CHAPTER XLV.
The Cholera by way of
Variety--Hot--Another Outlandish Procession--Pen
and-Ink Photograph of
"Jonesborough,"
Hunter--The Stateliest Ruin of
All--Stepping over the Borders of Holy-
Land--Bathing in the Sources of
Cesarea--
Disciples Knew--The Noble Steed
"Baalbec"--Sentimental Horse Idolatry of
the Arabs
CHAPTER
XLVI.
Dan--
Scraps of History--Character of the
Country--Bedouin Shepherds--Glimpses
of the Hoary Past--Mr. Grimes's
Bedouins--A
That Soldier's Manner of
Fighting--Barak's
Unlearning Some Things--Desolation
CHAPTER XLVII.
"Jack's Adventure"--Joseph's Pit--The Story of
Joseph--Joseph's
Magnanimity and Esau's--The Sacred
Pilgrims--Why We did not Sail on
Saviour's Brothers and
Sisters--Journeying toward Magdela
CHAPTER XLVIII.
Curious Specimens of Art and
Architecture--Public Reception of the
Pilgrims--Mary Magdalen's
House--Tiberias and its Queer Inhabitants--
The Sacred
CHAPTER XLIX.
The Ancient Baths--Ye Apparition--A
Distinguished Panorama--The Last
What one Sees from its Top--Memory of a
Deborah the Prophetess
CHAPTER L.
Toward
--Noted Grottoes in General--Joseph's Workshop--A
Sacred Bowlder--
The Fountain of the Virgin--Questionable
Female Beauty--
Literary Curiosities
CHAPTER LI.
Boyhood of the Saviour--Unseemly Antics
of Sober Pilgrims--Home of the
Witch of Endor--Nain--Profanation--A
Popular Oriental Picture--Biblical
Metaphors Becoming steadily More
Intelligible--The Shuuem Miracle--
The "Free Son of The
Desert"--Ancient Jezrael--Jehu's Achievements--
CHAPTER LII
Curious Remnant of the
Past--Shechem--The Oldest "First Family" on Earth
--The Oldest Manuscript Extant--The Genuine Tomb of
Joseph--Jacob's Well
--Shiloh--Camping with the Arabs--Jacob's Ladder--More
Desolation--
Ramah, Beroth, the Tomb of Samuel, The
Fountain of
Approaching
Features--Domiciled Within the Sacred
Walls
CHAPTER LIII.
"The Joy of the Whole Earth"--Description of Jerusalem--Church
of the
Holy Sepulchre--The Stone of
Unction--The Grave of Jesus--Graves of
Nicodemus and Joseph of Armattea--Places
of the Apparition--The Finding
of the There Crosses----The
Legend--Monkish Impostures--The Pillar of
Flagellation--The Place of a
Relic--Godfrey's Sword--"The Bonds of
Christ"--"The Center of the
Earth"--Place whence the Dust was taken of
which Adam was Made--Grave of Adam--The
Martyred Soldier--The Copper
Plate that was on the Cross--The
of the Garments--St. Dimas, the Penitent
Thief--The Late Emperor
Maximilian's Contribution--Grotto
wherein the Crosses were Found, and the
Nails, and the Crown of Thorns--Chapel
of the Mocking--Tomb of
Melchizedek--Graves of Two Renowned
Crusaders--The Place of the
Crucifixion
CHAPTER LIV.
The "Sorrowful Way"--The
Legend of St. Veronica's Handkerchief--
An Illustrious Stone--House of the
Wandering Jew--The Tradition of the
Wanderer--Solomon's
Admitted"--The Fate of a
Gossip--Turkish Sacred Relics--Judgment Seat of
David and Saul--Genuine Precious Remains
of Solomon's
with Sights--The Pool of Siloam--The
Sacred Localities
CHAPTER
Rebellion in the Camp--Charms of Nomadic
Life--Dismal Rumors--
for
of
Lazarus--"Bedouins!"--Ancient
The
hermits of Mars Saba--Good St.
Saba--Women not Admitted--Buried from the
World for all Time--Unselfish Catholic
Benevolence--Gazelles--The Plain
of the Shepherds--Birthplace of the
Saviour,
Nativity--Its Hundred Holy Places--The
Famous "Milk" Grotto--Tradition--
Return to
CHAPTER LVI.
Departure from
Horse of Simon the Tanner--The Long
Pilgrimage Ended--Character of
CHAPTER LVII.
The Happiness of being at Sea once
more--"Home" as it is in a Pleasure
Ship--"Shaking Hands" with the
Vessel--Jack in Costume--His Father's
Parting Advice--Approaching
Compliment for the Donkeys--Invasion of
the Lost Tribes of
of the Celebrated "
Hotel Contrasted with a Certain American
Hotel--Preparing for the
Pyramids
CHAPTER XLV.
The last twenty-four hours we staid in
violent attack of cholera, or cholera
morbus, and therefore had a good
chance and a good excuse to lie there on
that wide divan and take an
honest rest. I had nothing to do but listen to the
pattering of the
fountains and take medicine and throw it
up again. It was dangerous
recreation, but it was pleasanter than
traveling in
of snow from
was nothing to interfere with my eating
it--there was always room for
more.
I enjoyed myself very well.
Syrian travel has its interesting
features, like travel in any other part
of the world, and yet to break
your leg or have the cholera adds a
welcome variety to it.
We left
then the party stopped a while in the
shade of some fig-trees to give me
a chance to rest. It was the hottest day we had seen yet--the
sun-flames
shot down like the shafts of fire that
stream out before a blow-pipe--the
rays seemed to fall in a steady deluge
on the head and pass downward like
rain from a roof. I imagined I could distinguish between the
floods of
rays--I thought I could tell when each
flood struck my head, when it
reached my shoulders, and when the next
one came. It was terrible. All
the desert glared so fiercely that my
eyes were swimming in tears all the
time.
The boys had white umbrellas heavily lined with dark green. They
were a priceless blessing. I thanked fortune that I had one, too,
notwithstanding it was packed up with
the baggage and was ten miles
ahead.
It is madness to travel in
me in Beirout (these people who always
gorge you with advice) that it was
madness to travel in
that I got one.
But, honestly, I think an umbrella is a
nuisance any where when its
business is to keep the sun off. No Arab wears a brim to his fez, or
uses an umbrella, or any thing to shade
his eyes or his face, and he
always looks comfortable and proper in
the sun. But of all the
ridiculous sights I ever have seen, our
party of eight is the most so--
they do cut such an outlandish
figure. They travel single file; they
all
wear the endless white rag of
their hats and dangling down their
backs; they all wear thick green
spectacles, with side-glasses to them;
they all hold white umbrellas,
lined with green, over their heads;
without exception their stirrups are
too short--they are the very worst gang
of horsemen on earth, their
animals to a horse trot fearfully
hard--and when they get strung out one
after the other; glaring straight ahead
and breathless; bouncing high and
out of turn, all along the line; knees
well up and stiff, elbows flapping
like a rooster's that is going to crow,
and the long file of umbrellas
popping convulsively up and down--when
one sees this outrageous picture
exposed to the light of day, he is
amazed that the gods don't get out
their thunderbolts and destroy them off
the face of the earth! I do--I
wonder at it. I wouldn't let any such caravan go through a
country of
mine.
And when the sun drops below the horizon
and the boys close their
umbrellas and put them under their arms,
it is only a variation of the
picture, not a modification of its
absurdity.
But may be you can not see the wild
extravagance of my panorama. You
could if you were here. Here, you feel all the time just as if you
were
living about the year 1200 before
Christ--or back to the patriarchs--or
forward to the New Era. The scenery of the Bible is about you--the
customs of the patriarchs are around
you--the same people, in the same
flowing robes, and in sandals, cross
your path--the same long trains of
stately camels go and come--the same
impressive religious solemnity and
silence rest upon the desert and the
mountains that were upon them in the
remote ages of antiquity, and behold,
intruding upon a scene like this,
comes this fantastic mob of
green-spectacled Yanks, with their flapping
elbows and bobbing umbrellas! It is Daniel in the lion's den with a
green cotton umbrella under his arm, all
over again.
My umbrella is with the baggage, and so
are my green spectacles--and
there they shall stay. I will not use them. I will show some respect
for the eternal fitness of things. It will be bad enough to get sun-
struck, without looking ridiculous into
the bargain. If I fall, let me
fall bearing about me the semblance of a
Christian, at least.
Three or four hours out from
so abruptly converted, and from this
place we looked back over the
scorching desert, and had our last
glimpse of beautiful
in its robes of shining green. After nightfall we reached our tents,
just outside of the nasty Arab
real name of the place is El something
or other, but the boys still
refuse to recognize the Arab names or
try to pronounce them. When I say
that that village is of the usual style,
I mean to insinuate that all
Syrian villages within fifty miles of
that it would require more than human
intelligence to tell wherein one
differed from another. A Syrian village is a hive of huts one story
high
(the height of a man,) and as square as
a dry-goods box; it is mud-
plastered all over, flat roof and all,
and generally whitewashed after a
fashion.
The same roof often extends over half the town, covering many
of the streets, which are generally
about a yard wide. When you ride
through one of these villages at
noon-day, you first meet a melancholy
dog, that looks up at you and silently
begs that you won't run over him,
but he does not offer to get out of the
way; next you meet a young boy
without any clothes on, and he holds out
his hand and says "Bucksheesh!"
--he don't really expect a cent, but
then he learned to say that before
he learned to say mother, and now he can
not break himself of it; next
you meet a woman with a black veil drawn
closely over her face, and her
bust exposed; finally, you come to
several sore-eyed children and
children in all stages of mutilation and
decay; and sitting humbly in the
dust, and all fringed with filthy rags,
is a poor devil whose arms and
legs are gnarled and twisted like
grape-vines. These are all the people
you are likely to see. The balance of the population are asleep
within
doors, or abroad tending goats in the
plains and on the hill-sides. The
village is built on some consumptive
little water-course, and about it is
a little fresh-looking vegetation. Beyond this charmed circle, for miles
on every side, stretches a weary desert
of sand and gravel, which
produces a gray bunchy shrub like
sage-brush. A Syrian village is the
sorriest sight in the world, and its
surroundings are eminently in
keeping with it.
I would not have gone into this
dissertation upon Syrian villages but for
the fact that Nimrod, the Mighty Hunter
of Scriptural notoriety, is
buried in Jonesborough, and I wished the
public to know about how he is
located.
Like Homer, he is said to be buried in many other places, but
this is the only true and genuine place
his ashes inhabit.
When the original tribes were dispersed,
more than four thousand years
ago, Nimrod and a large party traveled
three or four hundred miles, and
settled where the great city of
that city. He also began to build the famous
circumstances over which he had no control
put it out of his power to
finish it. He ran it up eight stories high, however, and
two of them
still stand, at this day--a colossal
mass of brickwork, rent down the
centre by earthquakes, and seared and
vitrified by the lightnings of an
angry God. But the vast ruin will still stand for ages,
to shame the
puny labors of these modern generations
of men. Its huge compartments
are tenanted by owls and lions, and old
Nimrod lies neglected in this
wretched village, far from the scene of
his grand enterprise.
We left Jonesborough very early in the
morning, and rode forever and
forever and forever, it seemed to me,
over parched deserts and rocky
hills, hungry, and with no water to
drink. We had drained the goat-skins
dry in a little while. At
of El Yuba Dam, perched on the side of a
mountain, but the dragoman said
if we applied there for water we would
be attacked by the whole tribe,
for they did not love Christians. We had to journey on. Two hours later
we reached the foot of a tall isolated
mountain, which is crowned by the
crumbling
doubt.
It is a thousand feet long and two hundred wide, all of the most
symmetrical, and at the same time the most
ponderous masonry. The
massive towers and bastions are more
than thirty feet high, and have been
sixty.
From the mountain's peak its broken turrets rise above the groves
of ancient oaks and olives, and look
wonderfully picturesque. It is of
such high antiquity that no man knows
who built it or when it was built.
It is utterly inaccessible, except in
one place, where a bridle-path
winds upward among the solid rocks to
the old portcullis. The horses'
hoofs have bored holes in these rocks to
the depth of six inches during
the hundreds and hundreds of years that
the castle was garrisoned. We
wandered for three hours among the
chambers and crypts and dungeons of
the fortress, and trod where the mailed
heels of many a knightly Crusader
had rang, and where Phenician heroes had
walked ages before them.
We wondered how such a solid mass of
masonry could be affected even by an
earthquake, and could not understand
what agency had made Banias a ruin;
but we found the destroyer, after a
while, and then our wonder was
increased tenfold. Seeds had fallen in crevices in the vast
walls; the
seeds had sprouted; the tender,
insignificant sprouts had hardened; they
grew larger and larger, and by a steady,
imperceptible pressure forced
the great stones apart, and now are
bringing sure destruction upon a
giant work that has even mocked the
earthquakes to scorn! Gnarled and
twisted trees spring from the old walls
every where, and beautify and
overshadow the gray battlements with a
wild luxuriance of foliage.
From these old towers we looked down
upon a broad, far-reaching green
plain, glittering with the pools and
rivulets which are the sources of
the sacred river
And as the evening drew near, we
clambered down the mountain, through
groves of the Biblical oaks of
the border and entering the long-sought
foot, toward the wide valley, we entered
this little execrable village of
Banias and camped in a great grove of
olive trees near a torrent of
sparkling water whose banks are arrayed
in fig-trees, pomegranates and
oleanders in full leaf. Barring the proximity of the village, it is a
sort of paradise.
The very first thing one feels like
doing when he gets into camp, all
burning up and dusty, is to hunt up a
bath. We followed the stream up to
where it gushes out of the mountain
side, three hundred yards from the
tents, and took a bath that was so icy
that if I did not know this was
the main source of the sacred river, I
would expect harm to come of it.
It was bathing at noonday in the chilly
source of the Abana, "River of
generally does give me the cholera to
take a bath.
The incorrigible pilgrims have come in
with their pockets full of
specimens broken from the ruins. I wish this vandalism could be stopped.
They broke off fragments from Noah's
tomb; from the exquisite sculptures
of the temples of Baalbec; from the
houses of Judas and Ananias, in
the worn Greek and Roman inscriptions
set in the hoary walls of the
arches here that Jesus looked upon in
the flesh. Heaven protect the
Sepulchre when this tribe invades
The ruins here are not very
interesting. There are the massive walls
of
a great square building that was once
the citadel; there are many
ponderous old arches that are so smothered
with debris that they barely
project above the ground; there are
heavy-walled sewers through which the
crystal brook of which
the substructions of a costly marble
temple that Herod the Great built
here--patches of its handsome mosaic
floors still remain; there is a
quaint old stone bridge that was here
before Herod's time, may be;
scattered every where, in the paths and
in the woods, are Corinthian
capitals, broken porphyry pillars, and
little fragments of sculpture; and
up yonder in the precipice where the
fountain gushes out, are well-worn
Greek inscriptions over niches in the
rock where in ancient times the
Greeks, and after them the Romans,
worshipped the sylvan god Pan. But
trees and bushes grow above many of
these ruins now; the miserable huts
of a little crew of filthy Arabs are
perched upon the broken masonry of
antiquity, the whole place has a sleepy,
stupid, rural look about it, and
one can hardly bring himself to believe
that a busy, substantially built
city once existed here, even two
thousand years ago. The place was
nevertheless the scene of an event whose
effects have added page after
page and volume after volume to the
world's history. For in this place
Christ stood when he said to Peter:
"Thou art Peter; and upon this rock will I build my church, and the
gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give unto
thee the keys of the
bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatsoever thou shalt
loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven."
On those little sentences have been
built up the mighty edifice of the
Church of Rome; in them lie the
authority for the imperial power of the
Popes over temporal affairs, and their
godlike power to curse a soul or
wash it white from sin. To sustain the position of "the only
true
Church," which
and labored and struggled for many a
century, and will continue to keep
herself busy in the same work to the end
of time. The memorable words I
have quoted give to this ruined city
about all the interest it possesses
to people of the present day.
It seems curious enough to us to be
standing on ground that was once
actually pressed by the feet of the
Saviour. The situation is suggestive
of a reality and a tangibility that seem
at variance with the vagueness
and mystery and ghostliness that one
naturally attaches to the character
of a god. I can not comprehend yet that I am sitting
where a god has
stood, and looking upon the brook and
the mountains which that god looked
upon, and am surrounded by dusky men and
women whose ancestors saw him,
and even talked with him, face to face,
and carelessly, just as they
would have done with any other
stranger. I can not comprehend this; the
gods of my understanding have been
always hidden in clouds and very far
away.
This morning, during breakfast, the
usual assemblage of squalid humanity
sat patiently without the charmed circle
of the camp and waited for such
crumbs as pity might bestow upon their
misery. There were old and young,
brown-skinned and yellow. Some of the men were tall and stalwart, (for
one hardly sees any where such
splendid-looking men as here in the East,)
but all the women and children looked
worn and sad, and distressed with
hunger.
They reminded me much of Indians, did these people. They had
but little clothing, but such as they
had was fanciful in character and
fantastic in its arrangement. Any little absurd gewgaw or gimcrack they
had they disposed in such a way as to
make it attract attention most
readily.
They sat in silence, and with tireless patience watched our
every motion with that vile,
uncomplaining impoliteness which is so truly
Indian, and which makes a white man so
nervous and uncomfortable and
savage that he wants to exterminate the
whole tribe.
These people about us had other
peculiarities, which I have noticed in
the noble red man, too: they were
infested with vermin, and the dirt had
caked on them till it amounted to bark.
The little children were in a pitiable
condition--they all had sore eyes,
and were otherwise afflicted in various
ways. They say that hardly a
native child in all the East is free
from sore eyes, and that thousands
of them go blind of one eye or both
every year. I think this must be so,
for I see plenty of blind people every
day, and I do not remember seeing
any children that hadn't sore eyes. And, would you suppose that an
American mother could sit for an hour,
with her child in her arms, and
let a hundred flies roost upon its eyes
all that time undisturbed? I see
that every day. It makes my flesh creep. Yesterday we met a woman
riding on a little jackass, and she had
a little child in her arms--
honestly, I thought the child had
goggles on as we approached, and I
wondered how its mother could afford so
much style. But when we drew
near, we saw that the goggles were
nothing but a camp meeting of flies
assembled around each of the child's
eyes, and at the same time there was
a detachment prospecting its nose. The flies were happy, the child was
contented, and so the mother did not
interfere.
As soon as the tribe found out that we
had a doctor in our party, they
began to flock in from all
quarters. Dr. B., in the charity of his
nature, had taken a child from a woman
who sat near by, and put some sort
of a wash upon its diseased eyes. That woman went off and started the
whole nation, and it was a sight to see
them swarm! The lame, the halt,
the blind, the leprous--all the distempers
that are bred of indolence,
dirt, and iniquity--were represented in
the Congress in ten minutes, and
still they came! Every woman that had a sick baby brought it
along, and
every woman that hadn't, borrowed
one. What reverent and what worshiping
looks they bent upon that dread,
mysterious power, the Doctor! They
watched him take his phials out; they
watched him measure the particles
of white powder; they watched him add
drops of one precious liquid, and
drops of another; they lost not the
slightest movement; their eyes were
riveted upon him with a fascination that
nothing could distract.
I believe they thought he was gifted
like a god. When each individual
got his portion of medicine, his eyes
were radiant with joy--
notwithstanding by nature they are a
thankless and impassive race--and
upon his face was written the
unquestioning faith that nothing on earth
could prevent the patient from getting
well now.
Christ knew how to preach to these
simple, superstitious, disease-
tortured creatures: He healed the
sick. They flocked to our poor human
doctor this morning when the fame of
what he had done to the sick child
went abroad in the land, and they
worshiped him with their eyes while
they did not know as yet whether there
was virtue in his simples or not.
The ancestors of these--people precisely
like them in color, dress,
manners, customs, simplicity--flocked in
vast multitudes after Christ,
and when they saw Him make the afflicted
whole with a word, it is no
wonder they worshiped Him. No wonder His deeds were the talk of the
nation.
No wonder the multitude that followed Him was so great that at
one time--thirty miles from here--they
had to let a sick man down through
the roof because no approach could be
made to the door; no wonder His
audiences were so great at
removed a little distance from the
shore; no wonder that even in the
desert places about
had to feed them by a miracle or else
see them suffer for their confiding
faith and devotion; no wonder when there
was a great commotion in a city
in those days, one neighbor explained it
to another in words to this
effect: "They say that Jesus of
Nazareth is come!"
Well, as I was saying, the doctor
distributed medicine as long as he had
any to distribute, and his reputation is
mighty in
Among his patients was the child of the
Shiek's daughter--for even this
poor, ragged handful of sores and sin
has its royal Shiek--a poor old
mummy that looked as if he would be more
at home in a poor-house than in
the Chief Magistracy of this tribe of
hopeless, shirtless savages. The
princess--I mean the Shiek's
daughter--was only thirteen or fourteen
years old, and had a very sweet face and
a pretty one. She was the only
Syrian female we have seen yet who was
not so sinfully ugly that she
couldn't smile after
Sabbath.
Her child was a hard specimen, though--there wasn't enough of
it to make a pie, and the poor little
thing looked so pleadingly up at
all who came near it (as if it had an
idea that now was its chance or
never,) that we were filled with
compassion which was genuine and not put
on.
But this last new horse I have got is
trying to break his neck over the
tent-ropes, and I shall have to go out
and anchor him.
have parted company. The new horse is not much to boast of, I
think.
One of his hind legs bends the wrong
way, and the other one is as
straight and stiff as a tent-pole. Most of his teeth are gone, and he is
as blind as bat. His nose has been broken at some time or
other, and is
arched like a culvert now. His under lip hangs down like a camel's, and
his ears are chopped off close to his
head. I had some trouble at first
to find a name for him, but I finally
concluded to call him Baalbec,
because he is such a magnificent
ruin. I can not keep from talking about
my horses, because I have a very long
and tedious journey before me, and
they naturally occupy my thoughts about
as much as matters of apparently
much greater importance.
We satisfied our pilgrims by making
those hard rides from Baalbec to
them behind and get fresh animals for
them. The dragoman says Jack's
horse died. I swapped horses with Mohammed, the
kingly-looking Egyptian
who is our
Abraham, of course. I did not take this horse on account of his
personal
appearance, but because I have not seen
his back. I do not wish to see
it.
I have seen the backs of all the other horses, and found most of
them covered with dreadful saddle-boils
which I know have not been washed
or doctored for years. The idea of riding all day long over such
ghastly
inquisitions of torture is
sickening. My horse must be like the
others,
but I have at least the consolation of
not knowing it to be so.
I hope that in future I may be spared
any more sentimental praises of the
Arab's idolatry of his horse. In boyhood I longed to be an Arab of the
desert and have a beautiful mare, and
call her Selim or Benjamin or
Mohammed, and feed her with my own
hands, and let her come into the tent,
and teach her to caress me and look
fondly upon me with her great tender
eyes; and I wished that a stranger might
come at such a time and offer me
a hundred thousand dollars for her, so
that I could do like the other
Arabs--hesitate, yearn for the money,
but overcome by my love for my
mare, at last say, "Part with thee,
my beautiful one! Never with my
life!
Away, tempter, I scorn thy gold!"
and then bound into the saddle
and speed over the desert like the wind!
But I recall those aspirations. If these Arabs be like the other Arabs,
their love for their beautiful mares is
a fraud. These of my
acquaintance have no love for their
horses, no sentiment of pity for
them, and no knowledge of how to treat
them or care for them. The Syrian
saddle-blanket is a quilted mattress two
or three inches thick. It is
never removed from the horse, day or night. It gets full of dirt and
hair, and becomes soaked with
sweat. It is bound to breed sores. These
pirates never think of washing a horse's
back. They do not shelter the
horses in the tents, either--they must
stay out and take the weather as
it comes. Look at poor cropped and dilapidated
"Baalbec," and weep for
the sentiment that has been wasted upon
the Selims of romance!
CHAPTER XLVI.
About an hour's ride over a rough, rocky
road, half flooded with water,
and through a forest of oaks of
From a little mound here in the plain
issues a broad stream of limpid
water and forms a large shallow pool,
and then rushes furiously onward,
augmented in volume. This puddle is an important source of the
Its banks, and those of the brook are
respectably adorned with blooming
oleanders, but the unutterable beauty of
the spot will not throw a well-
balanced man into convulsions, as the
Syrian books of travel would lead
one to suppose.
From the spot I am speaking of, a
cannon-ball would carry beyond the
confines of
We were only one little hour's travel
within the borders of
had hardly begun to appreciate yet that
we were standing upon any
different sort of earth than that we had
always been used to, and see how
the historic names began already to
cluster! Dan--
the Sources of
the last, and it was not far away. The little
once the kingdom so famous in Scripture
for its bulls and its oaks.
to
"from
Israelites both mean the same--great
distance. With their slow camels
and asses, it was about a seven days'
journey from Dan to
a hundred and fifty or sixty miles--it
was the entire length of their
country, and was not to be undertaken
without great preparation and much
ceremony. When the Prodigal traveled to "a far
country," it is not
likely that he went more than eighty or
ninety miles.
from forty to sixty miles wide. The State of
into three Palestines, and there would
then be enough material left for
part of another--possibly a whole
one. From
is several thousand miles, but it will
be only a seven days' journey in
the cars when I am two or three years
older.--[The railroad has been
completed since the above was
written.]--If I live I shall necessarily
have to go across the continent every
now and then in those cars, but one
journey from Dan to
the most trying of the two. Therefore, if we chance to discover that
from Dan to
Israelites, let us not be airy with them,
but reflect that it was and is
a mighty stretch when one can not
traverse it by rail.
The small mound I have mentioned a while
ago was once occupied by the
Phenician city of
captured the place, and lived there in a
free and easy way, worshiping
gods of their own manufacture and
stealing idols from their neighbors
whenever they wore their own out. Jeroboam set up a golden calf here to
fascinate his people and keep them from
making dangerous trips to
allegiance. With all respect for those ancient
Israelites, I can not
overlook the fact that they were not
always virtuous enough to withstand
the seductions of a golden calf. Human nature has not changed much since
then.
Some forty centuries ago the city of
princes of
patriarch
They brought him to Dan, and father
Abraham, who was pursuing them, crept
softly in at dead of night, among the
whispering oleanders and under the
shadows of the stately oaks, and fell
upon the slumbering victors and
startled them from their dreams with the
clash of steel. He recaptured
We moved on. We were now in a green valley, five or six
miles wide and
fifteen long. The streams which are called the sources of
the
flow through it to
and from the southern extremity of the
out.
The
the marsh and the mountains which wall
the valley is a respectable strip
of fertile land; at the end of the
valley, toward Dan, as much as half
the land is solid and fertile, and
watered by
enough of it to make a farm. It almost warrants the enthusiasm of the
spies of that rabble of adventurers who
captured Dan. They said: "We
have seen the land, and behold it is
very good. * * * A place where
there is no want of any thing that is in
the earth."
Their enthusiasm was at least warranted
by the fact that they had never
seen a country as good as this. There was enough of it for the ample
support of their six hundred men and
their families, too.
When we got fairly down on the level
part of the Danite farm, we came to
places where we could actually run our
horses. It was a notable
circumstance.
We had been painfully clambering over
interminable hills and rocks for
days together, and when we suddenly came
upon this astonishing piece of
rockless plain, every man drove the
spurs into his horse and sped away
with a velocity he could surely enjoy to
the utmost, but could never hope
to comprehend in
Here were evidences of cultivation--a
rare sight in this country--an acre
or two of rich soil studded with last
season's dead corn-stalks of the
thickness of your thumb and very wide
apart. But in such a land it was a
thrilling spectacle. Close to it was a stream, and on its banks a
great
herd of curious-looking Syrian goats and
sheep were gratefully eating
gravel.
I do not state this as a petrified fact--I only suppose they
were eating gravel, because there did
not appear to be any thing else for
them to eat. The shepherds that tended them were the very
pictures of
Joseph and his brethren I have no doubt
in the world. They were tall,
muscular, and very dark-skinned
Bedouins, with inky black beards. They
had firm lips, unquailing eyes, and a
kingly stateliness of bearing.
They wore the parti-colored half bonnet,
half hood, with fringed ends
falling upon their shoulders, and the
full, flowing robe barred with
broad black stripes--the dress one sees
in all pictures of the swarthy
sons of the desert. These chaps would sell their younger brothers
if
they had a chance, I think. They have the manners, the customs, the
dress, the occupation and the loose
principles of the ancient stock.
[They attacked our camp last night, and
I bear them no good will.]
They had with them the pigmy jackasses
one sees all over
remembers in all pictures of the
"Flight into
Young Child are riding and Joseph is
walking alongside, towering high
above the little donkey's shoulders.
But really, here the man rides and
carries the child, as a general thing,
and the woman walks. The customs have not changed since Joseph's
time.
We would not have in our houses a
picture representing Joseph riding and
Mary walking; we would see profanation
in it, but a Syrian Christian
would not. I know that hereafter the picture I first
spoke of will look
odd to me.
We could not stop to rest two or three
hours out from our camp, of
course, albeit the brook was beside
us. So we went on an hour longer.
We saw water, then, but nowhere in all
the waste around was there a foot
of shade, and we were scorching to
death. "Like unto the shadow of a
great rock in a weary land." Nothing in the Bible is more beautiful than
that, and surely there is no place we
have wandered to that is able to
give it such touching expression as this
blistering, naked, treeless
land.
Here you do not stop just when you
please, but when you can. We found
water, but no shade. We traveled on and found a tree at last, but
no
water.
We rested and lunched, and came on to this place, Ain Mellahah
(the boys call it Baldwinsville.) It was
a very short day's run, but the
dragoman does not want to go further,
and has invented a plausible lie
about the country beyond this being
infested by ferocious Arabs, who
would make sleeping in their midst a
dangerous pastime. Well, they ought
to be dangerous. They carry a rusty old weather-beaten
flint-lock gun,
with a barrel that is longer than
themselves; it has no sights on it, it
will not carry farther than a brickbat,
and is not half so certain. And
the great sash they wear in many a fold
around their waists has two or
three absurd old horse-pistols in it
that are rusty from eternal disuse--
weapons that would hang fire just about
long enough for you to walk out
of range, and then burst and blow the
Arab's head off. Exceedingly
dangerous these sons of the desert are.
It used to make my blood run cold to
read Wm. C. Grimes' hairbreadth
escapes from Bedouins, but I think I could
read them now without a
tremor.
He never said he was attacked by Bedouins, I believe, or was
ever treated uncivilly, but then in
about every other chapter he
discovered them approaching, any how,
and he had a blood-curdling fashion
of working up the peril; and of
wondering how his relations far away
would feel could they see their poor
wandering boy, with his weary feet
and his dim eyes, in such fearful
danger; and of thinking for the last
time of the old homestead, and the dear
old church, and the cow, and
those things; and of finally
straightening his form to its utmost height
in the saddle, drawing his trusty
revolver, and then dashing the spurs
into "Mohammed" and sweeping
down upon the ferocious enemy determined to
sell his life as dearly as possible. True the Bedouins never did any
thing to him when he arrived, and never
had any intention of doing any
thing to him in the first place, and
wondered what in the mischief he was
making all that to-do about; but still I
could not divest myself of the
idea, somehow, that a frightful peril
had been escaped through that man's
dare-devil bravery, and so I never could
read about Wm. C. Grimes'
Bedouins and sleep comfortably
afterward. But I believe the Bedouins to
be a fraud, now. I have seen the monster, and I can outrun
him. I shall
never be afraid of his daring to stand
behind his own gun and discharge
it.
About fifteen hundred years before
Christ, this camp-ground of ours by
the Waters of Merom was the scene of one
of Joshua's exterminating
battles.
Jabin, King of Hazor, (up yonder above Dan,) called all the
sheiks about him together, with their
hosts, to make ready for
terrible General who was approaching.
"And when all these Kings were met together, they came and pitched
together by the Waters of Merom, to fight against
went out, they and all their hosts with them, much people, even as
the sand that is upon the sea-shore for multitude," etc.
But Joshua fell upon them and utterly
destroyed them, root and branch.
That was his usual policy in war. He never left any chance for newspaper
controversies about who won the
battle. He made this valley, so quiet
now, a reeking slaughter-pen.
Somewhere in this part of the country--I
do not know exactly where--
prophetess, told Barak to take ten
thousand men and sally forth against
another King Jabin who had been doing
something. Barak came down from
Jabin's forces, who were in command of
Sisera. Barak won the fight, and
while he was making the victory complete
by the usual method of
exterminating the remnant of the
defeated host, Sisera fled away on foot,
and when he was nearly exhausted by
fatigue and thirst, one Jael, a woman
he seems to have been acquainted with,
invited him to come into her tent
and rest himself. The weary soldier acceded readily enough, and
Jael put
him to bed. He said he was very thirsty, and asked his
generous
preserver to get him a cup of
water. She brought him some milk, and he
drank of it gratefully and lay down
again, to forget in pleasant dreams
his lost battle and his humbled
pride. Presently when he was asleep she
came softly in with a hammer and drove a
hideous tent-pen down through
his brain!
"For he was fast asleep and
weary. So he died." Such is the touching
language of the Bible. "The Song of Deborah and Barak"
praises Jael for
the memorable service she had rendered,
in an exultant strain:
"Blessed above women shall Jael the wife of Heber the Kenite be,
blessed shall she be above women in the tent.
"He asked for water, and she gave him milk; she brought forth
butter
in a lordly dish.
"She put her hand to the nail, and her right hand to the workman's
hammer; and with the hammer she smote Sisera, she smote off his head
when she had pierced and stricken through his temples.
"At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down: at her feet he bowed,
he fell: where he bowed, there he
fell down dead."
Stirring scenes like these occur in this
valley no more. There is not a
solitary village throughout its whole
extent--not for thirty miles in
either direction. There are two or three small clusters of Bedouin
tents, but not a single permanent
habitation. One may ride ten miles,
hereabouts, and not see ten human
beings.
To this region one of the prophecies is
applied:
"I will bring the land into desolation; and your enemies which
dwell
therein shall be astonished at it.
And I will scatter you among the
heathen, and I will draw out a sword after you; and your land shall
be desolate and your cities waste."
No man can stand here by deserted Ain
Mellahah and say the prophecy has
not been fulfilled.
In a verse from the Bible which I have
quoted above, occurs the phrase
"all these kings." It attracted my attention in a moment,
because it
carries to my mind such a vastly
different significance from what it
always did at home. I can see easily enough that if I wish to
profit by
this tour and come to a correct
understanding of the matters of interest
connected with it, I must studiously and
faithfully unlearn a great many
things I have somehow absorbed
concerning
system of reduction. Like my grapes which the spies bore out of
the
Promised Land, I have got every thing in
Some of my ideas were wild enough. The word
my mind a vague suggestion of a country
as large as the
I do not know why, but such was the
case. I suppose it was because I
could not conceive of a small country
having so large a history. I think
I was a little surprised to find that
the grand Sultan of Turkey was a
man of only ordinary size. I must try to reduce my ideas of
a more reasonable shape. One gets large impressions in boyhood,
sometimes, which he has to fight against
all his life. "All these
kings." When I used to read that in Sunday School, it
suggested to me
the several kings of such countries as
grave procession, with sceptres of gold
in their hands and flashing
crowns upon their heads. But here in Ain Mellahah, after coming
through
country, the phrase "all these
kings" loses its grandeur. It
suggests
only a parcel of petty chiefs--ill-clad
and ill-conditioned savages much
like our Indians, who lived in full
sight of each other and whose
"kingdoms" were large when
they were five miles square and contained two
thousand souls. The combined monarchies of the thirty
"kings" destroyed
by Joshua on one of his famous
campaigns, only covered an area about
equal to four of our counties of
ordinary size. The poor old sheik we
saw at Cesarea Philippi with his ragged
band of a hundred followers,
would have been called a
"king" in those ancient times.
It is seven in the morning, and as we
are in the country, the grass ought
to be sparkling with dew, the flowers
enriching the air with their
fragrance, and the birds singing in the
trees. But alas, there is no dew
here, nor flowers, nor birds, nor
trees. There is a plain and an
unshaded lake, and beyond them some
barren mountains. The tents are
tumbling, the Arabs are quarreling like
dogs and cats, as usual, the
campground is strewn with packages and
bundles, the labor of packing them
upon the backs of the mules is
progressing with great activity, the
horses are saddled, the umbrellas are
out, and in ten minutes we shall
mount and the long procession will move
again. The white city of the
Mellahah, resurrected for a moment out
of the dead centuries, will have
disappeared again and left no sign.
CHAPTER XLVII.
We traversed some miles of desolate
country whose soil is rich enough,
but is given over wholly to weeds--a
silent, mournful expanse, wherein we
saw only three persons--Arabs, with
nothing on but a long coarse shirt
like the "tow-linen" shirts
which used to form the only summer garment of
little negro boys on Southern
plantations. Shepherds they were, and
they
charmed their flocks with the
traditional shepherd's pipe--a reed
instrument that made music as
exquisitely infernal as these same Arabs
create when they sing.
In their pipes lingered no echo of the
wonderful music the shepherd
forefathers heard in the Plains of
Bethlehem what time the angels sang
"Peace on earth, good will to
men."
Part of the ground we came over was not
ground at all, but rocks--cream-
colored rocks, worn smooth, as if by
water; with seldom an edge or a
corner on them, but scooped out,
honey-combed, bored out with eye-holes,
and thus wrought into all manner of
quaint shapes, among which the
uncouth imitation of skulls was
frequent. Over this part of the route
were occasional remains of an old Roman
road like the
paving-stones still clung to their
places with Roman tenacity.
Gray lizards, those heirs of ruin, of
sepulchres and desolation, glided
in and out among the rocks or lay still
and sunned themselves. Where
prosperity has reigned, and fallen;
where glory has flamed, and gone out;
where beauty has dwelt, and passed away;
where gladness was, and sorrow
is; where the pomp of life has been, and
silence and death brood in its
high places, there this reptile makes
his home, and mocks at human
vanity.
His coat is the color of ashes: and ashes are the symbol of
hopes that have perished, of aspirations
that came to nought, of loves
that are buried. If he could speak, he would say, Build
temples: I will
lord it in their ruins; build palaces: I
will inhabit them; erect
empires: I will inherit them; bury your
beautiful: I will watch the worms
at their work; and you, who stand here
and moralize over me: I will crawl
over your corpse at the last.
A few ants were in this desert place,
but merely to spend the summer.
They brought their provisions from Ain
Mellahah--eleven miles.
Jack is not very well to-day, it is easy
to see; but boy as he is, he is
too much of a man to speak of it. He exposed himself to the sun too much
yesterday, but since it came of his
earnest desire to learn, and to make
this journey as useful as the
opportunities will allow, no one seeks to
discourage him by fault-finding. We missed him an hour from the camp,
and then found him some distance away,
by the edge of a brook, and with
no umbrella to protect him from the
fierce sun. If he had been used to
going without his umbrella, it would
have been well enough, of course;
but he was not. He was just in the act of throwing a clod at
a mud-
turtle which was sunning itself on a
small log in the brook. We said:
"Don't do that, Jack. What do you want to harm him for? What has he
done?"
"Well, then, I won't kill him, but I
ought to, because he is a fraud."
We asked him why, but he said it was no
matter. We asked him why, once
or twice, as we walked back to the camp
but he still said it was no
matter.
But late at night, when he was sitting in a thoughtful mood on
the bed, we asked him again and he said:
"Well, it don't matter; I don't
mind it now, but I did not like it today,
you know, because I don't tell any thing
that isn't so, and I don't think
the Colonel ought to, either. But he did; he told us at prayers in the
Pilgrims' tent, last night, and he
seemed as if he was reading it out of
the Bible, too, about this country
flowing with milk and honey, and about
the voice of the turtle being heard in
the land. I thought that was
drawing it a little strong, about the
turtles, any how, but I asked Mr.
Church if it was so, and he said it was,
and what Mr. Church tells me, I
believe.
But I sat there and watched that turtle nearly an hour today,
and I almost burned up in the sun; but I
never heard him sing. I believe
I sweated a double handful of sweat---I
know I did--because it got in my
eyes, and it was running down over my
nose all the time; and you know my
pants are tighter than any body else's--
buckskin seat of them got wet with
sweat, and then got dry again and
began to draw up and pinch and tear
loose--it was awful--but I never
heard him sing. Finally I said, This is a fraud--that is what
it is, it
is a fraud--and if I had had any sense I
might have known a cursed mud-
turtle couldn't sing. And then I said, I don't wish to be hard on
this
fellow, and I will just give him ten
minutes to commence; ten minutes--
and then if he don't, down goes his
building. But he didn't commence,
you know. I had staid there all that time, thinking may
be he might,
pretty soon, because he kept on raising
his head up and letting it down,
and drawing the skin over his eyes for a
minute and then opening them out
again, as if he was trying to study up
something to sing, but just as the
ten minutes were up and I was all beat
out and blistered, he laid his
blamed head down on a knot and went fast
asleep."
"It was a little hard, after you
had waited so long."
"I should think so. I said, Well, if you won't sing, you shan't
sleep,
any way; and if you fellows had let me
alone I would have made him shin
out of
matter now--let it go. The skin is all off the back of my
neck."
About ten in the morning we halted at
Joseph's Pit. This is a ruined
Khan of the Middle Ages, in one of whose
side courts is a great walled
and arched pit with water in it, and
this pit, one tradition says, is the
one Joseph's brethren cast him
into. A more authentic tradition, aided
by the geography of the country, places
the pit in
journey from here. However, since there are many who believe in
this
present pit as the true one, it has its
interest.
It is hard to make a choice of the most
beautiful passage in a book which
is so gemmed with beautiful passages as
the Bible; but it is certain that
not many things within its lids may take
rank above the exquisite story
of Joseph. Who taught those ancient writers their
simplicity of
language, their felicity of expression,
their pathos, and above all,
their faculty of sinking themselves
entirely out of sight of the reader
and making the narrative stand out alone
and seem to tell itself?
Shakspeare is always present when one
reads his book; Macaulay is present
when we follow the march of his stately
sentences; but the Old Testament
writers are hidden from view.
If the pit I have been speaking of is
the right one, a scene transpired
there, long ages ago, which is familiar
to us all in pictures. The sons
of Jacob had been pasturing their flocks
near there. Their father grew
uneasy at their long absence, and sent
Joseph, his favorite, to see if
any thing had gone wrong with them. He traveled six or seven days'
journey; he was only seventeen years
old, and, boy like, he toiled
through that long stretch of the vilest,
rockiest, dustiest country in
of many colors. Joseph was the favorite, and that was one
crime in the
eyes of his brethren; he had dreamed
dreams, and interpreted them to
foreshadow his elevation far above all
his family in the far future, and
that was another; he was dressed well
and had doubtless displayed the
harmless vanity of youth in keeping the
fact prominently before his
brothers. These were crimes his elders fretted over
among themselves and
proposed to punish when the opportunity
should offer. When they saw him
coming up from the
They said, "Lo, here is this
dreamer--let us kill him." But
Reuben
pleaded for his life, and they spared
it. But they seized the boy, and
stripped the hated coat from his back
and pushed him into the pit. They
intended to let him die there, but
Reuben intended to liberate him
secretly. However, while Reuben was away for a little
while, the
brethren sold Joseph to some
Ishmaelitish merchants who were journeying
towards
there in that place, even to this day;
and there it will remain until the
next detachment of image-breakers and
tomb desecraters arrives from the
away with them. For behold in them is no reverence for the
solemn
monuments of the past, and whithersoever
they go they destroy and spare
not.
Joseph became rich, distinguished,
powerful--as the Bible expresses it,
"lord over all the
strength, the brain of the monarchy,
though Pharaoh held the title.
Joseph is one of the truly great men of
the Old Testament. And he was
the noblest and the manliest, save
Esau. Why shall we not say a good
word for the princely Bedouin? The only crime that can be brought
against him is that he was
unfortunate. Why must every body praise
Joseph's great-hearted generosity to his
cruel brethren, without stint of
fervent language, and fling only a
reluctant bone of praise to Esau for
his still sublimer generosity to the
brother who had wronged him? Jacob
took advantage of Esau's consuming
hunger to rob him of his birthright
and the great honor and consideration
that belonged to the position; by
treachery and falsehood he robbed him of
his father's blessing; he made
of him a stranger in his home, and a
wanderer. Yet after twenty years
had passed away and Jacob met Esau and
fell at his feet quaking with fear
and begging piteously to be spared the
punishment he knew he deserved,
what did that magnificent savage
do? He fell upon his neck and embraced
him!
When Jacob--who was incapable of comprehending nobility of
character--still doubting, still
fearing, insisted upon "finding grace
with my lord" by the bribe of a
present of cattle, what did the gorgeous
son of the desert say?
"Nay, I have enough, my brother;
keep that thou hast unto thyself!"
Esau found Jacob rich, beloved by wives
and children, and traveling in
state, with servants, herds of cattle
and trains of camels--but he
himself was still the uncourted outcast
this brother had made him. After
thirteen years of romantic mystery, the
brethren who had wronged Joseph,
came, strangers in a strange land,
hungry and humble, to buy "a little
food"; and being summoned to a
palace, charged with crime, they beheld in
its owner their wronged brother; they
were trembling beggars--he, the
lord of a mighty empire! What Joseph that ever lived would have thrown
away such a chance to "show
off?" Who stands first--outcast
Esau
forgiving Jacob in prosperity, or Joseph
on a king's throne forgiving the
ragged tremblers whose happy rascality
placed him there?
Just before we came to Joseph's Pit, we had
"raised" a hill, and there, a
few miles before us, with not a tree or
a shrub to interrupt the view,
lay a vision which millions of
worshipers in the far lands of the earth
would give half their possessions to
see--the sacred
Therefore we tarried only a short time
at the pit. We rested the horses
and ourselves, and felt for a few
minutes the blessed shade of the
ancient buildings. We were out of water, but the two or three
scowling
Arabs, with their long guns, who were
idling about the place, said they
had none and that there was none in the
vicinity. They knew there was a
little brackish water in the pit, but
they venerated a place made sacred
by their ancestor's imprisonment too
much to be willing to see Christian
dogs drink from it. But
till he made a rope long enough to lower
a vessel to the bottom, and we
drank and then rode on; and in a short
time we dismounted on those shores
which the feet of the Saviour have made
holy ground.
At
roasting climate--and then lunched under
a neglected old fig-tree at the
fountain they call Ain-et-Tin, a hundred
yards from ruined
Every rivulet that gurgles out of the
rocks and sands of this part of the
world is dubbed with the title of
"fountain," and people familiar with
the
admiration over them, and exhaust their
powers of composition in writing
their praises. If all the poetry and nonsense that have been
discharged
upon the fountains and the bland scenery
of this region were collected in
a book, it would make a most valuable
volume to burn.
During luncheon, the pilgrim enthusiasts
of our party, who had been so
light-hearted and so happy ever since
they touched holy ground that they
did little but mutter incoherent
rhapsodies, could scarcely eat, so
anxious were they to "take
shipping" and sail in very person upon the
waters that had borne the vessels of the
Apostles. Their anxiety grew
and their excitement augmented with
every fleeting moment, until my fears
were aroused and I began to have
misgivings that in their present
condition they might break recklessly
loose from all considerations of
prudence and buy a whole fleet of ships
to sail in instead of hiring a
single one for an hour, as quiet folk
are wont to do. I trembled to
think of the ruined purses this day's
performances might result in.
I could not help reflecting bodingly
upon the intemperate zeal with which
middle-aged men are apt to surfeit
themselves upon a seductive folly
which they have tasted for the first
time. And yet I did not feel that
I had a right to be surprised at the
state of things which was giving me
so much concern. These men had been taught from infancy to
revere,
almost to worship, the holy places
whereon their happy eyes were resting
now.
For many and many a year this very picture had visited their
thoughts by day and floated through
their dreams by night. To stand
before it in the flesh--to see it as
they saw it now--to sail upon the
hallowed sea, and kiss the holy soil
that compassed it about: these were
aspirations they had cherished while a
generation dragged its lagging
seasons by and left its furrows in their
faces and its frosts upon their
hair.
To look upon this picture, and sail upon this sea, they had
forsaken home and its idols and
journeyed thousands and thousands of
miles, in weariness and
tribulation. What wonder that the sordid
lights
of work-day prudence should pale before
the glory of a hope like theirs
in the full splendor of its
fruition? Let them squander millions!
I said--who speaks of money at a time
like this?
In this frame of mind I followed, as
fast as I could, the eager footsteps
of the pilgrims, and stood upon the
shore of the lake, and swelled, with
hat and voice, the frantic hail they
sent after the "ship" that was
speeding by. It was a success. The toilers of the sea ran in and
beached their barque. Joy sat upon every countenance.
"How much?--ask him how much,
of us, and you--to
the place where the swine ran down into
the sea--quick!--and we want to
coast around every where--every
where!--all day long!--I could sail a
year in these waters!--and tell him
we'll stop at Magdala and finish at
Tiberias!--ask him how much?--any
thing--any thing whatever!--tell him we
don't care what the expense
is!" [I said to myself, I knew how
it would
be.]
One or two countenances fell. Then a pause.
"Too much!--we'll give him
one!"
I never shall know how it was--I shudder
yet when I think how the place
is given to miracles--but in a single
instant of time, as it seemed to
me, that ship was twenty paces from the
shore, and speeding away like a
frightened thing! Eight crestfallen creatures stood upon the
shore, and
O, to think of it! this--this--after all that overmastering
ecstacy!
Oh, shameful, shameful ending, after
such unseemly boasting! It was too
much like "Ho! let me at
him!" followed by a prudent
"Two of you hold
him--one can hold me!"
Instantly there was wailing and gnashing
of teeth in the camp. The two
Napoleons were offered--more if
necessary--and pilgrims and dragoman
shouted themselves hoarse with pleadings
to the retreating boatmen to
come back. But they sailed serenely away and paid no
further heed to
pilgrims who had dreamed all their lives
of some day skimming over the
sacred waters of
whisperings of its waves, and had
journeyed countless leagues to do it,
and--and then concluded that the fare
was too high. Impertinent
Mohammedan Arabs, to think such things
of gentlemen of another faith!
Well, there was nothing to do but just
submit and forego the privilege of
voyaging on Genessaret, after coming
half around the globe to taste that
pleasure. There was a time, when the Saviour taught
here, that boats
were plenty among the fishermen of the
coasts--but boats and fishermen
both are gone, now; and old Josephus had
a fleet of men-of-war in these
waters eighteen centuries ago--a hundred
and thirty bold canoes--but
they, also, have passed away and left no
sign. They battle here no more
by sea, and the commercial marine of
ships, just of a pattern with the little
skiffs the disciples knew. One
was lost to us for good--the other was
miles away and far out of hail.
So we mounted the horses and rode grimly
on toward Magdala, cantering
along in the edge of the water for want
of the means of passing over it.
How the pilgrims abused each other! Each said it was the other's fault,
and each in turn denied it. No word was spoken by the sinners--even the
mildest sarcasm might have been
dangerous at such a time. Sinners that
have been kept down and had examples
held up to them, and suffered
frequent lectures, and been so put upon
in a moral way and in the matter
of going slow and being serious and
bottling up slang, and so crowded in
regard to the matter of being proper and
always and forever behaving,
that their lives have become a burden to
them, would not lag behind
pilgrims at such a time as this, and
wink furtively, and be joyful, and
commit other such crimes--because it
would not occur to them to do it.
Otherwise they would. But they did do it, though--and it did them a
world of good to hear the pilgrims abuse
each other, too. We took an
unworthy satisfaction in seeing them
fall out, now and then, because it
showed that they were only poor human
people like us, after all.
So we all rode down to Magdala, while
the gnashing of teeth waxed and
waned by turns, and harsh words troubled
the holy calm of
Lest any man think I mean to be
ill-natured when I talk about our
pilgrims as I have been talking, I wish
to say in all sincerity that I do
not.
I would not listen to lectures from men I did not like and could
not respect; and none of these can say I
ever took their lectures
unkindly, or was restive under the
infliction, or failed to try to profit
by what they said to me. They are better men than I am; I can say that
honestly; they are good friends of mine,
too--and besides, if they did
not wish to be stirred up occasionally
in print, why in the mischief did
they travel with me? They knew me.
They knew my liberal way--that I
like to give and take--when it is for me
to give and other people to
take.
When one of them threatened to leave me in
cholera, he had no real idea of doing
it--I know his passionate nature
and the good impulses that underlie
it. And did I not overhear Church,
another pilgrim, say he did not care who
went or who staid, he would
stand by me till I walked out of
out in a coffin, if it was a year? And do I not include Church every
time I abuse the pilgrims--and would I
be likely to speak ill-naturedly
of him?
I wish to stir them up and make them healthy; that is all.
We had left
no semblance to a town, and had nothing
about it to suggest that it had
ever been a town. But all desolate and unpeopled as it was, it
was
illustrious ground. From it sprang that tree of Christianity
whose broad
arms overshadow so many distant lands
to-day. After Christ was tempted
of the devil in the desert, he came here
and began his teachings; and
during the three or four years he lived
afterward, this place was his
home almost altogether. He began to heal the sick, and his fame soon
spread so widely that sufferers came
from
even from
diseases. Here he healed the centurion's servant and
Peter's mother-in-
law, and multitudes of the lame and the
blind and persons possessed of
devils; and here, also, he raised
Jairus's daughter from the dead. He
went into a ship with his disciples, and
when they roused him from sleep
in the midst of a storm, he quieted the
winds and lulled the troubled sea
to rest with his voice. He passed over to the other side, a few miles
away and relieved two men of devils,
which passed into some swine. After
his return he called Matthew from the
receipt of customs, performed some
cures, and created scandal by eating
with publicans and sinners. Then he
went healing and teaching through
new gospel. He worked miracles in
or three miles from
miraculous draft of fishes is supposed
to have been taken, and it was in
the desert places near the other that he
fed the thousands by the
miracles of the loaves and fishes. He cursed them both, and
also, for not repenting, after all the
great works he had done in their
midst, and prophesied against them. They are all in ruins, now--which is
gratifying to the pilgrims, for, as
usual, they fit the eternal words of
gods to the evanescent things of this
earth; Christ, it is more probable,
referred to the people, not their shabby
villages of wigwams: he said it
would be sad for them at "the day
of judgment"--and what business have
mud-hovels at the Day of Judgment? It would not affect the prophecy in
the least--it would neither prove it or
disprove it--if these towns were
splendid cities now instead of the
almost vanished ruins they are.
Christ visited Magdala, which is near by
Cesarea Philippi. He went up to his old home at
brothers Joses, and Judas, and James,
and Simon--those persons who, being
own brothers to Jesus Christ, one would
expect to hear mentioned
sometimes, yet who ever saw their names
in a newspaper or heard them from
a pulpit? Who ever inquires what manner of youths they
were; and whether
they slept with Jesus, played with him
and romped about him; quarreled
with him concerning toys and trifles;
struck him in anger, not suspecting
what he was? Who ever wonders what they thought when they
saw him come
back to
make sure, and then said, "It is
Jesus?" Who wonders what passed in
their minds when they saw this brother,
(who was only a brother to them,
however much he might be to others a
mysterious stranger who was a god
and had stood face to face with God
above the clouds,) doing strange
miracles with crowds of astonished
people for witnesses? Who wonders if
the brothers of Jesus asked him to come
home with them, and said his
mother and his sisters were grieved at
his long absence, and would be
wild with delight to see his face
again? Who ever gives a thought to
the sisters of Jesus at all?--yet he had
sisters; and memories of them
must have stolen into his mind often
when he was ill-treated among
strangers; when he was homeless and said
he had not where to lay his
head; when all deserted him, even Peter,
and he stood alone among his
enemies.
Christ did few miracles in
people said, "This the Son of
God! Why, his father is nothing but a
carpenter. We know the family. We see them every day. Are not his
brothers named so and so, and his
sisters so and so, and is not his
mother the person they call Mary? This is absurd." He did not curse his
home, but he shook its dust from his
feet and went away.
five miles long and a mile or two wide,
which is mildly adorned with
oleanders which look all the better
contrasted with the bald hills and
the howling deserts which surround them,
but they are not as deliriously
beautiful as the books paint them. If one be calm and resolute he can
look upon their comeliness and live.
One of the most astonishing things that
have yet fallen under our
observation is the exceedingly small
portion of the earth from which
sprang the now flourishing plant of
Christianity. The longest journey
our Saviour ever performed was from here
to
to one hundred and twenty miles. The next longest was from here to
American appreciation of distances would
naturally suggest--the places
made most particularly celebrated by the
presence of Christ are nearly
all right here in full view, and within
cannon-shot of
Leaving out two or three short journeys
of the Saviour, he spent his
life, preached his gospel, and performed
his miracles within a compass no
larger than an ordinary county in the
can do to comprehend this stupefying
fact. How it wears a man out to
have to read up a hundred pages of
history every two or three miles--for
verily the celebrated localities of
How wearily, how bewilderingly they
swarm about your path!
In due time we reached the ancient
CHAPTER XLVIII.
Magdala is not a beautiful place. It is thoroughly Syrian, and that is
to say that it is thoroughly ugly, and
cramped, squalid, uncomfortable,
and filthy--just the style of cities
that have adorned the country since
Adam's time, as all writers have labored
hard to prove, and have
succeeded. The streets of Magdala are any where from
three to six feet
wide, and reeking with
uncleanliness. The houses are from five
to seven
feet high, and all built upon one
arbitrary plan--the ungraceful form of
a dry-goods box. The sides are daubed with a smooth white
plaster, and
tastefully frescoed aloft and alow with
disks of camel-dung placed there
to dry.
This gives the edifice the romantic appearance of having been
riddled with cannon-balls, and imparts
to it a very warlike aspect. When
the artist has arranged his materials
with an eye to just proportion--the
small and the large flakes in alternate
rows, and separated by carefully-
considered intervals--I know of nothing
more cheerful to look upon than a
spirited Syrian fresco. The flat, plastered roof is garnished by
picturesque stacks of fresco materials,
which, having become thoroughly
dried and cured, are placed there where
it will be convenient. It is
used for fuel. There is no timber of any consequence in
at all to waste upon fires--and neither
are there any mines of coal.
If my description has been intelligible,
you will perceive, now, that a
square, flat-roofed hovel, neatly
frescoed, with its wall-tops gallantly
bastioned and turreted with dried
camel-refuse, gives to a landscape a
feature that is exceedingly festive and
picturesque, especially if one is
careful to remember to stick in a cat
wherever, about the premises, there
is room for a cat to sit. There are no windows to a Syrian hut, and no
chimneys. When I used to read that they let a
bed-ridden man down
through the roof of a house in
the Saviour, I generally had a
three-story brick in my mind, and marveled
that they did not break his neck with
the strange experiment. I perceive
now, however, that they might have taken
him by the heels and thrown him
clear over the house without
discommoding him very much.
not changed any since those days, in
manners, customs, architecture, or
people.
As we rode into Magdala not a soul was
visible. But the ring of the
horses' hoofs roused the stupid population,
and they all came trooping
out--old men and old women, boys and
girls, the blind, the crazy, and the
crippled, all in ragged, soiled and
scanty raiment, and all abject
beggars by nature, instinct and
education. How the vermin-tortured
vagabonds did swarm! How they showed their scars and sores, and
piteously pointed to their maimed and
crooked limbs, and begged with
their pleading eyes for charity! We had invoked a spirit we could not
lay.
They hung to the horses's tails, clung to their manes and the
stirrups, closed in on every aide in
scorn of dangerous hoofs--and out of
their infidel throats, with one accord,
burst an agonizing and most
infernal chorus: "Howajji,
bucksheesh! howajji, bucksheesh! howajji,
bucksheesh! bucksheesh!
bucksheesh!" I never was in
a storm like that
before.
As we paid the bucksheesh out to
sore-eyed children and brown, buxom
girls with repulsively tattooed lips and
chins, we filed through the town
and by many an exquisite fresco, till we
came to a bramble-infested
inclosure and a Roman-looking ruin which
had been the veritable dwelling
of St. Mary Magdalene, the friend and
follower of Jesus. The guide
believed it, and so did I. I could not well do otherwise, with the house
right there before my eyes as plain as
day. The pilgrims took down
portions of the front wall for
specimens, as is their honored custom, and
then we departed.
We are camped in this place, now, just
within the city walls of Tiberias.
We went into the town before nightfall
and looked at its people--we cared
nothing about its houses. Its people are best examined at a distance.
They are particularly uncomely Jews,
Arabs, and negroes. Squalor and
poverty are the pride of Tiberias. The young women wear their dower
strung upon a strong wire that curves downward
from the top of the head
to the jaw--Turkish silver coins which
they have raked together or
inherited. Most of these maidens were not wealthy, but
some few had been
very kindly dealt with by fortune. I saw heiresses there worth, in their
own right--worth, well, I suppose I
might venture to say, as much as nine
dollars and a half. But such cases are rare. When you come across one
of these, she naturally puts on
airs. She will not ask for bucksheesh.
She will not even permit of undue
familiarity. She assumes a crushing
dignity and goes on serenely practicing
with her fine-tooth comb and
quoting poetry just the same as if you
were not present at all. Some
people can not stand prosperity.
They say that the long-nosed, lanky,
dyspeptic-looking body-snatchers,
with the indescribable hats on, and a
long curl dangling down in front of
each ear, are the old, familiar,
self-righteous Pharisees we read of in
the Scriptures. Verily, they look it. Judging merely by their general
style, and without other evidence, one
might easily suspect that self-
righteousness was their specialty.
From various authorities I have culled
information concerning Tiberias.
It was built by Herod Antipas, the
murderer of John the Baptist, and
named after the Emperor Tiberius. It is believed that it stands upon the
site of what must have been, ages ago, a
city of considerable
architectural pretensions, judging by
the fine porphyry pillars that are
scattered through Tiberias and down the
lake shore southward. These were
fluted, once, and yet, although the
stone is about as hard as iron, the
flutings are almost worn away. These pillars are small, and doubtless
the edifices they adorned were
distinguished more for elegance than
grandeur. This modern town--Tiberias--is only mentioned
in the New
Testament; never in the Old.
The Sanhedrim met here last, and for
three hundred years Tiberias was the
metropolis of the Jews in
of the Israelites, and is to them what
learned and famous Jewish rabbins. They lie buried here, and near them
lie also twenty-five thousand of their
faith who traveled far to be near
them while they lived and lie with them
when they died. The great Rabbi
Ben Israel spent three years here in the
early part of the third century.
He is dead, now.
The celebrated
[I measure all lakes by Tahoe, partly
because I am far more familiar with
it than with any other, and partly
because I have such a high admiration
for it and such a world of pleasant
recollections of it, that it is very
nearly impossible for me to speak of
lakes and not mention it.]--by a
good deal--it is just about two-thirds
as large. And when we come to
speak of beauty, this sea is no more to
be compared to Tahoe than a
meridian of longitude is to a
rainbow. The dim waters of this pool can
not suggest the limpid brilliancy of
Tahoe; these low, shaven, yellow
hillocks of rocks and sand, so devoid of
perspective, can not suggest the
grand peaks that compass Tahoe like a
wall, and whose ribbed and chasmed
fronts are clad with stately pines that
seem to grow small and smaller as
they climb, till one might fancy them
reduced to weeds and shrubs far
upward, where they join the everlasting
snows. Silence and solitude
brood over Tahoe; and silence and
solitude brood also over this lake of
Genessaret. But the solitude of the one is as cheerful
and fascinating
as the solitude of the other is dismal
and repellant.
In the early morning one watches the
silent battle of dawn and darkness
upon the waters of Tahoe with a placid
interest; but when the shadows
sulk away and one by one the hidden
beauties of the shore unfold
themselves in the full splendor of
like a rainbow with broad bars of blue
and green and white, half the
distance from circumference to centre;
when, in the lazy summer
afternoon, he lies in a boat, far out to
where the dead blue of the deep
water begins, and smokes the pipe of
peace and idly winks at the
distant crags and patches of snow from
under his cap-brim; when the boat
drifts shoreward to the white water, and
he lolls over the gunwale and
gazes by the hour down through the
crystal depths and notes the colors of
the pebbles and reviews the finny armies
gliding in procession a hundred
feet below; when at night he sees moon
and stars, mountain ridges
feathered with pines, jutting white
capes, bold promontories, grand
sweeps of rugged scenery topped with
bald, glimmering peaks, all
magnificently pictured in the polished
mirror of the lake, in richest,
softest detail, the tranquil interest
that was born with the morning
deepens and deepens, by sure degrees,
till it culminates at last in
resistless fascination!
It is solitude, for birds and squirrels
on the shore and fishes in the
water are all the creatures that are
near to make it otherwise, but it is
not the sort of solitude to make one
dreary. Come to Galilee for that.
If these unpeopled deserts, these rusty
mounds of barrenness, that never,
never, never do shake the glare from
their harsh outlines, and fade and
faint into vague perspective; that
melancholy ruin of Capernaum; this
stupid village of Tiberias, slumbering under
its six funereal plumes of
palms; yonder desolate declivity where
the swine of the miracle ran down
into the sea, and doubtless thought it
was better to swallow a devil or
two and get drowned into the bargain
than have to live longer in such a
place; this cloudless, blistering sky;
this solemn, sailless, tintless
lake, reposing within its rim of yellow
hills and low, steep banks, and
looking just as expressionless and
unpoetical (when we leave its sublime
history out of the question,) as any
metropolitan reservoir in
Christendom--if these things are not
food for rock me to sleep, mother,
none exist, I think.
But I should not offer the evidence for
the prosecution and leave the
defense unheard. Wm. C. Grimes deposes as follows:--
"We had taken ship to go over to the other side. The sea was not
more than six miles wide. Of the
beauty of the scene, however, I
can not say enough, nor can I imagine where those travelers carried
their eyes who have described the scenery of the lake as tame or
uninteresting. The first great
characteristic of it is the deep
basin in which it lies. This is
from three to four hundred feet
deep on all sides except at the lower end, and the sharp slope of
the banks, which are all of the richest green, is broken and
diversified by the wadys and water-courses which work their way down
through the sides of the basin, forming dark chasms or light sunny
valleys. Near Tiberias these
banks are rocky, and ancient
sepulchres open in them, with their doors toward the water. They
selected grand spots, as did the Egyptians of old, for burial
places, as if they designed that when the voice of God should reach
the sleepers, they should walk forth and open their eyes on scenes
of glorious beauty. On the east,
the wild and desolate mountains
contrast finely with the deep blue lake; and toward the north,
sublime and majestic, Hermon looks down on the sea, lifting his
white crown to heaven with the pride of a hill that has seen the
departing footsteps of a hundred generations. On the north-east
shore of the sea was a single tree, and this is the only tree of any
size visible from the water of the lake, except a few lonely palms
in the city of Tiberias, and by its solitary position attracts more
attention than would a forest.
The whole appearance of the scene is
precisely what we would expect and desire the scenery of Genessaret
to be, grand beauty, but quiet calm.
The very mountains are calm."
It is an ingeniously written
description, and well calculated to deceive.
But if the paint and the ribbons and the
flowers be stripped from it, a
skeleton will be found beneath.
So stripped, there remains a lake six
miles wide and neutral in color;
with steep green banks, unrelieved by
shrubbery; at one end bare,
unsightly rocks, with (almost invisible)
holes in them of no consequence
to the picture; eastward, "wild and
desolate mountains;" (low, desolate
hills, he should have said;) in the
north, a mountain called Hermon, with
snow on it; peculiarity of the picture,
"calmness;" its prominent
feature, one tree.
No ingenuity could make such a picture
beautiful--to one's actual vision.
I claim the right to correct
misstatements, and have so corrected the
color of the water in the above
recapitulation. The waters of Genessaret
are of an exceedingly mild blue, even
from a high elevation and a
distance of five miles. Close at hand (the witness was sailing on the
lake,) it is hardly proper to call them
blue at all, much less "deep"
blue.
I wish to state, also, not as a correction, but as matter of
opinion, that Mount Hermon is not a
striking or picturesque mountain by
any means, being too near the height of
its immediate neighbors to be so.
That is all. I do not object to the witness dragging a
mountain forty-
five miles to help the scenery under
consideration, because it is
entirely proper to do it, and besides,
the picture needs it.
"C. W. E.," (of "Life in
the Holy Land,") deposes as follows:--
"A beautiful sea lies unbosomed among the Galilean hills, in the
midst of that land once possessed by Zebulon and Naphtali, Asher and
Dan. The azure of the sky
penetrates the depths of the lake, and
the waters are sweet and cool. On
the west, stretch broad fertile
plains; on the north the rocky shores rise step by step until in the
far distance tower the snowy heights of Hermon; on the east through
a misty veil are seen the high plains of Perea, which stretch away
in rugged mountains leading the mind by varied paths toward
Jerusalem the Holy. Flowers bloom
in this terrestrial paradise,
once beautiful and verdant with waving trees; singing birds enchant
the ear; the turtle-dove soothes with its soft note; the crested
lark sends up its song toward heaven, and the grave and stately
stork inspires the mind with thought, and leads it on to meditation
and repose. Life here was once
idyllic, charming; here were once no
rich, no poor, no high, no
low. It was a world of ease, simplicity,
and beauty; now it is a scene of desolation and misery."
This is not an ingenious picture. It is the worst I ever saw. It
describes in elaborate detail what it
terms a "terrestrial paradise," and
closes with the startling information
that this paradise is "a scene of
desolation and misery."
I have given two fair, average specimens
of the character of the
testimony offered by the majority of the
writers who visit this region.
One says, "Of the beauty of the
scene I can not say enough," and then
proceeds to cover up with a woof of
glittering sentences a thing which,
when stripped for inspection, proves to
be only an unobtrusive basin of
water, some mountainous desolation, and
one tree. The other, after a
conscientious effort to build a
terrestrial paradise out of the same
materials, with the addition of a
"grave and stately stork," spoils it
all by blundering upon the ghastly truth
at the last.
Nearly every book concerning Galilee and
its lake describes the scenery
as beautiful. No--not always so straightforward as
that. Sometimes the
impression intentionally conveyed is
that it is beautiful, at the same
time that the author is careful not to
say that it is, in plain Saxon.
But a careful analysis of these
descriptions will show that the materials
of which they are formed are not
individually beautiful and can not be
wrought into combinations that are
beautiful. The veneration and the
affection which some of these men felt
for the scenes they were speaking
of, heated their fancies and biased
their judgment; but the pleasant
falsities they wrote were full of honest
sincerity, at any rate. Others
wrote as they did, because they feared
it would be unpopular to write
otherwise. Others were hypocrites and deliberately meant
to deceive.
Any of them would say in a moment, if
asked, that it was always right and
always best to tell the truth. They would say that, at any rate, if they
did not perceive the drift of the
question.
But why should not the truth be spoken
of this region? Is the truth
harmful?
Has it ever needed to hide its face?
God made the Sea of
Galilee and its surroundings as they
are. Is it the province of Mr.
Grimes to improve upon the work?
I am sure, from the tenor of books I
have read, that many who have
visited this land in years gone by, were
Presbyterians, and came seeking
evidences in support of their particular
creed; they found a Presbyterian
Palestine, and they had already made up
their minds to find no other,
though possibly they did not know it,
being blinded by their zeal.
Others were Baptists, seeking Baptist
evidences and a Baptist Palestine.
Others were Catholics, Methodists,
Episcopalians, seeking evidences
indorsing their several creeds, and a
Catholic, a Methodist, an
Episcopalian Palestine. Honest as these men's intentions may have
been,
they were full of partialities and
prejudices, they entered the country
with their verdicts already prepared,
and they could no more write
dispassionately and impartially about it
than they could about their own
wives and children. Our pilgrims have brought their verdicts with
them.
They have shown it in their conversation
ever since we left Beirout.
I can almost tell, in set phrase, what
they will say when they see Tabor,
Nazareth, Jericho and Jerusalem--because
I have the books they will
"smouch" their ideas
from. These authors write pictures and
frame
rhapsodies, and lesser men follow and
see with the author's eyes instead
of their own, and speak with his tongue.
What the pilgrims said at
Cesarea Philippi surprised me with its
wisdom. I found it afterwards in
Robinson. What they said when Genessaret burst upon
their vision,
charmed me with its grace. I find it in Mr. Thompson's "Land and
the
Book." They have spoken often, in happily worded
language which never
varied, of how they mean to lay their
weary heads upon a stone at Bethel,
as Jacob did, and close their dim eyes,
and dream, perchance, of angels
descending out of heaven on a
ladder. It was very pretty. But I have
recognized the weary head and the dim
eyes, finally. They borrowed the
idea--and the words--and the
construction--and the punctuation--from
Grimes.
The pilgrims will tell of Palestine, when they get home, not as
it appeared to them, but as it appeared
to Thompson and Robinson and
Grimes--with the tints varied to suit
each pilgrim's creed.
Pilgrims, sinners and Arabs are all
abed, now, and the camp is still.
Labor in loneliness is irksome. Since I made my last few notes, I have
been sitting outside the tent for half
an hour. Night is the time to see
Galilee.
Genessaret under these lustrous stars has nothing repulsive
about it. Genessaret with the glittering reflections of
the
constellations flecking its surface,
almost makes me regret that I ever
saw the rude glare of the day upon
it. Its history and its associations
are its chiefest charm, in any eyes, and
the spells they weave are feeble
in the searching light of the sun. Then, we scarcely feel the fetters.
Our thoughts wander constantly to the
practical concerns of life, and
refuse to dwell upon things that seem
vague and unreal. But when the day
is done, even the most unimpressible
must yield to the dreamy influences
of this tranquil starlight. The old traditions of the place steal upon
his memory and haunt his reveries, and
then his fancy clothes all sights
and sounds with the supernatural. In the lapping of the waves upon the
beach, he hears the dip of ghostly oars;
in the secret noises of the
night he hears spirit voices; in the soft
sweep of the breeze, the rush
of invisible wings. Phantom ships are on the sea, the dead of
twenty
centuries come forth from the tombs, and
in the dirges of the night wind
the songs of old forgotten ages find
utterance again.
In the starlight, Galilee has no
boundaries but the broad compass of the
heavens, and is a theatre meet for great
events; meet for the birth of a
religion able to save a world; and meet
for the stately Figure appointed
to stand upon its stage and proclaim its
high decrees. But in the
sunlight, one says: Is it for the deeds
which were done and the words
which were spoken in this little acre of
rocks and sand eighteen
centuries gone, that the bells are
ringing to-day in the remote islands
of the sea and far and wide over
continents that clasp the circumference
of the huge globe?
One can comprehend it only when night
has hidden all incongruities and
created a theatre proper for so grand a
drama.
CHAPTER XLIX.
We took another swim in the Sea of
Galilee at twilight yesterday, and
another at sunrise this morning. We have not sailed, but three swims are
equal to a sail, are they not? There were plenty of fish visible in the
water, but we have no outside aids in
this pilgrimage but "Tent Life in
the Holy Land," "The Land and
the Book," and other literature of like
description--no fishing-tackle. There were no fish to be had in the
village of Tiberias. True, we saw two or three vagabonds mending
their
nets, but never trying to catch any
thing with them.
We did not go to the ancient warm baths
two miles below Tiberias. I had
no desire in the world to go there. This seemed a little strange, and
prompted me to try to discover what the
cause of this unreasonable
indifference was. It turned out to be simply because Pliny
mentions
them.
I have conceived a sort of unwarrantable unfriendliness toward
Pliny and St. Paul, because it seems as
if I can never ferret out a place
that I can have to myself. It always and eternally transpires that St.
Paul has been to that place, and Pliny
has "mentioned" it.
In the early morning we mounted and
started. And then a weird apparition
marched forth at the head of the
procession--a pirate, I thought, if ever
a pirate dwelt upon land. It was a tall Arab, as swarthy as an Indian;
young-say thirty years of age. On his head he had closely bound a
gorgeous yellow and red striped silk
scarf, whose ends, lavishly fringed
with tassels, hung down between his
shoulders and dallied with the wind.
From his neck to his knees, in ample
folds, a robe swept down that was a
very star-spangled banner of curved and
sinuous bars of black and white.
Out of his back, somewhere, apparently,
the long stem of a chibouk
projected, and reached far above his
right shoulder. Athwart his back,
diagonally, and extending high above his
left shoulder, was an Arab gum
of Saladin's time, that was splendid
with silver plating from stock clear
up to the end of its measureless stretch
of barrel. About his waist was
bound many and many a yard of
elaborately figured but sadly tarnished
stuff that came from sumptuous Persia,
and among the baggy folds in front
the sunbeams glinted from a formidable
battery of old brass-mounted
horse-pistols and the gilded hilts of
blood-thirsty knives. There were
holsters for more pistols appended to
the wonderful stack of long-haired
goat-skins and Persian carpets, which
the man had been taught to regard
in the light of a saddle; and down among
the pendulous rank of vast
tassels that swung from that saddle, and
clanging against the iron shovel
of a stirrup that propped the warrior's
knees up toward his chin, was a
crooked, silver-clad scimitar of such
awful dimensions and such
implacable expression that no man might
hope to look upon it and not
shudder.
The fringed and bedizened prince whose privilege it is to ride
the pony and lead the elephant into a
country village is poor and naked
compared to this chaos of paraphernalia,
and the happy vanity of the one
is the very poverty of satisfaction
compared to the majestic serenity,
the overwhelming complacency of the
other.
"Who is this? What is this?" That was the trembling inquiry all down
the line.
"Our guard! From Galilee to the birthplace of the Savior,
the country is
infested with fierce Bedouins, whose
sole happiness it is, in this life,
to cut and stab and mangle and murder
unoffending Christians. Allah be
with us!"
"Then hire a regiment! Would you send us out among these desperate
hordes, with no salvation in our utmost
need but this old turret?"
The dragoman laughed--not at the
facetiousness of the simile, for verily,
that guide or that courier or that
dragoman never yet lived upon earth
who had in him the faintest appreciation
of a joke, even though that joke
were so broad and so ponderous that if
it fell on him it would flatten
him out like a postage stamp--the
dragoman laughed, and then, emboldened
by some thought that was in his brain,
no doubt, proceeded to extremities
and winked.
In straits like these, when a man
laughs, it is encouraging when he
winks, it is positively reassuring. He finally intimated that one guard
would be sufficient to protect us, but
that that one was an absolute
necessity. It was because of the moral weight his awful
panoply would
have with the Bedouins. Then I said we didn't want any guard at all.
If one fantastic vagabond could protect
eight armed Christians and a pack
of Arab servants from all harm, surely
that detachment could protect
themselves. He shook his head doubtfully. Then I said, just think of
how it looks--think of how it would
read, to self-reliant Americans, that
we went sneaking through this deserted
wilderness under the protection of
this masquerading Arab, who would break
his neck getting out of the
country if a man that was a man ever
started after him. It was a mean,
low, degrading position. Why were we ever told to bring navy revolvers
with us if we had to be protected at
last by this infamous star-spangled
scum of the desert? These appeals were vain--the dragoman only
smiled
and shook his head.
I rode to the front and struck up an
acquaintance with King Solomon-in-
all-his-glory, and got him to show me
his lingering eternity of a gun.
It had a rusty flint lock; it was ringed
and barred and plated with
silver from end to end, but it was as
desperately out of the
perpendicular as are the billiard cues
of '49 that one finds yet in
service in the ancient mining camps of
California. The muzzle was eaten
by the rust of centuries into a ragged
filigree-work, like the end of a
burnt-out stove-pipe. I shut one eye and peered within--it was
flaked
with iron rust like an old steamboat
boiler. I borrowed the ponderous
pistols and snapped them. They were rusty inside, too--had not been
loaded for a generation. I went back, full of encouragement, and
reported to the guide, and asked him to
discharge this dismantled
fortress. It came out, then. This fellow was a retainer of the Sheik of
Tiberias. He was a source of Government revenue. He was to the Empire
of Tiberias what the customs are to
America. The Sheik imposed guards
upon travelers and charged them for
it. It is a lucrative source of
emolument, and sometimes brings into the
national treasury as much as
thirty-five or forty dollars a year.
I knew the warrior's secret now; I knew
the hollow vanity of his rusty
trumpery, and despised his asinine
complacency. I told on him, and with
reckless daring the cavalcade straight
ahead into the perilous solitudes
of the desert, and scorned his frantic
warnings of the mutilation and
death that hovered about them on every
side.
Arrived at an elevation of twelve
hundred feet above the lake, (I ought
to mention that the lake lies six
hundred feet below the level of the
Mediterranean--no traveler ever neglects
to flourish that fragment of
news in his letters,) as bald and
unthrilling a panorama as any land can
afford, perhaps, was spread out before
us. Yet it was so crowded with
historical interest, that if all the
pages that have been written about
it were spread upon its surface, they
would flag it from horizon to
horizon like a pavement. Among the localities comprised in this view,
were Mount Hermon; the hills that border
Cesarea Philippi, Dan, the
Sources of the Jordan and the Waters of
Merom; Tiberias; the Sea of
Galilee; Joseph's Pit; Capernaum;
Bethsaida; the supposed scenes of the
Sermon on the Mount, the feeding of the
multitudes and the miraculous
draught of fishes; the declivity down
which the swine ran to the sea; the
entrance and the exit of the Jordan;
Safed, "the city set upon a hill,"
one of the four holy cities of the Jews,
and the place where they believe
the real Messiah will appear when he
comes to redeem the world; part of
the battle-field of Hattin, where the
knightly Crusaders fought their
last fight, and in a blaze of glory
passed from the stage and ended their
splendid career forever; Mount Tabor,
the traditional scene of the Lord's
Transfiguration. And down toward the southeast lay a landscape
that
suggested to my mind a quotation
(imperfectly remembered, no doubt:)
"The Ephraimites, not being called upon to share in the rich spoils
of the Ammonitish war, assembled a mighty host to fight against
Jeptha, Judge of Israel; who, being apprised of their approach,
gathered together the men of Israel and gave them battle and put
them to flight. To make his
victory the more secure, he stationed
guards at the different fords and passages of the Jordan, with
instructions to let none pass who could not say Shibboleth. The
Ephraimites, being of a different tribe, could not frame to
pronounce the word right, but called it Sibboleth, which proved them
enemies and cost them their lives; wherefore, forty and two thousand
fell at the different fords and passages of the Jordan that day."
We jogged along peacefully over the
great caravan route from Damascus to
Jerusalem and Egypt, past Lubia and
other Syrian hamlets, perched, in the
unvarying style, upon the summit of
steep mounds and hills, and fenced
round about with giant cactuses, (the
sign of worthless land,) with
prickly pears upon them like hams, and
came at last to the battle-field
of Hattin.
It is a grand, irregular plateau, and
looks as if it might have been
created for a battle-field. Here the peerless Saladin met the Christian
host some seven hundred years ago, and
broke their power in Palestine for
all time to come. There had long been a truce between the
opposing
forces, but according to the Guide-Book,
Raynauld of Chatillon, Lord of
Kerak, broke it by plundering a Damascus
caravan, and refusing to give up
either the merchants or their goods when
Saladin demanded them. This
conduct of an insolent petty chieftain
stung the Sultan to the quick, and
he swore that he would slaughter
Raynauld with his own hand, no matter
how, or when, or where he found
him. Both armies prepared for war.
Under the weak King of Jerusalem was the
very flower of the Christian
chivalry. He foolishly compelled them to undergo a
long, exhausting
march, in the scorching sun, and then,
without water or other
refreshment, ordered them to encamp in
this open plain. The splendidly
mounted masses of Moslem soldiers swept
round the north end of
Genessaret, burning and destroying as
they came, and pitched their camp
in front of the opposing lines. At dawn the terrific fight began.
Surrounded on all sides by the Sultan's
swarming battalions, the
Christian Knights fought on without a
hope for their lives. They fought
with desperate valor, but to no purpose;
the odds of heat and numbers,
and consuming thirst, were too great
against them. Towards the middle of
the day the bravest of their band cut
their way through the Moslem ranks
and gained the summit of a little hill,
and there, hour after hour, they
closed around the banner of the Cross,
and beat back the charging
squadrons of the enemy.
But the doom of the Christian power was
sealed. Sunset found Saladin
Lord of Palestine, the Christian
chivalry strewn in heaps upon the field,
and the King of Jerusalem, the Grand
Master of the Templars, and Raynauld
of Chatillon, captives in the Sultan's
tent. Saladin treated two of the
prisoners with princely courtesy, and
ordered refreshments to be set
before them. When the King handed an iced Sherbet to
Chatillon, the
Sultan said," It is thou that
givest it to him, not I." He
remembered
his oath, and slaughtered the hapless
Knight of Chatillon with his own
hand.
It was hard to realize that this silent
plain had once resounded with
martial music and trembled to the tramp
of armed men. It was hard to
people this solitude with rushing
columns of cavalry, and stir its torpid
pulses with the shouts of victors, the
shrieks of the wounded, and the
flash of banner and steel above the
surging billows of war. A desolation
is here that not even imagination can
grace with the pomp of life and
action.
We reached Tabor safely, and considerably
in advance of that old iron-
clad swindle of a guard. We never saw a human being on the whole
route,
much less lawless hordes of
Bedouins. Tabor stands solitary and
alone,
a giant sentinel above the Plain of
Esdraelon. It rises some fourteen
hundred feet above the surrounding
level, a green, wooden cone,
symmetrical and full of grace--a
prominent landmark, and one that is
exceedingly pleasant to eyes surfeited
with the repulsive monotony of
desert Syria. We climbed the steep path to its summit, through
breezy
glades of thorn and oak. The view presented from its highest peak was
almost beautiful. Below, was the broad, level plain of
Esdraelon,
checkered with fields like a
chess-board, and full as smooth and level,
seemingly; dotted about its borders with
white, compact villages, and
faintly penciled, far and near, with the
curving lines of roads and
trails.
When it is robed in the fresh verdure of spring, it must form a
charming picture, even by itself. Skirting its southern border rises
"Little Hermon," over whose
summit a glimpse of Gilboa is caught.
Nain,
famous for the raising of the widow's
son, and Endor, as famous for the
performances of her witch are in
view. To the eastward lies the Valley
of the Jordan and beyond it the
mountains of Gilead. Westward is Mount
Carmel.
Hermon in the north--the table-lands of Bashan--Safed, the holy
city, gleaming white upon a tall spur of
the mountains of Lebanon--a
steel-blue corner of the Sea of
Galilee--saddle-peaked Hattin,
traditional "Mount of Beatitudes"
and mute witness brave fights of the
Crusading host for Holy Cross--these
fill up the picture.
To glance at the salient features of
this landscape through the
picturesque framework of a ragged and
ruined stone window--arch of the
time of Christ, thus hiding from sight
all that is unattractive, is to
secure to yourself a pleasure worth
climbing the mountain to enjoy. One
must stand on his head to get the best
effect in a fine sunset, and set a
landscape in a bold, strong framework
that is very close at hand, to
bring out all its beauty. One learns this latter truth never more to
forget it, in that mimic land of
enchantment, the wonderful garden of my
lord the Count Pallavicini, near
Genoa. You go wandering for hours among
hills and wooded glens, artfully
contrived to leave the impression that
Nature shaped them and not man;
following winding paths and coming
suddenly upon leaping cascades and
rustic bridges; finding sylvan lakes
where you expected them not; loitering
through battered mediaeval castles
in miniature that seem hoary with age
and yet were built a dozen years
ago; meditating over ancient crumbling
tombs, whose marble columns were
marred and broken purposely by the
modern artist that made them;
stumbling unawares upon toy palaces,
wrought of rare and costly
materials, and again upon a peasant's
hut, whose dilapidated furniture
would never suggest that it was made so
to order; sweeping round and
round in the midst of a forest on an
enchanted wooden horse that is moved
by some invisible agency; traversing
Roman roads and passing under
majestic triumphal arches; resting in
quaint bowers where unseen spirits
discharge jets of water on you from
every possible direction, and where
even the flowers you touch assail you
with a shower; boating on a
subterranean lake among caverns and
arches royally draped with clustering
stalactites, and passing out into open
day upon another lake, which is
bordered with sloping banks of grass and
gay with patrician barges that
swim at anchor in the shadow of a
miniature marble temple that rises out
of the clear water and glasses its white
statues, its rich capitals and
fluted columns in the tranquil
depths. So, from marvel to marvel you
have drifted on, thinking all the time
that the one last seen must be the
chiefest. And, verily, the chiefest wonder is reserved
until the last,
but you do not see it until you step
ashore, and passing through a
wilderness of rare flowers, collected
from every corner of the earth, you
stand at the door of one more mimic
temple. Right in this place the
artist taxed his genius to the utmost,
and fairly opened the gates of
fairy land. You look through an unpretending pane of
glass, stained
yellow--the first thing you see is a
mass of quivering foliage, ten short
steps before you, in the midst of which
is a ragged opening like a
gateway-a thing that is common enough in
nature, and not apt to excite
suspicions of a deep human design--and
above the bottom of the gateway,
project, in the most careless way! a few
broad tropic leaves and
brilliant flowers. All of a sudden, through this bright, bold
gateway,
you catch a glimpse of the faintest,
softest, richest picture that ever
graced the dream of a dying Saint, since
John saw the New Jerusalem
glimmering above the clouds of
Heaven. A broad sweep of sea, flecked
with careening sails; a sharp, jutting
cape, and a lofty lighthouse on
it; a sloping lawn behind it; beyond, a
portion of the old "city of
palaces," with its parks and hills
and stately mansions; beyond these, a
prodigious mountain, with its strong
outlines sharply cut against ocean
and sky; and over all, vagrant shreds
and flakes of cloud, floating in a
sea of gold. The ocean is gold, the city is gold, the
meadow, the
mountain, the sky--every thing is
golden-rich, and mellow, and dreamy as
a vision of Paradise. No artist could put upon canvas, its
entrancing
beauty, and yet, without the yellow
glass, and the carefully contrived
accident of a framework that cast it
into enchanted distance and shut out
from it all unattractive features, it
was not a picture to fall into
ecstasies over. Such is life, and the trail of the serpent is
over us
all.
There is nothing for it now but to come
back to old Tabor, though the
subject is tiresome enough, and I can
not stick to it for wandering off
to scenes that are pleasanter to
remember. I think I will skip, any how.
There is nothing about Tabor (except we
concede that it was the scene of
the Transfiguration,) but some gray old
ruins, stacked up there in all
ages of the world from the days of stout
Gideon and parties that
flourished thirty centuries ago to the
fresh yesterday of Crusading
times.
It has its Greek Convent, and the coffee there is good, but never
a splinter of the true cross or bone of
a hallowed saint to arrest the
idle thoughts of worldlings and turn
them into graver channels.
A Catholic church is nothing to me that
has no relics.
The plain of Esdraelon--"the
battle-field of the nations"--only sets one
to dreaming of Joshua, and Benhadad, and
Saul, and Gideon; Tamerlane,
Tancred, Coeur de Lion, and Saladin; the
warrior Kings of Persia, Egypt's
heroes, and Napoleon--for they all
fought here. If the magic of the
moonlight could summon from the graves
of forgotten centuries and many
lands the countless myriads that have
battled on this wide, far-reaching
floor, and array them in the thousand
strange Costumes of their hundred
nationalities, and send the vast host
sweeping down the plain, splendid
with plumes and banners and glittering
lances, I could stay here an age
to see the phantom pageant. But the magic of the moonlight is a vanity
and a fraud; and whoso putteth his trust
in it shall suffer sorrow and
disappointment.
Down at the foot of Tabor, and just at
the edge of the storied Plain of
Esdraelon, is the insignificant village
of Deburieh, where Deborah,
prophetess of Israel, lived. It is just like Magdala.
CHAPTER L.
We descended from Mount Tabor, crossed a
deep ravine, followed a hilly,
rocky road to Nazareth--distant two
hours. All distances in the East are
measured by hours, not miles. A good horse will walk three miles an hour
over nearly any kind of a road;
therefore, an hour, here, always stands
for three miles. This method of computation is bothersome and
annoying;
and until one gets thoroughly accustomed
to it, it carries no
intelligence to his mind until he has
stopped and translated the pagan
hours into Christian miles, just as
people do with the spoken words of a
foreign language they are acquainted
with, but not familiarly enough to
catch the meaning in a moment. Distances traveled by human feet are also
estimated by hours and minutes, though I
do not know what the base of the
calculation is. In Constantinople you ask, "How far is
it to the
Consulate?" and they answer,
"About ten minutes." "How
far is it to the
Lloyds' Agency?" "Quarter of an hour." "How far is it to the lower
bridge?" "Four minutes." I can not be positive about it, but I think
that there, when a man orders a pair of
pantaloons, he says he wants them
a quarter of a minute in the legs and
nine seconds around the waist.
Two hours from Tabor to Nazareth--and as
it was an uncommonly narrow,
crooked trail, we necessarily met all
the camel trains and jackass
caravans between Jericho and
Jacksonville in that particular place and
nowhere else. The donkeys do not matter so much, because
they are so
small that you can jump your horse over
them if he is an animal of
spirit, but a camel is not
jumpable. A camel is as tall as any
ordinary
dwelling-house in Syria--which is to say
a camel is from one to two, and
sometimes nearly three feet taller than
a good-sized man. In this part
of the country his load is oftenest in
the shape of colossal sacks--one
on each side. He and his cargo take up as much room as a
carriage.
Think of meeting this style of obstruction
in a narrow trail. The camel
would not turn out for a king. He stalks serenely along, bringing his
cushioned stilts forward with the long,
regular swing of a pendulum, and
whatever is in the way must get out of
the way peaceably, or be wiped out
forcibly by the bulky sacks. It was a tiresome ride to us, and perfectly
exhausting to the horses. We were compelled to jump over upwards of
eighteen hundred donkeys, and only one
person in the party was unseated
less than sixty times by the
camels. This seems like a powerful
statement, but the poet has said,
"Things are not what they seem."
I can
not think of any thing, now, more
certain to make one shudder, than to
have a soft-footed camel sneak up behind
him and touch him on the ear
with its cold, flabby under-lip. A camel did this for one of the boys,
who was drooping over his saddle in a
brown study. He glanced up and saw
the majestic apparition hovering above
him, and made frantic efforts to
get out of the way, but the camel
reached out and bit him on the shoulder
before he accomplished it. This was the only pleasant incident of the
journey.
At Nazareth we camped in an olive grove
near the Virgin Mary's fountain,
and that wonderful Arab
"guard" came to collect some bucksheesh for his
"services" in following us
from Tiberias and warding off invisible
dangers with the terrors of his
armament. The dragoman had paid his
master, but that counted as nothing--if
you hire a man to sneeze for you,
here, and another man chooses to help
him, you have got to pay both.
They do nothing whatever without
pay. How it must have surprised these
people to hear the way of salvation
offered to them "without money and
without price." If the manners, the people or the customs of
this
country have changed since the Saviour's
time, the figures and metaphors
of the Bible are not the evidences to
prove it by.
We entered the great Latin Convent which
is built over the traditional
dwelling-place of the Holy Family. We went down a flight of fifteen
steps below the ground level, and stood
in a small chapel tricked out
with tapestry hangings, silver lamps,
and oil paintings. A spot marked
by a cross, in the marble floor, under
the altar, was exhibited as the
place made forever holy by the feet of
the Virgin when she stood up to
receive the message of the angel. So simple, so unpretending a locality,
to be the scene of so mighty an
event! The very scene of the
Annunciation--an event which has been
commemorated by splendid shrines
and august temples all over the
civilized world, and one which the
princes of art have made it their
loftiest ambition to picture worthily
on their canvas; a spot whose history is
familiar to the very children of
every house, and city, and obscure
hamlet of the furthest lands of
Christendom; a spot which myriads of men
would toil across the breadth of
a world to see, would consider it a
priceless privilege to look upon.
It was easy to think these
thoughts. But it was not easy to bring
myself
up to the magnitude of the
situation. I could sit off several
thousand
miles and imagine the angel appearing,
with shadowy wings and lustrous
countenance, and note the glory that
streamed downward upon the Virgin's
head while the message from the Throne
of God fell upon her ears--any one
can do that, beyond the ocean, but few
can do it here. I saw the little
recess from which the angel stepped, but
could not fill its void. The
angels that I know are creatures of
unstable fancy--they will not fit in
niches of substantial stone. Imagination labors best in distant fields.
I doubt if any man can stand in the
Grotto of the Annunciation and people
with the phantom images of his mind its
too tangible walls of stone.
They showed us a broken granite pillar,
depending from the roof, which
they said was hacked in two by the Moslem
conquerors of Nazareth, in the
vain hope of pulling down the
sanctuary. But the pillar remained
miraculously suspended in the air, and,
unsupported itself, supported
then and still supports the roof. By dividing this statement up among
eight, it was found not difficult to
believe it.
These gifted Latin monks never do any
thing by halves. If they were to
show you the Brazen Serpent that was
elevated in the wilderness, you
could depend upon it that they had on
hand the pole it was elevated on
also, and even the hole it stood
in. They have got the "Grotto"
of the
Annunciation here; and just as
convenient to it as one's throat is to his
mouth, they have also the Virgin's
Kitchen, and even her sitting-room,
where she and Joseph watched the infant
Saviour play with Hebrew toys
eighteen hundred years ago. All under one roof, and all clean, spacious,
comfortable "grottoes." It seems curious that personages intimately
connected with the Holy Family always
lived in grottoes--in Nazareth, in
Bethlehem, in imperial Ephesus--and yet
nobody else in their day and
generation thought of doing any thing of
the kind. If they ever did,
their grottoes are all gone, and I
suppose we ought to wonder at the
peculiar marvel of the preservation of
these I speak of. When the Virgin
fled from Herod's wrath, she hid in a
grotto in Bethlehem, and the same
is there to this day. The slaughter of the innocents in Bethlehem
was
done in a grotto; the Saviour was born
in a grotto--both are shown to
pilgrims yet. It is exceedingly strange that these
tremendous events all
happened in grottoes--and exceedingly
fortunate, likewise, because the
strongest houses must crumble to ruin in
time, but a grotto in the living
rock will last forever. It is an imposture--this grotto stuff--but it
is
one that all men ought to thank the
Catholics for. Wherever they ferret
out a lost locality made holy by some
Scriptural event, they straightway
build a massive--almost
imperishable--church there, and preserve the
memory of that locality for the gratification
of future generations. If
it had been left to Protestants to do
this most worthy work, we would not
even know where Jerusalem is to-day, and
the man who could go and put his
finger on Nazareth would be too wise for
this world. The world owes the
Catholics its good will even for the
happy rascality of hewing out these
bogus grottoes in the rock; for it is
infinitely more satisfactory to
look at a grotto, where people have
faithfully believed for centuries
that the Virgin once lived, than to have
to imagine a dwelling-place for
her somewhere, any where, nowhere, loose
and at large all over this town
of Nazareth. There is too large a scope of country. The imagination can
not work. There is no one particular spot to chain your
eye, rivet your
interest, and make you think. The memory of the Pilgrims can not perish
while Plymouth Rock remains to us. The old monks are wise. They know
how to drive a stake through a pleasant
tradition that will hold it to
its place forever.
We visited the places where Jesus worked
for fifteen years as a
carpenter, and where he attempted to
teach in the synagogue and was
driven out by a mob. Catholic chapels stand upon these sites and
protect
the little fragments of the ancient
walls which remain. Our pilgrims
broke off specimens. We visited, also, a new chapel, in the midst
of the
town, which is built around a boulder
some twelve feet long by four feet
thick; the priests discovered, a few
years ago, that the disciples had
sat upon this rock to rest, once, when
they had walked up from Capernaum.
They hastened to preserve the
relic. Relics are very good property.
Travelers are expected to pay for seeing
them, and they do it cheerfully.
We like the idea. One's conscience can never be the worse for
the
knowledge that he has paid his way like
a man. Our pilgrims would have
liked very well to get out their
lampblack and stencil-plates and paint
their names on that rock, together with
the names of the villages they
hail from in America, but the priests
permit nothing of that kind.
To speak the strict truth, however, our
party seldom offend in that way,
though we have men in the ship who never
lose an opportunity to do it.
Our pilgrims' chief sin is their lust
for "specimens." I suppose
that by
this time they know the dimensions of
that rock to an inch, and its
weight to a ton; and I do not hesitate
to charge that they will go back
there to-night and try to carry it off.
This "Fountain of the Virgin"
is the one which tradition says Mary used
to get water from, twenty times a day,
when she was a girl, and bear it
away in a jar upon her head. The water streams through faucets in the
face of a wall of ancient masonry which
stands removed from the houses of
the village. The young girls of Nazareth still collect
about it by the
dozen and keep up a riotous laughter and
sky-larking. The Nazarene girls
are homely. Some of them have large, lustrous eyes, but
none of them
have pretty faces. These girls wear a single garment, usually,
and it is
loose, shapeless, of undecided color; it
is generally out of repair, too.
They wear, from crown to jaw, curious
strings of old coins, after the
manner of the belles of Tiberias, and
brass jewelry upon their wrists and
in their ears. They wear no shoes and stockings. They are the most
human girls we have found in the country
yet, and the best natured.
But there is no question that these
picturesque maidens sadly lack
comeliness.
A pilgrim--the
"Enthusiast"--said: "See that tall, graceful girl! look at
the Madonna-like beauty of her countenance!"
Another pilgrim came along presently and
said: "Observe that tall,
graceful girl; what queenly Madonna-like
gracefulness of beauty is in her
countenance."
I said: "She is not tall, she is
short; she is not beautiful, she is
homely; she is graceful enough, I grant,
but she is rather boisterous."
The third and last pilgrim moved by,
before long, and he said: "Ah, what
a tall, graceful girl! what Madonna-like
gracefulness of queenly beauty!"
The verdicts were all in. It was time, now, to look up the authorities
for all these opinions. I found this paragraph, which follows. Written
by whom?
Wm. C. Grimes:
"After we were in the saddle, we rode down to the spring to have a
last look at the women of Nazareth, who were, as a class, much the
prettiest that we had seen in the East.
As we approached the crowd
a tall girl of nineteen advanced toward Miriam and offered her a cup
of water. Her movement was
graceful and queenly. We exclaimed on
the spot at the Madonna-like beauty of her countenance. Whitely was
suddenly thirsty, and begged for water, and drank it slowly, with
his eyes over the top of the cup, fixed on her large black eyes,
which gazed on him quite as curiously as he on her. Then Moreright
wanted water. She gave it to him and he managed to spill it
so as
to ask for another cup, and by the time she came to me she saw
through the operation; her eyes were full of fun as she looked at
me. I laughed outright, and she
joined me in as gay a shout as ever
country maiden in old Orange county.
I wished for a picture of her.
A Madonna, whose face was a portrait of that beautiful Nazareth
girl, would be a 'thing of beauty' and 'a joy forever.'"
That is the kind of gruel which has been
served out from Palestine for
ages.
Commend me to Fennimore Cooper to find beauty in the Indians, and
to Grimes to find it in the Arabs. Arab men are often fine looking, but
Arab women are not. We can all believe that the Virgin Mary was
beautiful; it is not natural to think
otherwise; but does it follow that
it is our duty to find beauty in these
present women of Nazareth?
I love to quote from Grimes, because he
is so dramatic. And because he
is so romantic. And because he seems to care but little
whether he tells
the truth or not, so he scares the
reader or excites his envy or his
admiration.
He went through this peaceful land with
one hand forever on his revolver,
and the other on his
pocket-handkerchief. Always, when he was
not on the
point of crying over a holy place, he
was on the point of killing an
Arab.
More surprising things happened to him in Palestine than ever
happened to any traveler here or
elsewhere since Munchausen died.
At Beit Jin, where nobody had interfered
with him, he crept out of his
tent at dead of night and shot at what
he took to be an Arab lying on a
rock, some distance away, planning
evil. The ball killed a wolf. Just
before he fired, he makes a dramatic
picture of himself--as usual, to
scare the reader:
"Was it imagination, or did I see a moving object on the surface of
the rock? If it were a man, why
did he not now drop me? He had a
beautiful shot as I stood out in my black boornoose against the
white tent. I had the sensation of
an entering bullet in my throat,
breast, brain."
Reckless creature!
Riding toward Genessaret, they saw two
Bedouins, and "we looked to our
pistols and loosened them quietly in our
shawls," etc. Always cool.
In Samaria, he charged up a hill, in the
face of a volley of stones; he
fired into the crowd of men who threw
them. He says:
"I never lost an opportunity of impressing the Arabs with the
perfection of American and English weapons, and the danger of
attacking any one of the armed Franks.
I think the lesson of that
ball not lost."
At Beit Jin he gave his whole band of
Arab muleteers a piece of his mind,
and then--
"I contented myself with a solemn assurance that if there occurred
another instance of disobedience to orders I would thrash the
responsible party as he never dreamed of being thrashed, and if I
could not find who was responsible, I would whip them all, from
first to last, whether there was a governor at hand to do it or I
had to do it myself"
Perfectly fearless, this man.
He rode down the perpendicular path in
the rocks, from the Castle of
Banias to the oak grove, at a flying
gallop, his horse striding "thirty
feet" at every bound. I stand prepared to bring thirty reliable
witnesses to prove that Putnam's famous
feat at Horseneck was
insignificant compared to this.
Behold him--always theatrical--looking
at Jerusalem--this time, by an
oversight, with his hand off his pistol
for once.
"I stood in the road, my hand on my horse's neck, and with my dim
eyes sought to trace the outlines of the holy places which I had
long before fixed in my mind, but the fast-flowing tears forbade my
succeeding. There were our
Mohammedan servants, a Latin monk, two
Armenians and a Jew in our cortege, and all alike gazed with
overflowing eyes."
If Latin monks and Arabs cried, I know
to a moral certainty that the
horses cried also, and so the picture is
complete.
But when necessity demanded, he could be
firm as adamant. In the Lebanon
Valley an Arab youth--a Christian; he is
particular to explain that
Mohammedans do not steal--robbed him of
a paltry ten dollars' worth of
powder and shot. He convicted him before a sheik and looked on
while he
was punished by the terrible bastinado. Hear him:
"He (Mousa) was on his back in a twinkling, howling, shouting,
screaming, but he was carried out to the piazza before the door,
where we could see the operation, and laid face down. One man sat
on his back and one on his legs, the latter holding up his feet,
while a third laid on the bare soles a rhinoceros-hide koorbash
--["A Koorbash is Arabic for cowhide, the cow being a rhinoceros.
It is the most cruel whip known to fame.
Heavy as lead, and
flexible as India-rubber, usually about forty inches long and
tapering gradually from an inch in diameter to a point, it
administers a blow which leaves its mark for time."--Scow Life in
Egypt, by the same author.]--that whizzed through the air at every
stroke. Poor Moreright was in
agony, and Nama and Nama the Second
(mother and sister of Mousa,) were on their faces begging and
wailing, now embracing my knees and now Whitely's, while the
brother, outside, made the air ring with cries louder than Mousa's.
Even Yusef came and asked me on his knees to relent, and last of
all, Betuni--the rascal had lost a feed-bag in their house and had
been loudest in his denunciations that morning--besought the Howajji
to have mercy on the fellow."
But not he! The punishment was "suspended," at
the fifteenth blow to
hear the confession. Then Grimes and his party rode away, and left
the
entire Christian family to be fined and
as severely punished as the
Mohammedan sheik should deem proper.
"As I mounted, Yusef once more begged me to interfere and have
mercy
on them, but I looked around at the dark faces of the crowd, and I
couldn't find one drop of pity in my heart for them."
He closes his picture with a rollicking
burst of humor which contrasts
finely with the grief of the mother and
her children.
One more paragraph:
"Then once more I bowed my head.
It is no shame to have wept in
Palestine. I wept, when I saw
Jerusalem, I wept when I lay in the
starlight at Bethlehem. I wept on
the blessed shores of Galilee.
My hand was no less firm on the rein, my anger did not tremble on
the trigger of my pistol when I rode with it in my right hand along
the shore of the blue sea" (weeping.) "My eye was not dimmed
by
those tears nor my heart in aught weakened. Let him who would sneer
at my emotion close this volume here, for he will find little to his
taste in my journeyings through Holy Land."
He never bored but he struck water.
I am aware that this is a pretty
voluminous notice of Mr. Grimes' book.
However, it is proper and legitimate to
speak of it, for "Nomadic Life in
Palestine" is a representative
book--the representative of a class of
Palestine books--and a criticism upon it
will serve for a criticism upon
them all. And since I am treating it in the
comprehensive capacity of a
representative book, I have taken the
liberty of giving to both book and
author fictitious names. Perhaps it is in better taste, any how, to do
this.
CHAPTER LI.
Nazareth is wonderfully interesting
because the town has an air about it
of being precisely as Jesus left it, and
one finds himself saying, all
the time, "The boy Jesus has stood
in this doorway--has played in that
street--has touched these stones with
his hands--has rambled over these
chalky hills." Whoever shall write the boyhood of Jesus
ingeniously will
make a book which will possess a vivid
interest for young and old alike.
I judge so from the greater interest we
found in Nazareth than any of our
speculations upon Capernaum and the Sea
of Galilee gave rise to. It was
not possible, standing by the Sea of
Galilee, to frame more than a vague,
far-away idea of the majestic Personage
who walked upon the crested waves
as if they had been solid earth, and who
touched the dead and they rose
up and spoke. I read among my notes, now, with a new
interest, some
sentences from an edition of 1621 of the
Apocryphal New Testament.
[Extract.]
"Christ, kissed by a bride made dumb by sorcerers, cures her. A
leprous girl cured by the water in which the infant Christ was
washed, and becomes the servant of Joseph and Mary. The leprous son
of a Prince cured in like manner.
"A young man who had been bewitched and turned into a mule,
miraculously cured by the infant Savior being put on his back, and
is married to the girl who had been cured of leprosy. Whereupon the
bystanders praise God.
"Chapter 16. Christ
miraculously widens or contracts gates, milk-
pails, sieves or boxes, not properly made by Joseph, he not being
skillful at his carpenter's trade.
The King of Jerusalem gives
Joseph an order for a throne.
Joseph works on it for two years and
makes it two spans too short. The
King being angry with him, Jesus
comforts him--commands him to pull one side of the throne while he
pulls the other, and brings it to its proper dimensions.
"Chapter 19. Jesus, charged
with throwing a boy from the roof of a
house, miraculously causes the dead boy to speak and acquit him;
fetches water for his mother, breaks the pitcher and miraculously
gathers the water in his mantle and brings it home.
"Sent to a schoolmaster, refuses to tell his letters, and the
schoolmaster going to whip him, his hand withers."
Further on in this quaint volume of
rejected gospels is an epistle of St.
Clement to the Corinthians, which was
used in the churches and considered
genuine fourteen or fifteen hundred
years ago. In it this account of the
fabled phoenix occurs:
"1. Let us consider that
wonderful type of the resurrection, which
is seen in the Eastern countries, that is to say, in Arabia.
"2. There is a certain bird
called a phoenix. Of this there is
never but one at a time, and that lives five hundred years. And
when the time of its dissolution draws near, that it must die, it
makes itself a nest of frankincense, and myrrh, and other spices,
into which, when its time is fulfilled, it enters and dies.
"3. But its flesh,
putrefying, breeds a certain worm, which, being
nourished by the juice of the dead bird, brings forth feathers; and
when it is grown to a perfect state, it takes up the nest in which
the bones of its parent lie, and carries it from Arabia into Egypt,
to a city called Heliopolis:
"4. And flying in open day
in the sight of all men, lays it upon
the altar of the sun, and so returns from whence it came.
"5. The priests then search
into the records of the time, and find
that it returned precisely at the end of five hundred years."
Business is business, and there is
nothing like punctuality, especially
in a phoenix.
The few chapters relating to the infancy
of the Saviour contain many
things which seem frivolous and not
worth preserving. A large part of
the remaining portions of the book read
like good Scripture, however.
There is one verse that ought not to
have been rejected, because it so
evidently prophetically refers to the
general run of Congresses of the
United States:
"199. They carry themselves
high, and as prudent men; and though
they are fools, yet would seem to be teachers."
I have set these extracts down, as I
found them. Everywhere among the
cathedrals of France and Italy, one
finds traditions of personages that
do not figure in the Bible, and of
miracles that are not mentioned in its
pages.
But they are all in this Apocryphal New Testament, and though
they have been ruled out of our modern
Bible, it is claimed that they
were accepted gospel twelve or fifteen
centuries ago, and ranked as high
in credit as any. One needs to read this book before he visits
those
venerable cathedrals, with their
treasures of tabooed and forgotten
tradition.
They imposed another pirate upon us at
Nazareth--another invincible Arab
guard.
We took our last look at the city, clinging like a whitewashed
wasp's nest to the hill-side, and at
eight o'clock in the morning
departed. We dismounted and drove the horses down a bridle-path
which I
think was fully as crooked as a
corkscrew, which I know to be as steep as
the downward sweep of a rainbow, and
which I believe to be the worst
piece of road in the geography, except
one in the Sandwich Islands, which
I remember painfully, and possibly one
or two mountain trails in the
Sierra Nevadas. Often, in this narrow path the horse had to
poise
himself nicely on a rude stone step and
then drop his fore-feet over the
edge and down something more than half
his own height. This brought his
nose near the ground, while his tail
pointed up toward the sky somewhere,
and gave him the appearance of preparing
to stand on his head. A horse
cannot look dignified in this
position. We accomplished the long
descent
at last, and trotted across the great
Plain of Esdraelon.
Some of us will be shot before we finish
this pilgrimage. The pilgrims
read "Nomadic Life" and keep
themselves in a constant state of Quixotic
heroism.
They have their hands on their pistols all the time, and every
now and then, when you least expect it,
they snatch them out and take aim
at Bedouins who are not visible, and
draw their knives and make savage
passes at other Bedouins who do not
exist. I am in deadly peril always,
for these spasms are sudden and
irregular, and of course I cannot tell
when to be getting out of the way. If I am accidentally murdered, some
time, during one of these romantic
frenzies of the pilgrims, Mr. Grimes
must be rigidly held to answer as an
accessory before the fact. If the
pilgrims would take deliberate aim and
shoot at a man, it would be all
right and proper--because that man would
not be in any danger; but these
random assaults are what I object
to. I do not wish to see any more
places like Esdraelon, where the ground
is level and people can gallop.
It puts melodramatic nonsense into the
pilgrims' heads. All at once,
when one is jogging along stupidly in
the sun, and thinking about
something ever so far away, here they
come, at a stormy gallop, spurring
and whooping at those ridgy old sore-backed
plugs till their heels fly
higher than their heads, and as they
whiz by, out comes a little potato-
gum of a revolver, there is a startling
little pop, and a small pellet
goes singing through the air. Now that I have begun this pilgrimage, I
intend to go through with it, though
sooth to say, nothing but the most
desperate valor has kept me to my
purpose up to the present time. I do
not mind Bedouins,--I am not afraid of
them; because neither Bedouins nor
ordinary Arabs have shown any
disposition to harm us, but I do feel
afraid of my own comrades.
Arriving at the furthest verge of the
Plain, we rode a little way up a
hill and found ourselves at Endor,
famous for its witch. Her descendants
are there yet. They were the wildest horde of half-naked
savages we have
found thus far. They swarmed out of mud bee-hives; out of
hovels of the
dry-goods box pattern; out of gaping
caves under shelving rocks; out of
crevices in the earth. In five minutes the dead solitude and silence
of
the place were no more, and a begging,
screeching, shouting mob were
struggling about the horses' feet and
blocking the way. "Bucksheesh!
bucksheesh! bucksheesh!
howajji, bucksheesh!" It was
Magdala over
again, only here the glare from the
infidel eyes was fierce and full of
hate.
The population numbers two hundred and fifty, and more than half
the citizens live in caves in the
rock. Dirt, degradation and savagery
are Endor's specialty. We say no more about Magdala and Deburieh
now.
Endor heads the list. It is worse than any Indian 'campoodie'. The hill
is barren, rocky, and forbidding. No sprig of grass is visible, and only
one tree. This is a fig-tree, which maintains a
precarious footing among
the rocks at the mouth of the dismal
cavern once occupied by the
veritable Witch of Endor. In this cavern, tradition says, Saul, the
king, sat at midnight, and stared and
trembled, while the earth shook,
the thunders crashed among the hills,
and out of the midst of fire and
smoke the spirit of the dead prophet
rose up and confronted him. Saul
had crept to this place in the darkness,
while his army slept, to learn
what fate awaited him in the morrow's
battle. He went away a sad man, to
meet disgrace and death.
A spring trickles out of the rock in the
gloomy recesses of the cavern,
and we were thirsty. The citizens of Endor objected to our going
in
there.
They do not mind dirt; they do not mind rags; they do not mind
vermin; they do not mind barbarous
ignorance and savagery; they do not
mind a reasonable degree of starvation,
but they do like to be pure and
holy before their god, whoever he may
be, and therefore they shudder and
grow almost pale at the idea of
Christian lips polluting a spring whose
waters must descend into their
sanctified gullets. We had no wanton
desire to wound even their feelings or
trample upon their prejudices, but
we were out of water, thus early in the
day, and were burning up with
thirst.
It was at this time, and under these circumstances, that I
framed an aphorism which has already
become celebrated. I said:
"Necessity knows no law." We went in and drank.
We got away from the noisy wretches,
finally, dropping them in squads and
couples as we filed over the hills--the
aged first, the infants next, the
young girls further on; the strong men
ran beside us a mile, and only
left when they had secured the last
possible piastre in the way of
bucksheesh.
In an hour, we reached Nain, where
Christ raised the widow's son to life.
Nain is Magdala on a small scale. It has no population of any
consequence. Within a hundred yards of it is the original
graveyard, for
aught I know; the tombstones lie flat on
the ground, which is Jewish
fashion in Syria. I believe the Moslems do not allow them to
have
upright tombstones. A Moslem grave is usually roughly plastered
over and
whitewashed, and has at one end an
upright projection which is shaped
into exceedingly rude attempts at
ornamentation. In the cities, there is
often no appearance of a grave at all; a
tall, slender marble tombstone,
elaborately lettred, gilded and painted,
marks the burial place, and this
is surmounted by a turban, so carved and
shaped as to signify the dead
man's rank in life.
They showed a fragment of ancient wall
which they said was one side of
the gate out of which the widow's dead
son was being brought so many
centuries ago when Jesus met the
procession:
"Now when he came nigh to the gate of the city, behold there was a
dead man carried out, the only son of his mother, and she was a
widow: and much people of the city was with her.
"And when the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her, and said,
Weep
not.
"And he came and touched the bier: and they that bare him stood
still. And he said, Young man, I
say unto thee, arise.
"And he that was dead sat up, and began to speak. And he delivered
him to his mother.
"And there came a fear on all.
And they glorified God, saying, That
a great prophet is risen up among us; and That God hath visited his
people."
A little mosque stands upon the spot
which tradition says was occupied by
the widow's dwelling. Two or three aged Arabs sat about its
door. We
entered, and the pilgrims broke
specimens from the foundation walls,
though they had to touch, and even step,
upon the "praying carpets" to do
it.
It was almost the same as breaking pieces from the hearts of those
old Arabs. To step rudely upon the sacred praying mats,
with booted
feet--a thing not done by any Arab--was
to inflict pain upon men who had
not offended us in any way. Suppose a party of armed foreigners were to
enter a village church in America and
break ornaments from the altar
railings for curiosities, and climb up
and walk upon the Bible and the
pulpit cushions? However, the cases are different. One is the
profanation of a temple of our
faith--the other only the profanation of a
pagan one.
We descended to the Plain again, and
halted a moment at a well--of
Abraham's time, no doubt. It was in a desert place. It was walled three
feet above ground with squared and heavy
blocks of stone, after the
manner of Bible pictures. Around it some camels stood, and others
knelt.
There was a group of sober little
donkeys with naked, dusky children
clambering about them, or sitting
astride their rumps, or pulling their
tails.
Tawny, black-eyed, barefooted maids, arrayed in rags and adorned
with brazen armlets and pinchbeck
ear-rings, were poising water-jars upon
their heads, or drawing water from the
well. A flock of sheep stood by,
waiting for the shepherds to fill the
hollowed stones with water, so that
they might drink--stones which, like
those that walled the well, were
worn smooth and deeply creased by the
chafing chins of a hundred
generations of thirsty animals. Picturesque Arabs sat upon the ground,
in groups, and solemnly smoked their
long-stemmed chibouks. Other Arabs
were filling black hog-skins with
water--skins which, well filled, and
distended with water till the short legs
projected painfully out of the
proper line, looked like the corpses of
hogs bloated by drowning. Here
was a grand Oriental picture which I had
worshiped a thousand times in
soft, rich steel engravings! But in the engraving there was no
desolation; no dirt; no rags; no fleas;
no ugly features; no sore eyes;
no feasting flies; no besotted ignorance
in the countenances; no raw
places on the donkeys' backs; no
disagreeable jabbering in unknown
tongues; no stench of camels; no
suggestion that a couple of tons of
powder placed under the party and
touched off would heighten the effect
and give to the scene a genuine interest
and a charm which it would
always be pleasant to recall, even
though a man lived a thousand years.
Oriental scenes look best in steel
engravings. I cannot be imposed upon
any more by that picture of the Queen of
Sheba visiting Solomon. I shall
say to myself, You look fine, Madam but
your feet are not clean and you
smell like a camel.
Presently a wild Arab in charge of a
camel train recognized an old friend
in Ferguson, and they ran and fell upon
each other's necks and kissed
each other's grimy, bearded faces upon
both cheeks. It explained
instantly a something which had always
seemed to me only a farfetched
Oriental figure of speech. I refer to the circumstance of Christ's
rebuking a Pharisee, or some such
character, and reminding him that from
him he had received no "kiss of
welcome." It did not seem
reasonable to
me that men should kiss each other, but
I am aware, now, that they did.
There was reason in it, too. The custom was natural and proper; because
people must kiss, and a man would not be
likely to kiss one of the women
of this country of his own free will and
accord. One must travel, to
learn.
Every day, now, old Scriptural phrases that never possessed any
significance for me before, take to
themselves a meaning.
We journeyed around the base of the
mountain--"Little Hermon,"--past the
old Crusaders' castle of El Fuleh, and
arrived at Shunem. This was
another Magdala, to a fraction, frescoes
and all. Here, tradition says,
the prophet Samuel was born, and here
the Shunamite woman built a little
house upon the city wall for the
accommodation of the prophet Elisha.
Elisha asked her what she expected in
return. It was a perfectly natural
question, for these people are and were
in the habit of proffering favors
and services and then expecting and
begging for pay. Elisha knew them
well.
He could not comprehend that any body should build for him that
humble little chamber for the mere sake
of old friendship, and with no
selfish motive whatever. It used to seem a very impolite, not to say a
rude, question, for Elisha to ask the
woman, but it does not seem so to
me now.
The woman said she expected nothing.
Then for her goodness and
her unselfishness, he rejoiced her heart
with the news that she should
bear a son. It was a high reward--but she would not have
thanked him for
a daughter--daughters have always been
unpopular here. The son was born,
grew, waxed strong, died. Elisha restored him to life in Shunem.
We found here a grove of lemon
trees--cool, shady, hung with fruit. One
is apt to overestimate beauty when it is
rare, but to me this grove
seemed very beautiful. It was beautiful. I do not overestimate it. I
must always remember Shunem gratefully,
as a place which gave to us this
leafy shelter after our long, hot ride. We lunched, rested, chatted,
smoked our pipes an hour, and then
mounted and moved on.
As we trotted across the Plain of
Jezreel, we met half a dozen Digger
Indians (Bedouins) with very long spears
in their hands, cavorting around
on old crowbait horses, and spearing
imaginary enemies; whooping, and
fluttering their rags in the wind, and
carrying on in every respect like
a pack of hopeless lunatics. At last, here were the "wild, free sons
of
the desert, speeding over the plain like
the wind, on their beautiful
Arabian mares" we had read so much
about and longed so much to see! Here
were the "picturesque
costumes!" This was the
"gallant spectacle!"
Tatterdemalion vagrants--cheap
braggadocio--"Arabian mares" spined and
necked like the ichthyosaurus in the
museum, and humped and cornered like
a dromedary! To glance at the genuine son of the desert is
to take the
romance out of him forever--to behold
his steed is to long in charity to
strip his harness off and let him fall
to pieces.
Presently we came to a ruinous old town
on a hill, the same being the
ancient Jezreel.
Ahab, King of Samaria, (this was a very
vast kingdom, for those days, and
was very nearly half as large as Rhode
Island) dwelt in the city of
Jezreel, which was his capital. Near him lived a man by the name of
Naboth, who had a vineyard. The King asked him for it, and when he would
not give it, offered to buy it. But Naboth refused to sell it. In those
days it was considered a sort of crime
to part with one's inheritance at
any price--and even if a man did part
with it, it reverted to himself or
his heirs again at the next jubilee
year. So this spoiled child of a
King went and lay down on the bed with
his face to the wall, and grieved
sorely.
The Queen, a notorious character in those days, and whose name
is a by-word and a reproach even in
these, came in and asked him
wherefore he sorrowed, and he told
her. Jezebel said she could secure
the vineyard; and she went forth and
forged letters to the nobles and
wise men, in the King's name, and
ordered them to proclaim a fast and set
Naboth on high before the people, and
suborn two witnesses to swear that
he had blasphemed. They did it, and the people stoned the
accused by the
city wall, and he died. Then Jezebel came and told the King, and said,
Behold, Naboth is no more--rise up and
seize the vineyard. So Ahab
seized the vineyard, and went into it to
possess it. But the Prophet
Elijah came to him there and read his
fate to him, and the fate of
Jezebel; and said that in the place
where dogs licked the blood of
Naboth, dogs should also lick his
blood--and he said, likewise, the dogs
should eat Jezebel by the wall of
Jezreel. In the course of time, the
King was killed in battle, and when his
chariot wheels were washed in the
pool of Samaria, the dogs licked the
blood. In after years, Jehu, who
was King of Israel, marched down against
Jezreel, by order of one of the
Prophets, and administered one of those
convincing rebukes so common
among the people of those days: he
killed many kings and their subjects,
and as he came along he saw Jezebel,
painted and finely dressed, looking
out of a window, and ordered that she be
thrown down to him. A servant
did it, and Jehu's horse trampled her
under foot. Then Jehu went in and
sat down to dinner; and presently he
said, Go and bury this cursed woman,
for she is a King's daughter. The spirit of charity came upon him too
late, however, for the prophecy had
already been fulfilled--the dogs had
eaten her, and they "found no more
of her than the skull, and the feet,
and the palms of her hands."
Ahab, the late King, had left a helpless
family behind him, and Jehu
killed seventy of the orphan sons. Then he killed all the relatives, and
teachers, and servants and friends of
the family, and rested from his
labors, until he was come near to
Samaria, where he met forty-two persons
and asked them who they were; they said
they were brothers of the King of
Judah.
He killed them. When he got to
Samaria, he said he would show
his zeal for the Lord; so he gathered all
the priests and people together
that worshiped Baal, pretending that he
was going to adopt that worship
and offer up a great sacrifice; and when
they were all shut up where they
could not defend themselves, he caused
every person of them to be killed.
Then Jehu, the good missionary, rested
from his labors once more.
We went back to the valley, and rode to
the Fountain of Ain Jelud. They
call it the Fountain of Jezreel,
usually. It is a pond about one hundred
feet square and four feet deep, with a
stream of water trickling into it
from under an overhanging ledge of
rocks. It is in the midst of a great
solitude. Here Gideon pitched his camp in the old
times; behind Shunem
lay the "Midianites, the
Amalekites, and the Children of the East," who
were "as grasshoppers for
multitude; both they and their camels were
without number, as the sand by the
sea-side for multitude." Which
means
that there were one hundred and
thirty-five thousand men, and that they
had transportation service accordingly.
Gideon, with only three hundred men,
surprised them in the night, and
stood by and looked on while they
butchered each other until a hundred
and twenty thousand lay dead on the
field.
We camped at Jenin before night, and got
up and started again at one
o'clock in the morning. Somewhere towards daylight we passed the
locality where the best authenticated
tradition locates the pit into
which Joseph's brethren threw him, and
about noon, after passing over a
succession of mountain tops, clad with
groves of fig and olive trees,
with the Mediterranean in sight some
forty miles away, and going by many
ancient Biblical cities whose
inhabitants glowered savagely upon our
Christian procession, and were seemingly
inclined to practice on it with
stones, we came to the singularly
terraced and unlovely hills that
betrayed that we were out of Galilee and
into Samaria at last.
We climbed a high hill to visit the city
of Samaria, where the woman may
have hailed from who conversed with
Christ at Jacob's Well, and from
whence, no doubt, came also the
celebrated Good Samaritan. Herod the
Great is said to have made a magnificent
city of this place, and a great
number of coarse limestone columns,
twenty feet high and two feet
through, that are almost guiltless of
architectural grace of shape and
ornament, are pointed out by many
authors as evidence of the fact. They
would not have been considered handsome
in ancient Greece, however.
The inhabitants of this camp are
particularly vicious, and stoned two
parties of our pilgrims a day or two ago
who brought about the difficulty
by showing their revolvers when they did
not intend to use them--a thing
which is deemed bad judgment in the Far
West, and ought certainly to be
so considered any where. In the new Territories, when a man puts his
hand on a weapon, he knows that he must
use it; he must use it instantly
or expect to be shot down where he
stands. Those pilgrims had been
reading Grimes.
There was nothing for us to do in
Samaria but buy handfuls of old Roman
coins at a franc a dozen, and look at a
dilapidated church of the
Crusaders and a vault in it which once
contained the body of John the
Baptist.
This relic was long ago carried away to Genoa.
Samaria stood a disastrous siege, once,
in the days of Elisha, at the
hands of the King of Syria. Provisions reached such a figure that
"an
ass' head was sold for eighty pieces of
silver and the fourth part of a
cab of dove's dung for five pieces of
silver."
An incident recorded of that heavy time
will give one a very good idea of
the distress that prevailed within these
crumbling walls. As the King
was walking upon the battlements one
day, "a woman cried out, saying,
Help, my lord, O King! And the King said, What aileth thee? and she
answered, This woman said unto me, Give
thy son, that we may eat him to-
day, and we will eat my son
to-morrow. So we boiled my son, and did
eat
him; and I said unto her on the next
day, Give thy son that we may eat
him; and she hath hid her son."
The prophet Elisha declared that within
four and twenty hours the prices
of food should go down to nothing,
almost, and it was so. The Syrian
army broke camp and fled, for some cause
or other, the famine was
relieved from without, and many a shoddy
speculator in dove's dung and
ass's meat was ruined.
We were glad to leave this hot and dusty
old village and hurry on. At
two o'clock we stopped to lunch and rest
at ancient Shechem, between the
historic Mounts of Gerizim and Ebal,
where in the old times the books of
the law, the curses and the blessings,
were read from the heights to the
Jewish multitudes below.
CHAPTER LII.
The narrow canon in which Nablous, or
Shechem, is situated, is under high
cultivation, and the soil is exceedingly
black and fertile. It is well
watered, and its affluent vegetation
gains effect by contrast with the
barren hills that tower on either
side. One of these hills is the
ancient Mount of Blessings and the other
the Mount of Curses and wise men
who seek for fulfillments of prophecy
think they find here a wonder of
this kind--to wit, that the Mount of
Blessings is strangely fertile and
its mate as strangely unproductive. We could not see that there was
really much difference between them in
this respect, however.
Shechem is distinguished as one of the
residences of the patriarch Jacob,
and as the seat of those tribes that cut
themselves loose from their
brethren of Israel and propagated
doctrines not in conformity with those
of the original Jewish creed. For thousands of years this clan have
dwelt in Shechem under strict tabu, and
having little commerce or
fellowship with their fellow men of any
religion or nationality. For
generations they have not numbered more
than one or two hundred, but they
still adhere to their ancient faith and
maintain their ancient rites and
ceremonies. Talk of family and old descent! Princes and nobles pride
themselves upon lineages they can trace
back some hundreds of years.
What is this trifle to this handful of
old first families of Shechem who
can name their fathers straight back
without a flaw for thousands--
straight back to a period so remote that
men reared in a country where
the days of two hundred years ago are
called "ancient" times grow dazed
and bewildered when they try to
comprehend it! Here is respectability
for you--here is
"family"--here is high descent worth talking about.
This sad, proud remnant of a once mighty
community still hold themselves
aloof from all the world; they still
live as their fathers lived, labor
as their fathers labored, think as they
did, feel as they did, worship in
the same place, in sight of the same
landmarks, and in the same quaint,
patriarchal way their ancestors did more
than thirty centuries ago. I
found myself gazing at any straggling
scion of this strange race with a
riveted fascination, just as one would
stare at a living mastodon, or a
megatherium that had moved in the grey
dawn of creation and seen the
wonders of that mysterious world that
was before the flood.
Carefully preserved among the sacred
archives of this curious community
is a MSS. copy of the ancient Jewish law, which is said
to be the oldest
document on earth. It is written on vellum, and is some four or
five
thousand years old. Nothing but bucksheesh can purchase a
sight. Its
fame is somewhat dimmed in these latter
days, because of the doubts so
many authors of Palestine travels have
felt themselves privileged to cast
upon it.
Speaking of this MSS. reminds me that I procured from the high-
priest of this ancient Samaritan
community, at great expense, a secret
document of still higher antiquity and
far more extraordinary interest,
which I propose to publish as soon as I
have finished translating it.
Joshua gave his dying injunction to the
children of Israel at Shechem,
and buried a valuable treasure secretly
under an oak tree there about the
same time. The superstitious Samaritans have always been
afraid to hunt
for it.
They believe it is guarded by fierce spirits invisible to men.
About a mile and a half from Shechem we
halted at the base of Mount Ebal
before a little square area, inclosed by
a high stone wall, neatly
whitewashed. Across one end of this inclosure is a tomb
built after the
manner of the Moslems. It is the tomb of Joseph. No truth is better
authenticated than this.
When Joseph was dying he prophesied that
exodus of the Israelites from
Egypt which occurred four hundred years
afterwards. At the same time he
exacted of his people an oath that when
they journeyed to the land of
Canaan they would bear his bones with
them and bury them in the ancient
inheritance of his fathers. The oath was kept. "And the bones of
Joseph,
which the children of Israel brought up
out of Egypt, buried they in
Shechem, in a parcel of ground which
Jacob bought of the sons of Hamor
the father of Shechem for a hundred
pieces of silver."
Few tombs on earth command the
veneration of so many races and men of
divers creeds as this of Joseph. "Samaritan and Jew, Moslem and
Christian alike, revere it, and honor it
with their visits. The tomb of
Joseph, the dutiful son, the
affectionate, forgiving brother, the
virtuous man, the wise Prince and
ruler. Egypt felt his influence--the
world knows his history."
In this same "parcel of
ground" which Jacob bought of the sons of Hamor
for a hundred pieces of silver, is
Jacob's celebrated well. It is cut in
the solid rock, and is nine feet square
and ninety feet deep. The name
of this unpretending hole in the ground,
which one might pass by and take
no notice of, is as familiar as
household words to even the children and
the peasants of many a far-off
country. It is more famous than the
Parthenon; it is older than the
Pyramids.
It was by this well that Jesus sat and
talked with a woman of that
strange, antiquated Samaritan community
I have been speaking of, and told
her of the mysterious water of
life. As descendants of old English
nobles still cherish in the traditions
of their houses how that this king
or that king tarried a day with some
favored ancestor three hundred years
ago, no doubt the descendants of the
woman of Samaria, living there in
Shechem, still refer with pardonable
vanity to this conversation of their
ancestor, held some little time gone by,
with the Messiah of the
Christians. It is not likely that they undervalue a
distinction such as
this.
Samaritan nature is human nature, and human nature remembers
contact with the illustrious, always.
For an offense done to the family honor,
the sons of Jacob exterminated
all Shechem once.
We left Jacob's Well and traveled till
eight in the evening, but rather
slowly, for we had been in the saddle
nineteen hours, and the horses were
cruelly tired. We got so far ahead of the tents that we had
to camp in
an Arab village, and sleep on the
ground. We could have slept in the
largest of the houses; but there were
some little drawbacks: it was
populous with vermin, it had a dirt
floor, it was in no respect cleanly,
and there was a family of goats in the
only bedroom, and two donkeys in
the parlor. Outside there were no inconveniences, except
that the dusky,
ragged, earnest-eyed villagers of both
sexes and all ages grouped
themselves on their haunches all around
us, and discussed us and
criticised us with noisy tongues till
midnight. We did not mind the
noise, being tired, but, doubtless, the
reader is aware that it is almost
an impossible thing to go to sleep when
you know that people are looking
at you.
We went to bed at ten, and got up again at two and started once
more.
Thus are people persecuted by dragomen, whose sole ambition in
life is to get ahead of each other.
About daylight we passed Shiloh, where
the Ark of the Covenant rested
three hundred years, and at whose gates
good old Eli fell down and "brake
his neck" when the messenger,
riding hard from the battle, told him of
the defeat of his people, the death of
his sons, and, more than all, the
capture of Israel's pride, her hope, her
refuge, the ancient Ark her
forefathers brought with them out of
Egypt. It is little wonder that
under circumstances like these he fell
down and brake his neck. But
Shiloh had no charms for us. We were so cold that there was no comfort
but in motion, and so drowsy we could
hardly sit upon the horses.
After a while we came to a shapeless
mass of ruins, which still bears the
name of Bethel. It was here that Jacob lay down and had that
superb
vision of angels flitting up and down a
ladder that reached from the
clouds to earth, and caught glimpses of
their blessed home through the
open gates of Heaven.
The pilgrims took what was left of the
hallowed ruin, and we pressed on
toward the goal of our crusade, renowned
Jerusalem.
The further we went the hotter the sun
got, and the more rocky and bare,
repulsive and dreary the landscape
became. There could not have been
more fragments of stone strewn broadcast
over this part of the world, if
every ten square feet of the land had been
occupied by a separate and
distinct stonecutter's establishment for
an age. There was hardly a tree
or a shrub any where. Even the olive and the cactus, those fast
friends
of a worthless soil, had almost deserted
the country. No landscape
exists that is more tiresome to the eye
than that which bounds the
approaches to Jerusalem. The only difference between the roads and the
surrounding country, perhaps, is that
there are rather more rocks in the
roads than in the surrounding country.
We passed Ramah, and Beroth, and on the
right saw the tomb of the prophet
Samuel, perched high upon a commanding
eminence. Still no Jerusalem came
in sight. We hurried on impatiently. We halted a moment at the ancient
Fountain of Beira, but its stones, worn
deeply by the chins of thirsty
animals that are dead and gone centuries
ago, had no interest for us--we
longed to see Jerusalem. We spurred up hill after hill, and usually
began to stretch our necks minutes
before we got to the top--but
disappointment always followed:--more
stupid hills beyond--more unsightly
landscape--no Holy City.
At last, away in the middle of the day,
ancient bite of wall and
crumbling arches began to line the
way--we toiled up one more hill, and
every pilgrim and every sinner swung his
hat on high! Jerusalem!
Perched on its eternal hills, white and
domed and solid, massed together
and hooped with high gray walls, the
venerable city gleamed in the sun.
So small! Why, it was no larger than an American
village of four
thousand inhabitants, and no larger than
an ordinary Syrian city of
thirty thousand. Jerusalem numbers only fourteen thousand
people.
We dismounted and looked, without
speaking a dozen sentences, across the
wide intervening valley for an hour or
more; and noted those prominent
features of the city that pictures make
familiar to all men from their
school days till their death. We could recognize the Tower of Hippicus,
the Mosque of Omar, the Damascus Gate,
the Mount of Olives, the Valley of
Jehoshaphat, the Tower of David, and the
Garden of Gethsemane--and dating
from these landmarks could tell very
nearly the localities of many others
we were not able to distinguish.
I record it here as a notable but not
discreditable fact that not even
our pilgrims wept. I think there was no individual in the party
whose
brain was not teeming with thoughts and
images and memories invoked by
the grand history of the venerable city
that lay before us, but still
among them all was no "voice of
them that wept."
There was no call for tears. Tears would have been out of place. The
thoughts Jerusalem suggests are full of
poetry, sublimity, and more than
all, dignity. Such thoughts do not find their appropriate
expression in
the emotions of the nursery.
Just after noon we entered these narrow,
crooked streets, by the ancient
and the famed Damascus Gate, and now for
several hours I have been trying
to comprehend that I am actually in the
illustrious old city where
Solomon dwelt, where Abraham held
converse with the Deity, and where
walls still stand that witnessed the
spectacle of the Crucifixion.
CHAPTER LIII.
A fast walker could go outside the walls
of Jerusalem and walk entirely
around the city in an hour. I do not know how else to make one
understand how small it is. The appearance of the city is peculiar. It
is as knobby with countless little domes
as a prison door is with bolt-
heads.
Every house has from one to half a dozen of these white plastered
domes of stone, broad and low, sitting
in the centre of, or in a cluster
upon, the flat roof. Wherefore, when one looks down from an
eminence,
upon the compact mass of houses (so
closely crowded together, in fact,
that there is no appearance of streets
at all, and so the city looks
solid,) he sees the knobbiest town in
the world, except Constantinople.
It looks as if it might be roofed, from
centre to circumference, with
inverted saucers. The monotony of the view is interrupted only
by the
great Mosque of Omar, the Tower of
Hippicus, and one or two other
buildings that rise into commanding prominence.
The houses are generally two stories
high, built strongly of masonry,
whitewashed or plastered outside, and
have a cage of wooden lattice-work
projecting in front of every
window. To reproduce a Jerusalem street,
it
would only be necessary to up-end a
chicken-coop and hang it before each
window in an alley of American houses.
The streets are roughly and badly paved
with stone, and are tolerably
crooked--enough so to make each street
appear to close together
constantly and come to an end about a
hundred yards ahead of a pilgrim as
long as he chooses to walk in it. Projecting from the top of the lower
story of many of the houses is a very
narrow porch-roof or shed, without
supports from below; and I have several
times seen cats jump across the
street from one shed to the other when
they were out calling. The cats
could have jumped double the distance
without extraordinary exertion. I
mention these things to give an idea of
how narrow the streets are.
Since a cat can jump across them without
the least inconvenience, it is
hardly necessary to state that such
streets are too narrow for carriages.
These vehicles cannot navigate the Holy
City.
The population of Jerusalem is composed
of Moslems, Jews, Greeks, Latins,
Armenians, Syrians, Copts, Abyssinians,
Greek Catholics, and a handful of
Protestants. One hundred of the latter sect are all that
dwell now in
this birthplace of Christianity. The nice shades of nationality
comprised in the above list, and the
languages spoken by them, are
altogether too numerous to mention. It seems to me that all the races
and colors and tongues of the earth must
be represented among the
fourteen thousand souls that dwell in
Jerusalem. Rags, wretchedness,
poverty and dirt, those signs and
symbols that indicate the presence of
Moslem rule more surely than the
crescent-flag itself, abound. Lepers,
cripples, the blind, and the idiotic,
assail you on every hand, and they
know but one word of but one language
apparently--the eternal
"bucksheesh." To see the numbers of maimed, malformed and
diseased
humanity that throng the holy places and
obstruct the gates, one might
suppose that the ancient days had come
again, and that the angel of the
Lord was expected to descend at any
moment to stir the waters of
Bethesda. Jerusalem is mournful, and dreary, and
lifeless. I would not
desire to live here.
One naturally goes first to the Holy
Sepulchre. It is right in the city,
near the western gate; it and the place
of the Crucifixion, and, in fact,
every other place intimately connected
with that tremendous event, are
ingeniously massed together and covered
by one roof--the dome of the
Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
Entering the building, through the midst
of the usual assemblage of
beggars, one sees on his left a few
Turkish guards--for Christians of
different sects will not only quarrel,
but fight, also, in this sacred
place, if allowed to do it. Before you is a marble slab, which covers
the Stone of Unction, whereon the
Saviour's body was laid to prepare it
for burial. It was found necessary to conceal the real
stone in this way
in order to save it from
destruction. Pilgrims were too much
given to
chipping off pieces of it to carry
home. Near by is a circular railing
which marks the spot where the Virgin
stood when the Lord's body was
anointed.
Entering the great Rotunda, we stand
before the most sacred locality in
Christendom--the grave of Jesus. It is in the centre of the church, and
immediately under the great dome. It is inclosed in a sort of little
temple of yellow and white stone, of
fanciful design. Within the little
temple is a portion of the very stone
which was rolled away from the door
of the Sepulchre, and on which the angel
was sitting when Mary came
thither "at early dawn." Stooping low, we enter the vault--the
Sepulchre
itself.
It is only about six feet by seven, and the stone couch on which
the dead Saviour lay extends from end to
end of the apartment and
occupies half its width. It is covered with a marble slab which has
been
much worn by the lips of pilgrims. This slab serves as an altar, now.
Over it hang some fifty gold and silver
lamps, which are kept always
burning, and the place is otherwise
scandalized by trumpery, gewgaws, and
tawdry ornamentation.
All sects of Christians (except
Protestants,) have chapels under the roof
of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and
each must keep to itself and not
venture upon another's ground. It has been proven conclusively that they
can not worship together around the
grave of the Saviour of the World in
peace.
The chapel of the Syrians is not handsome; that of the Copts is
the humblest of them all. It is nothing but a dismal cavern, roughly
hewn in the living rock of the Hill of
Calvary. In one side of it two
ancient tombs are hewn, which are
claimed to be those in which Nicodemus
and Joseph of Aramathea were buried.
As we moved among the great piers and
pillars of another part of the
church, we came upon a party of
black-robed, animal-looking Italian
monks, with candles in their hands, who
were chanting something in Latin,
and going through some kind of religious
performance around a disk of
white marble let into the floor. It was there that the risen Saviour
appeared to Mary Magdalen in the
likeness of a gardener. Near by was a
similar stone, shaped like a star--here
the Magdalen herself stood, at
the same time. Monks were performing in this place
also. They perform
everywhere--all over the vast building,
and at all hours. Their candles
are always flitting about in the gloom,
and making the dim old church
more dismal than there is any necessity
that it should be, even though it
is a tomb.
We were shown the place where our Lord
appeared to His mother after the
Resurrection. Here, also, a marble slab marks the place
where St.
Helena, the mother of the Emperor
Constantine, found the crosses about
three hundred years after the
Crucifixion. According to the legend,
this
great discovery elicited extravagant
demonstrations of joy. But they
were of short duration. The question intruded itself: "Which
bore the
blessed Saviour, and which the
thieves?" To be in doubt, in so
mighty a
matter as this--to be uncertain which
one to adore--was a grievous
misfortune. It turned the public joy to sorrow. But when lived there a
holy priest who could not set so simple
a trouble as this at rest? One
of these soon hit upon a plan that would
be a certain test. A noble lady
lay very ill in Jerusalem. The wise priests ordered that the three
crosses be taken to her bedside one at a
time. It was done. When her
eyes fell upon the first one, she
uttered a scream that was heard beyond
the Damascus Gate, and even upon the
Mount of Olives, it was said, and
then fell back in a deadly swoon. They recovered her and brought the
second cross. Instantly she went into fearful convulsions,
and it was
with the greatest difficulty that six
strong men could hold her. They
were afraid, now, to bring in the third
cross. They began to fear that
possibly they had fallen upon the wrong
crosses, and that the true cross
was not with this number at all. However, as the woman seemed likely to
die with the convulsions that were
tearing her, they concluded that the
third could do no more than put her out
of her misery with a happy
dispatch. So they brought it, and behold, a
miracle! The woman sprang
from her bed, smiling and joyful, and
perfectly restored to health. When
we listen to evidence like this, we
cannot but believe. We would be
ashamed to doubt, and properly,
too. Even the very part of Jerusalem
where this all occurred is there
yet. So there is really no room for
doubt.
The priests tried to show us, through a
small screen, a fragment of the
genuine Pillar of Flagellation, to which
Christ was bound when they
scourged him. But we could not see it, because it was dark
inside the
screen.
However, a baton is kept here, which the pilgrim thrusts through
a hole in the screen, and then he no
longer doubts that the true Pillar
of Flagellation is in there. He can not have any excuse to doubt it, for
he can feel it with the stick. He can feel it as distinctly as he could
feel any thing.
Not far from here was a niche where they
used to preserve a piece of the
True Cross, but it is gone, now. This piece of the cross was discovered
in the sixteenth century. The Latin priests say it was stolen away,
long
ago, by priests of another sect. That seems like a hard statement to
make, but we know very well that it was
stolen, because we have seen it
ourselves in several of the cathedrals
of Italy and France.
But the relic that touched us most was
the plain old sword of that stout
Crusader, Godfrey of Bulloigne--King
Godfrey of Jerusalem. No blade in
Christendom wields such enchantment as
this--no blade of all that rust in
the ancestral halls of Europe is able to
invoke such visions of romance
in the brain of him who looks upon
it--none that can prate of such
chivalric deeds or tell such brave tales
of the warrior days of old. It
stirs within a man every memory of the
Holy Wars that has been sleeping
in his brain for years, and peoples his
thoughts with mail-clad images,
with marching armies, with battles and
with sieges. It speaks to him of
Baldwin, and Tancred, the princely
Saladin, and great Richard of the Lion
Heart.
It was with just such blades as these that these splendid heroes
of romance used to segregate a man, so
to speak, and leave the half of
him to fall one way and the other half
the other. This very sword has
cloven hundreds of Saracen Knights from
crown to chin in those old times
when Godfrey wielded it. It was enchanted, then, by a genius that was
under the command of King Solomon. When danger approached its master's
tent it always struck the shield and
clanged out a fierce alarm upon the
startled ear of night. In times of doubt, or in fog or darkness, if
it
were drawn from its sheath it would
point instantly toward the foe, and
thus reveal the way--and it would also
attempt to start after them of its
own accord. A Christian could not be so disguised that it
would not know
him and refuse to hurt him--nor a Moslem
so disguised that it would not
leap from its scabbard and take his
life. These statements are all well
authenticated in many legends that are
among the most trustworthy legends
the good old Catholic monks
preserve. I can never forget old
Godfrey's
sword, now. I tried it on a Moslem, and clove him in
twain like a
doughnut. The spirit of Grimes was upon me, and if I
had had a graveyard
I would have destroyed all the infidels
in Jerusalem. I wiped the blood
off the old sword and handed it back to
the priest--I did not want the
fresh gore to obliterate those sacred
spots that crimsoned its brightness
one day six hundred years ago and thus
gave Godfrey warning that before
the sun went down his journey of life
would end.
Still moving through the gloom of the
Church of the Holy Sepulchre we
came to a small chapel, hewn out of the
rock--a place which has been
known as "The Prison of Our
Lord" for many centuries. Tradition
says
that here the Saviour was confined just
previously to the crucifixion.
Under an altar by the door was a pair of
stone stocks for human legs.
These things are called the "Bonds
of Christ," and the use they were once
put to has given them the name they now
bear.
The Greek Chapel is the most roomy, the
richest and the showiest chapel
in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Its altar, like that of all the
Greek churches, is a lofty screen that
extends clear across the chapel,
and is gorgeous with gilding and
pictures. The numerous lamps that hang
before it are of gold and silver, and
cost great sums.
But the feature of the place is a short
column that rises from the middle
of the marble pavement of the chapel,
and marks the exact centre of the
earth.
The most reliable traditions tell us that this was known to be
the earth's centre, ages ago, and that
when Christ was upon earth he set
all doubts upon the subject at rest
forever, by stating with his own lips
that the tradition was correct. Remember, He said that that particular
column stood upon the centre of the
world. If the centre of the world
changes, the column changes its position
accordingly. This column has
moved three different times of its own
accord. This is because, in great
convulsions of nature, at three
different times, masses of the earth--
whole ranges of mountains,
probably--have flown off into space, thus
lessening the diameter of the earth, and
changing the exact locality of
its centre by a point or two. This is a very curious and interesting
circumstance, and is a withering rebuke
to those philosophers who would
make us believe that it is not possible
for any portion of the earth to
fly off into space.
To satisfy himself that this spot was
really the centre of the earth, a
sceptic once paid well for the privilege
of ascending to the dome of the
church to see if the sun gave him a
shadow at noon. He came down
perfectly convinced. The day was very cloudy and the sun threw no
shadows at all; but the man was
satisfied that if the sun had come out
and made shadows it could not have made
any for him. Proofs like these
are not to be set aside by the idle
tongues of cavilers. To such as are
not bigoted, and are willing to be
convinced, they carry a conviction
that nothing can ever shake.
If even greater proofs than those I have
mentioned are wanted, to satisfy
the headstrong and the foolish that this
is the genuine centre of the
earth, they are here. The greatest of them lies in the fact that
from
under this very column was taken the
dust from which Adam was made. This
can surely be regarded in the light of a
settler. It is not likely that
the original first man would have been
made from an inferior quality of
earth when it was entirely convenient to
get first quality from the
world's centre. This will strike any reflecting mind
forcibly. That
Adam was formed of dirt procured in this
very spot is amply proven by the
fact that in six thousand years no man
has ever been able to prove that
the dirt was not procured here whereof
he was made.
It is a singular circumstance that right
under the roof of this same
great church, and not far away from that
illustrious column, Adam
himself, the father of the human race,
lies buried. There is no question
that he is actually buried in the grave
which is pointed out as his--
there can be none--because it has never
yet been proven that that grave
is not the grave in which he is buried.
The tomb of Adam! How touching it was, here in a land of
strangers, far
away from home, and friends, and all who
cared for me, thus to discover
the grave of a blood relation. True, a distant one, but still a
relation. The unerring instinct of nature thrilled its
recognition. The
fountain of my filial affection was
stirred to its profoundest depths,
and I gave way to tumultuous
emotion. I leaned upon a pillar and
burst
into tears. I deem it no shame to have wept over the grave
of my poor
dead relative. Let him who would sneer at my emotion close
this volume
here, for he will find little to his
taste in my journeyings through Holy
Land.
Noble old man--he did not live to see me--he did not live to see
his child. And I--I--alas, I did not live to see
him. Weighed down by
sorrow and disappointment, he died
before I was born--six thousand brief
summers before I was born. But let us try to bear it with fortitude.
Let us trust that he is better off where
he is. Let us take comfort in
the thought that his loss is our eternal
gain.
The next place the guide took us to in
the holy church was an altar
dedicated to the Roman soldier who was
of the military guard that
attended at the Crucifixion to keep
order, and who--when the vail of the
Temple was rent in the awful darkness
that followed; when the rock of
Golgotha was split asunder by an
earthquake; when the artillery of heaven
thundered, and in the baleful glare of
the lightnings the shrouded dead
flitted about the streets of Jerusalem--shook
with fear and said, "Surely
this was the Son of God!" Where this altar stands now, that Roman
soldier stood then, in full view of the
crucified Saviour--in full sight
and hearing of all the marvels that were
transpiring far and wide about
the circumference of the Hill of
Calvary. And in this self-same spot the
priests of the Temple beheaded him for
those blasphemous words he had
spoken.
In this altar they used to keep one of
the most curious relics that human
eyes ever looked upon--a thing that had
power to fascinate the beholder
in some mysterious way and keep him
gazing for hours together. It was
nothing less than the copper plate
Pilate put upon the Saviour's cross,
and upon which he wrote, "THIS IS
THE KING OF THE JEWS." I think St.
Helena, the mother of Constantine, found
this wonderful memento when she
was here in the third century. She traveled all over Palestine, and was
always fortunate. Whenever the good old enthusiast found a
thing
mentioned in her Bible, Old or New, she
would go and search for that
thing, and never stop until she found
it. If it was Adam, she would find
Adam; if it was the Ark, she would find
the Ark; if it was Goliath, or
Joshua, she would find them. She found the inscription here that I was
speaking of, I think. She found it in this very spot, close to
where the
martyred Roman soldier stood. That copper plate is in one of the
churches in Rome, now. Any one can see it there. The inscription is
very distinct.
We passed along a few steps and saw the
altar built over the very spot
where the good Catholic priests say the
soldiers divided the raiment of
the Saviour.
Then we went down into a cavern which
cavilers say was once a cistern.
It is a chapel, now, however--the Chapel
of St. Helena. It is fifty-one
feet long by forty-three wide. In it is a marble chair which Helena used
to sit in while she superintended her
workmen when they were digging and
delving for the True Cross. In this place is an altar dedicated to St.
Dimas, the penitent thief. A new bronze statue is here--a statue of St.
Helena.
It reminded us of poor Maximilian, so lately shot. He presented
it to this chapel when he was about to
leave for his throne in Mexico.
From the cistern we descended twelve
steps into a large roughly-shaped
grotto, carved wholly out of the living
rock. Helena blasted it out when
she was searching for the true
Cross. She had a laborious piece of
work,
here, but it was richly rewarded. Out of this place she got the crown of
thorns, the nails of the cross, the true
Cross itself, and the cross of
the penitent thief. When she thought she had found every thing
and was
about to stop, she was told in a dream
to continue a day longer. It was
very fortunate. She did so, and found the cross of the other
thief.
The walls and roof of this grotto still
weep bitter tears in memory of
the event that transpired on Calvary,
and devout pilgrims groan and sob
when these sad tears fall upon them from
the dripping rock. The monks
call this apartment the "Chapel of
the Invention of the Cross"--a name
which is unfortunate, because it leads
the ignorant to imagine that a
tacit acknowledgment is thus made that
the tradition that Helena found
the true Cross here is a fiction--an
invention. It is a happiness to
know, however, that intelligent people
do not doubt the story in any of
its particulars.
Priests of any of the chapels and
denominations in the Church of the Holy
Sepulchre can visit this sacred grotto
to weep and pray and worship the
gentle Redeemer. Two different congregations are not allowed
to enter at
the same time, however, because they
always fight.
Still marching through the venerable
Church of the Holy Sepulchre, among
chanting priests in coarse long robes
and sandals; pilgrims of all colors
and many nationalities, in all sorts of
strange costumes; under dusky
arches and by dingy piers and columns;
through a sombre cathedral gloom
freighted with smoke and incense, and
faintly starred with scores of
candles that appeared suddenly and as
suddenly disappeared, or drifted
mysteriously hither and thither about
the distant aisles like ghostly
jack-o'-lanterns--we came at last to a
small chapel which is called the
"Chapel of the Mocking." Under the altar was a fragment of a marble
column; this was the seat Christ sat on
when he was reviled, and
mockingly made King, crowned with a
crown of thorns and sceptred with a
reed.
It was here that they blindfolded him and struck him, and said in
derision, "Prophesy who it is that
smote thee." The tradition that
this
is the identical spot of the mocking is
a very ancient one. The guide
said that Saewulf was the first to
mention it. I do not know Saewulf,
but still, I cannot well refuse to
receive his evidence--none of us can.
They showed us where the great Godfrey
and his brother Baldwin, the first
Christian Kings of Jerusalem, once lay
buried by that sacred sepulchre
they had fought so long and so valiantly
to wrest from the hands of the
infidel.
But the niches that had contained the ashes of these renowned
crusaders were empty. Even the coverings of their tombs were gone--
destroyed by devout members of the Greek
Church, because Godfrey and
Baldwin were Latin princes, and had been
reared in a Christian faith
whose creed differed in some unimportant
respects from theirs.
We passed on, and halted before the tomb
of Melchisedek! You will
remember Melchisedek, no doubt; he was
the King who came out and levied a
tribute on Abraham the time that he
pursued Lot's captors to Dan, and
took all their property from them. That was about four thousand years
ago, and Melchisedek died shortly
afterward. However, his tomb is in a
good state of preservation.
When one enters the Church of the Holy
Sepulchre, the Sepulchre itself is
the first thing he desires to see, and
really is almost the first thing
he does see. The next thing he has a strong yearning to
see is the spot
where the Saviour was crucified. But this they exhibit last. It is the
crowning glory of the place. One is grave and thoughtful when he stands
in the little Tomb of the Saviour--he
could not well be otherwise in such
a place--but he has not the slightest
possible belief that ever the Lord
lay there, and so the interest he feels
in the spot is very, very greatly
marred by that reflection. He looks at the place where Mary stood, in
another part of the church, and where
John stood, and Mary Magdalen;
where the mob derided the Lord; where
the angel sat; where the crown of
thorns was found, and the true Cross;
where the risen Saviour appeared--
he looks at all these places with interest,
but with the same conviction
he felt in the case of the Sepulchre,
that there is nothing genuine about
them, and that they are imaginary holy
places created by the monks. But
the place of the Crucifixion affects him
differently. He fully believes
that he is looking upon the very spot
where the Savior gave up his
life.
He remembers that Christ was very celebrated, long before he came
to Jerusalem; he knows that his fame was
so great that crowds followed
him all the time; he is aware that his
entry into the city produced a
stirring sensation, and that his
reception was a kind of ovation; he can
not overlook the fact that when he was
crucified there were very many in
Jerusalem who believed that he was the
true Son of God. To publicly
execute such a personage was sufficient
in itself to make the locality of
the execution a memorable place for
ages; added to this, the storm, the
darkness, the earthquake, the rending of
the vail of the Temple, and the
untimely waking of the dead, were events
calculated to fix the execution
and the scene of it in the memory of
even the most thoughtless witness.
Fathers would tell their sons about the
strange affair, and point out the
spot; the sons would transmit the story
to their children, and thus a
period of three hundred years would
easily be spanned--[The thought is
Mr. Prime's, not mine, and is full of
good sense. I borrowed it from his
"Tent Life."--M. T.]--at which time Helena came and built a
church upon
Calvary to commemorate the death and
burial of the Lord and preserve the
sacred place in the memories of men;
since that time there has always
been a church there. It is not possible that there can be any
mistake
about the locality of the
Crucifixion. Not half a dozen persons
knew
where they buried the Saviour, perhaps,
and a burial is not a startling
event, any how; therefore, we can be
pardoned for unbelief in the
Sepulchre, but not in the place of the
Crucifixion. Five hundred years
hence there will be no vestige of Bunker
Hill Monument left, but America
will still know where the battle was
fought and where Warren fell. The
crucifixion of Christ was too notable an
event in Jerusalem, and the Hill
of Calvary made too celebrated by it, to
be forgotten in the short space
of three hundred years. I climbed the stairway in the church which
brings one to the top of the small
inclosed pinnacle of rock, and looked
upon the place where the true cross once
stood, with a far more absorbing
interest than I had ever felt in any
thing earthly before. I could not
believe that the three holes in the top
of the rock were the actual ones
the crosses stood in, but I felt
satisfied that those crosses had stood
so near the place now occupied by them,
that the few feet of possible
difference were a matter of no
consequence.
When one stands where the Saviour was
crucified, he finds it all he can
do to keep it strictly before his mind
that Christ was not crucified in a
Catholic Church. He must remind himself every now and then
that the
great event transpired in the open air,
and not in a gloomy, candle-
lighted cell in a little corner of a
vast church, up-stairs--a small cell
all bejeweled and bespangled with flashy
ornamentation, in execrable
taste.
Under a marble altar like a table, is a
circular hole in the marble
floor, corresponding with the one just
under it in which the true Cross
stood.
The first thing every one does is to kneel down and take a candle
and examine this hole. He does this strange prospecting with an
amount
of gravity that can never be estimated
or appreciated by a man who has
not seen the operation. Then he holds his candle before a richly
engraved picture of the Saviour, done on
a messy slab of gold, and
wonderfully rayed and starred with
diamonds, which hangs above the hole
within the altar, and his solemnity
changes to lively admiration. He
rises and faces the finely wrought
figures of the Saviour and the
malefactors uplifted upon their crosses
behind the altar, and bright with
a metallic lustre of many colors. He turns next to the figures close to
them of the Virgin and Mary Magdalen;
next to the rift in the living rock
made by the earthquake at the time of
the Crucifixion, and an extension
of which he had seen before in the wall
of one of the grottoes below; he
looks next at the show-case with a
figure of the Virgin in it, and is
amazed at the princely fortune in
precious gems and jewelry that hangs so
thickly about the form as to hide it
like a garment almost. All about
the apartment the gaudy trappings of the
Greek Church offend the eye and
keep the mind on the rack to remember
that this is the Place of the
Crucifixion--Golgotha--the Mount of
Calvary. And the last thing he looks
at is that which was also the first--the
place where the true Cross
stood.
That will chain him to the spot and compel him to look once more,
and once again, after he has satisfied
all curiosity and lost all
interest concerning the other matters
pertaining to the locality.
And so I close my chapter on the Church
of the Holy Sepulchre--the most
sacred locality on earth to millions and
millions of men, and women, and
children, the noble and the humble, bond
and free. In its history from
the first, and in its tremendous
associations, it is the most illustrious
edifice in Christendom. With all its clap-trap side-shows and
unseemly
impostures of every kind, it is still
grand, reverend, venerable--for a
god died there; for fifteen hundred
years its shrines have been wet with
the tears of pilgrims from the earth's
remotest confines; for more than
two hundred, the most gallant knights that
ever wielded sword wasted
their lives away in a struggle to seize
it and hold it sacred from
infidel pollution. Even in our own day a war, that cost millions
of
treasure and rivers of blood, was fought
because two rival nations
claimed the sole right to put a new dome
upon it. History is full of
this old Church of the Holy
Sepulchre--full of blood that was shed
because of the respect and the
veneration in which men held the last
resting-place of the meek and lowly, the
mild and gentle, Prince of
Peace!
CHAPTER LIV.
We were standing in a narrow street, by
the Tower of Antonio. "On these
stones that are crumbling away,"
the guide said, "the Saviour sat and
rested before taking up the cross. This is the beginning of the
Sorrowful Way, or the Way of
Grief." The party took note of the
sacred
spot, and moved on. We passed under the "Ecce Homo
Arch," and saw the
very window from which Pilate's wife
warned her husband to have nothing
to do with the persecution of the Just
Man. This window is in an
excellent state of preservation,
considering its great age. They showed
us where Jesus rested the second time,
and where the mob refused to give
him up, and said, "Let his blood be
upon our heads, and upon our
children's children forever." The French Catholics are building a church
on this spot, and with their usual
veneration for historical relics, are
incorporating into the new such scraps
of ancient walls as they have
found there. Further on, we saw the spot where the
fainting Saviour fell
under the weight of his cross. A great granite column of some ancient
temple lay there at the time, and the
heavy cross struck it such a blow
that it broke in two in the middle. Such was the guide's story when he
halted us before the broken column.
We crossed a street, and came presently
to the former residence of St.
Veronica. When the Saviour passed there, she came out,
full of womanly
compassion, and spoke pitying words to
him, undaunted by the hootings and
the threatenings of the mob, and wiped
the perspiration from his face
with her handkerchief. We had heard so much of St. Veronica, and
seen
her picture by so many masters, that it
was like meeting an old friend
unexpectedly to come upon her ancient
home in Jerusalem. The strangest
thing about the incident that has made
her name so famous, is, that when
she wiped the perspiration away, the
print of the Saviour's face remained
upon the handkerchief, a perfect
portrait, and so remains unto this day.
We knew this, because we saw this
handkerchief in a cathedral in Paris,
in another in Spain, and in two others
in Italy. In the Milan cathedral
it costs five francs to see it, and at
St. Peter's, at Rome, it is almost
impossible to see it at any price. No tradition is so amply verified as
this of St. Veronica and her
handkerchief.
At the next corner we saw a deep
indention in the hard stone masonry of
the corner of a house, but might have
gone heedlessly by it but that the
guide said it was made by the elbow of
the Saviour, who stumbled here and
fell.
Presently we came to just such another indention in a stone wall.
The guide said the Saviour fell here,
also, and made this depression with
his elbow.
There were other places where the Lord
fell, and others where he rested;
but one of the most curious landmarks of
ancient history we found on this
morning walk through the crooked lanes
that lead toward Calvary, was a
certain stone built into a house--a
stone that was so seamed and scarred
that it bore a sort of grotesque
resemblance to the human face. The
projections that answered for cheeks
were worn smooth by the passionate
kisses of generations of pilgrims from
distant lands. We asked "Why?"
The guide said it was because this was
one of "the very stones of
Jerusalem" that Christ mentioned
when he was reproved for permitting the
people to cry "Hosannah!" when he made his memorable entry into the
city upon an ass. One of the pilgrims said, "But there is
no evidence
that the stones did cry out--Christ said
that if the people stopped from
shouting Hosannah, the very stones would
do it." The guide was perfectly
serene.
He said, calmly, "This is one of the stones that would have
cried out. "It was of little use to try to shake
this fellow's simple
faith--it was easy to see that.
And so we came at last to another wonder,
of deep and abiding interest--
the veritable house where the unhappy
wretch once lived who has been
celebrated in song and story for more
than eighteen hundred years as the
Wandering Jew. On the memorable day of the Crucifixion he
stood in this
old doorway with his arms akimbo,
looking out upon the struggling mob
that was approaching, and when the weary
Saviour would have sat down and
rested him a moment, pushed him rudely
away and said, "Move on!" The
Lord said, "Move on, thou,
likewise," and the command has never been
revoked from that day to this. All men know how that the miscreant upon
whose head that just curse fell has
roamed up and down the wide world,
for ages and ages, seeking rest and
never finding it--courting death but
always in vain--longing to stop, in
city, in wilderness, in desert
solitudes, yet hearing always that
relentless warning to march--march on!
They say--do these hoary
traditions--that when Titus sacked Jerusalem and
slaughtered eleven hundred thousand Jews
in her streets and by-ways, the
Wandering Jew was seen always in the
thickest of the fight, and that when
battle-axes gleamed in the air, he bowed
his head beneath them; when
swords flashed their deadly lightnings,
he sprang in their way; he bared
his breast to whizzing javelins, to
hissing arrows, to any and to every
weapon that promised death and
forgetfulness, and rest. But it was
useless--he walked forth out of the
carnage without a wound. And it is
said that five hundred years afterward
he followed Mahomet when he
carried destruction to the cities of
Arabia, and then turned against him,
hoping in this way to win the death of a
traitor. His calculations were
wrong again. No quarter was given to any living creature
but one, and
that was the only one of all the host
that did not want it. He sought
death five hundred years later, in the
wars of the Crusades, and offered
himself to famine and pestilence at
Ascalon. He escaped again--he could
not die.
These repeated annoyances could have at last but one effect--
they shook his confidence. Since then the Wandering Jew has carried on a
kind of desultory toying with the most
promising of the aids and
implements of destruction, but with
small hope, as a general thing. He
has speculated some in cholera and
railroads, and has taken almost a
lively interest in infernal machines and
patent medicines. He is old,
now, and grave, as becomes an age like
his; he indulges in no light
amusements save that he goes sometimes
to executions, and is fond of
funerals.
There is one thing he can not avoid; go
where he will about the world, he
must never fail to report in Jerusalem
every fiftieth year. Only a year
or two ago he was here for the
thirty-seventh time since Jesus was
crucified on Calvary. They say that many old people, who are here
now,
saw him then, and had seen him
before. He looks always the same--old,
and withered, and hollow-eyed, and
listless, save that there is about him
something which seems to suggest that he
is looking for some one,
expecting some one--the friends of his youth,
perhaps. But the most of
them are dead, now. He always pokes about the old streets looking
lonesome, making his mark on a wall here
and there, and eyeing the oldest
buildings with a sort of friendly half
interest; and he sheds a few tears
at the threshold of his ancient
dwelling, and bitter, bitter tears they
are.
Then he collects his rent and leaves again. He has been seen
standing near the Church of the Holy
Sepulchre on many a starlight night,
for he has cherished an idea for many
centuries that if he could only
enter there, he could rest. But when he approaches, the doors slam to
with a crash, the earth trembles, and
all the lights in Jerusalem burn a
ghastly blue! He does this every fifty years, just the
same. It is
hopeless, but then it is hard to break
habits one has been eighteen
hundred years accustomed to. The old tourist is far away on his
wanderings, now. How he must smile to see a pack of blockheads
like us,
galloping about the world, and looking
wise, and imagining we are finding
out a good deal about it! He must have a consuming contempt for the
ignorant, complacent asses that go
skurrying about the world in these
railroading days and call it traveling.
When the guide pointed out where the
Wandering Jew had left his familiar
mark upon a wall, I was filled with
astonishment. It read:
"S.
T.--1860--X."
All I have revealed about the Wandering
Jew can be amply proven by
reference to our guide.
The mighty Mosque of Omar, and the paved
court around it, occupy a fourth
part of Jerusalem. They are upon Mount Moriah, where King
Solomon's
Temple stood. This Mosque is the holiest place the
Mohammedan knows,
outside of Mecca. Up to within a year or two past, no Christian
could
gain admission to it or its court for
love or money. But the prohibition
has been removed, and we entered freely
for bucksheesh.
I need not speak of the wonderful beauty
and the exquisite grace and
symmetry that have made this Mosque so
celebrated--because I did not see
them.
One can not see such things at an instant glance--one frequently
only finds out how really beautiful a
really beautiful woman is after
considerable acquaintance with her; and
the rule applies to Niagara
Falls, to majestic mountains and to
mosques--especially to mosques.
The great feature of the Mosque of Omar
is the prodigious rock in the
centre of its rotunda. It was upon this rock that Abraham came so
near
offering up his son Isaac--this, at
least, is authentic--it is very much
more to be relied on than most of the
traditions, at any rate. On this
rock, also, the angel stood and
threatened Jerusalem, and David persuaded
him to spare the city. Mahomet was well acquainted with this stone.
From it he ascended to heaven. The stone tried to follow him, and if the
angel Gabriel had not happened by the
merest good luck to be there to
seize it, it would have done it. Very few people have a grip like
Gabriel--the prints of his monstrous
fingers, two inches deep, are to be
seen in that rock to-day.
This rock, large as it is, is suspended
in the air. It does not touch
any thing at all. The guide said so. This is very wonderful. In the
place on it where Mahomet stood, he left
his foot-prints in the solid
stone.
I should judge that he wore about eighteens. But what I was
going to say, when I spoke of the rock
being suspended, was, that in the
floor of the cavern under it they showed
us a slab which they said
covered a hole which was a thing of
extraordinary interest to all
Mohammedans, because that hole leads
down to perdition, and every soul
that is transferred from thence to
Heaven must pass up through this
orifice.
Mahomet stands there and lifts them out by the hair. All
Mohammedans shave their heads, but they
are careful to leave a lock of
hair for the Prophet to take hold
of. Our guide observed that a good
Mohammedan would consider himself doomed
to stay with the damned forever
if he were to lose his scalp-lock and
die before it grew again. The most
of them that I have seen ought to stay
with the damned, any how, without
reference to how they were barbered.
For several ages no woman has been
allowed to enter the cavern where that
important hole is. The reason is that one of the sex was once
caught
there blabbing every thing she knew
about what was going on above ground,
to the rapscallions in the infernal
regions down below. She carried her
gossiping to such an extreme that
nothing could be kept private--nothing
could be done or said on earth but every
body in perdition knew all about
it before the sun went down. It was about time to suppress this woman's
telegraph, and it was promptly
done. Her breath subsided about the same
time.
The inside of the great mosque is very
showy with variegated marble walls
and with windows and inscriptions of
elaborate mosaic. The Turks have
their sacred relics, like the
Catholics. The guide showed us the
veritable armor worn by the great
son-in-law and successor of Mahomet,
and also the buckler of Mahomet's
uncle. The great iron railing which
surrounds the rock was ornamented in one
place with a thousand rags tied
to its open work. These are to remind Mahomet not to forget the
worshipers who placed them there. It is considered the next best thing
to tying threads around his finger by
way of reminders.
Just outside the mosque is a miniature
temple, which marks the spot where
David and Goliah used to sit and judge
the people.--[A pilgrim informs
me that it was not David and Goliah, but
David and Saul. I stick to my
own statement--the guide told me, and he
ought to know.]
Every where about the Mosque of Omar are
portions of pillars, curiously
wrought altars, and fragments of
elegantly carved marble--precious
remains of Solomon's Temple. These have been dug from all depths in the
soil and rubbish of Mount Moriah, and
the Moslems have always shown a
disposition to preserve them with the
utmost care. At that portion of
the ancient wall of Solomon's Temple
which is called the Jew's Place of
Wailing, and where the Hebrews assemble
every Friday to kiss the
venerated stones and weep over the
fallen greatness of Zion, any one can
see a part of the unquestioned and
undisputed Temple of Solomon, the same
consisting of three or four stones lying
one upon the other, each of
which is about twice as long as a
seven-octave piano, and about as thick
as such a piano is high. But, as I have remarked before, it is only a
year or two ago that the ancient edict
prohibiting Christian rubbish like
ourselves to enter the Mosque of Omar
and see the costly marbles that
once adorned the inner Temple was
annulled. The designs wrought upon
these fragments are all quaint and
peculiar, and so the charm of novelty
is added to the deep interest they
naturally inspire. One meets with
these venerable scraps at every turn,
especially in the neighboring
Mosque el Aksa, into whose inner walls a
very large number of them are
carefully built for preservation. These pieces of stone, stained and
dusty with age, dimly hint at a grandeur
we have all been taught to
regard as the princeliest ever seen on
earth; and they call up pictures
of a pageant that is familiar to all
imaginations--camels laden with
spices and treasure--beautiful slaves,
presents for Solomon's harem--a
long cavalcade of richly caparisoned
beasts and warriors--and Sheba's
Queen in the van of this vision of
"Oriental magnificence." These
elegant fragments bear a richer interest
than the solemn vastness of the
stones the Jews kiss in the Place of
Wailing can ever have for the
heedless sinner.
Down in the hollow ground, underneath
the olives and the orange-trees
that flourish in the court of the great
Mosque, is a wilderness of
pillars--remains of the ancient Temple;
they supported it. There are
ponderous archways down there, also,
over which the destroying "plough"
of prophecy passed harmless. It is pleasant to know we are disappointed,
in that we never dreamed we might see
portions of the actual Temple of
Solomon, and yet experience no shadow of
suspicion that they were a
monkish humbug and a fraud.
We are surfeited with sights. Nothing has any fascination for us, now,
but the Church of the Holy
Sepulchre. We have been there every day,
and
have not grown tired of it; but we are
weary of every thing else. The
sights are too many. They swarm about you at every step; no single
foot
of ground in all Jerusalem or within its
neighborhood seems to be without
a stirring and important history of its
own. It is a very relief to
steal a walk of a hundred yards without
a guide along to talk unceasingly
about every stone you step upon and drag
you back ages and ages to the
day when it achieved celebrity.
It seems hardly real when I find myself
leaning for a moment on a ruined
wall and looking listlessly down into
the historic pool of Bethesda. I
did not think such things could be so
crowded together as to diminish
their interest. But in serious truth, we have been drifting
about, for
several days, using our eyes and our
ears more from a sense of duty than
any higher and worthier reason. And too often we have been glad when it
was time to go home and be distressed no
more about illustrious
localities.
Our pilgrims compress too much into one
day. One can gorge sights to
repletion as well as sweetmeats. Since we breakfasted, this morning, we
have seen enough to have furnished us
food for a year's reflection if we
could have seen the various objects in
comfort and looked upon them
deliberately. We visited the pool of Hezekiah, where David
saw Uriah's
wife coming from the bath and fell in
love with her.
We went out of the city by the Jaffa
gate, and of course were told many
things about its Tower of Hippicus.
We rode across the Valley of Hinnom,
between two of the Pools of Gihon,
and by an aqueduct built by Solomon,
which still conveys water to the
city.
We ascended the Hill of Evil Counsel, where Judas received his
thirty pieces of silver, and we also
lingered a moment under the tree a
venerable tradition says he hanged
himself on.
We descended to the canon again, and
then the guide began to give name
and history to every bank and boulder we
came to: "This was the Field of
Blood; these cuttings in the rocks were
shrines and temples of Moloch;
here they sacrificed children; yonder is
the Zion Gate; the Tyropean
Valley, the Hill of Ophel; here is the
junction of the Valley of
Jehoshaphat--on your right is the Well
of Job." We turned up
Jehoshaphat. The recital went on. "This is the Mount of Olives; this is
the Hill of Offense; the nest of huts is
the Village of Siloam; here,
yonder, every where, is the King's
Garden; under this great tree
Zacharias, the high priest, was
murdered; yonder is Mount Moriah and the
Temple wall; the tomb of Absalom; the
tomb of St. James; the tomb of
Zacharias; beyond, are the Garden of
Gethsemane and the tomb of the
Virgin Mary; here is the Pool of Siloam,
and----"
We said we would dismount, and quench
our thirst, and rest. We were
burning up with the heat. We were failing under the accumulated fatigue
of days and days of ceaseless
marching. All were willing.
The Pool is a deep, walled ditch,
through which a clear stream of water
runs, that comes from under Jerusalem
somewhere, and passing through the
Fountain of the Virgin, or being
supplied from it, reaches this place by
way of a tunnel of heavy masonry. The famous pool looked exactly as it
looked in Solomon's time, no doubt, and
the same dusky, Oriental women,
came down in their old Oriental way, and
carried off jars of the water on
their heads, just as they did three
thousand years ago, and just as they
will do fifty thousand years hence if
any of them are still left on
earth.
We went away from there and stopped at
the Fountain of the Virgin. But
the water was not good, and there was no
comfort or peace any where, on
account of the regiment of boys and
girls and beggars that persecuted us
all the time for bucksheesh. The guide wanted us to give them some
money, and we did it; but when he went
on to say that they were starving
to death we could not but feel that we
had done a great sin in throwing
obstacles in the way of such a desirable
consummation, and so we tried to
collect it back, but it could not be
done.
We entered the Garden of Gethsemane, and
we visited the Tomb of the
Virgin, both of which we had seen
before. It is not meet that I should
speak of them now. A more fitting time will come.
I can not speak now of the Mount of
Olives or its view of Jerusalem, the
Dead Sea and the mountains of Moab; nor
of the Damascus Gate or the tree
that was planted by King Godfrey of
Jerusalem. One ought to feel
pleasantly when he talks of these
things. I can not say any thing about
the stone column that projects over
Jehoshaphat from the Temple wall like
a cannon, except that the Moslems
believe Mahomet will sit astride of it
when he comes to judge the world. It is a pity he could not judge it
from some roost of his own in Mecca,
without trespassing on our holy
ground.
Close by is the Golden Gate, in the Temple wall--a gate that was
an elegant piece of sculpture in the
time of the Temple, and is even so
yet.
From it, in ancient times, the Jewish High Priest turned loose the
scapegoat and let him flee to the
wilderness and bear away his twelve-
month load of the sins of the
people. If they were to turn one loose
now, he would not get as far as the
Garden of Gethsemane, till these
miserable vagabonds here would gobble
him up,--[Favorite pilgrim
expression.]--sins and all. They wouldn't care. Mutton-chops and sin is
good enough living for them. The Moslems watch the Golden Gate with a
jealous eye, and an anxious one, for
they have an honored tradition that
when it falls, Islamism will fall and
with it the Ottoman Empire. It did
not grieve me any to notice that the old
gate was getting a little shaky.
We are at home again. We are exhausted. The sun has roasted us, almost.
We have full comfort in one reflection,
however. Our experiences in
Europe have taught us that in time this
fatigue will be forgotten; the
heat will be forgotten; the thirst, the
tiresome volubility of the guide,
the persecutions of the beggars--and
then, all that will be left will be
pleasant memories of Jerusalem, memories
we shall call up with always
increasing interest as the years go by,
memories which some day will
become all beautiful when the last
annoyance that incumbers them shall
have faded out of our minds never again
to return. School-boy days are
no happier than the days of after life,
but we look back upon them
regretfully because we have forgotten
our punishments at school, and how
we grieved when our marbles were lost
and our kites destroyed--because we
have forgotten all the sorrows and privations
of that canonized epoch and
remember only its orchard robberies, its
wooden sword pageants and its
fishing holydays. We are satisfied. We can wait.
Our reward will come.
To us, Jerusalem and to-day's
experiences will be an enchanted memory a
year hence--memory which money could not
buy from us.
CHAPTER LV.
We cast up the account. It footed up pretty fairly. There was nothing
more at Jerusalem to be seen, except the
traditional houses of Dives and
Lazarus of the parable, the Tombs of the
Kings, and those of the Judges;
the spot where they stoned one of the
disciples to death, and beheaded
another; the room and the table made
celebrated by the Last Supper; the
fig-tree that Jesus withered; a number
of historical places about
Gethsemane and the Mount of Olives, and
fifteen or twenty others in
different portions of the city itself.
We were approaching the end. Human nature asserted itself, now.
Overwork and consequent exhaustion began
to have their natural effect.
They began to master the energies and
dull the ardor of the party.
Perfectly secure now, against failing to
accomplish any detail of the
pilgrimage, they felt like drawing in
advance upon the holiday soon to be
placed to their credit. They grew a little lazy. They were late to
breakfast and sat long at dinner. Thirty or forty pilgrims had arrived
from the ship, by the short routes, and
much swapping of gossip had to be
indulged in. And in hot afternoons, they showed a strong
disposition to
lie on the cool divans in the hotel and
smoke and talk about pleasant
experiences of a month or so gone
by--for even thus early do episodes of
travel which were sometimes annoying,
sometimes exasperating and full as
often of no consequence at all when they
transpired, begin to rise above
the dead level of monotonous
reminiscences and become shapely landmarks
in one's memory. The fog-whistle, smothered among a million of
trifling
sounds, is not noticed a block away, in
the city, but the sailor hears it
far at sea, whither none of those
thousands of trifling sounds can reach.
When one is in Rome, all the domes are
alike; but when he has gone away
twelve miles, the city fades utterly
from sight and leaves St. Peter's
swelling above the level plain like an
anchored balloon. When one is
traveling in Europe, the daily incidents
seem all alike; but when he has
placed them all two months and two
thousand miles behind him, those that
were worthy of being remembered are
prominent, and those that were really
insignificant have vanished. This disposition to smoke, and idle and
talk, was not well. It was plain that it must not be allowed to
gain
ground.
A diversion must be tried, or demoralization would ensue. The
Jordan, Jericho and the Dead Sea were
suggested. The remainder of
Jerusalem must be left unvisited, for a
little while. The journey was
approved at once. New life stirred in every pulse. In the saddle--
abroad on the plains--sleeping in beds
bounded only by the horizon: fancy
was at work with these things in a
moment.--It was painful to note how
readily these town-bred men had taken to
the free life of the camp and
the desert The nomadic instinct is a
human instinct; it was born with
Adam and transmitted through the
patriarchs, and after thirty centuries
of steady effort, civilization has not
educated it entirely out of us
yet.
It has a charm which, once tasted, a man will yearn to taste again.
The nomadic instinct can not be educated
out of an Indian at all.
The Jordan journey being approved, our
dragoman was notified.
At nine in the morning the caravan was
before the hotel door and we were
at breakfast. There was a commotion about the place. Rumors of war and
bloodshed were flying every where. The lawless Bedouins in the Valley of
the Jordan and the deserts down by the
Dead Sea were up in arms, and were
going to destroy all comers. They had had a battle with a troop of
Turkish cavalry and defeated them;
several men killed. They had shut up
the inhabitants of a village and a
Turkish garrison in an old fort near
Jericho, and were besieging them. They had marched upon a camp of our
excursionists by the Jordan, and the
pilgrims only saved their lives by
stealing away and flying to Jerusalem
under whip and spur in the darkness
of the night. Another of our parties had been fired on from
an ambush
and then attacked in the open day. Shots were fired on both sides.
Fortunately there was no bloodshed. We spoke with the very pilgrim who
had fired one of the shots, and learned
from his own lips how, in this
imminent deadly peril, only the cool
courage of the pilgrims, their
strength of numbers and imposing display
of war material, had saved them
from utter destruction. It was reported that the Consul had requested
that no more of our pilgrims should go
to the Jordan while this state of
things lasted; and further, that he was
unwilling that any more should
go, at least without an unusually strong
military guard. Here was
trouble.
But with the horses at the door and every body aware of what
they were there for, what would you have
done? Acknowledged that you
were afraid, and backed shamefully
out? Hardly. It would not be human
nature, where there were so many
women. You would have done as we did:
said you were not afraid of a million
Bedouins--and made your will and
proposed quietly to yourself to take up
an unostentatious position in the
rear of the procession.
I think we must all have determined upon
the same line of tactics, for it
did seem as if we never would get to
Jericho. I had a notoriously slow
horse, but somehow I could not keep him
in the rear, to save my neck.
He was forever turning up in the
lead. In such cases I trembled a
little, and got down to fix my
saddle. But it was not of any use. The
others all got down to fix their
saddles, too. I never saw such a time
with saddles. It was the first time any of them had got out
of order in
three weeks, and now they had all broken
down at once. I tried walking,
for exercise--I had not had enough in
Jerusalem searching for holy
places.
But it was a failure. The whole
mob were suffering for
exercise, and it was not fifteen minutes
till they were all on foot and I
had the lead again. It was very discouraging.
This was all after we got beyond
Bethany. We stopped at the village of
Bethany, an hour out from
Jerusalem. They showed us the tomb of
Lazarus.
I had rather live in it than in any
house in the town. And they showed
us also a large "Fountain of
Lazarus," and in the centre of the village
the ancient dwelling of Lazarus. Lazarus appears to have been a man of
property. The legends of the Sunday Schools do him
great injustice; they
give one the impression that he was
poor. It is because they get him
confused with that Lazarus who had no
merit but his virtue, and virtue
never has been as respectable as
money. The house of Lazarus is a three-
story edifice, of stone masonry, but the
accumulated rubbish of ages has
buried all of it but the upper
story. We took candles and descended to
the dismal cell-like chambers where
Jesus sat at meat with Martha and
Mary, and conversed with them about
their brother. We could not but look
upon these old dingy apartments with a
more than common interest.
We had had a glimpse, from a mountain
top, of the Dead Sea, lying like a
blue shield in the plain of the Jordan,
and now we were marching down a
close, flaming, rugged, desolate defile,
where no living creature could
enjoy life, except, perhaps, a
salamander. It was such a dreary,
repulsive, horrible solitude! It was the "wilderness" where John
preached, with camel's hair about his
loins--raiment enough--but he never
could have got his locusts and wild
honey here. We were moping along
down through this dreadful place, every
man in the rear. Our guards--two
gorgeous young Arab sheiks, with cargoes
of swords, guns, pistols and
daggers on board--were loafing ahead.
"Bedouins!"
Every man shrunk up and disappeared in
his clothes like a mud-turtle.
My first impulse was to dash forward and
destroy the Bedouins. My second
was to dash to the rear to see if there
were any coming in that
direction. I acted on the latter impulse. So did all the others. If
any Bedouins had approached us, then,
from that point of the compass,
they would have paid dearly for their
rashness. We all remarked that,
afterwards. There would have been scenes of riot and
bloodshed there
that no pen could describe. I know that, because each man told what he
would have done, individually; and such
a medley of strange and unheard-
of inventions of cruelty you could not
conceive of. One man said he had
calmly made up his mind to perish where
he stood, if need be, but never
yield an inch; he was going to wait,
with deadly patience, till he could
count the stripes upon the first
Bedouin's jacket, and then count them
and let him have it. Another was going to sit still till the first
lance
reached within an inch of his breast,
and then dodge it and seize it. I
forbear to tell what he was going to do
to that Bedouin that owned it.
It makes my blood run cold to think of
it. Another was going to scalp
such Bedouins as fell to his share, and
take his bald-headed sons of the
desert home with him alive for
trophies. But the wild-eyed pilgrim
rhapsodist was silent. His orbs gleamed with a deadly light, but his
lips moved not. Anxiety grew, and he was questioned. If he had got a
Bedouin, what would he have done with
him--shot him? He smiled a smile
of grim contempt and shook his
head. Would he have stabbed him? Another
shake.
Would he have quartered him--flayed him?
More shakes. Oh!
horror what would he have done?
"Eat him!"
Such was the awful sentence that
thundered from his lips. What was
grammar to a desperado like that? I was glad in my heart that I had been
spared these scenes of malignant
carnage. No Bedouins attacked our
terrible rear. And none attacked the front. The new-comers were only a
reinforcement of cadaverous Arabs, in
shirts and bare legs, sent far
ahead of us to brandish rusty guns, and
shout and brag, and carry on like
lunatics, and thus scare away all bands
of marauding Bedouins that might
lurk about our path. What a shame it is that armed white Christians
must
travel under guard of vermin like this
as a protection against the
prowling vagabonds of the desert--those
sanguinary outlaws who are always
going to do something desperate, but
never do it. I may as well mention
here that on our whole trip we saw no
Bedouins, and had no more use for
an Arab guard than we could have had for
patent leather boots and white
kid gloves. The Bedouins that attacked the other parties
of pilgrims so
fiercely were provided for the occasion
by the Arab guards of those
parties, and shipped from Jerusalem for
temporary service as Bedouins.
They met together in full view of the
pilgrims, after the battle, and
took lunch, divided the bucksheesh
extorted in the season of danger, and
then accompanied the cavalcade home to
the city! The nuisance of an Arab
guard is one which is created by the
Sheiks and the Bedouins together,
for mutual profit, it is said, and no
doubt there is a good deal of truth
in it.
We visited the fountain the prophet
Elisha sweetened (it is sweet yet,)
where he remained some time and was fed
by the ravens.
Ancient Jericho is not very picturesque
as a ruin. When Joshua marched
around it seven times, some three
thousand years ago, and blew it down
with his trumpet, he did the work so
well and so completely that he
hardly left enough of the city to cast a
shadow. The curse pronounced
against the rebuilding of it, has never
been removed. One King, holding
the curse in light estimation, made the
attempt, but was stricken sorely
for his presumption. Its site will always remain unoccupied; and
yet it
is one of the very best locations for a
town we have seen in all
Palestine.
At two in the morning they routed us out
of bed--another piece of
unwarranted cruelty--another stupid
effort of our dragoman to get ahead
of a rival. It was not two hours to the Jordan. However, we were
dressed and under way before any one
thought of looking to see what time
it was, and so we drowsed on through the
chill night air and dreamed of
camp fires, warm beds, and other
comfortable things.
There was no conversation. People do not talk when they are cold, and
wretched, and sleepy. We nodded in the saddle, at times, and woke
up
with a start to find that the procession
had disappeared in the gloom.
Then there was energy and attention to
business until its dusky outlines
came in sight again. Occasionally the order was passed in a low
voice
down the line: "Close up--close
up! Bedouins lurk here, every
where!"
What an exquisite shudder it sent
shivering along one's spine!
We reached the famous river before four
o'clock, and the night was so
black that we could have ridden into it
without seeing it. Some of us
were in an unhappy frame of mind. We waited and waited for daylight, but
it did not come. Finally we went away in the dark and slept an
hour on
the ground, in the bushes, and caught
cold. It was a costly nap, on that
account, but otherwise it was a paying
investment because it brought
unconsciousness of the dreary minutes
and put us in a somewhat fitter
mood for a first glimpse of the sacred
river.
With the first suspicion of dawn, every
pilgrim took off his clothes and
waded into the dark torrent, singing:
"On Jordan's stormy banks I
stand,
And cast a wistful eye
To Canaan's fair and happy land,
Where my possessions lie."
But they did not sing long. The water was so fearfully cold that they
were obliged to stop singing and scamper
out again. Then they stood on
the bank shivering, and so chagrined and
so grieved, that they merited
holiest compassion. Because another dream, another cherished
hope, had
failed.
They had promised themselves all along that they would cross the
Jordan where the Israelites crossed it
when they entered Canaan from
their long pilgrimage in the
desert. They would cross where the
twelve
stones were placed in memory of that
great event. While they did it they
would picture to themselves that vast
army of pilgrims marching through
the cloven waters, bearing the hallowed
ark of the covenant and shouting
hosannahs, and singing songs of
thanksgiving and praise. Each had
promised himself that he would be the
first to cross. They were at the
goal of their hopes at last, but the
current was too swift, the water was
too cold!
It was then that Jack did them a
service. With that engaging
recklessness of consequences which is
natural to youth, and so proper and
so seemly, as well, he went and led the
way across the Jordan, and all
was happiness again. Every individual waded over, then, and stood
upon
the further bank. The water was not quite breast deep, any
where. If it
had been more, we could hardly have
accomplished the feat, for the strong
current would have swept us down the
stream, and we would have been
exhausted and drowned before reaching a
place where we could make a
landing.
The main object compassed, the drooping, miserable party sat
down to wait for the sun again, for all
wanted to see the water as well
as feel it. But it was too cold a pastime. Some cans were filled from
the holy river, some canes cut from its
banks, and then we mounted and
rode reluctantly away to keep from
freezing to death. So we saw the
Jordan very dimly. The thickets of bushes that bordered its
banks threw
their shadows across its shallow,
turbulent waters ("stormy," the hymn
makes them, which is rather a
complimentary stretch of fancy,) and we
could not judge of the width of the
stream by the eye. We knew by our
wading experience, however, that many
streets in America are double as
wide as the Jordan.
Daylight came, soon after we got under
way, and in the course of an hour
or two we reached the Dead Sea. Nothing grows in the flat, burning
desert around it but weeds and the Dead
Sea apple the poets say is
beautiful to the eye, but crumbles to
ashes and dust when you break it.
Such as we found were not handsome, but
they were bitter to the taste.
They yielded no dust. It was because they were not ripe, perhaps.
The desert and the barren hills gleam
painfully in the sun, around the
Dead Sea, and there is no pleasant thing
or living creature upon it or
about its borders to cheer the eye. It is a scorching, arid, repulsive
solitude. A silence broods over the scene that is
depressing to the
spirits.
It makes one think of funerals and death.
The Dead Sea is small. Its waters are very clear, and it has a
pebbly
bottom and is shallow for some distance
out from the shores. It yields
quantities of asphaltum; fragments of it
lie all about its banks; this
stuff gives the place something of an
unpleasant smell.
All our reading had taught us to expect
that the first plunge into the
Dead Sea would be attended with
distressing results--our bodies would
feel as if they were suddenly pierced by
millions of red-hot needles; the
dreadful smarting would continue for
hours; we might even look to be
blistered from head to foot, and suffer
miserably for many days. We were
disappointed. Our eight sprang in at the same time that
another party of
pilgrims did, and nobody screamed once. None of them ever did complain
of any thing more than a slight pricking
sensation in places where their
skin was abraded, and then only for a
short time. My face smarted for a
couple of hours, but it was partly
because I got it badly sun-burned
while I was bathing, and staid in so
long that it became plastered over
with salt.
No, the water did not blister us; it did
not cover us with a slimy ooze
and confer upon us an atrocious
fragrance; it was not very slimy; and I
could not discover that we smelt really
any worse than we have always
smelt since we have been in
Palestine. It was only a different kind
of
smell, but not conspicuous on that
account, because we have a great deal
of variety in that respect. We didn't smell, there on the Jordan, the
same as we do in Jerusalem; and we don't
smell in Jerusalem just as we
did in Nazareth, or Tiberias, or Cesarea
Philippi, or any of those other
ruinous ancient towns in Galilee. No, we change all the time, and
generally for the worse. We do our own washing.
It was a funny bath. We could not sink. One could stretch himself at
full length on his back, with his arms
on his breast, and all of his body
above a line drawn from the corner of
his jaw past the middle of his
side, the middle of his leg and through
his ancle bone, would remain out
of water. He could lift his head clear out, if he
chose. No position
can be retained long; you lose your
balance and whirl over, first on your
back and then on your face, and so
on. You can lie comfortably, on your
back, with your head out, and your legs
out from your knees down, by
steadying yourself with your hands. You can sit, with your knees drawn
up to your chin and your arms clasped
around them, but you are bound to
turn over presently, because you are
top-heavy in that position. You can
stand up straight in water that is over
your head, and from the middle of
your breast upward you will not be
wet. But you can not remain so. The
water will soon float your feet to the
surface. You can not swim on your
back and make any progress of any
consequence, because your feet stick
away above the surface, and there is
nothing to propel yourself with but
your heels. If you swim on your face, you kick up the
water like a
stern-wheel boat. You make no headway. A horse is so top-heavy that he
can neither swim nor stand up in the
Dead Sea. He turns over on his side
at once.
Some of us bathed for more than an hour, and then came out
coated with salt till we shone like
icicles. We scrubbed it off with a
coarse towel and rode off with a
splendid brand-new smell, though it was
one which was not any more disagreeable
than those we have been for
several weeks enjoying. It was the variegated villainy and novelty of
it
that charmed us. Salt crystals glitter in the sun about the
shores of
the lake. In places they coat the ground like a
brilliant crust of ice.
When I was a boy I somehow got the
impression that the river Jordan was
four thousand miles long and thirty-five
miles wide. It is only ninety
miles long, and so crooked that a man
does not know which side of it he
is on half the time. In going ninety miles it does not get over
more
than fifty miles of ground. It is not any wider than Broadway in New
York.
There is the Sea of Galilee and this
Dead Sea--neither of them twenty
miles long or thirteen wide. And yet when I was in Sunday School I
thought they were sixty thousand miles
in diameter.
Travel and experience mar the grandest
pictures and rob us of the most
cherished traditions of our
boyhood. Well, let them go. I have already
seen the Empire of King Solomon diminish
to the size of the State of
Pennsylvania; I suppose I can bear the
reduction of the seas and the
river.
We looked every where, as we passed
along, but never saw grain or crystal
of Lot's wife. It was a great disappointment. For many and many a year
we had known her sad story, and taken
that interest in her which
misfortune always inspires. But she was gone. Her picturesque form no
longer looms above the desert of the
Dead Sea to remind the tourist of
the doom that fell upon the lost cities.
I can not describe the hideous
afternoon's ride from the Dead Sea to Mars
Saba.
It oppresses me yet, to think of it.
The sun so pelted us that
the tears ran down our cheeks once or
twice. The ghastly, treeless,
grassless, breathless canons smothered
us as if we had been in an oven.
The sun had positive weight to it, I
think. Not a man could sit erect
under it. All drooped low in the saddles. John preached in this
"Wilderness!" It must have been exhausting work. What a very heaven the
messy towers and ramparts of vast Mars
Saba looked to us when we caught a
first glimpse of them!
We staid at this great convent all
night, guests of the hospitable
priests.
Mars Saba, perched upon a crag, a human nest stock high up
against a perpendicular mountain wall,
is a world of grand masonry that
rises, terrace upon terrace away above
your head, like the terraced and
retreating colonnades one sees in
fanciful pictures of Belshazzar's Feast
and the palaces of the ancient Pharaohs. No other human dwelling is
near.
It was founded many ages ago by a holy recluse who lived at first
in a cave in the rock--a cave which is
inclosed in the convent walls,
now, and was reverently shown to us by
the priests. This recluse, by his
rigorous torturing of his flesh, his
diet of bread and water, his utter
withdrawal from all society and from the
vanities of the world, and his
constant prayer and saintly
contemplation of a skull, inspired an
emulation that brought about him many
disciples. The precipice on the
opposite side of the canyon is well
perforated with the small holes they
dug in the rock to live in. The present occupants of Mars Saba, about
seventy in number, are all hermits. They wear a coarse robe, an ugly,
brimless stove-pipe of a hat, and go
without shoes. They eat nothing
whatever but bread and salt; they drink
nothing but water. As long as
they live they can never go outside the
walls, or look upon a woman--for
no woman is permitted to enter Mars
Saba, upon any pretext whatsoever.
Some of those men have been shut up
there for thirty years. In all that
dreary time they have not heard the
laughter of a child or the blessed
voice of a woman; they have seen no
human tears, no human smiles; they
have known no human joys, no wholesome
human sorrows. In their hearts
are no memories of the past, in their
brains no dreams of the future.
All that is lovable, beautiful, worthy,
they have put far away from them;
against all things that are pleasant to
look upon, and all sounds that
are music to the ear, they have barred
their massive doors and reared
their relentless walls of stone
forever. They have banished the tender
grace of life and left only the sapped
and skinny mockery. Their lips
are lips that never kiss and never sing;
their hearts are hearts that
never hate and never love; their breasts
are breasts that never swell
with the sentiment, "I have a
country and a flag." They are dead
men who
walk.
I set down these first thoughts because
they are natural--not because
they are just or because it is right to
set them down. It is easy for
book-makers to say "I thought so
and so as I looked upon such and such a
scene"--when the truth is, they
thought all those fine things afterwards.
One's first thought is not likely to be
strictly accurate, yet it is no
crime to think it and none to write it
down, subject to modification by
later experience. These hermits are dead men, in several
respects, but
not in all; and it is not proper, that,
thinking ill of them at first, I
should go on doing so, or, speaking ill
of them I should reiterate the
words and stick to them. No, they treated us too kindly for that. There
is something human about them
somewhere. They knew we were foreigners
and Protestants, and not likely to feel
admiration or much friendliness
toward them. But their large charity was above considering
such things.
They simply saw in us men who were
hungry, and thirsty, and tired, and
that was sufficient. They opened their doors and gave us
welcome. They
asked no questions, and they made no
self-righteous display of their
hospitality. They fished for no compliments. They moved quietly about,
setting the table for us, making the
beds, and bringing water to wash in,
and paid no heed when we said it was
wrong for them to do that when we
had men whose business it was to perform
such offices. We fared most
comfortably, and sat late at
dinner. We walked all over the building
with the hermits afterward, and then sat
on the lofty battlements and
smoked while we enjoyed the cool air,
the wild scenery and the sunset.
One or two chose cosy bed-rooms to sleep
in, but the nomadic instinct
prompted the rest to sleep on the broad
divan that extended around the
great hall, because it seemed like
sleeping out of doors, and so was more
cheery and inviting. It was a royal rest we had.
When we got up to breakfast in the
morning, we were new men. For all
this hospitality no strict charge was
made. We could give something if
we chose; we need give nothing, if we
were poor or if we were stingy.
The pauper and the miser are as free as
any in the Catholic Convents of
Palestine. I have been educated to enmity toward every
thing that is
Catholic, and sometimes, in consequence
of this, I find it much easier to
discover Catholic faults than Catholic merits. But there is one thing I
feel no disposition to overlook, and no
disposition to forget: and that
is, the honest gratitude I and all
pilgrims owe, to the Convent Fathers
in Palestine. Their doors are always open, and there is
always a welcome
for any worthy man who comes, whether he
comes in rags or clad in purple.
The Catholic Convents are a priceless
blessing to the poor. A pilgrim
without money, whether he be a
Protestant or a Catholic, can travel the
length and breadth of Palestine, and in
the midst of her desert wastes
find wholesome food and a clean bed
every night, in these buildings.
Pilgrims in better circumstances are
often stricken down by the sun and
the fevers of the country, and then
their saving refuge is the Convent.
Without these hospitable retreats,
travel in Palestine would be a
pleasure which none but the strongest
men could dare to undertake. Our
party, pilgrims and all, will always be
ready and always willing, to
touch glasses and drink health,
prosperity and long life to the Convent
Fathers of Palestine.
So, rested and refreshed, we fell into
line and filed away over the
barren mountains of Judea, and along
rocky ridges and through sterile
gorges, where eternal silence and
solitude reigned. Even the scattering
groups of armed shepherds we met the
afternoon before, tending their
flocks of long-haired goats, were
wanting here. We saw but two living
creatures. They were gazelles, of "soft-eyed"
notoriety. They looked
like very young kids, but they
annihilated distance like an express
train.
I have not seen animals that moved faster, unless I might say it
of the antelopes of our own great
plains.
At nine or ten in the morning we reached
the Plain of the Shepherds, and
stood in a walled garden of olives where
the shepherds were watching
their flocks by night, eighteen
centuries ago, when the multitude of
angels brought them the tidings that the
Saviour was born. A quarter of
a mile away was Bethlehem of Judea, and
the pilgrims took some of the
stone wall and hurried on.
The Plain of the Shepherds is a desert,
paved with loose stones, void of
vegetation, glaring in the fierce
sun. Only the music of the angels it
knew once could charm its shrubs and
flowers to life again and restore
its vanished beauty. No less potent enchantment could avail to
work this
miracle.
In the huge Church of the Nativity, in
Bethlehem, built fifteen hundred
years ago by the inveterate St. Helena,
they took us below ground, and
into a grotto cut in the living
rock. This was the "manger"
where Christ
was born. A silver star set in the floor bears a Latin
inscription to
that effect. It is polished with the kisses of many
generations of
worshiping pilgrims. The grotto was tricked out in the usual
tasteless
style observable in all the holy places
of Palestine. As in the Church
of the Holy Sepulchre, envy and
uncharitableness were apparent here. The
priests and the members of the Greek and
Latin churches can not come by
the same corridor to kneel in the sacred
birthplace of the Redeemer, but
are compelled to approach and retire by
different avenues, lest they
quarrel and fight on this holiest ground
on earth.
I have no "meditations,"
suggested by this spot where the very first
"Merry Christmas!" was uttered
in all the world, and from whence the
friend of my childhood, Santa Claus,
departed on his first journey, to
gladden and continue to gladden roaring
firesides on wintry mornings in
many a distant land forever and
forever. I touch, with reverent finger,
the actual spot where the infant Jesus
lay, but I think--nothing.
You can not think in this place any more
than you can in any other in
Palestine that would be likely to
inspire reflection. Beggars, cripples
and monks compass you about, and make
you think only of bucksheesh when
you would rather think of something more
in keeping with the character of
the spot.
I was glad to get away, and glad when we
had walked through the grottoes
where Eusebius wrote, and Jerome fasted,
and Joseph prepared for the
flight into Egypt, and the dozen other
distinguished grottoes, and knew
we were done. The Church of the Nativity is almost as well
packed with
exceeding holy places as the Church of
the Holy Sepulchre itself. They
even have in it a grotto wherein twenty
thousand children were
slaughtered by Herod when he was seeking
the life of the infant Saviour.
We went to the Milk Grotto, of course--a
cavern where Mary hid herself
for a while before the flight into
Egypt. Its walls were black before
she entered, but in suckling the Child,
a drop of her milk fell upon the
floor and instantly changed the darkness
of the walls to its own snowy
hue.
We took many little fragments of stone from here, because it is
well known in all the East that a barren
woman hath need only to touch
her lips to one of these and her failing
will depart from her. We took
many specimens, to the end that we might
confer happiness upon certain
households that we wot of.
We got away from Bethlehem and its
troops of beggars and relic-peddlers
in the afternoon, and after spending
some little time at Rachel's tomb,
hurried to Jerusalem as fast as
possible. I never was so glad to get
home again before. I never have enjoyed rest as I have enjoyed
it during
these last few hours. The journey to the Dead Sea, the Jordan and
Bethlehem was short, but it was an
exhausting one. Such roasting heat,
such oppressive solitude, and such
dismal desolation can not surely exist
elsewhere on earth. And such fatigue!
The commonest sagacity warns me that I
ought to tell the customary
pleasant lie, and say I tore myself
reluctantly away from every noted
place in Palestine. Every body tells that, but with as little
ostentation as I may, I doubt the word
of every he who tells it. I could
take a dreadful oath that I have never
heard any one of our forty
pilgrims say any thing of the sort, and
they are as worthy and as
sincerely devout as any that come
here. They will say it when they get
home, fast enough, but why should they
not? They do not wish to array
themselves against all the Lamartines
and Grimeses in the world. It does
not stand to reason that men are
reluctant to leave places where the very
life is almost badgered out of them by
importunate swarms of beggars and
peddlers who hang in strings to one's
sleeves and coat-tails and shriek
and shout in his ears and horrify his
vision with the ghastly sores and
malformations they exhibit. One is glad to get away. I have heard
shameless people say they were glad to
get away from Ladies' Festivals
where they were importuned to buy by
bevies of lovely young ladies.
Transform those houris into dusky hags
and ragged savages, and replace
their rounded forms with shrunken and
knotted distortions, their soft
hands with scarred and hideous
deformities, and the persuasive music of
their voices with the discordant din of a
hated language, and then see
how much lingering reluctance to leave
could be mustered. No, it is the
neat thing to say you were reluctant,
and then append the profound
thoughts that "struggled for
utterance," in your brain; but it is the
true thing to say you were not
reluctant, and found it impossible to
think at all--though in good sooth it is
not respectable to say it, and
not poetical, either.
We do not think, in the holy places; we
think in bed, afterwards, when
the glare, and the noise, and the confusion
are gone, and in fancy we
revisit alone, the solemn monuments of
the past, and summon the phantom
pageants of an age that has passed away.
CHAPTER LVI.
We visited all the holy places about
Jerusalem which we had left
unvisited when we journeyed to the
Jordan and then, about three o'clock
one afternoon, we fell into procession
and marched out at the stately
Damascus gate, and the walls of
Jerusalem shut us out forever. We paused
on the summit of a distant hill and took
a final look and made a final
farewell to the venerable city which had
been such a good home to us.
For about four hours we traveled down
hill constantly. We followed a
narrow bridle-path which traversed the
beds of the mountain gorges, and
when we could we got out of the way of
the long trains of laden camels
and asses, and when we could not we
suffered the misery of being mashed
up against perpendicular walls of rock
and having our legs bruised by the
passing freight. Jack was caught two or three times, and Dan
and Moult
as often. One horse had a heavy fall on the slippery
rocks, and the
others had narrow escapes. However, this was as good a road as we had
found in Palestine, and possibly even
the best, and so there was not much
grumbling.
Sometimes, in the glens, we came upon
luxuriant orchards of figs,
apricots, pomegranates, and such things,
but oftener the scenery was
rugged, mountainous, verdureless and
forbidding. Here and there, towers
were perched high up on acclivities
which seemed almost inaccessible.
This fashion is as old as Palestine
itself and was adopted in ancient
times for security against enemies.
We crossed the brook which furnished
David the stone that killed Goliah,
and no doubt we looked upon the very
ground whereon that noted battle was
fought.
We passed by a picturesque old gothic ruin whose stone pavements
had rung to the armed heels of many a
valorous Crusader, and we rode
through a piece of country which we were
told once knew Samson as a
citizen.
We staid all night with the good monks
at the convent of Ramleh, and in
the morning got up and galloped the
horses a good part of the distance
from there to Jaffa, or Joppa, for the
plain was as level as a floor and
free from stones, and besides this was
our last march in Holy Land.
These two or three hours finished, we
and the tired horses could have
rest and sleep as long as we wanted
it. This was the plain of which
Joshua spoke when he said, "Sun,
stand thou still on Gibeon, and thou
moon in the valley of Ajalon." As we drew near to Jaffa, the boys
spurred up the horses and indulged in
the excitement of an actual race--
an experience we had hardly had since we
raced on donkeys in the Azores
islands.
We came finally to the noble grove of
orange-trees in which the Oriental
city of Jaffa lies buried; we passed
through the walls, and rode again
down narrow streets and among swarms of
animated rags, and saw other
sights and had other experiences we had
long been familiar with. We
dismounted, for the last time, and out
in the offing, riding at anchor,
we saw the ship! I put an exclamation point there because we
felt one
when we saw the vessel. The long pilgrimage was ended, and somehow we
seemed to feel glad of it.
[For description of Jaffa, see Universal
Gazetteer.] Simon the Tanner
formerly lived here. We went to his house. All the pilgrims visit Simon
the Tanner's house. Peter saw the vision of the beasts let down
in a
sheet when he lay upon the roof of Simon
the Tanner's house. It was from
Jaffa that Jonah sailed when he was told
to go and prophesy against
Nineveh, and no doubt it was not far
from the town that the whale threw
him up when he discovered that he had no
ticket. Jonah was disobedient,
and of a fault-finding, complaining
disposition, and deserves to be
lightly spoken of, almost. The timbers used in the construction of
Solomon's Temple were floated to Jaffa
in rafts, and the narrow opening
in the reef through which they passed to
the shore is not an inch wider
or a shade less dangerous to navigate
than it was then. Such is the
sleepy nature of the population
Palestine's only good seaport has now and
always had. Jaffa has a history and a stirring one. It will not be
discovered any where in this book. If the reader will call at the
circulating library and mention my name,
he will be furnished with books
which will afford him the fullest
information concerning Jaffa.
So ends the pilgrimage. We ought to be glad that we did not make it
for
the purpose of feasting our eyes upon
fascinating aspects of nature, for
we should have been disappointed--at
least at this season of the year. A
writer in "Life in the Holy
Land" observes:
"Monotonous and uninviting as much of the Holy Land will appear to
persons accustomed to the almost constant verdure of flowers, ample
streams and varied surface of our own country, we must remember that
its aspect to the Israelites after the weary march of forty years
through the desert must have been very different."
Which all of us will freely grant. But it truly is "monotonous and
uninviting," and there is no
sufficient reason for describing it as being
otherwise.
Of all the lands there are for dismal
scenery, I think Palestine must be
the prince. The hills are barren, they are dull of color,
they are
unpicturesque in shape. The valleys are unsightly deserts fringed
with a
feeble vegetation that has an expression
about it of being sorrowful and
despondent. The Dead Sea and the Sea of Galilee sleep in
the midst of a
vast stretch of hill and plain wherein
the eye rests upon no pleasant
tint, no striking object, no soft
picture dreaming in a purple haze or
mottled with the shadows of the
clouds. Every outline is harsh, every
feature is distinct, there is no
perspective--distance works no
enchantment here. It is a hopeless, dreary, heart-broken land.
Small shreds and patches of it must be
very beautiful in the full flush
of spring, however, and all the more
beautiful by contrast with the far-
reaching desolation that surrounds them
on every side. I would like much
to see the fringes of the Jordan in
spring-time, and Shechem, Esdraelon,
Ajalon and the borders of Galilee--but
even then these spots would seem
mere toy gardens set at wide intervals
in the waste of a limitless
desolation.
Palestine sits in sackcloth and
ashes. Over it broods the spell of a
curse that has withered its fields and
fettered its energies. Where
Sodom and Gomorrah reared their domes
and towers, that solemn sea now
floods the plain, in whose bitter waters
no living thing exists--over
whose waveless surface the blistering
air hangs motionless and dead--
about whose borders nothing grows but
weeds, and scattering tufts of
cane, and that treacherous fruit that
promises refreshment to parching
lips, but turns to ashes at the
touch. Nazareth is forlorn; about that
ford of Jordan where the hosts of Israel
entered the Promised Land with
songs of rejoicing, one finds only a
squalid camp of fantastic Bedouins
of the desert; Jericho the accursed,
lies a moldering ruin, to-day, even
as Joshua's miracle left it more than
three thousand years ago; Bethlehem
and Bethany, in their poverty and their
humiliation, have nothing about
them now to remind one that they once
knew the high honor of the
Saviour's presence; the hallowed spot
where the shepherds watched their
flocks by night, and where the angels
sang Peace on earth, good will to
men, is untenanted by any living
creature, and unblessed by any feature
that is pleasant to the eye. Renowned Jerusalem itself, the stateliest
name in history, has lost all its
ancient grandeur, and is become a
pauper village; the riches of Solomon
are no longer there to compel the
admiration of visiting Oriental queens;
the wonderful temple which was
the pride and the glory of Israel, is
gone, and the Ottoman crescent is
lifted above the spot where, on that
most memorable day in the annals of
the world, they reared the Holy
Cross. The noted Sea of Galilee, where
Roman fleets once rode at anchor and the
disciples of the Saviour sailed
in their ships, was long ago deserted by
the devotees of war and
commerce, and its borders are a silent
wilderness; Capernaum is a
shapeless ruin; Magdala is the home of
beggared Arabs; Bethsaida and
Chorazin have vanished from the earth,
and the "desert places" round
about them where thousands of men once
listened to the Saviour's voice
and ate the miraculous bread, sleep in
the hush of a solitude that is
inhabited only by birds of prey and
skulking foxes.
Palestine is desolate and unlovely. And why should it be otherwise? Can
the curse of the Deity beautify a land?
tradition--it is dream-land.