the walls of low ovens into which the mud seems to swell in great blisters by the street-side. In some of these ovens crowds of filthy children and tattooed women are sitting, while the men loiter in idle rows along the house walls. When suddenly you say to yourself that this is Shunem, or this Nain, or Magdala, the disappointment is complete.

In some places the houses are built of stones gathered from the ancient ruins of the neighbourhood (Colonel Conder believes that in hardly any instance are the stones fresh quarried). Other houses consist simply of four walls of mud, with a roof of the same material laid upon branches set across. A small stone roller may be seen lying somewhere on the roof, for in heat the mud cracks and needs to be rolled now and then to keep the rain from leaking through. The sheikh, or headman of the village, has a better house—often the one respectable habitation in the place, but suggestive of a ruined tower at that. It is a two-storeyed building, whose great feature is the public hall, or reception-room, where local matters are discussed and strangers interviewed. There is no glass in the windows, and the strong sunlight deepens the gloom of the interiors to a rich brown darkness with points of high light and colour. The shade is precious in these sun-smitten places, and Conder narrates an incident which often recurs to mind in them. It was in the cave of the Holy House at Nazareth, the reputed home of Jesus in His boyhood. The visitor “observed to the monk that it was dark for a dwelling-house, but he answered very simply, ‘The Lord had no need of much light.’” The rooms are almost bare of furniture, a bed and a few water-jars in a corner being sometimes the only objects visible. In some of them the floor space is divided into two levels, half the room being a platform two or three feet higher than the other half. On this platform the family lives, while the cattle occupy the lower part; and along the edge of the platform there are hollows in its floor, which serve as mangers for the beasts. No doubt it was in such a manger that Jesus was laid in Bethlehem.

The inhabitants of these villages are the Fellahin, of whom Conder has given so interesting a description.[13] He recognises in them a people of almost unmixed ancient stock. Distinct from Bedawin and from Turks, they are the “modern Canaanites,” probably descendants of the original inhabitants whom Israel displaced. These were never quite exterminated; and although there have no doubt been many minor instances of the absorption of other breeds, yet in the main they remain very much as they were when they talked with Jesus in Aramaic, or even as they were in days much earlier than His. A slight enrichment to their lives has been made by each of the invaders, and reminiscences of Israel, Rome, the early Christians, the Crusaders, may be found blended with their Mohammedanism. But they are conservative to the last degree, and any radical change seems an impossibility among them. Many things contribute to this conservatism, among which perhaps the chief is the tradition of intermarriage between the inhabitants of the same village. Another factor is their extraordinary ignorance, combined with a pride no less remarkable. It would be difficult to find anywhere men so self-satisfied on such small capital of merit. A third cause of their immovableness is to be found in the usury and oppression by which they are held down; and even their local self-government—that imperium in imperio which prevails under the larger oppression of the Turk—keeps up, so far as it is allowed, the ancestral ways and thoughts. In one respect this conservatism of theirs is a gain to the world: it has preserved among them those habits of speech and manner with which the Bible has made us all so familiar; and it is to them, with all their faults, that we owe much of the “sacramental value” of Palestine travel.

As for their faults, no doubt they are many, but it is not for the passing stranger to attempt an estimate of their character. The most obvious lapses are sins of speech, and one always has the impression that the interpreter is toning down as he translates. One can see that property is insecure, and life by no means so sacred as in the West. One incident brought this home to us vividly. Some of our party had been detained on an exploring excursion till after dark. When we asked a group of natives what could have become of them, the answer was more significant than reassuring, for they pointed with their fingers vertically downwards! It was not so bad as that, however, for we soon heard revolver shots, and answered them. We fired into a field, aiming at a large stack of corn to prevent accidents. Conceive our horror when a silent figure in flowing robes rose from the centre of the stack! He was spending the night there to keep his property from thieves. For the rest, it is their laziness that strikes one most forcibly. Their agriculture is as leisurely as it is primitive. They sit while reaping, and thresh by standing upon boards studded with flints, which oxen draw over the threshing-floors. Their ploughs are but iron-shod sticks which scratch the surface of the field. In outlandish districts they are described as mere savages, but we saw little to justify such a criticism. They are uncompromisingly dirty everywhere, yet their food is simple, and they appear in the main to be healthy enough. At first one’s impression of them is of universal gloom, sulky and contemptuous; but the mood soon changes if you stay among them for a little time, and the knit brows relax to a smiling childishness.

Of white towns, with a population between 3000 and 3500, there are about a dozen in Palestine, of which, excluding Damascus and Beyrout, the best known are Haifa and Acre, Tyre and Sidon, Tiberias, Jenin, Nablus, Bethlehem, Hebron, Gaza, Jaffa. They shine from far as you approach them. Some, like Jenin, gleam most picturesquely from among palm trees; others, like Nazareth seen from Jezreel, shew like stars of white in high mountain valleys; and yet others, like Bethshan, appear “like white islands in the mouth of an estuary.” The nearer view of Nazareth, when the hill has been climbed and the town suddenly reveals itself, is one of rare beauty. You are looking down into an oval hollow full of clean and bright houses. Many cypress trees and spreading figs enrich the prospect, and the whole picture is most pleasing. Bethlehem, again, has a picturesqueness that is all its own. Approaching it from the south, the track turns sharply into a valley whose end is entirely blocked by a lofty hill, covered along its whole length with shining white masonry set far up against the sky. It looks trim and newly finished; and one hardly knows whether to be delighted or vexed that Bethlehem should be so workmanlike a place.

But it is the sea-coast towns which are the most characteristic of their class. Tyre is a surprisingly living and wide-awake place still, and the name recalls ever some vista of blue sea with ships seen through the white arches or rich foliage that decorate the town’s western front. Jaffa is still more surprising. It is usual to embark at Port Said late in the evening, and when you wake in the morning and find the steamer at anchor, the first sight of Palestine that greets you is Jaffa, framed in the brass circle of the port-hole—a very perfect and brilliant little picture. The town is set well up, a conical

THE FOUNTAIN OF THE VIRGIN AT NAZARETH.

hill of sparkling colour, backed, as we first saw it, by cloudless Syrian sky, into which it ran its two minarets. It was larger than we had imagined, and much loftier, with a very bold and gaily tilted edge-line—a city set on its hill, and with a mighty consciousness of being so set, like Coventry Patmore’s old English cottage. Dark-leaved trees, red roofs, and occasional jewel-like points of green, where copper cupolas have been weathered, light up the picture into one of the most ideal of its kind.

Within, the white towns shew a strange mixture of splendour and of sordidness. The streets are aggressively irregular, and the whole impresses one as at once ancient and unfinished. The wider spaces are full of colour and of noise, and the houses which surround them are a patchwork of all manner of buildings, with smaller structures leaning against their sides, and gaudy awnings of ragged edge protecting doorways from the sun. Where the street narrows, it is filled with crowds of men, women, and children, and laden donkeys pushing them aside as they pass along. There are lanes, also, in deep shadow, with buttresses and long archways converting them into high and narrow tunnels. The shopkeepers in these lanes sit behind their piles of merchandise and converse in shrill voices with neighbours on the other side, not six feet away. The whole appearance of the town is that of close-huddled dwellings, which have squeezed themselves into as little space as possible, and have been forced to expand upwards for want of lateral room.

These towns are the mingling-places of Syria—crucibles of its national life, in which new and composite races are being molten. One or two of them, like Nablus and Hebron, are inhabited chiefly by a fanatical Moslem population, and in these life stagnates. But the others are open to the world. In the past, long before the modern stream of travellers came, this process was going on. In very early times the towns were recruited by the neighbouring Canaanites and Arabs. They were, as they still are, so insanitary that if it were not for such additions their population would soon die out. In Christ’s time the Greek and Roman world poured itself into them; then came the long train of Christian pilgrims; after that the Crusader hosts. Each of these, and many other incursions, have helped to mix the race of townsfolk. In Bethlehem and elsewhere there are many descendants of the Crusaders, whose fair hair and complexion tells its own tale. But the mingling of races has gone on with quite a new rapidity during the last few decades. Trade and travel have combined to force the West upon the East. Circassians, Kurds, Turks, Jews, Africans, Cypriotes have settled there. Travellers who have twice visited the land, with an interval of some years between their visits, are struck by the sudden and sweeping change. Even the passing visitor cannot fail to perceive it. The villagers remain apart, intermarrying within the village or with neighbouring Fellahin. The townspeople bring their brides from other towns, and sometimes from other nations. Many kinds of imported goods are exposed for sale in the bazaars. There are parts of Damascus where nothing is sold that was not made in Europe. The habits of the West are also invading towns. Intoxicating liquors are freely sold, and in Nazareth there are now no fewer than seventeen public-houses. “Paris fashions”—probably belated—are ousting the ancient customs. Tattooing is quite out of fashion among the women of the towns, and knives and forks have penetrated native houses even in Hebron. The traveller comes into contact with the townspeople far less fully than with the villagers. In the towns everybody is minding some business or other of his own, and the stranger meets with the residenter merely as buyer with seller. Once only did we see the interior of a town house, and that visit confirmed the impression of a new and composite life very remarkably. It was in Tyre. An agreeable native, who had brought some curiosities for sale, invited us to go home with him and inspect his stock. The house was in a narrow street, but the rooms were large. His wife sat near the window smoking a nargileh, her eyebrows painted black, and her face heavily powdered and rouged. The room was crowded with furniture. There were a sofa and two European beds with mosquito curtains; a new English wardrobe of carved walnut, with a large mirror; a kitchen dresser covered with dinner dishes of the customary European kind. Dry-goods boxes were drawn forth from under the beds and the sofa, and pasteboard boxes from drawers and shelves, all filled with the most indescribable medley of curiosities from rifled tombs. Bracelets, tear-bottles, ear-rings came to light in rapid succession. Finally, a square foot of lead-work appeared—part of a leaden winding-sheet which had recently been torn off an ancient corpse in a sarcophagus—a heavy shroud, finely ornamented with deep-moulded garlands and figures. Our hosts were good-humoured and pleasant people, who conducted the conversation in some five different languages, and appeared to combine in themselves and their properties several centuries of human life.

The grey city of Jerusalem stands unique among the towns of Palestine. With the brown villages it has nothing in common. The immense variety of its buildings, with their domes, flat terraces, minarets, and sloping roofs, distinguishes it at once from the rectangular masses of the villages. As if on purpose to emphasise the contrast, one of these villages has set itself right opposite the city across a narrow valley. Looking from the southern wall of the Haram enclosure, this village of Siloam is seen sprawling along the opposite hillside, a mere drift of square hovels seen across some fields of artichokes. Nothing could appear more miserable; inferiority is confessed in every line of it.

More might be said for the description of Jerusalem as the largest of the white towns. It is, like them, a centre where races mingle; indeed it is the centre of such mingling. All roads lead to it from north, south, east, and west; and when one suddenly comes upon one of those old Roman roads which make for Jerusalem with such purposeful and grim directness over the Judean mountains, one realises that this has been the centre and mingling-place of nationalities for many centuries. Yet on the spot an obvious distinction is felt at once. There are two Jerusalems: the old one within the walls, and a new one spreading on the open ground to the west and north. This “new Levantine city side by side with the old Oriental city” is quite a modern place. When Stanley wrote his Sinai and Palestine it was unsafe to inhabit houses outside the walls. Now such houses are clustered together to the west in a city which is actually larger than the enclosed one, and whose rows of shops are hardly distinguishable from those of Western Europe. A strange medley its buildings are! The best sites are occupied by the great Russian Cathedral and Hospice, white-walled and leaden-roofed. Beyond these, embedded in Jewish “colonies,” are the European consulates, with a Syrian Orphanage and an English Agricultural Settlement farther up the slope. The Tombs of the Kings lie to the north, in all their desolation, and the still more desolate Mound of Ashes which is supposed by some to be a relic of Temple sacrifices; but these are next neighbours to the Dominican monastery, the Bishop’s house, and the house of that curious body of Americans known as the “Overcomers”; while on the hill, not a mile above them, is an English villa. All this and much else pours itself into the city and mingles in the streets with the very composite life already dwelling there. Just at the foot of the hill which Gordon identified as Calvary, while Turkish bugles were blowing from the fort, we saw two Syrians engaged in rough horseplay, a party of Americans and English riding, some tonsured and cowled monks on foot, and a travelling showman with an ape clinging to him in terror of a tormenting crowd of Jews and Mohammedans; while poor women, unconscious of any part in so strange a tableau, were returning to the city with full waterpots on their heads.

Yet in Jerusalem all this makes a different impression from that of other towns. The mingling of races here is but, as it were, the surface appearance of a far more wonderful fact. From the days of Solomon, Israel centralised her life in Jerusalem. On that hill the mountainland seems to gather itself as in a natural centre, typical and representative of the whole. There the nation centred its life also, in “the mountain throne, and the mountain sanctuary of God.” Jeroboam’s attempt to decentralise cost the nation dear; but in spite of that attempt the centralisation took effect, and made her the most composite of cities from the first. All ends of the earth meet here as in a focus. Laden camels of the Arameans from the far East are making for the city, and ships flying like a cloud of homing doves to their windows are bearing precious freights to her port. History and religion are compressed within the walls. On the spot no one can forget the ancient geography which regarded Jerusalem as the centre of the earth, with Hell vertically below, and the island of Purgatory its antipodes, and Heaven’s centre overhead. In the Church of the Holy Sepulchre they shew a flattened ball in a little hollow place as the centre of the world. As in some other cases of faulty science, an imaginative mind may discover here a happy truth beneath the error. The composite life of Jerusalem without the walls is but of yesterday, that within the walls is hoary with age.

We have called it “a grey city,” and even in respect of colour this is a true name. Not that there is any one colour of Jerusalem. In the varying lights of sunrise, noon, afternoon, and evening, its colour changes. At one time it hangs, airy and dreamlike, over the steep bank of the Valley of Jehoshaphat; at another time it seems to sit solid on its rock, every roof and battlement picked out in photographic clearness; again, in the twilight of evening, all is sombre with rich purple shadows. There are spots of colour, too, which break its monotonous dull hue. The Mosque of Omar, with its faint metallic greenish colour, stands in contrast to everything, and makes a background of the city for its isolated beauty. There is another dome, that of the Synagogue of the Ashkenazim, whose colour is a lustrous blue-green, shining over the city almost luminously. White minarets and spires are seen here and there, and a few red-tiled roofs have found place within the walls. Several spots are softened by the foliage of trees, and the pools, whose edges are formed of picturesque and irregular house-sides, catch and intensify the colours in their rich reflections. Yet, in spite of all that, Jerusalem is grey. The walls are grey with a touch of orange in it. The houses, massed and huddled close within, are grey with a touch of blue. They are built roughly, the stones divided by broad seams of mortar, and most of them in their humble way conform to the fashion set by the Mosque of Omar and the Holy Sepulchre, and are domed. But the domes of ordinary houses are far from shapely, and suggest the fancy that the scorching sun has blistered the flat roofs.

By far the best view of Jerusalem is that which is seen from the Mount of Olives, as one approaches the city by the hill-road from Bethany. Her environs are of interest from many associations—there, on the Mount of Offence, Solomon offered sacrifices to idols; yonder, on the hill of Scopus, the main body of Titus’ troops was posted; here, near where we stand, is the place of the agony in Gethsemane. For many days one might go round about the city, every day gaining new knowledge of its story. But what the first eye-shot gives is this: a sharp angle formed by the two valleys of Jehoshaphat and Hinnom; steep banks rising from their bottoms to the walls, which they overlap in an irregular and wavy line; within the walls, glancing back from the angle which they form above the junction of the valleys, the eye runs up a gradually rising expanse of close-packed building, which is continued more sparsely in the long rolling slope beyond, to the ridge of Scopus in the north, and to the distant sweep of long level mountain-line in the west. It is as if the whole city had slidden down and

JOPPA FROM THE SEA.

been caught by that great angle of wall just before it precipitated itself into the gorges.

To see the grey city rightly, and feel how grey it is, you must view it across these gorges. The more distant environs are detached from the city. They are cultivated in patches, and dotted with modern buildings of various degrees of irrelevance. But these are mere accidents, which the place seems to ignore. The gorges themselves are part and parcel of the city, and they stand for the overflow of her sad and desolate spirit. Their sides are banks of rubbish—the wreckage and débris of a score of sieges, the accumulation of three thousand years. You look from the lower pool of Siloam in the valley of Hinnom, up a long dreary slope of dark grey rubbish, down which a horrible black stream of liquid filth trickles, tainting the air with its stench. Far off above you stands the wall, which in old days enclosed the pool. Here the city seems to have shrunk northwards, as if in some horror of conscience. The Field of Blood and the Hill of Evil Counsel are just across the gorge to the south. The valleys are full of tombs, those on the city side for the most part Mohammedan, while the lower slopes of Olivet are paved with the flat tombstones of Jews.

What a stretch of history unrolls itself to the imagination of him who lingers on the sight of Jerusalem! The boundaries seem to dwindle, till that which stands there is the old grey battle-beaten fortress of the Jebusites, the last post held by her enemies against Israel. David conquers it, and the procession of priests and people bring up to its gate the ark, for the celebration of whose entrance tradition has claimed the 24th Psalm. A new city rises, and falls, and rises again, through more than twenty sieges and rebuildings. Assyrians, Babylonians, Romans, Moslems, Crusaders batter at its gates. The level of the streets rises through the centuries, till now the traveller walks on a pavement thirty or forty feet above the floor of the ancient city. To discover the old foundations, the explorers of our time have sunk shafts which at some parts of the wall touch bottom 120 feet below the present surface. Far below the slighter masonry of the present wall, with its battlemented Turkish work, lie the huge stones of early days, some of which bear still the marks of Phœnician masons.[14]

The gates, of course, are modern, though in some of them there are immense stones of very ancient date, whose rustic work the Turkish builders have cut away, and scored the flat surface with imitation seams to make them match the small square stones of the building above. Yet the positions of the ancient gates are not difficult to fix, and modern ones do duty for some of them. Others are built up with solid masonry, notably the double-arched “Gate Beautiful,” which was thus closed because of a tradition that Messiah would return and enter the city by it. It was from this gate that in olden times the man went forth with the scapegoat that was to bear the sins of the people to the wilderness. The interior (which, however, dates from the seventh century) is a rich and beautiful piece of architecture, with massive monolithic pillars supporting heavy arches, and an elaborately decorative entablature cornicing the walls. It is a dreary little place, with its litter of débris and its flights of bats; and its dead wall, pierced only with loophole windows, now affords neither entrance for Christ nor exit for sin. What memories crowd the mind of the beholder as he looks upon these gates! Here, seven centuries ago, went out the weeping company of the inhabitants, when Saladin took the city. There, eleven centuries earlier, the Jews set fire to the Roman siege-engine, the flames were blown back upon the fortifications, and the wall fell and made an entrance for the legions. That was near the Jaffa Gate. Here again, by the Damascus Gate, if Gordon’s theory be the correct one, the Saviour passed to Calvary; and there may be stones there on which the cross struck, as Simon the Cyrenian staggered out under its weight.

It is indeed a strange city, a city of grey religion, in which three faiths cherish their most hallowed memories of days far past. But “far past” is written on every memory. That Beautiful Gate has indeed shut out Christ, and shut in all manner of sin unforgiven. The land, as has been already said, seems still inhabited by Christ, but He has forsaken Jerusalem; it is almost impossible to feel any sense of His presence there. This is a city of grey history, whose age and decrepitude force themselves upon every visitor. It has been well described as having still “the appearance of a gigantic fortress.” But it is a weird fortress, with an air of petrified gallantry about it, and an infinite loneliness and desolation. No river flows near to soften the landscape. A fierce sun beats down in summer there upon “a city of stone in a land of iron with a sky of brass.” But for the sound of bugles, whose calls seem always to shock one with their savage liveliness, it might be a fossil city. Built for eternity, setting the pattern for that “New Jerusalem” which has been the Utopia of so many devout souls, it seems a sarcasm on the great promise, a city “with a great future behind it.” What has this relic to do with a blessed future for mankind—this rugged bareness of stone, this contempt for beauty, this pitiful sordidness of detail? History and religion seem to mourn together here, and one sees in every remembrance of it those two weeping figures, the most significant of all, for its secular and religious life—Titus, who “gazed upon Jerusalem from Scopus the day before its destruction, and wept for the sake of the beautiful city”; and Jesus Christ who, when things were ripening for Titus, foresaw the coming of the legions as He looked upon Jerusalem from Olivet, “and when He was come near He beheld the city and wept over it.”

PART II
THE INVADERS

Since the days of the ancient Canaanites Palestine has been often invaded. The composite life of the towns we have already noted. The history of Palestine shows how composite the life of the whole land has become. Its central position among the nations is known to every one. To the south, shut off by but a strip of desert, are Egypt and Africa; to the east lie Arabia, Persia, and the farther Asiatic continent; easily accessible on the north are Asia Minor, Turkey, and Russia; while ships almost daily arrive which unite it on the west with Europe and America. Yet one day’s ride along any of its chief highways will do more to show the traveller what that central position practically means, than all his study of it in books and on maps. For in one day’s ride he may meet Kurds, Circassians, Arabs, Syrians, Turks, Cypriotes, Greeks, Russians, Egyptians, Nubians, Austrians, French, Germans, English, and Americans. In a mission school in Damascus were found some little dark-eyed Syrian children speaking English with an unmistakable Australian accent. They had been born and brought up in Queensland.

It is in Hauran that this mixture of races is most forcibly thrust upon one’s notice. In the villages south of Damascus, the crowd which gathers round the tents is sure to contain several smiling negroes, some of them branded on the cheeks; Circassians, with sickle-shaped nose and thin lips, sharp-featured and small-limbed men with an untamable expression on their bitter faces; Arabs, darker of complexion, and more languid of eye; and Turkish soldiers, thin and smallpox bitten. There are to be found the Jew, sneering complacently at the inferior world; the fanatical Moslem, who will break the water-bottle your lips have touched; the Druse, who objects to coffee and tobacco, and to whom you hesitate to say “Good morning,” lest he may have conscientious scruples about that; and the cross-bred ruffian, who has no scruples about anything. Everything helps to strengthen the impression. In Damascus it seems always to be Sunday with one or other portion of the population, and a different set of shutters are up each day for nearly half the week. The railway, it might be supposed, must have blended the life of the composite East, but it only serves to emphasise the compositeness. In one of the Hauran stations we had some hours to wait. We spread our rugs in the shadow of the station-house, with a Turkish officer, an Arab soldier, and a long line of camels to watch till lunch was ready. When the time came, the hall of the booking-office was cleared of passengers of a dozen different nationalities, and our lunch was spread on the floor, just in front of the ticket-window! The train came at last, an hour late, drawn by a rather blasé-looking engine. Then began that babel of tongues which shows how nations meet in the East. All the world seemed to have sent its representatives to that train—its wealth to the white-cushioned first-class; its middle-class to the bare boards of the second; its poverty to the cattle-trucks dignified by the name of third,—while behind the carriages came two waggons loaded with grain, their owner perched high on one, and a baby’s cradle on the other.

All this phantasmagoria of the present helps one to realise better the extraordinary history of the past. For thousands of years the flow of manifold human life through Syria has been continuous. At the mouth of the Dog River, whose valley has from time immemorial served as a main passage from the sea to the East for armies, there is, cut in smoothed faces of the solid rock, the most remarkable collection of inscriptions in the world. The Assyrian slab shows still the familiar bearded figure of the monarch with his air of strength untempered by compassion. The Egyptian slab records its invasion in hieroglyphics. The Greek, Roman, and French stones tell their similar tale. Throughout the land the same thing repeats itself. In Hauran we found a fine Egyptian hieroglyphic embedded in the mud-and-rubble interior wall of a private courtyard, an altar of the time of Titus lying exposed on a hillside, and many Graeco-Roman inscriptions built into the walls of houses.[15] The five names which we have selected from so great a number of invaders are those whose mark upon the land has been deepest and most permanent.

CHAPTER I
ISRAELITE

Every traveller is impressed by the very meagre remains of a material kind which Israel has left for curious eyes. In a museum at Jerusalem many of these have been gathered—fragments of pottery and glass, coins, and other relics,—but the total number of them is surprisingly small. There are, of course, those huge stones to which reference has been already made, cut in a style which experts used to regard as distinctive enough to enable them to identify it as Jewish work.[16] But inscriptions are extremely rare. Phœnicia and Israel seem to have purposely avoided the habit of Assyrian and Egyptian kings, who wrote upon everything they built. There is, of course, the Moabite stone, whose characters are closely allied to Hebrew writing. But with that exception there is hardly any certain Hebrew inscription extant except one. That is indeed a writing of romantic fame. There is a tunnel known as Hezekiah’s Aqueduct, connecting the Fountain of the Virgin with the Pool of Siloam at Jerusalem. Its length is rather more than the third of a mile; its

THE LAKE OF GALILEE, LOOKING SOUTH FROM TIBERIAS.

Two of the circular towers and wall which defended the ancient Tiberias are seen in the foreground.

height varies from five or six feet to one foot four inches. Its course bends in a wide sweep which adds greatly to the distance, and is said to have been taken in order to avoid tombs. There are a number of culs de sac, where the workmen had evidently lost their way. The flow of water is intermittent, so that Sir Charles Warren and his friends took their lives in their hands when they first explored it. Their mouths were often under water, “and a breath of air could only be obtained by twisting their faces up. To keep a light burning, to take measurements, and make observations under these circumstances was a work of no little difficulty; and yet, after crawling through mud and water for four hours, the honour of finding the inscription was reserved for a naked urchin of the town, who, some years after, announced that he had seen writing on the wall, whereupon Professor Sayce, and Herr Schick, and Dr. Guthe plunge naked into the muddy tunnel with acid solutions, and blotting-paper, and everything necessary to make squeezes, and emerge shivering and triumphant with the most interesting Hebrew inscription that has ever been found in Palestine.”[17] The inscription describes the meeting of the two parties of miners, who, like the engineers of modern tunnels, began to bore simultaneously at opposite ends.

Failing any wealth of such material remains, we must seek for Israel in the human life of the land. Jews are there in abundance, gathered, for the most part, within their four holy cities of Jerusalem, Tiberias, Hebron, and Safed. In Hebron they are a persecuted minority; in Safed they form about half the population; in Jerusalem, where there are more than seventy synagogues, it was estimated in 1898 that out of the 60,000 inhabitants 41,000 were Jews, nearly six times the number of the Mohammedans; while in Tiberias also they form about two-thirds of the population. Besides the Jews resident in these cities there are others both in the older colonies and in the new settlements of the Zionist movement, which have been created by the generosity of Jewish millionaires. Reports differ as to the success of these interesting experiments, and the knowledge of them which can be obtained from a passing visit is a quite inadequate ground for forming any judgment. Mr. Zangwill eloquently pleads for the restoration of the land to its ancient people; Colonel Conder assures us that the Jew is incapable of becoming a thoroughly successful agriculturist, though as a shopkeeper, a money-changer, or, in some cases, as a craftsman, he prospers in his native land. Certain it is that Jews are gathering to it from Russia, Poland, Germany, Spain, Arabia, and many other countries, with what ultimate result the future alone can shew.

It would be unfair and misleading to take the present Jewish population of Syria as the representative of ancient Israel. It still perpetuates, indeed, the sects of Pharisees and Sadducees, and it still holds aloof from the surrounding population with that independence and tenacity which has marked Israel from of old. Crucified by Romans, butchered and tortured by Crusaders, oppressed and driven forth by Moslems, this marvellous people lives yet and will live on. In Europe the lot of the Jew has been and still is a bitter one. In Syria to-day the lowest and most insulting term of abuse among the Fellahin is to call each other Jews. Yet the spirit of the people is not broken by oppression, as is the spirit of the Fellahin. The Jew takes what comes and says little; but he believes in himself, his past and his future, with a faith indomitable as it is daring. Still it must be confessed that the Jew of Palestine is generally repulsive. Mark Twain’s description of them as he saw them at Tiberias is hardly overdrawn—“long-nosed, lanky, dyspeptic-looking ghouls with the indescribable hats on, and a long curl dangling down in front of each ear.” The hats are circular black felt plates, giving to their wearers a peculiar air of conscious rectitude and semi-clerical superiority; the curls are grown for the convenience of the archangel in the resurrection! The younger men and lads of Tiberias impress one as the most unpleasant-looking of all the inhabitants of the land. They are so neurotic and effeminate, and at the same time so monstrously supercilious. The Jewish quarters are famous for their excessive dirt. In the visitors’ book of the hotel at Tiberias, Captain MacGregor wrote “that the Rob Roy and myself had stopped there two nights, and that the canoe was not devoured.” This is not encouraging, and in part it is the result of mistaken methods. Many of these Jews are subsidised, and a subsidised religion is inevitably degrading. A man who receives an income for no other service to his kind than that he is a Jew is not likely to do credit to his ancestors.

In the Samaritans we have better representatives of the ancient days. No people in the land have a more pathetic quaintness about them than these few survivors of antiquity who are still met with in the streets of Nablus. They preserve the old type of features, for their blood has been unmixed for more than 2000 years. But they are fast dying out, and only a remnant of less than 200 individuals is now alive. Difficult of access, reserved, mysterious, they are the ghosts of ancient Israel, who seem to haunt rather than to enjoy their former heritage.

In the manners and customs of Syria a still more interesting memorial of Israel is found. Many of these were not peculiar to Israel, nor was she the first to cherish them. They are the forms of the general Semitic stock, of which she was but one people. But the words and ways of Israel are the only form of Semitic life with which the world is familiar, and every student of the Bible finds in these the greatest source both of devout and of scientific interest. In the towns and in Jerusalem there is still much to remind one of the life so matchlessly delineated in Scripture. Lean and mangy dogs still sniff around Lazarus at the very door of Dives. The windows of houses generally face the interior courts, and the outer walls are blank, so that every door opened after nightfall contrasts the vivid light of the interior with the “outer darkness” of the street. Still more in the country, among the Fellahin and the wandering Arabs, does one seem to live in Bible times. The gipsy-like Bedawin west of Jordan are certainly degraded by change of nomadic habits and by contact with the villagers; yet there is enough of their desert heredity in them to interpret many of the patriarchal stories. The Arab sitting at noon-day in the shaded edge of his tent, or walking at eventide in the fields where it is pitched, is the true son of Abraham and Isaac. When you know him better you will not improbably recognise Jacob also. Except for tobacco, gunpowder, and coffee, he lives much as Israel lived in those days of wandering to which her writings love to trace back her origin. Even these modern innovations hardly break the continuity. The Arab smokes with such enthusiasm that it is difficult to imagine his fathers without their chibouk; and his brass-bound gun might be the heirloom of countless generations. Of the Fellah and his descent, and his conservatism of the past, we have already written.

So it comes to pass that he who journeys intelligently through Palestine reads the history of Israel ever afterwards with a quite new interest. The Bible is incomparably the best guide-book to Syria; and you seem to journey through its chapters as you move from place to place. Here is the fig tree planted in the vineyard; there, the tower guarding the wine-press. Unmuzzled oxen are trampling the corn on the threshing-floor, from whence the wind drives the chaff in a glistening cloud. Women are still coming from the city to draw water, and grinding in couples at the mill. We saw the prodigal son, drinking and singing at Beyrout; and the owner of the waggonloads of corn we noted in Hauran had kept them from the last year on the chance of a drought, which would raise their prices in the market—he was the rich man of the prophets who was grinding the faces of the poor. Under the walls of Jezreel a curious coincidence brought back vividly to mind the tragic fate of Jezebel. It was there that we first saw people with painted eyes and faces; and there a horse lay dead with a pack of dogs at work upon the body. Next morning, as we parted, nothing was left but the skeleton and the hoofs. The people whom you meet are talking in Bible language. When they repeat the familiar words of Scripture they are not quoting texts, but transacting business in their ordinary way. We were told of a shepherd near Hebron who, when asked why the sheepfolds there had no doors, answered quite simply, “I am the door.” He meant that at night, when the sheep were gathered within the circular stone wall of the enclosure, he lay down in its open entrance to sleep, so that no sheep might stray from its shelter without wakening him, and no ravenous beast might enter but across his body. In the north, an American was endeavouring to persuade a stalwart Syrian lad to try his fortunes in Chicago. The boy evidently felt the temptation, but he turned smilingly towards the middle-aged man at his side, and, pointing to him, answered, “Suffer me first to bury my father.”

But of all our experiences there was one which recalled the ancient life most vividly, and on that account it may be related here. We had camped over night near the village of Tell-es-Shihab in Hauran. In the morning we mounted our horses amid a crowd of villagers, and started for the village. The men protested loudly, and when we told them we were going only to search for inscriptions, they assured us that there were none. In spite of their opposition we rode on, followed by a tumultuous chorus. A chance remark led finally to an invitation from the headman of the village to his menzil, or reception hall. It was the mention of the name of Dr. Torrance, of the Tiberias Medical Mission, who, on one of his journeys, had cured this sheikh of an illness. At the door our host met us, and most courteously invited us to enter, bowing and touching our palms with his. The hall was dark, with the great stone arch characteristic of Hauran architecture spanning its centre. Smoke had coloured the arch and the rafters a rich dark brown, from whose shadow swallows flitted continually out into the sunshine and back again. We were seated on mats, spread with little squares of rich carpet round three sides of a hollow place in the floor, where a fire of charcoal burned, surrounded by parrot-beaked coffeepots. This was the hearth of hospitality, whose fire is never suffered to go out; near it stood the great stone mortar, in which a black slave was crushing coffeebeans. The coffee, deliciously flavoured with some cunning herb or other, was passed round. But the conversation which followed was the memorable part of that entertainment. In the shadow at the back the young men who had been admitted sat in silence. The old men, elders of the village community, sat in a row on stone benches right and left of the door. The sheikh made many apologies for not having called upon us at the tents—he had thought we were merchantmen going to buy silk at Damascus. Then followed endless over-valuation of each other, and flattery concerning our respective parents and relations. “How long would we stay under his roof? surely at least till to-morrow or next day? No, one of us had to catch a steamer at Beyrout? But any steamer would wait for so great a general,” etc. Until finally our leader came to the delicate subject of inscriptions, and was made free of the town, and immediately guided to the Egyptian slab mentioned on p. 87. It was a perfect specimen of intercourse with Arabs, and it dazed us with its ancient spell. There is no possibility of hurry. You must despatch your business by way of a discussion of things in general. Compliments were as rife and as conventional as those of Abraham and the children of Heth at Kirjath-Arba, and they were received and given without any pretence of taking them seriously. The elders sat silently leaning upon their staves, except now and then, when one of them would slowly rise and expatiate upon something the sheikh had said—perhaps about camels or the grain crop—beginning his interruption almost literally in the words of Job’s friends:—“Hearken to me, I also will shew mine opinion. I will answer also on my part, I also will shew mine opinion.

SITE OF THE ANCIENT CITY OF SAMARIA.

The remains of the ancient city are on the olive-clad hill to the left.

For I am full of matter, the spirit within me constraineth me.” Altogether it was a scene of the unadulterated East—just such a scene as might have been witnessed any time these three thousand years.

The great memorial of Israel is her religion. To her it was given to know the Eternal God and to pass on that knowledge to all the nations of the world. Among the many impressions given by a journey through Palestine, none is so important and none so strong as this, that the land was eminently suited for that one purpose and for that alone. She tried many similar experiments, but they all failed utterly. The luxurious orientalism of Solomon, the democratic revolt of Jeroboam, the military ambitions of Baasha, and the attempt at commercial supremacy which Omri made—each of these was an imitation of one or other of the contemporary nations. For Israel they were alike impossible. Their successive failures proclaim her a peculiar people, set in a peculiar place for a peculiar purpose. For them, as Renan says, “to act like men”—i.e. like all the rest of the world—was a sort of degradation. All other experiments in greatness failed; their greatness lay solely in the knowledge of the Lord.

CHAPTER II
GRÆCO-ROMAN

Nothing strikes one more than the contrast in Palestine between the vanishing of Hebrew buildings and the permanence of Roman ones. You have come here to a land which you know to have been for many years under Roman government, but which still to your imagination is Oriental, with here and there a Roman touch. You find, among the very ancient buildings, hardly a remaining trace of anything that is not Roman; and of Roman work you find an amount which probably astonishes you. Before you have long left Jaffa, some part or other of one of the old Roman roads making for Jerusalem will be seen. Not long afterwards Bether comes in sight—that terrible little valley where the blood ran so deep when the siege ended and the Jews’ last hope was broken. So you move on from point to point of Roman story until, as you climb the steep ascent from the Jordan valley to Gadara, you realise that it was when encamped just here that Vespasian heard the news of Nero’s death and was proclaimed emperor by his legion.

The Roman work in Palestine seems to exaggerate its peculiar characteristics, so that here one notices these more distinctly than in any other land. A Roman tower in Switzerland, a Roman road in Scotland—certainly they are Roman, but they are not removed from all things Swiss or Scotch by so vast an interval as that which divides Roman from native work in Palestine. It is indeed an invasion of arms, this Roman life—an intrusion of what is, first and last, alien to the spirit of the place. The traveller to-day, to whom the very dust of this land is dear, inevitably feels about the Roman relics an air of obtrusive and uncomprehending indifference. They “cared for none of these things,” or, if they did care a little now and then and try to understand, they did it clumsily and unnaturally. Rome’s policy was that of wide toleration, but her spirit was absolutely unaccommodating. She might allow her provinces to govern themselves and to worship pretty much as they chose, but she herself, in her officials and their works, stood aloof from them and was Rome still. This is to be seen in Palestine in all its good and in all its bad aspects. In those solidly-constructed bridges and mighty aqueducts and imperishable causeways there is the very embodiment of the Roman virtus and gravitas, that output of manhood which never trifled nor spared itself, that solemn, business-like reality which is so full of purpose. In this hard reality of Rome there is not only purpose but pitilessness of force to accomplish what is planned. Every Roman road you chance upon seems to be feeling its way with an unerring instinct towards Jerusalem or some other goal, and you know that it will arrive. Just as impressive, on the other hand, is the sense of Rome’s limitations. Her works disclose her seeing a certain length, and you know beyond all doubt that she will get there. But there are very obvious and very clearly defined limits to the length she ever sees or will go. The work of Greece is far beyond the furthest reach of Roman work—the glad spring, the grace of conscious strength that is beautiful as well as strong, the restfulness withal of perfect harmony that is thinking of more than merely utilitarian values; of these Rome knows not the secret. Beside the flight of Greek art she is pedestrian; to the Greek artist she plays at best but the part of Roman artisan. Forceful, massive, successful up to its highest desire, the Roman work is finished and perfect. And it has attained finish and perfection on a lower level than that of any nation that ever yet dreamed dreams or “looked beyond the world for truth and beauty.”

Not that there are no other traces of Rome in Syria beyond the stones of Roman ruins. In many place-names Latin is discernible, and the country is full of inscriptions of all sorts. A still more permanent mark was left by that invasion of Roman spirit which, for a time, claimed Israel for Rome. Rome came to Syria next in succession to the invasion of Alexander the Great. After his death the Macedonian power remained in the East, and the seductive spirit of Greek humanism became the rival of the old Puritan Hebraism of the nation. It was this that led to the Wars of the Maccabees, who fought for the sterner against the more genial spirit. As in the days of English Cromwell, the Puritan was invincible while he remained true to his faith—that singularly effective blend of patriotism with religious belief which has made itself felt in so many national histories. The triumph of Hebraism lasted for about a century, and then came Pompey in 63 B.C. to Jerusalem. Hellenism regained its ascendency and the Greek cities of Palestine their freedom. About a quarter of a century later the figure of Herod the Great appears as a critical factor in the history of Palestine. An Idumean and a Sadducee, he had neither patriotism nor religion to check his ambition. The path of glory and of easy advancement, then, was by way of Rome, and there was much in Herod that found Rome congenial. As a young man he had made his name by clearing out a notorious band of robbers from the valley which led down the great road from the Mediterranean to the Sea of Galilee at Capernaum. This “Vale of Doves” is flanked by precipices pierced with many caves, in which the robbers lived. Josephus tells us how Herod fell upon the device of letting down cages with the bravest of his soldiers. These men, lowered by ropes from the edge of the cliff, sprang upon the robbers in their cave’s mouth, and when they retreated within, smoked them out with fires like vermin. The man who contrived and carried out that design was not unworthy of the title “Great” from the Roman point of view. He became the centre and the champion of the new Hellenism, which was really the worship of Rome, touched as Rome was with the Greek culture she had conquered and envied and sought in vain to acquire. Rome was clumsily Greek at this time, and Herod was clumsily Roman. Certainly he would have been a Roman if he could. He was prepared to go any length to serve his end. At the Banias springs of Jordan he built a temple to Augustus. Samaria and Cæsarea, his Roman cities, must have cost him a fabulous sum to build.

Of the actual architectural remains of Rome in Palestine, the smallest are perhaps the most impressive. Here and there, from south to north, you come upon tesseræ, the remains of inlaid mosaic floors of the ancient houses. Sometimes it is single little cubes that turn up among the gravel of the sea-shore or shine from the newly-ploughed furrow. At other times broken fragments of a hand-breadth’s size may be found, with enough variety of colour to suggest the beginning of a pattern. But here and there you may find whole floors of elaborately designed mosaic, with concentric circles of various colour and size, with large-scale pictures, or, as in one case at least, with an ancient map—one of the most ancient in the world. On many a spot of Palestine you ride over ground whose stones are capitals of carved pillars, and whose layers of caked earth disclose fragments of ancient mosaic floors.

The Roman roads are still frequently met with in Palestine, and these, perhaps more than any other of their works, help the imagination to realise the old life in its magnificence of power. Whether the causeway lies bare to the weather across a mountain, or whether it cuts its track along the sheer cliff of a gorge, there is the same uncompromising purpose and capacity in it—the stride of the road, that seems to be aware of whither it is going and the reason for its going there. In the cities of the Decapolis and others there is generally one straight line of Roman causeway—the “Street called Straight,” which is by no means peculiar to Damascus. It was a Roman hobby, this of straightness, and one of the most characteristic of Roman hobbies. The roads went, so far as that was possible, up hill and down dale in a direct line from place to place; and in the cities at least one columned street did the same. The milestones which may still be found occasionally seem to heighten the human interest, though that is considerably damped when we realise that none of these roads date from the early Roman days in Syria. The paths our Saviour walked on were but tracks, not unlike those which modern travellers follow.

But the bridges are older, and in some places they are used for traffic to-day, spanning Jordan and Leontes. There is little causeway at the ends of them—their one business in these old days was to do the difficult and needful task of crossing water. Once across, the traveller might find his path or make it for himself. Parapets are not provided on the old bridges, and the surface is a flight of broad and shallow steps. If you walk unwarily and are drowned in the torrent below, that is no concern of these resolute but unluxurious bridge-builders. Their business is simply to span the stream. So effectively and conscientiously have they done this, that even when time and floods have broken the bridge, you may see the half of it still standing: the huge pier of stone and of mortar almost harder than stone stands at the side, and the actual arch is still flung across the water, wedged into an almost unbreakable strength by its keystone, while all the surface building above the arch has long been washed away. Such a ruin may be seen to-day on the coast some miles to the north of Tyre. It was in her fight with water, either for it in aqueducts or against it in quays and bridges, that Rome seems to have put out her utmost strength of masonry. Along the coasts both of the Mediterranean and of the Sea of Galilee, submerged stones and fragments of building may be seen, which bear testimony to this; and at Taricheæ, where a large fish-curing trade had to be provided for, there are remains of a dam and quay where Jordan swept round in a circle, affording a great length of water-frontage. But perhaps the most noticeable monuments of Rome in this dry and thirsty land are the

THE FORECOURT OF THE CHURCH OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE.

aqueducts, sections of which still stand in many parts. In the neighbourhood of Jericho, Laurence Oliphant counted nine different aqueducts. At Khan Minyeh, believed by some to be the site of Capernaum, there is a bewildering mass of water-building of many sorts. A Wasserthurm still stands, whose walls are 12 feet in thickness, and in all directions water is carried at various levels in channels which run along the top of mighty banks of masonry. Great stone water-pipes, with rim and hollow for fitting to the next pipes tightly, lie scattered in all directions, peeping up through the long grass and ferns, or hiding among the roots of the thorn trees. Elsewhere are to be seen longer stretches of aqueduct, whose architects have been able to turn strength into beauty in a very wonderful fashion. Roman building at its best relies on the one principle of constructive truth. It never aims at being pretty; it never fails in being right for the purpose it is meant to serve. From the point of view of beauty this may often have produced harsh, material, and heavy work—and indeed that is part of what we have already referred to as the limitation of Roman achievement. But the highest beauty is, after all, a matter far more of truth than of ornament, and there are many remains of Roman work in which such high beauty has been unconsciously attained. They built to accomplish some definite practical purpose, and for that end they built thoroughly and well. The result is the beauty which comes like a crown upon honest work beyond the design of the workers—a beauty of wholeness, adequacy, truth, which is perhaps not so far removed from the Hebrew idea of the “beauty of holiness” as careless observers might be disposed to think. This is seen in many a fragment of the Roman aqueducts. These irregular, three-tiered clusters of variously sized and shaped arches, carrying the stone or concrete channel across a gorge, have a real beauty of their own; and the long stretches of single or double tiers that take up the channel where it emerges from a mountain-tunnel, lead it high and secure across the treacherous ooze of a marsh, throw their level line on high bridges over ravines, and at last end in the tumbled ruins of a city whose pools and fountains they filled long ago—these have an indisputable beauty of workmanship and design, as well as an infinite pathos of sentiment.

Next in impressiveness to these monuments are the remains of the Greek amphitheatres of the Roman period. Whether it be that the massiveness of the stones has been too much for the lazy builders who have constructed their modern dwellings out of stolen fragments of ruins; or whether, in its irony, history has attached to these monuments of Rome’s attempt to amuse the world some special sacredness, it would be difficult to say. Certain it is that these in many places remain, sunk in the natural hollow of a hill as in a socket, while all traces of the city which once surrounded them have disappeared. They have been often described, both as they are found in Syria and elsewhere; and the stage arrangements, the underground passages, and the whole design of them does not materially differ from those of other countries. One feature in the Syrian theatres appears with special distinctness. When the play was going on, an awning may be supposed to have been spread horizontally over the roof, to shade spectators and actors from the sun. Between the edge of this awning and the flat top rim of the stage buildings, there would be a blank space left, as it were, like a framed and draped picture. The sites were so chosen that this space was filled up with some commandingly beautiful vista—in the north generally a view of Hermon. Hauran boasts many such theatres in the cities of the Decapolis. In cities which were first Greek and then Roman, such as these, it may be difficult to determine the exact date of a particular building. If the Romans built these theatres, they closely imitated the older Grecian work. They certainly built the theatre and hippodrome of Cæsarea, in which latter the goal-post is still to be seen, an immense granite stone, which has seen life in its day.

The theatres have, as a rule, survived the fortresses and the temples. Rome undertook many things. She would worship, govern, educate, amuse. Is it not significant that her wreck looks so like a gigantic playground, as if in those degenerate days of her conquest the Empire was already finding in the motto “il faut s’amuser” her rule of life? After all, it is his chief interest that is the immortal thing about any man or nation. Yet this may be an unjust and fanciful estimate. Relics of Roman temples and fortresses also remain. A statue of Jupiter has had its resurrection from the sands of Gaza, and a monument in honour of Jupiter Serapis now bears a Roman inscription near the Zion Gate of Jerusalem. Near springs and the fountain-heads of rivers especially, the ruins of Roman shrines to the Genius of the fountain are found, as at Banias. Fortresses too, where Roman garrisons used to be located, can still be traced, in a ring or an oblong trail of loose stones. Such ruins crown the height of Tabor, the summit of Gerizim, and many another hill. But these shew little trace of their former meaning. Here and there the acropolis of a Greek or Roman town may retain its ancient embankment, built on the steep slope of the hill, as if shoring up the plateau above where the temple once stood. Elsewhere, some parts of the curtain wall of a crusader castle may be blocks of Roman fortification left in situ. But the greater part of the Roman building must be looked for in the walls of village houses, where the contrast between such fragments and their surroundings is as grotesque as it is pitiful. The Gadarenes have built into their walls whatever lay nearest them. Coffins and tombstones, capitals and columns, even altars themselves, are there, “stopping holes to keep the wind away”; it is exactly what “imperial Cæsar” has come to in Gadara.

When Roman power decayed, the signs of its decadence were manifest in the departure from old severity into an efflorescence of ornament and a magnificence of mere size out of all proportion to the constructive meaning of the work. In Baalbek, Rome has left us a monument of such decadence. The elaborated detail is foreign to the grand simplicity of the old Roman style, and the exaggerated size is but boastfulness. “The Romans had seen the huge Jewish stones at Jerusalem” (as Dr. Merrill explained the matter to us) “and began at Baalbek to work on a bigger scale, the Barnums of the ancient world, whose ambition was to run the biggest show on earth. By and by they got tired of that, and left it off; it was not their line, after all.” “The line” of Rome was a very straight and simple one. With immense power and a great and single purpose, she went straight forward, and did what she meant to do. Hers was a rough simplicity which never failed. Strange that, with so mighty a resource, she should have ever gone out of her line to attempt any other work than her own! When men or nations discover their limitations, and rashly make up their mind no longer to stay within them, their ambition has already begun to foreshadow their downfall.

The pathos of seeing anything which evidently was once so competent and so strong, now so absolutely dead as Rome is, is heightened almost to weeping, in those places where the little and everyday memorials of her former life are commonest. It is not the gigantic monoliths, but the little tesseræ, not the fallen columns, but the broken jar-handles, that touch the heart most. Between Tyre and Sidon the rider passes over fields every stone of which is a fragment of some marble slab or curiously-carved piece of masonry. His horse is overturning the remains of Ornithopolis, “the city of the bird,” in these ploughed fields. But it is at Samaria that the emotion is most irresistible. Where the “fat valley” opens to the westward, a conical hill, slightly oval and with flattened top now clad with an orchard, nestles in and yet lies apart from the bend of the mountains of Ephraim. It was this hill that Omri bought from Shomer for the heavy price of two talents of silver. It was here that the city rose—the inferior houses (if we may reconstruct the probable past) of white brick, with rafters of sycamore; the grander ones of hewn stone and cedar—while the royal palace overtopped them all. A broad wall with terraced top encircled it, and the city lay there, “a vast luxurious couch, in which its nobles rested securely, ‘propped and cushioned up on both sides as in the cherished corner of a rich divan.’” It was Ahab’s capital too, and after the varying fortunes of centuries it was granted to Herod the Great by Augustus, who immediately called it by the Greek name of the emperor, Sebaste, and proceeded to rebuild it in a style of unheard-of magnificence. A hippodrome appeared in the hollow, a temple on the hill. Round the summit he ran a flat terrace with double colonnade of monolithic pillars about 16 feet in height, with palaces and massive gateways. From our camp on the threshing-floor, quite near the circuit of pillars—for many of them are still standing, and the bases of almost all may be seen in the ground—we crossed to within the ring of the colonnade. The ground was ploughed here even along the faces of the artificial terrace-banks, which still preserve their sheer angle, clean and steep as of old. The furrows were literally sown with fragments of broken pottery and tesseræ. We crossed to a squared and heavy mass of fallen stones and carved pillars lying slantwise against walls still strong in ruin, which bears the name of Herod’s daughter’s palace; and then along the colonnade to the great piles of masonry which guard the gate that looks toward Cæsarea. Two massive towers are there, partly in ruins and soon to be wholly so, for the cactus hedge is busy with its roots among the stones, and is making its way through cracks to the very heart of the towers. We sat there watching the sun sink into the sea, and thought of all those faded splendours and crimes that make this spot so famous among the tragic places of the world. It was the home of Jezebel, it was the slaughter-house of Mariamne, both of whom must often have watched the sunset from that gate. The ambitions of the ancient kings, the pride and wealth and cruelty of Herod, the beauty and the misery of passionate women, dead these many centuries—all seemed to people the place with ghosts, as the twilight deepened. We turned to go back, and found ourselves accompanied by the man who farms the hill—a tall, friendly, and gracious man in long flowing robes. He held the hand of his little five-year-old girl, a dark-eyed, sweet-faced child, dressed in a red cloak crossed with blue and yellow stripes. Her hair was short, in clustering curls of glossy black, with a blue bead cunningly inwoven among them to keep off the evil eye. She had her free hand entwined by all its fingers in the wool of a pet lamb, which she steered along sideways vigorously. How dead the mighty Herod and all the Roman glory seemed in contrast with this simple picture of the eternal life of home!

Where a multitude of men breathed joy and woe
Long ago;
Lust of glory pricked their hearts up, dread of shame
Struck them tame;
And that glory and that shame alike, the gold
Bought and sold.
Now,—the single little turret that remains
On the plains,
By the caper over-rooted, by the gourd
Overscored,
While the patching houseleek’s head of blossom winks
Through the chinks—
Marks the basement whence a tower in ancient time
Sprang sublime,
And a burning ring all round, the chariots traced
As they raced,
And the monarch and his minions and his dames
Viewed the games.
. . . . . . . . .
Oh heart! oh blood that freezes, blood that burns!
Earth’s returns
For whole centuries of folly, noise and sin!
Shut them in,
With their triumphs and their glories and the rest!
Love is best.[18]

It is not, however, merely with the chill of that which has been long dead that Rome affects us in Syria;

THE ROTUNDA AND CHAPEL OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE.

it is with the living interest which attaches to all that touched Christ, and entered in any way into Christianity. It is a far-reaching generalisation which reminds us that “the great civilisations have always risen in the meeting-places of ideas.”[19] Historically it is true that the times of greatest international struggle have been times of heightened vitality, when the mingling nations were ready to receive and to impart much, and to send forth a new spirit upon the world. Nothing could be more providentially apposite, from this point of view, than that Jesus should have been born “amid the fever of the establishment of the Roman power in Judea.” He kept aloof, indeed, from the Herodian people who lived delicately in kings’ houses, and from all the Greek and Græco-Roman life of his day. Yet, as Dr. Smith has shown us memorably, Jesus was no quiet rustic dreaming dreams and seeing visions far from the life of men. He lived and died in close touch with all that Rome, Greece, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Arabia had to show. Not for the first time, nor for the last, did He see, in His temptation, “the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them.” As this realisation becomes more and more distinct, a new force is added to the contention that His Gospel is the Gospel for the world. It was thought out and first preached amid the throng of commerce, and while the din of battle was as yet hardly silent.

This contact of Jesus Christ with Rome, which under Paul’s hand was to become the messenger and instrument of His kingdom, is vividly associated with two hill-tops in Palestine. One of them is that height near Nazareth, some ten minutes distant from the village well, the description of whose outlook closes the chapter on Galilee in the Historical Geography with the well-known passage about the boyhood of Jesus. There, while He faced seawards, lay on the left hand below Him the wine-coloured, battle-soaked plain of Jezreel, with squadrons of the Roman army marching east and west along it; while on the right hand the Sepphoris Road ran ribbon-like along the ranges, with its constant stream of merchandise. The other hill-top is that known as “Gordon’s Calvary” at Jerusalem—a low and rounded hillock just outside the Damascus Gate. If this be indeed the site of Calvary, Christ was crucified on a wedge of ground between a military and a commercial road; and “they that passed by wagging their heads” may have been soldiers from the Tower as well as merchants from the Northern Gate.

Certain it is, at least, that Rome was about His cradle and His grave. The earliest narratives of His earthly career bring Him to Bethlehem to a Roman taxation; the latest story delivers Him to a Roman judge, to Roman soldiers, and to a Roman cross.

CHAPTER III
CHRISTIAN

From the invasion of warlike Rome we turn to that “Peace and her huge invasion” which came to the Holy Land during the later days of the Roman Empire. Before the time of Constantine the Church in Syria had grown and spread with such startling vitality and promise of even more abundant life as to bring down upon her the cruelty of persecutions. In the north the Christian communities were mainly Gentile, in the south Jewish Christians. They must have been intellectually as well as spiritually vigorous, for the curious speculations and mystic dreams of the Gnostics had already, in the second century, gained footing in Syrian Christianity.

With Constantine (324-337) Roman persecution ceased for ever. The Jews were permitted to return to Jerusalem, and the construction of the written Talmud began its career of three centuries. Julian, the last emperor on the throne before the Empire divided into east and west, had apostatised from the Christian faith before his ascension, and in 361 he attempted the restoration of the temple in Jerusalem as a strength to Judaism against Christianity. But the Galilean had conquered, and it was the day of Christ. The recognition of Christianity as the religion of the State began a new era, which ran on for a thousand years in the Eastern Empire, until the siege of Constantinople changed the face of Europe in 1453. The words of Dante will often recur to the student of early Christian days in Palestine:—

Ah! Constantine, what evil came as child
Not of thy change of creed, but of the dower
Of which the first rich father thee beguiled.

The reference is to the legend of “The Donation of Constantine,” by which he transferred Rome and the states of the Church to the Papal See. Christianity in Syria has run a strange career.

Up to the time of Constantine the Church was at bay, fighting a desperate battle against the Pagan world. At Cæsarea especially, but in many another Roman town besides, native Syrians were forced underground into caves and catacombs, or brought to the death in the public games. Many records of this period survive. At Sidon, searching about among the tombs which Renan has recently explored, we came upon a broken marble slab—evidently the lintel of a church raised in memory of a local massacre of Christians—with the word MARTURION inscribed on it. The martyr monuments of Syria are wonderfully full of peace, hope, and assurance. Like Marius the Epicurean you feel, when first you come upon them, that for the first time you are seeing the wonderful spectacle of those who believe. You understand his impression of every form of human sorrow assuaged—desire, and the fulfilment of desire working on the very faces of the aged, and the young men obviously persons who had faced life and were glad. And the same wistful sense of a sure word of revelation comes upon the beholder as that which appealed to him. Surely here the earth was for once not forsaken of the higher powers, but visited and spoken to and loved!

After Constantine the pilgrim takes the place of foremost interest, which the martyr previously held. From 451, when an independent patriarchate was established at Jerusalem, pilgrimages became very frequent; and a century later there were hospices with 3000 beds in them within Jerusalem, while trade of many sorts flourished by their aid. In the oldest itineraries there are very curious accounts of these pilgrimages; but two, which Colonel Conder gives, are especially quaint and interesting. They refer to later pilgrimages, but are appropriate enough to earlier ones. The first one is from Saewulf, giving an account of his landing at Jaffa: “From his sins, or from the badness of the ship,” he was almost wrecked, and his companions were drowned before his eyes. The other is Sir John Maundeville’s—most fascinating, if most unscrupulous, of travellers: “Two miles from Jerusalem is Mount Joy, a very fair and delicious place. There Samuel the prophet lies in a fair tomb; and it is called Mount Joy because it gives joy to pilgrims’ hearts, for from that place men first see Jerusalem.”

From the first, pilgrimage seems to have had its moral disadvantages and special temptations. The Turkish proverb runs, “If your friend has made the pilgrimage once, distrust him—if he has made the pilgrimage twice, cut him dead.” And it would seem that the Christian pilgrim is not altogether in a position to throw stones at his Moslem brother. Apart from any sins to which the freedom of travel in a far land may be supposed to tempt poor human nature, there are some which are par excellence pilgrim sins. Thus we find in the seventeenth century the Armenian patriarch complaining that the seat in the Chapel of St. Helena in which he used to sit had been so hacked to pieces by relic-hunting pilgrims that he was “frequently obliged to renew it.” The case was all the harder because it was not from its association with the patriarch, but because St. Helena had sat in it, that it was so much in request! If Mark Twain be a true reporter, there are pilgrims who have inherited that particular kind of moral frailty with remarkable fidelity to the manners of their predecessors. Then again, the pilgrimages, which everywhere stimulated trade, created an amazing amount of fraud in the sale of false relics and other such traffic. Dr. Conan Doyle’s picture of the pilgrim in France, who takes a nail from the box of a blacksmith and sells it to unsuspecting soldiers as one of those which were driven into the wood of the true Cross, is drawn from the life. Even on the sacred spots themselves the simplicity of pilgrims has always been a temptation to custodians. A tale is told of some one who, only a year or two ago, dropped by accident a Bible down the dry shaft of Jacob’s Well. The Bible was reclaimed within a few days, but when brought up it was a mere mass of pulp. A large party of pilgrims had visited the place in the interval, and had professed a strong desire to drink water from the famous well. A small stream, conveniently diverted to the well mouth, had enabled the priest in charge to gratify their desire by draughts of water drawn from the depths before their eyes.

The pilgrim is still extant. For well-nigh two thousand years he has come and gone, a tourist who has always had an immense commercial value for the Holy Land. The levy made on pilgrims at the gate of Jerusalem was one of the principal causes of the Crusades, and it is hardly more than a hundred years since a heavy tax was imposed upon every pilgrim when he reached the gate of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The greater part of those who come now are Russians. Jaffa is full of them, but they are to be seen in long caravans of pedestrians, with a donkey or two bearing all their scanty luggage, as far north as Samaria and Galilee. The men are typical Russian peasants, in the blouses and caps that are so familiar. Their long hair may be fair or dark, but it is always matted and coarse. The women, with their good, weather-beaten faces, are uncommonly like old-fashioned peasant women from the northern Scottish countrysides. Their head-dress is a simple kerchief, and their hands grasp a rude pilgrim staff polished with much wear. The privations of such pilgrimages must be very great. They involve the expenditure of a lifetime’s savings, and a journey in many cases of at least six months. Most of this is done on foot, and largely by people who are growing old. There is no nation that could send forth such multitudes except “rough but believing Russia.” The belief is everything. They are very poor people, and very ignorant and simple. Yet many whose minds’ conflict seems only to grow sterner in this land of contradictions, may own without shame to a touch of something like envy as they see the exaltation of their childish faith. They encompass the walls of Jerusalem to the strains of Psalms, and march triumphantly to the sand south of Jaffa for shells to authenticate their travels, such as those which appear on the coats-of-arms of some European families, telling of former pilgrimages. Mere children in intellect, the gleam in their eyes tells that in their own pathetic way they have entered here into a veritable kingdom of heaven.

The objects of pilgrimage are somewhat gruesome in

THE DOME OF THE ROCK (MOSQUE OF OMAR), AS SEEN FROM THE PORCH ON THE NORTH SIDE OF THE MOSQUE EL AKSA.

their way. A favourite ambition used to be that of measuring the “stone of anointing” in the Holy Sepulchre, in order to have the pilgrim’s own winding-sheet made the same length. The great goal, however, is the Jordan, whose banks at the period after Constantine used to be paved with marble. In the old time a wooden cross was erected in mid-stream, and the waters were blessed by a priest, after which the pilgrims tumbled in with such haste that numbers of them were drowned. Here, too, the winding-sheet is in evidence. Besides the flask of Jordan water which they fill, they dip their own winding-sheets and those of friends at home who have been unable to come in person, but have sent these pale substitutes. It was not our good fortune to see the merry band of pilgrims at the Jordan, though we met scattered groups of Russians in many places. One other pilgrim we saw, and he accompanied us through several days’ march northward. He was a jet-black Abyssinian—a lonely and silent figure clad from head to foot in a loose robe of pure white sackcloth. He went with us to Nazareth, the destination of his pilgrimage. His only word in common with us was “Christianus,” and he always bowed and crossed himself when he said it. All day long he walked in silence in our company. He asked for nothing, but ate the meat he received in singleness of heart, and sat apart watching the loading and unloading of the baggage with the eyes of a great child.

While so many Christians paid a passing visit to Palestine in the early days, there were some who came to stay. It was the time of the rise of monastic institutions, which first appear in the beginning of the fourth century. Their history from the first is peculiarly associated with Syria, into which they spread almost immediately after their start in Egypt. Some of the most famous of the early recluses, including even St. Symeon Stylites himself, were of Syrian origin.[20] These ascetics were the natural successors of the martyrs. The first hints of them are given during the time of earlier martyrdoms, for it is recorded that Christians as early as the Decian persecutions fled to the wilderness and led a life there which was soon to become popular beyond all possibility of forecast.

It was not, however, until Constantine’s favour had secularised the Church, or at least had made easy that life which hitherto had been so dangerous, that the reaction set in which gave monasticism its great hold on the world. This is generally explained as a matter solely of protest against growing worldliness, or a development of that curious kind of “other-worldliness” which finds in asceticism the surest means of attaining earthly fame and heavenly reward. No doubt both these elements are true. In the early ascetics there was a self-denial prompted by the purest desire for escape from the defiling society of their time into the spiritual cleanness of the faith, and from its hard and coarse materialism into the delicate ideality and refinement of Christian thought and feeling. It was also, on the other hand, a refuge and an outlet for much of the inefficiency and moral worthlessness of the time, which found in its freedom from social restraint and its wide leisure things exactly to their own taste. But behind all this there is another fact which is really the most significant of all. Monasticism was “the compensation for martyrdom.” Readers of the letters of Ignatius are familiar with that mania for martyrdom which during persecuting times took possession of so many in the Church. In abnormal and extreme conditions such as these, certain minds grow hysterical and lose their perspective and sense of proportion altogether. In such minds a morbid and passionate delight in pain develops into a sort of lust—a religiosa cupiditas—for suffering torture, just as in the persecutors cruelty becomes a lust for inflicting it. So asceticism offered itself when martyrdom could no longer be had—“a voluntary martyrdom, a gradual self-destruction, a sort of religious suicide.”[21]

The new ideal passed through several successive phases. From an unorganised and individual way of life within the Church, it developed first into anchoretism about the beginning of the fourth century. In barren and solitary places, where life at best was precarious and physical enjoyment impossible, every cave and den had its tenant. On Mount Sinai one hermit is said to have lived for fifty years in absolute solitude, silence, and nakedness. As you ride down the terrific gorges from Mar Saba to the Dead Sea, you pass along precipitous hillsides and rock-faces which appear literally riddled with small caves and holes in the rock and sand. These, which now serve for a covert from the heat for passing shepherds, or for the lairs of jackals, were once populated by hermits. Saint Saba is said to have collected the bones of no fewer than 10,000 solitary dwellers in this district, who had fallen victims to the Carismians. And in many parts of Syria even now, a hillside which during the day has seemed barren of all human habitation, is unexpectedly illuminated with hermits’ lights—those “hands praying to God”—in the dark. The enthusiasm with which this dreary life has filled some of its devotees may be realised in the following lines from an epistle of St. Jerome:—“O desert, where the flowers of Christ are blooming! O solitude, where the stones for the new Jerusalem are prepared! O retreat, which rejoices in the friendship of God! What doest thou in the world, my brother, with thy soul greater than the world? How long wilt thou remain in the shadow of roofs, and in the smoky dungeon of cities? Believe me, I see here more of the light.”[22]

It was in cloister life, however—at first in smaller communities and then on the large scale of many cloisters gathered under a common rule—that early Christianity reached its full development. Besides the native establishments, there was, in the first centuries after Constantine, a cloud of religieux, flying like homing doves across the sea to alight and quietly settle down on holy soil. These establishments had many faults. They perpetuated little sectarian differences and exaggerated them into quite ridiculous importance. The very lamps that hang in the oldest churches are denominational, and are divided with a childish arithmetic among rival sects. The insistence of these on their respective rights is such that a guard of armed Moslem soldiers has to be kept perpetually on the spot to keep the peace. Yet there is a splendid dash of courage in this part of Church History, which cannot possibly have been all in vain. It must have been an exciting life in some of the outpost stations in these old days. “It is true,” says Warburton of one monastery, “the monks were occasionally massacred by the Saracens, Turks, and Carismians, but their martyrdom only gave fresh interest to the spot in the eyes of their successors.” No doubt these establishments drained the world of some of its best manhood, and diverted much greatly needed energy from family life and state loyalties; yet, on the other hand, these were the soldiers of the Cross who then fought the paganism of the world and conquered it.

Monastic establishments still remain, and supply much-needed inns to many thousands of poor travellers in Syria. They vary by very wide degrees of difference from one another. By far the worst place we saw in Palestine—one of the worst perhaps that could be seen anywhere—is the convent of Mar Saba near the Dead Sea. Coming out on the high ridge of the Judean mountain country, we caught a glimpse of two towers, which we have already described,[23] square and blind, and so pitilessly unsuggestive that they seemed, as it were, built into the desert, or part of its fantastic offspring. They were the most unhomely buildings we had ever seen, and they are the nearest point to which women are allowed to approach the monastery, lady travellers being accommodated with cells there if they have not tents. By and by we passed between them, down a road so steep as to be practically a stairway, on every step of which loathsomely dirty beggars sat plying their trade. In the courtyard to which this entrance led were two monks, fat and stupid-looking, who brought out strings of beads, rosaries, and crosses of their own manufacture for sale. Having, apparently, absolutely nothing to do, the making of these things may be taken for sign of enterprise and commercial genius, but as time is evidently valueless, they sell their work very cheap. To the right is a rock, hollowed out into a chamber or broad gallery, which is sacred as having been the shrine of Saint Saba’s devotions. The entrance is violently coloured in washes of blue and white paint, so crude and aggressive that it quite robs the pictures in the interior of their horror, and prepares you to look with unclouded eye upon the skulls which fill the grilled recesses. One of these skulls is set in front, to receive the kisses of devout pilgrims. It is deeply worn and polished. When it has actually been worn through to a hole it will be replaced, as others have been before it. Across the courtyard you follow narrow stairs and galleries that run irregularly along the edge of a precipice; for the monastery has affixed itself to the face of a cliff four hundred feet high. It clings there, supported by huge flying buttresses that spring from the depths below in a fashion which, as one writer says, remind you of pictures of Belshazzar’s feast. The cells of the monks, little disconnected “lean-to” sheds or caves, have the Greek cross upon their doors, and the often-repeated inscription, “O Christ, abide with us!” Here and there are a few plants in pots, or a feeble attempt at rearing vegetables in little garden patches which fill in any foot of level among the many-cornered buildings; while in one cranny grows the solitary date-palm which Saint Saba planted more than 1300 years ago. At every few yards you pause to look over a low balustrade into the gorge, which here is a sort of yellow-ochre gulf, with all the horror but none of the rich depth of colouring that belongs to frightful abysses. Over these walls the monks throw meat to the jackals which come and fight for it below. Occasionally, as we passed, a face was visible at a window, generally either wizened and dried up, or with a white, neurotic appearance that was almost more repulsive. Everywhere dirt reigned supreme—unspeakable filth in open drains and putrid litter. In one place, where the smell was sickening, a monk was lying asleep by the side of a broken drain, covered with flies in great black masses on his face and arms. In another place an abominable-looking dish of food, fly-blown and disgusting, was pushed with a spoon in it half through a hole broken in the bottom of a cell door. And everywhere throughout this palace of disgust was to be read the prayer, “O Christ, abide with us!”

That was the worst. Mar Saba is a sort of combination of prison and asylum, where lunatics are kept under the charge of monks condemned to this place for heresy or immorality. Other monasteries we saw, of a very different kind. Our tents precluded the necessity for our making any of these our home for the night, but in many cases it would have been very pleasant to do so. On the top of Tabor, at Tell Hum on the Sea of Galilee, and in other places, we were received and entertained with the most cordial and generous hospitality. The clean and spacious guest-chambers are open to all comers. They are adorned with photographs of various sorts, and often contain a cabinet of rare local curiosities. The brothers in charge of these establishments were fine genial men, courageously facing the risks of fever in deadly spots, or varying their hospitable labours on the heights by long seasons of study (for some of them are distinguished scholars); but always ready to meet a stranger as a friend, and to chat with him in French or German, over a pipe of Western tobacco, about the great world from which they had gone so far.

In all these ways the many-sided life of the old Christian days lingers and may still be seen. But it

THE DOME OF THE ROCK (MOSQUE OF OMAR).

From the barracks near the site of the Tower of Antonia. The north porch of the Dome of the Rock is towards the spectator; to the left is the Dome of the Chain; to the right, in the middle distance, is the Mosque of El Aksa.

lingers more impressively in the most ancient of the churches which date from this period. There is in Palestine an astonishing number of ruins of old Christian churches, many of them dating back, at least so far as their foundations go, to the Byzantine period. There are many modern churches, but they are not as a rule impressive. Even when, as in the Russian church at Gethsemane, the building is in itself rich and costly, it is so irrelevant as to rouse a feeling of rebellion.

Most of the ancient churches have utterly vanished, like that roofless basilica which Constantine built on the supposed scene of the Ascension on the Mount of Olives. In other cases they are mere heaps of ruin, like the remaining fragments of the Church of Jacob’s Well, which was built about the middle of the fourth century, and has been several times rebuilt since then. This church takes most travellers by surprise. They go expecting an out-door scene, with all the harvest breeze of the Scripture story on it. They find a newly built white wall, glaring in the sunshine. Through a gate in this wall they are admitted by certain broken-down-looking persons in the greenish-black garments of the Greek clergy. Within the gate, a few steps bring them to the edge of a sort of oblong pit full of masonry. It is the nave of the old church, and the splendidly carved pillars of its white stone show how beautiful it must have been. A door in the sunk side-wall opens upon a groined vault newly rebuilt. In the dim light you can discern in the centre a rough stone altar, with candles and lamps and a couple of execrable pictures of Christ and the woman of Sychar. On the ground before the altar is a flat stone perforated with a hole two feet in diameter. This is the cover of the well, and a second clerical person, badly marked with smallpox, lets down a twist of lighted candles by a long rope, while a little green lamp of silver hangs above, dripping oil steadily down the well. Surely this is the infatuation of reverence! If there is any memory of Jesus which is essentially of the open air, it is this incident of the Well of Samaria. Yet reverence must build its dark chamber, and proceed to illuminate with candles the spot where Jesus sat and saw the miles and miles of waving fields, white already to harvest. No doubt the church dates from the fourth century; but what right had even the ancients to build a church here, to keep men busy with their sectarianism on the very spot where they and all the world were told that the hour was come when neither in this mountain nor yet at Jerusalem would the Father be worshipped, but in spirit and in truth?

There are, however, two great churches of this ancient time which waken feelings very different from these; they have been for centuries the centres of Christian interest and devotion in the land, covering, as they are supposed to do, the sites of the birth and death of Jesus Christ. In some respects they are alike. The outsides of them are huddled and packed together, a heterogeneous mass of apparently unrelated buildings. The insides are not, like the houses, Rembrandt studies in intense light and shadow. By some skilful arrangement, the sunlight seems to be caught and diffused in a pale luminous twilight that sinks gradually to darkness in chapels and recesses, and blends with the light of many lamps and candles not unpleasingly. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is the gift of St. Helena, mother of Constantine, and was consecrated by her in A.D. 336. Tradition relates how, at the age of seventy-nine, she made her pilgrimage to Jerusalem, was baptized in Jordan, discovered the true Cross, and built the church upon the spot of its discovery. Our guide-book tells us of an ante-chamber “where Oriental Christians are in the habit of removing their shoes, though we need not follow their example.” Yet the Crusaders entered it barefooted, though with songs of praise, a thousand years ago; and the impulse of most Christians, however little they may be disposed to believe in the identity of the sacred sites within, will be to share the veneration of the Easterns. Not that what we see now is the original building. That was a rotunda and a basilica, the former quite other than the present rotunda, as we know from the fact that it formed the model for the Mosque of Omar. It has suffered many things from assault, from decay, from fire, and from rebuilding. In the twelfth century the whole group of detached shrines and monuments was included for the first time in one huge and complicated building. Probably no such patchwork in stone is to be seen elsewhere in the world. Yet each rebuilding found many of the older materials ready for its use, and incorporated them in the newer work. Thus the columns at the eastern door are supposed to have come from some ancient pagan temple, and the present foundations of the pillars belong to the old rotunda. The capitals of many pillars are Byzantine, while the pink limestone column which is embedded in the wall to the right of the eastern entrance is also very ancient.

It is a strange conglomeration of imaginary associations and real value of material. The atmosphere is at times dreadful enough within to justify that daring little touch of realism in the French bas-relief over the door, where some of the spectators at the raising of Lazarus are holding their noses with their hands! The chapel of the Empress adjoins the altar of the Penitent Thief; Adam and Abraham jostle each other for standing ground under the sacred roof; the stone of anointing has been “often changed” according to the guide-book, and the column of scourging “judging from the narratives of different pilgrims, must frequently have changed its colour and its size”—yet pilgrims poke a stick at it and kiss the part that has touched the stone to-day. Every incident of the world’s great tragedy is commemorated there, from the footprint of Jesus to the silver socket in the rock where His Cross was erected. Futile enough all this, and even wearisome. But the worship of fifteen hundred years is neither futile nor wearisome. And that worship seems to detach itself from the legends and find its embodiment in the marvels of precious stone that are gathered there. As one sees the slabs of costly stone with which the rock is overlaid—the ruddy yellow slab of the “anointing,” the red and white polished limestone of the central shrine, the green serpentine and the black basalt—one remembers the tomb which the Roman bishop ordered in St. Praxed’s, with its “peach-blossom marble,” its lump of lapis lazuli, “blue as a vein o’er the Madonna’s breast,” and its block of jasper, “pure green as a pistachio-nut.” But there is a difference. The stones of the Holy Sepulchre were given in love: they are the tribute of many souls whose adoration was the noblest feature of their times.

The Church of the Holy Nativity at Bethlehem is a simpler and, to many minds, a more impressive structure. It consists of a broad nave, entirely screened off from what lies beyond, with two rounded transepts and a rounded apse behind the screen—this trefoil-shaped inner building being the church proper. One of the transepts is the property of the Armenians; the other, together with the great altar in the apse, belongs to the Greeks. Below the great altar-rail (“in the breast of God,” in Dante’s language) is the cave of the Nativity, with steps leading down to it from either transept. A Mohammedan soldier stands at the bottom to keep the peace between Christians. The transepts and apse are ablaze with lamps and hangings. Below, the “manger” is overlaid with coloured marble, and the rock is entirely covered with yellow silk cloth, on which are stamped the insignia of the Franciscans—an arm of Christ crossed with an arm of St. Francis, both shewing the print of nails in the palms of their hands. All this, and the air of raree-show that exhibits so many spots where somebody or other stood, destroy any lingering credulity of which a man may still find himself capable; they make one rather ashamed, and glad to escape. But the nave is mighty in its simplicity, and no less mighty in its wealth of historical association. It is a great severe oblong basilica, with four rows of massive pillars giving double aisles. Old glass and old mosaics add their appropriate wealth of sombre beauty. The rafters, replacing Constantine’s beams of cedar from Lebanon, are the gift of Philip of Burgundy. Lead for the roof was sent by Edward IV. of England. Most impressive of all is the old plain font of polished stone, with its Greek inscription—not, like so many such inscriptions, a record of the donor’s name, but a prayer for God’s blessing upon those who gave it—“whose names are known to Thee only.” Opinions differ as to the plausibility of the claim to the site of our Lord’s nativity; but this church was built by Constantine, and the Vulgate was written in it by Jerome. And since that time the feet of countless millions of worshippers have trodden its stone pavement—a consecration in itself worth many traditional sanctities.

In this chapter we have sought to gather the most obvious survivals of that old Christian invasion of Palestine which followed next after the Roman. Almost inevitably we find ourselves quarrelling with the legendary lore that has stultified so many venerable buildings and associations. Yet in its legends too the early Church survives, and some of them embody eternal truths in forms of rare beauty. Take three of the legends of the Holy Sepulchre by way of example. They show the spot where the one-eyed soldier Longinus, who pierced the side of Christ, received back the lost eyesight at the touch of a drop of the blood. There, too, is the cleft in the rock through which blood flowed from the Cross down into the tomb of Adam, whose corpse came to life at once. And there, on Easter Eve, the sham miracle of the “Holy Fire” has been enacted annually for at least a thousand years. Who can miss the underlying truth beneath these legends? They are, for all but the ignorant and the gross, symbols of the eternal healing and quickening power that the love and sacrifice of Christ exert on humanity and even on His enemies. The torch-bearers, who kindle their fires at the blaze on Easter Eve, and speed thence to Bethlehem and other towns to light from it the candles waiting on many altars, tell their own exhilarating lesson. Two other legends may be mentioned, which the Western world owes to the Syrian Church—those of St. George and St. Christopher. St. George, who was a Roman soldier under Diocletian, was martyred in A.D. 303. His memory, mixed up with the Greek myth of Perseus and Andromeda, and with Crusader stories of Richard Cœur de Lion, stands for the victory of faith over paganism. St. Christopher would only follow the strongest, and finding that his master the devil was afraid of Christ, renounced his service and set out to seek Him who was strongest of all. The point of the story is that, after seeking Christ far and wide, he found Him while he was performing the humble task of carrying passengers across a river. It is characteristic of the pilgrim point of view that legend has fixed this scene not by some homely German stream but at the fords of Jordan, where he is said to have carried the infant Christ across upon his shoulder. Even of such legends no wise man will speak with scorn. They, too, are monuments of that conquest of Christ which gives its meaning and its glory to the Christian invasion.

INTERIOR OF THE MOSQUE OF EL AKSA, FROM THE SOUTH-EAST.

CHAPTER IV
MOSLEM

Mohammedanism is the religion which is everywhere in evidence in the East to-day. From the smart Turkish officer who drops in to smoke a cigarette with you in the tent after dinner, and discusses European politics in excellent French, down to the beggar who beseeches you in the name of Allah for a pipeful of tobacco or the end of your cigar, your acquaintance in Syria is Moslem. From the consecration of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to the Moslem capture of Jerusalem was exactly three hundred years. When, in 637, Jerusalem fell, Damascus had already fallen, and Antioch was to follow next year—all within sixteen years of the beginning of the Mohammedan era. The conquest was inevitable. First Persia and then the scattered tribes of pagan Arabs had proved too much for the Byzantine empire in Syria. Then the man appeared who understood his opportunity. The Eastern world was in confusion. Heathens constituted the ruling race, the Jews were scattered in their dispersion, and the Christians torn into many fragmentary heretical sects. It was the moment for a great union of scattered forces. The Arabs were united by the new faith in God, for which they abandoned their paganism with a marvellous willingness. The bond of union with Christians and Jews was the common ancestry in Abraham by which Mohammed hoped to rally and unite the Syrian world. One sharp battle at the Yarmuk threw Syria open to his advance, and the crisis of the faith was past.

Mohammed has been declared an impostor, who from first to last won his way by cleverness without faith; he has been idealised as a hero and prince of heroes in the religious world. Dean Milman, perhaps, is wisest when he says, “To the question whether Mohammed was hero, sage, impostor, or fanatic ... the best reply is the reverential phrase of Islam: ‘God knows.’” One thing is certain, viz., that he founded a religion which proved itself capable of wakening response from the Semitic East with a swiftness and a completeness never elsewhere known. It would be a matter of rather serious consequences to affirm that such sweeping success is possible without any vestige of honest faith on the part of its own prophet.

Arabia found Islam a religion after her own heart. The conquest of the Arabian mind, and that sudden transference of religious and political loyalties which changed it from chaos into cosmos, is little short of miraculous. In the words of one of the severest critics of Islam: “In A.D. 570, Abdullah, the son of Abd el Muttalib, a Mecca merchant, went on a trading trip from Mecca to Medina and died there; the same year his wife, Amina, gave birth to a boy, named Mohammed, at Mecca. One hundred years later the name of this Arab lad, joined to that of the Almighty, was called out from ten thousand mosques five times daily, from Muscat to Morocco, and his new religion was sweeping everything before it in three continents.”[24] In many ways the new religion was congenial to Arabia. “Although it made a most vigorous effort to conquer the world, it is, after all, a religion of the desert, of the tent, and the caravan, and is confined to nomad and savage or half-civilised nations, chiefly Arabs, Persians, and Turks. It never made an impression on Europe except by brute force; it is only encamped, not really domesticated, in Constantinople, and when it must withdraw from Europe it will leave no trace behind.”[25] It gave the heathen Arabs, in exchange for their precarious dependence on incalculable and wayward gods, the sublime conception of “Islam,” the absolute surrender to the One God, whom it declared to be Almighty, All-Wise, and All-Merciful. For the rest, its secret was simplicity. It drove straight for its object, sacrificing art, appetite, the purity of home life, the spirituality of religious imagination, and some of the accepted moralities of conscience. What was left was a creed and standard, somewhat impoverished truly, but workable and uncompromising. A thousand difficult questions were avoided, and one of those forces set in play before whose rough simplicity finer and more delicate things are swept away.

Mohammedanism meets the traveller at every turn in Syria. Now and then a dervish is encountered—the extremest sort of Moslem. It would seem difficult to develop a mystic school within the pale of so clear-cut a faith as Mohammedanism; yet it has been done. But the Mohammedan dervishes escape from this despised material world by the vulgar process of hypnotising themselves by the repetition of the word “Allah” or “Hu,” or by whirling in circles until they are stupefied. This they call the ecstatic state, and when they have reached it they are said to perform many violent tricks, stabbing their flesh or eating broken glass, without appearing to feel pain. In Syria they are by no means impressive in appearance. Here and there you meet one, with hair crimped in long thin pointed wisps, and sticking out in a wiry fashion from his head in all directions. The dazed and rather weak look in the eyes is suggestive of a strayed reveller rather than a holy man, but the people hold them in great reverence.

Another occasional freak of Mohammedanism is the religious procession, which is conducted on the principle of a rival show to the Christian fêtes. It starts on Good Friday from Jerusalem to visit the tomb of Moses—a late fiction, somewhat daring in its contradiction to the old belief that the tomb of Moses was known to no man. It is amusingly described by witnesses, but appears to be rather a poor affair on the whole.

These extravagances apart, one is never out of sight of Mohammedan religion for an hour of travel in Syria. The worship, like old idolatry, seems to have claimed every high hill and every green tree for its own. It has settled itself, in the very seat of old Judaism, on the sacred area of the temple. Almost every one of the prominent hills of Palestine is crowned with a little building, domed and whitewashed, opening in a porch in front, and containing a single empty chamber. This is the weli (i.e. monument, not necessarily tomb) of a Mohammedan saint. What the terms of canonisation may be, it is perhaps best not to inquire too minutely. Many of these departed saints are said to have been prophets, but the discoverer of coffee has his monument in Mocha, to which great processions come, and there is more than one weli in Palestine commemorative of a dead robber chief. Not the less sacred are they to the Mohammedans. In various parts of the country we were puzzled by little piles of stones, gathered and arranged in considerable numbers on the tops of long ascents or passes, and bearing a curious resemblance to the cairns which in certain districts of the west of Scotland mark the spots at which funeral processions have halted to change the coffin-bearers. The explanation of these little piles is very simple. When a Mohammedan comes to the hill-top, and looking around him sees a weli shining in the distance, he offers up a prayer, and drops a stone there, to call the attention of the next comer, that he also may look and pray. Very picturesque and quaint these little holy houses are; serving, like the hermit’s tower of old in Western lands, for landmarks as well as for shrines—the white light-houses of the inland.

It is not at the white tombs only that the Moslem prays. Five times a day, at the call from the mosque, he is summoned to his devotions. Often, indeed, it is inconvenient to worship at some of these hours, and it is permissible to say the prayer five times in succession in the evening, when there is most leisure. Sometimes he carries with him his rosary, to help his memory with the ninety-nine beautiful names of Allah, and in railway trains or steamers wealthy gentlemen are to be seen cherishing a string of amber beads which appear more like the property of young girls than of grown men. To perform his devotions the Syrian goes to a fountain, when that is possible, as it is part of the ritual to wash the hands before praying; but the Arab, spreading his carpet in the shade of his camel, far away upon the desert, where no water is to be had but the precious drops in his leathern bottle, is permitted to wash his hands and lips with sand instead. That which impresses every spectator is the extraordinary faculty for abstraction which is manifested. The Moslem seems to have at command the power of annihilating the world around him, and entering the unseen. His eyes are open, but you may pass within a yard of them and they will not seem to see you. They are fixed on the far distance, as if, over the Southern edge of the world, the man saw the Holy City towards which he bows, with its Kaaba and its black stone. He might be crystal-gazing, or watching the horizon for a sail at sea. People may be dancing and singing by his side, but he does not see them nor hear. Bathing once in the waters of Elisha’s fountain at Jericho we had a memorable instance of this. We found the pool empty and the walls undergoing repair. A lad who had charge of the place was persuaded in the usual fashion to let down the door of a sluice and so allow the pool to fill, greatly to the detriment of the newly mortared wall. When we had stripped, the owner of the place appeared, and we rose to the surface from a dive to hear a controversy going on, with violent gesture and apoplectic fury, which marks a high point in our register of vituperation. The water seemed on the whole to be the safest place, and we kept to it until suddenly we perceived that a great silence had fallen on the landscape. Looking anxiously to see what had happened, we found the owner on his knees, praying by his own spring. We dressed without delay, and had to pass in front of him to reach the tents, but he never seemed to know that we had passed.

The muezzin, or call to prayer from the minaret, is one of the most affecting of all Eastern sounds. Men are chosen for this office with singularly mellow and rich voices; they intone, with a very musical little cadence in a minor key, the first chapter of the Koran, and sometimes other prayers. At the great Mosque of Damascus, a solitary reciter calls from the slender minaret, and is answered from the balcony of the broader one across the court by twenty voices in unison. While the waves of rich sound float out over the city, and are caught and faintly echoed from scores of other minarets, one remembers how that voice has rolled forth already over innumerable villages from Bengal westwards, and men have paused from their labour to pray according to their lights.

Islam is usually supposed to have been the “Ishmaelite in church history,” with hand against every man from the first. Really, when it was Arabian, as it remained for four centuries, it was very tolerant, and the Christian pilgrims, priests, and monks were little disturbed. But in 1086 the Seljuk chiefs of wandering Turkish tribes came into possession, and the days of suspicion and that heavy cruelty which is characteristic of the stupid began. There were massacres of monks on Carmel and elsewhere then, and such a state of general tyranny and oppression that the cry reached the West, and the Crusades began. The Crusades, as they dragged their slow length along, did not tend to better understandings; and after Saladin’s conquest of Jerusalem, we read that the walls and pavement of the Mosque of Omar had to be purified with copious showers of water distilled from the fragrant roses of Damascus. The relations between Moslem and Christian in the land to-day are happier, and the intercourse of increasing trade and travel is breaking down old partitions here as elsewhere. Yet little love is lost between the professors of the rival faiths even now. Dr. Andrew Thomson relates how, in recent years, “it had been observed that at a particular period of the day the shadow of the great Mosque of Omar fell upon a certain Christian burying-ground. Even the honour of

THE TEMPLE AREA AND THE MOUNT OF OLIVES, FROM MOUNT ZION.

The dome on the right is that of the Mosque of El Aksa, and that on the left is the Mosque of Omar. Between these domes, and just below the principal group of cypresses, is the “Wailing Place.” The hills in the background are the Mount of Olives.

blessing conveyed by so sacred a shadow was grudged. The public authorities in Jerusalem were strongly urged to have the Christian cemetery removed to some more distant place, and it required all the combined influence of the European consulates to prevent a scandalous order to this effect from being issued.” The Ordnance Survey party was on several occasions attacked, and even fired upon. In fanatical Moslem cities like Hebron and Nablus, travellers have to conduct themselves with the utmost discretion, and even then will probably be stoned with more or less effect according to the courage and the marksmanship of the thrower. The Christians return the animosity with a kind of impatient ridicule, which seems to indicate a lack of refined piety on their part. Our camp-waiters were Christians, and they used to give us very freely their opinions on the theological differences between them and the Mohammedans. There would be a reverent if somewhat startling account of the Holy Trinity, and then, in scornful contrast: “Mohammedans only One,—and Mohammed all the rest!” The scorn is hardly to be wondered at when one remembers the intellectual level of the powers that be. This is forced upon one’s notice by countless tales of the custom-house and censorship officials. A map of ancient Palestine was objected to because “there were no maps in those days!” An engineer, telegraphing about a pump, was arrested because the message read: “One hundred revolutions!” In certain Bibles the text was erased, “Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners”; and it was directed that the word “Christians” should be substituted, as there were no sinners in the Turkish empire! After a certain amount of that regime, one would no doubt put new meaning into the prayer which invokes God’s mercy “upon all Turks,” as well as on infidels and heretics!

In spite of all this there is a good deal of interchange between the two faiths, or at least of borrowing on the part of Islam from Christian tradition. So many points have the two in common, that a theory has been broached on which Mohammed appears only as the Judaiser (as it were) of later days, who saw the difficulty that Christians had in working with general principles, and set himself to simplify the situation by reducing Christianity to a stereotyped system. Carlyle distinctly calls Islam “a kind of Christianity.” However this may be, there is no question as to the immense amount which Syrian Mohammedanism borrows from the Jewish and Christian Scriptures. Countless tombs and other monuments are dedicated to Joshua and other Old Testament worthies. This, of course, may be due to the fact that many Moslem saints have borne the old names, and as time went on their memories came to be confused with those of their more famous namesakes. Samson’s exploits especially have appealed to the Mohammedan imagination, and he appears under the incognito of “Ismân Aly,” among many other names. St. George is a very popular saint for Moslem worship. It startles us still more to find that in the great fire at Damascus numbers of Moslems threw themselves into the flames in the attempt to rescue the head of John the Baptist; while a copy of the Koran—one of the original four copies—which lay below the relic, was forgotten and destroyed.

The most extensive and curious point of contact between the two religions is found in those mosques which were formerly built as Christian churches, and then appropriated by the conquerors. The Grand Mosque of Damascus is a conspicuous case in point. It is built on the site of a pagan temple, part of whose hoary front still stands, a magnificent fragment of ancient heavy masonry and carving now brown and grey with age. On the ruins of the temple rose the Christian church of St. John the Baptist, whose date is about the beginning of the fifth century. After the Mohammedan conquest the church became a mosque, and fabulous sums were spent on its decoration. It has twice been destroyed by fire, and is now being restored after the last of these destructions.[26] The restoration has a very brand-new appearance, yet it is magnificent with its wealth of marble and of other costly stone. The Mosque of Samaria, conspicuous from a distance by its minaret is another Christian church reconstructed for Mohammedan worship. There was a sixth-century basilica here, but the present mosque is built out of the material of the Crusader church which replaced that. The severity and bareness of its stone walls and pillars are relieved only by one touch of colour—the flags and the lovely green pillars of the pulpit. The wall at the pulpit’s side has been recessed into a mihrab or niche, which points towards Mecca and so gives the worshipper his bearings. In the crypt, where the Crusaders believed they had the tomb of John the Baptist, large slabs of polished marble attest the former wealth of decoration, and these slabs are of peculiar interest because of one curious little fact. It was customary to carve on Christian buildings the sign of the Cross—a Maltese cross, set within a circle. Such a cross may be distinctly seen on one of the stones close to the embedded pillar at the south door of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. On the marble slabs of the crypt in Samaria these encircled crosses are to be seen; but the Mohammedans have chipped away the uprights of them, leaving only the meaningless horizontal bar bisecting the circle, and the obvious mark of the chisel in their rough workmanship leaves the uprights also faintly visible. Perhaps the most interesting case of all is the Mosque el Aksa, close to the Mosque of Omar, within the temple area. This is that “far-off place of prayer” which Mohammed counted among the most holy shrines in the world. Founded by Justinian as a Christian basilica, it was converted into a mosque by Omar, and adorned with unheard-of lavishness by Abd el Melik, who overlaid its doors with gold and silver plates. Since then it has passed through many adventures. Widened to efface some suggestion of cruciform shape, its breadth became unmanageable, and six rows of pillars support the roof. The roof has fallen in, and earthquakes have broken the building more than once, so that most of the masonry is comparatively modern, the great arches of the structure which supports the dome being “anchored” by wooden beams which throw horizontal bridges from capital to capital in Arab fashion. The green-and-gold mosaic with which the interior of the dome and the upper portion of the adjacent masonry is covered, cannot be very old, though their dim and antique beauty is worthy of the older art. The pulpit, richly inlaid with Aleppo work of ivory and mother-of-pearl, was Saladin’s gift seven hundred years ago. But that which most of all attracts the eye and fascinates the imagination is the aspect of the pillars, whose variegated colours are peculiarly rich and harmonious. Up to a certain height they are polished to the shining point by the garments of worshippers rubbing against them as they pass; above that they are smooth, unpolished stone. The capitals, and some at least of the columns, are very ancient, and may have stood in the original basilica.

The Mosque of Omar is not, strictly speaking, a mosque at all. The mosque is El Aksa, and the more famous building is but a glorified praying-station of the nature of a weli in its court. It stands near the centre of a wide open space, practically the only such space in Jerusalem, which occupies one-sixth part of the whole area of the city within the walls. The enclosure is partly artificial, supported on vast substructures of vaulted building which raise the enclosed ground to a general level. The mosque is set up on a platform ten feet higher than this level.

Its history has been a strange one. Behind the time of its erection lies all the story of the Temple, whose sacred ark Jewish tradition affirms to have been concealed here by Jeremiah. But that rock, whose red outcrop breaks through the floor of the mosque, leads us back to a dimmer past, and to the story of Abraham’s sacrifice upon Moriah, whose site this is said to be. Various theories have been advocated as to the place which the rock held in the arrangements of the Jewish temple. The Jews of to-day have a legend that on it somewhere the Unspeakable Name is written, and they explain the miracles of Jesus by the supposition that He had succeeded in deciphering it. We, too, for whom its chief interest and pathos lie in the fact that Christ came hither to worship, and in the things that befell Him here, may accept the meaning at least of that curious legend. For His own words were that He had declared to men the name of His Father, and that declaration has truly revealed to mankind the hidden meaning of their holiest things.

It was in 680 A.D. that the first Mohammedan sanctuary was erected on the temple area, but the date of the present building is two hundred years later. It struck us as a curious fact a year ago in Damascus that the burnt mosque was being rebuilt almost entirely by Christian masons. Still more surprising is it to learn that the Mosque of Omar was built by Byzantine architects and modelled on the Rotunda of the Holy Sepulchre. Two hundred years later the Crusaders entered Jerusalem, and, according to the dreadful story, “the carnage in the Mosque of Omar swept away the bodies of thousands in a deluge of human blood.”[27] Mistaking the Mosque for the veritable Temple of Solomon, they founded there the Society of the Knights Templars, on whose armorial bearings the dome appears. They converted the building into “Templum Domini,” and planted a large gilded cross upon the summit of it. Traces of their invasion still remain in the cutting of the rock to suit their altar, and in the great wrought-iron enclosing screen. For almost a century the Templum Domini remained in Christian hands, until 1187, when Saladin conquered Jerusalem. His generosity and gentleness contrasted strangely with the “loathsome triumph” of the Crusaders; but the first destination of the triumphal march was the mosque, from whose dome the Cross was hurled to the ground, and for two days dragged about the streets. From that time the mosque has been one of the most exclusive places in the world. Till recent years no Christian was permitted to enter it, and Jews avoid it, lest they should unwittingly tread upon the ground of the ancient Holy of Holies.

The first impressions of the Mosque of Omar are very pleasing. There is a barbaric splendour in its rich colouring and metallic glitter when seen from a short distance, while the more distant view of it is one of rare soft beauty. Its wide courts, too, give it a fresh and open-air character which is very refreshing after the stifling dark heat and closeness of the Holy Sepulchre. Above all it impresses one with its grand simplicity. The sharp-edge angles of the octagon are taken in at a glance; the rock within is bare rock, and infinitely more impressive than the silk and marble in which rock masquerades at Bethlehem. The great number of its pillars, screens, reading-stands, and other furniture, leaves little open room, and it feels rather a crowded than a spacious place for worship. Yet, on the other hand, you are not wearied with the complex symbolism of many of the ancient churches. The meaning of this may be poorer, but at least it is plain. This means just a perfectly shapely and highly coloured octagon, where men have worshipped God for a thousand years in the least complicated way in which worship has been done. Thus the mosque is typical of the faith and the policy that created it. “I do not believe,” says Disraeli’s Tancred, “that anything great is ever effected by management.... You require something more vigorous and more simple.... You must act like Moses and Mohammed.”

On the other hand, the enthusiasm for Mohammedan simplicity is sorely tried when the first moment of almost awestruck feeling ends with the advance of the guide. He is to shew you the wonders of the mosque, and the torrent of mingled absurdity and superstition by which you find yourself swept on is very trying to the would-be admirer of the faith and its monument. First of all, there are the relics—the footprint of Mohammed, and the hairs of his beard; the praying-places of Abraham and Elijah and other “very fine, high-class people,” as our dragoman described

THE WEST SIDE OF THE TEMPLE AREA.

From the barracks near the site of the Tower of Antonia. Above the domed building in the right foreground rises Mount Zion. The rosy hills to the left are the mountains of Judea.

them to us; the round hole where the rock let Mohammed through when he ascended to heaven, the hollow place in the roof of the cavern where it rose to let him stand erect to pray, the tongue with which it spoke, and the mark of the angel Gabriel’s finger when it had to be held down from following him in his ascension. Still more disenchanting is the knot of underground superstitions that desecrate the holy place, and rob it of its freshness and healthy simplicity, like snakes in the garden. The wild imagination of the East has pictured to itself the regions which lie underneath this sanctuary in its own grim way. In spite of a very obvious pillar, and a bit of white-washed wall to be seen in the cavern, the rock is supposed to hover unsupported over the abyss. Beneath is “the well of souls,” where the dead assemble twice weekly to pray. Some think of these departed ones as those who wait for the Resurrection, but a darker fancy holds that the gates of hell are here. The worshipper feels the souls of the dead flitting about him, and prays with the cries of the lost in his ears. Even the open spaces of the court are haunted by unclean legends, and seem to be heavy with the odour of graveyard mould. Here, at St. George’s dome, with the two red granite pillars in front of it, is the place where Solomon tormented the demons; there, by the eastern wall, is the throne whereon he sat when dead, the corpse leaning on his staff to cheat them, until worms gnawed the staff through, the body fell forward, and the demons found out the trick.

In common decency, any place that lays claim to sacredness must have something to say to worshippers regarding conduct; but the ethics of the Mosque of Omar are a match for its impostures, alike in gruesomeness and in impudence. They are all of the nature of magic tests, by which souls are to be tried for their eternal fate. The little arcades at the top of the steps of the platform are called “Balances” because the scales of judgment are to be suspended there on the Great Day. The Dome of the Chain owes its name to the circumstance that there a golden chain hung at David’s place of judgment, which had to be grasped by witnesses and dropped a link when a lie was told. A place in the outer wall is shown from which a wire will be suspended on the Day of Judgment, whose other end will be made fast on the Mount of Olives. Christ will sit on the wall and Mohammed on the mount. Over this wire must all men find their way, but only the good will cross, the wicked falling into the valley beneath. In the El Aksa Mosque a couple of pillars stand very near each other, so worn that they are perceptibly thinned. The space between them bulges, in which a piece of spiked iron-work is now inserted. These were another test for the final award—he who could squeeze himself through the aperture, and he alone, had found the true “narrow way” to heaven.

Frauds such as these force upon every visitor the question how far the Mohammedans themselves believe them. The utter want of earnestness, or anything that to a Western mind bears the resemblance of reality, is painfully evident in the attendants who guide you through the mosque. You are forced to respect its sacredness by purchasing the loan of slippers to cover your boots, and you feel rather like one entering a circus than a place of worship, when you have been transformed into an illuminated caricature by means of one yellow and another red slipper. Your guide, who wears the appearance of a convict in clericals, greatly enjoys your picturesqueness, and makes haste to conduct you to a certain jasper slab into which Mohammed drove nineteen nails of gold (which look, however, indistinguishable from iron). A nail comes out at the end of every epoch, and when all are gone the end of the world will come. One day the devil destroyed all but three and a half of them, when the Angel Gabriel, caught napping for once, stopped the mischief just in time. Here you are invited to lay any coins you may chance to have about you, and assured that if the coin be silver you will save your soul by giving it. As the coins are tabled, the whole body of assistant clergy assembles to count the collection.

All this, and much else, is but the inevitable outcome of a worship that gathers round a stone. It is a petrified worship, hard and dead as its sacred rock. Nothing could be more pathetic than a window in El Aksa almost darkened with little rags of clothing hung there by poor folk who come to pray for their sick friends. If Syrian Christianity is corrupt, it is at least not so pitiless as Syrian Mohammedanism. The very aspect and situation of the rival shrines is symbolic. The mosque does not really love men, whether it really believes in God or not. It sits apart in its wide enclosure, while the Church of the Sepulchre is huddled indistinguishably into the thickest pressure of the life of men and women in the city. The church seems, by its rugged and broken outline, to sympathise with the shattered fortunes of the life around it; it is grey and ruinous-looking, as if it had borne man’s sorrows and carried them. The mosque, with all its beauty, seems to sit there like some great sleek sphinx, watching everything, but sharing little and loving none of the misery around it. In this city of ruins there is something repellent about its smooth and self-complacent finish. No, the mosque does not really love men; whether it really believes in itself and its miracles or not is another of the many Mohammedan things which God only knows.

CHAPTER V
CRUSADER

To tell even in barest outline the long story of the Crusades would be a task as impossible as it would be thankless. The magic of Sir Walter Scott’s Talisman is happily not yet dead, and in some degree the Crusader still lives as an actual and human figure in our imagination. Many Christians who had come as pilgrims had settled in the land as its inhabitants, and for four centuries after the Arabian conquest these continued both their trade and their worship under the tolerably mild Mohammedan rule. In the eleventh century all was changed by the Saracen invasion. Pilgrims were extortionately taxed at the gates of Jerusalem; their lives were imperilled, their persons and their devotions insulted. The old commerce, which had grown to considerable proportions, was ruined, and pilgrimage, from being a lucrative and pleasant service, became an almost certain martyrdom.

It was this state of affairs which sent Peter the Hermit through Europe on his great campaign in 1093, and those extraordinary wars that raged in Syria through two centuries bore the complex character of the motives which had prompted them. From the departure of that motley rabble which followed the Hermit to the East in the first Crusade, down to the pitiful expedition of French children who started 30,000 strong from Vendôme in 1212, there stretches perhaps the most picturesque period in all history.[28]

The mass of paradox and contradiction which that period presents is no less striking. It was an invasion by the West, whose purpose was to rehabilitate an Eastern faith. It was a religious war carried on by the jealousies and ambitions of rival nations. It was the occasion of some of the most statesmanlike government that the world has seen, and it was accompanied from first to last by frequent outbursts of treachery, massacre, and lust. It was the most airy dream and at the same time the most effective practical force of its time. It was the expression of the most ascetic severity and the most reckless luxury. Utterly futile, commercially and socially disastrous, often wholly irreligious, it was yet everywhere a massive and purposeful conception, in which the determination and forcefulness of the West thrust their iron wedge clean to the centre of this sleepy land. Its high idealism, curiously alloyed with grosser elements both sensual and brutal, was yet able to preserve through all the genuine spiritual fire of chivalry and of faith.

Our task is simply to ascertain what all this stands for in the history of Palestine, and what it has left behind it there as its memorial. In two words, it stands for the contact of the East and West, and for their separateness. Into Europe the Crusades brought much from the East. It was due to them more than to all other causes that there was so immense an increase of Eastern merchandise in Western markets—not of Jerusalem relics only, but of Damascus ware and of Persian and even Indian produce from beyond the great rivers. Their influence on architecture, too, is a well-known fact of Western history. The Mosque of Omar rose on at least three European sites, and the plan of many another piece of Byzantine building and Arabesque decoration was brought home by the Crusaders from the wars. Into the East, again, the Crusades brought much from the West. From north to south of Palestine one meets with the remains and memorials of that invasion. Theirs are the footprints most visible throughout the land. Everything in Syria has felt the touch of them and retained its mark. At every turn one finds something recognisable and homely to Western ears and eyes—the name of a castle, the chiselling of a stone, the moulding of metal—they are strangely familiar as they are met so far away from home. Yet they survive as wreckage, and as wreckage only. He who hopes to westernise the East is attempting a task in which all must fail, whether they be soldiers or priests, missionaries or statesmen. The ancient Eastern life has long ago flowed back over the relics of the Western occupation of Syria.

The surviving traces are of many kinds. There are the descendants of Crusaders, sprung of intermarriages with Eastern women, and still preserving a distinctively European type in little suggestive details of feature or of hair. Names such as Belfort, Belvoir, Mirabel, Blanchegarde, or Sinjil (St. Giles), coming without apology next to the Hebrew and Arabic names of villages in Palestine, strike one with very much the same shock as old Scottish place-names do, alternating with incorporated aboriginal ones, on the railway stations of the Australian bush. Relics like the sword and spurs of Godfrey de Bouillon may, like most other relics, be discounted, but not so the wonderful masonry of castles and of churches which everywhere overawes the man accustomed to modern walls. Winding our way with tight rein along the narrow and crooked streets of Tyre, we suddenly plunged into the darkness and foul air of the Bazaar. At the other end of it, emerging under a Gothic archway, we found ourselves in the courtyard of a khan, a very dirty and unpleasant place. Seeing nothing but unclean stables, we imagined that our horses were to be put up here and perhaps fed, and we pitied them. Then, to our astonishment, we discovered that this was the old Crusader Church, where these broken and discoloured arches had once echoed the hymns and prayers of European chivalry; and that somewhere among them lay the bones of the great emperor so famous in

ENTRANCE TO THE CHURCH OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE.