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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land, by Henry Van
+Dyke
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land
+       Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit
+
+
+Author: Henry Van Dyke
+
+
+
+Release Date: July 4, 2009  [eBook #29314]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OUT-OF-DOORS IN THE HOLY LAND***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Juliet Sutherland, Marius Borror, and the Project
+Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)
+
+
+
+Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
+      file which includes the original illustrations.
+      See 29314-h.htm or 29314-h.zip:
+      (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/29314/29314-h/29314-h.htm)
+      or
+      (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/29314/29314-h.zip)
+
+
+Transcriber's note:
+
+      Text enclosed between plus signs was in bold face in the
+      original (example: +bold+).
+
+      The oe-ligature is represented by [oe].
+
+      A few typographical errors have been corrected; they are
+      listed at the end of the text.
+
+
+
+
+
+OUT-OF-DOORS IN THE HOLY LAND
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+                       BOOKS BY HENRY VAN DYKE
+
+   PUBLISHED BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+
+   +THE RULING PASSION.+ Illustrated in color.      $1.50
+
+   +THE BLUE FLOWER.+ Illustrated in color.         $1.50
+
+          *       *       *       *       *
+
+   +OUTDOORS IN THE HOLY LAND.+ Illustrated in
+   color                                      _net_ $1.50
+
+   +DAYS OFF.+ Illustrated in color.                $1.50
+
+   +LITTLE RIVERS.+ Illustrated in color.           $1.50
+
+   +FISHERMAN'S LUCK.+ Illustrated in color.        $1.50
+
+          *       *       *       *       *
+
+   +THE BUILDERS, AND OTHER POEMS.+                 $1.00
+
+   +MUSIC, AND OTHER POEMS.+                  _net_ $1.00
+
+   +THE TOILING OF FELIX, AND OTHER POEMS.+         $1.00
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+[Illustration: The Gate of David, Jerusalem.]
+
+
+OUT-OF-DOORS IN THE HOLY LAND
+
+Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit
+
+by
+
+HENRY VAN DYKE
+
+Illustrated
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+New York
+Charles Scribner's Sons
+MDCCCCVIII
+
+Copyright, 1908, by Charles Scribner's Sons
+Published November, 1908
+
+
+
+                               To
+
+                      HOWARD CROSBY BUTLER
+
+                        MASTER OF MERWICK
+
+                   PROFESSOR OF ART AND ARCHÆOLOGY
+
+                  WHO WAS A FRIEND TO THIS JOURNEY
+
+                      THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED
+
+                          BY HIS FRIEND
+
+                           THE AUTHOR
+
+
+
+
+                            PREFACE
+
+
+For a long time, in the hopefulness and confidence of youth, I dreamed
+of going to Palestine. But that dream was denied, for want of money and
+leisure.
+
+Then, for a long time, in the hardening strain of early manhood, I was
+afraid to go to Palestine, lest the journey should prove a
+disenchantment, and some of my religious beliefs be rudely shaken,
+perhaps destroyed. But that fear was removed by a little voyage to the
+gates of death, where it was made clear to me that no belief is worth
+keeping unless it can bear the touch of reality.
+
+In that year of pain and sorrow, through a full surrender to the Divine
+Will, the hopefulness and confidence of youth came back to me. Since
+then it has been possible once more to wake in the morning with the
+feeling that the day might bring something new and wonderful and
+welcome, and to travel into the future with a whole and happy heart.
+
+This is what I call growing younger; though the years increase, yet the
+burden of them is lessened, and the fear that life will some day lead
+into an empty prison-house has been cast out by the incoming of the
+Perfect Love.
+
+So it came to pass that when a friend offered me, at last, the
+opportunity of going to Palestine if I would give him my impressions of
+travel for his magazine, I was glad to go. Partly because there was a
+piece of work,--a drama whose scene lies in Damascus and among the
+mountains of Samaria,--that I wanted to finish there; partly because of
+the expectancy that on such a journey any of the days might indeed bring
+something new and wonderful and welcome; but most of all because I
+greatly desired to live for a little while in the country of Jesus,
+hoping to learn more of the meaning of His life in the land where it was
+spent, and lost, and forever saved.
+
+Here, then, you have the history of this little book, reader: and if it
+pleases you to look further into its pages, you can see for yourself how
+far my dreams and hopes were realised.
+
+It is the record of a long journey in the spirit and a short voyage in
+the body. If you find here impressions that are lighter, mingled with
+those that are deeper, that is because life itself is really woven of
+such contrasted threads. Even on a pilgrimage small adventures happen.
+Of the elders of Israel on Sinai it is written, "They saw God and did
+eat and drink"; and the Apostle Paul was not too much engrossed with his
+mission to send for the cloak and books and parchments that he left
+behind at Troas.
+
+If what you read here makes you wish to go to the Holy Land, I shall be
+glad; and if you go in the right way, you surely will not be
+disappointed.
+
+But there are two things in the book which I would not have you miss.
+
+The first is the new conviction,--new at least to me,--that Christianity
+is an out-of-doors religion. From the birth in the grotto at Bethlehem
+(where Joseph and Mary took refuge because there was no room for them in
+the inn) to the crowning death on the hill of Calvary outside the city
+wall, all of its important events took place out-of-doors. Except the
+discourse in the upper chamber at Jerusalem, all of its great words,
+from the sermon on the mount to the last commission to the disciples,
+were spoken in the open air. How shall we understand it unless we carry
+it under the free sky and interpret it in the companionship of nature?
+
+The second thing that I would have you find here is the deepened sense
+that Jesus Himself is the great, the imperishable miracle. His words are
+spirit and life. His character is the revelation of the Perfect Love.
+This was the something new and wonderful and welcome that came to me in
+Palestine: a simpler, clearer, surer view of the human life of God.
+
+                                                   HENRY VAN DYKE.
+
+Avalon,
+June 10, 1908.
+
+
+
+
+                        CONTENTS
+
+
+   I. _Travellers' Joy_                          1
+
+  II. _Going up to Jerusalem_                   23
+
+ III. _The Gates of Zion_                       45
+
+  IV. _Mizpah and the Mount of Olives_          67
+
+   V. _An Excursion to Bethlehem and Hebron_    83
+
+  VI. _The Temple and the Sepulchre_           105
+
+ VII. _Jericho and Jordan_                     125
+
+VIII. _A Journey to Jerash_                    151
+
+  IX. _The Mountains of Samaria_               191
+
+   X. _Galilee and the Lake_                   217
+
+  XI. _The Springs of Jordan_                  259
+
+ XII. _The Road to Damascus_                   291
+
+
+
+
+                      ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+_The Gate of David, Jerusalem_             Frontispiece
+
+_Jaffa_                               Facing page    14
+_The port where King Solomon landed his cedar beams
+from Lebanon for the building of the Temple_
+
+_The Tall Tower of the Forty Martyrs at Ramleh_      28
+
+_A Street in Jerusalem_                              60
+
+_A Street in Bethlehem_                              86
+
+_The Market-place, Bethlehem_                        90
+
+_Great Monastery of St. George_                     136
+
+_Ruins of Jerash, Looking West_                     184
+  _Propyl[oe]um and Temple terrace_
+
+_The Virgin's Fountain, Nazareth_                   232
+
+_The Approach to Bâniyâs_                           276
+
+_Bridge Over the River Lîtânî_                      282
+
+_A Small Bazaar in Damascus_                        316
+
+
+
+
+                                      I
+
+
+                               TRAVELLERS' JOY
+
+
+I
+
+INVITATION
+
+
+Who would not go to Palestine?
+
+To look upon that little stage where the drama of humanity has centred
+in such unforgetable scenes; to trace the rugged paths and ancient
+highways along which so many heroic and pathetic figures have travelled;
+above all, to see with the eyes as well as with the heart
+
+                 "Those holy fields
+  Over whose acres walked those blessed feet
+  Which, nineteen hundred years ago, were nail'd
+  For our advantage on the bitter cross"--
+
+for the sake of these things who would not travel far and endure many
+hardships?
+
+It is easy to find Palestine. It lies in the south-east corner of the
+Mediterranean coast, where the "sea in the midst of the nations," makes
+a great elbow between Asia Minor and Egypt. A tiny land, about a hundred
+and fifty miles long and sixty miles wide, stretching in a fourfold
+band from the foot of snowy Hermon and the Lebanons to the fulvous crags
+of Sinai: a green strip of fertile plain beside the sea, a blue strip of
+lofty and broken highlands, a gray-and-yellow strip of sunken
+river-valley, a purple strip of high mountains rolling away to the
+Arabian desert. There are a dozen lines of steamships to carry you
+thither; a score of well-equipped agencies to conduct you on what they
+call "a _de luxe_ religious expedition to Palestine."
+
+But how to find the Holy Land--ah, that is another question.
+
+Fierce and mighty nations, hundreds of human tribes, have trampled
+through that coveted corner of the earth, contending for its possession:
+and the fury of their fighting has swept the fields as with fire.
+Temples and palaces have vanished like tents from the hillside. The
+ploughshare of havoc has been driven through the gardens of luxury.
+Cities have risen and crumbled upon the ruins of older cities. Crust
+after crust of pious legend has formed over the deep valleys; and
+tradition has set up its altars "upon every high hill and under every
+green tree." The rival claims of sacred places are fiercely disputed by
+churchmen and scholars. It is a poor prophet that has but one birthplace
+and one tomb.
+
+And now, to complete the confusion, the hurried, nervous, comfort-loving
+spirit of modern curiosity has broken into Palestine, with railways from
+Jaffa to Jerusalem, from Mount Carmel to the Sea of Galilee, from Beirût
+to Damascus,--with macadamized roads to Shechem and Nazareth and
+Tiberias,--with hotels at all the "principal points of interest,"--and
+with every facility for doing Palestine in ten days, without getting
+away from the market-reports, the gossip of the _table d'hôte_, and all
+that queer little complex of distracting habits which we call
+civilization.
+
+But the Holy Land which I desire to see can be found only by escaping
+from these things. I want to get away from them; to return into the long
+past, which is also the hidden present, and to lose myself a little
+there, to the end that I may find myself again. I want to make
+acquaintance with the soul of that land where so much that is strange
+and memorable and for ever beautiful has come to pass: to walk quietly
+and humbly, without much disputation or talk, in fellowship with the
+spirit that haunts those hills and vales, under the influence of that
+deep and lucent sky. I want to feel that ineffable charm which breathes
+from its mountains, meadows and streams: that charm which made the
+children of Israel in the desert long for it as a land flowing with milk
+and honey; and the great Prince Joseph in Egypt require an oath of his
+brethren that they would lay his bones in the quiet vale of Shechem
+where he had fed his father's sheep; and the daughters of Jacob beside
+the rivers of Babylon mingle tears with their music when they remembered
+Zion.
+
+There was something in that land, surely, some personal and indefinable
+spirit of place, which was known and loved by prophet and psalmist, and
+most of all by Him who spread His table on the green grass, and taught
+His disciples while they walked the narrow paths waist-deep in rustling
+wheat, and spoke His messages of love from a little boat rocking on the
+lake, and found His asylum of prayer high on the mountainside, and kept
+His parting-hour with His friends in the moon-silvered quiet of the
+garden of olives. That spirit of place, that soul of the Holy Land, is
+what I fain would meet on my pilgrimage,--for the sake of Him who
+interprets it in love. And I know well where to find it,--out-of-doors.
+
+I will not sleep under a roof in Palestine, but nightly pitch my
+wandering tent beside some fountain, in some grove or garden, on some
+vacant threshing-floor, beneath the Syrian stars. I will not join myself
+to any company of labelled tourists hurrying with much discussion on
+their appointed itinerary, but take into fellowship three tried and
+trusty comrades, that we may enjoy solitude together. I will not seek to
+make any archæological discovery, nor to prove any theological theory,
+but simply to ride through the highlands of Judea, and the valley of
+Jordan, and the mountains of Gilead, and the rich plains of Samaria, and
+the grassy hills of Galilee, looking upon the faces and the ways of the
+common folk, the labours of the husbandman in the field, the vigils of
+the shepherd on the hillside, the games of the children in the
+market-place, and reaping
+
+  "The harvest of a quiet eye
+  That broods and sleeps on his own heart."
+
+Four things, I know, are unchanged amid all the changes that have passed
+over the troubled and bewildered land. The cities have sunken into dust:
+the trees of the forest have fallen: the nations have dissolved. But the
+mountains keep their immutable outline: the liquid stars shine with the
+same light, move on the same pathways: and between the mountains and the
+stars, two other changeless things, frail and imperishable,--the flowers
+that flood the earth in every springtide, and the human heart where
+hopes and longings and affections and desires blossom immortally.
+Chiefly of these things, and of Him who gave them a new meaning, I will
+speak to you, reader, if you care to go with me out-of-doors in the Holy
+Land.
+
+
+II
+
+MOVING PICTURES
+
+Of the voyage, made with all the swiftness and directness of one who
+seeks the shortest distance between two points, little remains in memory
+except a few moving pictures, vivid and half-real, as in a
+kinematograph.
+
+First comes a long, swift ship, the _Deutschland_, quivering and rolling
+over the dull March waves of the Atlantic. Then the morning sunlight
+streams on the jagged rocks of the Lizard, where two wrecked steamships
+are hanging, and on the green headlands and gray fortresses of Plymouth.
+Then a soft, rosy sunset over the mole, the dingy houses, the tiled
+roofs, the cliffs, the misty-budded trees of Cherbourg. Then Paris at
+two in the morning: the lower quarters still stirring with
+somnambulistic life, the lines of lights twinkling placidly on the empty
+boulevards. Then a whirl through the _Bois_ in a motor-car, a breakfast
+at Versailles with a merry little party of friends, a lazy walk through
+miles of picture-galleries without a guide-book or a care. Then the
+night express for Italy, a glimpse of the Alps at sunrise, snow all
+around us, the thick darkness of the Mount Cenis tunnel, the bright
+sunshine of Italian spring, terraced hillsides, clipped and pollarded
+trees, waking vineyards and gardens, Turin, Genoa, Rome, arches of
+ruined aqueducts, snow upon the Southern Apennines, the blooming fields
+of Capua, umbrella-pines and silvery poplars, and at last, from my
+balcony at the hotel, the glorious curving panorama of the bay of
+Naples, Vesuvius without a cloud, and Capri like an azure lion couchant
+on the broad shield of the sea. So ends the first series of films, ten
+days from home.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After an intermission of twenty-four hours, the second series begins on
+the white ship _Oceana_, an immense yacht, ploughing through the
+tranquil, sapphire Mediterranean, with ten passengers on board, and the
+band playing three times a day just as usual. Then comes the low line of
+the African coast, the lighthouse of Alexandria, the top of Pompey's
+Pillar showing over the white, modern city.
+
+Half a dozen little rowboats meet us, well out at sea, buffeted and
+tossed by the waves: they are fishing: see! one of the men has a strike,
+he pulls in his trolling-line, hand over hand, very slowly, it seems, as
+the steamship rushes by. I lean over the side, run to the stern of the
+ship to watch,--hurrah, he pulls in a silvery fish nearly three feet
+long. Good luck to you, my Egyptian brother of the angle!
+
+Now a glimpse of the crowded, busy harbour of Alexandria, (recalling
+memories of fourteen years ago,) and a leisurely trans-shipment to the
+little Khedivial steamer, _Prince Abbas_, with her Scotch officers,
+Italian stewards, Maltese doctor, Turkish sailors, and freight-handlers
+who come from whatever places it has pleased Heaven they should be born
+in. The freight is variegated, and the third-class passengers are a
+motley crowd.
+
+A glance at the forward main-deck shows Egyptians in white cotton, and
+Turks in the red fez, and Arabs in white and brown, and coal-black
+Soudanese, and nondescript Levantines, and Russians in fur coats and
+lamb's-wool caps, and Greeks in blue embroidered jackets, and women in
+baggy trousers and black veils, and babies, and cats, and parrots. Here
+is a tall, venerable grandfather, with spectacles and a long gray beard,
+dressed in a black robe with a hood and a yellow scarf; grave,
+patriarchal, imperturbable: his little granddaughter, a pretty elf of a
+child, with flower-like face and shining eyes, dances hither and yon
+among the chaos of freight and luggage; but as the chill of evening
+descends she takes shelter between his knees, under the folds of his
+long robe, and, while he feeds her with bread and sweetmeats, keeps up a
+running comment of remarks and laughter at all around her, and the
+unspeakable solemnity of old Father Abraham's face is lit up, now and
+then, with the flicker of a resistless smile.
+
+Here are two bronzed Arabs of the desert, in striped burnoose and white
+kaftan, stretched out for the night upon their rugs of many colours.
+Between them lies their latest purchase, a brand-new patent
+carpet-sweeper, made in Ohio, and going, who knows where among the hills
+of Bashan.
+
+A child dies in the night, on the voyage; in the morning, at anchor in
+the mouth of the Suez Canal, we hear the carpenter hammering together a
+little pine coffin. All day Sunday the indescribable traffic of Port
+Saïd passes around us; ships of all nations coming and going; a big
+German Lloyd boat just home from India crowded with troops in khâki,
+band playing, flags flying; huge dredgers, sombre, oxlike-looking
+things, with lines of incredibly dirty men in fluttering rags running up
+the gang-planks with bags of coal on their backs; rowboats shuttling to
+and fro between the ships and the huddled, transient, modern town, which
+is made up of curiosity shops, hotels, business houses and dens of
+iniquity; a row of Egyptian sail boats, with high prows, low sides, long
+lateen yards, ranged along the entrance to the canal. At sunset we steam
+past the big statue of Ferdinand de Lesseps, standing far out on the
+break-water and pointing back with a dramatic gesture to his
+world-transforming ditch. Then we go dancing over the yellow waves into
+the full moonlight toward Palestine.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the early morning I clamber on deck into a thunderstorm: wild west
+wind, rolling billows, flying gusts of rain, low clouds hanging over the
+sand-hills of the coast: a harbourless shore, far as eye can see, a
+land that makes no concession to the ocean with bay or inlet, but cries,
+"Hitherto shalt thou come, but no farther; and here shall thy proud
+waves be stayed." There are the flat-roofed houses, and the orange
+groves, and the minaret, and the lighthouse of Jaffa, crowning its
+rounded hill of rock. We are tossing at anchor a mile from the shore.
+Will the boats come out to meet us in this storm, or must we go on to
+Haifâ, fifty miles beyond? Rumour says that the police have refused to
+permit the boats to put out. But look, here they come, half a dozen open
+whale-boats, each manned by a dozen lusty, bare-legged, brown rowers,
+buffeting their way between the scattered rocks, leaping high on the
+crested waves. The chiefs of the crews scramble on board the steamer,
+identify the passengers consigned to the different tourist-agencies,
+sort out the baggage and lower it into the boats.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Illustration: Jaffa. The port where King Solomon landed his cedar beams
+from Lebanon for the building of the Temple.]
+
+My tickets, thus far, have been provided by the great Cook, and I fall
+to the charge of his head boatman, a dusky demon of energy. A slippery
+climb down the swaying ladder, a leap into the arms of two sturdy
+rowers, a stumble over the wet thwarts, and I find myself in the
+stern sheets of the boat. A young Dutchman follows with stolid
+suddenness. Two Italian gentlemen, weeping, refuse to descend more than
+half-way, climb back, and are carried on to Haifâ. A German lady with a
+parrot in a cage comes next, and her anxiety for the parrot makes her
+forget to be afraid. Then comes a little Polish lady, evidently a bride;
+she shuts her eyes tight and drops into the boat, pale, silent, resolved
+that she will not scream: her husband follows, equally pale, and she
+clings indifferently to his hand and to mine, her eyes still shut, a
+pretty image of white courage. The boat pushes off; the rowers smite the
+waves with their long oars and sing "Halli--yallah--yah hallah"; the
+steersman high in the stern shouts unintelligible (and, I fear, profane)
+directions; we are swept along on the tops of the waves, between the
+foaming rocks, drenched by spray and flying showers: at last we bump
+alongside the little quay, and climb out on the wet, gliddery stones.
+
+The kinematograph pictures are ended, for I am in Palestine, on the
+first of April, just fifteen days from home.
+
+
+III
+
+RENDEZVOUS
+
+Will my friends be here to meet me, I wonder? This is the question which
+presses upon me more closely than anything else, I must confess, as I
+set foot for the first time upon the sacred soil of Palestine. I know
+that this is not as it should be. All the conventions of travel require
+the pilgrim to experience a strange curiosity and excitement, a profound
+emotion, "a supreme anguish," as an Italian writer describes it, "in
+approaching this land long dreamed about, long waited for, and almost
+despaired of."
+
+But the conventions of travel do not always correspond to the realities
+of the heart. Your first sight of a place may not be your first
+perception of it: that may come afterward, in some quiet, unexpected
+moment. Emotions do not follow a time-table; and I propose to tell no
+lies in this book. My strongest feeling as I enter Jaffa is the desire
+to know whether my chosen comrades have come to the rendezvous at the
+appointed time, to begin our long ride together.
+
+It is a remote and uncertain combination, I grant you. The Patriarch, a
+tall, slender youth of seventy years, whose home is beside the Golden
+Gate of California, was wandering among the ruins of Sicily when I last
+heard from him. The Pastor and his wife, the Lady of Walla Walla, who
+live on the shores of Puget Sound, were riding camels across the
+peninsula of Sinai and steamboating up the Nile. Have the letters, the
+cablegrams that were sent to them been safely delivered? Have the
+hundreds of unknown elements upon which our combination depended been
+working secretly together for its success? Has our proposal been
+according to the supreme disposal, and have all the roads been kept
+clear by which we were hastening from three continents to meet on the
+first day of April at the _Hotel du Parc_ in Jaffa?
+
+Yes, here are my three friends, in the quaint little garden of the
+hotel, with its purple-flowering vines of Bougainvillea, fragrant
+orange-trees, drooping palms, and long-tailed cockatoos drowsing on
+their perches. When people really know each other an unfamiliar
+meeting-place lends a singular intimacy and joy to the meeting. There
+is a surprise in it, no matter how long and carefully it has been
+planned. There are a thousand things to talk of, but at first nothing
+will come except the wonder of getting together. The sight of the
+desired faces, unchanged beneath their new coats of tan, is a happy
+assurance that personality is not a dream. The touch of warm hands is a
+sudden proof that friendship is a reality.
+
+Presently it begins to dawn upon us that there is something wonderful in
+the place of our conjunction, and we realise dimly,--very dimly, I am
+sure, and yet with a certain vague emotion of reverence,--where we are.
+
+"We came yesterday," says the Lady, "and in the afternoon we went to see
+the House of Simon the Tanner, where they say the Apostle Peter lodged."
+
+"Did it look like the real house?"
+
+"Ah," she answers smilingly, "how do I know? They say there are two of
+them. But what do I care? It is certain that we are here. And I think
+that St. Peter was here once, too, whether the house he lived in is
+standing yet, or not."
+
+Yes, that is reasonably certain; and this is the place where he had his
+strange vision of a religion meant for all sorts and conditions of men.
+It is certain, also, that this is the port where Solomon landed his
+beams of cedar from Lebanon for the building of the Temple, and that the
+Emperor Vespasian sacked the town, and that Richard Lionheart planted
+the banner of the crusade upon its citadel. But how far away and
+dreamlike it all seems, on this spring morning, when the wind is tossing
+the fronds of the palm-trees, and the gleams of sunshine are flying
+across the garden, and the last clouds of the broken thunderstorm are
+racing westward through the blue toward the highlands of Judea.
+
+Here is our new friend, the dragoman George Cavalcanty, known as
+"Telhami," the Bethlehemite, standing beside us in the shelter of the
+orange-trees: a trim, alert figure, in his belted suit of khâki and his
+riding-boots of brown leather.
+
+"Is everything ready for the journey, George?"
+
+"Everything is prepared, according to the instructions you sent from
+Avalon. The tents are pitched a little beyond Latrûn, twenty miles away.
+The horses are waiting at Ramleh. After you have had your mid-day
+breakfast, we will drive there in carriages, and get into the saddle,
+and ride to our own camp before the night falls."
+
+
+_A PSALM OF THE DISTANT ROAD_
+
+_Happy is the man that seeth the face of a friend in a far country:
+The darkness of his heart is melted in the rising of an inward joy._
+
+_It is like the sound of music heard long ago and half forgotten:
+It is like the coming back of birds to a wood that winter hath made bare._
+
+_I knew not the sweetness of the fountain till I found it flowing in
+          the desert:
+Nor the value of a friend till the meeting in a lonely land._
+
+_The multitude of mankind had bewildered me and oppressed me:
+And I said to God, Why hast thou made the world so wide?_
+
+_But when my friend came the wideness of the world had no more terror:
+Because we were glad together among men who knew us not._
+
+_I was slowly reading a book that was written in a strange language:
+And suddenly I came upon a page in mine own familiar tongue._
+
+_This was the heart of my friend that quietly understood me:
+The open heart whose meaning was clear without a word._
+
+_O my God whose love followeth all thy pilgrims and strangers:
+I praise thee for the comfort of comrades on a distant road._
+
+
+
+
+                                  II
+
+                         GOING UP TO JERUSALEM
+
+
+I
+
+"THE EXCELLENCY OF SHARON"
+
+You understand that what we had before us in this first stage of our
+journey was a very simple proposition. The distance from Jaffa to
+Jerusalem is fifty miles by railway and forty miles by carriage-road.
+Thousands of pilgrims and tourists travel it every year; and most of
+them now go by the train in about four hours, with advertised stoppages
+of three minutes at Lydda, eight minutes at Ramleh, ten minutes at
+Sejed, and unadvertised delays at the convenience of the engine. But we
+did not wish to get our earliest glimpse of Palestine from a car-window,
+nor to begin our travels in a mechanical way. The first taste of a
+journey often flavours it to the very end.
+
+The old highroad, which is now much less frequented than formerly, is
+very fair as far as Ramleh; and beyond that it is still navigable for
+vehicles, though somewhat broken and billowy. Our plan, therefore, was
+to drive the first ten miles, where the road was flat and
+uninteresting, and then ride the rest of the way. This would enable us
+to avoid the advertised rapidity and the uncertain delays of the
+railway, and bring us quietly through the hills, about the close of the
+second day, to the gates of Jerusalem.
+
+The two victorias rattled through the streets of Jaffa, past the low,
+flat-topped Oriental houses, the queer little open shops, the
+orange-groves in full bloom, the palm-trees waving their plumes over
+garden-walls, and rolled out upon the broad highroad across the fertile,
+gently undulating Plain of Sharon. On each side were the neat,
+well-cultivated fields and vegetable-gardens of the German colonists
+belonging to the sect of the Templers. They are a people of antique
+theology and modern agriculture. Believing that the real Christianity is
+to be found in the Old Testament rather than in the New, they propose to
+begin the social and religious reformation of the world by a return to
+the programme of the Minor Prophets. But meantime they conduct their
+farming operations in a very profitable way. Their grain-fields, their
+fruit-orchards, their vegetable-gardens are trim and orderly, and they
+make an excellent wine, which they call "The Treasure of Zion." Their
+effect upon the landscape, however, is conventional.
+
+But in spite of the presence and prosperity of the Templers, the spirit
+of the scene through which we passed was essentially Oriental. The
+straggling hedges of enormous cactus, the rows of plumy
+eucalyptus-trees, the budding figs and mulberries, gave it a
+semi-tropical touch and along the highway we encountered fragments of
+the leisurely, dishevelled, dignified East: grotesque camels, pensive
+donkeys carrying incredible loads, flocks of fat-tailed sheep and
+lop-eared goats, bronzed peasants in flowing garments, and white-robed
+women with veiled faces.
+
+Beneath the tall tower of the forty martyrs at Ramleh (Mohammedan or
+Christian, their names are forgotten) we left the carriages, loaded our
+luggage on the three pack-mules, mounted our saddle-horses, and rode on
+across the plain, one of the fruitful gardens and historic battle-fields
+of the world. Here the hosts of the Israelites and the Philistines, the
+Egyptians and the Romans, the Persians and the Arabs, the Crusaders and
+the Saracens, have marched and contended. But as we passed through the
+sun-showers and rain-showers of an April afternoon, all was tranquillity
+and beauty on every side. The rolling fields were embroidered with
+innumerable flowers. The narcissus, the "rose of Sharon," had faded. But
+the little blue "lilies-of-the-valley" were there, and the pink and
+saffron mallows, and the yellow and white daisies, and the violet and
+snow of the drooping cyclamen, and the gold of the genesta, and the
+orange-red of the pimpernel, and, most beautiful of all, the glowing
+scarlet of the numberless anemones. Wide acres of young wheat and barley
+glistened in the light, as the wind-waves rippled through their short,
+silken blades. There were few trees, except now and then an
+olive-orchard or a round-topped carob with its withered pods.
+
+[Illustration: The Tall Tower of the Forty Martyrs at Ramleh.]
+
+The highlands of Judea lay stretched out along the eastern horizon, a
+line of azure and amethystine heights, changing colour and seeming
+almost to breathe and move as the cloud shadows fleeted over them, and
+reaching away northward and southward as far as eye could see. Rugged
+and treeless, save for a clump of oaks or terebinths planted here or
+there around some Mohammedan saint's tomb, they would have seemed
+forbidding but that their slopes were clothed with the tender herbage of
+spring, their outlines varied with deep valleys and blue gorges, and all
+their mighty bulwarks jewelled right royally with the opalescence of
+sunset.
+
+In a hollow of the green plain to the left we could see the white houses
+and the yellow church tower of Lydda, the supposed burial-place of Saint
+George of Cappadocia, who killed the dragon and became the patron saint
+of England. On a conical hill to the right shone the tents of the Scotch
+explorer who is excavating the ancient city of Gezer, which was the
+dowry of Pharaoh's daughter when she married King Solomon. City, did I
+say? At least four cities are packed one upon another in that grassy
+mound, the oldest going back to the flint age; and yet if you should
+examine their site and measure their ruins, you would feel sure that
+none of them could ever have amounted to anything more than what we
+should call a poor little town.
+
+It came upon us gently but irresistibly that afternoon, as we rode
+easily across the land of the Philistines in a few hours, that we had
+never really read the Old Testament as it ought to be read,--as a book
+written in an Oriental atmosphere, filled with the glamour, the imagery,
+the magniloquence of the East. Unconsciously we had been reading it as
+if it were a collection of documents produced in Heidelberg, Germany, or
+in Boston, Massachusetts: precise, literal, scientific.
+
+We had been imagining the Philistines as a mighty nation, and their land
+as a vast territory filled with splendid cities and ruled by powerful
+monarchs. We had been trying to understand and interpret the stories of
+their conflict with Israel as if they had been written by a Western
+war-correspondent, careful to verify all his statistics and meticulous
+in the exact description of all his events. This view of things melted
+from us with a gradual surprise as we realised that the more deeply we
+entered into the poetry, the closer we should come to the truth, of the
+narrative. Its moral and religious meaning is firm and steadfast as the
+mountains round about Jerusalem; but even as those mountains rose before
+us glorified, uplifted, and bejewelled by the vague splendours of the
+sunset, so the form of the history was enlarged and its colours
+irradiated by the figurative spirit of the East.
+
+There at our feet, bathed in the beauty of the evening air, lay the
+Valley of Aijalon, where Joshua fought with the "five kings of the
+Amorites," and broke them and chased them. The "kings" were head-men of
+scattered villages, chiefs of fierce and ragged tribes. But the fighting
+was hard, and as Joshua led his wild clansmen down upon them from the
+ascent of Beth-horon, he feared the day might be too short to win the
+victory. So he cheered the hearts of his men with an old war-song from
+the Book of Jasher.
+
+  "Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon;
+  And thou, moon, in the Valley of Aijalon.
+  And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed,
+  Until the nation had avenged themselves of their enemies."
+
+Does any one suppose that this is intended to teach us that the sun
+moves and that on this day his course was arrested? Must we believe that
+the whole solar system was dislocated for the sake of this battle? To
+understand the story thus is to misunderstand its vital spirit. It is
+poetry, imagination, heroism. By the new courage that came into the
+hearts of Israel with their leader's song, the Lord shortened the
+conflict to fit the day, and the sunset and the moonrise saw the Valley
+of Aijalon swept clean of Israel's foes.
+
+As we passed through the wretched, mud-built village of Latrûn (said to
+be the birthplace of the Penitent Thief), a dozen long-robed Arabs were
+earnestly discussing some question of municipal interest in the grassy
+market-place. They were as grave as the storks, in their solemn plumage
+of black and white, which were parading philosophically along the edge
+of a marsh to our right. A couple of jackals slunk furtively across the
+road ahead of us in the dusk. A _kafila_ of long-necked camels undulated
+over the plain. The shadows fell more heavily over cactus-hedge and
+olive-orchard as we turned down the hill.
+
+In the valley night had come. The large, trembling stars were strewn
+through the vault above us, and rested on the dim ridges of the
+mountains, and shone reflected in the puddles of the long road like
+fallen jewels. The lights of Latrûn, if it had any, were already out of
+sight behind us. Our horses were weary and began to stumble. Where was
+the camp?
+
+Look, there is a light, bobbing along the road toward us. It is
+Youssouf, our faithful major-domo, come out with a lantern to meet us. A
+few rods farther through the mud, and we turn a corner beside an acacia
+hedge and the ruined arch of an ancient well. There, in a little field
+of flowers, close to the tiniest of brooks, our tents are waiting for us
+with open doors. The candles are burning on the table. The rugs are
+spread and the beds are made. The dinner-table is laid for four, and
+there is a bright bunch of flowers in the middle of it. We have seen the
+excellency of Sharon and the moon is shining for us on the Valley of
+Aijalon.
+
+
+II
+
+"THE STRENGTH OF THE HILLS"
+
+It is no hardship to rise early in camp. At the windows of a house the
+daylight often knocks as an unwelcome messenger, rousing the sleeper
+with a sudden call. But through the roof and the sides of a tent it
+enters gently and irresistibly, embracing you with soft arms, laying
+rosy touches on your eyelids; and while your dream fades you know that
+you are awake and it is already day.
+
+As we lift the canvas curtains and come out of our pavilions, the sun is
+just topping the eastern hills, and all the field around us glittering
+with immense drops of dew. On the top of the ruined arch beside the camp
+our Arab watchman, hired from the village of Latrûn as we passed, is
+still perched motionless, wrapped in his flowing rags, holding his long
+gun across his knees.
+
+"_Salâm 'aleikum, yâ ghafîr!_" I say, and though my Arabic is doubtless
+astonishingly bad, he knows my meaning; for he answers gravely,
+"_'Aleikum essalâm!_--And with you be peace!"
+
+It is indeed a peaceful day in which our journey to Jerusalem is
+completed. Leaving the tents and impedimenta in charge of Youssouf and
+Shukari the cook, and the muleteers, we are in the saddle by seven
+o'clock, and riding into the narrow entrance of the Wâdi 'Ali. It is a
+long, steep valley leading into the heart of the hills. The sides are
+ribbed with rocks, among which the cyclamens grow in profusion. A few
+olives are scattered along the bottom of the vale, and at the tomb of
+the Imâm 'Ali there is a grove of large trees. At the summit of the pass
+we rest for half an hour, to give our horses a breathing-space, and to
+refresh our eyes with the glorious view westward over the tumbled
+country of the Shephelah, the opalescent Plain of Sharon, the sand-hills
+of the coast, and the broad blue of the Mediterranean. Northward and
+southward and eastward the rocky summits and ridges of Judea roll away.
+
+Now we understand what the Psalmist means by ascribing "the strength of
+the hills" to Jehovah; and a new light comes into the song:
+
+  "As the mountains are round about Jerusalem,
+  So Jehovah is round about his people."
+
+These natural walls and terraces of gray limestone have the air of
+antique fortifications and watch-towers of the border. They are truly
+"munitions of rocks." Chariots and horsemen could find no field for
+their man[oe]uvres in this broken and perpendicular country. Entangled
+in these deep and winding valleys by which they must climb up from the
+plain, the invaders would be at the mercy of the light infantry of the
+highlands, who would roll great stones upon them as they passed through
+the narrow defiles, and break their ranks by fierce and sudden downward
+rushes as they toiled panting up the steep hillsides. It was this
+strength of the hills that the children of Israel used for the defence
+of Jerusalem, and by this they were able to resist and defy the
+Philistines, whom they could never wholly conquer.
+
+Yonder on the hillside, as we ride onward, we see a reminder of that old
+tribal warfare between the people of the highlands and the people of the
+plains. That gray village, perched upon a rocky ridge above thick
+olive-orchards and a deliciously green valley, is the ancient
+Kirjath-Jearim, where the Ark of Jehovah was hidden for twenty years,
+after the Philistines had sent back this perilous trophy of their
+victory over the sons of Eli, being terrified by the pestilence and
+disaster that followed its possession. The men of Beth-shemesh, to whom
+it was first returned, were afraid to keep it, because they also had
+been smitten with death when they dared to peep into this dreadful box.
+But the men of Kirjath-Jearim were at once bolder and wiser, so they
+"came and fetched up the Ark of Jehovah, and brought it into the house
+of Abinadab in the hill, and set apart Eleazar, his son, to keep the Ark
+of Jehovah."
+
+What strange vigils in that little hilltop cottage where the young man
+watches over this precious, dangerous, gilded coffer, while Saul is
+winning and losing his kingdom in a turmoil of blood and sorrow and
+madness, forgetful of Israel's covenant with the Most High! At last
+comes King David, from his newly won stronghold of Zion, seeking eagerly
+for this lost symbol of the people's faith. "Lo, we heard of it at
+Ephratah; we found it in the field of the wood." So the gray stone
+cottage on the hilltop gave up its sacred treasure, and David carried it
+away with festal music and dancing. But was Eleazar glad, I wonder, or
+sorry, that his long vigil was ended?
+
+To part from a care is sometimes like losing a friend.
+
+I confess that it is difficult to make these ancient stories of peril
+and adventure, (or even the modern history of Abu Ghôsh the robber-chief
+of this village a hundred years ago), seem real to us to-day.
+Everything around us is so safe and tranquil, and, in spite of its
+novelty, so familiar. The road descends steeply with long curves and
+windings into the Wâdi Beit Hanîna. We meet and greet many travellers,
+on horseback, in carriages and afoot, natives and pilgrims, German
+colonists, French priests, Italian monks, English tourists and
+explorers. It is a pleasant game to guess from an approaching pilgrim's
+looks whether you should salute him with "_Guten Morgen_," or "_Buon'
+Giorno_," or "_Bon jour_, _m'sieur_." The country people answer your
+salutation with a pretty phrase: "_Nehârak saîd umubârak_--May your day
+be happy and blessed."
+
+At Kalôniyeh, in the bottom of the valley, there is a prosperous
+settlement of German Jews; and the gardens and orchards are flourishing.
+There is also a little wayside inn, a rude stone building, with a
+terrace around it; and there, with apricots and plums blossoming beside
+us, we eat our lunch _al fresco_, and watch our long pack-train, with
+the camp and baggage, come winding down the hill and go tinkling past us
+toward Jerusalem.
+
+The place is very friendly; we are in no haste to leave it. A few miles
+to the southward, sheltered in the lap of a rounding hill, we can see
+the tall cypress-trees and quiet gardens of 'Ain Karîm, the village
+where John the Baptist was born. It has a singular air of attraction,
+seen from a distance, and one of the sweetest stories in the world is
+associated with it. For it was there that the young bride Mary visited
+her older cousin Elizabeth,--you remember the exquisite picture of the
+"Visitation" by Albertinelli in the Uffizi at Florence,--and the joy of
+coming motherhood in these two women's hearts spoke from each to each
+like a bell and its echo. Would the birth of Jesus, the character of
+Jesus, have been possible unless there had been the virginal and
+expectant soul of such a woman as Mary, ready to welcome His coming with
+her song? "My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in
+God my Saviour." Does not the advent of a higher manhood always wait for
+the hope and longing of a nobler womanhood?
+
+The chiming of the bells of St. John floats faintly and silverly across
+the valley as we leave the shelter of the wayside rest-house and mount
+for the last stage of our upward journey. The road ascends steeply.
+Nestled in the ravine to our left is the grizzled and dilapidated
+village of Liftâ, a town with an evil reputation.
+
+"These people sold all their land," says George the dragoman, "twenty
+years ago, sold all the fields, gardens, olive-groves. Now they are
+dirty and lazy in that village,--all thieves!"
+
+Over the crest of the hill the red-tiled roofs of the first houses of
+Jerusalem are beginning to appear. They are houses of mercy, it seems:
+one an asylum for the insane, the other a home for the aged poor.
+Passing them, we come upon schools and hospital buildings and other
+evidences of the charity of the Rothschilds toward their own people. All
+around us are villas and consulates, and rows of freshly built houses
+for Jewish colonists.
+
+This is not at all the way that we had imagined to ourselves the first
+sight of the Holy City. All here is half-European, unromantic, not very
+picturesque. It may not be "the New Jerusalem," but it is certainly a
+modern Jerusalem. Here, in these comfortably commonplace dwellings, is
+almost half the present population of the city; and rows of new houses
+are rising on every side.
+
+But look down the southward-sloping road. There is the sight that you
+have imagined and longed to see: the brown battlements, the white-washed
+houses, the flat roofs, the slender minarets, the many-coloured domes of
+the ancient city of David, and Solomon, and Hezekiah, and Herod, and
+Omar, and Godfrey, and Saladin,--but never of Christ. That great black
+dome is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The one beyond it is the
+Mosque of Omar. Those golden bulbs and pinnacles beyond the city are the
+Greek Church of Saint Mary Magdalen on the side of the Mount of Olives;
+and on the top of the lofty ridge rises the great pointed tower of the
+Russians from which a huge bell booms out a deep-toned note of welcome.
+
+On every side we see the hospices and convents and churches and palaces
+of the different sects of Christendom. The streets are full of people
+and carriages and beasts of burden. The dust rises around us. We are
+tired with the trab, trab, trab of our horses' feet upon the hard
+highroad. Let us not go into the confusion of the city, but ride quietly
+down to the left into a great olive-grove, outside the Damascus Gate.
+
+Here our white tents are pitched among the trees, with the dear flag of
+our home flying over them. Here we shall find leisure and peace to unite
+our hearts, and bring our thoughts into tranquil harmony, before we go
+into the bewildering city. Here the big stars will look kindly down upon
+us through the silvery leaves, and the sounds of human turmoil and
+contention will not trouble us. The distant booming of the bell on the
+Mount of Olives will mark the night-hours for us, and the long-drawn
+plaintive call of the muezzin from the minaret of the little mosque at
+the edge of the grove will wake us to the sunrise.
+
+
+_A PSALM OF THE WELCOME TENT_
+
+_This is the thanksgiving of the weary:
+The song of him that is ready to rest._
+
+_It is good to be glad when the day is declining:
+And the setting of the sun is like a word of peace._
+
+_The stars look kindly on the close of a journey:
+The tent says welcome when the day's march is done._
+
+_For now is the time of the laying down of burdens:
+And the cool hour cometh to them that have borne the heat._
+
+_I have rejoiced greatly in labour and adventure:
+My heart hath been enlarged in the spending of my strength._
+
+_Now it is all gone yet I am not impoverished:
+For thus only may I inherit the treasure of repose._
+
+_Blessed be the Lord that teacheth my hands to unclose and my fingers
+          to loosen:
+He also giveth comfort to the feet that are washed from the dust of
+          the way._
+
+_Blessed be the Lord that maketh my meat at nightfall savoury:
+And filleth my evening cup with the wine of good cheer._
+
+_Blessed be the Lord that maketh me happy to be quiet:
+Even as a child that cometh softly to his mother's lap._
+
+_O God thou faintest not neither is thy strength worn away with labour:
+But it is good for us to be weary that we may obtain thy gift of rest._
+
+
+
+
+                                    III
+
+                             THE GATES OF ZION
+
+
+I
+
+A CITY THAT IS SET ON A HILL
+
+Out of the medley of our first impressions of Jerusalem one fact emerges
+like an island from the sea: it is a city that is lifted up. No river;
+no harbour; no encircling groves and gardens; a site so lonely and so
+lofty that it breathes the very spirit of isolation and proud
+self-reliance.
+
+  "Beautiful in elevation, the joy of the whole earth
+  Is Mount Zion, on the sides of the north
+  The city of the great King."
+
+Thus sang the Hebrew poet; and his song, like all true poetry, has the
+accuracy of the clearest vision. For this is precisely the one beauty
+that crowns Jerusalem: the beauty of a high place and all that belongs
+to it: clear sky, refreshing air, a fine outlook, and that indefinable
+sense of exultation that comes into the heart of man when he climbs a
+little nearer to the stars.
+
+Twenty-five hundred feet above the level of the sea is not a great
+height; but I can think of no other ancient and world-famous city that
+stands as high. Along the mountainous plateau of Judea, between the
+sea-coast plain of Philistia and the sunken valley of the Jordan, there
+is a line of sacred sites,--Beërsheba, Hebron, Bethlehem, Bethel,
+Shiloh, Shechem. Each of them marks the place where a town grew up
+around an altar. The central link in this chain of shrine-cities is
+Jerusalem. Her form and outline, her relation to the landscape and to
+the land, are unchanged from the days of her greatest glory. The
+splendours of her Temple and her palaces, the glitter of her armies, the
+rich colour and glow of her abounding wealth, have vanished. But though
+her garments are frayed and weather-worn, though she is an impoverished
+and dusty queen, she still keeps her proud position and bearing; and as
+you approach her by the ancient road along the ridges of Judea you see
+substantially what Sennacherib, and Nebuchadnezzar, and the Roman Titus
+must have seen.
+
+"The sides of the north" slope gently down to the huge gray wall of the
+city, with its many towers and gates. Within those bulwarks, which are
+thirty-eight feet high and two and a half miles in circumference,
+"Jerusalem is builded as a city that is compact together," covering with
+her huddled houses and crooked, narrow streets, the two or three rounded
+hills and shallow depressions in which the northern plateau terminates.
+South and east and west, the valley of the Brook Kidron and the Valley
+of Himmon surround the city wall with a dry moat three or four hundred
+feet deep.
+
+Imagine the knuckles of a clenched fist, extended toward the south: that
+is the site of Jerusalem, impregnable, (at least in ancient warfare),
+from all sides except the north, where the wrist joins it to the higher
+tableland. This northern approach, open to Assyria, and Babylon, and
+Damascus, and Persia, and Greece, and Rome, has always been the weak
+point of Jerusalem. She was no unassailable fortress of natural
+strength, but a city lifted up, a lofty shrine, whose refuge and
+salvation were in Jehovah,--in the faith, the loyalty, the courage which
+flowed into the heart of her people from their religion. When these
+failed, she fell.
+
+Jerusalem is no longer, and never again will be, the capital of an
+earthly kingdom. But she is still one of the high places of the world,
+exalted in the imagination and the memory of Jews and Christians and
+Mohammedans, a metropolis of infinite human hopes and longings and
+devotions. Hither come the innumerable companies of foot-weary pilgrims,
+climbing the steep roads from the sea-coast, from the Jordan, from
+Bethlehem,--pilgrims who seek the place of the Crucifixion, pilgrims who
+would weep beside the walls of their vanished Temple, pilgrims who
+desire to pray where Mohammed prayed. Century after century these human
+throngs have assembled from far countries and toiled upward to this
+open, lofty plateau, where the ancient city rests upon the top of the
+closed hand, and where the ever-changing winds from the desert and the
+sea sweep and shift over the rocky hilltops, the mute, gray battlements,
+and the domes crowned with the cross, the crescent, and the star.
+
+"The wind bloweth where it will, and thou hearest the voice thereof, but
+knowest not whence it cometh, nor whither it goeth; so is every one that
+is born of the Spirit."
+
+The mystery of the heart of mankind, the spiritual airs that breathe
+through it, the desires and aspirations that impel men in their
+journeyings, the common hopes that bind them together in companies, the
+fears and hatreds that array them in warring hosts,--there is no place
+in the world to-day where you can feel all this so deeply, so
+inevitably, so overwhelmingly, as at the Gates of Zion.
+
+It is a feeling of confusion, at first: a bewildering sense of something
+vast and old and secret, speaking many tongues, taking many forms, yet
+never fully revealing its source and its meaning. The Jews, Mohammedans,
+and Christians who flock to those gates are alike in their sincerity, in
+their devotion, in the spirit of sacrifice that leads them on their
+pilgrimage. Among them all there are hypocrites and bigots, doubtless,
+but there are also earnest and devout souls, seeking something that is
+higher than themselves, "a city set upon a hill." Why do they not
+understand one another? Why do they fight and curse one another? Do they
+not all come to humble themselves, to pray, to seek the light?
+
+Dark walls that embrace so many tear-stained, blood-stained, holy and
+dishonoured shrines! And you, narrow and gloomy gates, through whose
+portals so many myriads of mankind have passed with their swords, their
+staves, their burdens and their palm-branches! What songs of triumph you
+have heard, what yells of battle-rage, what moanings of despair, what
+murmurs of hopes and gratitude, what cries of anguish, what bursts of
+careless, happy laughter,--all borne upon the wind that bloweth where it
+will across these bare and rugged heights. We will not seek to enter yet
+into the mysteries that you hide. We will tarry here for a while in the
+open sunlight, where the cool breeze of April stirs the olive-groves
+outside the Damascus Gate. We will tranquillize our thoughts,--perhaps
+we may even find them growing clearer and surer,--among the simple cares
+and pleasures that belong to the life of every day; the life which must
+have food when it is hungry, and rest when it is weary, and a shelter
+from the storm and the night; the life of those who are all strangers
+and sojourners upon the earth, and whose richest houses and strongest
+cities are, after all, but a little longer-lasting tents and camps.
+
+
+II
+
+THE CAMP IN THE OLIVE-GROVE
+
+The place of our encampment is peaceful and friendly, without being
+remote or secluded. The grove is large and free from all undergrowth:
+the trunks of the ancient olive-trees are gnarled and massive, the
+foliage soft and tremulous. The corner that George has chosen for us is
+raised above the road by a kind of terrace, so that it is not too easily
+accessible to the curious passer-by. Across the road we see a gray stone
+wall, and above it the roof of the Anglican Bishop's house, and the
+schools, from which a sound of shrill young voices shouting in play or
+chanting in unison rises at intervals through the day. The ground on
+which we stand is slightly furrowed with the little ridges of last
+year's ploughing: but it has not yet been broken this spring, and it is
+covered with millions of infinitesimal flowers, blue and purple and
+yellow and white, like tiny pansies run wild.
+
+The four tents, each circular and about fifteen feet in diameter, are
+arranged in a crescent. The one nearest to the road is for the kitchen
+and service; there Shukari, our Maronite _chef_, in his white cap and
+apron, turns out an admirable six-course dinner on a portable charcoal
+range not three feet square. Around the door of this tent there is much
+coming and going: edibles of all kinds are brought for sale; visitors
+squat in sociable conversation; curious children hang about, watching
+the proceedings, or waiting for the favours which a good cook can
+bestow.
+
+The next tent is the dining-room; the huge wooden chests of the canteen,
+full of glass and china and table-linen and new Britannia-ware, which
+shines like silver, are placed one on each side of the entrance; behind
+the central tent-pole stands the dining-table, with two chairs at the
+back and one at each end, so that we can all enjoy the view through the
+open door. The tent is lofty and lined with many-coloured cotton cloth,
+arranged in elaborate patterns, scarlet and green and yellow and blue.
+When the four candles are lighted on the well-spread table, and Youssouf
+the Greek, in his embroidered jacket and baggy blue breeches, comes in
+to serve the dinner, it is quite an Oriental scene. His assistant,
+Little Youssouf, the Copt, squats outside of the tent, at one side of
+the door, to wash up the dishes and polish the Britannia-ware.
+
+The two other tents are of the same pattern and the same gaudy colours
+within: each of them contains two little iron bedsteads, two Turkish
+rugs, two washstands, one dressing-table, and such baggage as we had
+imagined necessary for our comfort, piled around the tent-pole,--this by
+way of precaution, lest some misguided hand should be tempted to slip
+under the canvas at night and abstract an unconsidered trifle lying near
+the edge of the tent.
+
+Of our own men I must say that we never had a suspicion, either of their
+honesty or of their good-humour. Not only the four who had most
+immediately to do with us, but also the two chief muleteers, Mohammed
+'Ali and Moûsa, and the songful boy, Mohammed el Nâsan, who warbled an
+interminable Arabian ditty all day long, and Fâris and the two other
+assistants, were models of fidelity and willing service. They did not
+quarrel (except once, over the division of the mule-loads, in the
+mountains of Gilead); they got us into no difficulties and subjected us
+to no blackmail from humbugging Bedouin chiefs. They are of a
+picturesque motley in costume and of a bewildering variety in
+creed--Anglican, Catholic, Coptic, Maronite, Greek, Mohammedan, and one
+of whom the others say that "he belongs to no religion, but sings
+beautiful Persian songs." Yet, so far as we are concerned, they all do
+the things they ought to do and leave undone the things they ought not
+to do, and their way with us is peace. Much of this, no doubt, is due to
+the wisdom, tact, and firmness of George the Bethlehemite, the best of
+dragomans.
+
+We have many visitors at the camp, but none unwelcome. The American
+Consul, a genial scholar who knows Palestine by heart and has made
+valuable contributions to the archæology of Jerusalem, comes with his
+wife to dine with us in the open air. George's gentle wife and his two
+bright little boys, Howard and Robert, are with us often. Missionaries
+come to tell us of their labours and trials. An Arab hunter, with his
+long flintlock musket, brings us beautiful gray partridges which he has
+shot among the near-by hills. The stable-master comes day after day
+with strings of horses galloping through the grove; for our first mounts
+were not to our liking, and we are determined not to start on our longer
+ride until we have found steeds that suit us. Peasants from the country
+round about bring all sorts of things to sell--vegetables, and lambs,
+and pigeons, and old coins, and embroidered caps.
+
+There are two men ploughing in a vineyard behind the camp, beyond the
+edge of the grove. The plough is a crooked stick of wood which scratches
+the surface of the earth. The vines are lying flat on the ground, still
+leafless, closely pruned: they look like big black snakes.
+
+Women of the city, dressed in black and blue silks, with black mantles
+over their heads, come out in the afternoon to picnic among the trees.
+They sit in little circles on the grass, smoking cigarettes and eating
+sweetmeats. If they see us looking at them they draw the corners of
+their mantles across the lower part of their faces; but when they think
+themselves unobserved they drop their veils and regard us curiously with
+lustrous brown eyes.
+
+One morning a procession of rustic women and girls, singing with shrill
+voices, pass the camp on their way to the city to buy the bride's
+clothes for a wedding. At nightfall they return singing yet more loudly,
+and accompanied by men and boys firing guns into the air and shouting.
+
+Another day a crowd of villagers go by. Their old Sheikh rides in the
+midst of them, with his white-and-gold turban, his long gray beard, his
+flowing robes of rich silk. He is mounted on a splendid white Arab
+horse, with arched neck and flaunting tail; and a beautiful, gaily
+dressed little boy rides behind him with both arms clasped around the
+old man's waist. They are going up to the city for the Mohammedan rite
+of circumcision.
+
+Later in the day a Jewish funeral comes hurrying through the grove: some
+twenty or thirty men in flat caps trimmed with fur and gabardines of
+cotton velvet, purple, or yellow, or pink, chanting psalms as they
+march, with the body of the dead man wrapped in linen cloth and carried
+on a rude bier on their shoulders. They seem in haste, (because the hour
+is late and the burial must be made before sunset), perhaps a little
+indifferent, or almost joyful. Certainly there is no sign of grief in
+their looks or their voices; for among them it is counted a fortunate
+thing to die in the Holy City and to be buried on the southern slope of
+the Valley of Jehoshaphat, where Gabriel is to blow his trumpet for the
+resurrection.
+
+
+III
+
+IN THE STREETS OF JERUSALEM
+
+Outside the gates we ride, for the roads which encircle the city wall
+and lead off to the north and south and east and west, are fairly broad
+and smooth. But within the gates we walk, for the streets are narrow,
+steep and slippery, and to attempt them on horseback is to travel with
+an anxious mind.
+
+Through the Jaffa Gate, indeed, you may easily ride, or even drive in
+your carriage: not through the gateway itself, which is a close and
+crooked alley, but through the great gap in the wall beside it, made for
+the German Emperor to pass through at the time of his famous imperial
+scouting-expedition in Syria in 1898. Thus following the track of the
+great William you come to the entrance of the Grand New Hotel, among
+curiosity-shops and tourist-agencies, where a multitude of bootblacks
+assure you that you need "a shine," and _valets de place_ press their
+services upon you, and ingratiating young merchants try to allure you
+into their establishments to purchase photographs or embroidered scarves
+or olive-wood souvenirs of the Holy Land.
+
+[Illustration: A Street in Jerusalem.]
+
+Come over to Cook's office, where we get our letters, and stand for a
+while on the little terrace with the iron railing, looking at the motley
+crowd which fills the place in front of the citadel. Groups of
+blue-robed peasant women sit on the curbstone, selling firewood and
+grass and vegetables. Their faces are bare and brown, wrinkled with the
+sun and the wind. Turkish soldiers in dark-green uniform, Greek priests
+in black robes and stove-pipe hats, Bedouins in flowing cloaks of brown
+and white, pale-faced Jews with velvet gabardines and curly ear-locks,
+Moslem women in many-coloured silken garments and half-transparent
+veils, British tourists with cork helmets and white umbrellas, camels,
+donkeys, goats, and sheep, jostle together in picturesque confusion.
+There is a water-carrier with his shiny, dripping, bulbous goat-skin
+on his shoulders. There is an Arab of the wilderness with a young
+gazelle in his arms.
+
+Now let us go down the greasy, gliddery steps of David Street, between
+the diminutive dusky shops with open fronts where all kinds of queer
+things to eat and to wear are sold, and all sorts of craftsmen are at
+work making shoes, and tin pans, and copper pots, and wooden seats, and
+little tables, and clothes of strange pattern. A turn to the left brings
+us into Christian Street and the New Bazaar of the Greeks, with its
+modern stores.
+
+A turn to the right and a long descent under dark archways and through
+dirty, shadowy alleys brings us to the Place of Lamentations, beside the
+ancient foundation wall of the Temple, where the Jews come in the
+afternoon of Fridays and festival-days to lean their heads against the
+huge stones and murmur forth their wailings over the downfall of
+Jerusalem. "For the majesty that is departed," cries the leader, and the
+others answer: "We sit in solitude and mourn." "We pray Thee have mercy
+on Zion," cries the leader, and the others answer: "Gather the children
+of Jerusalem." With most of them it seems a perfunctory mourning; but
+there are two or three old men with the tears running down their faces
+as they kiss the smooth-worn stones.
+
+We enter convents and churches, mosques and tombs. We trace the course
+of the traditional _Via Dolorosa_, and try to reconstruct in our
+imagination the probable path of that grievous journey from the
+judgment-hall of injustice to the Calvary of cruelty--a path which now
+lies buried far below the present level of the city.
+
+One impression deepens in my mind with every hour: this was never
+Christ's city. The confusion, the shallow curiosity, the self-interest,
+the clashing prejudices, the inaccessibility of the idle and busy
+multitudes were the same in His day that they are now. It was not here
+that Jesus found the men and women who believed in Him and loved Him,
+but in the quiet villages, among the green fields, by the peaceful
+lake-shores. And it is not here that we shall find the clearest traces,
+the most intimate visions of Him, but away in the big out-of-doors,
+where the sky opens free above us, and the landscapes roll away to far
+horizons.
+
+As we loiter about the city, now alone, now under the discreet and
+unhampering escort of the Bethlehemite; watching the Mussulmans at their
+dinner in some dingy little restaurant, where kitchen, store-room and
+banquet-hall are all in the same apartment, level and open to the
+street; pausing to bargain with an impassive Arab for a leather belt or
+with an ingratiating Greek for a string of amber beads; looking in
+through the unshuttered windows of the Jewish houses where the families
+are gathered in festal array for the household rites of Passover week;
+turning over the chaplets, and rosaries, and anklets, and bracelets of
+coloured glass and mother-of-pearl, and variegated stones, and curious
+beans and seed-pods in the baskets of the street-vendors around the
+Church of the Holy Sepulchre; stepping back into an archway to avoid a
+bag-footed camel, or a gaily caparisoned horse, or a heavy-laden donkey
+passing through a narrow street; exchanging a smile and an
+unintelligible friendly jest with a sweet-faced, careless child;
+listening to long disputes between buyers and sellers in that
+resounding Arab tongue which seems full of tragic indignation and wrath,
+while the eyes of the handsome brown Bedouins who use it remain
+unsearchable in their Oriental languor and pride; Jerusalem becomes to
+us more and more a symbol and epitome of that which is changeless and
+transient, capricious and inevitable, necessary and insignificant,
+interesting and unsatisfying, in the unfinished tragi-comedy of human
+life. There are times when it fascinates us with its whirling charm.
+There are other times when we are glad to ride away from it, to seek
+communion with the great spirit of some antique prophet, or to find the
+consoling presence of Him who spake the words of the eternal life.
+
+
+_A PSALM OF GREAT CITIES_
+
+_How wonderful are the cities that man hath builded:
+Their walls are compacted of heavy stones,
+And their lofty towers rise above the tree-tops._
+
+_Rome, Jerusalem, Cairo, Damascus,--
+Venice, Constantinople, Moscow, Pekin,--
+London, New York, Berlin, Paris, Vienna,--_
+
+_These are the names of mighty enchantments:
+They have called to the ends of the earth,
+They have secretly summoned an host of servants._
+
+_They shine from far sitting beside great waters:
+They are proudly enthroned upon high hills,
+They spread out their splendour along the rivers._
+
+_Yet are they all the work of small patient fingers:
+Their strength is in the hand of man,
+He hath woven his flesh and blood into their glory._
+
+_The cities are scattered over the world like ant-hills:
+Every one of them is full of trouble and toil,
+And their makers run to and fro within them._
+
+_Abundance of riches is laid up in their store-houses:
+Yet they are tormented with the fear of want,
+The cry of the poor in their streets is exceeding bitter._
+
+_Their inhabitants are driven by blind perturbations:
+They whirl sadly in the fever of haste,
+Seeking they know not what, they pursue it fiercely._
+
+_The air is heavy-laden with their breathing:
+The sound of their coming and going is never still,
+Even in the night I hear them whispering and crying._
+
+_Beside every ant-hill I behold a monster crouching:
+This is the ant-lion Death,
+He thrusteth forth his tongue and the people perish._
+
+_O God of wisdom thou hast made the country:
+Why hast thou suffered man to make the town?_
+
+_Then God answered, Surely I am the maker of man:
+And in the heart of man I have set the city._
+
+
+
+
+                                  IV
+
+                    MIZPAH AND THE MOUNT OF OLIVES
+
+
+I
+
+THE JUDGMENT-SEAT OF SAMUEL
+
+Mizpah of Benjamin stands to the northwest: the sharpest peak in the
+Judean range, crowned with a ragged, dusty village and a small mosque.
+We rode to it one morning over the steepest, stoniest bridle-paths that
+we had ever seen. The country was bleak and rocky, a skeleton of
+landscape; but between the stones and down the precipitous hillsides and
+along the hot gorges, the incredible multitude of spring flowers were
+abloom.
+
+It was a stiff scramble up the conical hill to the little hamlet at the
+top, built out of and among ruins. The mosque, evidently an old
+Christian church remodelled, was bare, but fairly clean, cool, and
+tranquil. We peered through a grated window, tied with many-coloured
+scraps of rags by the Mohammedan pilgrims, into a whitewashed room
+containing a huge sarcophagus said to be the tomb of Samuel. Then we
+climbed the minaret and lingered on the tiny railed balcony, feeding on
+the view.
+
+The peak on which we stood was isolated by deep ravines from the other
+hills of desolate gray and scanty green. Beyond the western range lay
+the Valley of Aijalon, and beyond that the rich Plain of Sharon with
+iridescent hues of green and blue and silver, and beyond that the yellow
+line of the sand-dunes broken by the white spot of Jaffa, and beyond
+that the azure breadth of the Mediterranean. Northward, at our feet, on
+the summit of a lower conical hill, ringed with gray rock, lay the
+village of El-Jib, the ancient Geba of Benjamin, one of the cities which
+Joshua gave to the Levites.
+
+This was the place from which Jonathan and his armour-bearer set out,
+without Saul's knowledge, on their daring, perilous scouting expedition
+against the Philistines. What fighting there was in olden days over that
+tumbled country of hills and gorges, stretching away north to the blue
+mountains of Samaria and the summits of Ebal and Gerizim on the horizon!
+
+There on the rocky backbone of Benjamin and Ephraim, was Ramallah
+(where we had spent Sunday in the sweet orderliness of the Friends'
+Mission School), and Beëroth, and Bethel, and Gilgal, and Shiloh.
+Eastward, behind the hills, we could trace the long, vast trench of the
+Jordan valley running due north and south, filled with thin violet haze
+and terminating in a glint of the Dead Sea. Beyond that deep line of
+division rose the mountains of Gilead and Moab, a lofty, unbroken
+barrier. To the south-east we could see the red roofs of the new
+Jerusalem, and a few domes and minarets of the ancient city. Beyond
+them, in the south, was the truncated cone of the Frank Mountain, where
+the crusaders made their last stand against the Saracens; and the hills
+around Bethlehem; and a glimpse, nearer at hand, of the tall cypresses
+and peaceful gardens of 'Ain Karîm.
+
+This terrestrial paradise of vision encircled us with jewel-hues and
+clear, exquisite outlines. Below us were the flat roofs of Nebi Samwîl,
+with a dog barking on every roof; the filthy courtyards and dark
+doorways, with a woman in one of them making bread; the ruined archways
+and broken cisterns with a pool of green water stagnating in one
+corner; peasants ploughing their stony little fields, and a string of
+donkeys winding up the steep path to the hill.
+
+Here, centuries ago, Samuel called all Israel to Mizpah, and offered
+sacrifice before Jehovah, and judged the people. Here he inspired them
+with new courage and sent them down to discomfit the Philistines. Hither
+he came as judge and ruler of Israel, making his annual circuit between
+Gilgal and Bethel and Mizpah. Here he assembled the tribes again, when
+they were tired of his rule, and gave them a King according to their
+desire, even the tall warrior Saul, the son of Kish.
+
+Do the bones of the prophet rest here or at Ramah? I do not know. But
+here, on this commanding peak, he began and ended his judgeship; from
+this aerie he looked forth upon the inheritance of the turbulent sons of
+Jacob; and here, if you like, today, a pale, clever young Mohammedan
+will show you what he calls the coffin of Samuel.
+
+
+II
+
+THE HILL THAT JESUS LOVED
+
+We had seen from Mizpah the sharp ridge of the Mount of Olives, rising
+beyond Jerusalem. Our road thither from the camp led us around the city,
+past the Damascus Gate, and the royal grottoes, and Herod's Gate, and
+the Tower of the Storks, and St. Stephen's Gate, down into the Valley of
+the Brook Kidron. Here, on the west, rises the precipitous Temple Hill
+crowned with the wall of the city, and on the east the long ridge of
+Olivet.
+
+There are several buildings on the side of the steep hill, marking
+supposed holy places or sacred events--the Church of the Tomb of the
+Virgin, the Latin Chapel of the Agony, the Greek Church of St. Mary
+Magdalen. On top of the ridge are the Russian Buildings, with the Chapel
+of the Ascension, and the Latin Buildings, with the Church of the Creed,
+the Church of the Paternoster, and a Carmelite Nunnery. Among the walls
+of these inclosures we wound our way, and at last tied our horses
+outside of the Russian garden. We climbed the two hundred and fourteen
+steps of the lofty Belvidere Tower, and found ourselves in possession of
+one of the great views of the world. There is Jerusalem, across the
+Kidron, spread out like a raised map below us. The mountains of Judah
+roll away north and south and east and west--the clean-cut pinnacle of
+Mizpah, the lofty plain of Rephaïm, the dark hills toward Hebron, the
+rounded top of Scopus where Titus camped with his Roman legions, the
+flattened peak of Frank Mountain. Bethlehem is not visible; but there is
+the tiny village of Bethphage, and the first roof of Bethany peeping
+over the ridge, and the Inn of the Good Samaritan in a red cut of the
+long serpentine road to Jericho. The dark range of Gilead and Moab seems
+like a huge wall of lapis-lazuli beyond the furrowed, wrinkled,
+yellowish clay-hills and the wide gray trench of the Jordan Valley,
+wherein the river marks its crooked path with a line of deep green. The
+hundreds of ridges that slope steeply down to that immense depression
+are touched with a thousand hues of amethystine light, and the ravines
+between them filled with a thousand tones of azure shadow. At the end
+of the valley glitter the blue waters of the Dead Sea, fifteen miles
+away, four thousand feet below us, yet seeming so near that we almost
+expect to hear the sound of its waves on the rocky shores of the
+Wilderness of Tekoa.
+
+On this mount Jesus of Nazareth often walked with His disciples. On this
+widespread landscape His eyes rested as He spoke divinely of the
+invisible kingdom of peace and love and joy that shall never pass away.
+Over this walled city, sleeping in the sunshine, full of earthly dreams
+and disappointments, battlemented hearts and whited sepulchres of the
+spirit, He wept, and cried: "O Jerusalem, how often would I have
+gathered thy children together even as a hen gathereth her own brood
+under her wings, and ye would not!"
+
+
+III
+
+THE GARDEN OF GETHSEMANE
+
+Come down, now, from the mount of vision to the grove of olive-trees,
+the Garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus used to take refuge with His
+friends. It lies on the eastern slope of Olivet, not far above the
+Valley of Kidron, over against that city-gate which was called the
+Beautiful, or the Golden, but which is now walled up.
+
+The grove probably belonged to some friend of Jesus or of one of His
+disciples, who permitted them to make use of it for their quiet
+meetings. At that time, no doubt, the whole hillside was covered with
+olive-trees, but most of these have now disappeared. The eight aged
+trees that still cling to life in Gethsemane have been inclosed with a
+low wall and an iron railing, and the little garden that blooms around
+them is cared for by Franciscan monks from Italy.
+
+The gentle, friendly Fra Giovanni, in bare sandaled feet, coarse brown
+robe, and broad-brimmed straw hat, is walking among the flowers. He
+opens the gate for us and courteously invites us in, telling us in
+broken French that we may pick what flowers we like. Presently I fall
+into discourse with him in broken Italian, telling him of my visit years
+ago to the cradle of his Order at Assisi, and to its most beautiful
+shrine at La Verna, high above the Val d'Arno. His old eyes soften into
+youthful brightness as he speaks of Italy. It was most beautiful, he
+said, _bellisima!_ But he is happier here, caring for this garden, it is
+most holy, _santissima!_
+
+The bronzed Mohammedan gardener, silent, patient, absorbed in his task,
+moves with his watering-pot among the beds, quietly refreshing the
+thirsty blossoms. There are wall-flowers, stocks, pansies, baby's
+breath, pinks, anemones of all colours, rosemary, rue, poppies--all
+sorts of sweet old-fashioned flowers. Among them stand the scattered
+venerable trees, with enormous trunks, wrinkled and contorted, eaten
+away by age, patched and built up with stones, protected and tended with
+pious care, as if they were very old people whose life must be tenderly
+nursed and sheltered. Their boles hardly seem to be of wood; so dark, so
+twisted, so furrowed are they, of an aspect so enduring that they
+appear to be cast in bronze or carved out of black granite. Above each
+of them spreads a crown of fresh foliage, delicate, abundant, shimmering
+softly in the sunlight and the breeze, with silken turnings of the under
+side of the innumerable leaves. In the centre of the garden is a kind of
+open flower house with a fountain of flowing water, erected in memory of
+a young American girl. At each corner a pair of slender cypresses lift
+their black-green spires against the blanched azure of the sky.
+
+It is a place of refuge, of ineffable tranquillity, of unforgetful
+tenderness. The inclosure does not offend. How else could this sacred
+shrine of the out-of-doors be preserved? And what more fitting guardian
+for it than the Order of that loving Saint Francis, who called the sun
+and the moon his brother and his sister and preached to a joyous
+congregation of birds as his "little brothers of the air"? The flowers
+do not offend. Their antique fragrance, gracious order, familiar looks,
+are a symbol of what faithful memory does with the sorrows and
+sufferings of those who have loved us best--she treasures and
+transmutes them into something beautiful, she grows her sweetest flowers
+in the ground that tears have made holy.
+
+It is here, in this quaint and carefully tended garden, this precious
+place which has been saved alike from the oblivious trampling of the
+crowd and from the needless imprisonment of four walls and a roof, it is
+here in the open air, in the calm glow of the afternoon, under the
+shadow of Mount Zion, that we find for the first time that which we have
+come so far to seek,--the soul of the Holy Land, the inward sense of the
+real presence of Jesus.
+
+It is as clear and vivid as any outward experience. Why should I not
+speak of it as simply and candidly? Nothing that we have yet seen in
+Palestine, no vision of wide-spread landscape, no sight of ancient ruin
+or famous building or treasured relic, comes as close to our hearts as
+this little garden sleeping in the sun. Nothing that we have read from
+our Bibles in the new light of this journey has been for us so suddenly
+illumined, so deeply and tenderly brought home to us, as the story of
+Gethsemane.
+
+Here, indeed, in the moonlit shadow of these olives--if not of these
+very branches, yet of others sprung from the same immemorial stems--was
+endured the deepest suffering ever borne for man, the most profound
+sorrow of the greatest Soul that loved all human souls. It was not in
+the temptation in the wilderness, as Milton imagined, that the crisis of
+the Divine life was enacted and Paradise was regained. It was in the
+agony in the garden.
+
+Here the love of life wrestled in the heart of Jesus with the purpose of
+sacrifice, and the anguish of that wrestling wrung the drops of blood
+from Him like sweat. Here, for the only time, He found the cup of sorrow
+and shame too bitter, and prayed the Father to take it from His lips if
+it were possible--possible without breaking faith, without surrendering
+love. For that He would not do, though His soul was exceeding sorrowful,
+even unto death. Here He learned the frailty of human friendship, the
+narrowness and dulness and coldness of the very hearts for whom He had
+done and suffered most, who could not even watch with Him one hour.
+
+What infinite sense of the poverty and feebleness of mankind, the
+inveteracy of selfishness, the uncertainty of human impulses and
+aspirations and promises; what poignant questioning of the necessity,
+the utility of self-immolation must have tortured the soul of Jesus in
+that hour! It was His black hour. None can imagine the depth of that
+darkness but those who have themselves passed through some of its outer
+shadows, in the times when love seems vain, and sacrifice futile, and
+friendship meaningless, and life a failure, and death intolerable.
+
+Jesus met the spirit of despair in the Garden of Gethsemane; and after
+that meeting, the cross had no terrors for Him, because He had already
+endured them; the grave no fear, because He had already conquered it.
+How calm and gentle was the voice with which He wakened His disciples,
+how firm the step with which He went to meet Judas! The bitterness of
+death was behind Him in the shadow of the olive-trees. The peace of
+Heaven shone above Him in the silent stars.
+
+
+_A PSALM OF SURRENDER_
+
+_Mine enemies have prevailed against me, O God:
+Thou hast led me deep into their ambush._
+
+_They surround me with a hedge of spears:
+And the sword in my hand is broken._
+
+_My friends also have forsaken my side:
+From a safe place they look upon me with pity._
+
+_My heart is like water poured upon the ground:
+I have come alone to the place of surrender._
+
+_To thee, to thee only will I give up my sword:
+The sword which was broken in thy service._
+
+_Thou hast required me to suffer for thy cause:
+By my defeat thy will is victorious._
+
+_O my King show me thy face shining in the dark:
+While I drink the loving-cup of death to thy glory._
+
+
+
+
+                                    V
+
+                   AN EXCURSION TO BETHLEHEM AND HEBRON
+
+
+I
+
+BETHLEHEM
+
+A sparkling morning followed a showery night, and all the little red and
+white and yellow flowers were lifting glad faces to the sun as we took
+the highroad to Bethlehem. Leaving the Jaffa Gate on the left, we
+crossed the head of the deep Valley of Hinnom, below the dirty Pool of
+the Sultan, and rode up the hill on the opposite side of the vale.
+
+There was much rubbish and filth around us, and the sight of the
+Ophthalmic Hospital of the English Knights of Saint John, standing in
+the beauty of cleanness and order beside the road, did our eyes good.
+Blindness is one of the common afflictions of the people of Palestine.
+Neglect and ignorance and dirt and the plague of crawling flies spread
+the germs of disease from eye to eye, and the people submit to it with
+pathetic and irritating fatalism. It is hard to persuade these poor
+souls that the will of Allah or Jehovah in this matter ought not to be
+accepted until after it has been questioned. But the light of true and
+humane religion is spreading a little. We rejoiced to see the
+reception-room of the hospital filled with all sorts and conditions of
+men, women and children waiting for the good physicians who save and
+restore sight in the name of Jesus.
+
+To the right, a little below us, lay the ugly railway station; before
+us, rising gently southward, extended the elevated Plain of Rephaïm
+where David smote the host of the Philistines after he had heard "the
+sound of a going in the tops of the mulberry-trees." The red soil was
+cultivated in little farms and gardens. The almond-trees were in leaf;
+the hawthorn in blossom; the fig-trees were putting forth their tender
+green.
+
+[Illustration: A Street in Bethlehem.]
+
+A slowly ascending road brought us to the hill of Mâr Elyâs, and the
+so-called Well of the Magi. Here the legend says the Wise Men halted
+after they had left Jerusalem, and the star reappeared to guide them on
+to Bethlehem. Certain it is that they must have taken this road; and
+certain it is that both Bethlehem and Jerusalem, hidden from each other
+by the rising ground, are clearly visible to one who stands in the
+saddle of this hill.
+
+There were fine views down the valleys to the east, with blue glimpses
+of the Dead Sea at the end of them. The supposed tomb of Rachel, a dingy
+little building with a white dome, interested us less than the broad
+lake of olive-orchards around the distant village of Beit Jâlâ, and the
+green fields, pastures and gardens encircling the double hill of
+Bethlehem, the ancient "House of Bread." There was an aspect of
+fertility and friendliness about the place that seemed in harmony with
+its name and its poetic memories.
+
+In a walled kitchen-garden at the entrance of the town was David's Well.
+We felt no assurance, of course, as we looked down into it, that this
+was the veritable place. But at all events it served to bring back to us
+one of the prettiest bits of romance in the Old Testament. When the bold
+son of Jesse had become a chieftain of outlaws and was besieged by the
+Philistines in the stronghold of Adullam, his heart grew thirsty for a
+draught from his father's well, whose sweetness he had known as a boy.
+And when his three mighty men went up secretly at the risk of their
+lives, and broke through the host of their enemies, and brought their
+captain a vessel of this water, "he would not drink thereof, but poured
+it out unto Jehovah."
+
+There was a division of opinion in our party in regard to this act. "It
+was sheer foolishness," said the Patriarch, "to waste anything that had
+cost so much to get. What must the three mighty men have thought when
+they saw that for which they had risked their lives poured out upon the
+ground?" "Ah, no," said the Lady. "It was the highest gratitude, because
+it was touched with poetry. It was the best compliment that David could
+have given to his friends. Some gifts are too precious to be received in
+any other way than this." And in my heart I knew that she was right.
+
+Riding through the narrow streets of the town, which is inhabited almost
+entirely by Christians, we noted the tranquil good looks of the women, a
+distinct type, rather short of stature, round-faced, placid and kind of
+aspect. Not a few of them had blue eyes. They wore dark-blue skirts,
+dark-red jackets, and a white veil over their heads, but not over their
+faces. Under the veil the married women wore a peculiar cap of stiff,
+embroidered black cloth, about six inches high, and across the front of
+this cap was strung their dowry of gold or silver coins. Such a dress,
+no doubt, was worn by the Virgin Mary, and such tranquil, friendly
+looks, I think, were hers, but touched with a rarer light of beauty
+shining from a secret source within.
+
+A crowd of little boys and girls just released from school for their
+recess shouted and laughed and chased one another, pausing for a moment
+in round-eyed wonder when I pointed my camera at them. Donkeys and
+camels and sheep made our passage through the town slow, and gave us
+occasion to look to our horses' footing. At one corner a great white sow
+ran out of an alley-way, followed by a twinkling litter of pink pigs. In
+the market-place we left our horses in the shadow of the monastery wall
+and entered, by a low door, the lofty, bare Church of the Nativity.
+
+The long rows of immense marble pillars had some faded remains of
+painting on them. There were a few battered fragments of mosaic in the
+clerestory, dimly glittering. But the general effect of the whitewashed
+walls, the ancient brown beams and rafters of the roof, the large, empty
+space, was one of extreme simplicity.
+
+When we came into the choir and apse we found ourselves in the midst of
+complexity. The ownership of the different altars with their gilt
+ornaments, of the swinging lamps, of the separate doorways of the Greeks
+and the Armenians and the Latins, was bewildering. Dark, winding steps,
+slippery with the drippings from many candles, led us down into the
+Grotto of the Nativity. It was a cavern perhaps forty feet long and ten
+feet wide, lit by thirty pendent lamps (Greek, Armenian and Latin):
+marble floor and walls hung with draperies; a silver star in the
+pavement before the altar to mark the spot where Christ was born; a
+marble manger in the corner to mark the cradle in which Christ was laid;
+a never-ceasing stream of poor pilgrims, who come kneeling, and kissing
+the star and the stones and the altar for Christ's sake.
+
+[Illustration: The Market-place, Bethlehem.]
+
+We paused for a while, after we had come up, to ask ourselves whether
+what we had seen was in any way credible. Yes, credible, but not
+convincing. No doubt the ancient Khân of Bethlehem must have been
+somewhere near this spot, in the vicinity of the market-place of the
+town. No doubt it was the custom, when there were natural hollows or
+artificial grottos in the rock near such an inn, to use them as shelters
+and stalls for the cattle. It is quite possible, it is even probable,
+that this may have been one of the shallow caverns used for such a
+purpose. If so, there is no reason to deny that this may be the place of
+the wondrous birth, where, as the old French _Noel_ has it:
+
+  "_Dieu parmy les pastoreaux,
+  Sous la crêche des toreaux,
+  Dans les champs a voulu naistre;
+  Et non parmy les arroys
+  Des grands princes et des roys,--
+  Lui des plus grands roys le maistre._"
+
+But to the eye, at least, there is no reminder of the scene of the
+Nativity in this close and stifling chapel, hung with costly silks and
+embroideries, glittering with rich lamps, filled with the smoke of
+incense and waxen tapers. And to the heart there is little suggestion
+of the lonely night when Joseph found a humble refuge here for his young
+bride to wait in darkness, pain and hope for her hour to come.
+
+In the church above, the Latins and Armenians and Greeks guard their
+privileges and prerogatives jealously. There have been fights here about
+the driving of a nail, the hanging of a picture, the sweeping of a bit
+of the floor. The Crimean War began in a quarrel between the Greeks and
+the Latins, and a mob-struggle in the Church of the Nativity. Underneath
+the floor, to the north of the Grotto of the Nativity, is the cave in
+which Saint Jerome lived peaceably for many years, translating the Bible
+into Latin. That was better than fighting.
+
+
+II
+
+ON THE ROAD TO HEBRON
+
+We ate our lunch at Bethlehem in a curiosity-shop. The table was spread
+at the back of the room by the open window. All around us were hanging
+innumerable chaplets and rosaries of mother-of-pearl, of carnelian, of
+carved olive-stones, of glass beads; trinkets and souvenirs of all
+imaginable kinds, tiny sheep-bells and inlaid boxes and carved fans
+filled the cases and cabinets. Through the window came the noise of
+people busy at Bethlehem's chief industry, the cutting and polishing of
+mother-of-pearl for mementoes. The jingling bells of our pack-train,
+passing the open door, reminded us that our camp was to be pitched miles
+away on the road to Hebron.
+
+We called for the horses and rode on through the town. Very beautiful
+and peaceful was the view from the southern hill, looking down upon the
+pastures of Bethlehem where "shepherds watched their flocks by night,"
+and the field of Boaz where Ruth followed the reapers among the corn.
+
+Down dale and up hill we journeyed; bright green of almond-trees, dark
+green of carob-trees, snowy blossoms of apricot-trees, rosy blossoms of
+peach-trees, argent verdure of olive-trees, adorning the valleys. Then
+out over the wilder, rockier heights; and past the great empty Pools of
+Solomon, lying at the head of the Wâdi Artâs, watched by a square ruined
+castle; and up the winding road and along the lofty flower-sprinkled
+ridges; and at last we came to our tents, pitched in the wide, green
+Wâdi el-'Arrûb, beside the bridge.
+
+Springs gushed out of the hillside here and ran down in a little
+laughing brook through lawns full of tiny pink and white daisies, and
+broad fields of tangled weeds and flowers, red anemones, blue iris,
+purple mallows, scarlet adonis, with here and there a strip of
+cultivated ground shimmering with silky leeks or dotted with young
+cucumbers. There was a broken aqueduct cut in the rock at the side of
+the valley, and the brook slipped by a large ruined reservoir.
+
+"George," said I to the Bethlehemite, as he sat meditating on the edge
+of the dry pool, "what do you think of this valley?"
+
+"I think," said George, "that if I had a few thousand dollars to buy the
+land, with all this runaway water I could make it blossom like a
+peach-tree."
+
+The cold, green sunset behind the western hills darkened into night. The
+air grew chilly, dropping nearly to the point of frost. We missed the
+blazing camp-fire of the Canadian forests, and went to bed early,
+tucking in the hot-water bags at our feet and piling on the blankets and
+rugs. All through the night we could hear the passers-by shouting and
+singing along the Hebron road. There was one unknown traveller whose
+high-pitched, quavering Arab song rose far away, and grew louder as he
+approached, and passed us in a whirlwind of lugubrious music, and
+tapered slowly off into distance and silence--a chant a mile long.
+
+The morning broke through flying clouds, with a bitter, wet, west wind
+rasping the bleak highlands. There were spiteful showers with intervals
+of mocking sunshine; it was a mischievous and prankish bit of weather,
+no day for riding. But the Lady was indomitable, so we left the
+Patriarch in his tent, wrapped ourselves in garments of mackintosh and
+took the road again.
+
+The country, at first, was wild and barren, a wilderness of rocks and
+thorn bushes and stunted scrub oaks. Now and then a Greek partridge, in
+its beautiful plumage of fawn-gray, marked with red and black about the
+head, clucked like a hen on the stony hillside, or whirred away in low,
+straight flight over the bushes. Flocks of black and brown goats, with
+pendulous ears, skipped up and down the steep ridges, standing up on
+their hind legs to browse the foliage of the little oak shrubs, or
+showing themselves off in a butting-match on top of a big rock. Marching
+on the highroad they seemed sedate, despondent, pattering along soberly
+with flapping ears. In the midst of one flock I saw a fierce-looking
+tattered pastor tenderly carrying a little black kid in his bosom--as
+tenderly as if it were a lamb. It seemed like an illustration of a
+picture that I saw long ago in the Catacombs, in which the infant church
+of Christ silently expressed the richness of her love, the breadth of
+her hope:
+
+  "On those walls subterranean, where she hid
+  Her head 'mid ignominy, death and tombs,
+  She her Good Shepherd's hasty image drew--
+  And on His shoulders, not a lamb, a kid."
+
+As we drew nearer to Hebron the region appeared more fertile, and the
+landscape smiled a little under the gleams of wintry sunshine. There
+were many vineyards; in most of them the vines trailed along the ground,
+but in some they were propped up on sticks, like old men leaning on
+crutches. Almond and apricot-trees flourished. The mulberries, the
+olives, the sycamores were abundant. Peasants were ploughing the fields
+with their crooked sticks shod with a long iron point. When a man puts
+his hand to such a plough he dares not look back, else it will surely go
+aside. It makes a scratch, not a furrow. (I saw a man in the hospital at
+Nazareth who had his thigh pierced clear through by one of these
+dagger-like iron plough points.)
+
+Children were gathering roots and thorn branches for firewood. Women
+were carrying huge bundles on their heads. Donkey-boys were urging their
+heavy-laden animals along the road, and cameleers led their deliberate
+strings of ungainly beasts by a rope or a light chain reaching from one
+nodding head to another.
+
+A camel's load never looks as large as a donkey's, but no doubt he often
+finds it heavy, and he always looks displeased with it. There is
+something about the droop of a camel's lower lip which seems to express
+unalterable disgust with the universe. But the rest of the world around
+Hebron appeared to be reasonably happy. In spite of weather and poverty
+and hard work the ploughmen sang in the fields, the children skipped and
+whistled at their tasks, the passers-by on the road shouted greetings to
+the labourers in the gardens and vineyards. Somewhere round about here
+is supposed to lie the Valley of Eshcol from which the Hebrew spies
+brought back the monstrous bunch of grapes, a cluster that reached from
+the height of a man's shoulder to the ground.
+
+
+III
+
+THE TENTING-GROUND OF ABRAHAM
+
+Hebron lies three thousand feet above the sea, and is one of the ancient
+market-places and shrines of the world. From time immemorial it has been
+a holy town, a busy town, and a turbulent town. The Hittites and the
+Amorites dwelt here, and Abraham, a nomadic shepherd whose tents
+followed his flocks over the land of Canaan, bought here his only piece
+of real estate, the field and cave of Machpelah. He bought it for a
+tomb,--even a nomad wishes to rest quietly in death,--and here he and
+his wife Sarah, and his children Isaac and Rebekah, and his
+grandchildren Jacob and Leah were buried.
+
+The modern town has about twenty thousand inhabitants, chiefly
+Mohammedans of a fanatical temper, and is incredibly dirty. We passed
+the muddy pool by which King David, when he was reigning here, hanged
+the murderers of Ishbosheth. We climbed the crooked streets to the
+Mosque which covers the supposed site of the cave of Machpelah. But we
+did not see the tomb of Abraham, for no "infidel" is allowed to pass
+beyond the seventh step in the flight of stairs which leads up to the
+doorway.
+
+As we went down through the narrow, dark, crowded Bazaar a violent storm
+of hail broke over the city, pelting into the little open shops and
+covering the streets half an inch deep with snowy sand and pebbles of
+ice. The tempest was a rude joke, which seemed to surprise the surly
+crowd into a good humour. We laughed with the Moslems as we took shelter
+together from our common misery under a stone archway.
+
+After the storm had passed we ate our midday meal on a housetop, which
+a friend of the dragoman put at our disposal, and rode out in the
+afternoon to the Oak of Abraham on the hill of Mamre. The tree is an
+immense, battered veteran, with a trunk ten feet in diameter, and
+wide-flung, knotted arms which still bear a few leaves and acorns. It
+has been inclosed with a railing, patched up with masonry, partially
+protected by a roof. The Russian monks who live near by have given it
+pious care, yet its inevitable end is surely near.
+
+The death of a great sheltering tree has a kind of dumb pathos. It seems
+like the passing away of something beneficent and helpless, something
+that was able to shield others but not itself.
+
+On this hill, under the oaks of Mamre, Abraham's tents were pitched many
+a year, and here he entertained the three angels unawares, and Sarah
+made pancakes for them, and listened behind the tent-flap while they
+were talking with her husband, and laughed at what they said. This may
+not be the very tree that flung its shadow over the tent, but no doubt
+it is a son or a grandson of that tree, and the acorns that still fall
+from it may be the seeds of other oaks to shelter future generations of
+pilgrims; and so throughout the world, the ancient covenant of
+friendship is unbroken, and man remains a grateful lover of the big,
+kind trees.
+
+We got home to our camp in the green meadow of the springs late in the
+afternoon, and on the third day we rode back to Jerusalem, and pitched
+the tents in a new place, on a hill opposite the Jaffa Gate, with a
+splendid view of the Valley of Hinnom, the Tower of David, and the
+western wall of the city.
+
+
+_A PSALM OF FRIENDLY TREES_
+
+_I will sing of the bounty of the big trees,
+They are the green tents of the Almighty,
+He hath set them up for comfort and for shelter._
+
+_Their cords hath he knotted in the earth,
+He hath driven their stakes securely,
+Their roots take hold of the rocks like iron._
+
+_He sendeth into their bodies the sap of life,
+They lift themselves lightly towards the heavens.
+They rejoice in the broadening of their branches._
+
+_Their leaves drink in the sunlight and the air,
+They talk softly together when the breeze bloweth,
+Their shadow in the noonday is full of coolness._
+
+_The tall palm-trees of the plain are rich in fruit,
+While the fruit ripeneth the flower unfoldeth,
+The beauty of their crown is renewed on high forever._
+
+_The cedars of Lebanon are fed by the snow,
+Afar on the mountain they grow like giants,
+In their layers of shade a thousand years are sighing._
+
+_How fair are the trees that befriend the home of man,
+The oak, and the terebinth, and the sycamore,
+The fruitful fig-tree and the silvery olive._
+
+_In them the Lord is loving to his little birds,--
+The linnets and the finches and the nightingales,--
+They people his pavilions with nests and with music._
+
+_The cattle are very glad of a great tree,
+They chew the cud beneath it while the sun is burning,
+There also the panting sheep lie down around their shepherd._
+
+_He that planteth a tree is a servant of God,
+He provideth a kindness for many generations,
+And faces that he hath not seen shall bless him._
+
+_Lord, when my spirit shall return to thee,
+At the foot of a friendly tree let my body be buried,
+That this dust may rise and rejoice among the branches._
+
+
+
+
+                                VI
+
+                   THE TEMPLE AND THE SEPULCHRE
+
+
+I
+
+THE DOME OF THE ROCK
+
+There is an upward impulse in man that draws him to a hilltop for his
+place of devotion and sanctuary of ascending thoughts. The purer air,
+the wider outlook, the sense of freedom and elevation, help to release
+his spirit from the weight that bends his forehead to the dust. A
+traveller in Palestine, if he had wings, could easily pass through the
+whole land by short flights from the summit of one holy hill to another,
+and look down from a series of mountain-altars upon the wrinkled map of
+sacred history without once descending into the valley or toiling over
+the plain. But since there are no wings provided in the human outfit,
+our journey from shrine to shrine must follow the common way of
+men,--which is also a symbol,--the path of up-and-down, and many
+windings, and weary steps.
+
+The oldest of the shrines of Jerusalem is the threshing-floor of Araunah
+the Jebusite, which David bought from him in order that it might be
+made the site of the Temple of Jehovah. No doubt the King knew of the
+traditions which connected the place with ancient and famous rites of
+worship. But I think he was moved also by the commanding beauty of the
+situation, on the very summit of Mount Moriah, looking down into the
+deep Valley of the Kidron.
+
+Our way to this venerable and sacred hill leads through the crooked
+duskiness of David Street, and across the half-filled depression of the
+Tyrop[oe]on Valley which divides the city, and up through the dim,
+deserted Bazaar of the Cotton Merchants, and so through the central
+western gate of the Haram-esh-Sherîf, "the Noble Sanctuary."
+
+This is a great inclosure, clean, spacious, airy, a place of refuge from
+the foul confusion of the city streets. The wall that shuts us in is
+almost a mile long, and within this open space, which makes an immediate
+effect of breadth and tranquil order, are some of the most sacred
+buildings of Islam and some of the most significant landmarks of
+Christianity.
+
+Slender and graceful arcades are outlined against the clear, blue sky:
+little domes are poised over praying-places and fountains of ablution:
+wide and easy flights of steps lead from one level to another, in this
+park of prayer.
+
+At the southern end, beyond the tall cypresses and the plashing fountain
+fed from Solomon's Pools, stands the long Mosque el-Aksa: to
+Mohammedans, the place to which Allah brought their prophet from Mecca
+in one night; to Christians, the Basilica which the Emperor Justinian
+erected in honor of the Virgin Mary. At the northern end rises the
+ancient wall of the Castle of Antonia, from whose steps Saint Paul,
+protected by the Roman captain, spoke his defence to the Jerusalem mob.
+The steps, hewn partly in the solid rock, are still visible; but the
+site of the castle is occupied by the Turkish barracks, beside which the
+tallest minaret of the Haram lifts its covered gallery high above the
+corner of the great wall.
+
+Yonder to the east is the Golden Gate, above the steep Valley of
+Jehoshaphat. It is closed with great stones; because the Moslem
+tradition says that some Friday a Christian conqueror will enter
+Jerusalem by that gate. Not far away we see the column in the wall from
+which the Mohammedans believe a slender rope, or perhaps a naked sword,
+will be stretched, in the judgment day, to the Mount of Olives opposite.
+This, according to them, will be the bridge over which all human souls
+must walk, while Christ sits at one end, Mohammed at the other, watching
+and judging. The righteous, upheld by angels, will pass safely; the
+wicked, heavy with unbalanced sins, will fall.
+
+Dominating all these wide-spread relics and shrines, in the centre of
+the inclosure, on a raised platform approached through delicate arcades,
+stands the great Dome of the Rock, built by Abd-el-Melik in 688 A.D., on
+the site of the Jewish Temple. The exterior of the vast octagon, with
+its lower half cased in marble and its upper half incrusted with Persian
+tiles of blue and green, its broad, round lantern and swelling black
+dome surmounted by a glittering crescent, is bathed in full sunlight;
+serene, proud, eloquent of a certain splendid simplicity. Within, the
+light filters dimly through windows of stained glass and falls on marble
+columns, bronzed beams, mosaic walls, screens of wrought iron and carved
+wood. We walk as if through an interlaced forest and undergrowth of
+rich entangled colours. It all seems visionary, unreal, fantastic, until
+we climb the bench by the end of the inner screen and look upon the Rock
+over which the Dome is built.
+
+This is the real thing,--a plain gray limestone rock, level and fairly
+smooth, the unchanged summit of Mount Moriah. Here the priest-king
+Melchizedek offered sacrifice. Here Abraham, in the cruel fervour of his
+faith, was about to slay his only son Isaac because he thought it would
+please Jehovah. Here Araunah the Jebusite threshed his corn on the
+smooth rock and winnowed it in the winds of the hilltop, until King
+David stepped over from Mount Zion, and bought the threshing-floor and
+the oxen of him for fifty shekels of silver, and built in this place an
+altar to the Lord. Here Solomon erected his splendid Temple and the
+Chaldeans burned it. Here Zerubbabel built the second Temple after the
+return of the Jews from exile, and Antiochus Epiphanes desecrated it,
+and Herod burned part of it and pulled down the rest. Here Herod built
+the third Temple, larger and more magnificent than the first, and the
+soldiers of the Emperor Titus burned it. Here the Emperor Hadrian built
+a temple to Jupiter and himself, and some one, perhaps the Christians,
+burned it. Here Mohammed came to pray, declaring that one prayer here
+was worth a thousand elsewhere. Here the Caliph Omar built a little
+wooden mosque, and the Caliph Abd-el-Melik replaced it with this great
+one of marble, and the Crusaders changed it into a Christian temple, and
+Saladin changed it back again into a mosque.
+
+This Haram-esh-Sherîf is the second holiest place in the Moslem world.
+Hither come the Mohammedan pilgrims by thousands, for the sake of
+Mohammed. Hither come the Christian pilgrims by thousands, for the sake
+of Him who said: "Neither in this mountain nor in Jerusalem shall ye
+worship the Father." Hither the Jewish pilgrims never come, for fear
+their feet may unwittingly tread upon "the Holy of Holies," and defile
+it; but they creep outside of the great inclosure, in the gloomy trench
+beside the foundation stones of the wall, mourning and lamenting for the
+majesty that is departed and the Temple that is ground to powder.
+
+But amid all these changes and perturbations, here stands the good old
+limestone rock, the threshing-floor of Araunah, the capstone of the
+hill, waiting for the sun to shine and the dews to fall on it once more,
+as they did when the foundations of the earth were laid.
+
+The legend says that you can hear the waters of the flood roaring in an
+abyss underneath the rock. I laid my ear against the rugged stone and
+listened. What sound? Was it the voice of turbulent centuries and the
+lapsing tides of men?
+
+
+II
+
+GOLGOTHA
+
+"We ought to go again to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre," said the
+Lady in a voice of dutiful reminder, "we have not half seen it." So we
+went down to the heart of Jerusalem and entered the labyrinthine shrine.
+
+The motley crowd in the paved quadrangle in front of the double-arched
+doorway were buying and selling, bickering and chaffering and chattering
+as usual. Within the portal, on a slightly raised platform to the left,
+the Turkish guardians of the holy places and keepers of the peace
+between Christians were seated among their rugs and cushions, impassive,
+indolent, dignified, drinking their coffee or smoking their tobacco,
+conversing gravely or counting the amber beads of their comboloios. The
+Sultan owns the Holy Sepulchre; but he is a liberal host and permits all
+factions of Christendom to visit it and celebrate their rites in turn,
+provided only they do not beat or kill one another in their devotions.
+We saw his silent sentinels of tolerance scattered in every part of the
+vast, confused edifice.
+
+The interior was dim and shadowy. Opposite the entrance was the Stone of
+Unction, a marble slab on which it is said the body of Christ was
+anointed when it was taken down from the cross. Pilgrim after pilgrim
+came kneeling to this stone, and bending to kiss it, beneath the Latin,
+Greek, Armenian and Coptic lamps which hang above it by silver chains.
+
+The Chapel of the Crucifixion was on our right, above us, in the second
+story of the church. We climbed the steep flight of stairs and stood in
+a little room, close, obscure, crowded with lamps and icons and
+candelabra, incrusted with ornaments of gold and silver, full of strange
+odours and glimmerings of mystic light. There, they told us, in front of
+that rich altar was the silver star which marked the place in the rock
+where the Holy Cross stood. And on either side of it were the sockets
+which received the crosses of the two thieves. And a few feet away,
+covered by a brass slide, was the cleft in the rock which was made by
+the earthquake. It was lined with slabs of reddish marble and looked
+nearly a foot deep.
+
+Priests in black robes and tall, cylindrical hats, and others with brown
+robes, rope girdles and tonsured heads, were coming and going around us.
+Pilgrims were climbing and descending the stairs, kneeling and murmuring
+unintelligible devotions, kissing the star and the cleft in the rock and
+the icons. Underneath us, though we were supposed to stand on the hill
+called Golgotha, were the offices of the Greek clergy and the Chapel of
+Adam.
+
+We went around from chapel to chapel; into the opulent Greek cathedral
+where they show the "Centre of the World"; into the bare little Chapel
+of the Syrians where they show the tombs of Nicodemus and Joseph of
+Arimathæa; into the Chapel of the Apparition where the Franciscans say
+that Christ appeared to His mother after the resurrection. There was
+sweet singing in this chapel and a fragrant smell of incense. We went
+into the Chapel of Saint Helena, underground, which belongs to the
+Greeks; into the Chapel of the Parting of the Raiment which belongs to
+the Armenians. We were impartial in our visitation, but we did not have
+time to see the Abyssinian Chapel, the Coptic Chapel of Saint Michael,
+nor the Church of Abraham where the Anglicans are allowed to celebrate
+the eucharist twice a month.
+
+The centre of all this maze of creeds, ceremonies and devotions is the
+Chapel of the Holy Sepulchre, a little edifice of precious marbles,
+carved and gilded, standing beneath the great dome of the church, in the
+middle of a rotunda surrounded by marble pillars. We bought and lighted
+our waxen tapers and waited for a lull in the stream of pilgrims to
+enter the shrine. First we stood in the vestibule with its tall
+candelabra; then in the Angels' Chapel, with its fifteen swinging lamps,
+making darkness visible; then, stooping through a low doorway, we came
+into the tiny chamber, six feet square, which is said to contain the
+rock-hewn tomb in which the Saviour of the World was buried.
+
+Mass is celebrated here daily by different Christian sects. Pilgrims,
+rich and poor, come hither from all parts of the habitable globe. They
+kneel beneath the three-and-forty pendent lamps of gold and silver. They
+kiss the worn slab of marble which covers the tombstone, some of them
+smiling with joy, some of them weeping bitterly, some of them with
+quiet, business-like devotion as if they were performing a duty. The
+priest of their faith blesses them, sprinkles the relics which they lay
+on the altar with holy water, and one by one the pilgrims retire
+backward through the low portal.
+
+I saw a Russian peasant, sad-eyed, wrinkled, bent with many sorrows, lay
+his cheek silently on the tombstone with a look on his face as if he
+were a child leaning against his mother's breast. I saw a little
+barefoot boy of Jerusalem, with big, serious eyes, come quickly in, and
+try to kiss the stone; but it was too high for him, so he kissed his
+hand and laid it upon the altar. I saw a young nun, hardly more than a
+girl, slender, pale, dark-eyed, with a noble Italian face, shaken with
+sobs, the tears running down her cheeks, as she bent to touch her lips
+to the resting-place of the Friend of Sinners.
+
+This, then, is the way in which the craving for penitence, for
+reverence, for devotion, for some utterance of the nameless thirst and
+passion of the soul leads these pilgrims. This is the form in which the
+divine mystery of sacrificial sorrow and death appeals to them, speaks
+to their hearts and comforts them.
+
+Could any Christian of whatever creed, could any son of woman with a
+heart to feel the trouble and longing of humanity, turn his back upon
+that altar? Must I not go away from that mysterious little room as the
+others had gone, with my face toward the stone of remembrance, stooping
+through the lowly door?
+
+And yet--and yet in my deepest heart I was thirsty for the open air,
+the blue sky, the pure sunlight, the tranquillity of large and silent
+spaces.
+
+The Lady went with me across the crowded quadrangle into the cool,
+clean, quiet German Church of the Redeemer. We climbed to the top of the
+lofty bell tower.
+
+Jerusalem lay at our feet, with its network of streets and lanes,
+archways and convent walls, domes small and great--the black Dome of the
+Rock in the centre of its wide inclosure, the red dome and the green
+dome of the Jewish synagogues on Mount Zion, the seven gilded domes of
+the Russian Church of Saint Mary Magdalen, a hundred tiny domes of
+dwelling-houses, and right in front of us the yellow dome of the Greek
+"Centre of the World" and the black dome of the Holy Sepulchre.
+
+The quadrangle was still full of people buying and selling, but the
+murmur of their voices was faint and far away, less loud than the
+twittering of the thousands of swallows that soared and circled, with
+glistening of innumerable blue-black wings and soft sheen of white
+breasts, in the tender light of sunset above the façade of the gray
+old church.
+
+Westward the long ridge of Olivet was bathed in the rays of the
+declining sun.
+
+Northward, beyond the city-gate, the light fell softly on a little rocky
+hill, shaped like a skull, the ancient place of stoning for those whom
+the cruel city had despised and rejected and cast out. At the foot of
+that eminence there is a quiet garden and a tomb hewn in the rock.
+Rosemary and rue grow there, roses and lilies; birds sing among the
+trees. Is not that little rounded hill, still touched with the free
+light of heaven, still commanding a clear outlook over the city to the
+Mount of Olives--is not that the true Golgotha, where Christ was lifted
+up?
+
+As we were thinking of this we saw a man come out on the roof of the
+Greek "Centre of the World," and climb by a ladder up the side of the
+huge dome. He went slowly and carefully, yet with confidence, as if the
+task were familiar. He carried a lantern in one hand. He was going to
+the top of the dome to light up the great cross for the night. We spoke
+no word, but each knew the thought that was in the other's heart.
+
+Wherever the crucifixion took place, it was surely in the open air,
+beneath the wide sky, and the cross that stood on Golgotha has become
+the light at the centre of the world's night.
+
+
+_A PSALM OF THE UNSEEN ALTAR_
+
+_Man the maker of cities is also a builder of altars:
+Among his habitations he setteth tables for his god._
+
+_He bringeth the beauty of the rocks to enrich them:
+Marble and alabaster, porphyry, jasper and jade._
+
+_He cometh with costly gifts to offer an oblation:
+He would buy favour with the fairest of his flock._
+
+_Around the many altars I hear strange music arising:
+Loud lamentations and shouting and singing and sighs._
+
+_I perceive also the pain and terror of their sacrifices:
+I see the white marble wet with tears and with blood._
+
+_Then I said, These are the altars of ignorance:
+Yet they are built by thy children, O God, who know thee not._
+
+_Surely thou wilt have pity upon them and lead them:
+Hast thou not prepared for them a table of peace?_
+
+_Then the Lord mercifully sent his angel forth to lead me:
+He led me through the temples, the holy place that is hidden._
+
+_Lo, there are multitudes kneeling in the silence of the spirit:
+They are kneeling at the unseen altar of the lowly heart._
+
+_Here is plentiful forgiveness for the souls that are forgiving:
+And the joy of life is given unto all who long to give._
+
+_Here a Father's hand upholdeth all who bear each other's burdens:
+And the benediction falleth upon all who pray in love._
+
+_Surely this is the altar where the penitent find pardon:
+And the priest who hath blessed it forever is the Holy One of God._
+
+
+
+
+                                  VII
+
+                           JERICHO AND JORDAN
+
+
+I
+
+"GOING DOWN TO JERICHO"
+
+In the memory of every visitor to Jerusalem the excursion to Jericho is
+a vivid point. For this is the one trip which everybody makes, and it is
+a convention of the route to regard it as a perilous and exciting
+adventure. Perhaps it is partly this flavour of a not-too-dangerous
+danger, this shivering charm of a hazard to be taken without too much
+risk, that attracts the average tourist, prudently romantic, to make the
+journey to the lowest inhabited town in the world.
+
+Jericho has always had an ill name. Weak walls, weak hearts, weak morals
+were its early marks. Sweltering on the rich plain of the lower Jordan,
+eight hundred feet below the sea, at the entrance of the two chief
+passes into the Judean highlands, it was too indolent or cowardly to
+maintain its own importance. Stanley called it "the key of Palestine";
+but it was only a latch which any bold invader could lift. The people
+of Jericho were famous for light fingers and lively feet, great robbers
+and runners-away. Joshua blotted the city out with a curse; five
+centuries later Hiel the Bethelite rebuilt it with the bloody sacrifice
+of his two sons. Antony gave it to Cleopatra, and Herod bought it from
+her for a winter palace, where he died. Nothing fine or brave, so far as
+I can remember, is written of any of its inhabitants, except the good
+deed of Rahab, a harlot, and the honest conduct of Zacchæus, a publican.
+To this day, at the _tables d'hôte_ of Jerusalem the name of Jericho
+stirs up a little whirlwind of bad stories and warnings.
+
+Last night we were dining with friends at one of the hotels, and the
+usual topic came up for discussion. Imagine what followed.
+
+"That Jericho road is positively frightful," says a British female
+tourist in lace cap, lilac ribbons and a maroon poplin dress, "the heat
+is most extr'ordinary!"
+
+"No food fit to eat at the hotel," grumbles her husband, a rosy,
+bald-headed man in plaid knickerbockers, "no bottled beer; beastly
+little hole!"
+
+"A voyage of the most fatiguing, of the most perilous, I assure you,"
+says a little Frenchman with a forked beard. "But I rejoice myself of
+the adventure, of the romance accomplished."
+
+"I want to know," piped a lady in a green shirt-waist from Andover,
+Mass., "is there really and truly any danger?"
+
+"I guess not for us," answers the dominating voice of the conductor of
+her party. "There's always a bunch of robbers on that road, but I have
+hired the biggest man of the bunch to take care of us. Just wait till
+you see that dandy Sheikh in his best clothes; he looks like a museum of
+old weapons."
+
+"Have you heard," interposed a lady-like clergyman on the other side of
+the table, with gold-rimmed spectacles gleaming above his high, black
+waistcoat, "what happened on the Jericho road, week before last? An
+English gentleman, of very good family, imprudently taking a short cut,
+became separated from his companions. The Bedouins fell upon him, beat
+him quite painfully, deprived him of his watch and several necessary
+garments, and left him prostrate upon the earth, in an embarrassingly
+denuded condition. Just fancy! Was it not perfectly shocking?" (The
+clergyman's voice was full of delicious horror.) "But, after all," he
+resumed with a beaming smile, "it was most scriptural, you know, quite
+like a Providential confirmation of Holy Writ!"
+
+"Most unpleasant for the Englishman," growls the man in knickerbockers.
+"But what can you expect under this rotten Turkish government?"
+
+"I know a story about Jericho," begins a gentleman from Colorado, with a
+hay-coloured moustache and a droop in his left eyelid--and then follows
+a series of tales about that ill-reputed town and the road thither,
+which leave the lady in the lace cap gasping, and the man with the
+forked beard visibly swelling with pride at having made the journey, and
+the little woman in the green shirt-waist quivering with exquisite fears
+and mentally clinging with both arms to the personal conductor of her
+party, who looks becomingly virile, and exchanges a surreptitious wink
+with the gentleman from Colorado.
+
+Of course, I am not willing to make an affidavit to the correctness of
+every word in this conversation; but I can testify that it fairly
+represents the _Jericho-motif_ as you may hear it played almost any
+night in the Jerusalem hotels. It sounded to us partly like an echo of
+ancient legends kept alive by dragomans and officials for purposes of
+revenue, and partly like an outcrop of the hysterical habit in people
+who travel in flocks and do nothing without much palaver. In our quiet
+camp, George the Bethlehemite assured us that the sheikhs were
+"humbugs," and an escort of soldiers a nuisance. So we placidly made our
+preparations to ride on the morrow, with no other safeguards than our
+friendly dispositions and a couple of excellent American revolvers.
+
+But it was no brief _Ausflug_ to Jericho and return that we had before
+us: it was the beginning of a long and steady ride, weeks in the saddle,
+from six to nine hours a day.
+
+Imagine us then, morning after morning, mounting somewhere between six
+and eight o'clock, according to the weather and the length of the
+journey, and jingling out of camp, followed at a discreet distance by
+Youssouf on his white pony with the luncheon, and Paris on his tiny
+donkey, Tiddly-winks. About noon, sometimes a little earlier, sometimes
+a little later, the white pony catches up with us, and the tent and the
+rugs are spread for the midday meal and the _siesta_. It may be in our
+dreams, or while the Lady is reading from some pleasant book, or while
+the smoke of the afternoon pipe of peace is ascending, that we hear the
+musical bells of our long baggage-train go by us on the way to our
+night-quarters.
+
+The evening ride is always shorter than the morning, sometimes only an
+hour or two in the saddle; and at the end of it there is the surprise of
+a new camp ground, the comfortable tents, the refreshing bath tub, the
+quiet dinner by sunset-glow or candle-light. Then a bit of friendly talk
+over the walnuts and the "Treasure of Zion"; a cup of fragrant Turkish
+coffee; and George enters the door of the tent to report on the
+condition of things in general, and to discuss the plan of the next
+day's journey.
+
+
+II
+
+THE GOOD SAMARITAN'S ROAD
+
+It is strange how every day, no matter in what mood of merry jesting or
+practical modernity we set out, an hour of riding in the open air brings
+us back to the mystical charm of the Holy Land and beneath the spell of
+its memories and dreams. The wild hillsides, the flowers of the field,
+the shimmering olive-groves, the brown villages, the crumbling ruins,
+the deep-blue sky, subdue us to themselves and speak to us "rememberable
+things."
+
+We pass down the Valley of the Brook Kidron, where no water ever flows;
+and through the crowd of beggars and loiterers and pilgrims at the
+crossroads; and up over the shoulder of the Mount of Olives, past the
+wide-spread Jewish burying-ground, where we take our last look at the
+towers and domes and minarets and walls of Jerusalem. The road descends
+gently, on the other side of the hill, to Bethany, a disconsolate group
+of hovels. The sweet home of Mary and Martha is gone. It is a waste of
+time to look at the uncertain ruins which are shown here as sacred
+sites. Look rather at the broad landscape eastward and southward, the
+luminous blue sky, the joyful little flowers on the rocky slopes,--these
+are unchanged.
+
+Not far beyond Bethany, the road begins to drop, with great windings,
+into a deep, desolate valley, crowded with pilgrims afoot and on
+donkey-back and in ramshackle carriages,--Russians and Greeks returning
+from their sacred bath in the Jordan. Here and there, at first, we can
+see a shepherd with his flock upon the haggard hillside.
+
+  "As for the grass, it grew as scant as hair
+          In leprosy."
+
+Once the Patriarch and I, scrambling on foot down a short-cut, think we
+see a Bedouin waiting for us behind a rock, with his long gun over his
+shoulder; but it turns out to be only a brown little peasant girl,
+ragged and smiling, watching her score of lop-eared goats.
+
+As the valley descends the landscape becomes more and more arid and
+stricken. The heat broods over it like a disease.
+
+                "I think I never saw
+  Such starved, ignoble nature; nothing throve;
+  For flowers--as well expect a cedar grove!"
+
+We might be on the way with Childe Roland to the Dark Tower. But instead
+we come, about noon, through a savage glen beset with blood-red rocks
+and honeycombed with black caves on the other side of the ravine, to the
+so-called "Inn of the Good Samaritan."
+
+The local colour of the parable surrounds us. Here is a fitting scene
+for such a drama of lawless violence, cowardly piety, and unconventional
+mercy. In these caverns robbers could hide securely. On this wild road
+their victim might lie and bleed to death. By these paths across the
+glen the priest and the Levite could "pass by on the other side,"
+discreetly turning their heads away from any interruption to their
+selfish duties. And in some such wayside khân as this, standing like a
+lonely fortress among the sun-baked hills, the friendly half-heathen
+from Samaria could safely leave the stranger whom he had rescued,
+provided he paid at least a part of his lodging in advance.
+
+We eat our luncheon in one of the three big, disorderly rooms of the
+inn, and go on, in the cool of the afternoon, toward Jericho. The road
+still descends steeply, among ragged and wrinkled hills. On our left we
+look down into the Wâdi el-Kelt, a gloomy gorge five or six hundred feet
+deep, with a stream of living water singing between its prison walls.
+Tradition calls this the Brook Cherith, where Elijah hid himself from
+Ahab, and was fed by Arabs of a tribe called "the Ravens." But the
+prophet's hiding-place was certainly on the other side of the Jordan,
+and this Wâdi is probably the Valley of Achor, spoken of in the Book of
+Joshua. On the opposite side of the cañon, half-way down the face of the
+precipice, clings the monastery of Saint George, one of the pious
+penitentiaries to which the Greek Church assigns unruly and criminal
+monks.
+
+[Illustration: Great Monastery of St. George.]
+
+As we emerge from the narrow valley a great view opens before us: to the
+right, the blue waters of the Dead Sea, like a mirror of burnished
+steel; in front, the immense plain of the Jordan, with the dark-green
+ribbon of the river-jungle winding through its length and the purple
+mountains of Gilead and Moab towering beyond it; to the left, the
+furrowed gray and yellow ridges and peaks of the northern "wilderness"
+of Judea, the wild country into which Jesus retired alone after the
+baptism by John in the Jordan.
+
+One of these peaks, the Quarantana, is supposed to be the "high
+mountain" from which the Tempter showed Jesus the "kingdoms of the
+world." In the foreground of that view, sweeping from the snowy summits
+of Hermon in the north, past the Greek cities of Pella and Scythopolis,
+down the vast valley with its wealth of palms and balsams, must have
+stood the Roman city of Jericho, with its imperial farms and the
+palaces, baths and theatres of Herod the Great,--a visible image of what
+Christ might have won for Himself if He had yielded to the temptation
+and turned from the pathway of spiritual light to follow the shadows of
+earthly power and glory.
+
+Herod's Jericho has vanished; there is nothing left of it but the
+outline of one of the great pools which he built to irrigate his
+gardens. The modern Jericho is an unhappy little adobe village, lying a
+mile or so farther to the east. A mile to the north, near a copious
+fountain of pure water, called the Sultan's Spring, is the site of the
+oldest Jericho, which Joshua conquered and Hiel rebuilt. The spring,
+which is probably the same that Elisha cleansed with salt (II Kings ii:
+19-22), sends forth a merry stream to turn a mill and irrigate a group
+of gardens full of oranges, figs, bananas, grapes, feathery bamboos and
+rosy oleanders. But the ancient city is buried under a great mound of
+earth, which the German _Palästina-Verein_ is now excavating.
+
+As we come up to the mound I pull out my little camera and prepare to
+take a picture of the hundred or so dusty Arabs--men, women and
+children--who are at work in the trenches. A German _gelehrter_ in a
+very excited state rushes up to me and calls upon me to halt, in the
+name of the Emperor. The taking of pictures by persons not imperially
+authorised is _streng verboten_. He is evidently prepared to be abusive,
+if not actually violent, until I assure him, in the best German that I
+can command, that I have no political or archæological intentions, and
+that if the photographing of his picturesque work-people to him
+displeasing is, I will my camera immediately in its pocket put. This
+mollifies him, and he politely shows us what he is doing.
+
+A number of ruined houses, and a sort of central temple, with a rude
+flight of steps leading up to it, have been discovered. A portion of
+what seems to be the city-wall has just been laid bare. If there are any
+inscriptions or relics of any value they are kept secret; but there is
+plenty of broken pottery of a common kind. It is all very poor and
+beggarly looking; no carving nor even any hewn stones. The buildings
+seem to be of rubble, and "the walls of Jericho" are little better than
+the stone fences on a Connecticut farm. No wonder they fell down at the
+blast of Joshua's rams' horns and the rush of his fierce tribesmen.
+
+We ride past the gardens and through the shady lanes to our camp, on the
+outskirts of the modern village. The air is heavy and languid, full of
+relaxing influence, an air of sloth and luxury, seeming to belong to
+some strange region below the level of human duty and effort as far as
+it is below the level of the sea. The fragrance of the orange-blossoms,
+like a subtle incense of indulgence, floats on the evening breeze.
+Veiled figures pass us in the lanes, showing lustrous eyes. A sound of
+Oriental music and laughter and clapping hands comes from one of the
+houses in an inclosure hedged with acacia-trees. We sit in the door of
+our tent at sundown and dream of the vanished palm-groves, the gardens
+of Cleopatra, the palaces of Herod, the soft, ignoble history of that
+region of fertility and indolence, rich in harvests, poor in manhood.
+
+Then it seems as if some one were saying, "I will lift up mine eyes unto
+the hills, from whence cometh my help." There they stand, all about us:
+eastward, the great purple ranges of Gad and Reuben, from which Elijah
+the Tishbite descended to rebuke and warn Israel; westward, against the
+saffron sky, the ridges and peaks of Judea, among which Amos and
+Jeremiah saw their lofty visions; northward, the clear-cut pinnacle of
+Sartoba, and far away beyond it the dim outlines of the Galilean hills
+from which Jesus of Nazareth came down to open blind eyes and to
+shepherd wandering souls. With the fading of the sunset glow a deep blue
+comes upon all the mountains, a blue which strangely seems to grow
+paler as the sky above them darkens, sinking down upon them through
+infinite gradations of azure into something mysterious and
+indescribable, not a color, not a shadow, not a light, but a secret
+hyaline illumination which transforms them into aerial battlements and
+ramparts, on whose edge the great stars rest and flame, the watch-fires
+of the Eternal.
+
+
+III
+
+"PASSING OVER JORDAN"
+
+I have often wondered why the Jordan, which plays such an important part
+in the history of the Hebrews, receives so little honour and praise in
+their literature. Sentimental travellers and poets of other races have
+woven a good deal of florid prose and verse about the name of this
+river. There is no doubt that it is the chief stream of Palestine, the
+only one, in fact, that deserves to be called a river. Yet the Bible has
+no song of loving pride for the Jordan; no tender and beautiful words to
+describe it; no record of the longing of exiled Jews to return to the
+banks of their own river and hear again the voice of its waters. At
+this strange silence I have wondered much, not knowing the reason of it.
+Now I know.
+
+The Jordan is not a little river to be loved: it is a barrier to be
+passed over. From its beginning in the marshes of Huleh to its end in
+the Dead Sea, (excepting only the lovely interval of the Lake of
+Galilee), this river offers nothing to man but danger and difficulty,
+perplexity and trouble. Fierce and sullen and intractable, it flows
+through a long depression, at the bottom of which it has dug for itself
+a still deeper crooked ditch, along the Eastern border of Galilee and
+Samaria and Judea, as if it wished to cut them off completely. There are
+no pleasant places along its course, no breezy forelands where a man
+might build a house with a fair outlook over flowing water, no rich and
+tranquil coves where the cattle would love to graze, or stand knee-deep
+in the quiet stream. There is no sense of leisure, of refreshment, of
+kind companionship and friendly music about the Jordan. It is in a hurry
+and a secret rage. Yet there is something powerful, self-reliant,
+inevitable about it. In thousands of years it has changed less than any
+river in the world. It is a flowing, everlasting symbol of division, of
+separation: a river of solemn meetings and partings like that of Elijah
+and Elisha, of Jesus and John the Baptist: a type of the narrow stream
+of death. It seems to say to man, "Cross me if you will, if you can; and
+then go your way."
+
+The road that leads us from Jericho toward the river is pleasant enough,
+at first, for the early sunlight is gentle and caressing, and there is a
+cool breeze moving across the plain. It is hard to believe that we are
+eight hundred feet below the sea this morning, and still travelling
+downward. The lush fields of barley, watered by many channels from the
+brook Kelt, are waving and glistening around us. Quails are running
+along the edge of the road, appearing and disappearing among the thick
+grain-stalks. The bulbuls warble from the thorn-bushes, and a crested
+hoopoo croons in a jujube-tree. Larks are on the wing, scattering music.
+
+We are on the upper edge of that great belt of sunken land between the
+mountains of Gilead and the mountains of Ephraim and Judah, which
+reaches from the Lake of Galilee to the Dead Sea, and which the Arabs
+call _El-Ghôr_, the "Rift." It is a huge trench, from three to fourteen
+miles wide, sinking from six hundred feet below the level of the
+Mediterranean, at the northern end, to thirteen hundred feet below, at
+the southern end. The surface is fairly level, sloping gently from each
+side toward the middle, and the soil is of an inexhaustible fertility,
+yielding abundant crops wherever it is patiently irrigated from the
+streams which flow out of the mountains east and west, but elsewhere
+lying baked and arid under the heavy, close, feverous air. No strong
+race has ever inhabited this trench as a home; no great cities have ever
+grown here, and its civilization, such as it had, was a hot-bed product,
+soon ripe and quickly rotten.
+
+We have passed beyond the region of greenness already; the little
+water-brooks have ceased to gleam through the grain: the wild grasses
+and weeds have a parched and yellow look: the freshness of the early
+morning has vanished, and we are descending through a desolate land of
+sour and leprous hills of clay and marl, eroded by the floods into
+fantastic shapes, furrowed and scarred and scabbed with mineral refuse.
+The gullies are steep and narrow: the heat settles on them like a curse.
+
+Through this battered and crippled region, the centre of the Jordan
+Valley, runs the Jordan Bed, twisting like a big green serpent. A dense
+half-tropical jungle, haunted by wild beasts and poisonous reptiles and
+insects, conceals, almost at every point, the down-rushing, swirling,
+yellow flood.
+
+It has torn and desolated its own shores with sudden spates. The feet of
+the pilgrims who bathe in it sink into the mud as they wade out
+waist-deep, and if they venture beyond the shelter of the bank the
+whirling eddies threaten to sweep them away. The fords are treacherous,
+with shifting bottom and changing currents. The poets and prophets of
+the Old Testament give us a true idea of this uninhabitable and
+unlovable river-bed when they speak of "the pride of Jordan," "the
+swellings of Jordan," where the lion hides among the reeds in his secret
+lair, a "refuge of lies," which the "overflowing scourge" shall sweep
+away.
+
+No, it was not because the Jordan was beautiful that John the Baptist
+chose it as the scene of his preaching and ministry, but because it was
+wild and rude, an emblem of violent and sudden change, of irrevocable
+parting, of death itself, and because in its one gift of copious and
+unfailing water, he found the necessary element for his deep baptism of
+repentance, in which the sinful past of the crowd who followed him was
+to be symbolically immersed and buried and washed away.
+
+At the place where we reach the water there is an open bit of ground; a
+miserable hovel gives shelter to two or three Turkish soldiers; an
+ungainly latticed bridge, stilted on piles of wood, straddles the river
+with a single span. The toll is three piastres, (about twelve cents,)
+for a man and horse.
+
+The only place from which I can take a photograph of the river is the
+bridge itself, so I thrust the camera through one of the diamond-shaped
+openings on the lattice-work and try to make a truthful record of the
+lower Jordan at its best. Imagine the dull green of the tangled
+thickets, the ragged clumps of reeds and water-grasses, the sombre and
+silent flow of the fulvous water sliding and curling down out of the
+jungle, and the implacable fervour of the pallid, searching sunlight
+heightening every touch of ugliness and desolation, and you will
+understand why the Hebrew poets sang no praise of the Jordan, and why
+Naaman the Syrian thought scorn of it when he remembered the lovely and
+fruitful rivers of Damascus.
+
+
+_A PSALM OF RIVERS_
+
+_The rivers of God are full of water:
+They are wonderful in the renewal of their strength:
+He poureth them out from a hidden fountain._
+
+_They are born among the hills in the high places:
+Their cradle is in the bosom of the rocks:
+The mountain is their mother and the forest is their father._
+
+_They are nourished among the long grasses:
+They receive the tribute of a thousand springs:
+The rain and the snow are a heritage for them._
+
+_They are glad to be gone from their birthplace:
+With a joyful noise they hasten away:
+They are going forever and never departed._
+
+_The courses of the rivers are all appointed:
+They roar loudly but they follow the road:
+The finger of God hath marked their pathway._
+
+_The rivers of Damascus rejoice among their gardens:
+The great river of Egypt is proud of his ships:
+The Jordan is lost in the Lake of Bitterness._
+
+_Surely the Lord guideth them every one in his wisdom:
+In the end he gathereth all their drops on high:
+He sendeth them forth again in the clouds of mercy._
+
+_O my God, my life runneth away like a river:
+Guide me, I beseech thee, in a pathway of good:
+Let me flow in blessing to my rest in thee._
+
+
+
+
+                                   VIII
+
+                           A JOURNEY TO JERASH
+
+
+I
+
+THROUGH THE LAND OF GILEAD
+
+I never heard of Jerash until my friend the Archæologist told me about
+it, one night when we were sitting beside my study fire at Avalon. "It
+is the site of the old city of Gerasa," said he. "The most satisfactory
+ruins that I have ever seen."
+
+There was something suggestive and potent in that phrase, "satisfactory
+ruins." For what is it that weaves the charm of ruins? What do we ask of
+them to make their magic complete and satisfying? There must be an
+element of picturesqueness, certainly, to take the eye with pleasure in
+the contrast between the frailty of man's works and the imperishable
+loveliness of nature. There must also be an element of age; for new
+ruins are painful, disquieting, intolerable; they speak of violence and
+disorder; it is not until the bloom of antiquity gathers upon them that
+the relics of vast and splendid edifices attract us and subdue us with a
+spell, breathing tranquillity and noble thoughts. There must also be an
+element of magnificence in decay, of symmetry broken but not destroyed,
+a touch of delicate art and workmanship, to quicken the imagination and
+evoke the ghost of beauty haunting her ancient habitations. And beyond
+these things I think there must be two more qualities in a ruin that
+satisfies us: a clear connection with the greatness and glory of the
+past, with some fine human achievement, with some heroism of men dead
+and gone; and last of all, a spirit of mystery, the secret of some
+unexplained catastrophe, the lost link of a story never to be fully
+told.
+
+This, or something like it, was what the Archæologist's phrase seemed to
+promise me as we watched the glowing embers on the hearth of Avalon. And
+it is this promise that has drawn me, with my three friends, on this
+April day into the Land of Gilead, riding to Jerash.
+
+The grotesque and rickety bridge by which we have crossed the Jordan
+soon disappears behind us, as we trot along the winding bridle-path
+through the river-jungle, in the stifling heat. Coming out on the open
+plain, which rises gently toward the east, we startle great flocks of
+storks into the air, and they swing away in languid circles, dappling
+the blaze of morning with their black-tipped wings. Grotesque, ungainly,
+gothic birds, they do not seem to belong to the Orient, but rather to
+have drifted hither out of some quaint, familiar fairy tale of the
+North; and indeed they are only transient visitors here, and will soon
+be on their way to build their nests on the roofs of German villages and
+clapper their long, yellow bills over the joy of houses full of little
+children.
+
+The rains of spring have spread a thin bloom of green over the plain.
+Tender herbs and light grasses partly veil the gray and stony ground.
+There is a month of scattered feeding for the flocks and herds. Away to
+the south, where the foot-hills begin to roll up suddenly from the
+Jordan, we can see a black line of Bedouin tents quivering through the
+heat.
+
+Now the trail divides, and we take the northern fork, turning soon into
+the open mouth of the Wâdi Shaîb, a broad, grassy valley between high
+and treeless hills. The watercourse that winds down the middle of it is
+dry: nothing but a tumbled bed of gray rocks,--the bare bones of a
+little river. But as we ascend slowly the flowers increase; wild
+hollyhocks, and morning-glories, and clumps of blue anchusa, and scarlet
+adonis, and tall wands of white asphodel.
+
+The morning grows hotter and hotter as we plod along. Presently we come
+up with three mounted Arabs, riding leisurely. Salutations are exchanged
+with gravity. Then the Arabs whisper something to each other and spur
+away at a great pace ahead of us--laughing. Why did they laugh?
+
+Ah, now we know. For here is a lofty cliff on one side of the valley,
+hanging over just far enough to make a strip of cool shade at its base,
+with ferns and deep grass and a glimmer of dripping water. And here our
+wise Arabs are sitting at their ease to eat their mid-day meal under
+"the shadow of a great rock in a weary land."
+
+Vainly we search the valley for another rock like that. It is the only
+one; and the Arabs laughed because they knew it. We must content
+ourselves with this little hill where a few hawthorn bushes offer us
+tiny islets of shade, beset with thorns, and separated by straits of
+intolerable glare. Here we eat a little, but without comfort; and sleep
+a little, but without refreshment; and talk a little, but restlessly. As
+soon as we dare, we get into the saddle again and toil up through the
+valley, now narrowing into a rugged gorge, crammed with ardent heat. The
+sprinkling of trees and bushes, the multitude of flowers, assure us that
+there must be moisture underground, along the bed of the stream; but
+above ground there is not a drop, and not a breath of wind to break the
+dead calm of the smothering air. Why did we come into this heat-trap?
+
+But presently the ravine leads us, by steep stairs of rock, up to a
+high, green table-land. A heavenly breeze from the west is blowing here.
+The fields are full of flowers--red anemones, white and yellow daisies,
+pink flax, little blue bell-flowers--a hundred kinds. One knoll is
+covered with cyclamens; another with splendid purple iris, immense
+blossoms, so dark that they look almost black against the grass; but
+hold them up to the sun and you will see the imperial colour. We have
+never found such wild flowers, not even on the Plain of Sharon; the
+hills around Jerusalem were but sparsely adorned in comparison with
+these highlands of bloom.
+
+And here are oak-trees, broad-limbed and friendly, clothed in glistening
+green. Let us rest for a while in this cool shade and forget the misery
+of the blazing noon. Below us lies the gray Jordan valley and the
+steel-blue mirror of the Dead Sea; and across that gulf we see the
+furrowed mountains of Judea and Samaria, and far to the north the peaks
+of Galilee. Around us is the Land of Gilead, a rolling hill-country,
+with long ridges and broad summits, a rounded land, a verdurous land, a
+land of rich pasturage. There are deep valleys that cut into it and
+divide it up. But the main bulk of it is lifted high in the air, and
+spread out nobly to the visitations of the wind. And see--far away
+there, to the south, across the Wádi Nimrîn, a mountainside covered with
+wild trees, a real woodland, almost a forest!
+
+Now we must travel on, for it is still a long way to our night-quarters
+at Es Salt. We pass several Bedouin camps, the only kind of villages in
+this part of the world. The tents of goat's-hair are swarming with
+life. A score of ragged Arab boys are playing hockey on the green with
+an old donkey's hoof for a ball. They yell with refreshing vigour, just
+like universal human boys.
+
+The trail grows steeper and more rocky, ascending apparently impossible
+places, and winding perilously along the cliffs above little vineyards
+and cultivated fields where men are ploughing. Travel and traffic
+increase along this rude path, which is the only highway: evidently we
+are coming near to some place of importance.
+
+But where is Es Salt? For nine hours we have been in the saddle, riding
+steadily toward that mysterious metropolis of the Belka, the only living
+city in the Land of Gilead; and yet there is no trace of it in sight.
+Have we missed the trail? The mule-train with our tents and baggage
+passed us in the valley while we were sweltering under the hawthorns. It
+seems as if it must have vanished into the pastoral wilderness and left
+us travelling an endless road to nowhere.
+
+At last we top a rugged ridge and look down upon the solution of the
+mystery. Es Salt is a city that can be hid; for it is not set upon a
+hill, but tucked away in a valley that curves around three sides of a
+rocky eminence, and is sheltered from the view by higher ranges.
+
+Who can tell how this city came here, hidden in this hollow place almost
+three thousand feet above the sea? Who was its founder? What was its
+ancient name? It is a place without traditions, without antiquities,
+without a shrine of any kind; just a living town, thriving and
+prospering in its own dirty and dishevelled way, in the midst of a
+country of nomads, growing in the last twenty years from six thousand to
+fifteen thousand inhabitants, driving a busy trade with the surrounding
+country, exporting famous raisins and dye-stuff made from sumach, the
+seat of the Turkish Government of the Belka, with a garrison and a
+telegraph office--decidedly a thriving town of to-day; yet without a
+road by which a carriage can approach it; and old, unmistakably old!
+
+The castle that crowns the eminence in the centre is a ruin of unknown
+date. The copious spring that gushes from the castle-hill must have
+invited men for many centuries to build their habitations around it.
+The gray houses seem to have slipped and settled down into the curving
+valley, and to have crowded one another up the opposite slopes, as if
+hundreds of generations had found here a hiding-place and a city of
+refuge.
+
+We ride through a Mohammedan graveyard--unfenced, broken, neglected--and
+down a steep, rain-gulleyed hillside, into the filthy, narrow street.
+The people all have an Arab look, a touch of the wildness of the desert
+in their eyes and their free bearing. There are many fine figures and
+handsome faces, some with auburn hair and a reddish hue showing through
+the bronze of their cheeks. They stare at us with undisguised curiosity
+and wonder, as if we came from a strange world. The swarthy merchants in
+the doors of their little shops, the half-veiled women in the lanes, the
+groups of idlers at the corners of the streets, watch us with a gaze
+which seems almost defiant. Evidently tourists are a rarity
+here--perhaps an intrusion to be resented.
+
+We inquire whether our baggage-train has been seen, where our camp is
+pitched. No one knows, no one cares; until at last a ragged, smiling
+urchin, one of those blessed, ubiquitous boys who always know everything
+that happens in a town, offers to guide us. He trots ahead, full of
+importance, dodging through the narrow alleys, making the complete
+circuit of the castle-hill and leading us to the upper end of the
+eastern valley. Here, among a few olive-trees beside the road, our white
+tents are standing, so close to an encampment of wandering gypsies that
+the tent-ropes cross.
+
+Directly opposite rises a quarter of the town, tier upon tier of
+flat-roofed houses, every roof-top covered with people. A wild-looking
+crowd of visitors have gathered in the road. Two soldiers, with the
+appearance of partially reformed brigands, are acting as our guard, and
+keeping the inquisitive spectators at a respectful distance. Our mules
+and donkeys and horses are munching their supper in a row, tethered to a
+long rope in front of the tents. Shukari, the cook, in his white cap and
+apron, is gravely intent upon the operation of his little charcoal
+range. Youssouf, the major-domo, is setting the table with flowers and
+lighted candles in the dining-tent. After a while he comes to the door
+of our sleeping-tents to inform us, with due ceremony, that dinner is
+served; and we sit down to our repast in the midst of the swarming
+Edomites and the wandering Zingari as peacefully and properly as if we
+were dining at the Savoy.
+
+The night darkens around us. Lights twinkle, one above another, up the
+steep hillside of houses; above them are the tranquil stars, the lit
+windows of unknown habitations; and on the hill-top one great planet
+burns in liquid flame.
+
+The crowd melts away, chattering down the road; it forms again, from
+another quarter, and again dissolves. Meaningless shouts and cries and
+songs resound from the hidden city. In the gypsy camp beside us insomnia
+reigns. A little forge is clinking and clanking. Donkeys raise their
+antiphonal lament. Dogs salute the stars in chorus. First a leader, far
+away, lifts a wailing, howling, shrieking note; then the mysterious
+unrest that torments the bosom of Oriental dogdom breaks loose in a
+hundred, a thousand answering voices, swelling into a yapping, growling,
+barking, yelling discord. A sudden silence cuts the tumult short, until
+once more the unknown misery, (or is it the secret joy), of the canine
+heart bursts out in long-drawn dissonance.
+
+From the road and from the tents of the gypsies various human voices are
+sounding close around us all the night. Through our confused dreams and
+broken sleep we strangely seem to catch fragments of familiar speech,
+phrases of English or French or German. Then, waking and listening, we
+hear men muttering and disputing, women complaining or soothing their
+babies, children quarrelling or calling to each other, in Arabic, or
+Romany--not a word that we can understand--voices that tell us only that
+we are in a strange land, and very far away from home, camping in the
+heart of a wild city.
+
+
+II
+
+OVER THE BROOK JABBOK
+
+After such a night the morning is welcome, as it breaks over the eastern
+hill behind us, with rosy light creeping slowly down the opposite slope
+of houses. Before the sunbeams have fairly reached the bottom of the
+valley we are in the saddle, ready to leave Es Salt without further
+exploration.
+
+There is a general monotony about this riding through Palestine which
+yet leaves room for a particular variety of the most entrancing kind.
+Every day is like every other in its main outline, but the details are
+infinitely uncertain--always there is something new, some touch of a
+distinct and memorable charm.
+
+To-day it is the sense of being in the country of the nomads, the
+tent-dwellers, the masters of innumerable flocks and herds, whose wealth
+goes wandering from pasture to pasture, bleating and lowing and browsing
+and multiplying over the open moorland beneath the blue sky. This is the
+prevailing impression of this day: and the symbol of it is the thin,
+quavering music of the pastoral pipe, following us wherever we go,
+drifting tremulously and plaintively down from some rock on the
+hillside, or floating up softly from some hidden valley, where a brown
+shepherd or goatherd is minding his flock with music.
+
+What quaint and rustic melodies are these! Wild and unfamiliar to our
+ears; yet doubtless the same wandering airs that were played by the sons
+and servants of Jacob when he returned from his twenty years of
+profitable exile in Haran with his rich wages of sheep and goats and
+cattle and wives and maid-servants, the fruit of his hard labour and
+shrewd bargaining with his father-in-law Laban, and passed cautiously
+through Gilead on his way to the Promised Land.
+
+On the highland to the east of Es Salt we see a fine herd of horses,
+brood-mares and foals. A little farther on, we come to a muddy pond or
+tank at which a drove of asses are drinking. A steep and winding path,
+full of loose stones, leads us down into a grassy, oval plain, a great
+cup of green, eight or ten miles long and five or six miles wide,
+rimmed with bare hills from five to eight hundred feet high. This, we
+conjecture, is the fertile basin of El Buchaia, or Bekaa.
+
+Bedouin farmers are ploughing the rich, reddish soil. Their black
+tent-villages are tucked away against the feet of the surrounding hills.
+The broad plain itself is without sign of human dwelling, except that
+near each focus of the ellipse there is a pile of shattered ruins with a
+crumbling, solitary tower, where a shepherd sits piping to his lop-eared
+flock.
+
+In one place we pass through a breeding-herd of camels, browsing on the
+short grass. The old ones are in the process of the spring moulting;
+their thick, matted hair is peeling off in large flakes, like fragments
+of a ragged, moth-eaten coat. The young ones are covered with pearl-gray
+wool, soft and almost downy, like gigantic goslings with four legs.
+(What is the word for a young camel, I wonder; is it camelet or
+camelot?) But young and old have a family resemblance of ugliness.
+
+The camel is the most ungainly and stupid of God's useful beasts--an
+awkward necessity--the humpbacked ship of the desert. The Arabs have a
+story which runs thus: "What did Allah say when He had finished making
+the camel? He couldn't say anything; He just looked at the camel, and
+laughed, and laughed!"
+
+But in spite of his ridiculous appearance the camel seems satisfied with
+himself; in fact there is an expression of supreme contempt in his face
+when he droops his pendulous lower lip and wrinkles his nose, which has
+led the Arabs to tell another story about him: "Why does the camel
+despise his master? Because man knows only the ninety-nine common names
+of Allah; but the hundredth name, the wonderful name, the beautiful
+name, is a secret revealed to the camel alone. Therefore he scorns the
+whole race of men."
+
+The cattle that feed around the edges of this peaceful plain are small
+and nimble, as if they were used to long, rough journeys. The prevailing
+colour is black, or rusty brown. They are evidently of a degenerate and
+played-out stock. Even the heifers are used for ploughing, and they look
+but little larger than the donkeys which are often yoked beside them.
+They come around the grassy knoll when our luncheon-tent is pitched,
+and stare at us very much as the people stared in Es Salt.
+
+In the afternoon we pass over the rim of the broad vale and descend a
+narrower ravine, where oaks and terebinths, laurels and balsams,
+pistachios and almonds are growing. The grass springs thick and lush,
+tall weeds and trailing vines appear, a murmur of flowing water is heard
+under the tangled herbage at the bottom of the wâdi. Presently we are
+following a bright little brook, crossing and recrossing it as it leads
+us toward our camp-ground.
+
+There are the tents, standing in a line on the flowery bank of the
+brook, across the water from the trail. A few steps lower down there is
+a well-built stone basin with a copious spring gushing into it from the
+hillside under an arched roof. Here the people of the village, (which is
+somewhere near us on the mountain, but out of sight), come to fill their
+pitchers and water-skins, and to let their cattle and donkeys drink. All
+through the late afternoon they are coming and going, plashing through
+the shallow ford below us, enjoying the cool, clear water, disappearing
+along the foot-paths that lead among the hills.
+
+These are very different cattle from the herds we saw among the Bedouins
+a couple of hours ago; fine large creatures, well bred and well fed,
+some cream-coloured, some red, some belted with white. And these men who
+follow them, on foot or on horseback, truculent looking fellows with
+blue eyes and light hair and broad faces, clad in long, close-fitting
+tunics, with belts around their waists and small black caps of fur, some
+of them with high boots--who are they?
+
+They are some of the Circassian immigrants who were driven out of Russia
+by the Czar after the Russo-Turkish War of 1877, and deported again
+after the Bulgarian atrocities, and whom the Turkish Government has
+colonized through eastern Palestine on land given by the Sultan. Nobody
+really knows to whom the land belongs, I suppose; but the Bedouins have
+had the habit, for many centuries, of claiming and using it as they
+pleased for their roaming flocks and herds. Now these northern invaders
+are taking and holding the most fertile places, the best springs, the
+fields that are well watered through the year.
+
+Therefore the Arab hates the Circassian, though he be of the same
+religion, far more than he hates the Christian, almost as much as he
+hates the Turk. But the Circassian can take care of himself; he is a
+fierce and hardy fighter; and in his rude way he understands how to make
+farming and stock-raising pay.
+
+Indeed, this Land of Gilead is a region in which twenty times the
+present population, if they were industrious and intelligent and had
+good government, might prosper. No wonder that the tribe of Gad and
+Reuben and the half-tribe of Manasseh, on the way to Canaan, "when they
+saw the land of Jazer and the land of Gilead, that, behold, the place
+was a place for cattle," (Numbers xxxii) fell in love with it, and
+besought Moses that they might have their inheritance there, and not
+westward of the Jordan. No wonder that they recrossed the river after
+they had helped Joshua to conquer the Canaanites, and settled in this
+high country, so much fairer and more fertile than Judea, or even than
+Samaria.
+
+It was here, in 1880, that Laurence Oliphant, the gifted English
+traveller and mystic, proposed to establish his fine scheme for the
+beginning of the restoration of the Jews to Palestine. A territory
+extending from the brook of Jabbok on the north to the brook of Arnon on
+the south, from the Jordan Valley on the west to the Arabian desert on
+the east; railways running up from the sea at Haifâ, and down from
+Damascus, and southward to the Gulf of Akabah, and across to Ismailia on
+the Suez Canal; a government of local autonomy guaranteed and protected
+by the Sublime Porte; sufficient capital supplied by the Jewish bankers
+of London and Paris and Berlin and Vienna; and the outcasts of Israel
+gathered from all the countries where they are oppressed, to dwell
+together in peace and plenty, tending sheep and cattle, raising fruit
+and grain, pressing out wine and oil, and supplying the world with the
+balm of Gilead--such was Oliphant's beautiful dream.
+
+But it did not come true; because Russia did not like it, because Turkey
+was afraid of it, because the rest of Europe did not care for it,--and
+perhaps because the Jews themselves were not generally enthusiastic over
+it. Perhaps the majority of them would rather stay where they are.
+Perhaps they do not yearn passionately for Palestine and the simple
+life.
+
+But it is not of these things that we are thinking, I must confess, as
+the ruddy sun slowly drops toward the heights of Pennel, and we stroll
+out in the evening glow, along the edge of the wild ravine into which
+our little stream plunges, and look down into the deep, grand valley of
+the Brook Jabbok.
+
+Yonder, on the other side of the great gulf of heliotrope shadow,
+stretches the long bulk of the Jebel Ajlûn, shaggy with oak-trees. It
+was somewhere on the slopes of that wooded mountain that one of the most
+tragic battles of the world was fought. For there the army of Absalom
+went out to meet the army of his father David. "And the battle was
+spread over the face of all the country, and the forest devoured more
+people that day than the sword devoured." It was there that the young
+man Absalom rode furiously upon his mule, "and the mule went under the
+thick boughs of a great oak, and his head caught hold of the oak, and he
+was taken up between heaven and earth." And a man came and told Joab,
+the captain of David's host, "Behold I saw Absalom hanging in the midst
+of an oak." Then Joab made haste; "and he took three darts in his hand,
+and thrust them through the heart of Absalom while he was yet alive in
+the midst of the oak." And when the news came to David, sitting in the
+gate of the city of Mahanaim, he went up into the chamber over the gate
+and wept bitterly, crying, "Would I had died for thee, O Absalom, my
+son!" (II Samuel xviii.)
+
+To remember a story like that is to feel the pathos with which man has
+touched the face of nature. But there is another story, more mystical,
+more beautiful, which belongs to the scene upon which we are looking.
+Down in the purple valley, where the smooth meadows spread so fair, and
+the little river curves and gleams through the thickets of oleander,
+somewhere along that flashing stream is the place where Jacob sent his
+wives and his children, his servants and his cattle, across the water in
+the darkness, and there remained all night long alone, for "there
+wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day."
+
+Who was this "man" with whom the patriarch contended at midnight, and
+to whom he cried, "I will not let thee go except thou bless me"? On the
+morrow Jacob was to meet his fierce and powerful brother Esau, whom he
+had wronged and outwitted, from whom he had stolen the birthright
+blessing twenty years before. Was it the prospect of this dreaded
+meeting that brought upon Jacob the night of lonely struggle by the
+Brook Jabbok? Was it the promise of reconciliation with his brother that
+made him say at dawn, "I have seen God face to face, and my life is
+saved"? Was it the unexpected friendliness and gentleness of that
+brother in the encounter of the morning that inspired Jacob's cry, "I
+have seen _thy face as one seeth the face of God_, and thou wast pleased
+with me"?
+
+Yes, that _is_ what the old story means, in its Oriental imagery. The
+midnight wrestling is the pressure of human enmity and strife. The
+morning peace is the assurance of human forgiveness and love. The face
+of God seen in the face of human kindness--that is the sunrise vision of
+the Brook Jabbok.
+
+Such are the thoughts with which we fall asleep in our tents beside the
+murmuring brook of Er Rumman. Early the next morning we go down, and
+down, and down, by ledge and terrace and grassy slope, into the Vale of
+Jabbok. It is sixty miles long, beginning on the edge of the mountain of
+Moab, and curving eastward, northward, westward, south-westward, between
+Gilead and Ajlûn, until it opens into the Jordan Valley.
+
+Here is the famous little river, a swift, singing current of gray-blue
+water--Nahr ez-Zerka "blue river," the Arabs call it--dashing and
+swirling merrily between the thickets of willows and tamaracks and
+oleanders that border it. The ford is rather deep, for the spring flood
+is on; but our horses splash through gaily, scattering the water around
+them in showers which glitter in the sunshine.
+
+Is this the brook beside which a man once met God? Yes--and by many
+another brook too.
+
+
+III
+
+THE RUINS OF GERASA
+
+We are coming now into the region of the Decapolis, the Greek cities
+which sprang up along the eastern border of Palestine after the
+conquests of Alexander the Great.
+
+They were trading cities, undoubtedly, situated on the great roads which
+led from the east across the desert to the Jordan Valley, and so,
+converging upon the Plain of Esdraelon, to the Mediterranean Sea and to
+Greece and Italy. Their wealth tempted the Jewish princes of the
+Hasmonean line to conquer and plunder them; but the Roman general Pompey
+restored their civic liberties, B.C. 65, and caused them to be rebuilt
+and strengthened. By the beginning of the Christian era, they were once
+more rich and flourishing, and a league was formed of ten
+municipalities, with certain rights of communal and local government,
+under the protection and suzerainty of the Roman Empire.
+
+The ten cities which originally composed this confederacy for mutual
+defence and the development of their trade, were Scythopolis, Hippos,
+Damascus, Gadara, Raphana, Kanatha, Pella, Dion, Philadelphia and
+Gerasa. Their money was stamped with the image of Cæsar. Their soldiers
+followed the Imperial eagles. Their traditions, their arts, their
+literature were Greek. But their strength and their new prosperity were
+Roman.
+
+Here in this narrow wâdi through which we are climbing up from the Vale
+of Jabbok we find the traces of the presence of the Romans in the
+fragments of a paved military road and an aqueduct. Presently we
+surmount a rocky hill and look down into the broad, shallow basin of
+Jerash. Gently sloping, rock-strewn hills surround it; through the
+centre flows a stream, with banks bordered by trees; a water-fall is
+flashing opposite to us; on a cluster of rounded knolls about the middle
+of the valley, on the west bank of the stream, are spread the vast,
+incredible, complete ruins of the ancient city of Gerasa.
+
+They rise like a dream in the desolation of the wilderness, columns and
+arches and vaults and amphitheatres and temples, suddenly appearing in
+the bare and lonely landscape as if by enchantment.
+
+How came these monuments of splendour and permanence into this country
+of simplicity and transience, this land of shifting shepherds and
+drovers, this empire of the black tent, this immemorial region that has
+slept away the centuries under the spell of the pastoral pipe? What
+magical music of another kind, strong, stately and sonorous, music of
+brazen trumpets and shawms, of silver harps and cymbals, evoked this
+proud and potent city on the border of the desert, and maintained for
+centuries, amid the sweeping, turbulent floods of untamable tribes of
+rebels and robbers, this lofty landmark of
+
+    "the glory that was Greece
+  And the grandeur that was Rome"?
+
+What sudden storm of discord and disaster shook it all down again,
+loosened the sinews of majesty and power, stripped away the garments of
+beauty and luxury, dissolved the lovely body of living joy, and left
+this skeleton of dead splendour diffused upon the solitary ground?
+
+Who can solve these mysteries? It is all unaccountable,
+unbelievable,--the ghost of the dream of a dream,--yet here it is,
+surrounded by the green hills, flooded with the frank light of noon,
+neighboured by a dirty, noisy little village of Arabs and Circassians on
+the east bank of the stream, and with real goats and lean, black cattle
+grazing between the carved columns and under the broken architraves of
+Gerasa the Golden.
+
+Let us go up into the wrecked city.
+
+This triumphal arch, with its three gates and its lofty Corinthian
+columns, stands outside of the city walls: a structure which has no
+other use or meaning than the expression of Imperial pride: thus the
+Roman conquerors adorn and approach their vassal-town.
+
+Behind the arch a broad, paved road leads to the southern gate, perhaps
+a thousand feet away. Beside the road, between the arch and the gate,
+lie two buildings of curious interest. The first is a great pool of
+stone, seven hundred feet long by three hundred feet wide. This is the
+Naumachia, which is filled with water by conduits from the neighbouring
+stream, in order that the Greeks may hold their mimic naval combats and
+regattas here in the desert, for they are always at heart a seafaring
+people. Beyond the pool there is a Circus, with four rows of stone seats
+and an oval arena, for wild-beast shows and gladiatorial combats.
+
+The city walls have almost entirely disappeared and the South Gate is in
+ruins. Entering and turning to the left, we ascend a little hill and
+find the Temple (perhaps dedicated to Artemis), and close beside it the
+great South Theatre. There is hardly a break in the semicircular stone
+benches, thirty-two rows of seats rising tier above tier, divided into
+an upper and a lower section by a broader row of "boxes" or stalls,
+richly carved, and reserved, no doubt, for magnates of the city and
+persons of importance. The stage, over a hundred feet wide, is backed by
+a straight wall adorned with Corinthian columns and decorated niches.
+The theatre faces due north; and the spectator sitting here, if the play
+wearies him, can lift his eyes and look off beyond the proscenium over
+the length and breadth of Gerasa.
+
+  "But he looked upon the city, every side,
+                      Far and wide,
+  All the mountains topped with temples, all the glades
+                      Colonnades,
+  All the causeys, bridges, aqueducts,--and then,
+                      All the men!"
+
+In the hollow northward from this theatre is the Forum, or the
+Market-place, or the Hippodrome--I cannot tell what it is, but a
+splendid oval of Ionic pillars incloses an open space of more than three
+hundred feet in length and two hundred and fifty feet in width, where
+the Gerasenes may barter or bicker or bet, as they will.
+
+From the Forum to the North Gate runs the main street, more than half a
+mile long, lined with a double row of columns, from twenty to thirty
+feet high, with smooth shafts and acanthus capitals. At the intersection
+of the cross-streets there are tetrapylons, with domes, and pedestals
+for statues. The pavement of the roadway is worn into ruts by the
+chariot wheels. Under the arcades behind the columns run the sidewalks
+for foot-passengers. Turn to the right from the main street and you come
+to the Public Baths, an immense building like a palace, supplied with
+hot and cold water, adorned with marble and mosaic. On the left lies the
+Tribuna, with its richly decorated façade and its fountain of flowing
+water. A few yards farther north is the Propylæum of the Great Temple; a
+superb gateway, decorated with columns and garlands and shell niches,
+opening to a wide flight of steps by which we ascend to the temple-area,
+a terrace nearly twice the size of Madison Square Garden, surrounded by
+two hundred and sixty columns, and standing clear above the level of the
+encircling city.
+
+The Temple of the Sun rises at the western end of this terrace, facing
+the dawn. The huge columns of the portico, forty-five feet high and five
+feet in diameter, with rich Corinthian capitals, are of rosy-yellow
+limestone, which seems to be saturated with the sunshine of a thousand
+years. Behind them are the walls of the Cella, or inner shrine, with its
+vaulted apse for the image of the god, and its secret stairs and
+passages in the rear wall for the coming and going of the priests, and
+the ascent to the roof for the first salutation of the sunrise over the
+eastern hills.
+
+Spreading our cloth between two pillars of the portico we celebrate the
+feast of noontide, and looking out over the wrecked magnificence of the
+city we try to reconstruct the past.
+
+[Illustration: Ruins of Jerash, Looking West. Propylæum and Temple
+terrace.]
+
+It was in the days of Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius, in the latter
+part of the second century after Christ, that these temples and palaces
+and theatres were rising. Those were the palmy days of Græco-Roman
+civilisation in Syria; then the shops along the Colonnade were filled
+with rich goods, the Forum listened to the voice of world-famous orators
+and teachers, and proud lords and ladies assembled in the Naumachia to
+watch the sham battles of the miniature galleys. A little later the new
+religion of Christianity found a foothold here, (see, these are the
+ruined outlines of a Christian church below us to the south, and the
+foundation of a great Basilica), and by the fifth century the pagan
+worship was dying out, and the Bishop of Gerasa had a seat in the
+Council of Chalcedon. It was no longer with the comparative merits of
+Stoicism and Epicureanism and Neo-Platonism, or with the rival literary
+fame of their own Ariston and Kerykos as against Meleager and Menippus
+and Theodorus of Gadara, that the Gerasenes concerned themselves. They
+were busy now with the controversies about Homoiousia and Homoöusia,
+with the rivalry of the Eutychians and the Nestorians, with the
+conflicting, not to say combative, claims of such saints as Dioscurus of
+Alexandria and Theodoret of Cyrus. But trade continued brisk, and the
+city was as rich and as proud as ever. In the seventh century an Arabian
+chronicler named it among the great towns of Palestine, and a poet
+praised its fertile territory and its copious spring.
+
+Then what happened? Earthquake, pestilence, conflagration, pillage,
+devastation--who knows? A Mohammedan writer of the thirteenth century
+merely mentions it as "a great city of ruins"; and so it lay, deserted
+and forgotten, until a German traveller visited it in 1806; and so it
+lies to-day, with all its dwellings and its walls shattered and
+dissolved beside its flowing stream in the centre of its green valley,
+and only the relics of its temples, its theatres, its colonnades, and
+its triumphal arch remaining to tell us how brave and rich and gay it
+was in the days of old.
+
+Do you believe it? Does it seem at all real or possible to you? Look up
+at this tall pillar above us. See how the wild marjoram has thrust its
+roots between the joints and hangs like "the hyssop that springeth out
+of the wall." See how the weather has worn deep holes and crevices in
+the topmost drum, and how the sparrows have made their nests there. Lean
+your back against the pillar; feel it vibrate like "a reed shaken with
+the wind"; watch that huge capital of acanthus leaves swaying slowly to
+and fro and trembling upon its stalk "as a flower of the field."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+All the afternoon and all the next morning we wander through the ruins,
+taking photographs, deciphering inscriptions, discovering new points of
+view to survey the city. We sit on the arch of the old Roman bridge
+which spans the stream, and look down into the valley filled with
+gardens and orchards; tall poplars shiver in the breeze; peaches, plums,
+and cherries are in bloom; almonds clad in pale-green foliage; figs
+putting forth their verdant shoots; pomegranates covered with ruddy
+young leaves. We go up to see the beautiful spring which bursts from
+the hillside above the town and supplies it with water. Then we go back
+again to roam aimlessly and dreamily, like folk bewitched, among the
+tumbled heaps of hewn stones, the broken capitals, and the tall, rosy
+columns, soaked with sunbeams.
+
+The Arabs of Jerash have a bad reputation as robbers and extortionists;
+and in truth they are rather a dangerous-looking lot of fellows, with
+bold, handsome brown faces and inscrutable dark eyes. But although we
+have paid no tribute to them, they do not molest us. They seem to regard
+us with a contemptuous pity, as harmless idiots who loaf among the
+fallen stones and do not even attempt to make excavations.
+
+Our camp is in the inclosure of the North Theatre, a smaller building
+than that which stands beside the South Gate, but large enough to hold
+an audience of two or three thousand. The semicircle of seats is still
+unbroken; the arrangements of the stage, the stairways, the entries of
+the building can all be easily traced.
+
+There were gay times in the city when these two theatres were filled
+with people. What comedies of Plautus or Terence or Aristophanes or
+Menander; what tragedies of Seneca, or of the seven dramatists of
+Alexandria who were called the "Pleias," were presented here?
+
+Look up along those lofty tiers of seats in the pale, clear starlight.
+Can you see no shadowy figures sitting there, hear no light whisper of
+ghostly laughter, no thin ripple of clapping hands? What flash of wit
+amuses them, what nobly tragic word or action stirs them to applause?
+What problem of their own life, what reflection of their own heart, does
+the stage reveal to them? We shall never know. The play at Gerasa is
+ended.
+
+
+_A PSALM AMONG THE RUINS_
+
+_The lizard rested on the rock while I sat among the ruins;
+And the pride of man was like a vision of the night._
+
+_Lo, the lords of the city have disappeared into darkness;
+The ancient wilderness hath swallowed up all their work._
+
+_There is nothing left of the city but a heap of fragments;
+The bones of a carcass that a wild beast hath devoured._
+
+_Behold the desert waiteth hungrily for man's dwellings;
+Surely the tide of desolation returneth upon his toil._
+
+_All that he hath painfully lifted up is shaken down in a moment;
+The memory of his glory is buried beneath the billows of sand._
+
+_Then a voice said, Look again upon the ruins;
+These broken arches have taught generations to build._
+
+_Moreover the name of this city shall be remembered;
+Here a poor man spoke a word that shall not die._
+
+_This is the glory that is stronger than the desert;
+For God hath given eternity to the thought of man._
+
+
+
+
+                                   IX
+
+                        THE MOUNTAINS OF SAMARIA
+
+
+I
+
+JORDAN FERRY
+
+Look down from these tranquil heights of Jebel Osha, above the noiseful,
+squalid little city of Es Salt, and you see what Moses saw when he
+climbed Mount Pisgah and looked upon the Promised Land which he was
+never to enter.
+
+  "Could we but climb where Moses stood,
+        And view the landscape o'er,
+  Not Jordan's stream, nor death's cold flood,
+        Should fright us from the shore."
+
+Pisgah was probably a few miles south of the place where we are now
+standing, but the main features of the view are the same. These broad
+mountain-shoulders, falling steeply away to the west, clad in the
+emerald robe of early spring; this immense gulf at our feet, four
+thousand feet below us, a huge trough of gray and yellow, through which
+the dark-green ribbon of the Jordan jungle, touched with a few silvery
+gleams of water, winds to the blue basin of the Dead Sea; those scarred
+and wrinkled hills rising on the other side, the knotted brow of
+Quarantana, the sharp cone of Sartoba, the distant peak of Mizpeh, the
+long line of Judean, Samarian, and Galilean summits, Olivet, and Ebal,
+and Gerizim, and Gilboa, and Tabor, rolling away to the northward,
+growing ever fairer with the promise of fertile valleys between them and
+rich plains beyond them, and fading at last into the azure vagueness of
+the highlands round the Lake of Galilee.
+
+Why does that country toward which we are looking and travelling seem to
+us so much more familiar and real, so much more a part of the actual
+world, than this region of forgotten Greek and Roman glory, from which
+we are returning like those who awake from sleep? The ruined splendours
+of Jerash fade behind us like a dream. Samaria and Galilee, crowded with
+memories and associations which have been woven into our minds by the
+wonderful Bible story, draw us to them with the convincing touch of
+reality. Yet even while we recognise this strange difference between
+our feelings toward the Holy Land and those toward other parts of the
+ancient world, we know that it is not altogether true.
+
+Gerasa was as really a part of God's big world as Shechem or Jezreel or
+Sychar. It stood in His sight, and He must have regarded the human souls
+that lived there. He must have cared for them, and watched over them,
+and judged them equitably, dividing the just from the unjust, the
+children of love from the children of hate, even as He did with men on
+the other side of the Jordan, even as He does with all men everywhere
+to-day. If faith in a God who is the Father and Lord of all mankind
+means anything it means this: equal care, equal justice, equal mercy for
+all the world. Gerasa has been forgotten of men, but God never forgot
+it.
+
+What, then, is the difference? Just this: in the little land between the
+Jordan and the sea, things came to pass which have a more enduring
+significance than the wars and splendours, the wealth and culture of the
+Decapolis. Conflicts were fought there in which the eternal issues of
+good and evil were clearly manifest. Ideas were worked out there which
+have a permanent value to the spiritual life of man. Revelations were
+made there which have become the guiding stars of succeeding
+generations. This is why that country of the Bible seems more real to
+us: because its history is more significant, because it is Divinely
+inspired with a meaning for our faith and hope.
+
+Do you agree with this? I do not know. But at least if you were with us
+on this glorious morning, riding down from the heights of Jebel Osha you
+would feel the vivid beauty, the subduing grandeur of the scene. You
+would rejoice in the life-renewing air that blows softly around us and
+invites us to breathe deep,--in the pure morning faces of the flowers
+opening among the rocks,--in the light waving of silken grasses along
+the slopes by which we steeply descend.
+
+There is a young Gileadite running beside us, a fine fellow about
+eighteen years old, with his white robe girded up about his loins,
+leaving his brown legs bare. His head-dress is encircled with the black
+_'agâl_ of camel's hair like a rustic crown. A long gun is slung over
+his back; a wicked-looking curved knife with a brass sheath sticks in
+his belt; his silver powder-horn and leather bullet-pouch hang at his
+waist. He strides along with a free, noble step, or springs lightly from
+rock to rock like a gazelle.
+
+His story is a short one, and simple,--if true. His younger brother has
+run away from the family tent among the pastures of Gilead, seeking his
+fortune in the wide world. And now this elder brother has come out to
+look for the prodigal, at Nablûs, at Jaffa, at Jerusalem,--Allah knows
+how far the quest may lead! But he is afraid of robbers if he crosses
+the Jordan Valley alone. May he keep company with us and make the
+perilous transit under our august protection? Yes, surely, my brown son
+of Esau; and we will not inquire too closely whether you are really
+running after your brother or running away yourself.
+
+There may be a thousand robbers concealed along the river-bed, but we
+can see none of them. The valley is heat and emptiness. Even the jackal
+that slinks across the trail in front of us, droops and drags his tail
+in visible exhaustion. His lolling, red tongue is a signal of distress.
+In a climate like this one expects nothing from man or beast. Life
+degenerates, shrivels, stifles; and in the glaring open spaces a sullen
+madness lurks invisible.
+
+We are coming to the ancient fording-place of the river, called Adamah,
+where an event once happened which was of great consequence to the
+Israelites and which has often been misunderstood. They were encamped on
+the east side, opposite Jericho, nearly thirty miles below this point,
+waiting for their first opportunity to cross the Jordan. Then, says the
+record, "the waters which came down from above stopped, and were piled
+up in a heap, a great way off, at Adam, ... and the people passed over
+right against Jericho." (Joshua iii: 14-16.)
+
+Look at these great clay-banks overhanging the river, and you will
+understand what it was that opened a dry path for Israel into Canaan.
+One of these huge masses of clay was undermined, and slipped, and fell
+across the river, heaping up the waters behind a temporary natural dam,
+and cutting off the supply of the lower stream. It may have taken three
+or four days for the river to carve its way through or around that
+obstruction, and meantime any one could march across to Jericho without
+wetting his feet. I have seen precisely the same thing happen on a
+salmon river in Canada quite as large as the Jordan.
+
+The river is more open at this place, and there is a curious
+six-cornered ferry-boat, pulled to and fro with ropes by a half-dozen
+bare-legged Arabs. If it had been a New England river, the practical
+Western mind would have built a long boat with a flat board at each
+side, and rigged a couple of running wheels on a single rope. Then the
+ferryman would have had nothing to do but let the stern of his craft
+swing down at an angle with the stream, and the swift current would have
+pushed him from one side to the other at his will. But these Orientals
+have been running their ferry in their own way, no doubt, for many
+centuries; and who are we to break in upon their laborious indolence
+with new ideas? It is enough that they bring us over safely, with our
+cattle and our stuff, in several bands, with much tugging at the ropes
+and shouting and singing.
+
+We look in vain on the shore of the Jordan for a pleasant place to eat
+our luncheon. The big trees stand with their feet in the river, and the
+smaller shrubs are scraggly and spiny. At last we find a little patch of
+shade on a steep bank above the yellow stream, and here we make
+ourselves as comfortable as we can, with the thermometer at 110°, and
+the hungry gnats and mosquitoes swarming around us.
+
+Early in the afternoon we desperately resolve to brave the sun, and ride
+up from the river-bed into the open plain on the west. Here we catch our
+first clear view of Mount Hermon, with its mantle of glistening snow,
+hanging like a cloud on the northern horizon, ninety miles away, beyond
+the Lake of Galilee and the Waters of Merom; a vision of distance and
+coolness and grandeur.
+
+The fields, watered by the full streams descending from the Wâdi Fârah,
+are green with wheat and barley. Along our path are balsam-trees and
+thorny jujubes, from whose branches we pluck the sweet, insipid fruit as
+we ride beneath them. Herds of cattle are pasturing on the plain, and
+long rows of black Bedouin tents are stretched at the foot of the
+mountains. We cross a dozen murmuring watercourses embowered in the
+dark, glistening foliage of the oleanders glowing with great soft flames
+of rosy bloom.
+
+At the Serâi on the hill which watches over this Jiftlîk, or domain of
+the Sultan, there are some Turkish soldiers saddling their horses for an
+expedition; perhaps to collect taxes or to chase robbers. The peasants
+are returning, by the paths among the cornfields, to their huts. The
+lines of camp-fires begin to gleam from the transient Bedouin villages.
+Our white tents are pitched in a flowery meadow, beside a low-voiced
+stream, and as we fall asleep the night air is trembling with the
+shrill, innumerable _brek-ek-ek-coäx-coäx_ of the frog chorus.
+
+
+II
+
+MOUNT EPHRAIM AND JACOB'S WELL
+
+Samaria is a mountain land, but its characteristic features, as
+distinguished from Judea, are the easiness of approach through open
+gateways among the hills, and the fertility of the broad vales and level
+plains which lie between them. The Kingdom of Israel, in its brief
+season of prosperity, was richer, more luxurious, and weaker than the
+Kingdom of Judah. The poet Isaiah touched the keynote of the northern
+kingdom when he sang of "the crown of pride of the drunkards of
+Ephraim," and "the fading flower of his glorious beauty which is on the
+head of the fat valley." (Isaiah xxviii: 1-6.)
+
+We turn aside from the open but roundabout way of the well-tilled Wâdi
+Fârah and take a shorter, steeper path toward Shechem, through a deep,
+narrow mountain gorge. The day is hot and hazy, for the Sherkîyeh is
+blowing from the desert across the Jordan Valley: the breath of
+Jehovah's displeasure with His people, "a dry wind of the high places
+of the wilderness toward the daughter of my people, neither to fan nor
+to cleanse."
+
+At times the walls of rock come so close together that we have to wind
+through a passage not more than ten feet wide. The air is parched as in
+an oven. Our horses scramble wearily up the stony gallery and the rough
+stairways. One of our company faints under the fervent heat, and falls
+from his horse. But fortunately no bones are broken; a half-hour's rest
+in the shadow of a great rock revives him and we ride on.
+
+The wonderful flowers are blooming wherever they can find a foothold
+among the stones. Now and then we cross the mouth of some little lonely
+side-valley, full of mignonette and cyclamens and tall spires of pink
+hollyhock. Under the huge, dark sides of Eagle's Crag--bare and rugged
+as Ben Nevis--we pass into the fruitful plain of Makhna, where the
+silken grainfields rustle far and wide, and the rich olive-orchards on
+the hill-slopes offer us a shelter for our midday meal and siesta. Mount
+Ebal and Mount Gerizim now rise before us in their naked bulk; and, as
+we mount toward the valley which lies between them, we stay for a while
+to rest at Jacob's Well.
+
+There is a mystery about this ancient cistern on the side of the
+mountain. Why was it dug here, a hundred feet deep, although there are
+springs and streams of living water flowing down the valley, close at
+hand? Whence came the tradition of the Samaritans that Jacob gave them
+this well, although the Old Testament says nothing about it? Why did the
+Samaritan woman, in Jesus' time, come hither to draw water when there
+was a brook, not fifty yards away, which she must cross to get to the
+well?
+
+Who can tell? Certainly there must have been some use and reason for
+such a well, else the men of long ago would never have toiled to make
+it. Perhaps the people of Sychar had some superstition about its water
+which made them prefer it. Or perhaps the stream was owned and used for
+other purposes, while the water of the well was free.
+
+It makes no difference whether a solution of the problem is ever found.
+Its very existence adds to the touch of truth in the narrative of St.
+John's Gospel. Certainly this well was here in Jesus' day, close beside
+the road which He would be most likely to take in going from Jerusalem
+to Galilee. Here He sat, alone and weary, while the disciples went on to
+the village to buy food. And here, while He waited and thirsted, He
+spoke to an unknown, unfriendly, unhappy woman the words which have been
+a spring of living water to the weary and fevered heart of the world:
+"God is a spirit, and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit
+and in truth."
+
+
+III
+
+NABLÛS AND SEBASTE
+
+About a mile from Jacob's Well, the city of Nablûs lies in the hollow
+between Mount Gerizim on the south and Mount Ebal on the north. The side
+of Gerizim is precipitous and jagged; Ebal rises more smoothly, but very
+steeply, and is covered with plantations of thornless cactus, (_Opuntia
+cochinillifera_), cultivated for the sake of the cochineal insects which
+live upon the plant and from which a red dye is made.
+
+The valley is well watered, and is about a quarter of a mile wide. A
+little east of the city there are two natural bays or amphitheatres
+opposite to each other in the mountains. Here the tribes of Israel may
+have been gathered while the priests chanted the curses of the law from
+Ebal and the blessings from Gerizim. (Joshua viii: 30-35.) The cliffs
+were sounding-boards and sent the loud voices of blessing and cursing
+out over the multitude so that all could hear.
+
+It seems as if it were mainly the echo of the cursing of Ebal that
+greets us as we ride around the fierce little Mohammedan city of Nablûs
+on Friday afternoon, passing through the open and dilapidated cemeteries
+where the veiled women are walking and gossiping away their holiday. The
+looks of the inhabitants are surly and hostile. The children shout
+mocking ditties at us, reviling the "Nazarenes." We will not ask our
+dragoman to translate the words that we catch now and then; it is easy
+to guess that they are not "fit to print."
+
+Our camp is close beside a cemetery, near the eastern gate of the town.
+The spectators who watch us from a distance while we dine are numerous;
+and no doubt they are passing unfavourable criticisms on our table
+manners, and on the Frankish custom of permitting one unveiled lady to
+travel with three husbands. The population of Nablûs is about
+twenty-five thousand. It has a Turkish governor, a garrison, several
+soap factories, and a million dogs which howl all night.
+
+At half-past six the next morning we set out on foot to climb Mount
+Ebal, which is three thousand feet high. The view from the rocky summit
+sweeps over all Palestine, from snowy Hermon to the mountains round
+about Jerusalem, from Carmel to Nebo, from the sapphire expanse of the
+Mediterranean to the violet valley of the Jordan and the garnet wall of
+Moab and Gilead beyond.
+
+For us the view is veiled in mystery by the haze of the south wind. The
+ranges and peaks far away fade into cloudlike shadows. The depths below
+us seem to sink unfathomably. Nablûs is buried in the gulf. On the
+summit of Gerizim, a Mohammedan _wêli_, shining like a flake of mica,
+marks the plateau where the Samaritan Temple stood. Hilltop towns,
+Asîret, Tallûza, Yasîd, emerge like islands from the misty sea. In that
+great shadowy hollow to the west lie the ruins of the city of Samaria,
+which Cæsar Augustus renamed Sebaste, in honour of his wife Augusta. If
+she could see the village of Sebastiyeh now she would not be proud of
+her namesake town. It is there that we are going to make our midday
+camp.
+
+King Omri acted as a wise man when he moved the capital of Israel from
+Shechem, an indefensible site, commanded by overhanging mountains and
+approached by two easy vales, to Shomron, the "watch-hill" which stands
+in the centre of the broad Vale of Barley.
+
+As we ride across the smiling corn-fields toward the isolated eminence,
+we see its strength as well as its beauty. It rises steeply from the
+valley to a height of more than three hundred feet. The encircling
+mountains are too far away to dominate it under the ancient conditions
+of warfare without cannons, and a good wall must have made it, as its
+name implied, an impregnable "stronghold," watching over a region of
+immense fertility.
+
+What pomps and splendours, what revels and massacres, what joys of
+victory and horrors of defeat, that round hill rising from the Vale of
+Barley has seen. Now there is nothing left of its crown of pride, but
+the broken pillars of the marble colonnade a mile long with which Herod
+the Great girdled the hill, and a few indistinguishable ruins of the
+temple which he built in honour of the divine Augustus and of the
+hippodrome which he erected for the people. We climb the terraces and
+ride through the olive-groves and ploughed fields where the street of
+columns once ran. A few of them are standing upright; others leaning or
+fallen, half sunken in the ground; fragments of others built into the
+stone walls which divide the fields. There are many hewn and carven
+stones imbedded in the miserable little modern village which crouches on
+the north end of the hill, and the mosque into which the Crusaders'
+Church of Saint John has been transformed is said to contain the tombs
+of Elisha, Obadiah and John the Baptist. This rumour does not concern us
+deeply and we will leave its truth uninvestigated.
+
+Let us tie our horses among Herod's pillars, and spread the rugs for our
+noontide rest by the ruined south gate of the city. At our feet lies the
+wide, level, green valley where the mighty host of Ben-hadad, King of
+Damascus, once besieged the starving city and waited for its surrender.
+(II Kings vii.) There in the twilight of long ago a panic terror
+whispered through the camp, and the Syrians rose and fled, leaving their
+tents and their gear behind them. And there four nameless lepers of
+Israel, wandering in their despair, found the vast encampment deserted,
+and entered in, and ate and drank, and picked up gold and silver, until
+their conscience smote them. Then they climbed up to this gate with the
+good news that the enemy had vanished, and the city was saved.
+
+
+IV
+
+DÔTHÂN AND THE GOODNESS OF THE SAMARITAN
+
+Over the steep mountains that fence Samaria to the north, down through
+terraced vales abloom with hawthorns and blood-red poppies, across
+hill-circled plains where the long, silvery wind-waves roll over the sea
+of grain from shore to shore, past little gray towns sleeping on the
+sunny heights, by paths that lead us near flowing springs where the
+village girls fill their pitchers, and down stony slopes where the
+goatherds in bright-coloured raiment tend their flocks, and over broad,
+moist fields where the path has been obliterated by the plough, and
+around the edge of marshes where the storks rise heavily on long
+flapping wings, we come galloping at sunset to our camp beside the
+little green hill of Dôthân.
+
+Behind it are the mountains, swelling and softly rounded like breasts.
+It was among them that the servant of Elisha saw the vision of horses
+and chariots of fire protecting his master. (II Kings vi: 14-19.)
+
+North and east of Dôthân the plain extends smooth and gently sloping,
+full of young harvest. There the chariot of Naaman rolled when he came
+down from Damascus to be healed by the prophet of Israel. (II Kings v:
+9.)
+
+On top of the hill is a spreading terebinth-tree, with some traces of
+excavation and rude ruins beneath it. There Joseph's envious brethren
+cast him into one of the dry pits, from which they drew him up again to
+sell him to a caravan of merchants, winding across the plain on their
+way from Midian into Egypt. (Genesis xxxvii.)
+
+Truly, many and wonderful things came to pass of old around this little
+green hill. And now, at the foot of it, there is a well-watered garden,
+with figs, oranges, almonds, vines, and tall, trembling poplars,
+surrounded by a hedge of prickly pear. Outside of the hedge a big, round
+spring of crystal water is flowing steadily over the rim of its basin of
+stones. There the flocks and herds are gathered, morning and evening, to
+drink. There the children of the tiny hamlet on the hillside come to
+paddle their feet in the running stream. There a caravan of Greek
+pilgrims, on their way from Damascus to Jerusalem for Easter, halt in
+front of our camp, to refresh themselves with a draught of the cool
+water.
+
+As we watch them from our tents there is a sudden commotion among them,
+a cry of pain, and then voices of dismay. George and two or three of our
+men run out to see what is the matter, and come hurrying back to get
+some cotton cloth and oil and wine. One of the pilgrims, an old woman of
+seventy, has fallen from her horse on the sharp stones beside the
+spring, breaking her wrist and cutting her head.
+
+I do not know whether the way in which they bound up that poor old
+stranger's wounds was surgically wise, but I know that it was humanly
+kind and tender. I do not know which of our various churches were
+represented among her helpers, but there must have been at least three,
+and the muleteer from Bagdad who "had no religion but sang beautiful
+Persian songs" was also there, and ready to help with the others. And so
+the parable which lighted our dusty way going down to Jericho is
+interpreted in our pleasant camp at Dôthân.
+
+The paths of the Creeds are many and winding; they cross and diverge;
+but on all of them the Good Samaritan is welcome, and I think he travels
+to a happy place.
+
+
+_A PSALM OF THE HELPERS_
+
+_The ways of the world are full of haste and turmoil:
+I will sing of the tribe of helpers who travel in peace._
+
+_He that turneth from the road to rescue another,
+Turneth toward his goal:
+He shall arrive in due time by the foot-path of mercy,
+God will be his guide._
+
+_He that taketh up the burden of the fainting,
+Lighteneth his own load:
+The Almighty will put his arms underneath him,
+He shall lean upon the Lord._
+
+_He that speaketh comfortable words to mourners,
+Healeth his own heart:
+In his time of grief they will return to remembrance,
+God will use them for balm._
+
+_He that careth for the sick and wounded,
+Watcheth not alone:
+There are three in the darkness together,
+And the third is the Lord._
+
+_Blessed is the way of the helpers:
+The companions of the Christ._
+
+
+
+
+                                     X
+
+                            GALILEE AND THE LAKE
+
+
+I
+
+THE PLAIN OF ESDRAELON
+
+Going from Samaria into Galilee is like passing from the Old Testament
+into the New.
+
+There is indeed little difference in the outward landscape: the same
+bare lines of rolling mountains, green and gray near by, blue or purple
+far away; the same fertile valleys and emerald plains embosomed among
+the hills; the same orchards of olive-trees, not quite so large, nor so
+many, but always softening and shading the outlook with their touches of
+silvery verdure.
+
+It is the spirit of the landscape that changes; the inward view; the
+atmosphere of memories and associations through which we travel. We have
+been riding with fierce warriors and proud kings and fiery prophets of
+Israel, passing the sites of royal splendour and fields of ancient
+havoc, retracing the warpaths of the Twelve Tribes. But when we enter
+Galilee the keynote of our thoughts is modulated into peace. Issachar
+and Zebulon and Asher and Naphtali have left no trace or message for us
+on the plains and hills where they once lived and fought. We journey
+with Jesus of Nazareth, the friend of publicans and sinners, the
+shepherd of the lost sheep, the human embodiment of the Divine Love.
+
+This transition in our journey is marked outwardly by the crossing of
+the great Plain of Esdraelon, which we enter by the gateway of Jenîn.
+There are a few palm-trees lending a little grace to the disconsolate
+village, and the Turkish captain of the military post, a grizzled
+veteran of Plevna, invites us into the guard-room to drink coffee with
+him, while we wait for a dilatory telegraph operator to send a message.
+Then we push out upon the green sea to a brown island: the village of
+Zer'în, the ancient Jezreel.
+
+The wretched hamlet of adobe huts, with mud beehives plastered against
+the walls, stands on the lowest bench of the foothills of Mount Gilboa,
+opposite the equally wretched hamlet of Sûlem in a corresponding
+position at the base of a mountain called Little Hermon. The
+widespread, opulent view is haunted with old stories of battle, murder
+and sudden death.
+
+Down to the east we see the line of brighter green creeping out from the
+flanks of Mount Gilboa, marking the spring where Gideon sifted his band
+of warriors for the night-attack on the camp of Midian. (Judges vii:
+4-23.) Under the brow of the hill are the ancient wine-presses, cut in
+the rock, which belonged to the vineyard of Naboth, whom Jezebel
+assassinated. (I Kings xxi: 1-16.) From some window of her favourite
+palace on this eminence, that hard, old, painted queen looked down the
+broad valley of Jezreel, and saw Jehu in his chariot driving furiously
+from Gilead to bring vengeance upon her. On those dark ridges to the
+south the brave Jonathan was slain by the Philistines and the desperate
+Saul fell upon his own sword. (I Samuel xxxi: 1-6.) Through that open
+valley, which slopes so gently down to the Jordan at Bethshan, the
+hordes of Midian and the hosts of Damascus marched against Israel. By
+the pass of Jenîn, Holofernes led his army in triumph until he met
+Judith of Bethulia and lost his head. Yonder in the corner to the
+northward, at the base of Mount Tabor, Deborah and Barak gathered the
+tribes against the Canaanites under Sisera. (Judges iv: 4-22.) Away to
+the westward, in the notch of Megiddo, Pharaoh-Necho's archers pierced
+King Josiah, and there was great mourning for him in Hadad-rimmon. (II
+Chronicles xxxv: 24-25; Zechariah xii: 11.) Farther still, where the
+mountain spurs of Galilee approach the long ridge of Carmel, Elijah put
+the priests of Baal to death by the Brook Kishon. (I Kings xviii:
+20-40.)
+
+All over that great prairie, which makes a broad break between the
+highlands of Galilee and the highlands of Samaria and Judea, and opens
+an easy pathway rising no more than three hundred feet between the
+Jordan and the Mediterranean--all over that fertile, blooming area and
+around the edges of it are sown the legends
+
+  "Of old, unhappy, far-off things
+  And battles long ago."
+
+But on this bright April day when we enter the plain of Armageddon,
+everything is tranquil and joyous.
+
+The fields are full of rustling wheat, and bearded barley, and
+blue-green stalks of beans, and feathery _kirsenneh_, camel-provender.
+The peasants in their gay-coloured clothing are ploughing the rich,
+red-brown soil for the late crop of _doura_. The newly built railway
+from Haifâ to Damascus lies like a yellow string across the prairie from
+west to east; and from north to south a single file of two hundred
+camels, with merchandise for Egypt, undulate along the ancient road of
+the caravans, turning their ungainly heads to look at the puffing engine
+which creeps toward them from the distance.
+
+Larks singing in the air, storks parading beside the watercourses,
+falcons poising overhead, poppies and pink gladioluses and blue
+corn-cockles blooming through the grain,--a little village on a swell of
+rising ground, built for their farm hands by the rich Greeks who have
+bought the land and brought it under cultivation,--an air so pure and
+soft that it is like a caress,--all seems to speak a language of peace
+and promise, as if one of the old prophets were telling of the day when
+Jehovah shall have compassion on His people Israel and restore them.
+"They that dwell under His shadow shall return; they shall revive as
+the grain, and blossom as the vine: the scent thereof shall be as the
+wine of Lebanon."
+
+It is, indeed, not impossible that wise methods of colonization, better
+agriculture and gardening, the development of fruit-orchards and
+vineyards, and above all, more rational government and equitable
+taxation may one day give back to Palestine something of her old
+prosperity and population. If the Jews really want it no doubt they can
+have it. Their rich men have the money and the influence; and there are
+enough of their poorer folk scattered through Europe to make any land
+blossom like the rose, if they have the will and the patience for the
+slow toil of the husbandman and the vine-dresser and the shepherd and
+the herdsman.
+
+But the proud kingdom of David and Solomon will never be restored; not
+even the tributary kingdom of Herod. For the land will never again stand
+at the crossroads, the four-corners of the civilized world. The Suez
+Canal to the south, and the railways through the Lebanon and Asia Minor
+to the north, have settled that. They have left Palestine in a corner,
+off the main-travelled roads. The best that she can hope for is a
+restoration to quiet fruitfulness, to placid and humble industry, to
+olive-crowned and vine-girdled felicity, never again to power.
+
+And if that lowly re-coronation comes to her, it will not be on the
+stony heights around Jerusalem: it will be in the Plain of Sharon, in
+the outgoings of Mount Ephraim, in the green pastures of Gilead, in the
+lovely region of "Galilee of the Gentiles." It will not be by the sword
+of Gideon nor by the sceptre of Solomon, but by the sign of peace on
+earth and good-will among men.
+
+With thoughts like these we make our way across the verdurous inland sea
+of Esdraelon, out of the Old Testament into the New. Landmarks of the
+country of the Gospel begin to appear: the wooded dome of Mount Tabor,
+the little village of Nain where Jesus restored the widow's only son.
+(Luke vii: 11-16.) But these lie far to our right. The beacon which
+guides us is a glimpse of white walls and red roofs, high on a shoulder
+of the Galilean hills: the outlying houses of Nazareth, where the boy
+Jesus dwelt with His parents after their return from the flight into
+Egypt, and was obedient to them, and grew in wisdom and stature, and in
+favour with God and men.
+
+
+II
+
+THEIR OWN CITY NAZARETH
+
+Our camp in Nazareth is on a terrace among the olive-trees, on the
+eastern side of a small valley, facing the Mohammedan quarter of the
+town.
+
+This is distinctly the most attractive little city that we have seen in
+Palestine. The houses are spread out over a wider area than is usual in
+the East, covering three sides of a gentle depression high on the side
+of the Jebel es-Sikh, and creeping up the hill-slopes as if to seek a
+larger view and a purer air. Some of them have gardens, fair white
+walls, red-tiled roofs, balconies of stone or wrought iron. Even in the
+more closely built portion of the town the streets seem cleaner, the
+bazaars lighter and less malodorous, the interior courtyards into which
+we glance in passing more neat and homelike. Many of the doorways and
+living-rooms of the humbler houses are freshly whitewashed with a
+light-blue tint which gives them an immaculate air of cleanliness.
+
+The Nazarene women are generally good looking, and free and dignified in
+their bearing. The children, fairer in complexion than is common in
+Syria, are almost all charming with the beauty of youth, and among them
+are some very lovely faces of boys and girls. I do not mean to say that
+Nazareth appears to us an earthly paradise; only that it shines by
+contrast with places like Hebron and Jericho and Nablûs, even with
+Bethlehem, and that we find here far less of human squalor and misery to
+sadden us with thoughts of
+
+  "What man has made of man."
+
+The population of the town is about eleven or twelve thousand, a quarter
+of them Mussulmans, and the rest Christians of various sects, including
+two or three hundred Protestants. The people used to have rather a bad
+reputation for turbulence; but we see no signs of it, either in the
+appearance of the city or in the demeanour of the inhabitants. The
+children and the townsfolk whom we meet in the streets, and of whom we
+ask our way now and then, are civil and friendly. The man who comes to
+the camp to sell us antique coins and lovely vases of iridescent glass
+dug from the tombs of Tyre and Sidon, may be an inveterate humbug, but
+his manners are good and his prices are low. The soft-voiced women and
+lustrous-eyed girls who hang about the Lady's tent, persuading her to
+buy their small embroideries and lace-work and trinkets, are gentle and
+ingratiating, though persistent.
+
+I am honestly of the opinion that Christian mission-schools and
+hospitals have done a great deal for Nazareth. We go this morning to
+visit the schools of the English Church Missionary Society, where Miss
+Newton is conducting an admirable and most successful work for the girls
+of Nazareth. She is away on a visit to some of her outlying stations;
+but the dark-eyed, happy-looking Syrian teacher shows us all the
+classes. There are five of them, and every room is full and bright and
+orderly.
+
+On the Christian side, the older girls sing a hymn for us, in their high
+voices and quaint English accent, about Jesus stilling the storm on
+Galilee, and the intermediate girls and the tiny co-educated boys and
+girls in the kindergarten go through various pretty performances. Then
+the teacher leads us across the street to the two Moslem classes, and we
+cannot tell the difference between them and the Christian children,
+except that now the singing of "Jesus loves me" and the recitation of
+"The Lord is my Shepherd" are in Arabic. There is one blind girl who
+recites most perfectly and eagerly. Another girl of about ten years
+carries her baby-brother in her arms. Two little laggards, (they were
+among the group at our camp early in the morning), arrive late, weeping
+out their excuses to the teacher. She hears them with a kind, humorous
+look on her face, gives them a soft rebuke and a task, and sends them to
+their seats, their tears suddenly transformed to smiles.
+
+From the schools we go to the hospital of the British Medical Mission, a
+little higher up the hill. We find young Doctor Scrimgeour, who has
+lately come out from Edinburgh University, and his white-uniformed,
+cheerful, busy nurses, tasked to the limit of their strength by the
+pressure of their work, but cordial and simple in their welcome. As I
+walk with the doctor on his rounds I see every ward full, and all kinds
+of calamity and suffering waiting for the relief and help of his kind,
+skilful knife. Here are hernia, and tuberculous glands, and cataract,
+and stone, and bone tuberculosis, and a score of other miseries; and
+there, on the table, with pale, dark face and mysterious eyes, lies a
+man whose knee has been shattered by a ball from a Martini rifle in an
+affray with robbers.
+
+"Was he one of the robbers," I ask, "or one of the robbed?"
+
+"I really don't know," says the doctor, "but in a few minutes I am going
+to do my best for him."
+
+Is not this Christ's work that is still doing in Christ's town, this
+teaching of the children, this helping of the sick and wounded, for His
+sake, and in His name? Yet there are silly folk who say they do not
+believe in missions.
+
+There are a few so-called sacred places and shrines in Nazareth--the
+supposed scene of the Annunciation; the traditional Workshop of Joseph;
+the alleged _Mensa Christi_, a flat stone which He is said to have used
+as a table when He ate with His disciples; and so on. But all these
+uncertain relics and memorials, as usual, are inclosed in chapels, belit
+with lamps, and encircled with ceremonial. The very spring at which the
+Virgin Mary must have often filled her pitcher, (for it is the only
+flowing fountain in the town), now rises beneath the Greek Church of
+Saint Gabriel, and is conducted past the altar in a channel of stone
+where the pilgrims bathe their eyes and faces. To us, who are seeking
+our Holy Land out-of-doors, these shut-in shrines and altared memorials
+are less significant than what we find in the open, among the streets
+and on the surrounding hillsides.
+
+The Virgin's Fountain, issuing from the church, flows into a big, stone
+basin under a round arch. Here, as often as we pass, we see the maidens
+and the mothers of Nazareth, with great earthern vessels poised upon
+their shapely heads, coming with merry talk and laughter, to draw water.
+Even so the mother of Jesus must have come to this fountain many a time,
+perhaps with her wondrous boy running beside her, clasping her hand or a
+fold of her bright-coloured garment. Perhaps, when the child was little
+she carried Him on her shoulder, as the women carry their children
+to-day.
+
+Passing through a street, we look into the interior of a carpenter-shop,
+with its simple tools, its little pile of new lumber, its floor littered
+with chips and shavings, and its air full of the pleasant smell of
+freshly cut wood. There are a few articles of furniture which the
+carpenter has made: a couple of chairs, a table, a stool: and he
+himself, with his leg stretched out and his piece of wood held firmly by
+his naked toes, is working busily at a tiny bed which needs only a pair
+of rockers to become a cradle. Outside the door of the shop a boy of ten
+or twelve is cutting some boards and slats, and putting them neatly
+together. We ask him what he is making. "A box," he answers, "a box for
+some doves"--and then bends his head over his absorbing task. Even so
+Jesus must have worked at the shop of Joseph, the carpenter, and learned
+His handicraft.
+
+[Illustration: The Virgin's Fountain, Nazareth.]
+
+Let us walk up, at eventide, to the top of the hill behind the town.
+Here is one of the loveliest views in all Palestine. The sun is setting
+and the clear-obscure of twilight already rests over the streets and
+houses, the minarets and spires, the slender cypresses and round
+olive-trees and grotesque hedges of cactus. But on the heights the warm
+radiance from the west pours its full flood, lighting up all the
+flowerets of delicate pink flax and golden chrysanthemum and blue
+campanula with which the grass is broidered. Far and wide that roseate
+illumination spreads itself; changing the snowy mantle of distant
+Hermon, the great Sheikh of Mountains, from ermine to flamingo feathers;
+making the high hills of Naphtali and the excellency of Carmel glow as
+if with soft, transfiguring, inward fire; touching the little town of
+Saffûriyeh below us, where they say that the Virgin Mary was born, and
+the city of Safed, thirty miles away on the lofty shoulder of Jebel
+Jermak; suffusing the haze that fills the Valley of the Jordan, and the
+long bulwarks of the Other-Side, with hues of mauve and purple; and
+bathing the wide expanse of the western sea with indescribable
+splendours, over which the flaming sun poises for a moment beneath the
+edge of a low-hung cloud.
+
+On this hilltop, I doubt not, the boy Jesus often filled His hands with
+flowers. Here He could watch the creeping caravans of Arabian merchants,
+and the glittering legions of Roman soldiers, and the slow files of
+Jewish pilgrims, coming up from the Valley of Jezreel and stretching out
+across the Plain of Esdraelon. Hither, at the evening hour, He came as a
+youth to find the blessing of wide and tranquil thought. Here, when the
+burden of manhood pressed upon Him, He rested after the day's work, free
+from that sadness which often touches us in the vision of earth's
+transient beauty, because He saw far beyond the horizon into the
+spirit-world, where there is no night, nor weariness, nor sin, nor
+death.
+
+For nearly thirty years He must have lived within sight of this hilltop.
+And then, one day, He came back from a journey to the Jordan and
+Jerusalem, and entered into the little synagogue at the foot of this
+hill, and began to preach to His townsfolk His glad tidings of spiritual
+liberty and brotherhood and eternal life.
+
+But they were filled with scorn and wrath. His words rebuked them, stung
+them, inflamed them with hatred. They laid violent hands on Him, and
+led Him out to the brow of the hill,--perhaps it was yonder on that
+steep, rocky peak to the south of the town, looking back toward the
+country of the Old Testament,--to cast Him down headlong.
+
+Yet I think there must have been a few friends and lovers of His in that
+disdainful and ignorant crowd; for He passed through the midst of them
+unharmed, and went His way to the home of Peter and Andrew and John and
+Philip, beside the Sea of Galilee, never to come back to Nazareth.
+
+
+III
+
+A WEDDING IN CANA OF GALILEE
+
+We thought to save a little time on our journey, and perhaps to spare
+ourselves a little jolting on the hard high-road, by sending the
+saddle-horses ahead with the caravan, and taking a carriage for the
+sixteen-mile drive to Tiberias. When we came to the old sarcophagus
+which serves as a drinking trough at the spring outside the village of
+Cana, a strange thing befell us.
+
+We had halted for a moment to refresh the horses. Suddenly there was a
+sound of furious galloping on the road behind us. A score of cavaliers
+in Bedouin dress, with guns and swords, came after us in hot haste. The
+leaders dashed across the open space beside the spring, wheeled their
+foaming horses and dashed back again.
+
+"Is this our affair with robbers, at last?" we asked George.
+
+He laughed a little. "No," said he, "this is the beginning of a wedding
+in Kafr Kennâ. The bridegroom and his friends come over from some other
+village where they live, to show off a bit of _fantasia_ to the bride
+and her friends. They carry her back with them after the marriage. We
+wait a while and see how they ride."
+
+The horses were gayly caparisoned with ribbons and tassels and
+embroidered saddle-cloths. The riders were handsome, swarthy fellows
+with haughty faces. Their eyes glanced sideways at us to see whether we
+were admiring them, as they shouted their challenges to one another and
+raced wildly up and down the rock-strewn course, with their robes flying
+and their horses' sides bloody with spurring. One of the men was a huge
+coal-black Nubian who brandished a naked sword as he rode. Others
+whirled their long muskets in the air and yelled furiously. The riding
+was cruel, reckless, superb; loose reins and loose stirrups on the
+headlong gallop; then the sharp curb brought the horse up suddenly, the
+rein on his neck turned him as if on a pivot, and the pressure of the
+heel sent him flying back over the course.
+
+Presently there was a sound of singing and clapping hands behind the
+high cactus-hedges to our left, and from a little lane the bridal
+procession walked up to take the high-road to the village. There were a
+dozen men in front, firing guns and shouting, then came the women, with
+light veils of gauze over their faces, singing shrilly, and in the midst
+of them, in gay attire, but half-concealed with long, dark mantles, the
+bride and "the virgins, her companions, in raiment of needlework."
+
+As they saw the photographic camera pointed at them they laughed, and
+crowded closer together, and drew the ends of their dark mantles over
+their heads. So they passed up the road, their shrill song broken a
+little by their laughter; and the company of horsemen, the bridegroom
+and his friends, wheeled into line, two by two, and trotted after them
+into the village.
+
+This was all that we saw of the wedding at Kafr Kennâ--just a vivid,
+mysterious flash of human figures, drawn together by the primal impulse
+and longing of our common nature, garbed and ordered by the social
+customs which make different lands and ages seem strange to each other,
+and moving across the narrow stage of Time into the dimness of that Arab
+village, where Jesus and His mother and His disciples were guests at a
+wedding long ago.
+
+
+IV
+
+TIBERIAS
+
+It is one of the ironies of fate that the lake which saw the greater
+part of the ministry of Jesus, should take its modern name from a city
+built by Herod Antipas, and called after one of the most infamous of the
+Roman Emperors,--"the Sea of Tiberias."
+
+Our road to this city of decadence leads gradually downward, through a
+broad, sinking moorland, covered with weeds and wild flowers--rich,
+monotonous, desolate. The broidery of pink flax and yellow
+chrysanthemums and white marguerites still follows us; but now the wider
+stretches of thistles and burdocks and daturas and cockleburs and
+water-plantains seem to be more important. The landscape saddens around
+us, under the deepening haze of the desert-wind, the sombre Sherkîyeh.
+There are no golden sunbeams, no cool cloud-shadows, only a gray and
+melancholy illumination growing ever fainter and more nebulous as the
+day declines, and the outlines of the hills fade away from the dim,
+silent, forsaken plain through which we move.
+
+We are crossing the battlefield where the soldiers of Napoleon, under
+the brave Junot, fought desperately against the overwhelming forces of
+the Turks. Yonder, away to the left, in the mysterious haze, the double
+"Horns of Hattin" rise like a shadowy exhalation.
+
+That is said to be the mountain where Jesus gathered the multitude
+around Him and spoke His new beatitudes on the meek, the merciful, the
+peacemakers, the pure in heart. It is certainly the place where the
+hosts of the Crusaders met the army of Saladin, in the fierce heat of a
+July day, seven hundred years ago, and while the burning grass and weeds
+and brush flamed around them, were cut to pieces and trampled and
+utterly consumed. There the new Kingdom of Jerusalem,--the last that was
+won with the sword,--went down in ruin around the relics of "the true
+cross," which its soldiers carried as their talisman; and Guy de
+Lusignan, their King, was captured. The noble prisoners were invited by
+Saladin to his tent, and he offered them sherbets, cooled with snow from
+Hermon, to slake their feverish thirst. When they were refreshed, the
+conqueror ordered them to be led out and put to the sword,--just yonder
+at the foot of the Mount of Beatitudes.
+
+From terrace to terrace of the falling moor we roll along the winding
+road through the brumous twilight, until we come within sight of the
+black, ruined walls, the gloomy towers, the huddled houses of the
+worn-out city of Tiberias. She is like an ancient beggar sitting on a
+rocky cape beside the lake and bathing her feet in the invisible water.
+The gathering dusk lends a sullen and forlorn aspect to the place.
+Behind us rise the shattered volcanic crags and cliffs of basalt; before
+us glimmer pallid and ghostly touches of light from the hidden waves; a
+few lamps twinkle here and there in the dormant town.
+
+This was the city which Herod Antipas built for the capital of his
+Province of Galilee. He laid its foundations in an ancient graveyard,
+and stretched its walls three miles along the lake, adorning it with a
+palace, a forum, a race-course, and a large synagogue. But to strict
+Jews the place was unclean, because it was defiled with Roman idols, and
+because its builders had polluted themselves by digging up the bones of
+the dead. Herod could get few Jews to live in his city, and it became a
+catch-all for the off-scourings of the land, people of all creeds and
+none, aliens, mongrels, soldiers of fortune, and citizens of the
+high-road. It was the strongest fortress and probably the richest town
+of Galilee in Christ's day, but so far as we know He never entered it.
+
+After the fall of Jerusalem, strangely enough, the Jews made it their
+favourite city, the seat of their Sanhedrim and the centre of
+rabbinical learning. Here the famous Rabbis Jehuda and Akîba and the
+philosopher Maimonides taught. Here the Mishna and the Gemara were
+written. And here, to-day, two-thirds of the five thousand inhabitants
+are Jews, many of them living on the charity of their kindred in Europe,
+and spending their time in the study of the Talmud while they wait for
+the Messiah who shall restore the kingdom to Israel. You may see their
+flat fur caps, dingy gabardines, long beards and melancholy faces on
+every street in the drowsy little city, dreaming (among fleas and
+fevers) of I know not what impossible glories to come.
+
+You may see, also, on the hill near the Serâi, the splendid Mission
+Hospital of the United Free Church of Scotland, where for twenty-three
+years Doctor Torrance has been ministering to the body and soul of
+Tiberias in the name of Jesus. Do you find the building too large and
+fine, the lovely garden too beautiful with flowers, the homes of the
+doctors, and teachers, and helpers of the sick and wounded, too clean
+and healthful and orderly? Do you say "To what purpose is this waste?"
+Then I know not how to measure your ignorance. For you have failed to
+see that this is the embassy of the only King who still cares for the
+true welfare of this forsaken, bedraggled, broken-down Tiberias.
+
+On the evening of our arrival, however, all these things are hidden from
+us in the dusk. We drive past the ruined gate of the city, a mile along
+the southern road toward the famous Hot Baths. Here, on a little terrace
+above the lake, between the road and the black basalt cliffs, our camp
+is pitched, and through the darkness
+
+  'We hear the water lapping on the crag,
+  And the long ripple washing in the reeds.'
+
+In the freshness of the early morning the sunrise pours across the lake
+into our tents. There is a light, cool breeze blowing from the north,
+rippling the clear, green water, (of a hue like the stone called _aqua
+marina_), with a thousand flaws and wrinkles, which catch the flashing
+light and reflect the deep blue sky, and change beneath the shadow of
+floating clouds to innumerable colours of lapis lazuli, and violet, and
+purple, and peacock blue.
+
+The old comparison of the shape of the lake to a lute, or a harp, is not
+clear to us from the point at which we stand: for the northwestward
+sweep of the bay of Gennesaret, which reaches a breadth of nearly eight
+miles from the eastern shore, is hidden from us by a promontory, where
+the dark walls and white houses of Tiberias slope to the water. But we
+can see the full length of the lake, from the depression of the Jordan
+Valley at the southern end, to the shores of Bethsaida and Capernaum at
+the foot of the northern hills, beyond which the dazzling whiteness of
+Hermon is visible.
+
+Opposite rise the eastern heights of the Jaulân, with almost level top
+and steep flanks, furrowed by rocky ravines, descending precipitously to
+a strip of smooth, green shore. Behind us the mountains are more broken
+and varied in form, lifted into sharper peaks and sloped into broader
+valleys. The whole aspect of the scene is like a view in the English
+Lake country, say on Windermere or Ullswater; only there are no forests
+or thickets to shade and soften it. Every edge of the hills is like a
+silhouette against the sky; every curve of the shore clear and distinct.
+
+Of the nine rich cities which once surrounded the lake, none is left
+except this ragged old Tiberias. Of the hundreds of fishing boats and
+passenger vessels which once crossed its waters, all have vanished
+except half a dozen little pleasure skiffs kept for the use of tourists.
+Of the armies and caravans which once travelled these shores, all have
+passed by into the eternal far-away, except the motley string of
+visitors to the Hot Springs, who were coming up to bathe in the
+medicinal waters in the days of Joshua when the place was called
+Hammath, and in the time of the Greeks when it was named Emmaus, and who
+are still trotting along the road in front of our camp toward the big,
+white dome and dirty bath-houses of Hummam. They come from all parts of
+Syria, from Damascus and the sea-coast, from Judea and the Haurân;
+Greeks and Arabs and Turks and Maronites and Jews; on foot, on
+donkey-back, and in litters. Now, it is a cavalcade of Druses from the
+Lebanon, men, women and children, riding on tired horses. Now, it is a
+procession of Hebrews walking with a silken canopy over the sacred books
+of their law.
+
+In the morning we visit Tiberias, buy some bread and fish in the market,
+and go through the Mission Hospital, where one of the gentle nurses
+binds up a foolish little wound on my wrist.
+
+In the afternoon we sail on the southern part of the lake. The boatmen
+laugh at my fruitless fishing with artificial flies, and catch a few
+small fish for us with their nets in the shallow, muddy places along the
+shore. The wind is strange and variable, now sweeping down in violent
+gusts that bend the long arm of the lateen sail, now dying away to a
+dead calm through which we row lazily home.
+
+I remember a small purple kingfisher poising in the air over a shoal,
+his head bent downward, his wings vibrating swiftly. He drops like a
+shot and comes up out of the water with a fish held crosswise in his
+bill. With measured wing-strokes he flits to the top of a rock to eat
+his supper, and a robber-gull flaps after him to take it away. But the
+industrious kingfisher is too quick to be robbed. He bolts his fish with
+a single gulp. We eat ours in more leisurely fashion, by the light of
+the candles in our peaceful tent.
+
+
+V
+
+MEMORIES OF THE LAKE
+
+A hundred little points of illumination flash into memory as I look back
+over the hours that we spent beside the Sea of Galilee. How should I
+write of them all without being tedious? How, indeed, should I hope to
+make them visible or significant in the bare words of description?
+
+Never have I passed richer, fuller hours; but most of their wealth was
+in very little things: the personal look of a flower growing by the
+wayside; the intimate message of a bird's song falling through the sunny
+air; the expression of confidence and appeal on the face of a wounded
+man in the hospital, when the good physician stood beside his cot; the
+shadows of the mountains lengthening across the valleys at sunset; the
+laughter of a little child playing with a broken water pitcher; the
+bronzed profiles and bold, free ways of our sunburned rowers; the sad
+eyes of an old Hebrew lifted from the book that he was reading; the
+ruffling breezes and sudden squalls that changed the surface of the
+lake; the single palm-tree that waved over the mud hovels of Magdala;
+the millions of tiny shells that strewed the beach of Capernaum and
+Bethsaida; the fertile sweep of the Plain of Gennesaret rising from the
+lake; and the dark precipices of the "Robbers' Gorge" running back into
+the western mountains.
+
+The written record of these hours is worth little; but in experience and
+in memory they have a mystical meaning and beauty, because they belong
+to the country where Jesus walked with His fishermen-disciples, and took
+the little children in His arms, and healed the sick, and opened blind
+eyes to behold ineffable things.
+
+Every touch that brings that country nearer to us in our humanity and
+makes it more real, more simple, more vivid, is precious. For the one
+irreparable loss that could befall us in religion,--a loss that is often
+threatened by our abstract and theoretical ways of thinking and speaking
+about Him,--would be to lose Jesus out of the lowly and familiar ways of
+our mortal life. He entered these lowly ways as the Son of Man in order
+to make us sure that we are the children of God.
+
+Therefore I am glad of every hour spent by the Lake of Galilee.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I remember, when we came across in our boat to Tell Hûm, where the
+ancient city of Capernaum stood, the sun was shining with a fervent heat
+and the air of the lake, six hundred and eighty feet below the level of
+the sea, was soft and languid. The gray-bearded German monk who came to
+meet us at the landing and admitted us to the inclosure of his little
+monastery where he was conducting the excavation of the ruins, wore a
+cork helmet and spectacles. He had been heated, even above the ninety
+degrees Fahrenheit which the thermometer marked, by the rudeness of a
+couple of tourists who had just tried to steal a photograph of his work.
+He had foiled them by opening their camera and blotting the film with
+sunlight, and had then sent them away with fervent words. But as he
+walked with us among his roses and Pride of India trees, his spirit
+cooled within him, and he showed himself a learned and accomplished man.
+
+He told us how he had been working there for two or three years,
+keeping records and drawings and photographs of everything that was
+found; going back to the Franciscan convent at Jerusalem for his short
+vacation in the heat of mid-summer; putting his notes in order, reading
+and studying, making ready to write his book on Capernaum. He showed us
+the portable miniature railway which he had made; and the little iron
+cars to carry away the great piles of rubbish and earth; and the rich
+columns, carved lintels, marble steps and shell-niches of the splendid
+building which his workmen had uncovered. The outline was clear and
+perfect. We could see how the edifice of fine, white limestone had been
+erected upon an older foundation of basalt, and how an earthquake had
+twisted it and shaken down its pillars. It was undoubtedly a synagogue,
+perhaps the very same which the rich Roman centurion built for the Jews
+in Capernaum (Luke vii: 5), and where Jesus healed the man who had an
+unclean spirit. (Luke iv: 31-37.) Of all the splendours of that proud
+city of the lake, once spreading along a mile of the shore, nothing
+remained but these tumbled ruins in a lonely, fragrant garden, where the
+patient father was digging with his Arab workmen and getting ready to
+write his book.
+
+"_Weh dir, Capernaum_" I quoted. The _padre_ nodded his head gravely.
+"_Ja, ja,_" said he, "_es ist buchstäblich erfüllt!_"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I remember the cool bath in the lake, at a point between Bethsaida and
+Capernaum, where a tangle of briony and honeysuckle made a shelter
+around a shell-strewn beach, and the rosy oleanders bloomed beside an
+inflowing stream. I swam out a little way and floated, looking up into
+the deep sky, while the waves plashed gently and caressingly around my
+face.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I remember the old Arab fisherman, who was camped with his family in a
+black tent on a meadow where several lively brooks came in (one of them
+large enough to turn a mill). I persuaded him by gestures to wade out
+into the shallow part of the lake and cast his bell-net for fish. He
+gathered the net in his hand, and whirled it around his head. The leaden
+weights around the bottom spread out in a wide circle and splashed into
+the water. He drew the net toward him by the cord, the ring of sinkers
+sweeping the bottom, and lifted it slowly, carefully--but no fish!
+
+Then I rigged up my pocket fly-rod with a gossamer leader and two tiny
+trout-flies, a Royal Coach-man and a Queen of the Water, and began to
+cast along the crystal pools and rapids of the larger stream. How
+merrily the fish rose there, and in the ripples where the brooks ran out
+into the lake. There were half a dozen different kinds of fish, but I
+did not know the name of any of them. There was one that looked like a
+black bass, and others like white perch and sunfish; and one kind was
+very much like a grayling. But they were not really of the _salmo_
+family, I knew, for none of them had the soft fin in front of the tail.
+How surprised the old fisherman was when he saw the fish jumping at
+those tiny hooks with feathers; and how round the eyes of his children
+were as they looked on; and how pleased they were with the _bakhshîsh_
+which they received, including a couple of baithooks for the eldest boy!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I remember the place where we ate our lunch in a small grove of
+eucalyptus-trees, with sweet-smelling yellow acacias blossoming around
+us. It was near the site which some identify with the ancient Bethsaida,
+but others say that it was farther to the east, and others again say
+that Capernaum was really located here. The whole problem of these lake
+cities, where they stood, how they supported such large populations (not
+less than fifteen thousand people in each), is difficult and may never
+be solved. But it did not trouble us deeply. We were content to be
+beside the same waters, among the same hills, that Jesus knew and loved.
+
+It was here, along this shore, that He found Simon and his brother
+Andrew casting their net, and James and his brother John mending theirs,
+and called them to come with Him. These fishermen, with their frank and
+free hearts unspoiled by the sophistries of the Pharisees, with their
+minds unhampered by social and political ambitions, followers of a
+vocation which kept them out of doors and reminded them daily of their
+dependence on the bounty of God,--these children of nature, and others
+like them, were the men whom He chose for His disciples, the listeners
+who had ears to hear His marvellous gospel.
+
+It was here, on these pale, green waves, that He sat in a little boat,
+near the shore, and spoke to the multitude who had gathered to hear Him.
+
+He spoke of the deep and tranquil confidence that man may learn from
+nature, from the birds and the flowers.
+
+He spoke of the infinite peace of the heart that knows the true meaning
+of love, which is giving and blessing, and the true secret of courage,
+which is loyalty to the truth.
+
+He spoke of the God whom we can trust as a child trusts its father, and
+of the Heaven which waits for all who do good to their fellowmen.
+
+He spoke of the wisdom whose fruit is not pride but humility, of the
+honour whose crown is not authority but service, of the purity which is
+not outward but inward, and of the joy which lasts forever.
+
+He spoke of forgiveness for the guilty, of compassion for the weak, of
+hope for the desperate.
+
+He told these poor and lowly folk that their souls were unspeakably
+precious, and that He had come to save them and make them inheritors of
+an eternal kingdom. He told them that He had brought this message from
+God, their Father and His Father.
+
+He spoke with the simplicity of one who knows, with the assurance of one
+who has seen, with the certainty and clearness of one for whom doubt
+does not exist.
+
+He offered Himself, in His stainless purity, in His supreme love, as the
+proof and evidence of His gospel, the bread of Heaven, the water of
+life, the Saviour of sinners, the light of the world. "Come unto Me," He
+said, "and I will give you rest."
+
+This was the heavenly music that came into the world by the Lake of
+Galilee. And its voice has spread through the centuries, comforting the
+sorrowful, restoring the penitent, cheering the despondent, and telling
+all who will believe it, that our human life is worth living, because it
+gives each one of us the opportunity to share in the Love which is
+sovereign and immortal.
+
+
+_A PSALM OF THE GOOD TEACHER_
+
+_The Lord is my teacher:
+I shall not lose the way to wisdom._
+
+_He leadeth me in the lowly path of learning,
+He prepareth a lesson for me every day;
+He findeth the clear fountains of instruction,
+Little by little he showeth me the beauty of the truth._
+
+_The world is a great book that he hath written,
+He turneth the leaves for me slowly;
+They are all inscribed with images and letters,
+His face poureth light on the pictures and the words._
+
+_Then am I glad when I perceive his meaning,
+He taketh me by the hand to the hill-top of vision;
+In the valley also he walketh beside me,
+And in the dark places he whispereth to my heart._
+
+_Yea, though my lesson be hard it is not hopeless,
+For the Lord is very patient with his slow scholar;
+He will wait awhile for my weakness,
+He will help me to read the truth through tears._
+
+_Surely thou wilt enlighten me daily by joy and by sorrow:
+And lead me at last, O Lord, to the perfect knowledge of thee._
+
+
+
+
+                                XI
+
+                      THE SPRINGS OF JORDAN
+
+
+I
+
+THE HILL-COUNTRY OF NAPHTALI
+
+Naphtali was the northernmost of the tribes of Israel, a bold and free
+highland clan, inhabiting a country of rugged hills and steep
+mountainsides, with fertile vales and little plains between.
+
+"Naphtali is a hind let loose," said the old song of the Sons of Jacob
+(Genesis xlix: 21); and as we ride up from the Lake of Galilee on our
+way northward, we feel the meaning of the poet's words. A people
+dwelling among these rock-strewn heights, building their fortress-towns
+on sharp pinnacles, and climbing these steep paths to the open fields of
+tillage or of war, would be like wild deer in their spirit of liberty,
+and they would need to be as nimble and sure-footed.
+
+Our good little horses are shod with round plates of iron, and they
+clatter noisily among the loose stones and slip on the rocky ledges, as
+we strike over the hills from Capernaum, without a path, to join the
+main trail at Khân Yubb Yûsuf.
+
+We are skirting fields of waving wheat and barley, but there are no
+houses to be seen. Far and wide the sea of verdure rolls around us,
+broken only by ridges of grayish rock and scarped cliffs of reddish
+basalt. We wade saddle-deep in herbage; broad-leaved fennel and
+trembling reeds; wild asparagus and artichokes; a hundred kinds of
+flowering weeds; acres of last year's thistles, standing blanched and
+ghostlike in the summer sunshine.
+
+The phantom city of Safed gleams white from its far-away hilltop,--the
+latest and perhaps the last of the famous seats of rabbinical learning.
+It is one of the sacred places of modern Judaism. No Hebrew pilgrim
+fails to visit it. Here, they say, the Messiah will one day reveal
+himself, and after establishing His kingdom, will set out to conquer the
+world.
+
+But it is not to the city, shining like a flake of mica from the
+greenness of the distant mountain, that our looks and thoughts are
+turning. It is backward to the lucent sapphire of the Lake of Galilee,
+upon whose shores our hearts have seen the secret vision, heard the
+inward message of the Man of Nazareth.
+
+Ridge after ridge reveals new outlooks toward its tranquil loveliness.
+Turn after turn, our winding way leads us to what we think must be the
+parting view. Sleeping in still, forsaken beauty among the sheltering
+hills, and open to the cloudless sky which makes its water like a little
+heaven, it seems to silently return our farewell looks with pleading for
+remembrance. Now, after one more round among the inclosing ridges,
+another vista opens, the widest and the most serene of all.
+
+Farewell, dear Lake of Jesus! Our eyes may never rest on thee again; but
+surely they will not forget thee. For now, as often we come to some fair
+water in the Western mountains, or unfold the tent by some lone lakeside
+in the forests of the North, the lapping of thy waves will murmur
+through our thoughts; thy peaceful brightness will arise before us; we
+shall see the rose-flush of thy oleanders, and the waving of thy reeds;
+the sweet, faint smell of thy gold-flowered acacias will return to us
+from purple orchids and white lilies. Let the blessing that is thine go
+with us everywhere in God's great out-of-doors, and our hearts never
+lose the comradeship of Him who made thee holiest among all the waters
+of the world!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Khân of Joseph's Pit is a ruin; a huge and broken building deserted
+by the caravans which used to throng this highway from Damascus to the
+cities of the lake, and to the ports of Acre and Joppa, and to the
+metropolis of Egypt. It is hard to realize that this wild moorland path
+by which we are travelling was once a busy road, filled with camels,
+horses, chariots, foot-passengers, clanking companies of soldiers; that
+these crumbling, cavernous walls, overgrown with thorny capers and wild
+marjoram and mandragora, were once crowded every night with a motley mob
+of travellers and merchants; that this pool of muddy water, gloomily
+reflecting the ruins, was once surrounded by flocks and herds and beasts
+of burden; that only a few hours to the southward there was once a ring
+of splendid, thriving, bustling towns around the shores of Galilee, out
+of which and into which the multitudes were forever journeying. Now they
+are all gone from the road, and the vast wayside caravanserai is
+sleeping into decay--a dormitory for bats and serpents.
+
+What is it that makes the wreck of an inn more lonely and forbidding
+than any other ruin?
+
+A few miles more of riding along the flanks of the mountains bring us to
+a place where we turn a corner suddenly, and come upon the full view of
+the upper basin of the Jordan; a vast oval green cup, with the little
+Lake of Huleh lying in it like a blue jewel, and the giant bulk of Mount
+Hermon towering beyond it, crowned and cloaked with silver snows.
+
+Up the steep and slippery village street of Rosh Pinnah, a modern Jewish
+colony founded by the Rothschilds in 1882, we scramble wearily to our
+camping-ground for the night. Above us on a hilltop is the old Arab
+village of Jaûneh, brown, picturesque, and filthy. Around us are the
+colonists' new houses, with their red-tiled roofs and white walls. Two
+straight streets running in parallel lines up the hillside are roughly
+paved with cobble-stones and lined with trees; mulberries,
+white-flowered acacias, eucalyptus, feathery pepper-trees, and
+rose-bushes. Water runs down through pipes from a copious spring on the
+mountain, and flows abundantly into every house, plashing into covered
+reservoirs and open stone basins for watering the cattle. Below us the
+long avenues of eucalyptus, the broad vineyards filled with low, bushy
+vines, the immense orchards of pale-green almond-trees, the smiling
+wheat-fields, slope to the lake and encircle its lower end.
+
+The children who come to visit our camp on the terrace wear shoes and
+stockings, carry school-books in their bags, and bring us offerings of
+little bunches of sweet-smelling garden roses and pendulous
+locust-blooms. We are a thousand years away from the Khân of Joseph's
+Pit; but we can still see the old mud village on the height against the
+sunset, and the camp-fires gleaming in front of the black Bedouin tents
+far below, along the edge of the marshes. We are perched between the old
+and the new, between the nomad and the civilized man, and the unchanging
+white head of Hermon looks down upon us all.
+
+In the morning, on the way down, I stop at the door of a house and fall
+into talk with an intelligent, schoolmasterish sort of man, a Roumanian,
+who speaks a little weird German. Is the colony prospering? Yes, but
+not so fast that it makes them giddy. What are they raising? Wheat and
+barley, a few vegetables, a great deal of almonds and grapes. Good
+harvests? Some years good, some years bad; the Arabs bad every year,
+terrible thieves; but the crops are plentiful most of the time. Are the
+colonists happy, contented? A thin smile wrinkles around the man's lips
+as he answers with the statement of a world-wide truth, "_Ach, Herr, der
+Ackerbauer ist nie zufrieden._" ("Ah, Sir, the farmer is never
+contented.")
+
+
+II
+
+THE WATERS OF MEROM
+
+All day we ride along the hills skirting the marshy plain of Huleh. Here
+the springs and parent streams of Jordan are gathered, behind the
+mountains of Naphtali and at the foot of Hermon, as in a great green
+basin about the level of the ocean, for the long, swift rush down the
+sunken trench which leads to the deep, sterile bitterness of the Dead
+Sea. Was there ever a river that began so fair and ended in such waste
+and desolation?
+
+Here in this broad, level, well-watered valley, along the borders of
+these vast beds of papyrus and rushes intersected by winding, hidden
+streams, Joshua and his fierce clans of fighting men met the Kings of
+the north with their horses and chariots, "at the waters of Merom," in
+the last great battle for the possession of the Promised Land. It was a
+furious conflict, the hordes of footmen against the squadrons of
+horsemen; but the shrewd command that came from Joshua decided it:
+"Hough their horses and burn their chariots with fire." The Canaanites
+and the Amorites and the Hittites and the Hivites were swept from the
+field, driven over the western mountains, and the Israelites held the
+Jordan from Jericho to Hermon. (Joshua xi:1-15.)
+
+The springs that burst from the hills to the left of our path and run
+down to the sluggish channels of the marsh on our right are abundant and
+beautiful.
+
+Here is 'Ain Mellâha, a crystal pool a hundred yards wide, with wild
+mint and watercress growing around it, white and yellow lilies floating
+on its surface, and great fish showing themselves in the transparent
+open spaces among the weeds, where the water bubbles up from the bottom
+through dancing hillocks of clean, white sand and shining pebbles.
+
+Here is 'Ain el-Belâta, a copious stream breaking forth from the rocks
+beneath a spreading terebinth-tree, and rippling down with merry rapids
+toward the jungle of rustling reeds and plumed papyrus.
+
+While luncheon is preparing in the shade of the terebinth, I wade into
+the brook and cast my fly along the ripples. A couple of ragged,
+laughing, bare-legged Bedouin boys follow close behind me, watching the
+new sport with wonder. The fish are here, as lively and gamesome as
+brook trout, plump, golden-sided fellows ten or twelve inches long. The
+feathered hooks tempt them, and they rise freely to the lure. My
+tattered pages are greatly excited, and make impromptu pouches in the
+breast of their robes, stuffing in the fish until they look quite fat.
+The catch is enough for a good supper for their whole family, and a
+dozen more for a delicious fish-salad at our camp that night. What kind
+of fish are they? I do not know: doubtless something Scriptural and
+Oriental. But they taste good; and so far as there is any record, they
+are the first fish ever taken with the artificial fly in the sources of
+the Jordan.
+
+The plain of Huleh is full of life. Flocks of waterfowl and solemn
+companies of storks circle over the swamps. The wet meadows are covered
+with herds of black buffaloes, wallowing in the ditches, or staring at
+us sullenly under their drooping horns. Little bunches of horses, and
+brood mares followed by their long-legged, awkward foals, gallop beside
+our cavalcade, whinnying and kicking up their heels in the joy of
+freedom. Flocks of black goats clamber up the rocky hillsides, following
+the goatherd who plays upon his rustic pipe quavering and fantastic
+music, softened by distance into a wild sweetness. Small black cattle
+with white faces march in long files across the pastures, or wander
+through the thickets of bulrushes and papyrus and giant fennel,
+appearing and disappearing as the screen of broad leaves and trembling
+plumes close behind them.
+
+A few groups of huts made out of wattled reeds stand beside the sluggish
+watercourses, just as they did when Macgregor in his Rob Roy canoe
+attempted to explore this impenetrable morass forty years ago. Along the
+higher ground are lines of black Bedouin tents, arranged in transitory
+villages.
+
+These flitting habitations of the nomads, who come down from the hills
+and lofty deserts to fatten their flocks and herds among unfailing
+pasturage, are all of one pattern. The low, flat roof of black goats'
+hair is lifted by the sticks which support it, into half a dozen little
+peaks, perhaps five or six feet from the ground. Between these peaks the
+cloth sags down, and is made fast along the edges by intricate and
+confusing guy-ropes. The tent is shallow, not more than six feet deep,
+and from twelve to thirty feet long, according to the wealth of the
+owner and the size of his family,--two things which usually correspond.
+The sides and the partitions are sometimes made of woven reeds, like
+coarse matting. Within there is an apartment (if you can call it so) for
+the family, a pen for the chickens, and room for dogs, cats, calves and
+other creatures to find shelter. The fireplace of flat stones is in the
+centre, and the smoke oozes out through the roof and sides.
+
+The Bedouin men, in flowing _burnous_ and _keffiyeh_, with the _'agâl_
+of dark twisted camel's hair like a crown upon their heads, are almost
+all handsome: clean-cut, haughty faces, bold in youth and dignified in
+old age. The women look weatherbeaten and withered beside them. Even
+when you see a fine face in the dark blue mantle or under the white
+head-dress, it is almost always disfigured by purplish tattooing around
+the lips and chin. Some of the younger girls are beautiful, and most of
+the children are entrancing.
+
+They play games in a ring, with songs and clapping hands; the boys
+charge up and down among the tents with wild shouts, driving a round
+bone or a donkey's hoof with their shinny-sticks; the girls chase one
+another and hide among the bushes in some primeval form of "tag" or
+"hide-and-seek."
+
+A merry little mob pursues us as we ride through each encampment, with
+outstretched hands and half-jesting, half-plaintive cries of
+"_Bakhshîsh! bakhshîsh!_" They do not really expect anything. It is only
+a part of the game. And when the Lady holds out her open hand to them
+and smiles as she repeats, "_Bakhshîsh! bakhshîsh!_" they take the joke
+quickly, and run away, laughing, to their sports.
+
+At one village, in the dusk, there is an open-air wedding: a row of men
+dancing; a ring of women and girls looking on; musicians playing the
+shepherd's pipe and the drum; maidens running beside us to beg a present
+for the invisible bride: a rude charcoal sketch of human society,
+primitive, irrepressible, confident, encamped for a moment on the
+shadowy border of the fecund and unconquerable marsh.
+
+Thus we traverse the strange country of Bedouinia, travelling all day in
+the presence of the Great Sheikh of Mountains, and sleep at night on the
+edge of a little village whose name we shall never know. A dozen times
+we ask George for the real name of that place, and a dozen times he
+repeats it for us with painstaking courtesy; it sounds like a compromise
+between a cough and a sneeze.
+
+
+III
+
+WHERE JORDAN RISES
+
+The Jordan is assembled in the northern end of the basin of Huleh under
+a mysterious curtain of tall, tangled water-plants. Into that ancient
+and impenetrable place of hiding and blending enter many little springs
+and brooks, but the main sources of the river are three.
+
+The first and the longest is the Hasbâni, a strong, foaming stream that
+comes down with a roar from the western slope of Hermon. We cross it by
+the double arch of a dilapidated Saracen bridge, looking down upon
+thickets of oleander, willow, tamarisk and woodbine.
+
+The second and largest source springs from the rounded hill of Tel
+el-Kâdi, the supposed site of the ancient city of Dan, the northern
+border of Israel. Here the wandering, landless Danites, finding a
+country to their taste, put the too fortunate inhabitants of Leshem to
+the sword and took possession. And here King Jereboam set up one of his
+idols of the golden calf.
+
+There is no vestige of the city, no trace of the idolatrous shrine, on
+the huge mound which rises thirty or forty feet above the plain. But it
+is thickly covered with trees: poplars and oaks and wild figs and
+acacias and wild olives. A pair of enormous veterans, a valonia oak and
+a terebinth, make a broad bower of shade above the tomb of an unknown
+Mohammedan saint, and there we eat our midday meal, with the murmur of
+running waters all around us, a clear rivulet singing at our feet, and
+the chant of innumerable birds filling the vault of foliage above our
+heads.
+
+After lunch, instead of sleeping, two of us wander into the dense grove
+that spreads over the mound. Tiny streams of water trickle through it:
+blackberry-vines and wild grapes are twisted in the undergrowth; ferns
+and flowery nettles and mint grow waist-high. The main spring is at the
+western base of the mound. The water comes bubbling and whirling out
+from under a screen of wild figs and vines, forming a pool of palest,
+clearest blue, a hundred feet in diameter. Out of this pool the new-born
+river rushes, foaming and shouting down the hillside, through lines of
+flowering styrax and hawthorn and willows trembling over its wild joy.
+
+The third and most impressive of the sources of Jordan is at Bâniyâs, on
+one of the foothills of Hermon. Our path thither leads us up from Dan,
+through high green meadows, shaded by oak-trees, sprinkled with
+innumerable blossoming shrubs and bushes, and looking down upon the
+lower fields blue with lupins and vetches, or golden with yellow
+chrysanthemums beneath which the red glow of the clover is dimly burning
+like a secret fire.
+
+Presently we come, by way of a broad, natural terrace where the white
+encampment of the Moslem dead lies gleaming beneath the shade of mighty
+oaks and terebinths, and past the friendly olive-grove where our own
+tents are standing, to a deep ravine filled to the brim with luxuriant
+verdure of trees and vines and ferns. Into this green cleft a little
+river, dancing and singing, suddenly plunges and disappears, and from
+beneath the veil of moist and trembling leaves we hear the sound of its
+wild joy, a fracas of leaping, laughing waters.
+
+[Illustration: The Approach to Bâniyâs.]
+
+An old Roman bridge spans the stream on the brink of its downward
+leap. Crossing over, we ride through the ruined gateway of the town of
+Bâniyâs, turn to right and left among its dirty, narrow streets, pass
+into a leafy lane, and come out in front of a cliff of ruddy limestone,
+with niches and shrines carved on its face, and a huge, dark cavern
+gaping in the centre.
+
+A tumbled mass of broken rocks lies below the mouth of the cave. From
+this slope of débris, sixty or seventy feet long, a line of springs gush
+forth in singing foam. Under the shadow of trembling poplars and
+broad-boughed sycamores, amid the lush greenery of wild figs and grapes,
+bracken and briony and morning-glory, drooping maidenhair and
+flower-laden styrax, the hundred rills swiftly run together and flow
+away with one impulse, a full-grown little river.
+
+There is an immemorial charm about the place. Mysteries of grove and
+fountain, of cave and hilltop, bewitch it with the magic of Nature's
+life, ever springing and passing, flowering and fading, basking in the
+open sunlight and hiding in the secret places of the earth. It is such a
+place as Claude Lorraine might have imagined and painted as the scene
+of one of his mythical visions of Arcadia; such a place as antique fancy
+might have chosen and decked with altars for the worship of unseen
+dryads and nymphs, oreads and naiads. And so, indeed, it was chosen, and
+so it was decked.
+
+Here, in all probability, was Baal-Gad, where the Canaanites paid their
+reverence to the waters that spring from underground. Here, certainly,
+was Paneas of the Greeks, where the rites of Pan and all the nymphs were
+celebrated. Here Herod the Great built a marble temple to Augustus the
+Tolerant, on this terrace of rock above the cave. Here, no doubt, the
+statue of the Emperor looked down upon a strange confusion of revelries
+and wild offerings in honour of the unknown powers of Nature.
+
+All these things have withered, crumbled, vanished. There are no more
+statues, altars, priests, revels and sacrifices at Bâniyâs--only the
+fragment of an inscription around one of the votive niches carved on the
+cliff, which records the fact that the niche was made by a certain
+person who at that time was "Priest of Pan." _But the name of this_
+_person who wished to be remembered is precisely the part of the carving
+which is illegible._
+
+Ironical inscription! Still the fountains gush from the rocks, the
+poplars tremble in the breeze, the sweet incense rises from the
+orange-flowered styrax, the birds chant the joy of living, the sunlight
+and the moonlight fall upon the sparkling waters, and the liquid
+starlight drips through the glistening leaves. But the Priest of Pan is
+forgotten, and all that old interpretation and adoration of Nature,
+sensuous, passionate, full of mingled cruelty and ecstasy, has melted
+like a mist from her face, and left her serene and pure and lovely as
+ever.
+
+Here at Paneas, after the city had been rebuilt by Philip the Tetrarch
+and renamed after him and his Imperial master, there came one day a
+Peasant of Galilee who taught His disciples to draw near to Nature, not
+with fierce revelry and superstitious awe, but with tranquil confidence
+and calm joy. The goatfoot god, the god of panic, the great god Pan,
+reigns no more beside the upper springs of Jordan. The name that we
+remember here, the name that makes the message of flowing stream and
+sheltering tree and singing bird more clear and cool and sweet to our
+hearts, is the name of Jesus of Nazareth.
+
+
+IV
+
+CÆSAREA PHILIPPI
+
+Yes, this little Mohammedan town of Bâniyâs, with its twoscore wretched
+houses built of stones from the ancient ruins and huddled within the
+broken walls of the citadel, is the ancient site of Cæsarea Philippi. In
+the happy days that we spend here, rejoicing in the most beautiful of
+all our camps in the Holy Land, and yielding ourselves to the full charm
+of the out-of-doors more perfectly expressed than we had ever thought to
+find it in Palestine,--in this little paradise of friendly trees and
+fragrant flowers,
+
+      "at snowy Hermon's foot,
+  Amid the music of his waterfalls,"--
+
+the thought of Jesus is like the presence of a comrade, while the
+memories of human grandeur and transience, of man's long toil, unceasing
+conflict, vain pride and futile despair, visit us only as flickering
+ghosts.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We climb to the top of the peaked hill, a thousand feet above the town,
+and explore the great Crusaders' Castle of Subeibeh, a ruin vaster in
+extent and nobler in situation than the famous _Schloss_ of Heidelberg.
+It not only crowns but completely covers the summit of the steep ridge
+with the huge drafted stones of its foundations. The immense round
+towers, the double-vaulted gateways, are still standing. Long flights of
+steps lead down to subterranean reservoirs of water. Spacious
+courtyards, where the knights and men-at-arms once exercised, are
+transformed into vegetable gardens, and the passageways between the
+north citadel and the south citadel are travelled by flocks of lop-eared
+goats.
+
+From room to room we clamber by slopes of crumbling stone, discovering
+now a guard-chamber with loopholes for the archers, and now an arched
+chapel with the plaster intact and faint touches of colour still showing
+upon it. Perched on the high battlements we look across the valley of
+Huleh and the springs of Jordan to Kal'at Hûnîn on the mountains of
+Naphtali, and to Kal'at esh-Shakîf above the gorge of the River Lîtânî.
+
+From these three great fortresses, in the time of the Crusaders, flashed
+and answered the signal-fires of the chivalry of Europe fighting for
+possession of Palestine. What noble companies of knights and ladies
+inhabited these castles, what rich festivals were celebrated within
+these walls, what desperate struggles defended them, until at last the
+swarthy hordes of Saracens stormed the gates and poured over the
+defences and planted the standard of the crescent on the towers and lit
+the signal-fires of Islam from citadel to citadel.
+
+All the fires have gone out now. The yellow whin blazes upon the
+hillsides. The wild fig-tree splits the masonry. The scorpion lodges in
+the deserted chambers. On the fallen stone of the Crusaders' gate, where
+the Moslem victor has carved his Arabic inscription, a green-gray lizard
+poises motionless, like a bronze figure on a paper-weight.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Illustration: Bridge Over the River Lîtânî.]
+
+We pass through the southern entrance of the village of Bâniyâs, a
+massive square portal, rebuilt by some Arab ruler, and go out on the
+old Roman bridge which spans the ravine. The aqueduct carried by the
+bridge is still full of flowing water, and the drops which fall from it
+in a fine mist make a little rainbow as the afternoon sun shines through
+the archway draped with maidenhair fern. On the stone pavement of the
+bridge we trace the ruts worn two thousand years ago by the chariots of
+the men who conquered the world. The chariots have all rolled by. On the
+broken edge of the tower above the gateway sits a ragged Bedouin boy,
+making shrill, plaintive music with his pipe of reeds.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We repose in front of our tents among the olive-trees at the close of
+the day. The cool sound of running streams and rustling poplars is on
+the moving air, and the orange-golden sunset enchants the orchard with
+mystical light. All the swift visions of striving Saracens and
+Crusaders, of conquering Greeks and Romans, fade away from us, and we
+see the figure of the Man of Nazareth with His little company of friends
+and disciples coming up from Galilee.
+
+It was here that Jesus retreated with His few faithful followers from
+the opposition of the Scribes and Pharisees. This was the northernmost
+spot of earth ever trodden by His feet, the longest distance from
+Jerusalem that He ever travelled. Here in this exquisite garden of
+Nature, in a region of the Gentiles, within sight of the shrines devoted
+to those Greek and Roman rites which were so luxurious and so tolerant,
+four of the most beautiful and significant events of His life and
+ministry took place.
+
+He asked His disciples plainly to tell their secret thought of Him--whom
+they believed their Master to be. And when Peter answered simply: "Thou
+art the Christ, the Son of the living God," Jesus blessed him for the
+answer, and declared that He would build His church upon that rock.
+
+Then He took Peter and James and John with Him and climbed one of the
+high and lonely slopes of Hermon. There He was transfigured before them,
+His face shining like the sun and His garments glistening like the snow
+on the mountain-peaks. But when they begged to stay there with Him, He
+led them down to the valley again, among the sinning and suffering
+children of men.
+
+At the foot of the mount of transfiguration He healed the demoniac boy
+whom his father had brought to the other disciples, but for whom they
+had been unable to do anything; and He taught them that the power to
+help men comes from faith and prayer.
+
+And then, at last, He turned His steps from this safe and lovely refuge,
+(where He might surely have lived in peace, or from which He might have
+gone out unmolested into the wide Gentile world), backward to His own
+country, His own people, the great, turbulent, hard-hearted Jewish city,
+and the fate which was not to be evaded by One who loved sinners and
+came to save them. He went down into Galilee, down through Samaria and
+Perea, down to Jerusalem, down to Gethsemane and to Golgotha,--fearless,
+calm,--sustained and nourished by that secret food which satisfied His
+heart in doing the will of God.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was in the quest of this Jesus, in the hope of somehow drawing nearer
+to Him, that we made our pilgrimage to the Holy Land. And now, in the
+cool of the evening at Cæsarea Philippi, we ask ourselves whether our
+desire has been granted, our hope fulfilled?
+
+Yes, more richly, more wonderfully than we dared to dream. For we have
+found a new vision of Christ, simpler, clearer, more satisfying, in the
+freedom and reality of God's out-of-doors.
+
+Not through the mists and shadows of an infinite regret, the sadness of
+sweet, faded dreams and hopes that must be resigned, as Pierre Loti saw
+the phantom of a Christ whose irrevocable disappearance has left the
+world darker than ever!
+
+Not amid strange portents and mysterious rites, crowned with I know not
+what aureole of traditionary splendours, founder of elaborate ceremonies
+and centre of lamplit shrines, as Matilde Serao saw the image of that
+Christ whom the legends of men have honoured and obscured!
+
+The Jesus whom we have found is the Child of Nazareth playing among the
+flowers; the Man of Galilee walking beside the lake, healing the sick,
+comforting the sorrowful, cheering the lonely and despondent; the
+well-beloved Son of God transfigured in the sunset glow of snowy Hermon,
+weeping by the sepulchre in Bethany, agonizing in the moonlit garden of
+Gethsemane, giving His life for those who did not understand Him, though
+they loved Him, and for those who did not love Him because they did not
+understand Him, and rising at last triumphant over death,--such a
+Saviour as all men need and as no man could ever have imagined if He had
+not been real.
+
+His message has not died away, nor will it ever die. For confidence and
+calm joy He tells us to turn to Nature. For love and sacrifice He bids
+us live close to our fellowmen. For comfort and immortal hope He asks us
+to believe in Him and in our Father, God.
+
+That is all.
+
+But the bringing of that heavenly message made the country to which it
+came the Holy Land. And the believing of that message, to-day, will lead
+any child of man into the kingdom of heaven. And the keeping of that
+faith, the following of that Life, will transfigure any country beneath
+the blue sky into a holy land.
+
+
+_THE PSALM OF A SOJOURNER_
+
+_Thou hast taken me into the tent of the world, O God:
+Beneath thy blue canopy I have found shelter:
+Therefore thou wilt not deny me the right of a guest._
+
+_Naked and poor I arrived at the door before sunset:
+Thou hast refreshed me with beautiful bowls of milk:
+As a great chief thou hast set forth food in abundance._
+
+_I have loved the daily delights of thy dwelling:
+Thy moon and thy stars have lighted me to my bed:
+In the morning I have found joy with thy servants._
+
+_Surely thou wilt not send me away in the darkness?
+There the enemy Death is lying in wait for my soul:
+Thou art the host of my life and I claim thy protection._
+
+_Then the Lord of the tent of the world made answer:
+The right of a guest endureth but for an appointed time:
+After three days and three nights cometh the day of departure._
+
+_Yet hearken to me since thou fearest the foe in the dark:
+I will make with thee a new covenant of everlasting hospitality:
+Behold I will come unto thee as a stranger and be thy guest._
+
+_Poor and needy will I come that thou mayest entertain me:
+Meek and lowly will I come that thou mayest find a friend:
+With mercy and with truth will I come to give thee comfort._
+
+_Therefore open the door of thy heart and bid me welcome:
+In this tent of the world I will be thy brother of the bread:
+And when thou farest forth I will be thy companion forever._
+
+_Then my soul rested in the word of the Lord:
+And I saw that the curtains of the world were shaken,
+But I looked beyond them to the eternal camp-fires of my friend._
+
+
+
+
+                                XII
+
+                       THE ROAD TO DAMASCUS
+
+
+I
+
+THROUGH THE LAND OF THE DRUSES
+
+You may go to Damascus now by rail, if you like, and have a choice
+between two rival routes, one under government ownership, the other
+built and managed by a corporation. But to us encamped among the silvery
+olives at Bâniyâs, beside the springs of Jordan, it seemed a happy
+circumstance that both railways were so far away that it would have
+taken longer to reach them than to ride our horses straight into the
+city. We were delivered from the modern folly of trying to save time by
+travelling in a conveyance more speedy than picturesque, and left free
+to pursue our journey in a leisurely, independent fashion and by the
+road that would give us most pleasure. So we chose the longer way, the
+northern path around Mount Hermon, through the country of the Druses,
+instead of the more frequented road to the east by Kafr Hawar.
+
+How delightful is the morning of such a journey! The fresh face of the
+world bathed in sparkling dew; the greetings from tent to tent as we
+four friends make our rendezvous from the far countries of sleep; the
+relish of breakfast in the open air; the stir of the camp in preparation
+for a flitting; canvas sinking to the ground, bales and boxes heaped
+together, mule-bells tinkling through the grove, horses refreshed by
+their long rest whinnying and nipping at each other in play--all these
+are charming variations and accompaniments to the old tune of "Boots and
+Saddles."
+
+The immediate effect of such a setting out for a day's ride is to renew
+in the heart those "vital feelings of delight" which make one simply and
+inexplicably glad to be alive. We are delivered from those morbid
+questionings and exorbitant demands by which we are so often possessed
+and plagued as by some strange inward malady. We feel a sense of health
+and harmony diffused through body and mind as we ride over the beautiful
+terrace which slopes down from Bâniyâs to Tel-el Kâdi.
+
+We are glad of the green valonia oaks that spread their shade over us,
+and of the blossoming hawthorns that scatter their flower-snow on the
+hillside. We are glad of the crested larks that rise warbling from the
+grass, and of the buntings and chaffinches that make their small merry
+music in every thicket, and of the black and white chats that shift
+their burden of song from stone to stone beside the path, and of the
+cuckoo that tells his name to us from far away, and of the splendid
+bee-eaters that glitter over us like a flock of winged emeralds as we
+climb the rocky hill toward the north. We are glad of the broom in
+golden flower, and of the pink and white rock-roses, and of the spicy
+fragrance of mint and pennyroyal that our horses trample out as they
+splash through the spring holes and little brooks. We are glad of the
+long, wide views westward over the treeless mountains of Naphtali and
+the southern ridges of the Lebanon, and of the glimpses of the ruined
+castles of the Crusaders, Kal'at esh-Shakîf and Hûnîn, perched like
+dilapidated eagles on their distant crags. Everything seems to us like a
+personal gift. We have the feeling of ownership for this day of all the
+world's beauty. We could not explain or justify it to any sad
+philosopher who might reproach us for unreasoning felicity. We should be
+defenceless before his arguments and indifferent to his scorn. We should
+simply ride on into the morning, reflecting in our hearts something of
+the brightness of the birds' plumage, the cheerfulness of the brooks'
+song, the undimmed hyaline of the sky, and so, perhaps, fulfilling the
+Divine Intention of Nature as well as if we chose to becloud our mirror
+with melancholy thoughts.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We are following up the valley of the longest and highest, but not the
+largest, of the sources of the Jordan: the little River Hâsbânî, a
+strong and lovely stream, which rises somewhere in the northern end of
+the Wâdi et-Teim, and flows along the western base of Mount Hermon,
+receiving the tribute of torrents which burst out in foaming springs far
+up the ravines, and are fed underground by the melting of the perpetual
+snow of the great mountain. Now and then we have to cross one of these
+torrents, by a rude stone bridge or by wading. All along the way Hermon
+looks down upon us from his throne, nine thousand feet in air. His head
+is wrapped in a turban of spotless white, like a Druse chieftain, and
+his snowy winter cloak still hangs down over his shoulders, though its
+lower edges are already fringed and its seams opened by the warm suns of
+April.
+
+Presently we cross a bridge to the west bank of the Hâsbânî, and ride up
+the delightful vale where poplars and mulberries, olives, almonds, vines
+and figs, grow abundantly along the course of the river. There are low
+weirs across the stream for purposes of irrigation, and a larger dam
+supplies a mill with power. To the left is the sharp barren ridge of the
+Jebel ez-Zohr separating us from the gorge of the River Lîtânî. Groups
+of labourers are at work on the watercourses among the groves and
+gardens. Vine-dressers are busy in the vineyards. Ploughmen are driving
+their shallow furrows through the stony fields on the hillside. The
+little river, here in its friendliest mood, winds merrily among the
+plantations and orchards which it nourishes, making a cheerful noise
+over beds of pebbles, and humming a deeper note where the clear green
+water plunges over a weir.
+
+We have now been in the saddle five hours; the sun is ardent; the
+temperature is above eighty-five degrees in the shade, and along the
+bridle-path there is no shade. We are hungry, thirsty, and tired. As we
+cross the river again, splashing through a ford, our horses drink
+eagerly and attempt to lie down in the cool water. We have to use strong
+persuasion not only with them, but also with our own spirits, to pass by
+the green grass and the sheltering olive-trees on the east bank and push
+on up the narrow, rocky defile in which Hâsbeiyâ is hidden. The
+bridle-path is partly paved with rough cobblestones, hard and slippery,
+which make the going weariful. The heat presses on us like a burden.
+Things that would have delighted us in the morning now give us no
+pleasure. We have made the greedy traveller's mistake of measuring our
+march by the extent of our endurance instead of by the limit of our
+enjoyment.
+
+Hâsbeiyâ proves to be a rather thriving and picturesque town built
+around the steep sides of a bay or opening in the valley. The
+amphitheatre of hills is terraced with olive-orchards and vineyards.
+There are also many mulberry-trees cultivated for the silkworms, and the
+ever-present figs and almonds are not wanting. The stone houses of the
+town rise, on winding paths, one above the other, many of them having
+arched porticoes, red-tiled roofs, and green-latticed windows. It is a
+place of about five thousand population, now more than half Christian,
+but formerly one of the strongholds and capitals of the mysterious Druse
+religion.
+
+Our tents are pitched at the western end of the town, on a low terrace
+where olive-trees are growing. When we arrive we find the camp
+surrounded and filled with curious, laughing children. The boys are a
+little troublesome at first, but a word from an old man who seems to be
+in charge brings them to order, and at least fifty of them, big and
+little, squat in a semicircle on the grass below the terrace, watching
+us with their lustrous brown eyes.
+
+They look full of fun, those young Druses and Maronites and Greeks and
+Mohammedans, so I try a mild joke on them, by pretending that they are
+a class and that I am teaching them a lesson. "A, B, C," I chant, and
+wait for them to repeat after me. They promptly take the lesson out of
+my hands and recite the entire English alphabet in chorus, winding up
+with shouts of "Goot mornin'! How you do?" and merry laughter. They are
+all pupils from the mission schools which have been established since
+the great Massacre of 1860, and which are helping, I hope, to make
+another forever impossible.
+
+One of our objects in coming to Hâsbeiyâ was to ascend Mount Hermon. We
+send for the Druse guide and the Christian guide; both of them assure us
+that the adventure is impossible on account of the deep snow, which has
+increased during the last fortnight. We can not get within a mile of the
+summit. The snow will be waist-deep in the hollows. The mountain is
+inaccessible until June. So, after exchanging visits with the
+missionaries and seeing something of their good work, we ride on our way
+the next morning.
+
+
+II
+
+RÂSHEIYÂ AND ITS AMERICANISM
+
+The journey to Râsheiyâ is like that of the preceding day, except that
+the bridle-paths are rougher and more precipitous, and the views wider
+and more splendid. We have crossed the Hâsbânî again, and leaving the
+Druses' valley, the Wâdi et-Teim, behind us, have climbed the high
+table-land to the west. We did not know why George Cavalcanty led us
+away from the path marked in our Baedeker, but we took it for granted
+that he had some good reason. It is well not to ask a wise dragoman all
+the questions that you can think of. Tell him where you want to go, and
+let him show you how to get there. Certainly we are not inclined to
+complain of the longer and steeper route by which he has brought us,
+when we sit down at lunch-time among the limestone crags and pinnacles
+of the wild upland and look abroad upon a landscape which offers the
+grandeur of immense outlines and vast distances, the beauty of a crystal
+clearness in all its infinitely varied forms, and the enchantment of
+gemlike colours, delicate, translucent, vivid, shifting and playing in
+hues of rose and violet and azure and purple and golden brown and bright
+green, as if the bosom of Mother Earth were the breast of a dove,
+breathing softly in the sunlight.
+
+As we climb toward Râsheiyâ we find ourselves going back a month or more
+into early spring. Here are the flowers that we saw in the Plain of
+Sharon on the first of April, gorgeous red anemones, fragrant purple and
+white cyclamens, delicate blue irises. The fig-tree is putting forth her
+tender leaf. The vines, lying flat on the ground, are bare and dormant.
+The springing grain, a few inches long, is in its first flush of almost
+dazzling green.
+
+The town, built in terraces on three sides of a rocky hill, 4,100 feet
+above the sea, commands an extensive view. Hermon is in full sight;
+snow-capped Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon face each other for forty miles;
+and the little lake of Kafr Kûk makes a spot of blue light in the
+foreground.
+
+We are camped on the threshing-floor, a level meadow beyond and below
+the town; and there the Râsheiyan gilded youth come riding their
+blooded horses in the afternoon, running races over the smooth turf and
+showing off their horsemanship for our benefit.
+
+There is something very attractive about these Arabian horses as you see
+them in their own country. They are spirited, fearless, sure-footed, and
+yet, as a rule, so docile that they may be ridden with a halter. They
+are good for a long journey, or a swift run, or a _fantasia_. The
+prevailing colour among them is gray, but you see many bays and sorrels
+and a few splendid blacks. An Arabian stallion satisfies the romantic
+ideal of how a horse ought to look. His arched neck, small head, large
+eyes wide apart, short body, round flanks, delicate pasterns, and little
+feet; the way he tosses his mane and cocks his flowing tail when he is
+on parade; the swiftness and spring of his gallop, the dainty grace of
+his walk--when you see these things you recognise at once the real,
+original horse which the painters used to depict in their "Portraits of
+General X on his Favourite Charger."
+
+I asked Calvalcanty what one of these fine creatures would cost. "A good
+horse, two or three hundred dollars; an extra-good one, four hundred; a
+fancy one, who knows?"
+
+We find Râsheiyâ full of Americanism. We walk out to take photographs,
+and at almost every street corner some young man who has been in the
+United States or Canada salutes us with: "How are you to-day? You
+fellows come from America? What's the news there? Is Bryan elected yet?
+I voted for McKinley. I got a store in Kankakee. I got one in Jackson,
+Miss." A beautiful dark-eyed girl, in a dreadful department-store dress,
+smiles at us from an open door and says: "Take my picture? I been at
+America."
+
+One talkative and friendly fellow joins us in our walk; in fact he takes
+possession of us, guiding us up the crooked alleys and out on the
+housetops which command the best views, and showing us off to his
+friends,--an old gentleman who is spinning goats' hair for the coarse
+black tents (St. Paul's trade), and two ladies who are grinding corn in
+a hand-mill, one pushing and the other pulling. Our self-elected guide
+has spent seven years in Illinois and Indiana, peddling and
+store-keeping. He has returned to Râsheiyâ as a successful adventurer
+and built a stone house with a red roof and an arched portico. Is he
+going to settle down there for life? "I not know," says he. "Guess I
+want sell my house now. This country beautiful; I like look at her. But
+America free--good government--good place to live. Gee whiz! I go back
+quick, you bet."
+
+
+III
+
+ANTI-LEBANON AND THE RIVER ABANA
+
+Our path the next day leads up to the east over the ridges of the slight
+depression which lies between Mount Hermon and the rest of the
+Anti-Lebanon range. We pass the disconsolate village and lake of Kafr
+Kûk. The water which shone so blue in the distance now confesses itself
+a turbid, stagnant pool, locked in among the hills, and breeding fevers
+for those who live beside it. The landscape grows wild and sullen as we
+ascend; the hills are strewn with shattered fragments of rock, or worn
+into battered and fantastic crags; the bottoms of the ravines are
+soaked and barren as if the winter floods had just left them. Presently
+we are riding among great snowdrifts. It is the first day of May. We
+walk on the snow, and pack a basketful on one of the mules, and pelt
+each other with snowballs.
+
+We have gone back another month in the calendar and are now at the place
+where "winter lingers in the lap of spring." Snowdrops, crocuses, and
+little purple grape-hyacinths are blooming at the edge of the drifts.
+The thorny shrubs and bushes, and spiny herbs like astragalus and
+cousinia, are green-stemmed but leafless, and the birds that flutter
+among them are still in the first rapture of vernal bliss, the gay music
+that follows mating and precedes nesting. Big dove-coloured partridges,
+beautifully marked with black and red, are running among the rocks. We
+are at the turn of the year, the surprising season when the tide of
+light and life and love swiftly begins to rise.
+
+From this Alpine region we descend through two months in half a day. It
+is mid-March on a beautiful green plain where herds of horses were
+feeding around an encampment of black Bedouin tents; the beginning of
+April at Khân Meithelûn, on the post-road, where there are springs, and
+poplar-groves, in one of which we eat our lunch, with lemonade cooled by
+the snows of Hermon; the end of April at Dimas, where we find our tents
+pitched upon the threshing-floor, a levelled terrace of clay looking
+down upon the flat roofs of the village.
+
+Our camp is 3,600 feet above sea-level, and our morning path follows the
+telegraph-poles steeply down to the post-road, and so by a more gradual
+descent along the hard and dusty turnpike toward Damascus. The
+landscape, at first, is bare and arid: rounded reddish mountains, gray
+hillsides, yellowish plains faintly tinged with a thin green. But at
+El-Hâmi the road drops into the valley of the Baradâ, the far-famed
+River Abana, and we find ourselves in a verdant paradise.
+
+Tall trees arch above the road; white balconies gleam through the
+foliage; the murmur and the laughter of flowing streams surround us. The
+railroad and the carriage-road meet and cross each other down the vale.
+Country houses and cafés, some dingy and dilapidated, others new and
+trim, are half hidden among the groves or perched close beside the
+highway. Poplars and willows, plane-trees and lindens, walnuts and
+mulberries, apricots and almonds, twisted fig-trees and climbing roses,
+grow joyfully wherever the parcelled water flows in its many channels.
+Above this line, on the sides of the vale, everything is bare and brown
+and dry. But the depth of the valley is an embroidered sash of bloom
+laid across the sackcloth of the desert. And in the centre of this long
+verdure runs the parent river, a flood of clear green; rushing, leaping,
+curling into white foam; filling its channel of thirty or forty feet
+from bank to bank, and making the silver-leafed willows and poplars,
+that stand with their feet in the stream, tremble with the swiftness of
+its cool, strong current. Truly Naaman the Syrian was right in his
+boasting to the prophet Elisha: Abana, the river of Damascus, is better
+than all the waters of Israel.
+
+The vale narrows as we descend along the stream, until suddenly we pass
+through a gateway of steep cliffs and emerge upon an open plain beset
+with mountains on three sides. The river, parting into seven branches,
+goes out to water a hundred and fifty square miles of groves and
+gardens, and we follow the road through the labyrinth of rich and
+luscious green. There are orchards of apricots enclosed with high mud
+walls; and open gates through which we catch glimpses of crimson
+rose-trees and scarlet pomegranates and little fields of wheat glowing
+with blood-red poppies; and hedges of white hawthorn and wild brier; and
+trees, trees, trees, everywhere embowering us and shutting us in.
+
+Presently we see, above the leafy tops, a sharp-pointed minaret with a
+golden crescent above it. Then we find ourselves again beside the main
+current of the Baradâ, running swift and merry in a walled channel
+straight across an open common, where soldiers are exercising their
+horses, and donkeys and geese are feeding, and children are playing, and
+dyers are sprinkling their long strips of blue cotton cloth laid out
+upon the turf beside the river. The road begins to look like the
+commencement of a street; domes and minarets rise before us; there are
+glimpses of gray walls and towers, a few shops and open-air cafés, a
+couple of hotel signs. The river dives under a bridge and disappears by
+a hundred channels beneath the city, leaving us at the western entrance
+of Damascus.
+
+
+IV
+
+THE CITY THAT A LITTLE RIVER MADE
+
+I cannot tell whether the river, the gardens, and the city would have
+seemed so magical and entrancing if we had come upon them in some other
+way or seen them in a different setting. You can never detach an
+experience from its matrix and weigh it alone. Comparisons with the
+environs of Naples or Florence visited in an automobile, or with the
+suburbs of Boston seen from a trolley-car, are futile and
+unilluminating.
+
+The point about the Baradâ is that it springs full-born from the barren
+sides of the Anti-Lebanon, swiftly creates a paradise as it runs, and
+then disappears absolutely in a wide marsh on the edge of the desert.
+
+The point about Damascus is that she flourishes on a secluded plain,
+the Ghûtah, seventy miles from the sea and twenty-three hundred feet
+above it, with no _hinterland_ and no sustaining provinces, no political
+leadership, and no special religious sanctity, with nothing, in fact, to
+account for her distinction, her splendour, her populous vitality, her
+self-sufficing charm, except her mysterious and enduring quality as a
+mere city, a hive of men. She is the oldest living city in the world; no
+one knows her birthday or her founder's name. She has survived the
+empires and kingdoms which conquered her,--Nineveh, Babylon, Samaria,
+Greece, Egypt--their capitals are dust, but Damascus still blooms "like
+a tree planted by the rivers of water." She has given her name to the
+reddest of roses, the sweetest of plums, the richest of metalwork, and
+the most lustrous of silks; her streets have bubbled and eddied with the
+currents of
+
+            the multitudinous folk
+  That do inhabit her and make her great.
+
+She is the typical city, pure and simple, of the Orient, as New York or
+San Francisco is of the Occident: the open port on the edge of the
+desert, the trading-booth at the foot of the mountains, the pavilion in
+the heart of the blossoming bower,--the wonderful child of a little
+river and an immemorial Spirit of Place.
+
+Every time we go into the city, (whether from our tents on the terrace
+above an ancient and dilapidated pleasure-garden, or from our red-tiled
+rooms in the good Hôtel d'Orient, to which we had been driven by a
+plague of sand-flies in the camp), we step at once into a chapter of the
+"Arabian Nights' Entertainments."
+
+It is true, there are electric lights and there is a trolley-car
+crawling around the city; but they no more make it Western and modern
+than a bead necklace would change the character of the Venus of Milo.
+The driver of the trolley-car looks like one of "The Three Calenders,"
+and a gayly dressed little boy beside him blows loudly on an instrument
+of discord as the machine tranquilly advances through the crowd. (A man
+was run over a few months ago; his friends waited for the car to come
+around the next day, pulled the driver from his perch, and stuck a
+number of long knives through him in a truly Oriental manner.)
+
+The crowd itself is of the most indescribable and engaging variety and
+vivacity. The Turkish soldiers in dark uniform and red fez; the
+cheerful, grinning water-carriers with their dripping, bulbous goatskins
+on their backs; the white-turbaned Druses with their bold, clean-cut
+faces; the bronzed, impassive sons of the desert, with their flowing
+mantles and bright head-cloths held on by thick, dark rolls of camel's
+hair; the rich merchants in their silken robes of many colours; the
+picturesquely ragged beggars; the Moslem pilgrims washing their heads
+and feet, with much splashing, at the pools in the marble courtyards of
+the mosques; the merry children, running on errands or playing with the
+water that gushes from many a spout at the corner of a street or on the
+wall of a house; the veiled Mohammedan women slipping silently through
+the throng, or bending over the trinkets or fabrics in some open-fronted
+shop, lifting the veil for a moment to show an olive-tinted cheek and a
+pair of long, liquid brown eyes; the bearded Greek priests in their
+black robes and cylinder hats; the Christian women wrapped in their long
+white sheets, but with their pretty faces uncovered, and a red rose or a
+white jasmine stuck among their smooth, shining black tresses; the
+seller of lemonade with his gaily decorated glass vessel on his back and
+his clinking brass cups in his hand, shouting, "_A remedy for the
+heat_,"--"_Cheer up your hearts_,"--"_Take care of your teeth_;" the boy
+peddling bread, with an immense tray of thin, flat loaves on his head,
+crying continually to Allah to send him customers; the seller of
+turnip-pickle with a huge pink globe upon his shoulder looking like the
+inside of a pale watermelon; the donkeys pattering along between fat
+burdens of grass or charcoal; a much-bedizened horseman with embroidered
+saddle-cloth and glittering bridle, riding silent and haughty through
+the crowd as if it did not exist; a victoria dashing along the street at
+a trot, with whip cracking like a pack of firecrackers, and shouts of,
+"_O boy! Look out for your back! your foot! your side!_"--all these
+figures are mingled in a passing show of which we never grow weary.
+
+The long bazaars, covered with a round, wooden archway rising from the
+second story of the houses, are filled with a rich brown hue like a
+well-coloured meerschaum pipe; and through this mellow, brumous
+atmosphere beams of golden sunlight slant vividly from holes in the
+roof. An immense number of shops, small and great, shelter themselves in
+these bazaars, for the most part opening, without any reserve of a front
+wall or a door, in frank invitation to the street. On the earthen
+pavement, beaten hard as cement, camels are kneeling, while the
+merchants let down their corded bales and display their Persian carpets
+or striped silks. The cook-shops show their wares and their processes,
+and send up an appetising smell of lamb _kibâbs_ and fried fish and
+stuffed cucumbers and stewed beans and okra, and many other dainties
+preparing on diminutive charcoal grills.
+
+In the larger and richer shops, arranged in semi-European fashion, there
+are splendid rugs, and embroideries old and new, and delicately
+chiselled brasswork, and furniture of strange patterns lavishly inlaid
+with mother-of-pearl; and there I go with the Lady to study the art of
+bargaining as practised between the trained skill of the Levant and the
+native genius of Walla Walla, Washington. In the smaller and poorer
+bazaars the high, arched roofs give place to tattered awnings, and
+sometimes to branches of trees; the brown air changes to an atmosphere
+of brilliant stripes and patches; the tiny shops, (hardly more than open
+booths), are packed and festooned with all kinds of goods, garments and
+ornaments: the chafferers conduct their negotiations from the street,
+(sidewalk there is none), or squat beside the proprietor on the little
+platform of his stall.
+
+[Illustration: A Small Bazaar in Damascus.]
+
+The custom of massing the various trades and manufactures adds to the
+picturesque joy of shopping or dawdling in Damascus. It is like passing
+through rows of different kinds of strange fruits. There is a region of
+dangling slippers, red and yellow, like cherries; a little farther on we
+come to a long trellis of clothes, limp and pendulous, like bunches of
+grapes; then we pass through a patch of saddles, plain and coloured,
+decorated with all sorts of beads and tinsel, velvet and morocco, lying
+on the ground or hung on wooden supports, like big, fantastic melons.
+
+In the coppersmiths' bazaar there is an incessant clattering of little
+hammers upon hollow metal. The goldsmiths sit silent in their pens
+within a vast, dim building, or bend over their miniature furnaces
+making gold and silver filigree. Here are the carpenters using their
+bare feet in their work almost as deftly as their fingers; and yonder
+the dyers festooning their long strips of blue cotton from their windows
+and balconies. Down there, on the way to the Great Mosque, the
+booksellers hold together: a dwindling tribe, apparently, for of the
+thirty or forty shops which were formerly theirs not more than half a
+dozen remain true to literature: the rest are full of red and yellow
+slippers. Damascus is more inclined to loafing or to dancing than to
+reading. It seems to belong to the gay, smiling, easy-going East of
+Scheherazade and Aladdin, not to the sombre and reserved Orient of
+fierce mystics and fanatical fatalists.
+
+Yet we feel, or imagine that we feel, the hidden presence of passions
+and possibilities that belong to the tragic side of life underneath
+this laughing mask of comedy. No longer ago than 1860, in the great
+Massacre, five thousand Christians perished by fire and shot and dagger
+in two days; the streets ran with blood; the churches were piled with
+corpses; hundreds of Christian women were dragged away to Moslem harems;
+only the brave Abd-el-Kader, with his body-guard of dauntless Algerine
+veterans, was able to stay the butchery by flinging himself between the
+blood-drunken mob and their helpless victims.
+
+This was the last wholesale assassination of modern times that a great
+city has seen, and prosperous, pleasure-loving, insouciant Damascus
+seems to have quite forgotten it. Yet there are still enough wild
+Kurdish shepherds, and fierce Bedouins of the desert, and riffraff of
+camel-drivers and herdsmen and sturdy beggars and homeless men, among
+her three hundred thousand people to make dangerous material if the
+tiger-madness should break loose again. A gay city is not always a safe
+city. The Lady and I saw a man stabbed to death at noon, not fifty feet
+away from us, in a street beside the Ottoman Bank.
+
+Nothing is safe until justice and benevolence and tolerance and mutual
+respect are diffused in the hearts of men. How far this inward change
+has gone in Damascus no one can tell. But that some advance has been
+made, by real reforms in the Turkish government, by the spread of
+intelligence and the enlightenment of self-interest, by the sense of
+next-doorness to Paris and Berlin and London, which telegraphs,
+railways, and steamships have produced, above all by the useful work of
+missionary hospitals and schools, and by the humanizing process which
+has been going on inside of all the creeds, no careful observer can
+doubt. I fear that men will still continue to kill each other, for
+various causes, privately and publicly. But thank God it is not likely
+to be done often, if ever again, in the name of Religion!
+
+The medley of things seen and half understood has left patterns
+damascened upon my memory with intricate clearness: immense droves of
+camels coming up from the wilderness to be sold in the market; factories
+of inlaid woodwork and wrought brasswork in which hundreds of young
+children, with beautiful and seeming-merry faces, are hammering and
+filing and cutting out the designs traced by the draughtsmen who sit at
+their desks like schoolmasters; vast mosques with rows of marble
+columns, and floors covered with bright-coloured rugs, and files of men,
+sometimes two hundred in a line, with a leader in front of them, making
+their concerted genuflections toward Mecca; costly interiors of private
+houses which outwardly show bare white-washed walls, but within welcome
+the stranger to hospitality of fruits, coffee, and sweetmeats, in
+stately rooms ornamented with rich tiles and precious marbles, looking
+upon arcaded courtyards fragrant with blossoming orange-trees and
+musical with tinkling fountains; tombs of Moslem warriors and
+saints,--Saladin, the Sultan Beibars, the Sheikh Arslân, the philosopher
+Ibn-el-Arabi, great fighters now quiet, and restless thinkers finally
+satisfied; public gardens full of rose-bushes, traversed by clear, swift
+streams, where groups of women sit gossiping in the shade of the trees
+or in little kiosques, the Mohammedans with their light veils not
+altogether hiding their olive faces and languid eyes, the Christians
+and Jewesses with bare heads, heavy necklaces of amber, flowers behind
+their ears, silken dresses of soft and varied shades; cafés by the
+river, where grave and important Turks pose for hours on red velvet
+divans, smoking the successive cigarette or the continuous nargileh. Out
+of these memory-pictures of Damascus I choose three.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Lady and I are climbing up from the great Mosque of the Ommayyades
+into the Minaret of the Bride, at the hour of 'Asr, or afternoon prayer.
+As we tread the worn spiral steps in the darkness we hear, far above,
+the chant of the choir of muezzins, high-pitched, long-drawn, infinitely
+melancholy, calling the faithful to their devotions.
+
+"_Allah akbar! Allah akbar! Allah is great! I testify there is no God
+but Allah, and Mohammed is the prophet of Allah! Come to prayer!_"
+
+The plaintive notes float away over the city toward all four quarters of
+the sky, and quaver into silence. We come out from the gloom of the
+staircase into the dazzling light of the balcony which runs around the
+top of the minaret. For a few moments we can see little; but when the
+first bewilderment passes, we are conscious that all the charm and
+wonder of Damascus are spread at our feet.
+
+The oval mass of the city lies like a carving of old ivory, faintly
+tinged with pink, on a huge table of malachite. The setting of groves
+and gardens, luxuriant, interminable, deeply and beautifully green,
+covers a circuit of sixty miles. Beyond it, in sharpest contrast, rise
+the bare, fawn-coloured mountains, savage, intractable, desolate; away
+to the west, the snow-crowned bulk of Hermon; away to the east, the
+low-rolling hills and slumbrous haze of the desert. Under these flat
+roofs and white domes and long black archways of bazaars three hundred
+thousand folk are swarming. And there, half emerging from the huddle of
+decrepit modern buildings and partly hidden by the rounded shed of a
+bazaar, is the ruined top of a Roman arch of triumph, battered, proud,
+and indomitable.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+An hour later we are scrambling up a long, shaky ladder to the flat
+roofs of the joiners' bazaar, built close against the southern wall of
+the Mosque. We walk across the roofs and find the ancient south door of
+the Mosque, now filled up with masonry, and almost completely concealed
+by the shops above which we are standing. Only the entablature is
+visible, richly carved with garlands. Kneeling down, we read upon the
+lintel the Greek inscription in uncial letters, cut when the Mosque was
+a Christian church. The Moslems who are bowing and kneeling and
+stretching out their hands toward Mecca among the marble pillars below,
+know nothing of this inscription. Few even of the Christian visitors to
+Damascus have ever seen it with their own eyes, for it is difficult to
+find and read. But there it still endures and waits, the bravest
+inscription in the world: "_Thy kingdom, O Christ, is a kingdom of all
+ages, and Thy dominion lasts throughout all generations._"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+From this eloquent and forgotten stone my memory turns to the Hospital
+of the Edinburgh Medical Mission. I see the lovely garden full of roses,
+columbines, lilies, pansies, sweet-peas, strawberries just in bloom. I
+see the poor people coming in a steady stream to the neat, orderly
+dispensary; the sweet, clean wards with their spotless beds; the
+merciful candour and completeness of the operating-room; the patient,
+cheerful, vigorous, healing ways of the great Scotch doctor, who limps
+around on his broken leg to minister to the needs of other folk. I see
+the little group of nurses and physicians gathered on Sunday evening in
+the doctor's parlour for an hour of serious, friendly talk, hopeful and
+happy. And there, amid the murmur of Abana's rills, and close to the
+confused and glittering mystery of the Orient, I hear the music of a
+simple hymn:
+
+   "Dear Lord and Father of mankind,
+     Forgive our foolish ways!
+   Reclothe us in our rightful mind,
+   In purer lives thy service find,
+     In deeper reverence, praise.
+
+   "O Sabbath rest by Galilee!
+     O calm of hills above,
+   Where Jesus knelt to share with Thee
+   The silence of eternity
+     Interpreted by love!
+
+   "Drop thy still dews of quietness,
+     Till all our strivings cease;
+   Take from our souls the strain and stress,
+   And let our ordered lives confess
+     The beauty of Thy peace."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+Corrections made to printed original.
+
+p. 6, 'Eygpt' corrected to 'Egypt'.
+
+p. 167, 'is is camelet' corrected to 'is it camelet'.
+
+p. 182, 'acqueducts' corrected to 'aqueducts'.
+
+p. 190, added a period after 'generations to build'.
+
+p. 277, added a period after 'immemorial charm about the place'.
+
+Where accented and non-accented versions of the same place-names
+exist the non-accented were converted to accented:
+
+Bakhshîsh ...... Bakhshish
+Bâniyâs ........ Baniyas
+Haifâ .......... Haifa
+Lîtânî ......... Litani and Litâni
+Serâi .......... Serai
+Nablûs ......... Nablus
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OUT-OF-DOORS IN THE HOLY LAND***
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+<h1>The Project Gutenberg eBook, Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land, by Henry Van
+Dyke</h1>
+<pre>
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at <a href = "http://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a></pre>
+<p>Title: Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land</p>
+<p>       Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit</p>
+<p>Author: Henry Van Dyke</p>
+<p>Release Date: July 4, 2009  [eBook #29314]</p>
+<p>Language: English</p>
+<p>Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1</p>
+<p>***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OUT-OF-DOORS IN THE HOLY LAND***</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>E-text prepared by Juliet Sutherland, Marius Borror,<br />
+    and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team<br />
+    (http://www.pgdp.net)</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<table summary="ads" style="background-color: #ccccff; " cellpadding="10" border="0">
+  <tbody>
+  <tr>
+    <td style="vertical-align: top; width: 25%">Transcriber's note: </td>
+    <td>A few typographical errors have been corrected, mainly of inconsistent place-names.
+        They appear in the text <span class="correction" title="explanation will pop up">like
+        this</span>, and the explanation will appear when the mouse pointer is
+        moved over the marked passage.
+  </td></tr></tbody></table>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr class="full" />
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h4>OUT-OF-DOORS<br />
+<br />
+IN THE<br /><br />
+HOLY LAND</h4>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 407px; ">
+<img src="images/cover.jpg" width="407" height="500" alt="Front Cover." title="Front Cover." />
+<span class="caption">Front Cover.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p><br /><br /></p>
+<div class="centered" style="font-size: 84%; ">
+<table border="1" cellpadding="4" width="85%" cellspacing="2" summary="Contents">
+
+<tr><td colspan="2" align="center"><b><span style="font-size: 120%; ">BOOKS BY HENRY VAN DYKE</span></b><br /><br />
+<span class="smcap">Published by</span> CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>The Ruling Passion.</b> Illustrated in color.</td><td align='right'>$1.50</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>The Blue Flower.</b> Illustrated in color. </td><td align='right'>$1.50</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>Outdoors in the Holy Land.</b> Illustrated in color</td><td align='right'><i>net</i> $1.50</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>Days Off.</b> Illustrated in color.</td><td align='right'>$1.50</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>Little Rivers.</b> Illustrated in color.</td><td align='right'>$1.50</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>Fisherman's Luck.</b> Illustrated in color.</td><td align='right'>$1.50</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>The Builders, and Other Poems.</b></td><td align='right'>$1.50</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>Music, and Other Poems.</b></td><td align='right'><i>net</i> $1.50</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><b>The Toiling of Felix, and Other Poems.</b></td><td align='right'>$1.50</td></tr>
+</table>
+</div>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 334px; ">
+<img src="images/frontis.jpg" width="334" height="500" alt="The Gate of David, Jerusalem." title="The Gate of David, Jerusalem." />
+<span class="caption">The Gate of David, Jerusalem.</span>
+</div>
+
+<h1>OUT-OF-DOORS<br /><br /></h1>
+<h5>IN<br /><br /></h5>
+<h1>THE HOLY LAND<br /><br /></h1>
+<h5>IMPRESSIONS OF TRAVEL<br />
+IN BODY AND SPIRIT<br /><br /></h5>
+<h5>BY<br /></h5>
+<h4>HENRY VAN DYKE<br /></h4>
+<h5>ILLUSTRATED<br /><br /></h5>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h4>NEW YORK<br /></h4>
+<h5>CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS<br />
+MDCCCCVIII</h5>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p class="center"><i>Copyright, 1908, by Charles Scribner's Sons<br /><br />
+Published November, 1908</i><br /></p>
+
+<p class="center">To<br /><br />
+HOWARD CROSBY BUTLER<br /><br />
+MASTER OF MERWICK<br /><br />
+PROFESSOR OF ART AND ARCHÆOLOGY<br /><br />
+WHO WAS A FRIEND TO THIS JOURNEY<br /><br />
+THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED<br /><br />
+BY HIS FRIEND<br /><br />
+THE AUTHOR</p>
+
+<hr />
+<p><!-- Page ix --><span class="pagenum"><a name="pageix"></a>[page ix]</span></p>
+
+<h3>PREFACE</h3>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">For</span> a long time, in the hopefulness and confidence of youth, I dreamed
+of going to Palestine. But that dream was denied, for want of money and
+leisure.</p>
+
+<p>Then, for a long time, in the hardening strain of early manhood, I was
+afraid to go to Palestine, lest the journey should prove a
+disenchantment, and some of my religious beliefs be rudely shaken,
+perhaps destroyed. But that fear was removed by a little voyage to the
+gates of death, where it was made clear to me that no belief is worth
+keeping unless it can bear the touch of reality.</p>
+
+<p>In that year of pain and sorrow, through a full surrender to the Divine
+Will, the hopefulness and confidence of youth came back to me. Since
+then it has been possible once more to wake in the morning with the
+feeling that the day might bring something new and wonderful and
+welcome, and to travel into the future with a whole and happy heart.</p>
+
+<p>This is what I call growing younger; though the <!-- Page x --><span class="pagenum"><a name="pagex"></a>[page x]</span> years increase,
+yet the burden of them is lessened, and the fear that life will some day
+lead into an empty prison-house has been cast out by the incoming of the
+Perfect Love.</p>
+
+<p>So it came to pass that when a friend offered me, at last, the
+opportunity of going to Palestine if I would give him my impressions of
+travel for his magazine, I was glad to go. Partly because there was a
+piece of work,&mdash;a drama whose scene lies in Damascus and among the
+mountains of Samaria,&mdash;that I wanted to finish there; partly
+because of the expectancy that on such a journey any of the days might
+indeed bring something new and wonderful and welcome; but most of all
+because I greatly desired to live for a little while in the country of
+Jesus, hoping to learn more of the meaning of His life in the land
+where it was spent, and lost, and forever saved.</p>
+
+<p>Here, then, you have the history of this little book, reader: and if it
+pleases you to look further into its pages, you can see for yourself how
+far my dreams and hopes were realised.</p>
+
+<p>It is the record of a long journey in the spirit and <!-- Page xi --><span class="pagenum"><a name="pagexi"></a>[page xi]</span> a short
+voyage in the body. If you find here impressions that are lighter,
+mingled with those that are deeper, that is because life itself is
+really woven of such contrasted threads. Even on a pilgrimage small
+adventures happen. Of the elders of Israel on Sinai it is written, "They
+saw God and did eat and drink"; and the Apostle Paul was not too much
+engrossed with his mission to send for the cloak and books and
+parchments that he left behind at Troas.</p>
+
+<p>If what you read here makes you wish to go to the Holy Land, I shall be
+glad; and if you go in the right way, you surely will not be
+disappointed.</p>
+
+<p>But there are two things in the book which I would not have you miss.</p>
+
+<p>The first is the new conviction,&mdash;new at least to me,&mdash;that
+Christianity is an out-of-doors religion. From the birth in the grotto
+at Bethlehem (where Joseph and Mary took refuge because there was no
+room for them in the inn) to the crowning death on the hill of Calvary
+outside the city wall, all of its important events took place
+out-of-doors. Except the discourse in the upper chamber at Jerusalem,
+<!-- Page xii --><span class="pagenum"><a name="pagexii"></a>[page xii]</span> all of its great words, from the sermon on the mount to the
+last commission to the disciples, were spoken in the open air. How shall
+we understand it unless we carry it under the free sky and interpret it
+in the companionship of nature?</p>
+
+<p>The second thing that I would have you find here is the deepened sense
+that Jesus Himself is the great, the imperishable miracle. His words are
+spirit and life. His character is the revelation of the Perfect Love.
+This was the something new and wonderful and welcome that came to me in
+Palestine: a simpler, clearer, surer view of the human life of God.</p>
+
+<p style="text-align: right;">HENRY VAN DYKE.</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Avalon,<br />
+June 10, 1908.</span></p>
+
+<hr />
+<h3>CONTENTS</h3>
+
+<div class="centered">
+<table border="0" cellpadding="6" width="75%" cellspacing="2" summary="Contents">
+
+<tr><td align='right'>I.</td><td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><i>Travellers' Joy</i></span></td><td align='right'><a href='#page1'>1</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>II.</td><td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><i>Going up to Jerusalem</i></span></td><td align='right'><a href='#page23'>23</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>III.</td><td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><i>The Gates of Zion</i></span></td><td align='right'><a href='#page45'>45</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>IV.</td><td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><i>Mizpah and the Mount of Olives</i></span></td><td align='right'><a href='#page67'>67</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>V.</td><td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><i>An Excursion to Bethlehem and Hebron</i></span></td><td align='right'><a href='#page83'>83</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>VI.</td><td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><i>The Temple and the Sepulchre</i></span></td><td align='right'><a href='#page105'>105</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>VII.</td><td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><i>Jericho and Jordan</i></span></td><td align='right'><a href='#page125'>125</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>VIII.</td><td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><i>A Journey to Jerash</i></span></td><td align='right'><a href='#page151'>151</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>IX.</td><td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><i>The Mountains of Samaria</i></span></td><td align='right'><a href='#page191'>191</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>X.</td><td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><i>Galilee and the Lake</i></span></td><td align='right'><a href='#page217'>217</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>XI.</td><td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><i>The Springs of Jordan</i></span></td><td align='right'><a href='#page259'>259</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>XII.</td><td align='left'><span style="margin-left: 2em;"><i>The Road to Damascus</i></span></td><td align='right'><a href='#page291'>291</a></td></tr>
+</table>
+</div>
+
+<hr />
+<h3>ILLUSTRATIONS</h3>
+
+<div class="centered">
+<table border="0" cellpadding="6" width="85%" cellspacing="2" summary="Contents">
+
+<tr><td align='left'><i>The Gate of David, Jerusalem</i></td><td align='right'>Frontispiece</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><i>Jaffa<br />
+<span style="font-size: 84%;">&nbsp;&nbsp;The port where King Solomon landed his cedar beams<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;from Lebanon for the building of the Temple</span></i></td>
+<td align='right'>Facing page&nbsp;<a href='#page14'>14</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><i>The Tall Tower of the Forty Martyrs at Ramleh</i></td><td align='right'><a href='#page28'>28</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><i>Street in Jerusalem</i></td><td align='right'><a href='#page60'>60</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><i>A Street in Bethlehem</i></td><td align='right'><a href='#page86'>86</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><i>The Market-place, Bethlehem</i></td><td align='right'><a href='#page90'>90</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><i>Great Monastery of St. George</i></td><td align='right'><a href='#page136'>136</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><i>Ruins of Jerash, Looking West<br />
+   <span style="font-size: 84%;">&nbsp;&nbsp;Propyl&oelig;um and Temple terrace</span></i></td>
+   <td align='right'><a href='#page184'>184</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><i>The Virgin's Fountain, Nazareth</i></td><td align='right'><a href='#page232'>232</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><i>The Approach to <span class="correction" title="originally 'Baniyas' without accents">Bâniyâs</span></i></td><td align='right'><a href='#page276'>276</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><i>Bridge Over the River <span class="correction" title="originally without accents">Lîtânî</span></i></td><td align='right'><a href='#page282'>282</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'><i>A Small Bazaar in Damascus</i></td><td align='right'><a href='#page316'>316</a></td></tr>
+</table>
+</div>
+
+<hr />
+<p><!-- Page 1 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page1"></a>[page 1]</span></p>
+
+<h2>I<br /><br />TRAVELLERS' JOY</h2>
+
+<hr />
+<p><!-- Page 2 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page2"></a>[page 2]</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p><!-- Page 3 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page3"></a>[page 3]</span></p>
+
+<h3>I<br /><br />INVITATION<br /></h3>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Who</span> would not go to Palestine? </p>
+
+<p>To look upon that little stage where the drama of</p>
+
+<p>humanity has centred in such unforgetable scenes; to trace the rugged
+paths and ancient highways along which so many heroic and pathetic
+figures have travelled; above all, to see with the eyes as well as with
+the heart</p>
+
+<p class= "poem">
+<span class="i6">"Those holy fields<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Over whose acres walked those blessed feet<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Which, nineteen hundred years ago, were nail'd<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For our advantage on the bitter cross"&mdash;</span></p>
+
+<p>for the sake of these things who would not travel far and endure many
+hardships? </p>
+
+<p>It is easy to find Palestine. It lies in the south-east corner of the
+Mediterranean coast, where the "sea in the midst of the nations," makes
+a great elbow between Asia Minor and Egypt. A tiny land, about a
+hundred and fifty miles long and <!-- Page 4 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page4"></a>[page 4]</span>
+
+sixty miles wide, stretching in a fourfold band from the foot of snowy
+Hermon and the Lebanons to the fulvous crags of Sinai: a green strip of
+fertile plain beside the sea, a blue strip of lofty and broken
+highlands, a gray-and-yellow strip of sunken river-valley, a purple
+strip of high mountains rolling away to the Arabian desert. There are a
+dozen lines of steamships to carry you thither; a score of well-equipped
+agencies to conduct you on what they call "a <i>de luxe</i> religious
+expedition to Palestine." </p>
+
+<p>But how to find the Holy Land&mdash;ah, that is another question. </p>
+
+<p>Fierce and mighty nations, hundreds of human tribes, have trampled
+through that coveted corner of the earth, contending for its possession:
+and the fury of their fighting has swept the fields as with fire.
+Temples and palaces have vanished like tents from the hillside. The
+ploughshare of havoc has been driven through the gardens of luxury.
+Cities have risen and crumbled upon the ruins of older cities. Crust
+after crust of pious legend has formed over the deep valleys; and
+tradition has set up its altars "upon every high hill and under every
+<!-- Page 5 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page5"></a>[page 5]</span>
+
+green tree." The rival claims of sacred places are fiercely disputed by
+churchmen and scholars. It is a poor prophet that has but one birthplace
+and one tomb. </p>
+
+<p>And now, to complete the confusion, the hurried, nervous, comfort-loving
+spirit of modern curiosity has broken into Palestine, with railways from
+Jaffa to Jerusalem, from Mount Carmel to the Sea of Galilee, from Beirût
+to Damascus,&mdash;with macadamized roads to Shechem and Nazareth and
+Tiberias,&mdash;with hotels at all the "principal points of
+interest,"&mdash;and with every facility for doing Palestine in ten
+days, without getting away from the market-reports, the gossip of the
+<i>table d'hôte</i>, and all that queer little complex of distracting habits
+which we call civilization. </p>
+
+<p>But the Holy Land which I desire to see can be found only by escaping
+from these things. I want to get away from them; to return into the long
+past, which is also the hidden present, and to lose myself a little
+there, to the end that I may find myself again. I want to make
+acquaintance with the soul of that land where so much that is strange
+and memorable and for ever beautiful has come to pass: to walk <!-- Page
+6 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page6"></a>[page 6]</span>
+
+quietly and humbly, without much disputation or talk, in fellowship with
+the spirit that haunts those hills and vales, under the influence of
+that deep and lucent sky. I want to feel that ineffable charm which
+breathes from its mountains, meadows and streams: that charm which made
+the children of Israel in the desert long for it as a land flowing with
+milk and honey; and the great Prince Joseph in <span class="correction" title="corrected from 'Eygpt'">Egypt</span> require an oath of
+his brethren that they would lay his bones in the quiet vale of Shechem
+where he had fed his father's sheep; and the daughters of Jacob beside
+the rivers of Babylon mingle tears with their music when they remembered
+Zion. </p>
+
+<p>There was something in that land, surely, some personal and indefinable
+spirit of place, which was known and loved by prophet and psalmist, and
+most of all by Him who spread His table on the green grass, and taught
+His disciples while they walked the narrow paths waist-deep in rustling
+wheat, and spoke His messages of love from a little boat rocking on the
+lake, and found His asylum of prayer high on the mountainside, and kept
+His parting-hour with His friends in the moon-silvered quiet of the
+<!--Page 7 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page7"></a>[page 7]</span> garden of olives. That spirit of place, that soul of the Holy
+Land, is what I fain would meet on my pilgrimage,&mdash;for the sake of
+Him who interprets it in love. And I know well where to find
+it,&mdash;out-of-doors. </p>
+
+<p>I will not sleep under a roof in Palestine, but nightly pitch my
+wandering tent beside some fountain, in some grove or garden, on some
+vacant threshing-floor, beneath the Syrian stars. I will not join myself
+to any company of labelled tourists hurrying with much discussion on
+their appointed itinerary, but take into fellowship three tried and
+trusty comrades, that we may enjoy solitude together. I will not seek to
+make any archæological discovery, nor to prove any theological theory,
+but simply to ride through the highlands of Judea, and the valley of
+Jordan, and the mountains of Gilead, and the rich plains of Samaria, and
+the grassy hills of Galilee, looking upon the faces and the ways of the
+common folk, the labours of the husbandman in the field, the vigils of
+the shepherd on the hillside, the games of the children in the
+market-place, and reaping</p>
+
+<p class= "poem">
+<span class="i05">"The harvest of a quiet eye<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That broods and sleeps on his own heart."</span></p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 8 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page8"></a>[page 8]</span></p>
+
+<p>Four things, I know, are unchanged amid all the changes that have passed
+over the troubled and bewildered land. The cities have sunken into dust:
+the trees of the forest have fallen: the nations have dissolved. But the
+mountains keep their immutable outline: the liquid stars shine with the
+same light, move on the same pathways: and between the mountains and the
+stars, two other changeless things, frail and imperishable,&mdash;the
+flowers that flood the earth in every springtide, and the human heart
+where hopes and longings and affections and desires blossom immortally.
+Chiefly of these things, and of Him who gave them a new meaning, I will
+speak to you, reader, if you care to go with me out-of-doors in the Holy
+Land.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><!-- Page 9 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page9"></a>[page 9]</span></p>
+
+<h3>II<br /><br />MOVING PICTURES<br /><br /></h3>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Of</span> the voyage, made with all the swiftness and directness of one who
+seeks the shortest distance between two points, little remains in memory
+except a few moving pictures, vivid and half-real, as in a
+kinematograph. </p>
+
+<p>First comes a long, swift ship, the <i>Deutschland</i>, quivering and rolling
+over the dull March waves of the Atlantic. Then the morning sunlight
+streams on the jagged rocks of the Lizard, where two wrecked steamships
+are hanging, and on the green headlands and gray fortresses of Plymouth.
+Then a soft, rosy sunset over the mole, the dingy houses, the tiled
+roofs, the cliffs, the misty-budded trees of Cherbourg. Then Paris at
+two in the morning: the lower quarters still stirring with
+somnambulistic life, the lines of lights twinkling placidly on the empty
+boulevards. Then a whirl through the <i>Bois</i> in a motor-car, a breakfast
+at Versailles with a merry little party of friends, a lazy walk through
+miles of picture-galleries <!-- Page 10 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page10"></a>[page 10]</span> without a guide-book or a care.
+Then the night express for Italy, a glimpse of the Alps at sunrise, snow
+all around us, the thick darkness of the Mount Cenis tunnel, the bright
+sunshine of Italian spring, terraced hillsides, clipped and pollarded
+trees, waking vineyards and gardens, Turin, Genoa, Rome, arches of
+ruined aqueducts, snow upon the Southern Apennines, the blooming fields
+of Capua, umbrella-pines and silvery poplars, and at last, from my
+balcony at the hotel, the glorious curving panorama of the bay of
+Naples, Vesuvius without a cloud, and Capri like an azure lion couchant
+on the broad shield of the sea. So ends the first series of films, ten
+days from home. </p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>After an intermission of twenty-four hours, the second series begins on
+the white ship <i>Oceana</i>, an immense yacht, ploughing through the
+tranquil, sapphire Mediterranean, with ten passengers on board, and the
+band playing three times a day just as usual. Then comes the low line of
+the African coast, the lighthouse of Alexandria, the top of Pompey's
+Pillar showing over the white, modern city. </p>
+
+<p>Half a dozen little rowboats meet us, well out at <!-- Page 11 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page11"></a>[page 11]</span> sea,
+buffeted and tossed by the waves: they are fishing: see! one of the men
+has a strike, he pulls in his trolling-line, hand over hand, very
+slowly, it seems, as the steamship rushes by. I lean over the side, run
+to the stern of the ship to watch,&mdash;hurrah, he pulls in a silvery
+fish nearly three feet long. Good luck to you, my Egyptian brother of
+the angle! </p>
+
+<p>Now a glimpse of the crowded, busy harbour of Alexandria, (recalling
+memories of fourteen years ago,) and a leisurely trans-shipment to the
+little Khedivial steamer, <i>Prince Abbas</i>, with her Scotch officers,
+Italian stewards, Maltese doctor, Turkish sailors, and freight-handlers
+who come from whatever places it has pleased Heaven they should be born
+in. The freight is variegated, and the third-class passengers are a
+motley crowd. </p>
+
+<p>A glance at the forward main-deck shows Egyptians in white cotton, and
+Turks in the red fez, and Arabs in white and brown, and coal-black
+Soudanese, and nondescript Levantines, and Russians in fur coats and
+lamb's-wool caps, and Greeks in blue embroidered jackets, and women in
+baggy trousers and black veils, and babies, and cats, and parrots. <!--
+Page 12 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page12"></a>[page 12]</span>
+
+Here is a tall, venerable grandfather, with spectacles and a long gray
+beard, dressed in a black robe with a hood and a yellow scarf; grave,
+patriarchal, imperturbable: his little granddaughter, a pretty elf of a
+child, with flower-like face and shining eyes, dances hither and yon
+among the chaos of freight and luggage; but as the chill of evening
+descends she takes shelter between his knees, under the folds of his
+long robe, and, while he feeds her with bread and sweetmeats, keeps up a
+running comment of remarks and laughter at all around her, and the
+unspeakable solemnity of old Father Abraham's face is lit up, now and
+then, with the flicker of a resistless smile. </p>
+
+<p>Here are two bronzed Arabs of the desert, in striped burnoose and white
+kaftan, stretched out for the night upon their rugs of many colours.
+Between them lies their latest purchase, a brand-new patent
+carpet-sweeper, made in Ohio, and going, who knows where among the hills
+of Bashan. </p>
+
+<p>A child dies in the night, on the voyage; in the morning, at anchor in
+the mouth of the Suez Canal, we hear the carpenter hammering together a
+little pine coffin. All day Sunday the indescribable traffic <!-- Page
+13 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page13"></a>[page 13]</span> of Port Saïd passes around us; ships of all nations
+coming and going; a big German Lloyd boat just home from India crowded
+with troops in khâki, band playing, flags flying; huge dredgers, sombre,
+oxlike-looking things, with lines of incredibly dirty men in fluttering
+rags running up the gang-planks with bags of coal on their backs;
+rowboats shuttling to and fro between the ships and the huddled,
+transient, modern town, which is made up of curiosity shops, hotels,
+business houses and dens of iniquity; a row of Egyptian sail boats, with
+high prows, low sides, long lateen yards, ranged along the entrance to
+the canal. At sunset we steam past the big statue of Ferdinand de
+Lesseps, standing far out on the break-water and pointing back with a
+dramatic gesture to his world-transforming ditch. Then we go dancing
+
+
+over the yellow waves into the full moonlight toward Palestine. </p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>In the early morning I clamber on deck into a thunderstorm: wild west
+wind, rolling billows, flying gusts of rain, low clouds hanging over the
+sand-hills of the coast: a harbourless shore, far as eye can see, a <!--
+Page 14 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page14"></a>[page 14]</span> land that makes no concession to the ocean with bay
+or inlet, but cries, "Hitherto shalt thou come, but no farther; and here
+shall thy proud waves be stayed." There are the flat-roofed houses, and
+the orange groves, and the minaret, and the lighthouse of Jaffa,
+crowning its rounded hill of rock. We are tossing at anchor a mile from
+the shore. Will the boats come out to meet us in this storm, or must we
+go on to Haifâ, fifty miles beyond? Rumour says that the police have
+refused to permit the boats to put out. But look, here they come, half a
+dozen open whale-boats, each manned by a dozen lusty, bare-legged, brown
+rowers, buffeting their way between the scattered rocks, leaping high on
+the crested waves. The chiefs of the crews scramble on board the
+steamer, identify the passengers consigned to the different
+tourist-agencies, sort out the baggage and lower it into the boats. </p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/illus01.jpg" width="500" height="324" alt="Jaffa." title="Jaffa." />
+<span class="caption">Jaffa.<br />
+The port where king Solomon landed his cedar beams from Lebanon for the building of the temple.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>My tickets, thus far, have been provided by the great Cook, and I fall
+to the charge of his head boatman, a dusky demon of energy. A slippery
+climb down the swaying ladder, a leap into the arms of two sturdy
+rowers, a stumble over the wet thwarts, and I <!-- Page 15 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page15"></a>[page 15]</span>
+
+find myself in the stern sheets of the boat. A young Dutchman follows
+with stolid suddenness. Two Italian gentlemen, weeping, refuse to
+descend more than half-way, climb back, and are carried on to Haifâ. A
+German lady with a parrot in a cage comes next, and her anxiety for the
+parrot makes her forget to be afraid. Then comes a little Polish lady,
+evidently a bride; she shuts her eyes tight and drops into the boat,
+pale, silent, resolved that she will not scream: her husband follows,
+equally pale, and she clings indifferently to his hand and to mine, her
+eyes still shut, a pretty image of white courage. The boat pushes off;
+the rowers smite the waves with their long oars and sing
+"Halli&mdash;yallah&mdash;yah hallah"; the steersman high in the stern
+shouts unintelligible (and, I fear, profane) directions; we are swept
+along on the tops of the waves, between the foaming rocks, drenched by
+spray and flying showers: at last we bump alongside the little quay, and
+climb out on the wet, gliddery stones. </p>
+
+<p>The kinematograph pictures are ended, for I am in Palestine, on the
+first of April, just fifteen days from home.</p>
+
+<hr />
+<p><!-- Page 16 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page16"></a>[page 16]</span></p>
+
+<h3>III<br /><br />RENDEZVOUS<br /><br /></h3>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Will</span> my friends be here to meet me, I wonder? This is the question which
+presses upon me more closely than anything else, I must confess, as I
+set foot for the first time upon the sacred soil of Palestine. I know
+that this is not as it should be. All the conventions of travel require
+the pilgrim to experience a strange curiosity and excitement, a profound
+emotion, "a supreme anguish," as an Italian writer describes it, "in
+approaching this land long dreamed about, long waited for, and almost
+despaired of." </p>
+
+<p>But the conventions of travel do not always correspond to the realities
+of the heart. Your first sight of a place may not be your first
+perception of it: that may come afterward, in some quiet, unexpected
+moment. Emotions do not follow a time-table; and I propose to tell no
+lies in this book. My strongest feeling as I enter Jaffa is the desire
+to know whether my chosen comrades have come to the rendezvous at the
+appointed time, to begin our long ride together. </p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 17 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page17"></a>[page 17]</span></p>
+
+<p>It is a remote and uncertain combination, I grant you. The Patriarch, a
+tall, slender youth of seventy years, whose home is beside the Golden
+Gate of California, was wandering among the ruins of Sicily when I last
+heard from him. The Pastor and his wife, the Lady of Walla Walla, who
+live on the shores of Puget Sound, were riding camels across the
+peninsula of Sinai and steamboating up the Nile. Have the letters, the
+cablegrams that were sent to them been safely delivered? Have the
+hundreds of unknown elements upon which our combination depended been
+working secretly together for its success? Has our proposal been
+according to the supreme disposal, and have all the roads been kept
+clear by which we were hastening from three continents to meet on the
+first day of April at the <i>Hotel du Parc</i> in Jaffa? </p>
+
+<p>Yes, here are my three friends, in the quaint little garden of the
+hotel, with its purple-flowering vines of Bougainvillea, fragrant
+orange-trees, drooping palms, and long-tailed cockatoos drowsing on
+their perches. When people really know each other an unfamiliar
+meeting-place lends a singular intimacy <!-- Page 18 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page18"></a>[page 18]</span> and joy to the
+meeting. There is a surprise in it, no matter how long and carefully it
+has been planned. There are a thousand things to talk of, but at first
+nothing will come except the wonder of getting together. The sight of
+the desired faces, unchanged beneath their new coats of tan, is a happy
+assurance that personality is not a dream. The touch of warm hands is a
+sudden proof that friendship is a reality. </p>
+
+<p>Presently it begins to dawn upon us that there is something wonderful in
+the place of our conjunction, and we realise dimly,&mdash;very dimly, I
+am sure, and yet with a certain vague emotion of reverence,&mdash;where
+we are. </p>
+
+<p>"We came yesterday," says the Lady, "and in the afternoon we went to see
+the House of Simon the Tanner, where they say the Apostle Peter lodged."
+</p>
+
+<p>"Did it look like the real house?" </p>
+
+<p>"Ah," she answers smilingly, "how do I know? They say there are two of
+them. But what do I care? It is certain that we are here. And I think
+that St. Peter was here once, too, whether the house he lived in is
+standing yet, or not." </p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 19 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page19"></a>[page 19]</span></p>
+
+<p>Yes, that is reasonably certain; and this is the place where he had his
+strange vision of a religion meant for all sorts and conditions of men.
+It is certain, also, that this is the port where Solomon landed his
+beams of cedar from Lebanon for the building of the Temple, and that the
+Emperor Vespasian sacked the town, and that Richard Lionheart planted
+the banner of the crusade upon its citadel. But how far away and
+dreamlike it all seems, on this spring morning, when the wind is tossing
+the fronds of the palm-trees, and the gleams of sunshine are flying
+across the garden, and the last clouds of the broken thunderstorm are
+racing westward through the blue toward the highlands of Judea. </p>
+
+<p>Here is our new friend, the dragoman George Cavalcanty, known as
+"Telhami," the Bethlehemite, standing beside us in the shelter of the
+orange-trees: a trim, alert figure, in his belted suit of khâki and his
+riding-boots of brown leather. </p>
+
+<p>"Is everything ready for the journey, George?" </p>
+
+<p>"Everything is prepared, according to the instructions you sent from
+Avalon. The tents are pitched a little beyond Latrûn, twenty miles away.
+The horses <!-- Page 20 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page20"></a>[page 20]</span> are waiting at Ramleh. After you have had your
+mid-day breakfast, we will drive there in carriages, and get into the
+saddle, and ride to our own camp before the night falls." </p>
+
+<hr />
+<p><!-- Page 21 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page21"></a>[page 21]</span></p>
+
+<h4><i>A PSALM OF THE DISTANT ROAD</i></h4>
+
+<p class="noind"><i>Happy is the man that seeth the face of a friend in a far country: <br />
+The darkness of his heart is melted in the rising of an inward joy.</i><br /><br />
+
+<i>It is like the sound of music heard long ago and half forgotten: <br />
+It is like the coming back of birds to a wood that winter hath made bare.</i><br /><br />
+
+<i>I knew not the sweetness of the fountain till I found it flowing in the desert: <br />
+Nor the value of a friend till the meeting in a lonely land.</i><br /><br />
+
+<i>The multitude of mankind had bewildered me and oppressed me: <br />
+And I said to God, Why hast thou made the world so wide?</i><br /><br />
+
+<i>But when my friend came the wideness of the world had no more terror: <br />
+Because we were glad together among men who knew us not.</i><br /><br />
+
+<!-- Page 22 --><span class="pagenum2"><a name="page22"></a>[page 22]</span>
+
+<i>I was slowly reading a book that was written in a strange language: <br />
+And suddenly I came upon a page in mine own familiar tongue.</i><br /><br />
+
+<i>This was the heart of my friend that quietly understood me: <br />
+The open heart whose meaning was clear without a word.</i><br /><br />
+
+<i>O my God whose love followeth all thy pilgrims and strangers: <br />
+I praise thee for the comfort of comrades on a distant road.</i></p>
+
+<hr />
+<p><!-- Page 23 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page23"></a>[page 23]</span><br /></p>
+
+<h2>II<br /><br />
+GOING UP TO JERUSALEM</h2>
+<hr />
+
+<p><!-- Page 24 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page24"></a>[page 24]</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p><!-- Page 25 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page25"></a>[page 25]</span></p>
+
+<h3>I<br /><br />
+"THE EXCELLENCY OF SHARON"</h3>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">You</span> understand that what we had before us in this first stage of our
+journey was a very simple proposition. The distance from Jaffa to
+Jerusalem is fifty miles by railway and forty miles by carriage-road.
+Thousands of pilgrims and tourists travel it every year; and most of
+them now go by the train in about four hours, with advertised stoppages
+of three minutes at Lydda, eight minutes at Ramleh, ten minutes at
+Sejed, and unadvertised delays at the convenience of the engine. But we
+did not wish to get our earliest glimpse of Palestine from a car-window,
+nor to begin our travels in a mechanical way. The first taste of a
+journey often flavours it to the very end.</p>
+
+<p>The old highroad, which is now much less frequented than formerly, is
+very fair as far as Ramleh; and beyond that it is still navigable for
+vehicles, though somewhat broken and billowy. Our plan, therefore, was
+to drive the first ten miles, where the <!-- Page 26 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page26"></a>[page 26]</span> road was flat and
+uninteresting, and then ride the rest of the way. This would enable us
+to avoid the advertised rapidity and the uncertain delays of the
+railway, and bring us quietly through the hills, about the close of the
+second day, to the gates of Jerusalem.</p>
+
+<p>The two victorias rattled through the streets of Jaffa, past the low,
+flat-topped Oriental houses, the queer little open shops, the
+orange-groves in full bloom, the palm-trees waving their plumes over
+garden-walls, and rolled out upon the broad highroad across the fertile,
+gently undulating Plain of Sharon. On each side were the neat,
+well-cultivated fields and vegetable-gardens of the German colonists
+belonging to the sect of the Templers. They are a people of antique
+theology and modern agriculture. Believing that the real Christianity is
+to be found in the Old Testament rather than in the New, they propose to
+begin the social and religious reformation of the world by a return to
+the programme of the Minor Prophets. But meantime they conduct their
+farming operations in a very profitable way. Their grain-fields, their
+fruit-orchards, their vegetable-gardens are trim and <!-- Page 27 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page27"></a>[page 27]</span> orderly,
+and they make an excellent wine, which they call "The Treasure of Zion."
+Their effect upon the landscape, however, is conventional.</p>
+
+<p>But in spite of the presence and prosperity of the Templers, the spirit
+of the scene through which we passed was essentially Oriental. The
+straggling hedges of enormous cactus, the rows of plumy
+eucalyptus-trees, the budding figs and mulberries, gave it a
+semi-tropical touch and along the highway we encountered fragments of
+the leisurely, dishevelled, dignified East: grotesque camels, pensive
+donkeys carrying incredible loads, flocks of fat-tailed sheep and
+lop-eared goats, bronzed peasants in flowing garments, and white-robed
+women with veiled faces.</p>
+
+<p>Beneath the tall tower of the forty martyrs at Ramleh (Mohammedan or
+Christian, their names are forgotten) we left the carriages, loaded our
+luggage on the three pack-mules, mounted our saddle-horses, and rode on
+across the plain, one of the fruitful gardens and historic battle-fields
+of the world. Here the hosts of the Israelites and the Philistines, the
+Egyptians and the Romans, the Persians and the Arabs, the Crusaders and
+the Saracens, have marched <!-- Page 28 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page28"></a>[page 28]</span> and contended. But as we passed
+through the sun-showers and rain-showers of an April afternoon, all was
+tranquillity and beauty on every side. The rolling fields were
+embroidered with innumerable flowers. The narcissus, the "rose of
+Sharon," had faded. But the little blue "lilies-of-the-valley" were
+there, and the pink and saffron mallows, and the yellow and white
+daisies, and the violet and snow of the drooping cyclamen, and the gold
+of the genesta, and the orange-red of the pimpernel, and, most beautiful
+of all, the glowing scarlet of the numberless anemones. Wide acres of
+young wheat and barley glistened in the light, as the wind-waves rippled
+through their short, silken blades. There were few trees, except now and
+then an olive-orchard or a round-topped carob with its withered pods.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 335px;">
+<img src="images/illus02.jpg" width="335" height="500" title="The Tall Tower of the Forty Martyrs at Ramleh." alt="The Tall Tower of the Forty Martyrs at Ramleh."/>
+<span class="caption">"The Tall Tower of the Forty Martyrs at Ramleh."</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>The highlands of Judea lay stretched out along the eastern horizon, a
+line of azure and amethystine heights, changing colour and seeming
+almost to breathe and move as the cloud shadows fleeted over them, and
+reaching away northward and southward as far as eye could see. Rugged
+and treeless, save for a clump of oaks or terebinths planted here or
+<!-- Page 29 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page29"></a>[page 29]</span> there around some Mohammedan saint's tomb, they would have
+seemed forbidding but that their slopes were clothed with the tender
+herbage of spring, their outlines varied with deep valleys and blue
+gorges, and all their mighty bulwarks jewelled right royally with the
+opalescence of sunset.</p>
+
+<p>In a hollow of the green plain to the left we could see the white houses
+and the yellow church tower of Lydda, the supposed burial-place of Saint
+George of Cappadocia, who killed the dragon and became the patron saint
+of England. On a conical hill to the right shone the tents of the Scotch
+explorer who is excavating the ancient city of Gezer, which was the
+dowry of Pharaoh's daughter when she married King Solomon. City, did I
+say? At least four cities are packed one upon another in that grassy
+mound, the oldest going back to the flint age; and yet if you should
+examine their site and measure their ruins, you would feel sure that
+none of them could ever have amounted to anything more than what we
+should call a poor little town.</p>
+
+<p>It came upon us gently but irresistibly that afternoon, as we rode
+easily across the land of the Philistines <!-- Page 30 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page30"></a>[page 30]</span> in a few hours, that
+we had never really read the Old Testament as it ought to be
+read,&mdash;as a book written in an Oriental atmosphere, filled with the
+glamour, the imagery, the magniloquence of the East. Unconsciously we
+had been reading it as if it were a collection of documents produced in
+Heidelberg, Germany, or in Boston, Massachusetts: precise, literal,
+scientific.</p>
+
+<p>We had been imagining the Philistines as a mighty nation, and their land
+as a vast territory filled with splendid cities and ruled by powerful
+monarchs. We had been trying to understand and interpret the stories of
+their conflict with Israel as if they had been written by a Western
+war-correspondent, careful to verify all his statistics and meticulous
+in the exact description of all his events. This view of things melted
+from us with a gradual surprise as we realised that the more deeply we
+entered into the poetry, the closer we should come to the truth, of the
+narrative. Its moral and religious meaning is firm and steadfast as the
+mountains round about Jerusalem; but even as those mountains rose before
+us glorified, uplifted, and bejewelled <!-- Page 31 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page31"></a>[page 31]</span> by the vague splendours
+of the sunset, so the form of the history was enlarged and its colours
+irradiated by the figurative spirit of the East.</p>
+
+<p>There at our feet, bathed in the beauty of the evening air, lay the
+Valley of Aijalon, where Joshua fought with the "five kings of the
+Amorites," and broke them and chased them. The "kings" were head-men of
+scattered villages, chiefs of fierce and ragged tribes. But the fighting
+was hard, and as Joshua led his wild clansmen down upon them from the
+ascent of Beth-horon, he feared the day might be too short to win the
+victory. So he cheered the hearts of his men with an old war-song from
+the Book of Jasher.</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<span class="i0">"Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And thou, moon, in the Valley of Aijalon.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Until the nation had avenged themselves of their enemies."</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Does any one suppose that this is intended to teach us that the sun
+moves and that on this day his course was arrested? Must we believe that
+the whole solar system was dislocated for the sake of this battle? To
+understand the story thus is to misunderstand its vital spirit. It is
+poetry, imagination, heroism. By <!-- Page 32 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page32"></a>[page 32]</span> the new courage that came
+into the hearts of Israel with their leader's song, the Lord shortened
+the conflict to fit the day, and the sunset and the moonrise saw the
+Valley of Aijalon swept clean of Israel's foes.</p>
+
+<p>As we passed through the wretched, mud-built village of Latrûn (said to
+be the birthplace of the Penitent Thief), a dozen long-robed Arabs were
+earnestly discussing some question of municipal interest in the grassy
+market-place. They were as grave as the storks, in their solemn plumage
+of black and white, which were parading philosophically along the edge
+of a marsh to our right. A couple of jackals slunk furtively across the
+road ahead of us in the dusk. A <i>kafila</i> of long-necked camels undulated
+over the plain. The shadows fell more heavily over cactus-hedge and
+olive-orchard as we turned down the hill.</p>
+
+<p>In the valley night had come. The large, trembling stars were strewn
+through the vault above us, and rested on the dim ridges of the
+mountains, and shone reflected in the puddles of the long road like
+fallen jewels. The lights of Latrûn, if it had any, were already out of
+sight behind us. Our horses were weary and began to stumble. Where was
+the camp? <!-- Page 33 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page33"></a>[page 33]</span> Look, there is a light, bobbing along the road
+toward us. It is Youssouf, our faithful major-domo, come out with a
+lantern to meet us. A few rods farther through the mud, and we turn a
+corner beside an acacia hedge and the ruined arch of an ancient well.
+There, in a little field of flowers, close to the tiniest of brooks, our
+tents are waiting for us with open doors. The candles are burning on the
+table. The rugs are spread and the beds are made. The dinner-table is
+laid for four, and there is a bright</p>
+
+<p>bunch of flowers in the middle of it. We have seen the excellency of
+Sharon and the moon is shining for us on the Valley of Aijalon.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<h3>II
+<br /><br />"THE STRENGTH OF THE HILLS"</h3>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">It</span> is no hardship to rise early in camp. At the windows of a house the
+daylight often knocks as an unwelcome messenger, rousing the sleeper
+with a sudden call. But through the roof and the sides of a tent it
+enters gently and irresistibly, embracing you <!-- Page 34 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page34"></a>[page 34]</span> with soft arms,
+laying rosy touches on your eyelids; and while your dream fades you know
+that you are awake and it is already day.</p>
+
+<p>As we lift the canvas curtains and come out of our pavilions, the sun is
+just topping the eastern hills, and all the field around us glittering
+with immense drops of dew. On the top of the ruined arch beside the camp
+our Arab watchman, hired from the village of Latrûn as we passed, is
+still perched motionless, wrapped in his flowing rags, holding his long
+gun across his knees.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Salâm 'aleikum, yâ ghafîr!</i>" I say, and though my Arabic is doubtless
+astonishingly bad, he knows my meaning; for he answers gravely,
+"<i>'Aleikum essalâm!</i>&mdash;And with you be peace!"</p>
+
+<p>It is indeed a peaceful day in which our journey to Jerusalem is
+completed. Leaving the tents and impedimenta in charge of Youssouf and
+Shukari the cook, and the muleteers, we are in the saddle by seven
+o'clock, and riding into the narrow entrance of the Wâdi 'Ali. It is a
+long, steep valley leading into the heart of the hills. The sides are
+ribbed with rocks, among which the cyclamens grow in profusion. <!--
+Page 35 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page35"></a>[page 35]</span>A few olives are scattered along the bottom of the
+vale, and at the tomb of the Imâm 'Ali there is a grove of large trees.
+At the summit of the pass we rest for half an hour, to give our horses a
+breathing-space, and to refresh our eyes with the glorious view westward
+over the tumbled country of the Shephelah, the opalescent Plain of
+Sharon, the sand-hills of the coast, and the broad blue of the
+Mediterranean. Northward and southward and eastward the rocky summits
+and ridges of Judea roll away.</p>
+
+<p>Now we understand what the Psalmist means by ascribing "the strength of
+the hills" to Jehovah; and a new light comes into the song:</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+<span class="i05">"As the mountains are round about Jerusalem,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">So Jehovah is round about his people."</span></p>
+
+<p>These natural walls and terraces of gray limestone have the air of
+antique fortifications and watch-towers of the border. They are truly
+"munitions of rocks." Chariots and horsemen could find no field for
+their man&oelig;uvres in this broken and perpendicular country. Entangled
+in these deep and winding valleys by which they must climb up from the
+plain, the <!-- Page 36 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page36"></a>[page 36]</span> invaders would be at the mercy of the light
+infantry of the highlands, who would roll great stones upon them as they
+passed through the narrow defiles, and break their ranks by fierce and
+sudden downward rushes as they toiled panting up the steep hillsides. It
+was this strength of the hills that the children of Israel used for the
+defence of Jerusalem, and by this they were able to resist and defy the
+Philistines, whom they could never wholly conquer.</p>
+
+<p>Yonder on the hillside, as we ride onward, we see a reminder of that old
+tribal warfare between the people of the highlands and the people of the
+plains. That gray village, perched upon a rocky ridge above thick
+olive-orchards and a deliciously green valley, is the ancient
+Kirjath-Jearim, where the Ark of Jehovah was hidden for twenty years,
+after the Philistines had sent back this perilous trophy of their
+victory over the sons of Eli, being terrified by the pestilence and
+disaster that followed its possession. The men of Beth-shemesh, to whom
+it was first returned, were afraid to keep it, because they also had
+been smitten with death when they dared to peep into this dreadful box.
+But the men of Kirjath-Jearim <!-- Page 37 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page37"></a>[page 37]</span> were at once bolder and wiser,
+so they "came and fetched up the Ark of Jehovah, and brought it into the
+house of Abinadab in the hill, and set apart Eleazar, his son, to keep
+the Ark of Jehovah."</p>
+
+<p>What strange vigils in that little hilltop cottage where the young man
+watches over this precious, dangerous, gilded coffer, while Saul is
+winning and losing his kingdom in a turmoil of blood and sorrow and
+madness, forgetful of Israel's covenant with the Most High! At last
+comes King David, from his newly won stronghold of Zion, seeking eagerly
+for this lost symbol of the people's faith. "Lo, we heard of it at
+Ephratah; we found it in the field of the wood." So the gray stone
+cottage on the hilltop gave up its sacred treasure, and David carried it
+away with festal music and dancing. But was Eleazar glad, I wonder, or
+sorry, that his long vigil was ended?</p>
+
+<p>To part from a care is sometimes like losing a friend.</p>
+
+<p>I confess that it is difficult to make these ancient stories of peril
+and adventure, (or even the modern history of Abu Ghôsh the robber-chief
+of this village <!-- Page 38 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page38"></a>[page 38]</span> a hundred years ago), seem real to us to-day.
+Everything around us is so safe and tranquil, and, in spite of its
+novelty, so familiar. The road descends steeply with long curves and
+windings into the Wâdi Beit Hanîna. We meet and greet many travellers,
+on horseback, in carriages and afoot, natives and pilgrims, German
+colonists, French priests, Italian monks, English tourists and
+explorers. It is a pleasant game to guess from an approaching pilgrim's
+looks whether you should salute him with "<i>Guten Morgen</i>," or "<i>Buon'
+Giorno</i>," or "<i>Bon jour</i>, <i>m'sieur</i>." The country people answer your
+salutation with a pretty phrase: "<i>Nehârak saîd umubârak</i>&mdash;May your
+day be happy and blessed."</p>
+
+<p>At Kalôniyeh, in the bottom of the valley, there is a prosperous
+settlement of German Jews; and the gardens and orchards are flourishing.
+There is also a little wayside inn, a rude stone building, with a
+terrace around it; and there, with apricots and plums blossoming beside
+us, we eat our lunch <i>al fresco</i>, and watch our long pack-train, with
+the camp and baggage, come winding down the hill and go tinkling past us
+toward Jerusalem.</p> <p><!-- Page 39 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page39"></a>[page 39]</span></p> <p>The place is very friendly; we are in no
+haste to leave it. A few miles to the southward, sheltered in the lap of
+a rounding hill, we can see the tall cypress-trees and quiet gardens of
+'Ain Karîm, the village where John the Baptist was born. It has a
+singular air of attraction, seen from a distance, and one of the
+sweetest stories in the world is associated with it. For it was there
+that the young bride Mary visited her older cousin Elizabeth,&mdash;you
+remember the exquisite picture of the "Visitation" by Albertinelli in
+the Uffizi at Florence,&mdash;and the joy of coming motherhood in these
+two women's hearts spoke from each to each like a bell and its echo.
+Would the birth of Jesus, the character of Jesus, have been possible
+unless there had been the virginal and expectant soul of such a woman as
+Mary, ready to welcome His coming with her song? "My soul doth magnify
+the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour." Does not the
+advent of a higher manhood always wait for the hope and longing of a
+nobler womanhood?</p>
+
+<p>The chiming of the bells of St. John floats faintly and silverly across
+the valley as we leave the shelter <!-- Page 40 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page40"></a>[page 40]</span> of the wayside rest-house
+and mount for the last stage of our upward journey. The road ascends
+steeply. Nestled in the ravine to our left is the grizzled and
+dilapidated village of Liftâ, a town with an evil reputation.</p>
+
+<p>"These people sold all their land," says George the dragoman, "twenty
+years ago, sold all the fields, gardens, olive-groves. Now they are
+dirty and lazy in that village,&mdash;all thieves!"</p>
+
+<p>Over the crest of the hill the red-tiled roofs of the first houses of
+Jerusalem are beginning to appear. They are houses of mercy, it seems:
+one an asylum for the insane, the other a home for the aged poor.
+Passing them, we come upon schools and hospital buildings and other
+evidences of the charity of the Rothschilds toward their own people. All
+around us are villas and consulates, and rows of freshly built houses
+for Jewish colonists.</p>
+
+<p>This is not at all the way that we had imagined to ourselves the first
+sight of the Holy City. All here is half-European, unromantic, not very
+picturesque. It may not be "the New Jerusalem," but it is certainly a
+modern Jerusalem. Here, in these comfortably <!-- Page 41 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page41"></a>[page 41]</span> commonplace
+dwellings, is almost half the present population of the city; and rows
+of new houses are rising on every side.</p>
+
+<p>But look down the southward-sloping road. There is the sight that you
+have imagined and longed to see: the brown battlements, the white-washed
+houses, the flat roofs, the slender minarets, the many-coloured domes of
+the ancient city of David, and Solomon, and Hezekiah, and Herod, and
+Omar, and Godfrey, and Saladin,&mdash;but never of Christ. That great
+black dome is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The one beyond it is the
+Mosque of Omar. Those golden bulbs and pinnacles beyond the city are the
+Greek Church of Saint Mary Magdalen on the side of the Mount of Olives;
+and on the top of the lofty ridge rises the great pointed tower of the
+Russians from which a huge bell booms out a deep-toned note of welcome.</p>
+
+<p>On every side we see the hospices and convents and churches and palaces
+of the different sects of Christendom. The streets are full of people
+and carriages and beasts of burden. The dust rises around us. We are
+tired with the trab, trab, trab of <!-- Page 42 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page42"></a>[page 42]</span> our horses' feet upon the
+hard highroad. Let us not go into the confusion of the city, but ride
+quietly down to the left into a great olive-grove, outside the Damascus
+Gate.</p>
+
+<p>Here our white tents are pitched among the trees, with the dear flag of
+our home flying over them. Here we shall find leisure and peace to unite
+our hearts, and bring our thoughts into tranquil harmony, before we go
+into the bewildering city. Here the big stars will look kindly down upon
+us through the silvery leaves, and the sounds of human turmoil and
+contention will not trouble us. The distant booming of the bell on the
+Mount of Olives will mark the night-hours for us, and the long-drawn
+plaintive call of the muezzin from the minaret of the little mosque at
+the edge of the grove will wake us to the sunrise.</p>
+
+<hr />
+<p><!-- Page 43 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page43"></a>[page 43]</span></p>
+
+<h4><i>A PSALM OF THE WELCOME TENT</i></h4>
+
+<p class="noind"><i>This is the thanksgiving of the weary:<br />
+The song of him that is ready to rest.</i><br /><br />
+
+<i>It is good to be glad when the day is declining:<br />
+And the setting of the sun is like a word of peace.</i><br /><br />
+
+<i>The stars look kindly on the close of a journey:<br />
+The tent says welcome when the day's march is done.</i><br /><br />
+
+<i>For now is the time of the laying down of burdens:<br />
+And the cool hour cometh to them that have borne the heat.</i><br /><br />
+
+<i>I have rejoiced greatly in labour and adventure:<br />
+My heart hath been enlarged in the spending of my strength.</i><br /><br />
+
+<i>Now it is all gone yet I am not impoverished:<br />
+For thus only may I inherit the treasure of repose.</i><br /><br />
+
+<i>Blessed be the Lord that teacheth my hands to unclose and my fingers to loosen:<br />
+He also giveth comfort to the feet that are washed from the dust of the way.</i><br /><br />
+
+<!-- Page 44 --><span class="pagenum2"><a name="page44"></a>[page 44]</span>
+
+<i>Blessed be the Lord that maketh my meat at nightfall savoury:<br />
+And filleth my evening cup with the wine of good cheer.</i><br /><br />
+
+<i>Blessed be the Lord that maketh me happy to be quiet:<br />
+Even as a child that cometh softly to his mother's lap.</i><br /><br />
+
+<i>O God thou faintest not neither is thy strength worn away with labour:<br />
+But it is good for us to be weary that we may obtain thy gift of rest.</i><br /></p>
+
+<hr />
+<p><!-- Page 45 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page45"></a>[page 45]</span></p>
+
+<h2>III<br /><br />
+THE GATES OF ZION</h2>
+<hr />
+
+<p><!-- Page 46 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page46"></a>[page 46]</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p><!-- Page 47 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page47"></a>[page 47]</span></p>
+
+<h3>I<br /><br />
+
+A CITY THAT IS SET ON A HILL</h3>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Out</span> of the medley of our first impressions of Jerusalem one fact emerges
+like an island from the sea: it is a city that is lifted up. No river;
+no harbour; no encircling groves and gardens; a site so lonely and so
+lofty that it breathes the very spirit of isolation and proud
+self-reliance.</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+<span class="i05">"Beautiful in elevation, the joy of the whole earth<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Is Mount Zion, on the sides of the north<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The city of the great King."</span></p>
+
+<p>Thus sang the Hebrew poet; and his song, like all true poetry, has the
+accuracy of the clearest vision. For this is precisely the one beauty
+that crowns Jerusalem: the beauty of a high place and all that belongs
+to it: clear sky, refreshing air, a fine outlook, and that indefinable
+sense of exultation that comes into the heart of man when he climbs a
+little nearer to the stars.</p>
+
+<p>Twenty-five hundred feet above the level of the <!-- Page 48 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page48"></a>[page 48]</span> sea is not a
+great height; but I can think of no other ancient and world-famous city
+that stands as high. Along the mountainous plateau of Judea, between the
+sea-coast plain of Philistia and the sunken valley of the Jordan, there
+is a line of sacred sites,&mdash;Beërsheba, Hebron, Bethlehem, Bethel,
+Shiloh, Shechem. Each of them marks the place where a town grew up
+around an altar. The central link in this chain of shrine-cities is
+Jerusalem. Her form and outline, her relation to the landscape and to
+the land, are unchanged from the days of her greatest glory. The
+splendours of her Temple and her palaces, the glitter of her armies, the
+rich colour and glow of her abounding wealth, have vanished. But though
+her garments are frayed and weather-worn, though she is an impoverished
+and dusty queen, she still keeps her proud position and bearing; and as
+you approach her by the ancient road along the ridges of Judea you see
+substantially what Sennacherib, and Nebuchadnezzar, and the Roman Titus
+must have seen.</p>
+
+<p>"The sides of the north" slope gently down to the huge gray wall of the
+city, with its many towers and gates. Within those bulwarks, which are
+thirty-eight <!-- Page 49 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page49"></a>[page 49]</span> feet high and two and a half miles in
+circumference, "Jerusalem is builded as a city that is compact
+together," covering with her huddled houses and crooked, narrow streets,
+the two or three rounded hills and shallow depressions in which the
+northern plateau terminates. South and east and west, the valley of the
+Brook Kidron and the Valley of Himmon surround the city wall with a dry
+moat three or four hundred feet deep.</p>
+
+<p>Imagine the knuckles of a clenched fist, extended toward the south: that
+is the site of Jerusalem, impregnable, (at least in ancient warfare),
+from all sides except the north, where the wrist joins it to the higher
+tableland. This northern approach, open to Assyria, and Babylon, and
+Damascus, and Persia, and Greece, and Rome, has always been the weak
+point of Jerusalem. She was no unassailable fortress of natural
+strength, but a city lifted up, a lofty shrine, whose refuge and
+salvation were in Jehovah,&mdash;in the faith, the loyalty, the courage
+which flowed into the heart of her people from their religion. When
+these failed, she fell.</p>
+
+<p>Jerusalem is no longer, and never again will be, <!-- Page 50 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page50"></a>[page 50]</span> the capital
+of an earthly kingdom. But she is still one of the high places of the
+world, exalted in the imagination and the memory of Jews and Christians
+and Mohammedans, a metropolis of infinite human hopes and longings and
+devotions. Hither come the innumerable companies of foot-weary pilgrims,
+climbing the steep roads from the sea-coast, from the Jordan, from
+Bethlehem,&mdash;pilgrims who seek the place of the Crucifixion,
+pilgrims who would weep beside the walls of their vanished Temple,
+pilgrims who desire to pray where Mohammed prayed. Century after century
+these human throngs have assembled from far countries and toiled upward
+to this open, lofty plateau, where the ancient city rests upon the top
+of the closed hand, and where the ever-changing winds from the desert
+and the sea sweep and shift over the rocky hilltops, the mute, gray
+battlements, and the domes crowned with the cross, the crescent, and the
+star.</p>
+
+<p>"The wind bloweth where it will, and thou hearest the voice thereof, but
+knowest not whence it cometh, nor whither it goeth; so is every one that
+is born of the Spirit."</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 51 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page51"></a>[page 51]</span></p>
+
+<p>The mystery of the heart of mankind, the spiritual airs that breathe
+through it, the desires and aspirations that impel men in their
+journeyings, the common hopes that bind them together in companies, the
+fears and hatreds that array them in warring hosts,&mdash;there is no
+place in the world to-day where you can feel all this so deeply, so
+inevitably, so overwhelmingly, as at the Gates of Zion.</p>
+
+<p>It is a feeling of confusion, at first: a bewildering sense of something
+vast and old and secret, speaking many tongues, taking many forms, yet
+never fully revealing its source and its meaning. The Jews, Mohammedans,
+and Christians who flock to those gates are alike in their sincerity, in
+their devotion, in the spirit of sacrifice that leads them on their
+pilgrimage. Among them all there are hypocrites and bigots, doubtless,
+but there are also earnest and devout souls, seeking something that is
+higher than themselves, "a city set upon a hill." Why do they not
+understand one another? Why do they fight and curse one another? Do they
+not all come to humble themselves, to pray, to seek the light?</p>
+
+<p>Dark walls that embrace so many tear-stained, <!-- Page 52 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page52"></a>[page 52]</span> blood-stained,
+holy and dishonoured shrines! And you, narrow and gloomy gates, through
+whose portals so many myriads of mankind have passed with their swords,
+their staves, their burdens and their palm-branches! What songs of
+triumph you have heard, what yells of battle-rage, what moanings of
+despair, what murmurs of hopes and gratitude, what cries of anguish,
+what bursts of careless, happy laughter,&mdash;all borne upon the wind
+that bloweth where it will across these bare and rugged heights. We will
+not seek to enter yet into the mysteries that you hide. We will tarry
+here for a while in the open sunlight, where the cool breeze of April
+stirs the olive-groves outside the Damascus Gate. We will tranquillize
+our thoughts,&mdash;perhaps we may even find them growing clearer and
+surer,&mdash;among the simple cares and pleasures that belong to the
+life of every day; the life which must have food when it is hungry, and
+rest when it is weary, and a shelter from the storm and the night; the
+life of those who are all strangers and sojourners upon the earth, and
+whose richest houses and strongest cities are, after all, but a little
+longer-lasting tents and camps.</p>
+
+<hr />
+<p><!-- Page 53 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page53"></a>[page 53]</span></p>
+
+<h3>II<br /><br />
+THE CAMP IN THE OLIVE-GROVE</h3>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> place of our encampment is peaceful and friendly, without being
+remote or secluded. The grove is large and free from all undergrowth:
+the trunks of the ancient olive-trees are gnarled and massive, the
+foliage soft and tremulous. The corner that George has chosen for us is
+raised above the road by a kind of terrace, so that it is not too easily
+accessible to the curious passer-by. Across the road we see a gray stone
+wall, and above it the roof of the Anglican Bishop's house, and the
+schools, from which a sound of shrill young voices shouting in play or
+chanting in unison rises at intervals through the day. The ground on
+which we stand is slightly furrowed with the little ridges of last
+year's ploughing: but it has not yet been broken this spring, and it is
+covered with millions of infinitesimal flowers, blue and purple and
+yellow and white, like tiny pansies run wild.</p>
+
+<p>The four tents, each circular and about fifteen feet <!-- Page 54 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page54"></a>[page 54]</span> in
+diameter, are arranged in a crescent. The one nearest to the road is for
+the kitchen and service; there Shukari, our Maronite <i>chef</i>, in his
+white cap and apron, turns out an admirable six-course dinner on a
+portable charcoal range not three feet square. Around the door of this
+tent there is much coming and going: edibles of all kinds are brought
+for sale; visitors squat in sociable conversation; curious children hang
+about, watching the proceedings, or waiting for the favours which a good
+cook can bestow.</p>
+
+<p>The next tent is the dining-room; the huge wooden chests of the canteen,
+full of glass and china and table-linen and new Britannia-ware, which
+shines like silver, are placed one on each side of the entrance; behind
+the central tent-pole stands the dining-table, with two chairs at the
+back and one at each end, so that we can all enjoy the view through the
+open door. The tent is lofty and lined with many-coloured cotton cloth,
+arranged in elaborate patterns, scarlet and green and yellow and blue.
+When the four candles are lighted on the well-spread table, and Youssouf
+the Greek, in his embroidered jacket and baggy blue breeches, comes in
+to serve the dinner, it <!-- Page 55 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page55"></a>[page 55]</span> is quite an Oriental scene. His
+assistant, Little Youssouf, the Copt, squats outside of the tent, at one
+side of the door, to wash up the dishes and polish the Britannia-ware.</p>
+
+<p>The two other tents are of the same pattern and the same gaudy colours
+within: each of them contains two little iron bedsteads, two Turkish
+rugs, two washstands, one dressing-table, and such baggage as we had
+imagined necessary for our comfort, piled around the
+tent-pole,&mdash;this by way of precaution, lest some misguided hand
+should be tempted to slip under the canvas at night and abstract an
+unconsidered trifle lying near the edge of the tent.</p>
+
+<p>Of our own men I must say that we never had a suspicion, either of their
+honesty or of their good-humour. Not only the four who had most
+immediately to do with us, but also the two chief muleteers, Mohammed
+'Ali and Moûsa, and the songful boy, Mohammed el Nâsan, who warbled an
+interminable Arabian ditty all day long, and Fâris and the two other
+assistants, were models of fidelity and willing service. They did not
+quarrel (except once, over the division of the mule-loads, in the
+mountains of Gilead); <!-- Page 56 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page56"></a>[page 56]</span> they got us into no difficulties and
+subjected us to no blackmail from humbugging Bedouin chiefs. They are of
+a picturesque motley in costume and of a bewildering variety in
+creed&mdash;Anglican, Catholic, Coptic, Maronite, Greek, Mohammedan, and
+one of whom the others say that "he belongs to no religion, but sings
+beautiful Persian songs." Yet, so far as we are concerned, they all do
+the things they ought to do and leave undone the things they ought not
+to do, and their way with us is peace. Much of this, no doubt, is due to
+the wisdom, tact, and firmness of George the Bethlehemite, the best of
+dragomans.</p>
+
+<p>We have many visitors at the camp, but none unwelcome. The American
+Consul, a genial scholar who knows Palestine by heart and has made
+valuable contributions to the archæology of Jerusalem, comes with his
+wife to dine with us in the open air. George's gentle wife and his two
+bright little boys, Howard and Robert, are with us often. Missionaries
+come to tell us of their labours and trials. An Arab hunter, with his
+long flintlock musket, brings us beautiful gray partridges which he has
+shot among the near-by hills. The stable-master comes day <!-- Page 57 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page57"></a>[page 57]</span>
+after day with strings of horses galloping through the grove; for our
+first mounts were not to our liking, and we are determined not to start
+on our longer ride until we have found steeds that suit us. Peasants
+from the country round about bring all sorts of things to
+sell&mdash;vegetables, and lambs, and pigeons, and old coins, and
+embroidered caps.</p>
+
+<p>There are two men ploughing in a vineyard behind the camp, beyond the
+edge of the grove. The plough is a crooked stick of wood which scratches
+the surface of the earth. The vines are lying flat on the ground, still
+leafless, closely pruned: they look like big black snakes.</p>
+
+<p>Women of the city, dressed in black and blue silks, with black mantles
+over their heads, come out in the afternoon to picnic among the trees.
+They sit in little circles on the grass, smoking cigarettes and eating
+sweetmeats. If they see us looking at them they draw the corners of
+their mantles across the lower part of their faces; but when they think
+themselves unobserved they drop their veils and regard us curiously with
+lustrous brown eyes.</p>
+
+<p>One morning a procession of rustic women and <!-- Page 58 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page58"></a>[page 58]</span> girls, singing
+with shrill voices, pass the camp on their way to the city to buy the
+bride's clothes for a wedding. At nightfall they return singing yet more
+loudly, and accompanied by men and boys firing guns into the air and
+shouting.</p>
+
+<p>Another day a crowd of villagers go by. Their old Sheikh rides in the
+midst of them, with his white-and-gold turban, his long gray beard, his
+flowing robes of rich silk. He is mounted on a splendid white Arab
+horse, with arched neck and flaunting tail; and a beautiful, gaily
+dressed little boy rides behind him with both arms clasped around the
+old man's waist. They are going up to the city for the Mohammedan rite
+of circumcision.</p>
+
+<p>Later in the day a Jewish funeral comes hurrying through the grove: some
+twenty or thirty men in flat caps trimmed with fur and gabardines of
+cotton velvet, purple, or yellow, or pink, chanting psalms as they
+march, with the body of the dead man wrapped in linen cloth and carried
+on a rude bier on their shoulders. They seem in haste, (because the hour
+is late and the burial must be made before sunset), perhaps a little
+indifferent, or almost joyful. <!-- Page 59 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page59"></a>[page 59]</span> Certainly there is no sign of
+grief in their looks or their voices; for among them it is counted a
+fortunate thing to die in the Holy City and to be buried on the southern
+slope of the Valley of Jehoshaphat, where Gabriel is to blow his trumpet
+for the resurrection.</p>
+
+<hr />
+<h3>III<br /><br />
+IN THE STREETS OF JERUSALEM</h3>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Outside</span> the gates we ride, for the roads which encircle the city wall
+and lead off to the north and south and east and west, are fairly broad
+and smooth. But within the gates we walk, for the streets are narrow,
+steep and slippery, and to attempt them on horseback is to travel with
+an anxious mind.</p>
+
+<p>Through the Jaffa Gate, indeed, you may easily ride, or even drive in
+your carriage: not through the gateway itself, which is a close and
+crooked alley, but through the great gap in the wall beside it, made for
+the German Emperor to pass through at the time of his famous imperial
+scouting-expedition in Syria in 1898. Thus following the track of the
+great William <!-- Page 60 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page60"></a>[page 60]</span> you come to the entrance of the Grand New Hotel,
+among curiosity-shops and tourist-agencies, where a multitude of
+bootblacks assure you that you need "a shine," and <i>valets de place</i>
+press their services upon you, and ingratiating young merchants try to
+allure you into their establishments to purchase photographs or
+embroidered scarves or olive-wood souvenirs of the Holy Land.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 333px; ">
+<img src="images/illus03.jpg" width="333" height="500" alt="A Street in Jerusalem." title="A Street in Jerusalem." />
+<span class="caption">A Street in Jerusalem.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Come over to Cook's office, where we get our letters, and stand for a
+while on the little terrace with the iron railing, looking at the motley
+crowd which fills the place in front of the citadel. Groups of
+blue-robed peasant women sit on the curbstone, selling firewood and
+grass and vegetables. Their faces are bare and brown, wrinkled with the
+sun and the wind. Turkish soldiers in dark-green uniform, Greek priests
+in black robes and stove-pipe hats, Bedouins in flowing cloaks of brown
+and white, pale-faced Jews with velvet gabardines and curly ear-locks,
+Moslem women in many-coloured silken garments and half-transparent
+veils, British tourists with cork helmets and white umbrellas, camels,
+donkeys, goats, and sheep, jostle together in picturesque confusion.
+<!-- Page 61 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page61"></a>[page 61]</span> There is a water-carrier with his shiny, dripping, bulbous
+goat-skin on his shoulders. There is an Arab of the wilderness with a
+young gazelle in his arms.</p>
+
+<p>Now let us go down the greasy, gliddery steps of David Street, between
+the diminutive dusky shops with open fronts where all kinds of queer
+things to eat and to wear are sold, and all sorts of craftsmen are at
+work making shoes, and tin pans, and copper pots, and wooden seats, and
+little tables, and clothes of strange pattern. A turn to the left brings
+us into Christian Street and the New Bazaar of the Greeks, with its
+modern stores.</p>
+
+<p>A turn to the right and a long descent under dark archways and through
+dirty, shadowy alleys brings us to the Place of Lamentations, beside the
+ancient foundation wall of the Temple, where the Jews come in the
+afternoon of Fridays and festival-days to lean their heads against the
+huge stones and murmur forth their wailings over the downfall of
+Jerusalem. "For the majesty that is departed," cries the leader, and the
+others answer: "We sit in solitude and mourn." "We pray Thee have mercy
+on Zion," cries the leader, <!-- Page 62 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page62"></a>[page 62]</span> and the others answer: "Gather the
+children of Jerusalem." With most of them it seems a perfunctory
+mourning; but there are two or three old men with the tears running down
+their faces as they kiss the smooth-worn stones.</p>
+
+<p>We enter convents and churches, mosques and tombs. We trace the course
+of the traditional <i>Via Dolorosa</i>, and try to reconstruct in our
+imagination the probable path of that grievous journey from the
+judgment-hall of injustice to the Calvary of cruelty&mdash;a path which
+now lies buried far below the present level of the city.</p>
+
+<p>One impression deepens in my mind with every hour: this was never
+Christ's city. The confusion, the shallow curiosity, the self-interest,
+the clashing prejudices, the inaccessibility of the idle and busy
+multitudes were the same in His day that they are now. It was not here
+that Jesus found the men and women who believed in Him and loved Him,
+but in the quiet villages, among the green fields, by the peaceful
+lake-shores. And it is not here that we shall find the clearest traces,
+the most intimate visions of Him, but away in the big out-of-doors,
+where <!-- Page 63 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page63"></a>[page 63]</span> the sky opens free above us, and the landscapes roll
+away to far horizons.</p>
+
+<p>As we loiter about the city, now alone, now under the discreet and
+unhampering escort of the Bethlehemite; watching the Mussulmans at their
+dinner in some dingy little restaurant, where kitchen, store-room and
+banquet-hall are all in the same apartment, level and open to the
+street; pausing to bargain with an impassive Arab for a leather belt or
+with an ingratiating Greek for a string of amber beads; looking in
+through the unshuttered windows of the Jewish houses where the families
+are gathered in festal array for the household rites of Passover week;
+turning over the chaplets, and rosaries, and anklets, and bracelets of
+coloured glass and mother-of-pearl, and variegated stones, and curious
+beans and seed-pods in the baskets of the street-vendors around the
+Church of the Holy Sepulchre; stepping back into an archway to avoid a
+bag-footed camel, or a gaily caparisoned horse, or a heavy-laden donkey
+passing through a narrow street; exchanging a smile and an
+unintelligible friendly jest with a sweet-faced, careless child;
+listening to long <!-- Page 64 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page64"></a>[page 64]</span> disputes between buyers and sellers in that
+resounding Arab tongue which seems full of tragic indignation and wrath,
+while the eyes of the handsome brown Bedouins who use it remain
+unsearchable in their Oriental languor and pride; Jerusalem becomes to
+us more and more a symbol and epitome of that which is changeless and
+transient, capricious and inevitable, necessary and insignificant,
+interesting and unsatisfying, in the unfinished tragi-comedy of human
+life. There are times when it fascinates us with its whirling charm.
+There are other times when we are glad to ride away from it, to seek
+communion with the great spirit of some antique prophet, or to find the
+consoling presence of Him who spake the words of the eternal life.</p>
+
+<hr />
+<p><!-- Page 65 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page65"></a>[page 65]</span></p>
+<h4><i>A PSALM OF GREAT CITIES</i></h4>
+
+<p class="noind"><i>How wonderful are the cities that man hath builded:<br />
+Their walls are compacted of heavy stones,<br />
+And their lofty towers rise above the tree-tops.</i><br /><br />
+
+<i>Rome, Jerusalem, Cairo, Damascus,&mdash;<br />
+Venice, Constantinople, Moscow, Pekin,&mdash;<br />
+London, New York, Berlin, Paris, Vienna,&mdash;</i><br /><br />
+
+<i>These are the names of mighty enchantments:<br />
+They have called to the ends of the earth,<br />
+They have secretly summoned an host of servants.</i><br /><br />
+
+<i>They shine from far sitting beside great waters:<br />
+They are proudly enthroned upon high hills,<br />
+They spread out their splendour along the rivers.</i><br /><br />
+
+<i>Yet are they all the work of small patient fingers:<br />
+Their strength is in the hand of man,<br />
+He hath woven his flesh and blood into their glory.</i><br /><br />
+
+<i>The cities are scattered over the world like ant-hills:<br />
+Every one of them is full of trouble and toil,<br />
+And their makers run to and fro within them.</i><br /><br />
+
+<!-- Page 66 --><span class="pagenum2"><a name="page66"></a>[page 66]</span>
+
+<i>Abundance of riches is laid up in their store-houses:<br />
+Yet they are tormented with the fear of want,<br />
+The cry of the poor in their streets is exceeding bitter.</i><br /><br />
+
+<i>Their inhabitants are driven by blind perturbations:<br />
+They whirl sadly in the fever of haste,<br />
+Seeking they know not what, they pursue it fiercely.</i><br /><br />
+
+<i>The air is heavy-laden with their breathing:<br />
+The sound of their coming and going is never still,<br />
+Even in the night I hear them whispering and crying.</i><br /><br />
+
+<i>Beside every ant-hill I behold a monster crouching:<br />
+This is the ant-lion Death,<br />
+He thrusteth forth his tongue and the people perish.</i><br /><br />
+
+<i>O God of wisdom thou hast made the country:<br />
+Why hast thou suffered man to make the town?</i><br /><br />
+
+<i>Then God answered, Surely I am the maker of man:<br />
+And in the heart of man I have set the city.</i></p>
+
+<hr />
+<p><!-- Page 67 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page67"></a>[page 67]</span></p>
+
+<h2>IV<br /><br />
+MIZPAH AND THE MOUNT OF<br />
+OLIVES</h2>
+
+<hr />
+<p><!-- Page 68 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page68"></a>[page 68]</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p><!-- Page 69 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page69"></a>[page 69]</span></p>
+
+<h3>I<br /><br />
+THE JUDGMENT-SEAT OF SAMUEL</h3>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Mizpah</span> of Benjamin stands to the northwest: the sharpest peak in the
+Judean range, crowned with a ragged, dusty village and a small mosque.
+We rode to it one morning over the steepest, stoniest bridle-paths that
+we had ever seen. The country was bleak and rocky, a skeleton of
+landscape; but between the stones and down the precipitous hillsides and
+along the hot gorges, the incredible multitude of spring flowers were
+abloom.</p>
+
+<p>It was a stiff scramble up the conical hill to the little hamlet at the
+top, built out of and among ruins. The mosque, evidently an old
+Christian church remodelled, was bare, but fairly clean, cool, and
+tranquil. We peered through a grated window, tied with many-coloured
+scraps of rags by the Mohammedan pilgrims, into a whitewashed room
+containing a huge sarcophagus said to be the tomb of Samuel. Then we
+climbed the minaret and <!-- Page 70 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page70"></a>[page 70]</span> lingered on the tiny railed balcony,
+feeding on the view.</p>
+
+<p>The peak on which we stood was isolated by deep ravines from the other
+hills of desolate gray and scanty green. Beyond the western range lay
+the Valley of Aijalon, and beyond that the rich Plain of Sharon with
+iridescent hues of green and blue and silver, and beyond that the yellow
+line of the sand-dunes broken by the white spot of Jaffa, and beyond
+that the azure breadth of the Mediterranean. Northward, at our feet, on
+the summit of a lower conical hill, ringed with gray rock, lay the
+village of El-Jib, the ancient Geba of Benjamin, one of the cities which
+Joshua gave to the Levites.</p>
+
+<p>This was the place from which Jonathan and his armour-bearer set out,
+without Saul's knowledge, on their daring, perilous scouting expedition
+against the Philistines. What fighting there was in olden days over that
+tumbled country of hills and gorges, stretching away north to the blue
+mountains of Samaria and the summits of Ebal and Gerizim on the horizon!</p>
+
+<p>There on the rocky backbone of Benjamin and <!-- Page 71 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page71"></a>[page 71]</span> Ephraim, was
+Ramallah (where we had spent Sunday in the sweet orderliness of the
+Friends' Mission School), and Beëroth, and Bethel, and Gilgal, and
+Shiloh. Eastward, behind the hills, we could trace the long, vast trench
+of the Jordan valley running due north and south, filled with thin
+violet haze and terminating in a glint of the Dead Sea. Beyond that deep
+line of division rose the mountains of Gilead and Moab, a lofty,
+unbroken barrier. To the south-east we could see the red roofs of the
+new Jerusalem, and a few domes and minarets of the ancient city. Beyond
+them, in the south, was the truncated cone of the Frank Mountain, where
+the crusaders made their last stand against the Saracens; and the hills
+around Bethlehem; and a glimpse, nearer at hand, of the tall cypresses
+and peaceful gardens of 'Ain Karîm.</p>
+
+<p>This terrestrial paradise of vision encircled us with jewel-hues and
+clear, exquisite outlines. Below us were the flat roofs of Nebi Samwîl,
+with a dog barking on every roof; the filthy courtyards and dark
+doorways, with a woman in one of them making bread; the ruined archways
+and broken cisterns <!-- Page 72 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page72"></a>[page 72]</span> with a pool of green water stagnating in
+one corner; peasants ploughing their stony little fields, and a string
+of donkeys winding up the steep path to the hill.</p>
+
+<p>Here, centuries ago, Samuel called all Israel to Mizpah, and offered
+sacrifice before Jehovah, and judged the people. Here he inspired them
+with new courage and sent them down to discomfit the Philistines. Hither
+he came as judge and ruler of Israel, making his annual circuit between
+Gilgal and Bethel and Mizpah. Here he assembled the tribes again, when
+they were tired of his rule, and gave them a King according to their
+desire, even the tall warrior Saul, the son of Kish.</p>
+
+<p>Do the bones of the prophet rest here or at Ramah? I do not know. But
+here, on this commanding peak, he began and ended his judgeship; from
+this aerie he looked forth upon the inheritance of the turbulent sons of
+Jacob; and here, if you like, today, a pale, clever young Mohammedan
+will show you what he calls the coffin of Samuel.</p>
+
+<hr />
+<p><!-- Page 73 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page73"></a>[page 73]</span></p>
+
+<h3>II<br /><br />
+THE HILL THAT JESUS LOVED</h3>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">We</span> had seen from Mizpah the sharp ridge of the Mount of Olives, rising
+beyond Jerusalem. Our road thither from the camp led us around the city,
+past the Damascus Gate, and the royal grottoes, and Herod's Gate, and
+the Tower of the Storks, and St. Stephen's Gate, down into the Valley of
+the Brook Kidron. Here, on the west, rises the precipitous Temple Hill
+crowned with the wall of the city, and on the east the long ridge of
+Olivet.</p>
+
+<p>There are several buildings on the side of the steep hill, marking
+supposed holy places or sacred events&mdash;the Church of the Tomb of
+the Virgin, the Latin Chapel of the Agony, the Greek Church of St. Mary
+Magdalen. On top of the ridge are the Russian Buildings, with the Chapel
+of the Ascension, and the Latin Buildings, with the Church of the Creed,
+the Church of the Paternoster, and a Carmelite Nunnery. Among the walls
+of these inclosures we wound our way, and at last tied our <!-- Page 74 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page74"></a>[page 74]</span>
+horses outside of the Russian garden. We climbed the two hundred and
+fourteen steps of the lofty Belvidere Tower, and found ourselves in
+possession of one of the great views of the world. There is Jerusalem,
+across the Kidron, spread out like a raised map below us. The mountains
+of Judah roll away north and south and east and west&mdash;the clean-cut
+pinnacle of Mizpah, the lofty plain of Rephaïm, the dark hills toward
+Hebron, the rounded top of Scopus where Titus camped with his Roman
+legions, the flattened peak of Frank Mountain. Bethlehem is not visible;
+but there is the tiny village of Bethphage, and the first roof of
+Bethany peeping over the ridge, and the Inn of the Good Samaritan in a
+red cut of the long serpentine road to Jericho. The dark range of Gilead
+and Moab seems like a huge wall of lapis-lazuli beyond the furrowed,
+wrinkled, yellowish clay-hills and the wide gray trench of the Jordan
+Valley, wherein the river marks its crooked path with a line of deep
+green. The hundreds of ridges that slope steeply down to that immense
+depression are touched with a thousand hues of amethystine light, and
+the ravines between them filled with a <!-- Page 75 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page75"></a>[page 75]</span> thousand tones of azure
+shadow. At the end of the valley glitter the blue waters of the Dead
+Sea, fifteen miles away, four thousand feet below us, yet seeming so
+near that we almost expect to hear the sound of its waves on the rocky
+shores of the Wilderness of Tekoa.</p>
+
+<p>On this mount Jesus of Nazareth often walked with His disciples. On this
+widespread landscape His eyes rested as He spoke divinely of the
+invisible kingdom of peace and love and joy that shall never pass away.
+Over this walled city, sleeping in the sunshine, full of earthly dreams
+and disappointments, battlemented hearts and whited sepulchres of the
+spirit, He wept, and cried: "O Jerusalem, how often would I have
+gathered thy children together even as a hen gathereth her own brood
+under her wings, and ye would not!"</p>
+
+<hr />
+<p><!-- Page 76 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page76"></a>[page 76]</span></p>
+
+<h3>III<br /><br />
+
+THE GARDEN OF GETHSEMANE</h3>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Come</span> down, now, from the mount of vision to the grove of olive-trees,
+the Garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus used to take refuge with His
+friends. It lies on the eastern slope of Olivet, not far above the
+Valley of Kidron, over against that city-gate which was called the
+Beautiful, or the Golden, but which is now walled up.</p>
+
+<p>The grove probably belonged to some friend of Jesus or of one of His
+disciples, who permitted them to make use of it for their quiet
+meetings. At that time, no doubt, the whole hillside was covered with
+olive-trees, but most of these have now disappeared. The eight aged
+trees that still cling to life in Gethsemane have been inclosed with a
+low wall and an iron railing, and the little garden that blooms around
+them is cared for by Franciscan monks from Italy.</p>
+
+<p>The gentle, friendly Fra Giovanni, in bare sandaled feet, coarse brown
+robe, and broad-brimmed straw hat, is walking among the flowers. He
+opens <!-- Page 77 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page77"></a>[page 77]</span> the gate for us and courteously invites us in, telling
+us in broken French that we may pick what flowers we like. Presently I
+fall into discourse with him in broken Italian, telling him of my visit
+years ago to the cradle of his Order at Assisi, and to its most
+beautiful shrine at La Verna, high above the Val d'Arno. His old eyes
+soften into youthful brightness as he speaks of Italy. It was most
+beautiful, he said, <i>bellisima!</i> But he is happier here, caring for this
+garden, it is most holy, <i>santissima!</i></p>
+
+<p>The bronzed Mohammedan gardener, silent, patient, absorbed in his task,
+moves with his watering-pot among the beds, quietly refreshing the
+thirsty blossoms. There are wall-flowers, stocks, pansies, baby's
+breath, pinks, anemones of all colours, rosemary, rue, poppies&mdash;all
+sorts of sweet old-fashioned flowers. Among them stand the scattered
+venerable trees, with enormous trunks, wrinkled and contorted, eaten
+away by age, patched and built up with stones, protected and tended with
+pious care, as if they were very old people whose life must be tenderly
+nursed and sheltered. Their boles hardly seem to be of wood; so dark, so
+twisted, so furrowed are they, of <!-- Page 78 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page78"></a>[page 78]</span> an aspect so enduring that
+they appear to be cast in bronze or carved out of black granite. Above
+each of them spreads a crown of fresh foliage, delicate, abundant,
+shimmering softly in the sunlight and the breeze, with silken turnings
+of the under side of the innumerable leaves. In the centre of the garden
+is a kind of open flower house with a fountain of flowing water, erected
+in memory of a young American girl. At each corner a pair of slender
+cypresses lift their black-green spires against the blanched azure of
+the sky.</p>
+
+<p>It is a place of refuge, of ineffable tranquillity, of unforgetful
+tenderness. The inclosure does not offend. How else could this sacred
+shrine of the out-of-doors be preserved? And what more fitting guardian
+for it than the Order of that loving Saint Francis, who called the sun
+and the moon his brother and his sister and preached to a joyous
+congregation of birds as his "little brothers of the air"? The flowers
+do not offend. Their antique fragrance, gracious order, familiar looks,
+are a symbol of what faithful memory does with the sorrows and
+sufferings of those who have loved us best--she treasures and <!-- Page
+79 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page79"></a>[page 79]</span> transmutes them into something beautiful, she grows her
+sweetest flowers in the ground that tears have made holy.</p>
+
+<p>It is here, in this quaint and carefully tended garden, this precious
+place which has been saved alike from the oblivious trampling of the
+crowd and from the needless imprisonment of four walls and a roof, it is
+here in the open air, in the calm glow of the afternoon, under the
+shadow of Mount Zion, that we find for the first time that which we have
+come so far to seek,&mdash;the soul of the Holy Land, the inward sense
+of the real presence of Jesus.</p>
+
+<p>It is as clear and vivid as any outward experience. Why should I not
+speak of it as simply and candidly? Nothing that we have yet seen in
+Palestine, no vision of wide-spread landscape, no sight of ancient ruin
+or famous building or treasured relic, comes as close to our hearts as
+this little garden sleeping in the sun. Nothing that we have read from
+our Bibles in the new light of this journey has been for us so suddenly
+illumined, so deeply and tenderly brought home to us, as the story of
+Gethsemane.</p>
+
+<p>Here, indeed, in the moonlit shadow of these <!-- Page 80 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page80"></a>[page 80]</span> olives&mdash;if
+not of these very branches, yet of others sprung from the same
+immemorial stems&mdash;was endured the deepest suffering ever borne for
+man, the most profound sorrow of the greatest Soul that loved all human
+souls. It was not in the temptation in the wilderness, as Milton
+imagined, that the crisis of the Divine life was enacted and Paradise
+was regained. It was in the agony in the garden.</p>
+
+<p>Here the love of life wrestled in the heart of Jesus with the purpose of
+sacrifice, and the anguish of that wrestling wrung the drops of blood
+from Him like sweat. Here, for the only time, He found the cup of sorrow
+and shame too bitter, and prayed the Father to take it from His lips if
+it were possible&mdash;possible without breaking faith, without
+surrendering love. For that He would not do, though His soul was
+exceeding sorrowful, even unto death. Here He learned the frailty of
+human friendship, the narrowness and dulness and coldness of the very
+hearts for whom He had done and suffered most, who could not even watch
+with Him one hour.</p>
+
+<p>What infinite sense of the poverty and feebleness of mankind, the
+inveteracy of selfishness, the uncertainty <!-- Page 81 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page81"></a>[page 81]</span> of human impulses
+and aspirations and promises; what poignant questioning of the
+necessity, the utility of self-immolation must have tortured the soul of
+Jesus in that hour! It was His black hour. None can imagine the depth of
+that darkness but those who have themselves passed through some of its
+outer shadows, in the times when love seems vain, and sacrifice futile,
+and friendship meaningless, and life a failure, and death intolerable.</p>
+
+<p>Jesus met the spirit of despair in the Garden of Gethsemane; and after
+that meeting, the cross had no terrors for Him, because He had already
+endured them; the grave no fear, because He had already conquered it.
+How calm and gentle was the voice with which He wakened His disciples,
+how firm the step with which He went to meet Judas! The bitterness of
+death was behind Him in the shadow of the olive-trees. The peace of
+Heaven shone above Him in the silent stars.</p>
+
+<hr />
+<p><!-- Page 82 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page82"></a>[page 82]</span></p>
+
+<h4><i>A PSALM OF SURRENDER</i></h4>
+
+<p class="noind"><i>Mine enemies have prevailed against me, O God:<br />
+Thou hast led me deep into their ambush.</i><br /><br />
+
+<i>They surround me with a hedge of spears:<br />
+And the sword in my hand is broken.</i><br /><br />
+
+<i>My friends also have forsaken my side:<br />
+From a safe place they look upon me with pity.</i><br /><br />
+
+<i>My heart is like water poured upon the ground:<br />
+I have come alone to the place of surrender.</i><br />
+
+<i>To thee, to thee only will I give up my sword:<br />
+The sword which was broken in thy service.</i><br /><br />
+<br />
+<i>Thou hast required me to suffer for thy cause:<br />
+By my defeat thy will is victorious.</i><br /><br />
+
+<i>O my King show me thy face shining in the dark:<br />
+While I drink the loving-cup of death to thy glory.</i></p>
+
+<hr />
+<p><!-- Page 83 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page83"></a>[page 83]</span></p>
+
+<h2>V<br /><br />
+AN EXCURSION TO BETHLEHEM<br />
+AND HEBRON</h2>
+<hr />
+
+<p><!-- Page 84 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page84"></a>[page 84]</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p><!-- Page 85 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page85"></a>[page 85]</span></p>
+
+<h3>I<br /><br />
+BETHLEHEM</h3>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">A sparkling</span> morning followed a showery night, and all the little red and
+white and yellow flowers were lifting glad faces to the sun as we took
+the highroad to Bethlehem. Leaving the Jaffa Gate on the left, we
+crossed the head of the deep Valley of Hinnom, below the dirty Pool of
+the Sultan, and rode up the hill on the opposite side of the vale.</p>
+
+<p>There was much rubbish and filth around us, and the sight of the
+Ophthalmic Hospital of the English Knights of Saint John, standing in
+the beauty of cleanness and order beside the road, did our eyes good.
+Blindness is one of the common afflictions of the people of Palestine.
+Neglect and ignorance and dirt and the plague of crawling flies spread
+the germs of disease from eye to eye, and the people submit to it with
+pathetic and irritating fatalism. It is hard to persuade these poor
+souls that the will of <!-- Page 86 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page86"></a>[page 86]</span> Allah or Jehovah in this matter ought
+not to be accepted until after it has been questioned. But the light of
+true and humane religion is spreading a little. We rejoiced to see the
+reception-room of the hospital filled with all sorts and conditions of
+men, women and children waiting for the good physicians who save and
+restore sight in the name of Jesus.</p>
+
+<p>To the right, a little below us, lay the ugly railway station; before
+us, rising gently southward, extended the elevated Plain of Rephaïm
+where David smote the host of the Philistines after he had heard "the
+sound of a going in the tops of the mulberry-trees." The red soil was
+cultivated in little farms and gardens. The almond-trees were in leaf;
+the hawthorn in blossom; the fig-trees were putting forth their tender
+green.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 332px; ">
+<img src="images/illus04.jpg" width="332" height="500" alt="A Street in Bethlehem." title="A Street in Bethlehem." />
+<span class="caption">A Street in Bethlehem.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>A slowly ascending road brought us to the hill of Mâr Elyâs, and the
+so-called Well of the Magi. Here the legend says the Wise Men halted
+after they had left Jerusalem, and the star reappeared to guide them on
+to Bethlehem. Certain it is that they must have taken this road; and
+certain it is that both Bethlehem and Jerusalem, hidden from each other
+<!-- Page 87 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page87"></a>[page 87]</span> by the rising ground, are clearly visible to one who stands in
+the saddle of this hill.</p>
+
+<p>There were fine views down the valleys to the east, with blue glimpses
+of the Dead Sea at the end of them. The supposed tomb of Rachel, a dingy
+little building with a white dome, interested us less than the broad
+lake of olive-orchards around the distant village of Beit Jâlâ, and the
+green fields, pastures and gardens encircling the double hill of
+Bethlehem, the ancient "House of Bread." There was an aspect of
+fertility and friendliness about the place that seemed in harmony with
+its name and its poetic memories.</p>
+
+<p>In a walled kitchen-garden at the entrance of the town was David's Well.
+We felt no assurance, of course, as we looked down into it, that this
+was the veritable place. But at all events it served to bring back to us
+one of the prettiest bits of romance in the Old Testament. When the bold
+son of Jesse had become a chieftain of outlaws and was besieged by the
+Philistines in the stronghold of Adullam, his heart grew thirsty for a
+draught from his father's well, whose sweetness he had known as a boy.
+And when his three mighty men went up secretly at the <!-- Page 88 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page88"></a>[page 88]</span> risk of
+their lives, and broke through the host of their enemies, and brought
+their captain a vessel of this water, "he would not drink thereof, but
+poured it out unto Jehovah."</p>
+
+<p>There was a division of opinion in our party in regard to this act. "It
+was sheer foolishness," said the Patriarch, "to waste anything that had
+cost so much to get. What must the three mighty men have thought when
+they saw that for which they had risked their lives poured out upon the
+ground?" "Ah, no," said the Lady. "It was the highest gratitude, because
+it was touched with poetry. It was the best compliment that David could
+have given to his friends. Some gifts are too precious to be received in
+any other way than this." And in my heart I knew that she was right.</p>
+
+<p>Riding through the narrow streets of the town, which is inhabited almost
+entirely by Christians, we noted the tranquil good looks of the women, a
+distinct type, rather short of stature, round-faced, placid and kind of
+aspect. Not a few of them had blue eyes. They wore dark-blue skirts,
+dark-red jackets, and a white veil over their heads, but not over their
+faces. <!-- Page 89 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page89"></a>[page 89]</span> Under the veil the married women wore a peculiar cap of
+stiff, embroidered black cloth, about six inches high, and across the
+front of this cap was strung their dowry of gold or silver coins. Such a
+dress, no doubt, was worn by the Virgin Mary, and such tranquil,
+friendly looks, I think, were hers, but touched with a rarer light of
+beauty shining from a secret source within.</p>
+
+<p>A crowd of little boys and girls just released from school for their
+recess shouted and laughed and chased one another, pausing for a moment
+in round-eyed wonder when I pointed my camera at them. Donkeys and
+camels and sheep made our passage through the town slow, and gave us
+occasion to look to our horses' footing. At one corner a great white sow
+ran out of an alley-way, followed by a twinkling litter of pink pigs. In
+the market-place we left our horses in the shadow of the monastery wall
+and entered, by a low door, the lofty, bare Church of the Nativity.</p>
+
+<p>The long rows of immense marble pillars had some faded remains of
+painting on them. There were a few battered fragments of mosaic in the
+clerestory, <!-- Page 90 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page90"></a>[page 90]</span> dimly glittering. But the general effect of the
+whitewashed walls, the ancient brown beams and rafters of the roof, the
+large, empty space, was one of extreme simplicity.</p>
+
+<p>When we came into the choir and apse we found ourselves in the midst of
+complexity. The ownership of the different altars with their gilt
+ornaments, of the swinging lamps, of the separate doorways of the Greeks
+and the Armenians and the Latins, was bewildering. Dark, winding steps,
+slippery with the drippings from many candles, led us down into the
+Grotto of the Nativity. It was a cavern perhaps forty feet long and ten
+feet wide, lit by thirty pendent lamps (Greek, Armenian and Latin):
+marble floor and walls hung with draperies; a silver star in the
+pavement before the altar to mark the spot where Christ was born; a
+marble manger in the corner to mark the cradle in which Christ was laid;
+a never-ceasing stream of poor pilgrims, who come kneeling, and kissing
+the star and the stones and the altar for Christ's sake.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 337px; ">
+<img src="images/illus05.jpg" width="337" height="500" alt="The Market-place, Bethlehem." title="The Market-place, Bethlehem." />
+<span class="caption">The Market-place, Bethlehem.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>We paused for a while, after we had come up, to ask ourselves whether
+what we had seen was in any <!-- Page 91 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page91"></a>[page 91]</span> way credible. Yes, credible, but
+not convincing. No doubt the ancient Khân of Bethlehem must have been
+somewhere near this spot, in the vicinity of the market-place of the
+town. No doubt it was the custom, when there were natural hollows or
+artificial grottos in the rock near such an inn, to use them as shelters
+and stalls for the cattle. It is quite possible, it is even probable,
+that this may have been one of the shallow caverns used for such a
+purpose. If so, there is no reason to deny that this may be the place of
+the wondrous birth, where, as the old French <i>Noel</i> has it:</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+<i><span class="i05">"Dieu parmy les pastoreaux,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sous la crêche des toreaux,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Dans les champs a voulu naistre;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Et non parmy les arroys<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Des grands princes et des roys,&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Lui des plus grands roys le maistre."</span></i></p>
+
+<p>But to the eye, at least, there is no reminder of the scene of the
+Nativity in this close and stifling chapel, hung with costly silks and
+embroideries, glittering with rich lamps, filled with the smoke of
+incense and waxen tapers. And to the heart there is little suggestion
+<!-- Page 92 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page92"></a>[page 92]</span> of the lonely night when Joseph found a humble refuge here for
+his young bride to wait in darkness, pain and hope for her hour to come.</p>
+
+<p>In the church above, the Latins and Armenians and Greeks guard their
+privileges and prerogatives jealously. There have been fights here about
+the driving of a nail, the hanging of a picture, the sweeping of a bit
+of the floor. The Crimean War began in a quarrel between the Greeks and
+the Latins, and a mob-struggle in the Church of the Nativity. Underneath
+the floor, to the north of the Grotto of the Nativity, is the cave in
+which Saint Jerome lived peaceably for many years, translating the Bible
+into Latin. That was better than fighting.</p>
+
+<hr />
+<h3>II<br /><br />
+ON THE ROAD TO HEBRON</h3>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">We</span> ate our lunch at Bethlehem in a curiosity-shop. The table was spread
+at the back of the room by the open window. All around us were hanging
+innumerable chaplets and rosaries of mother-of-pearl, of carnelian, of
+carved olive-stones, of glass <!-- Page 93 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page93"></a>[page 93]</span> beads; trinkets and souvenirs of
+all imaginable kinds, tiny sheep-bells and inlaid boxes and carved fans
+filled the cases and cabinets. Through the window came the noise of
+people busy at Bethlehem's chief industry, the cutting and polishing of
+mother-of-pearl for mementoes. The jingling bells of our pack-train,
+passing the open door, reminded us that our camp was to be pitched miles
+away on the road to Hebron.</p>
+
+<p>We called for the horses and rode on through the town. Very beautiful
+and peaceful was the view from the southern hill, looking down upon the
+pastures of Bethlehem where "shepherds watched their flocks by night,"
+and the field of Boaz where Ruth followed the reapers among the corn.</p>
+
+<p>Down dale and up hill we journeyed; bright green of almond-trees, dark
+green of carob-trees, snowy blossoms of apricot-trees, rosy blossoms of
+peach-trees, argent verdure of olive-trees, adorning the valleys. Then
+out over the wilder, rockier heights; and past the great empty Pools of
+Solomon, lying at the head of the Wâdi Artâs, watched by a square ruined
+castle; and up the winding road and along <!-- Page 94 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page94"></a>[page 94]</span> the lofty
+flower-sprinkled ridges; and at last we came to our tents, pitched in
+the wide, green Wâdi el-'Arrûb, beside the bridge.</p>
+
+<p>Springs gushed out of the hillside here and ran down in a little
+laughing brook through lawns full of tiny pink and white daisies, and
+broad fields of tangled weeds and flowers, red anemones, blue iris,
+purple mallows, scarlet adonis, with here and there a strip of
+cultivated ground shimmering with silky leeks or dotted with young
+cucumbers. There was a broken aqueduct cut in the rock at the side of
+the valley, and the brook slipped by a large ruined reservoir.</p>
+
+<p>"George," said I to the Bethlehemite, as he sat meditating on the edge
+of the dry pool, "what do you think of this valley?"</p>
+
+<p>"I think," said George, "that if I had a few thousand dollars to buy the
+land, with all this runaway water I could make it blossom like a
+peach-tree."</p>
+
+<p>The cold, green sunset behind the western hills darkened into night. The
+air grew chilly, dropping nearly to the point of frost. We missed the
+blazing camp-fire of the Canadian forests, and went to bed <!-- Page 95 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page95"></a>[page 95]</span>
+early, tucking in the hot-water bags at our feet and piling on the
+blankets and rugs. All through the night we could hear the passers-by
+shouting and singing along the Hebron road. There was one unknown
+traveller whose high-pitched, quavering Arab song rose far away, and
+grew louder as he approached, and passed us in a whirlwind of lugubrious
+music, and tapered slowly off into distance and silence&mdash;a chant a
+mile long.</p>
+
+<p>The morning broke through flying clouds, with a bitter, wet, west wind
+rasping the bleak highlands. There were spiteful showers with intervals
+of mocking sunshine; it was a mischievous and prankish bit of weather,
+no day for riding. But the Lady was indomitable, so we left the
+Patriarch in his tent, wrapped ourselves in garments of mackintosh and
+took the road again.</p>
+
+<p>The country, at first, was wild and barren, a wilderness of rocks and
+thorn bushes and stunted scrub oaks. Now and then a Greek partridge, in
+its beautiful plumage of fawn-gray, marked with red and black about the
+head, clucked like a hen on the stony hillside, or whirred away in low,
+straight flight over <!-- Page 96 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page96"></a>[page 96]</span> the bushes. Flocks of black and brown
+goats, with pendulous ears, skipped up and down the steep ridges,
+standing up on their hind legs to browse the foliage of the little oak
+shrubs, or showing themselves off in a butting-match on top of a big
+rock. Marching on the highroad they seemed sedate, despondent, pattering
+along soberly with flapping ears. In the midst of one flock I saw a
+fierce-looking tattered pastor tenderly carrying a little black kid in
+his bosom&mdash;as tenderly as if it were a lamb. It seemed like an
+illustration of a picture that I saw long ago in the Catacombs, in which
+the infant church of Christ silently expressed the richness of her love,
+the breadth of her hope:</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+<span class="i05">"On those walls subterranean, where she hid<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Her head 'mid ignominy, death and tombs,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">She her Good Shepherd's hasty image drew&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And on His shoulders, not a lamb, a kid."</span></p>
+
+<p>As we drew nearer to Hebron the region appeared more fertile, and the
+landscape smiled a little under the gleams of wintry sunshine. There
+were many vineyards; in most of them the vines trailed along the ground,
+but in some they were propped up on <!-- Page 97 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page97"></a>[page 97]</span> sticks, like old men
+leaning on crutches. Almond and apricot-trees flourished. The
+mulberries, the olives, the sycamores were abundant. Peasants were
+ploughing the fields with their crooked sticks shod with a long iron
+point. When a man puts his hand to such a plough he dares not look back,
+else it will surely go aside. It makes a scratch, not a furrow. (I saw a
+man in the hospital at Nazareth who had his thigh pierced clear through
+by one of these dagger-like iron plough points.)</p>
+
+<p>Children were gathering roots and thorn branches for firewood. Women
+were carrying huge bundles on their heads. Donkey-boys were urging their
+heavy-laden animals along the road, and cameleers led their deliberate
+strings of ungainly beasts by a rope or a light chain reaching from one
+nodding head to another.</p>
+
+<p>A camel's load never looks as large as a donkey's, but no doubt he often
+finds it heavy, and he always looks displeased with it. There is
+something about the droop of a camel's lower lip which seems to express
+unalterable disgust with the universe. But the rest of the world around
+Hebron appeared to be <!-- Page 98 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page98"></a>[page 98]</span> reasonably happy. In spite of weather
+and poverty and hard work the ploughmen sang in the fields, the children
+skipped and whistled at their tasks, the passers-by on the road shouted
+greetings to the labourers in the gardens and vineyards. Somewhere round
+about here is supposed to lie the Valley of Eshcol from which the Hebrew
+spies brought back the monstrous bunch of grapes, a cluster that reached
+from the height of a man's shoulder to the ground.</p>
+
+<hr />
+<h3>III<br /><br />
+THE TENTING-GROUND OF<br />
+ABRAHAM</h3>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Hebron</span> lies three thousand feet above the sea, and is one of the ancient
+market-places and shrines of the world. From time immemorial it has been
+a holy town, a busy town, and a turbulent town. The Hittites and the
+Amorites dwelt here, and Abraham, a nomadic shepherd whose tents
+followed his flocks over the land of Canaan, bought here his only piece
+of real estate, the field and cave of Machpelah. He bought it for a
+tomb,&mdash;even a nomad wishes <!-- Page 99 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page99"></a>[page 99]</span> to rest quietly in
+death,&mdash;and here he and his wife Sarah, and his children Isaac and
+Rebekah, and his grandchildren Jacob and Leah were buried.</p>
+
+<p>The modern town has about twenty thousand inhabitants, chiefly
+Mohammedans of a fanatical temper, and is incredibly dirty. We passed
+the muddy pool by which King David, when he was reigning here, hanged
+the murderers of Ishbosheth. We climbed the crooked streets to the
+Mosque which covers the supposed site of the cave of Machpelah. But we
+did not see the tomb of Abraham, for no "infidel" is allowed to pass
+beyond the seventh step in the flight of stairs which leads up to the
+doorway.</p>
+
+<p>As we went down through the narrow, dark, crowded Bazaar a violent storm
+of hail broke over the city, pelting into the little open shops and
+covering the streets half an inch deep with snowy sand and pebbles of
+ice. The tempest was a rude joke, which seemed to surprise the surly
+crowd into a good humour. We laughed with the Moslems as we took shelter
+together from our common misery under a stone archway.</p>
+
+<p>After the storm had passed we ate our midday <!-- Page 100 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page100"></a>[page 100]</span> meal on a
+housetop, which a friend of the dragoman put at our disposal, and rode
+out in the afternoon to the Oak of Abraham on the hill of Mamre. The
+tree is an immense, battered veteran, with a trunk ten feet in diameter,
+and wide-flung, knotted arms which still bear a few leaves and acorns.
+It has been inclosed with a railing, patched up with masonry, partially
+protected by a roof. The Russian monks who live near by have given it
+pious care, yet its inevitable end is surely near.</p>
+
+<p>The death of a great sheltering tree has a kind of dumb pathos. It seems
+like the passing away of something beneficent and helpless, something
+that was able to shield others but not itself.</p>
+
+<p>On this hill, under the oaks of Mamre, Abraham's tents were pitched many
+a year, and here he entertained the three angels unawares, and Sarah
+made pancakes for them, and listened behind the tent-flap while they
+were talking with her husband, and laughed at what they said. This may
+not be the very tree that flung its shadow over the tent, but no doubt
+it is a son or a grandson of that tree, and the acorns that still fall
+from it may be the seeds of <!-- Page 101 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page101"></a>[page 101]</span> other oaks to shelter future
+generations of pilgrims; and so throughout the world, the ancient
+covenant of friendship is unbroken, and man remains a grateful lover of
+the big, kind trees.</p>
+
+<p>We got home to our camp in the green meadow of the springs late in the
+afternoon, and on the third day we rode back to Jerusalem, and pitched
+the tents in a new place, on a hill opposite the Jaffa Gate, with a
+splendid view of the Valley of Hinnom, the Tower of David, and the
+western wall of the city.</p>
+
+<hr />
+<p><!-- Page 102 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page102"></a>[page 102]</span></p>
+
+<h4><i>A PSALM OF FRIENDLY TREES</i></h4>
+
+<p class="noind"><i>I will sing of the bounty of the big trees,<br />
+They are the green tents of the Almighty,<br />
+He hath set them up for comfort and for shelter.</i><br />
+<br />
+<i>Their cords hath he knotted in the earth,<br />
+He hath driven their stakes securely,<br />
+Their roots take hold of the rocks like iron.</i><br />
+<br />
+<i>He sendeth into their bodies the sap of life,<br />
+They lift themselves lightly towards the heavens.<br />
+They rejoice in the broadening of their branches.</i><br />
+<br />
+<i>Their leaves drink in the sunlight and the air,<br />
+They talk softly together when the breeze bloweth,<br />
+Their shadow in the noonday is full of coolness.</i><br />
+<br />
+<i>The tall palm-trees of the plain are rich in fruit,<br />
+While the fruit ripeneth the flower unfoldeth,<br />
+The beauty of their crown is renewed on high forever.</i><br />
+<br />
+<i>The cedars of Lebanon are fed by the snow,<br />
+Afar on the mountain they grow like giants,<br />
+In their layers of shade a thousand years are sighing.</i><br />
+
+<!-- Page 103 --><span class="pagenum2"><a name="page103"></a>[page 103]</span>
+
+<br />
+<i>How fair are the trees that befriend the home of man,<br />
+The oak, and the terebinth, and the sycamore,<br />
+The fruitful fig-tree and the silvery olive.</i><br />
+<br />
+<i>In them the Lord is loving to his little birds,&mdash;<br />
+The linnets and the finches and the nightingales,&mdash;<br />
+They people his pavilions with nests and with music.</i><br />
+<br />
+<i>The cattle are very glad of a great tree,<br />
+They chew the cud beneath it while the sun is burning,<br />
+There also the panting sheep lie down around their shepherd.</i><br />
+<br />
+<i>He that planteth a tree is a servant of God,<br />
+He provideth a kindness for many generations,<br />
+And faces that he hath not seen shall bless him.</i><br />
+<br />
+<i>Lord, when my spirit shall return to thee,<br />
+At the foot of a friendly tree let my body be buried,<br />
+That this dust may rise and rejoice among the branches.</i></p>
+
+<hr />
+<p><!-- Page 104 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page104"></a>[page 104]</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p><!-- Page 105 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page105"></a>[page 105]</span></p>
+
+<h2>VI<br /><br />
+THE TEMPLE AND THE<br />
+SEPULCHRE</h2>
+<hr />
+
+<p><!-- Page 106 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page106"></a>[page 106]</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p><!-- Page 107 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page107"></a>[page 107]</span></p>
+
+<h3>I<br /><br />
+THE DOME OF THE ROCK</h3>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">There</span> is an upward impulse in man that draws him to a hilltop for his
+place of devotion and sanctuary of ascending thoughts. The purer air,
+the wider outlook, the sense of freedom and elevation, help to release
+his spirit from the weight that bends his forehead to the dust. A
+traveller in Palestine, if he had wings, could easily pass through the
+whole land by short flights from the summit of one holy hill to another,
+and look down from a series of mountain-altars upon the wrinkled map of
+sacred history without once descending into the valley or toiling over
+the plain. But since there are no wings provided in the human outfit,
+our journey from shrine to shrine must follow the common way of
+men,&mdash;which is also a symbol,&mdash;the path of up-and-down, and
+many windings, and weary steps.</p>
+
+<p>The oldest of the shrines of Jerusalem is the threshing-floor of Araunah
+the Jebusite, which David <!-- Page 108 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page108"></a>[page 108]</span> bought from him in order that it
+might be made the site of the Temple of Jehovah. No doubt the King knew
+of the traditions which connected the place with ancient and famous
+rites of worship. But I think he was moved also by the commanding beauty
+of the situation, on the very summit of Mount Moriah, looking down into
+the deep Valley of the Kidron.</p>
+
+<p>Our way to this venerable and sacred hill leads through the crooked
+duskiness of David Street, and across the half-filled depression of the
+Tyrop&oelig;on Valley which divides the city, and up through the dim,
+deserted Bazaar of the Cotton Merchants, and so through the central
+western gate of the Haram-esh-Sherîf, "the Noble Sanctuary."</p>
+
+<p>This is a great inclosure, clean, spacious, airy, a place of refuge from
+the foul confusion of the city streets. The wall that shuts us in is
+almost a mile long, and within this open space, which makes an immediate
+effect of breadth and tranquil order, are some of the most sacred
+buildings of Islam and some of the most significant landmarks of
+Christianity.</p>
+
+<p>Slender and graceful arcades are outlined against the clear, blue sky:
+little domes are poised over <!-- Page 109 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page109"></a>[page 109]</span> praying-places and fountains of
+ablution: wide and easy flights of steps lead from one level to another,
+in this park of prayer.</p>
+
+<p>At the southern end, beyond the tall cypresses and the plashing fountain
+fed from Solomon's Pools, stands the long Mosque el-Aksa: to
+Mohammedans, the place to which Allah brought their prophet from Mecca
+in one night; to Christians, the Basilica which the Emperor Justinian
+erected in honor of the Virgin Mary. At the northern end rises the
+ancient wall of the Castle of Antonia, from whose steps Saint Paul,
+protected by the Roman captain, spoke his defence to the Jerusalem mob.
+The steps, hewn partly in the solid rock, are still visible; but the
+site of the castle is occupied by the Turkish barracks, beside which the
+tallest minaret of the Haram lifts its covered gallery high above the
+corner of the great wall.</p>
+
+<p>Yonder to the east is the Golden Gate, above the steep Valley of
+Jehoshaphat. It is closed with great stones; because the Moslem
+tradition says that some Friday a Christian conqueror will enter
+Jerusalem by that gate. Not far away we see the column in the <!-- Page
+110 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page110"></a>[page 110]</span> wall from which the Mohammedans believe a slender
+rope, or perhaps a naked sword, will be stretched, in the judgment day,
+to the Mount of Olives opposite. This, according to them, will be the
+bridge over which all human souls must walk, while Christ sits at one
+end, Mohammed at the other, watching and judging. The righteous, upheld
+by angels, will pass safely; the wicked, heavy with unbalanced sins,
+will fall.</p>
+
+<p>Dominating all these wide-spread relics and shrines, in the centre of
+the inclosure, on a raised platform approached through delicate arcades,
+stands the great Dome of the Rock, built by Abd-el-Melik in 688 A.D., on
+the site of the Jewish Temple. The exterior of the vast octagon, with
+its lower half cased in marble and its upper half incrusted with Persian
+tiles of blue and green, its broad, round lantern and swelling black
+dome surmounted by a glittering crescent, is bathed in full sunlight;
+serene, proud, eloquent of a certain splendid simplicity. Within, the
+light filters dimly through windows of stained glass and falls on marble
+columns, bronzed beams, mosaic walls, screens of wrought iron and carved
+wood. <!-- Page 111 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page111"></a>[page 111]</span> We walk as if through an interlaced forest and
+undergrowth of rich entangled colours. It all seems visionary, unreal,
+fantastic, until we climb the bench by the end of the inner screen and
+look upon the Rock over which the Dome is built.</p>
+
+<p>This is the real thing,&mdash;a plain gray limestone rock, level and
+fairly smooth, the unchanged summit of Mount Moriah. Here the
+priest-king Melchizedek offered sacrifice. Here Abraham, in the cruel
+fervour of his faith, was about to slay his only son Isaac because he
+thought it would please Jehovah. Here Araunah the Jebusite threshed his
+corn on the smooth rock and winnowed it in the winds of the hilltop,
+until King David stepped over from Mount Zion, and bought the
+threshing-floor and the oxen of him for fifty shekels of silver, and
+built in this place an altar to the Lord. Here Solomon erected his
+splendid Temple and the Chaldeans burned it. Here Zerubbabel built the
+second Temple after the return of the Jews from exile, and Antiochus
+Epiphanes desecrated it, and Herod burned part of it and pulled down the
+rest. Here Herod built the third Temple, larger and more magnificent
+than the first, and the <!-- Page 112 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page112"></a>[page 112]</span> soldiers of the Emperor Titus burned
+it. Here the Emperor Hadrian built a temple to Jupiter and himself, and
+some one, perhaps the Christians, burned it. Here Mohammed came to pray,
+declaring that one prayer here was worth a thousand elsewhere. Here the
+Caliph Omar built a little wooden mosque, and the Caliph Abd-el-Melik
+replaced it with this great one of marble, and the Crusaders changed it
+into a Christian temple, and Saladin changed it back again into a
+mosque.</p>
+
+<p>This Haram-esh-Sherîf is the second holiest place in the Moslem world.
+Hither come the Mohammedan pilgrims by thousands, for the sake of
+Mohammed. Hither come the Christian pilgrims by thousands, for the sake
+of Him who said: "Neither in this mountain nor in Jerusalem shall ye
+worship the Father." Hither the Jewish pilgrims never come, for fear
+their feet may unwittingly tread upon "the Holy of Holies," and defile
+it; but they creep outside of the great inclosure, in the gloomy trench
+beside the foundation stones of the wall, mourning and lamenting for the
+majesty that is departed and the Temple that is ground to powder.</p> <p><!--
+Page 113 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page113"></a>[page 113]</span></p> <p>But amid all these changes and perturbations,
+here stands the good old limestone rock, the threshing-floor of Araunah,
+the capstone of the hill, waiting for the sun to shine and the dews to
+fall on it once more, as they did when the foundations of the earth were
+laid.</p>
+
+<p>The legend says that you can hear the waters of the flood roaring in an
+abyss underneath the rock. I laid my ear against the rugged stone and
+listened. What sound? Was it the voice of turbulent centuries and the
+lapsing tides of men?</p>
+
+<hr />
+<h3>II<br /><br />
+GOLGOTHA</h3>
+
+<p>"<span class="smcap">We</span> ought to go again to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre," said the
+Lady in a voice of dutiful reminder, "we have not half seen it." So we
+went down to the heart of Jerusalem and entered the labyrinthine shrine.</p>
+
+<p>The motley crowd in the paved quadrangle in front of the double-arched
+doorway were buying and selling, bickering and chaffering and chattering
+as <!-- Page 114 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page114"></a>[page 114]</span> usual. Within the portal, on a slightly raised platform to
+the left, the Turkish guardians of the holy places and keepers of the
+peace between Christians were seated among their rugs and cushions,
+impassive, indolent, dignified, drinking their coffee or smoking their
+tobacco, conversing gravely or counting the amber beads of their
+comboloios. The Sultan owns the Holy Sepulchre; but he is a liberal host
+and permits all factions of Christendom to visit it and celebrate their
+rites in turn, provided only they do not beat or kill one another in
+their devotions. We saw his silent sentinels of tolerance scattered in
+every part of the vast, confused edifice.</p>
+
+<p>The interior was dim and shadowy. Opposite the entrance was the Stone of
+Unction, a marble slab on which it is said the body of Christ was
+anointed when it was taken down from the cross. Pilgrim after pilgrim
+came kneeling to this stone, and bending to kiss it, beneath the Latin,
+Greek, Armenian and Coptic lamps which hang above it by silver chains.</p>
+
+<p>The Chapel of the Crucifixion was on our right, above us, in the second
+story of the church. We <!-- Page 115 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page115"></a>[page 115]</span> climbed the steep flight of stairs
+and stood in a little room, close, obscure, crowded with lamps and icons
+and candelabra, incrusted with ornaments of gold and silver, full of
+strange odours and glimmerings of mystic light. There, they told us, in
+front of that rich altar was the silver star which marked the place in
+the rock where the Holy Cross stood. And on either side of it were the
+sockets which received the crosses of the two thieves. And a few feet
+away, covered by a brass slide, was the cleft in the rock which was made
+by the earthquake. It was lined with slabs of reddish marble and looked
+nearly a foot deep.</p>
+
+<p>Priests in black robes and tall, cylindrical hats, and others with brown
+robes, rope girdles and tonsured heads, were coming and going around us.
+Pilgrims were climbing and descending the stairs, kneeling and murmuring
+unintelligible devotions, kissing the star and the cleft in the rock and
+the icons. Underneath us, though we were supposed to stand on the hill
+called Golgotha, were the offices of the Greek clergy and the Chapel of
+Adam.</p>
+
+<p>We went around from chapel to chapel; into the <!-- Page 116 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page116"></a>[page 116]</span> opulent Greek
+cathedral where they show the "Centre of the World"; into the bare
+little Chapel of the Syrians where they show the tombs of Nicodemus and
+Joseph of Arimathæa; into the Chapel of the Apparition where the
+Franciscans say that Christ appeared to His mother after the
+resurrection. There was sweet singing in this chapel and a fragrant
+smell of incense. We went into the Chapel of Saint Helena, underground,
+which belongs to the Greeks; into the Chapel of the Parting of the
+Raiment which belongs to the Armenians. We were impartial in our
+visitation, but we did not have time to see the Abyssinian Chapel, the
+Coptic Chapel of Saint Michael, nor the Church of Abraham where the
+Anglicans are allowed to celebrate the eucharist twice a month.</p>
+
+<p>The centre of all this maze of creeds, ceremonies and devotions is the
+Chapel of the Holy Sepulchre, a little edifice of precious marbles,
+carved and gilded, standing beneath the great dome of the church, in the
+middle of a rotunda surrounded by marble pillars. We bought and lighted
+our waxen tapers and waited for a lull in the stream of pilgrims to
+enter <!-- Page 117 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page117"></a>[page 117]</span> the shrine. First we stood in the vestibule with its
+tall candelabra; then in the Angels' Chapel, with its fifteen swinging
+lamps, making darkness visible; then, stooping through a low doorway, we
+came into the tiny chamber, six feet square, which is said to contain
+the rock-hewn tomb in which the Saviour of the World was buried.</p>
+
+<p>Mass is celebrated here daily by different Christian sects. Pilgrims,
+rich and poor, come hither from all parts of the habitable globe. They
+kneel beneath the three-and-forty pendent lamps of gold and silver. They
+kiss the worn slab of marble which covers the tombstone, some of them
+smiling with joy, some of them weeping bitterly, some of them with
+quiet, business-like devotion as if they were performing a duty. The
+priest of their faith blesses them, sprinkles the relics which they lay
+on the altar with holy water, and one by one the pilgrims retire
+backward through the low portal.</p>
+
+<p>I saw a Russian peasant, sad-eyed, wrinkled, bent with many sorrows, lay
+his cheek silently on the tombstone with a look on his face as if he
+were a child leaning against his mother's breast. I saw a <!-- Page 118 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page118"></a>[page 118]</span>
+little barefoot boy of Jerusalem, with big, serious eyes, come quickly
+in, and try to kiss the stone; but it was too high for him, so he kissed
+his hand and laid it upon the altar. I saw a young nun, hardly more than
+a girl, slender, pale, dark-eyed, with a noble Italian face, shaken with
+sobs, the tears running down her cheeks, as she bent to touch her lips
+to the resting-place of the Friend of Sinners.</p>
+
+<p>This, then, is the way in which the craving for penitence, for
+reverence, for devotion, for some utterance of the nameless thirst and
+passion of the soul leads these pilgrims. This is the form in which the
+divine mystery of sacrificial sorrow and death appeals to them, speaks
+to their hearts and comforts them.</p>
+
+<p>Could any Christian of whatever creed, could any son of woman with a
+heart to feel the trouble and longing of humanity, turn his back upon
+that altar? Must I not go away from that mysterious little room as the
+others had gone, with my face toward the stone of remembrance, stooping
+through the lowly door?</p>
+
+<p>And yet&mdash;and yet in my deepest heart I was <!-- Page 119 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page119"></a>[page 119]</span> thirsty for
+the open air, the blue sky, the pure sunlight, the tranquillity of large
+and silent spaces.</p>
+
+<p>The Lady went with me across the crowded quadrangle into the cool,
+clean, quiet German Church of the Redeemer. We climbed to the top of the
+lofty bell tower.</p>
+
+<p>Jerusalem lay at our feet, with its network of streets and lanes,
+archways and convent walls, domes small and great&mdash;the black Dome
+of the Rock in the centre of its wide inclosure, the red dome and the
+green dome of the Jewish synagogues on Mount Zion, the seven gilded
+domes of the Russian Church of Saint Mary Magdalen, a hundred tiny domes
+of dwelling-houses, and right in front of us the yellow dome of the
+Greek "Centre of the World" and the black dome of the Holy Sepulchre.</p>
+
+<p>The quadrangle was still full of people buying and selling, but the
+murmur of their voices was faint and far away, less loud than the
+twittering of the thousands of swallows that soared and circled, with
+glistening of innumerable blue-black wings and soft sheen of white
+breasts, in the tender light of sunset above the façade of the gray old
+church.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 120 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page120"></a>[page 120]</span></p>
+
+<p>Westward the long ridge of Olivet was bathed in the
+rays of the declining sun.</p>
+
+<p>Northward, beyond the city-gate, the light fell softly on a little rocky
+hill, shaped like a skull, the ancient place of stoning for those whom
+the cruel city had despised and rejected and cast out. At the foot of
+that eminence there is a quiet garden and a tomb hewn in the rock.
+Rosemary and rue grow there, roses and lilies; birds sing among the
+trees. Is not that little rounded hill, still touched with the free
+light of heaven, still commanding a clear outlook over the city to the
+Mount of Olives&mdash;is not that the true Golgotha, where Christ was
+lifted up?</p>
+
+<p>As we were thinking of this we saw a man come out on the roof of the
+Greek "Centre of the World," and climb by a ladder up the side of the
+huge dome. He went slowly and carefully, yet with confidence, as if the
+task were familiar. He carried a lantern in one hand. He was going to
+the top of the dome to light up the great cross for the night. We spoke
+no word, but each knew the thought that was in the other's heart.</p>
+
+<p><!--Page 121 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page121"></a>[page 121]</span></p>
+
+<p>Wherever the crucifixion took place, it was
+surely in the open air, beneath the wide sky, and the cross that stood
+on Golgotha has become the light at the centre of the world's night.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 122 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page122"></a>[page 122]</span></p>
+
+<hr />
+<h4><i>A PSALM OF THE UNSEEN ALTAR</i></h4>
+
+<p class="noind"><i>Man the maker of cities is also a builder of altars:<br />
+Among his habitations he setteth tables for his god.</i><br />
+<br />
+<i>He bringeth the beauty of the rocks to enrich them:<br />
+Marble and alabaster, porphyry, jasper and jade.</i><br />
+<br />
+<i>He cometh with costly gifts to offer an oblation:<br />
+He would buy favour with the fairest of his flock.</i><br />
+<br />
+<i>Around the many altars I hear strange music arising:<br />
+Loud lamentations and shouting and singing and sighs.</i><br />
+<br />
+<i>I perceive also the pain and terror of their sacrifices:<br />
+I see the white marble wet with tears and with blood.</i><br />
+<br />
+<i>Then I said, These are the altars of ignorance:<br />
+Yet they are built by thy children, O God, who know thee not.</i><br />
+<br />
+<i>Surely thou wilt have pity upon them and lead them:<br />
+Hast thou not prepared for them a table of peace?</i><br />
+<br />
+
+<!-- Page 123 --><span class="pagenum2"><a name="page123"></a>[page 123]</span>
+
+<i>Then the Lord mercifully sent his angel forth to lead me:<br />
+He led me through the temples, the holy place that is hidden.</i><br />
+<br />
+<i>Lo, there are multitudes kneeling in the silence of the spirit:<br />
+They are kneeling at the unseen altar of the lowly heart.</i><br />
+<br />
+<i>Here is plentiful forgiveness for the souls that are forgiving:<br />
+And the joy of life is given unto all who long to give.</i><br />
+<br />
+<i>Here a Father's hand upholdeth all who bear each other's burdens:<br />
+And the benediction falleth upon all who pray in love.</i><br />
+<br />
+<i>Surely this is the altar where the penitent find pardon:<br />
+And the priest who hath blessed it forever is the Holy One of God.</i></p>
+
+<hr />
+<p><!-- Page 124 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page124"></a>[page 124]</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p><!-- Page 125 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page125"></a>[page 125]</span></p>
+
+<h2>VII<br /><br />
+JERICHO AND JORDAN</h2>
+<hr />
+
+<p><!-- Page 126 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page126"></a>[page 126]</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p><!-- Page 127 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page127"></a>[page 127]</span></p>
+
+<h3>I<br /><br />
+"GOING DOWN TO JERICHO"</h3>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">In</span> the memory of every visitor to Jerusalem the excursion to Jericho is
+a vivid point. For this is the one trip which everybody makes, and it is
+a convention of the route to regard it as a perilous and exciting
+adventure. Perhaps it is partly this flavour of a not-too-dangerous
+danger, this shivering charm of a hazard to be taken without too much
+risk, that attracts the average tourist, prudently romantic, to make the
+journey to the lowest inhabited town in the world.</p>
+
+<p>Jericho has always had an ill name. Weak walls, weak hearts, weak morals
+were its early marks. Sweltering on the rich plain of the lower Jordan,
+eight hundred feet below the sea, at the entrance of the two chief
+passes into the Judean highlands, it was too indolent or cowardly to
+maintain its own importance. Stanley called it "the key of Palestine";
+but it was only a latch which any bold invader could <!-- Page 128 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page128"></a>[page 128]</span> lift.
+The people of Jericho were famous for light fingers and lively feet,
+great robbers and runners-away. Joshua blotted the city out with a
+curse; five centuries later Hiel the Bethelite rebuilt it with the
+bloody sacrifice of his two sons. Antony gave it to Cleopatra, and Herod
+bought it from her for a winter palace, where he died. Nothing fine or
+brave, so far as I can remember, is written of any of its inhabitants,
+except the good deed of Rahab, a harlot, and the honest conduct of
+Zacchæus, a publican. To this day, at the <i>tables d'hôte</i> of Jerusalem
+the name of Jericho stirs up a little whirlwind of bad stories and
+warnings.</p>
+
+<p>Last night we were dining with friends at one of the hotels, and the
+usual topic came up for discussion. Imagine what followed.</p>
+
+<p>"That Jericho road is positively frightful," says a British female
+tourist in lace cap, lilac ribbons and a maroon poplin dress, "the heat
+is most extr'ordinary!"</p>
+
+<p>"No food fit to eat at the hotel," grumbles her husband, a rosy,
+bald-headed man in plaid knickerbockers, "no bottled beer; beastly
+little hole!"</p> <p><!-- Page 129 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page129"></a>[page 129]</span></p> <p>"A voyage of the most fatiguing, of the most
+perilous, I assure you," says a little Frenchman with a forked beard.
+"But I rejoice myself of the adventure, of the romance accomplished."</p>
+
+<p>"I want to know," piped a lady in a green shirt-waist from Andover,
+Mass., "is there really and truly any danger?"</p>
+
+<p>"I guess not for us," answers the dominating voice of the conductor of
+her party. "There's always a bunch of robbers on that road, but I have
+hired the biggest man of the bunch to take care of us. Just wait till
+you see that dandy Sheikh in his best clothes; he looks like a museum of
+old weapons."</p>
+
+<p>"Have you heard," interposed a lady-like clergyman on the other side of
+the table, with gold-rimmed spectacles gleaming above his high, black
+waistcoat, "what happened on the Jericho road, week before last? An
+English gentleman, of very good family, imprudently taking a short cut,
+became separated from his companions. The Bedouins fell upon him, beat
+him quite painfully, deprived him of his watch and several necessary
+garments, and left him prostrate upon the earth, in an embarrassingly
+denuded <!-- Page 130 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page130"></a>[page 130]</span> condition. Just fancy! Was it not perfectly
+shocking?" (The clergyman's voice was full of delicious horror.) "But,
+after all," he resumed with a beaming smile, "it was most scriptural,
+you know, quite like a Providential confirmation of Holy Writ!"</p>
+
+<p>"Most unpleasant for the Englishman," growls the man in knickerbockers.
+"But what can you expect under this rotten Turkish government?"</p>
+
+<p>"I know a story about Jericho," begins a gentleman from Colorado, with a
+hay-coloured moustache and a droop in his left eyelid&mdash;and then
+follows a series of tales about that ill-reputed town and the road
+thither, which leave the lady in the lace cap gasping, and the man with
+the forked beard visibly swelling with pride at having made the journey,
+and the little woman in the green shirt-waist quivering with exquisite
+fears and mentally clinging with both arms to the personal conductor of
+her party, who looks becomingly virile, and exchanges a surreptitious
+wink with the gentleman from Colorado.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, I am not willing to make an affidavit to the correctness of
+every word in this conversation; but I can testify that it fairly
+represents the <i>Jericho-motif</i> <!-- Page 131 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page131"></a>[page 131]</span> as you may hear it played
+almost any night in the Jerusalem hotels. It sounded to us partly like
+an echo of ancient legends kept alive by dragomans and officials for
+purposes of revenue, and partly like an outcrop of the hysterical habit
+in people who travel in flocks and do nothing without much palaver. In
+our quiet camp, George the Bethlehemite assured us that the sheikhs were
+"humbugs," and an escort of soldiers a nuisance. So we placidly made our
+preparations to ride on the morrow, with no other safeguards than our
+friendly dispositions and a couple of excellent American revolvers.</p>
+
+<p>But it was no brief <i>Ausflug</i> to Jericho and return that we had before
+us: it was the beginning of a long and steady ride, weeks in the saddle,
+from six to nine hours a day.</p>
+
+<p>Imagine us then, morning after morning, mounting somewhere between six
+and eight o'clock, according to the weather and the length of the
+journey, and jingling out of camp, followed at a discreet distance by
+Youssouf on his white pony with the luncheon, and Paris on his tiny
+donkey, Tiddly-winks. About noon, sometimes a little earlier, <!-- Page
+132 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page132"></a>[page 132]</span> sometimes a little later, the white pony catches up
+with us, and the tent and the rugs are spread for the midday meal and
+the <i>siesta</i>. It may be in our dreams, or while the Lady is reading from
+some pleasant book, or while the smoke of the afternoon pipe of peace is
+ascending, that we hear the musical bells of our long baggage-train go
+by us on the way to our night-quarters.</p>
+
+<p>The evening ride is always shorter than the morning, sometimes only an
+hour or two in the saddle; and at the end of it there is the surprise of
+a new camp ground, the comfortable tents, the refreshing bath tub, the
+quiet dinner by sunset-glow or candle-light. Then a bit of friendly talk
+over the walnuts and the "Treasure of Zion"; a cup of fragrant Turkish
+coffee; and George enters the door of the tent to report on the
+condition of things in general, and to discuss the plan of the next
+day's journey.</p>
+
+<hr />
+<p><!-- Page 133 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page133"></a>[page 133]</span></p>
+
+<h3>II<br /><br />
+THE GOOD SAMARITAN'S ROAD</h3>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">It</span> is strange how every day, no matter in what mood of merry jesting or
+practical modernity we set out, an hour of riding in the open air brings
+us back to the mystical charm of the Holy Land and beneath the spell of
+its memories and dreams. The wild hillsides, the flowers of the field,
+the shimmering olive-groves, the brown villages, the crumbling ruins,
+the deep-blue sky, subdue us to themselves and speak to us "rememberable
+things."</p>
+
+<p>We pass down the Valley of the Brook Kidron, where no water ever flows;
+and through the crowd of beggars and loiterers and pilgrims at the
+crossroads; and up over the shoulder of the Mount of Olives, past the
+wide-spread Jewish burying-ground, where we take our last look at the
+towers and domes and minarets and walls of Jerusalem. The road descends
+gently, on the other side of the hill, to Bethany, a disconsolate group
+of hovels. The sweet home of Mary and Martha is gone. It is a waste of
+time to look at the uncertain ruins which are shown <!-- Page 134 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page134"></a>[page 134]</span> here as
+sacred sites. Look rather at the broad landscape eastward and southward,
+the luminous blue sky, the joyful little flowers on the rocky
+slopes,&mdash;these are unchanged.</p>
+
+<p>Not far beyond Bethany, the road begins to drop, with great windings,
+into a deep, desolate valley, crowded with pilgrims afoot and on
+donkey-back and in ramshackle carriages,&mdash;Russians and Greeks
+returning from their sacred bath in the Jordan. Here and there, at
+first, we can see a shepherd with his flock upon the haggard hillside.</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+<span class="i0">"As for the grass, it grew as scant as hair<br /></span>
+<span class="i4">In leprosy."</span></p>
+
+<p>Once the Patriarch and I, scrambling on foot down a short-cut, think we
+see a Bedouin waiting for us behind a rock, with his long gun over his
+shoulder; but it turns out to be only a brown little peasant girl,
+ragged and smiling, watching her score of lop-eared goats.</p>
+
+<p>As the valley descends the landscape becomes more and more arid and
+stricken. The heat broods over it like a disease.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 135 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page135"></a>[page 135]</span></p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+<span class="i6">"I think I never saw<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Such starved, ignoble nature; nothing throve;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For flowers&mdash;as well expect a cedar grove!"</span></p>
+
+<p>We might be on the way with Childe Roland to the Dark Tower. But instead
+we come, about noon, through a savage glen beset with blood-red rocks
+and honeycombed with black caves on the other side of the ravine, to the
+so-called "Inn of the Good Samaritan."</p>
+
+<p>The local colour of the parable surrounds us. Here is a fitting scene
+for such a drama of lawless violence, cowardly piety, and unconventional
+mercy. In these caverns robbers could hide securely. On this wild road
+their victim might lie and bleed to death. By these paths across the
+glen the priest and the Levite could "pass by on the other side,"
+discreetly turning their heads away from any interruption to their
+selfish duties. And in some such wayside khân as this, standing like a
+lonely fortress among the sun-baked hills, the friendly half-heathen
+from Samaria could safely leave the stranger whom he had rescued,
+provided he paid at least a part of his lodging in advance.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 136 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page136"></a>[page 136]</span></p>
+
+<p>We eat our luncheon in one of the three big, disorderly rooms of the
+inn, and go on, in the cool of the afternoon, toward Jericho. The road
+still descends steeply, among ragged and wrinkled hills. On our left we
+look down into the Wâdi el-Kelt, a gloomy gorge five or six hundred feet
+deep, with a stream of living water singing between its prison walls.
+Tradition calls this the Brook Cherith, where Elijah hid himself from
+Ahab, and was fed by Arabs of a tribe called "the Ravens." But the
+prophet's hiding-place was certainly on the other side of the Jordan,
+and this Wâdi is probably the Valley of Achor, spoken of in the Book of
+Joshua. On the opposite side of the cañon, half-way down the face of the
+precipice, clings the monastery of Saint George, one of the pious
+penitentiaries to which the Greek Church assigns unruly and criminal
+monks.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 315px; ">
+<img src="images/illus06.jpg" width="315" height="500" alt="Great Monastery of St. George." title="Great Monastery of St. George." />
+<span class="caption">Great Monastery of St. George.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>As we emerge from the narrow valley a great view opens before us: to the
+right, the blue waters of the Dead Sea, like a mirror of burnished
+steel; in front, the immense plain of the Jordan, with the dark-green
+ribbon of the river-jungle winding through its length and the purple
+mountains of Gilead and <!-- Page 137 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page137"></a>[page 137]</span> Moab towering beyond it; to the left,
+the furrowed gray and yellow ridges and peaks of the northern
+"wilderness" of Judea, the wild country into which Jesus retired alone
+after the baptism by John in the Jordan.</p>
+
+<p>One of these peaks, the Quarantana, is supposed to be the "high
+mountain" from which the Tempter showed Jesus the "kingdoms of the
+world." In the foreground of that view, sweeping from the snowy summits
+of Hermon in the north, past the Greek cities of Pella and Scythopolis,
+down the vast valley with its wealth of palms and balsams, must have
+stood the Roman city of Jericho, with its imperial farms and the
+palaces, baths and theatres of Herod the Great,&mdash;a visible image of
+what Christ might have won for Himself if He had yielded to the
+temptation and turned from the pathway of spiritual light to follow the
+shadows of earthly power and glory.</p>
+
+<p>Herod's Jericho has vanished; there is nothing left of it but the
+outline of one of the great pools which he built to irrigate his
+gardens. The modern Jericho is an unhappy little adobe village, lying a
+<!-- Page 138 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page138"></a>[page 138]</span> mile or so farther to the east. A mile to the north, near a
+copious fountain of pure water, called the Sultan's Spring, is the site
+of the oldest Jericho, which Joshua conquered and Hiel rebuilt. The
+spring, which is probably the same that Elisha cleansed with salt (II
+Kings ii: 19-22), sends forth a merry stream to turn a mill and irrigate
+a group of gardens full of oranges, figs, bananas, grapes, feathery
+bamboos and rosy oleanders. But the ancient city is buried under a great
+mound of earth, which the German <i>Palästina-Verein</i> is now excavating.</p>
+
+<p>As we come up to the mound I pull out my little camera and prepare to
+take a picture of the hundred or so dusty Arabs&mdash;men, women and
+children&mdash;who are at work in the trenches. A German <i>gelehrter</i> in
+a very excited state rushes up to me and calls upon me to halt, in the
+name of the Emperor. The taking of pictures by persons not imperially
+authorised is <i>streng verboten</i>. He is evidently prepared to be abusive,
+if not actually violent, until I assure him, in the best German that I
+can command, that I have no political or archæological intentions, and
+that if the photographing of his picturesque work-people to him <!--
+Page 139 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page139"></a>[page 139]</span> displeasing is, I will my camera immediately in
+its pocket put. This mollifies him, and he politely shows us what he is
+doing.</p>
+
+<p>A number of ruined houses, and a sort of central temple, with a rude
+flight of steps leading up to it, have been discovered. A portion of
+what seems to be the city-wall has just been laid bare. If there are any
+inscriptions or relics of any value they are kept secret; but there is
+plenty of broken pottery of a common kind. It is all very poor and
+beggarly looking; no carving nor even any hewn stones. The buildings
+seem to be of rubble, and "the walls of Jericho" are little better than
+the stone fences on a Connecticut farm. No wonder they fell down at the
+blast of Joshua's rams' horns and the rush of his fierce tribesmen.</p>
+
+<p>We ride past the gardens and through the shady lanes to our camp, on the
+outskirts of the modern village. The air is heavy and languid, full of
+relaxing influence, an air of sloth and luxury, seeming to belong to
+some strange region below the level of human duty and effort as far as
+it is below the level of the sea. The fragrance of the orange-blossoms,
+like a subtle <!-- Page 140 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page140"></a>[page 140]</span> incense of indulgence, floats on the evening
+breeze. Veiled figures pass us in the lanes, showing lustrous eyes. A
+sound of Oriental music and laughter and clapping hands comes from one
+of the houses in an inclosure hedged with acacia-trees. We sit in the
+door of our tent at sundown and dream of the vanished palm-groves, the
+gardens of Cleopatra, the palaces of Herod, the soft, ignoble history of
+that region of fertility and indolence, rich in harvests, poor in
+manhood.</p>
+
+<p>Then it seems as if some one were saying, "I will lift up mine eyes unto
+the hills, from whence cometh my help." There they stand, all about us:
+eastward, the great purple ranges of Gad and Reuben, from which Elijah
+the Tishbite descended to rebuke and warn Israel; westward, against the
+saffron sky, the ridges and peaks of Judea, among which Amos and
+Jeremiah saw their lofty visions; northward, the clear-cut pinnacle of
+Sartoba, and far away beyond it the dim outlines of the Galilean hills
+from which Jesus of Nazareth came down to open blind eyes and to
+shepherd wandering souls. With the fading of the sunset glow a deep blue
+comes upon all the mountains, <!-- Page 141 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page141"></a>[page 141]</span> a blue which strangely seems to
+grow paler as the sky above them darkens, sinking down upon them through
+infinite gradations of azure into something mysterious and
+indescribable, not a color, not a shadow, not a light, but a secret
+hyaline illumination which transforms them into aerial battlements and
+ramparts, on whose edge the great stars rest and flame, the watch-fires
+of the Eternal.</p>
+
+<hr />
+<h3>III<br /><br />
+"PASSING OVER JORDAN"</h3>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">I have</span> often wondered why the Jordan, which plays such an important part
+in the history of the Hebrews, receives so little honour and praise in
+their literature. Sentimental travellers and poets of other races have
+woven a good deal of florid prose and verse about the name of this
+river. There is no doubt that it is the chief stream of Palestine, the
+only one, in fact, that deserves to be called a river. Yet the Bible has
+no song of loving pride for the Jordan; no tender and beautiful words to
+describe it; no record of the longing of exiled Jews to return to the
+banks of <!-- Page 142 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page142"></a>[page 142]</span> their own river and hear again the voice of its
+waters. At this strange silence I have wondered much, not knowing the
+reason of it. Now I know.</p>
+
+<p>The Jordan is not a little river to be loved: it is a barrier to be
+passed over. From its beginning in the marshes of Huleh to its end in
+the Dead Sea, (excepting only the lovely interval of the Lake of
+Galilee), this river offers nothing to man but danger and difficulty,
+perplexity and trouble. Fierce and sullen and intractable, it flows
+through a long depression, at the bottom of which it has dug for itself
+a still deeper crooked ditch, along the Eastern border of Galilee and
+Samaria and Judea, as if it wished to cut them off completely. There are
+no pleasant places along its course, no breezy forelands where a man
+might build a house with a fair outlook over flowing water, no rich and
+tranquil coves where the cattle would love to graze, or stand knee-deep
+in the quiet stream. There is no sense of leisure, of refreshment, of
+kind companionship and friendly music about the Jordan. It is in a hurry
+and a secret rage. Yet there is something powerful, self-reliant,
+inevitable about it. In thousands of years <!-- Page 143 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page143"></a>[page 143]</span> it has changed
+less than any river in the world. It is a flowing, everlasting symbol of
+division, of separation: a river of solemn meetings and partings like
+that of Elijah and Elisha, of Jesus and John the Baptist: a type of the
+narrow stream of death. It seems to say to man, "Cross me if you will,
+if you can; and then go your way."</p>
+
+<p>The road that leads us from Jericho toward the river is pleasant enough,
+at first, for the early sunlight is gentle and caressing, and there is a
+cool breeze moving across the plain. It is hard to believe that we are
+eight hundred feet below the sea this morning, and still travelling
+downward. The lush fields of barley, watered by many channels from the
+brook Kelt, are waving and glistening around us. Quails are running
+along the edge of the road, appearing and disappearing among the thick
+grain-stalks. The bulbuls warble from the thorn-bushes, and a crested
+hoopoo croons in a jujube-tree. Larks are on the wing, scattering music.</p>
+
+<p>We are on the upper edge of that great belt of sunken land between the
+mountains of Gilead and the mountains of Ephraim and Judah, which
+reaches <!-- Page 144 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page144"></a>[page 144]</span> from the Lake of Galilee to the Dead Sea, and which
+the Arabs call <i>El-Ghôr</i>, the "Rift." It is a huge trench, from three to
+fourteen miles wide, sinking from six hundred feet below the level of
+the Mediterranean, at the northern end, to thirteen hundred feet below,
+at the southern end. The surface is fairly level, sloping gently from
+each side toward the middle, and the soil is of an inexhaustible
+fertility, yielding abundant crops wherever it is patiently irrigated
+from the streams which flow out of the mountains east and west, but
+elsewhere lying baked and arid under the heavy, close, feverous air. No
+strong race has ever inhabited this trench as a home; no great cities
+have ever grown here, and its civilization, such as it had, was a
+hot-bed product, soon ripe and quickly rotten.</p>
+
+<p>We have passed beyond the region of greenness already; the little
+water-brooks have ceased to gleam through the grain: the wild grasses
+and weeds have a parched and yellow look: the freshness of the early
+morning has vanished, and we are descending through a desolate land of
+sour and leprous hills of clay and marl, eroded by the floods into
+fantastic <!-- Page 145 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page145"></a>[page 145]</span> shapes, furrowed and scarred and scabbed with
+mineral refuse. The gullies are steep and narrow: the heat settles on
+them like a curse.</p>
+
+<p>Through this battered and crippled region, the centre of the Jordan
+Valley, runs the Jordan Bed, twisting like a big green serpent. A dense
+half-tropical jungle, haunted by wild beasts and poisonous reptiles and
+insects, conceals, almost at every point, the down-rushing, swirling,
+yellow flood.</p>
+
+<p>It has torn and desolated its own shores with sudden spates. The feet of
+the pilgrims who bathe in it sink into the mud as they wade out
+waist-deep, and if they venture beyond the shelter of the bank the
+whirling eddies threaten to sweep them away. The fords are treacherous,
+with shifting bottom and changing currents. The poets and prophets of
+the Old Testament give us a true idea of this uninhabitable and
+unlovable river-bed when they speak of "the pride of Jordan," "the
+swellings of Jordan," where the lion hides among the reeds in his secret
+lair, a "refuge of lies," which the "overflowing scourge" shall sweep
+away.</p>
+
+<p>No, it was not because the Jordan was beautiful <!-- Page 146 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page146"></a>[page 146]</span> that John the
+Baptist chose it as the scene of his preaching and ministry, but because
+it was wild and rude, an emblem of violent and sudden change, of
+irrevocable parting, of death itself, and because in its one gift of
+copious and unfailing water, he found the necessary element for his deep
+baptism of repentance, in which the sinful past of the crowd who
+followed him was to be symbolically immersed and buried and washed away.</p>
+
+<p>At the place where we reach the water there is an open bit of ground; a
+miserable hovel gives shelter to two or three Turkish soldiers; an
+ungainly latticed bridge, stilted on piles of wood, straddles the river
+with a single span. The toll is three piastres, (about twelve cents,)
+for a man and horse.</p>
+
+<p>The only place from which I can take a photograph of the river is the
+bridge itself, so I thrust the camera through one of the diamond-shaped
+openings on the lattice-work and try to make a truthful record of the
+lower Jordan at its best. Imagine the dull green of the tangled
+thickets, the ragged clumps of reeds and water-grasses, the sombre and
+silent flow of the fulvous water sliding and curling down <!-- Page 147 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page147"></a>[page 147]</span> out
+of the jungle, and the implacable fervour of the pallid, searching
+sunlight heightening every touch of ugliness and desolation, and you
+will understand why the Hebrew poets sang no praise of the Jordan, and
+why Naaman the Syrian thought scorn of it when he remembered the lovely
+and fruitful rivers of Damascus.</p>
+
+<hr />
+<p><!-- Page 148 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page148"></a>[page 148]</span></p>
+
+<h4><i>A PSALM OF RIVERS</i></h4>
+
+<p class="noind"><i>The rivers of God are full of water:<br />
+They are wonderful in the renewal of their strength:<br />
+He poureth them out from a hidden fountain.</i><br />
+<br />
+<i>They are born among the hills in the high places:<br />
+Their cradle is in the bosom of the rocks:<br />
+The mountain is their mother and the forest is their father.</i><br />
+<br />
+<i>They are nourished among the long grasses:<br />
+They receive the tribute of a thousand springs:<br />
+The rain and the snow are a heritage for them.</i><br />
+<br />
+<i>They are glad to be gone from their birthplace:<br />
+With a joyful noise they hasten away:<br />
+They are going forever and never departed.</i><br />
+<br />
+<i>The courses of the rivers are all appointed:<br />
+They roar loudly but they follow the road:<br />
+The finger of God hath marked their pathway.</i><br />
+<br />
+<i>The rivers of Damascus rejoice among their gardens:<br />
+The great river of Egypt is proud of his ships:<br />
+The Jordan is lost in the Lake of Bitterness.</i><br />
+<br />
+
+<!-- Page 149 --><span class="pagenum2"><a name="page149"></a>[page 149]</span>
+
+<i>Surely the Lord guideth them every one in his wisdom:<br />
+In the end he gathereth all their drops on high:<br />
+He sendeth them forth again in the clouds of mercy.</i><br />
+<br />
+<i>O my God, my life runneth away like a river:<br />
+Guide me, I beseech thee, in a pathway of good:<br />
+Let me flow in blessing to my rest in thee.</i></p>
+
+<hr />
+<p><!-- Page 150 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page150"></a>[page 150]</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p><!-- Page 151 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page151"></a>[page 151]</span></p>
+
+<h2>VIII<br /><br />
+A JOURNEY TO JERASH</h2>
+<hr />
+
+<p><!-- Page 152 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page152"></a>[page 152]</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p><!-- Page 153 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page153"></a>[page 153]</span></p>
+
+<h3>I<br /><br />
+THROUGH THE LAND OF GILEAD</h3>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">I never</span> heard of Jerash until my friend the Archæologist told me about
+it, one night when we were sitting beside my study fire at Avalon. "It
+is the site of the old city of Gerasa," said he. "The most satisfactory
+ruins that I have ever seen."</p>
+
+<p>There was something suggestive and potent in that phrase, "satisfactory
+ruins." For what is it that weaves the charm of ruins? What do we ask of
+them to make their magic complete and satisfying? There must be an
+element of picturesqueness, certainly, to take the eye with pleasure in
+the contrast between the frailty of man's works and the imperishable
+loveliness of nature. There must also be an element of age; for new
+ruins are painful, disquieting, intolerable; they speak of violence and
+disorder; it is not until the bloom of antiquity gathers upon them that
+the relics of vast and splendid edifices attract us and subdue us with a
+spell, breathing <!-- Page 154 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page154"></a>[page 154]</span> tranquillity and noble thoughts. There must
+also be an element of magnificence in decay, of symmetry broken but not
+destroyed, a touch of delicate art and workmanship, to quicken the
+imagination and evoke the ghost of beauty haunting her ancient
+habitations. And beyond these things I think there must be two more
+qualities in a ruin that satisfies us: a clear connection with the
+greatness and glory of the past, with some fine human achievement, with
+some heroism of men dead and gone; and last of all, a spirit of mystery,
+the secret of some unexplained catastrophe, the lost link of a story
+never to be fully told.</p>
+
+<p>This, or something like it, was what the Archæologist's phrase seemed to
+promise me as we watched the glowing embers on the hearth of Avalon. And
+it is this promise that has drawn me, with my three friends, on this
+April day into the Land of Gilead, riding to Jerash.</p>
+
+<p>The grotesque and rickety bridge by which we have crossed the Jordan
+soon disappears behind us, as we trot along the winding bridle-path
+through the river-jungle, in the stifling heat. Coming out on the <!--
+Page 155 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page155"></a>[page 155]</span> open plain, which rises gently toward the east,
+we startle great flocks of storks into the air, and they swing away in
+languid circles, dappling the blaze of morning with their black-tipped
+wings. Grotesque, ungainly, gothic birds, they do not seem to belong to
+the Orient, but rather to have drifted hither out of some quaint,
+familiar fairy tale of the North; and indeed they are only transient
+visitors here, and will soon be on their way to build their nests on the
+roofs of German villages and clapper their long, yellow bills over the
+joy of houses full of little children.</p>
+
+<p>The rains of spring have spread a thin bloom of green over the plain.
+Tender herbs and light grasses partly veil the gray and stony ground.
+There is a month of scattered feeding for the flocks and herds. Away to
+the south, where the foot-hills begin to roll up suddenly from the
+Jordan, we can see a black line of Bedouin tents quivering through the
+heat.</p>
+
+<p>Now the trail divides, and we take the northern fork, turning soon into
+the open mouth of the Wâdi Shaîb, a broad, grassy valley between high
+and treeless hills. The watercourse that winds down the <!-- Page 156 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page156"></a>[page 156]</span>
+middle of it is dry: nothing but a tumbled bed of gray rocks,mdash;the
+bare bones of a little river. But as we ascend slowly the flowers
+increase; wild hollyhocks, and morning-glories, and clumps of blue
+anchusa, and scarlet adonis, and tall wands of white asphodel.</p>
+
+<p>The morning grows hotter and hotter as we plod along. Presently we come
+up with three mounted Arabs, riding leisurely. Salutations are exchanged
+with gravity. Then the Arabs whisper something to each other and spur
+away at a great pace ahead of us&mdash;laughing. Why did they laugh?</p>
+
+<p>Ah, now we know. For here is a lofty cliff on one side of the valley,
+hanging over just far enough to make a strip of cool shade at its base,
+with ferns and deep grass and a glimmer of dripping water. And here our
+wise Arabs are sitting at their ease to eat their mid-day meal under
+"the shadow of a great rock in a weary land."</p>
+
+<p>Vainly we search the valley for another rock like that. It is the only
+one; and the Arabs laughed because they knew it. We must content
+ourselves with this little hill where a few hawthorn bushes <!-- Page
+157 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page157"></a>[page 157]</span> offer us tiny islets of shade, beset with thorns, and
+separated by straits of intolerable glare. Here we eat a little, but
+without comfort; and sleep a little, but without refreshment; and talk a
+little, but restlessly. As soon as we dare, we get into the saddle again
+and toil up through the valley, now narrowing into a rugged gorge,
+crammed with ardent heat. The sprinkling of trees and bushes, the
+multitude of flowers, assure us that there must be moisture underground,
+along the bed of the stream; but above ground there is not a drop, and
+not a breath of wind to break the dead calm of the smothering air. Why
+did we come into this heat-trap?</p>
+
+<p>But presently the ravine leads us, by steep stairs of rock, up to a
+high, green table-land. A heavenly breeze from the west is blowing here.
+The fields are full of flowers&mdash;red anemones, white and yellow
+daisies, pink flax, little blue bell-flowers&mdash;a hundred kinds. One
+knoll is covered with cyclamens; another with splendid purple iris,
+immense blossoms, so dark that they look almost black against the grass;
+but hold them up to the sun and you will see the imperial colour. We
+have never found such <!-- Page 158 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page158"></a>[page 158]</span> wild flowers, not even on the Plain of
+Sharon; the hills around Jerusalem were but sparsely adorned in
+comparison with these highlands of bloom.</p>
+
+<p>And here are oak-trees, broad-limbed and friendly, clothed in glistening
+green. Let us rest for a while in this cool shade and forget the misery
+of the blazing noon. Below us lies the gray Jordan valley and the
+steel-blue mirror of the Dead Sea; and across that gulf we see the
+furrowed mountains of Judea and Samaria, and far to the north the peaks
+of Galilee. Around us is the Land of Gilead, a rolling hill-country,
+with long ridges and broad summits, a rounded land, a verdurous land, a
+land of rich pasturage. There are deep valleys that cut into it and
+divide it up. But the main bulk of it is lifted high in the air, and
+spread out nobly to the visitations of the wind. And see&mdash;far away
+there, to the south, across the Wádi Nimrîn, a mountainside covered with
+wild trees, a real woodland, almost a forest!</p>
+
+<p>Now we must travel on, for it is still a long way to our night-quarters
+at Es Salt. We pass several Bedouin camps, the only kind of villages in
+this part of the world. The tents of goat's-hair are swarming <!-- Page
+159 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page159"></a>[page 159]</span> with life. A score of ragged Arab boys are playing
+hockey on the green with an old donkey's hoof for a ball. They yell with
+refreshing vigour, just like universal human boys.</p>
+
+<p>The trail grows steeper and more rocky, ascending apparently impossible
+places, and winding perilously along the cliffs above little vineyards
+and cultivated fields where men are ploughing. Travel and traffic
+increase along this rude path, which is the only highway: evidently we
+are coming near to some place of importance.</p>
+
+<p>But where is Es Salt? For nine hours we have been in the saddle, riding
+steadily toward that mysterious metropolis of the Belka, the only living
+city in the Land of Gilead; and yet there is no trace of it in sight.
+Have we missed the trail? The mule-train with our tents and baggage
+passed us in the valley while we were sweltering under the hawthorns. It
+seems as if it must have vanished into the pastoral wilderness and left
+us travelling an endless road to nowhere.</p>
+
+<p>At last we top a rugged ridge and look down upon the solution of the
+mystery. Es Salt is a city that <!-- Page 160 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page160"></a>[page 160]</span> can be hid; for it is not set
+upon a hill, but tucked away in a valley that curves around three sides
+of a rocky eminence, and is sheltered from the view by higher ranges.</p>
+
+<p>Who can tell how this city came here, hidden in this hollow place almost
+three thousand feet above the sea? Who was its founder? What was its
+ancient name? It is a place without traditions, without antiquities,
+without a shrine of any kind; just a living town, thriving and
+prospering in its own dirty and dishevelled way, in the midst of a
+country of nomads, growing in the last twenty years from six thousand to
+fifteen thousand inhabitants, driving a busy trade with the surrounding
+country, exporting famous raisins and dye-stuff made from sumach, the
+seat of the Turkish Government of the Belka, with a garrison and a
+telegraph office&mdash;decidedly a thriving town of to-day; yet without
+a road by which a carriage can approach it; and old, unmistakably old!</p>
+
+<p>The castle that crowns the eminence in the centre is a ruin of unknown
+date. The copious spring that gushes from the castle-hill must have
+invited men <!-- Page 161 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page161"></a>[page 161]</span> for many centuries to build their habitations
+around it. The gray houses seem to have slipped and settled down into
+the curving valley, and to have crowded one another up the opposite
+slopes, as if hundreds of generations had found here a hiding-place and
+a city of refuge.</p>
+
+<p>We ride through a Mohammedan graveyard&mdash;unfenced, broken,
+neglected&mdash;and down a steep, rain-gulleyed hillside, into the
+filthy, narrow street. The people all have an Arab look, a touch of the
+wildness of the desert in their eyes and their free bearing. There are
+many fine figures and handsome faces, some with auburn hair and a
+reddish hue showing through the bronze of their cheeks. They stare at us
+with undisguised curiosity and wonder, as if we came from a strange
+world. The swarthy merchants in the doors of their little shops, the
+half-veiled women in the lanes, the groups of idlers at the corners of
+the streets, watch us with a gaze which seems almost defiant. Evidently
+tourists are a rarity here&mdash;perhaps an intrusion to be resented.</p>
+
+<p>We inquire whether our baggage-train has been seen, where our camp is
+pitched. No one knows, <!-- Page 162 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page162"></a>[page 162]</span> no one cares; until at last a ragged,
+smiling urchin, one of those blessed, ubiquitous boys who always know
+everything that happens in a town, offers to guide us. He trots ahead,
+full of importance, dodging through the narrow alleys, making the
+complete circuit of the castle-hill and leading us to the upper end of
+the eastern valley. Here, among a few olive-trees beside the road, our
+white tents are standing, so close to an encampment of wandering gypsies
+that the tent-ropes cross.</p>
+
+<p>Directly opposite rises a quarter of the town, tier upon tier of
+flat-roofed houses, every roof-top covered with people. A wild-looking
+crowd of visitors have gathered in the road. Two soldiers, with the
+appearance of partially reformed brigands, are acting as our guard, and
+keeping the inquisitive spectators at a respectful distance. Our mules
+and donkeys and horses are munching their supper in a row, tethered to a
+long rope in front of the tents. Shukari, the cook, in his white cap and
+apron, is gravely intent upon the operation of his little charcoal
+range. Youssouf, the major-domo, is setting the table with flowers and
+lighted candles in the dining-tent. After <!-- Page 163 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page163"></a>[page 163]</span> a while he comes to
+the door of our sleeping-tents to inform us, with due ceremony, that
+dinner is served; and we sit down to our repast in the midst of the
+swarming Edomites and the wandering Zingari as peacefully and properly
+as if we were dining at the Savoy.</p>
+
+<p>The night darkens around us. Lights twinkle, one above another, up the
+steep hillside of houses; above them are the tranquil stars, the lit
+windows of unknown habitations; and on the hill-top one great planet
+burns in liquid flame.</p>
+
+<p>The crowd melts away, chattering down the road; it forms again, from
+another quarter, and again dissolves. Meaningless shouts and cries and
+songs resound from the hidden city. In the gypsy camp beside us insomnia
+reigns. A little forge is clinking and clanking. Donkeys raise their
+antiphonal lament. Dogs salute the stars in chorus. First a leader, far
+away, lifts a wailing, howling, shrieking note; then the mysterious
+unrest that torments the bosom of Oriental dogdom breaks loose in a
+hundred, a thousand answering voices, swelling into a yapping, growling,
+barking, yelling discord. A sudden silence cuts the <!-- Page 164 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page164"></a>[page 164]</span> tumult
+short, until once more the unknown misery, (or is it the secret joy), of
+the canine heart bursts out in long-drawn dissonance.</p>
+
+<p>From the road and from the tents of the gypsies various human voices are
+sounding close around us all the night. Through our confused dreams and
+broken sleep we strangely seem to catch fragments of familiar speech,
+phrases of English or French or German. Then, waking and listening, we
+hear men muttering and disputing, women complaining or soothing their
+babies, children quarrelling or calling to each other, in Arabic, or
+Romany&mdash;not a word that we can understand&mdash;voices that tell us
+only that we are in a strange land, and very far away from home, camping
+in the heart of a wild city.</p>
+
+<hr />
+<p><!-- Page 165 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page165"></a>[page 165]</span></p>
+
+<h3>II<br /><br />
+OVER THE BROOK JABBOK</h3>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">After</span> such a night the morning is welcome, as it breaks over the eastern
+hill behind us, with rosy light creeping slowly down the opposite slope
+of houses. Before the sunbeams have fairly reached the bottom of the
+valley we are in the saddle, ready to leave Es Salt without further
+exploration.</p>
+
+<p>There is a general monotony about this riding through Palestine which
+yet leaves room for a particular variety of the most entrancing kind.
+Every day is like every other in its main outline, but the details are
+infinitely uncertain&mdash;always there is something new, some touch of
+a distinct and memorable charm.</p>
+
+<p>To-day it is the sense of being in the country of the nomads, the
+tent-dwellers, the masters of innumerable flocks and herds, whose wealth
+goes wandering from pasture to pasture, bleating and lowing and browsing
+and multiplying over the open moorland beneath the blue sky. This is the
+prevailing impression <!-- Page 166 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page166"></a>[page 166]</span> of this day: and the symbol of it is
+the thin, quavering music of the pastoral pipe, following us wherever we
+go, drifting tremulously and plaintively down from some rock on the
+hillside, or floating up softly from some hidden valley, where a brown
+shepherd or goatherd is minding his flock with music.</p>
+
+<p>What quaint and rustic melodies are these! Wild and unfamiliar to our
+ears; yet doubtless the same wandering airs that were played by the sons
+and servants of Jacob when he returned from his twenty years of
+profitable exile in Haran with his rich wages of sheep and goats and
+cattle and wives and maid-servants, the fruit of his hard labour and
+shrewd bargaining with his father-in-law Laban, and passed cautiously
+through Gilead on his way to the Promised Land.</p>
+
+<p>On the highland to the east of Es Salt we see a fine herd of horses,
+brood-mares and foals. A little farther on, we come to a muddy pond or
+tank at which a drove of asses are drinking. A steep and winding path,
+full of loose stones, leads us down into a grassy, oval plain, a great
+cup of green, eight or ten miles long and five or six miles wide, rimmed
+<!-- Page 167 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page167"></a>[page 167]</span> with bare hills from five to eight hundred feet high. This,
+we conjecture, is the fertile basin of El Buchaia, or Bekaa.</p>
+
+<p>Bedouin farmers are ploughing the rich, reddish soil. Their black
+tent-villages are tucked away against the feet of the surrounding hills.
+The broad plain itself is without sign of human dwelling, except that
+near each focus of the ellipse there is a pile of shattered ruins with a
+crumbling, solitary tower, where a shepherd sits piping to his lop-eared
+flock.</p>
+
+<p>In one place we pass through a breeding-herd of camels, browsing on the
+short grass. The old ones are in the process of the spring moulting;
+their thick, matted hair is peeling off in large flakes, like fragments
+of a ragged, moth-eaten coat. The young ones are covered with pearl-gray
+wool, soft and almost downy, like gigantic goslings with four legs.
+(What is the word for a young camel, I wonder; is <span class="correction" title="corrected from 'is'">it</span> camelet or
+camelot?) But young and old have a family resemblance of ugliness.</p>
+
+<p>The camel is the most ungainly and stupid of God's useful
+beasts&mdash;an awkward necessity&mdash;the humpbacked ship of the
+desert. The Arabs have <!-- Page 168 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page168"></a>[page 168]</span> a story which runs thus: "What did
+Allah say when He had finished making the camel? He couldn't say
+anything; He just looked at the camel, and laughed, and laughed!"</p>
+
+<p>But in spite of his ridiculous appearance the camel seems satisfied with
+himself; in fact there is an expression of supreme contempt in his face
+when he droops his pendulous lower lip and wrinkles his nose, which has
+led the Arabs to tell another story about him: "Why does the camel
+despise his master? Because man knows only the ninety-nine common names
+of Allah; but the hundredth name, the wonderful name, the beautiful
+name, is a secret revealed to the camel alone. Therefore he scorns the
+whole race of men."</p>
+
+<p>The cattle that feed around the edges of this peaceful plain are small
+and nimble, as if they were used to long, rough journeys. The prevailing
+colour is black, or rusty brown. They are evidently of a degenerate and
+played-out stock. Even the heifers are used for ploughing, and they look
+but little larger than the donkeys which are often yoked beside them.
+They come around the grassy knoll when our luncheon-tent <!-- Page 169 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page169"></a>[page 169]</span> is
+pitched, and stare at us very much as the people stared in Es Salt.</p>
+
+<p>In the afternoon we pass over the rim of the broad vale and descend a
+narrower ravine, where oaks and terebinths, laurels and balsams,
+pistachios and almonds are growing. The grass springs thick and lush,
+tall weeds and trailing vines appear, a murmur of flowing water is heard
+under the tangled herbage at the bottom of the wâdi. Presently we are
+following a bright little brook, crossing and recrossing it as it leads
+us toward our camp-ground.</p>
+
+<p>There are the tents, standing in a line on the flowery bank of the
+brook, across the water from the trail. A few steps lower down there is
+a well-built stone basin with a copious spring gushing into it from the
+hillside under an arched roof. Here the people of the village, (which is
+somewhere near us on the mountain, but out of sight), come to fill their
+pitchers and water-skins, and to let their cattle and donkeys drink. All
+through the late afternoon they are coming and going, plashing through
+the shallow ford below us, enjoying the cool, clear water, disappearing
+along the foot-paths that lead among the hills.</p> <p><!-- Page 170 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page170"></a>[page 170]</span></p> <p>These are
+very different cattle from the herds we saw among the Bedouins a couple
+of hours ago; fine large creatures, well bred and well fed, some
+cream-coloured, some red, some belted with white. And these men who
+follow them, on foot or on horseback, truculent looking fellows with
+blue eyes and light hair and broad faces, clad in long, close-fitting
+tunics, with belts around their waists and small black caps of fur, some
+of them with high boots&mdash;who are they?</p>
+
+<p>They are some of the Circassian immigrants who were driven out of Russia
+by the Czar after the Russo-Turkish War of 1877, and deported again
+after the Bulgarian atrocities, and whom the Turkish Government has
+colonized through eastern Palestine on land given by the Sultan. Nobody
+really knows to whom the land belongs, I suppose; but the Bedouins have
+had the habit, for many centuries, of claiming and using it as they
+pleased for their roaming flocks and herds. Now these northern invaders
+are taking and holding the most fertile places, the best springs, the
+fields that are well watered through the year.</p>
+
+<p>Therefore the Arab hates the Circassian, though <!-- Page 171 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page171"></a>[page 171]</span> he be of the
+same religion, far more than he hates the Christian, almost as much as
+he hates the Turk. But the Circassian can take care of himself; he is a
+fierce and hardy fighter; and in his rude way he understands how to make
+farming and stock-raising pay.</p>
+
+<p>Indeed, this Land of Gilead is a region in which twenty times the
+present population, if they were industrious and intelligent and had
+good government, might prosper. No wonder that the tribe of Gad and
+Reuben and the half-tribe of Manasseh, on the way to Canaan, "when they
+saw the land of Jazer and the land of Gilead, that, behold, the place
+was a place for cattle," (Numbers xxxii) fell in love with it, and
+besought Moses that they might have their inheritance there, and not
+westward of the Jordan. No wonder that they recrossed the river after
+they had helped Joshua to conquer the Canaanites, and settled in this
+high country, so much fairer and more fertile than Judea, or even than
+Samaria.</p>
+
+<p>It was here, in 1880, that Laurence Oliphant, the gifted English
+traveller and mystic, proposed to establish his fine scheme for the
+beginning of the <!-- Page 172 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page172"></a>[page 172]</span> restoration of the Jews to Palestine. A
+territory extending from the brook of Jabbok on the north to the brook
+of Arnon on the south, from the Jordan Valley on the west to the Arabian
+desert on the east; railways running up from the sea at <span class="correction" title="originally without accents">Haifâ</span>, and down
+from Damascus, and southward to the Gulf of Akabah, and across to
+Ismailia on the Suez Canal; a government of local autonomy guaranteed
+and protected by the Sublime Porte; sufficient capital supplied by the
+Jewish bankers of London and Paris and Berlin and Vienna; and the
+outcasts of Israel gathered from all the countries where they are
+oppressed, to dwell together in peace and plenty, tending sheep and
+cattle, raising fruit and grain, pressing out wine and oil, and
+supplying the world with the balm of Gilead&mdash;such was Oliphant's
+beautiful dream.</p>
+
+<p>But it did not come true; because Russia did not like it, because Turkey
+was afraid of it, because the rest of Europe did not care for
+it,&mdash;and perhaps because the Jews themselves were not generally
+enthusiastic over it. Perhaps the majority of them would rather stay
+where they are. Perhaps <!-- Page 173 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page173"></a>[page 173]</span> they do not yearn passionately for
+Palestine and the simple life.</p>
+
+<p>But it is not of these things that we are thinking, I must confess, as
+the ruddy sun slowly drops toward the heights of Pennel, and we stroll
+out in the evening glow, along the edge of the wild ravine into which
+our little stream plunges, and look down into the deep, grand valley of
+the Brook Jabbok.</p>
+
+<p>Yonder, on the other side of the great gulf of heliotrope shadow,
+stretches the long bulk of the Jebel Ajlûn, shaggy with oak-trees. It
+was somewhere on the slopes of that wooded mountain that one of the most
+tragic battles of the world was fought. For there the army of Absalom
+went out to meet the army of his father David. "And the battle was
+spread over the face of all the country, and the forest devoured more
+people that day than the sword devoured." It was there that the young
+man Absalom rode furiously upon his mule, "and the mule went under the
+thick boughs of a great oak, and his head caught hold of the oak, and he
+was taken up between heaven and earth." And a man came and told Joab,
+the captain of David's host, "Behold I saw Absalom <!-- Page 174 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page174"></a>[page 174]</span> hanging in
+the midst of an oak." Then Joab made haste; "and he took three darts in
+his hand, and thrust them through the heart of Absalom while he was yet
+alive in the midst of the oak." And when the news came to David, sitting
+in the gate of the city of Mahanaim, he went up into the chamber over
+the gate and wept bitterly, crying, "Would I had died for thee, O
+Absalom, my son!" (II Samuel xviii.)</p>
+
+<p>To remember a story like that is to feel the pathos with which man has
+touched the face of nature. But there is another story, more mystical,
+more beautiful, which belongs to the scene upon which we are looking.
+Down in the purple valley, where the smooth meadows spread so fair, and
+the little river curves and gleams through the thickets of oleander,
+somewhere along that flashing stream is the place where Jacob sent his
+wives and his children, his servants and his cattle, across the water in
+the darkness, and there remained all night long alone, for "there
+wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day."</p>
+
+<p>Who was this "man" with whom the patriarch <!-- Page 175 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page175"></a>[page 175]</span> contended at
+midnight, and to whom he cried, "I will not let thee go except thou
+bless me"? On the morrow Jacob was to meet his fierce and powerful
+brother Esau, whom he had wronged and outwitted, from whom he had stolen
+the birthright blessing twenty years before. Was it the prospect of this
+dreaded meeting that brought upon Jacob the night of lonely struggle by
+the Brook Jabbok? Was it the promise of reconciliation with his brother
+that made him say at dawn, "I have seen God face to face, and my life is
+saved"? Was it the unexpected friendliness and gentleness of that
+brother in the encounter of the morning that inspired Jacob's cry, "I
+have seen <i>thy face as one seeth the face of God</i>, and thou wast pleased
+with me"?</p>
+
+<p>Yes, that <i>is</i> what the old story means, in its Oriental imagery. The
+midnight wrestling is the pressure of human enmity and strife. The
+morning peace is the assurance of human forgiveness and love. The face
+of God seen in the face of human kindness&mdash;that is the sunrise
+vision of the Brook Jabbok.</p>
+
+<p>Such are the thoughts with which we fall asleep <!-- Page 176 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page176"></a>[page 176]</span> in our tents
+beside the murmuring brook of Er Rumman. Early the next morning we go
+down, and down, and down, by ledge and terrace and grassy slope, into
+the Vale of Jabbok. It is sixty miles long, beginning on the edge of the
+mountain of Moab, and curving eastward, northward, westward,
+south-westward, between Gilead and Ajlûn, until it opens into the Jordan
+Valley.</p>
+
+<p>Here is the famous little river, a swift, singing current of gray-blue
+water&mdash;Nahr ez-Zerka "blue river," the Arabs call it&mdash;dashing
+and swirling merrily between the thickets of willows and tamaracks and
+oleanders that border it. The ford is rather deep, for the spring flood
+is on; but our horses splash through gaily, scattering the water around
+them in showers which glitter in the sunshine.</p>
+
+<p>Is this the brook beside which a man once met God? Yes&mdash;and by many
+another brook too.</p>
+
+<hr />
+<p><!-- Page 177 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page177"></a>[page 177]</span></p>
+
+<h3>III<br /><br />
+THE RUINS OF GERASA</h3>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">We</span> are coming now into the region of the Decapolis, the Greek cities
+which sprang up along the eastern border of Palestine after the
+conquests of Alexander the Great.</p>
+
+<p>They were trading cities, undoubtedly, situated on the great roads which
+led from the east across the desert to the Jordan Valley, and so,
+converging upon the Plain of Esdraelon, to the Mediterranean Sea and to
+Greece and Italy. Their wealth tempted the Jewish princes of the
+Hasmonean line to conquer and plunder them; but the Roman general Pompey
+restored their civic liberties, <span class="smcap">B.C.</span> 65, and caused them to be rebuilt
+and strengthened. By the beginning of the Christian era, they were once
+more rich and flourishing, and a league was formed of ten
+municipalities, with certain rights of communal and local government,
+under the protection and suzerainty of the Roman Empire.</p>
+
+<p>The ten cities which originally composed this confederacy <!-- Page 178 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page178"></a>[page 178]</span> for
+mutual defence and the development of their trade, were Scythopolis,
+Hippos, Damascus, Gadara, Raphana, Kanatha, Pella, Dion, Philadelphia
+and Gerasa. Their money was stamped with the image of Cæsar. Their
+soldiers followed the Imperial eagles. Their traditions, their arts,
+their literature were Greek. But their strength and their new prosperity
+were Roman.</p>
+
+<p>Here in this narrow wâdi through which we are climbing up from the Vale
+of Jabbok we find the traces of the presence of the Romans in the
+fragments of a paved military road and an aqueduct. Presently we
+surmount a rocky hill and look down into the broad, shallow basin of
+Jerash. Gently sloping, rock-strewn hills surround it; through the
+centre flows a stream, with banks bordered by trees; a water-fall is
+flashing opposite to us; on a cluster of rounded knolls about the middle
+of the valley, on the west bank of the stream, are spread the vast,
+incredible, complete ruins of the ancient city of Gerasa.</p>
+
+<p>They rise like a dream in the desolation of the wilderness, columns and
+arches and vaults and <!-- Page 179 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page179"></a>[page 179]</span> amphitheatres and temples, suddenly
+appearing in the bare and lonely landscape as if by enchantment.</p>
+
+<p>How came these monuments of splendour and permanence into this country
+of simplicity and transience, this land of shifting shepherds and
+drovers, this empire of the black tent, this immemorial region that has
+slept away the centuries under the spell of the pastoral pipe? What
+magical music of another kind, strong, stately and sonorous, music of
+brazen trumpets and shawms, of silver harps and cymbals, evoked this
+proud and potent city on the border of the desert, and maintained for
+centuries, amid the sweeping, turbulent floods of untamable tribes of
+rebels and robbers, this lofty landmark of</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+<span class="i2">"the glory that was Greece<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the grandeur that was Rome"?</span></p>
+
+<p>What sudden storm of discord and disaster shook it all down again,
+loosened the sinews of majesty and power, stripped away the garments of
+beauty and luxury, dissolved the lovely body of living joy, and left
+this skeleton of dead splendour diffused upon the solitary ground?</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 180 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page180"></a>[page 180]</span></p>
+
+<p>Who can solve these mysteries? It is all unaccountable,
+unbelievable,&mdash;the ghost of the dream of a dream,&mdash;yet here it
+is, surrounded by the green hills, flooded with the frank light of noon,
+neighboured by a dirty, noisy little village of Arabs and Circassians on
+the east bank of the stream, and with real goats and lean, black cattle
+grazing between the carved columns and under the broken architraves of
+Gerasa the Golden.</p>
+
+<p>Let us go up into the wrecked city.</p>
+
+<p>This triumphal arch, with its three gates and its lofty Corinthian
+columns, stands outside of the city walls: a structure which has no
+other use or meaning than the expression of Imperial pride: thus the
+Roman conquerors adorn and approach their vassal-town.</p>
+
+<p>Behind the arch a broad, paved road leads to the southern gate, perhaps
+a thousand feet away. Beside the road, between the arch and the gate,
+lie two buildings of curious interest. The first is a great pool of
+stone, seven hundred feet long by three hundred feet wide. This is the
+Naumachia, which is filled with water by conduits from the neighbouring
+<!-- Page 181 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page181"></a>[page 181]</span> stream, in order that the Greeks may hold their mimic naval
+combats and regattas here in the desert, for they are always at heart a
+seafaring people. Beyond the pool there is a Circus, with four rows of
+stone seats and an oval arena, for wild-beast shows and gladiatorial
+combats.</p>
+
+<p>The city walls have almost entirely disappeared and the South Gate is in
+ruins. Entering and turning to the left, we ascend a little hill and
+find the Temple (perhaps dedicated to Artemis), and close beside it the
+great South Theatre. There is hardly a break in the semicircular stone
+benches, thirty-two rows of seats rising tier above tier, divided into
+an upper and a lower section by a broader row of "boxes" or stalls,
+richly carved, and reserved, no doubt, for magnates of the city and
+persons of importance. The stage, over a hundred feet wide, is backed by
+a straight wall adorned with Corinthian columns and decorated niches.
+The theatre faces due north; and the spectator sitting here, if the play
+wearies him, can lift his eyes and look off beyond the proscenium over
+the length and breadth of Gerasa.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 182 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page182"></a>[page 182]</span></p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+<span class="i0">"But he looked upon the city, every side,<br /></span>
+<span class="i6">Far and wide,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">All the mountains topped with temples, all the glades<br /></span>
+<span class="i6">Colonnades,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">All the causeys, bridges, <span class="correction" title="corrected from 'acqueducts'">aqueducts</span>,&mdash;and then,<br /></span>
+<span class="i6">All the men!"<br /></span></p>
+
+<p>In the hollow northward from this theatre is the Forum, or the
+Market-place, or the Hippodrome&mdash;I cannot tell what it is, but a
+splendid oval of Ionic pillars incloses an open space of more than three
+hundred feet in length and two hundred and fifty feet in width, where
+the Gerasenes may barter or bicker or bet, as they will.</p>
+
+<p>From the Forum to the North Gate runs the main street, more than half a
+mile long, lined with a double row of columns, from twenty to thirty
+feet high, with smooth shafts and acanthus capitals. At the intersection
+of the cross-streets there are tetrapylons, with domes, and pedestals
+for statues. The pavement of the roadway is worn into ruts by the
+chariot wheels. Under the arcades behind the columns run the sidewalks
+for foot-passengers. Turn to the right from the main street and you come
+to <!-- Page 183 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page183"></a>[page 183]</span> the Public Baths, an immense building like a palace,
+supplied with hot and cold water, adorned with marble and mosaic. On the
+left lies the Tribuna, with its richly decorated façade and its fountain
+of flowing water. A few yards farther north is the Propylæum of the
+Great Temple; a superb gateway, decorated with columns and garlands and
+shell niches, opening to a wide flight of steps by which we ascend to
+the temple-area, a terrace nearly twice the size of Madison Square
+Garden, surrounded by two hundred and sixty columns, and standing clear
+above the level of the encircling city.</p>
+
+<p>The Temple of the Sun rises at the western end of this terrace, facing
+the dawn. The huge columns of the portico, forty-five feet high and five
+feet in diameter, with rich Corinthian capitals, are of rosy-yellow
+limestone, which seems to be saturated with the sunshine of a thousand
+years. Behind them are the walls of the Cella, or inner shrine, with its
+vaulted apse for the image of the god, and its secret stairs and
+passages in the rear wall for the coming and going of the priests, and
+the ascent to the roof for the first salutation of the sunrise over the
+eastern hills.</p> <p><!-- Page 184 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page184"></a>[page 184]</span></p> <p>Spreading our cloth between two pillars of the
+portico we celebrate the feast of noontide, and looking out over the
+wrecked magnificence of the city we try to reconstruct the past.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px; ">
+<img src="images/illus07.jpg" width="500" height="336" alt="Ruins of Jerash, Looking West. Propylæum and Temple terrace." title="Ruins of Jerash, Looking West. Propylæum and Temple terrace." />
+<span class="caption">Ruins of Jerash, Looking West. Propylæum and Temple terrace.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>It was in the days of Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius, in the latter
+part of the second century after Christ, that these temples and palaces
+and theatres were rising. Those were the palmy days of Græco-Roman
+civilisation in Syria; then the shops along the Colonnade were filled
+with rich goods, the Forum listened to the voice of world-famous orators
+and teachers, and proud lords and ladies assembled in the Naumachia to
+watch the sham battles of the miniature galleys. A little later the new
+religion of Christianity found a foothold here, (see, these are the
+ruined outlines of a Christian church below us to the south, and the
+foundation of a great Basilica), and by the fifth century the pagan
+worship was dying out, and the Bishop of Gerasa had a seat in the
+Council of Chalcedon. It was no longer with the comparative merits of
+Stoicism and Epicureanism and Neo-Platonism, or with the rival literary
+fame of their own Ariston and Kerykos as against Meleager and Menippus
+<!-- Page 185 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page185"></a>[page 185]</span> and Theodorus of Gadara, that the Gerasenes concerned
+themselves. They were busy now with the controversies about Homoiousia
+and Homoöusia, with the rivalry of the Eutychians and the Nestorians,
+with the conflicting, not to say combative, claims of such saints as
+Dioscurus of Alexandria and Theodoret of Cyrus. But trade continued
+brisk, and the city was as rich and as proud as ever. In the seventh
+century an Arabian chronicler named it among the great towns of
+Palestine, and a poet praised its fertile territory and its copious
+spring.</p>
+
+<p>Then what happened? Earthquake, pestilence, conflagration, pillage,
+devastation&mdash;who knows? A Mohammedan writer of the thirteenth
+century merely mentions it as "a great city of ruins"; and so it lay,
+deserted and forgotten, until a German traveller visited it in 1806; and
+so it lies to-day, with all its dwellings and its walls shattered and
+dissolved beside its flowing stream in the centre of its green valley,
+and only the relics of its temples, its theatres, its colonnades, and
+its triumphal arch remaining to tell us how brave and rich and gay it
+was in the days of old.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 186 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page186"></a>[page 186]</span></p>
+
+<p>Do you believe it? Does it seem at all real or possible to you? Look up
+at this tall pillar above us. See how the wild marjoram has thrust its
+roots between the joints and hangs like "the hyssop that springeth out
+of the wall." See how the weather has worn deep holes and crevices in
+the topmost drum, and how the sparrows have made their nests there. Lean
+your back against the pillar; feel it vibrate like "a reed shaken with
+the wind"; watch that huge capital of acanthus leaves swaying slowly to
+and fro and trembling upon its stalk "as a flower of the field."</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>All the afternoon and all the next morning we wander through the ruins,
+taking photographs, deciphering inscriptions, discovering new points of
+view to survey the city. We sit on the arch of the old Roman bridge
+which spans the stream, and look down into the valley filled with
+gardens and orchards; tall poplars shiver in the breeze; peaches, plums,
+and cherries are in bloom; almonds clad in pale-green foliage; figs
+putting forth their verdant shoots; pomegranates covered with ruddy
+young <!-- Page 187 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page187"></a>[page 187]</span> leaves. We go up to see the beautiful spring which
+bursts from the hillside above the town and supplies it with water. Then
+we go back again to roam aimlessly and dreamily, like folk bewitched,
+among the tumbled heaps of hewn stones, the broken capitals, and the
+tall, rosy columns, soaked with sunbeams.</p>
+
+<p>The Arabs of Jerash have a bad reputation as robbers and extortionists;
+and in truth they are rather a dangerous-looking lot of fellows, with
+bold, handsome brown faces and inscrutable dark eyes. But although we
+have paid no tribute to them, they do not molest us. They seem to regard
+us with a contemptuous pity, as harmless idiots who loaf among the
+fallen stones and do not even attempt to make excavations.</p>
+
+<p>Our camp is in the inclosure of the North Theatre, a smaller building
+than that which stands beside the South Gate, but large enough to hold
+an audience of two or three thousand. The semicircle of seats is still
+unbroken; the arrangements of the stage, the stairways, the entries of
+the building can all be easily traced.</p>
+
+<p>There were gay times in the city when these two <!-- Page 188 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page188"></a>[page 188]</span> theatres were
+filled with people. What comedies of Plautus or Terence or Aristophanes
+or Menander; what tragedies of Seneca, or of the seven dramatists of
+Alexandria who were called the "Pleias," were presented here?</p>
+
+<p>Look up along those lofty tiers of seats in the pale, clear starlight.
+Can you see no shadowy figures sitting there, hear no light whisper of
+ghostly laughter, no thin ripple of clapping hands? What flash of wit
+amuses them, what nobly tragic word or action stirs them to applause?
+What problem of their own life, what reflection of their own heart, does
+the stage reveal to them? We shall never know. The play at Gerasa is
+ended.</p>
+
+<hr />
+<p><!-- Page 189 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page189"></a>[page 189]</span></p>
+
+<h4><i>A PSALM AMONG THE RUINS</i></h4>
+
+<p class="noind"><i>The lizard rested on the rock while I sat among the ruins;<br />
+And the pride of man was like a vision of the night.</i><br />
+<br />
+<i>Lo, the lords of the city have disappeared into darkness;<br />
+The ancient wilderness hath swallowed up all their work.</i><br />
+<br />
+<i>There is nothing left of the city but a heap of fragments;<br />
+The bones of a carcass that a wild beast hath devoured.</i><br />
+<br />
+<i>Behold the desert waiteth hungrily for man's dwellings;<br />
+Surely the tide of desolation returneth upon his toil.</i><br />
+<br />
+<i>All that he hath painfully lifted up is shaken down in a moment;<br />
+The memory of his glory is buried beneath the billows of sand.</i><br />
+<br />
+
+<!-- Page 190 --><span class="pagenum2"><a name="page190"></a>[page 190]</span>
+
+<i>Then a voice said, Look again upon the ruins;<br />
+These broken arches have taught generations to <span class="correction" title="added period after 'build'">build.</span></i><br />
+<br />
+<i>Moreover the name of this city shall be remembered;<br />
+Here a poor man spoke a word that shall not die.</i><br />
+<br />
+<i>This is the glory that is stronger than the desert;<br />
+For God hath given eternity to the thought of man.</i></p>
+
+<hr />
+<p><!-- Page 191 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page191"></a>[page 191]</span></p>
+
+<h2>IX<br /><br />
+THE MOUNTAINS OF SAMARIA</h2>
+<hr />
+
+<p><!-- Page 192 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page192"></a>[page 192]</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p><!-- Page 193 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page193"></a>[page 193]</span></p>
+
+<h3>I<br /><br />
+JORDAN FERRY</h3>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Look</span> down from these tranquil heights of Jebel Osha, above the noiseful,
+squalid little city of Es Salt, and you see what Moses saw when he
+climbed Mount Pisgah and looked upon the Promised Land which he was
+never to enter.</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+<span class="i0">"Could we but climb where Moses stood,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">And view the landscape o'er,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Not Jordan's stream, nor death's cold flood,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Should fright us from the shore."</span></p>
+
+<p>Pisgah was probably a few miles south of the place where we are now
+standing, but the main features of the view are the same. These broad
+mountain-shoulders, falling steeply away to the west, clad in the
+emerald robe of early spring; this immense gulf at our feet, four
+thousand feet below us, a huge trough of gray and yellow, through which
+the dark-green ribbon of the Jordan jungle, touched <!-- Page 194 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page194"></a>[page 194]</span> with a
+few silvery gleams of water, winds to the blue basin of the Dead Sea;
+those scarred and wrinkled hills rising on the other side, the knotted
+brow of Quarantana, the sharp cone of Sartoba, the distant peak of
+Mizpeh, the long line of Judean, Samarian, and Galilean summits, Olivet,
+and Ebal, and Gerizim, and Gilboa, and Tabor, rolling away to the
+northward, growing ever fairer with the promise of fertile valleys
+between them and rich plains beyond them, and fading at last into the
+azure vagueness of the highlands round the Lake of Galilee.</p>
+
+<p>Why does that country toward which we are looking and travelling seem to
+us so much more familiar and real, so much more a part of the actual
+world, than this region of forgotten Greek and Roman glory, from which
+we are returning like those who awake from sleep? The ruined splendours
+of Jerash fade behind us like a dream. Samaria and Galilee, crowded with
+memories and associations which have been woven into our minds by the
+wonderful Bible story, draw us to them with the convincing touch of
+reality. Yet even while we recognise this strange <!-- Page 195 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page195"></a>[page 195]</span> difference
+between our feelings toward the Holy Land and those toward other parts
+of the ancient world, we know that it is not altogether true.</p>
+
+<p>Gerasa was as really a part of God's big world as Shechem or Jezreel or
+Sychar. It stood in His sight, and He must have regarded the human souls
+that lived there. He must have cared for them, and watched over them,
+and judged them equitably, dividing the just from the unjust, the
+children of love from the children of hate, even as He did with men on
+the other side of the Jordan, even as He does with all men everywhere
+to-day. If faith in a God who is the Father and Lord of all mankind
+means anything it means this: equal care, equal justice, equal mercy for
+all the world. Gerasa has been forgotten of men, but God never forgot
+it.</p>
+
+<p>What, then, is the difference? Just this: in the little land between the
+Jordan and the sea, things came to pass which have a more enduring
+significance than the wars and splendours, the wealth and culture of the
+Decapolis. Conflicts were fought there in which the eternal issues of
+good and evil were clearly manifest. Ideas were worked out there which
+<!-- Page 196 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page196"></a>[page 196]</span> have a permanent value to the spiritual life of man.
+Revelations were made there which have become the guiding stars of
+succeeding generations. This is why that country of the Bible seems more
+real to us: because its history is more significant, because it is
+Divinely inspired with a meaning for our faith and hope.</p>
+
+<p>Do you agree with this? I do not know. But at least if you were with us
+on this glorious morning, riding down from the heights of Jebel Osha you
+would feel the vivid beauty, the subduing grandeur of the scene. You
+would rejoice in the life-renewing air that blows softly around us and
+invites us to breathe deep,&mdash;in the pure morning faces of the
+flowers opening among the rocks,&mdash;in the light waving of silken
+grasses along the slopes by which we steeply descend.</p>
+
+<p>There is a young Gileadite running beside us, a fine fellow about
+eighteen years old, with his white robe girded up about his loins,
+leaving his brown legs bare. His head-dress is encircled with the black
+<i>'agâl</i> of camel's hair like a rustic crown. A long gun is slung over
+his back; a wicked-looking curved <!-- Page 197 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page197"></a>[page 197]</span> knife with a brass sheath
+sticks in his belt; his silver powder-horn and leather bullet-pouch hang
+at his waist. He strides along with a free, noble step, or springs
+lightly from rock to rock like a gazelle.</p>
+
+<p>His story is a short one, and simple,&mdash;if true. His younger brother
+has run away from the family tent among the pastures of Gilead, seeking
+his fortune in the wide world. And now this elder brother has come out
+to look for the prodigal, at Nablûs, at Jaffa, at Jerusalem,&mdash;Allah
+knows how far the quest may lead! But he is afraid of robbers if he
+crosses the Jordan Valley alone. May he keep company with us and make
+the perilous transit under our august protection? Yes, surely, my brown
+son of Esau; and we will not inquire too closely whether you are really
+running after your brother or running away yourself.</p>
+
+<p>There may be a thousand robbers concealed along the river-bed, but we
+can see none of them. The valley is heat and emptiness. Even the jackal
+that slinks across the trail in front of us, droops and drags his tail
+in visible exhaustion. His lolling, red tongue is a signal of distress.
+In a climate like this <!-- Page 198 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page198"></a>[page 198]</span> one expects nothing from man or beast.
+Life degenerates, shrivels, stifles; and in the glaring open spaces a
+sullen madness lurks invisible.</p>
+
+<p>We are coming to the ancient fording-place of the river, called Adamah,
+where an event once happened which was of great consequence to the
+Israelites and which has often been misunderstood. They were encamped on
+the east side, opposite Jericho, nearly thirty miles below this point,
+waiting for their first opportunity to cross the Jordan. Then, says the
+record, "the waters which came down from above stopped, and were piled
+up in a heap, a great way off, at Adam, ... and the people passed over
+right against Jericho." (Joshua iii: 14-16.)</p>
+
+<p>Look at these great clay-banks overhanging the river, and you will
+understand what it was that opened a dry path for Israel into Canaan.
+One of these huge masses of clay was undermined, and slipped, and fell
+across the river, heaping up the waters behind a temporary natural dam,
+and cutting off the supply of the lower stream. It may have taken three
+or four days for the river to carve its <!-- Page 199 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page199"></a>[page 199]</span> way through or around
+that obstruction, and meantime any one could march across to Jericho
+without wetting his feet. I have seen precisely the same thing happen on
+a salmon river in Canada quite as large as the Jordan.</p>
+
+<p>The river is more open at this place, and there is a curious
+six-cornered ferry-boat, pulled to and fro with ropes by a half-dozen
+bare-legged Arabs. If it had been a New England river, the practical
+Western mind would have built a long boat with a flat board at each
+side, and rigged a couple of running wheels on a single rope. Then the
+ferryman would have had nothing to do but let the stern of his craft
+swing down at an angle with the stream, and the swift current would have
+pushed him from one side to the other at his will. But these Orientals
+have been running their ferry in their own way, no doubt, for many
+centuries; and who are we to break in upon their laborious indolence
+with new ideas? It is enough that they bring us over safely, with our
+cattle and our stuff, in several bands, with much tugging at the ropes
+and shouting and singing.</p>
+
+<p>We look in vain on the shore of the Jordan for a <!-- Page 200 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page200"></a>[page 200]</span> pleasant
+place to eat our luncheon. The big trees stand with their feet in the
+river, and the smaller shrubs are scraggly and spiny. At last we find a
+little patch of shade on a steep bank above the yellow stream, and here
+we make ourselves as comfortable as we can, with the thermometer at
+110°, and the hungry gnats and mosquitoes swarming around us.</p>
+
+<p>Early in the afternoon we desperately resolve to brave the sun, and ride
+up from the river-bed into the open plain on the west. Here we catch our
+first clear view of Mount Hermon, with its mantle of glistening snow,
+hanging like a cloud on the northern horizon, ninety miles away, beyond
+the Lake of Galilee and the Waters of Merom; a vision of distance and
+coolness and grandeur.</p>
+
+<p>The fields, watered by the full streams descending from the Wâdi Fârah,
+are green with wheat and barley. Along our path are balsam-trees and
+thorny jujubes, from whose branches we pluck the sweet, insipid fruit as
+we ride beneath them. Herds of cattle are pasturing on the plain, and
+long rows of black Bedouin tents are stretched at the foot of the <!--
+Page 201 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page201"></a>[page 201]</span> mountains. We cross a dozen murmuring
+watercourses embowered in the dark, glistening foliage of the oleanders
+glowing with great soft flames of rosy bloom.</p>
+
+<p>At the Serâi on the hill which watches over this Jiftlîk, or domain of
+the Sultan, there are some Turkish soldiers saddling their horses for an
+expedition; perhaps to collect taxes or to chase robbers. The peasants
+are returning, by the paths among the cornfields, to their huts. The
+lines of camp-fires begin to gleam from the transient Bedouin villages.
+Our white tents are pitched in a flowery meadow, beside a low-voiced
+stream, and as we fall asleep the night air is trembling with the
+shrill, innumerable <i>brek-ek-ek-coäx-coäx</i> of the frog chorus.</p>
+
+<hr />
+<p><!-- Page 202 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page202"></a>[page 202]</span></p>
+
+<h3>II<br /><br />
+MOUNT EPHRAIM AND JACOB'S WELL</h3>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Samaria</span> is a mountain land, but its characteristic features, as
+distinguished from Judea, are the easiness of approach through open
+gateways among the hills, and the fertility of the broad vales and level
+plains which lie between them. The Kingdom of Israel, in its brief
+season of prosperity, was richer, more luxurious, and weaker than the
+Kingdom of Judah. The poet Isaiah touched the keynote of the northern
+kingdom when he sang of "the crown of pride of the drunkards of
+Ephraim," and "the fading flower of his glorious beauty which is on the
+head of the fat valley." (Isaiah xxviii: 1-6.)</p>
+
+<p>We turn aside from the open but roundabout way of the well-tilled Wâdi
+Fârah and take a shorter, steeper path toward Shechem, through a deep,
+narrow mountain gorge. The day is hot and hazy, for the Sherkîyeh is
+blowing from the desert across the Jordan Valley: the breath of
+Jehovah's displeasure with His people, "a dry wind of the high places of
+<!-- Page 203 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page203"></a>[page 203]</span> the wilderness toward the daughter of my people, neither to
+fan nor to cleanse."</p>
+
+<p>At times the walls of rock come so close together that we have to wind
+through a passage not more than ten feet wide. The air is parched as in
+an oven. Our horses scramble wearily up the stony gallery and the rough
+stairways. One of our company faints under the fervent heat, and falls
+from his horse. But fortunately no bones are broken; a half-hour's rest
+in the shadow of a great rock revives him and we ride on.</p>
+
+<p>The wonderful flowers are blooming wherever they can find a foothold
+among the stones. Now and then we cross the mouth of some little lonely
+side-valley, full of mignonette and cyclamens and tall spires of pink
+hollyhock. Under the huge, dark sides of Eagle's Crag&mdash;bare and
+rugged as Ben Nevis&mdash;we pass into the fruitful plain of Makhna,
+where the silken grainfields rustle far and wide, and the rich
+olive-orchards on the hill-slopes offer us a shelter for our midday meal
+and siesta. Mount Ebal and Mount Gerizim now rise before us in their
+naked bulk; and, as we mount toward the valley which lies <!-- Page 204 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page204"></a>[page 204]</span>
+between them, we stay for a while to rest at Jacob's Well.</p>
+
+<p>There is a mystery about this ancient cistern on the side of the
+mountain. Why was it dug here, a hundred feet deep, although there are
+springs and streams of living water flowing down the valley, close at
+hand? Whence came the tradition of the Samaritans that Jacob gave them
+this well, although the Old Testament says nothing about it? Why did the
+Samaritan woman, in Jesus' time, come hither to draw water when there
+was a brook, not fifty yards away, which she must cross to get to the
+well?</p>
+
+<p>Who can tell? Certainly there must have been some use and reason for
+such a well, else the men of long ago would never have toiled to make
+it. Perhaps the people of Sychar had some superstition about its water
+which made them prefer it. Or perhaps the stream was owned and used for
+other purposes, while the water of the well was free.</p>
+
+<p>It makes no difference whether a solution of the problem is ever found.
+Its very existence adds to the touch of truth in the narrative of St.
+John's Gospel. <!-- Page 205 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page205"></a>[page 205]</span> Certainly this well was here in Jesus' day,
+close beside the road which He would be most likely to take in going
+from Jerusalem to Galilee. Here He sat, alone and weary, while the
+disciples went on to the village to buy food. And here, while He waited
+and thirsted, He spoke to an unknown, unfriendly, unhappy woman the
+words which have been a spring of living water to the weary and fevered
+heart of the world: "God is a spirit, and they that worship Him must
+worship Him in spirit and in truth."</p>
+
+<hr />
+<h3>III<br /><br />
+NABLÛS AND SEBASTE</h3>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">About</span> a mile from Jacob's Well, the city of <span class="correction" title="originally without accent">Nablûs</span> lies in the hollow
+between Mount Gerizim on the south and Mount Ebal on the north. The side
+of Gerizim is precipitous and jagged; Ebal rises more smoothly, but very
+steeply, and is covered with plantations of thornless cactus, (<i>Opuntia
+cochinillifera</i>), cultivated for the sake of the cochineal insects which
+live upon the plant and from which a red dye is made.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 206 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page206"></a>[page 206]</span></p>
+
+<p>The valley is well watered, and is about a quarter of a mile wide. A
+little east of the city there are two natural bays or amphitheatres
+opposite to each other in the mountains. Here the tribes of Israel may
+have been gathered while the priests chanted the curses of the law from
+Ebal and the blessings from Gerizim. (Joshua viii: 30-35.) The cliffs
+were sounding-boards and sent the loud voices of blessing and cursing
+out over the multitude so that all could hear.</p>
+
+<p>It seems as if it were mainly the echo of the cursing of Ebal that
+greets us as we ride around the fierce little Mohammedan city of Nablûs
+on Friday afternoon, passing through the open and dilapidated cemeteries
+where the veiled women are walking and gossiping away their holiday. The
+looks of the inhabitants are surly and hostile. The children shout
+mocking ditties at us, reviling the "Nazarenes." We will not ask our
+dragoman to translate the words that we catch now and then; it is easy
+to guess that they are not "fit to print."</p>
+
+<p>Our camp is close beside a cemetery, near the eastern gate of the town.
+The spectators who watch <!-- Page 207 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page207"></a>[page 207]</span> us from a distance while we dine are
+numerous; and no doubt they are passing unfavourable criticisms on our
+table manners, and on the Frankish custom of permitting one unveiled
+lady to travel with three husbands. The population of Nablûs is about
+twenty-five thousand. It has a Turkish governor, a garrison, several
+soap factories, and a million dogs which howl all night.</p>
+
+<p>At half-past six the next morning we set out on foot to climb Mount
+Ebal, which is three thousand feet high. The view from the rocky summit
+sweeps over all Palestine, from snowy Hermon to the mountains round
+about Jerusalem, from Carmel to Nebo, from the sapphire expanse of the
+Mediterranean to the violet valley of the Jordan and the garnet wall of
+Moab and Gilead beyond.</p>
+
+<p>For us the view is veiled in mystery by the haze of the south wind. The
+ranges and peaks far away fade into cloudlike shadows. The depths below
+us seem to sink unfathomably. Nablûs is buried in the gulf. On the
+summit of Gerizim, a Mohammedan <i>wêli</i>, shining like a flake of mica,
+marks the plateau where the Samaritan Temple <!-- Page 208 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page208"></a>[page 208]</span> stood. Hilltop
+towns, Asîret, Tallûza, Yasîd, emerge like islands from the misty sea.
+In that great shadowy hollow to the west lie the ruins of the city of
+Samaria, which Cæsar Augustus renamed Sebaste, in honour of his wife
+Augusta. If she could see the village of Sebastiyeh now she would not be
+proud of her namesake town. It is there that we are going to make our
+midday camp.</p>
+
+<p>King Omri acted as a wise man when he moved the capital of Israel from
+Shechem, an indefensible site, commanded by overhanging mountains and
+approached by two easy vales, to Shomron, the "watch-hill" which stands
+in the centre of the broad Vale of Barley.</p>
+
+<p>As we ride across the smiling corn-fields toward the isolated eminence,
+we see its strength as well as its beauty. It rises steeply from the
+valley to a height of more than three hundred feet. The encircling
+mountains are too far away to dominate it under the ancient conditions
+of warfare without cannons, and a good wall must have made it, as its
+name implied, an impregnable "stronghold," watching over a region of
+immense fertility.</p> <p><!-- Page 209 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page209"></a>[page 209]</span></p> <p>What pomps and splendours, what revels and
+massacres, what joys of victory and horrors of defeat, that round hill
+rising from the Vale of Barley has seen. Now there is nothing left of
+its crown of pride, but the broken pillars of the marble colonnade a
+mile long with which Herod the Great girdled the hill, and a few
+indistinguishable ruins of the temple which he built in honour of the
+divine Augustus and of the hippodrome which he erected for the people.
+We climb the terraces and ride through the olive-groves and ploughed
+fields where the street of columns once ran. A few of them are standing
+upright; others leaning or fallen, half sunken in the ground; fragments
+of others built into the stone walls which divide the fields. There are
+many hewn and carven stones imbedded in the miserable little modern
+village which crouches on the north end of the hill, and the mosque into
+which the Crusaders' Church of Saint John has been transformed is said
+to contain the tombs of Elisha, Obadiah and John the Baptist. This
+rumour does not concern us deeply and we will leave its truth
+uninvestigated.</p>
+
+<p>Let us tie our horses among Herod's pillars, and <!-- Page 210 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page210"></a>[page 210]</span> spread the
+rugs for our noontide rest by the ruined south gate of the city. At our
+feet lies the wide, level, green valley where the mighty host of
+Ben-hadad, King of Damascus, once besieged the starving city and waited
+for its surrender. (II Kings vii.) There in the twilight of long ago a
+panic terror whispered through the camp, and the Syrians rose and fled,
+leaving their tents and their gear behind them. And there four nameless
+lepers of Israel, wandering in their despair, found the vast encampment
+deserted, and entered in, and ate and drank, and picked up gold and
+silver, until their conscience smote them. Then they climbed up to this
+gate with the good news that the enemy had vanished, and the city was
+saved.</p>
+
+<hr />
+<p><!-- Page 211 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page211"></a>[page 211]</span></p>
+
+<h3>IV<br /><br />
+DÔTHÂN AND THE GOODNESS OF THE<br />
+SAMARITAN</h3>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Over</span> the steep mountains that fence Samaria to the north, down through
+terraced vales abloom with hawthorns and blood-red poppies, across
+hill-circled plains where the long, silvery wind-waves roll over the sea
+of grain from shore to shore, past little gray towns sleeping on the
+sunny heights, by paths that lead us near flowing springs where the
+village girls fill their pitchers, and down stony slopes where the
+goatherds in bright-coloured raiment tend their flocks, and over broad,
+moist fields where the path has been obliterated by the plough, and
+around the edge of marshes where the storks rise heavily on long
+flapping wings, we come galloping at sunset to our camp beside the
+little green hill of Dôthân.</p>
+
+<p>Behind it are the mountains, swelling and softly rounded like breasts.
+It was among them that the servant of Elisha saw the vision of horses
+and chariots of fire protecting his master. (II Kings vi: 14-19.)</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 212 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page212"></a>[page 212]</span></p>
+
+<p>North and east of Dôthân the plain extends smooth and gently sloping,
+full of young harvest. There the chariot of Naaman rolled when he came
+down from Damascus to be healed by the prophet of Israel. (II Kings v:
+9.)</p>
+
+<p>On top of the hill is a spreading terebinth-tree, with some traces of
+excavation and rude ruins beneath it. There Joseph's envious brethren
+cast him into one of the dry pits, from which they drew him up again to
+sell him to a caravan of merchants, winding across the plain on their
+way from Midian into Egypt. (Genesis xxxvii.)</p>
+
+<p>Truly, many and wonderful things came to pass of old around this little
+green hill. And now, at the foot of it, there is a well-watered garden,
+with figs, oranges, almonds, vines, and tall, trembling poplars,
+surrounded by a hedge of prickly pear. Outside of the hedge a big, round
+spring of crystal water is flowing steadily over the rim of its basin of
+stones. There the flocks and herds are gathered, morning and evening, to
+drink. There the children of the tiny hamlet on the hillside come to
+paddle their feet in the running stream. There a caravan of Greek
+pilgrims, <!-- Page 213 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page213"></a>[page 213]</span> on their way from Damascus to Jerusalem for Easter,
+halt in front of our camp, to refresh themselves with a draught of the
+cool water.</p>
+
+<p>As we watch them from our tents there is a sudden commotion among them,
+a cry of pain, and then voices of dismay. George and two or three of our
+men run out to see what is the matter, and come hurrying back to get
+some cotton cloth and oil and wine. One of the pilgrims, an old woman of
+seventy, has fallen from her horse on the sharp stones beside the
+spring, breaking her wrist and cutting her head.</p>
+
+<p>I do not know whether the way in which they bound up that poor old
+stranger's wounds was surgically wise, but I know that it was humanly
+kind and tender. I do not know which of our various churches were
+represented among her helpers, but there must have been at least three,
+and the muleteer from Bagdad who "had no religion but sang beautiful
+Persian songs" was also there, and ready to help with the others. And so
+the parable which lighted our dusty way going down to Jericho is
+interpreted in our pleasant camp at Dôthân.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 214 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page214"></a>[page 214]</span></p>
+
+<p>The paths of the Creeds are many and winding; they cross and diverge;
+but on all of them the Good Samaritan is welcome, and I think he travels
+to a happy place.</p>
+
+<hr />
+<p><!-- Page 215 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page215"></a>[page 215]</span></p>
+
+<h4><i>A PSALM OF THE HELPERS</i></h4>
+
+<p class="noind"><i>The ways of the world are full of haste and turmoil:<br />
+I will sing of the tribe of helpers who travel in peace.</i><br />
+<br />
+<i>He that turneth from the road to rescue another,<br />
+Turneth toward his goal:<br />
+He shall arrive in due time by the foot-path of mercy,<br />
+God will be his guide.</i><br />
+<br />
+<i>He that taketh up the burden of the fainting,<br />
+Lighteneth his own load:<br />
+The Almighty will put his arms underneath him,<br />
+He shall lean upon the Lord.</i><br />
+<br />
+<i>He that speaketh comfortable words to mourners,<br />
+Healeth his own heart:<br />
+In his time of grief they will return to remembrance,<br />
+God will use them for balm.</i><br />
+<br />
+<i>He that careth for the sick and wounded,<br />
+Watcheth not alone:<br />
+There are three in the darkness together,<br />
+And the third is the Lord.</i><br />
+<br />
+<i>Blessed is the way of the helpers:<br />
+The companions of the Christ.</i></p>
+
+<hr />
+<p><!-- Page 216 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page216"></a>[page 216]</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p><!-- Page 217 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page217"></a>[page 217]</span></p>
+
+<h2>X<br /><br />
+GALILEE AND THE LAKE</h2>
+
+<hr />
+<p><!-- Page 218 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page218"></a>[page 218]</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p><!-- Page 219 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page219"></a>[page 219]</span></p>
+
+<h3>I<br /><br />
+THE PLAIN OF ESDRAELON</h3>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Going</span> from Samaria into Galilee is like passing from the Old Testament
+into the New.</p>
+
+<p>There is indeed little difference in the outward landscape: the same
+bare lines of rolling mountains, green and gray near by, blue or purple
+far away; the same fertile valleys and emerald plains embosomed among
+the hills; the same orchards of olive-trees, not quite so large, nor so
+many, but always softening and shading the outlook with their touches of
+silvery verdure.</p>
+
+<p>It is the spirit of the landscape that changes; the inward view; the
+atmosphere of memories and associations through which we travel. We have
+been riding with fierce warriors and proud kings and fiery prophets of
+Israel, passing the sites of royal splendour and fields of ancient
+havoc, retracing the warpaths of the Twelve Tribes. But when we enter
+Galilee the keynote of our thoughts <!-- Page 220 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page220"></a>[page 220]</span> is modulated into peace.
+Issachar and Zebulon and Asher and Naphtali have left no trace or
+message for us on the plains and hills where they once lived and fought.
+We journey with Jesus of Nazareth, the friend of publicans and sinners,
+the shepherd of the lost sheep, the human embodiment of the Divine Love.</p>
+
+<p>This transition in our journey is marked outwardly by the crossing of
+the great Plain of Esdraelon, which we enter by the gateway of Jenîn.
+There are a few palm-trees lending a little grace to the disconsolate
+village, and the Turkish captain of the military post, a grizzled
+veteran of Plevna, invites us into the guard-room to drink coffee with
+him, while we wait for a dilatory telegraph operator to send a message.
+Then we push out upon the green sea to a brown island: the village of
+Zer'în, the ancient Jezreel.</p>
+
+<p>The wretched hamlet of adobe huts, with mud beehives plastered against
+the walls, stands on the lowest bench of the foothills of Mount Gilboa,
+opposite the equally wretched hamlet of Sûlem in a corresponding
+position at the base of a mountain <!-- Page 221 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page221"></a>[page 221]</span> called Little Hermon. The
+widespread, opulent view is haunted with old stories of battle, murder
+and sudden death.</p>
+
+<p>Down to the east we see the line of brighter green creeping out from the
+flanks of Mount Gilboa, marking the spring where Gideon sifted his band
+of warriors for the night-attack on the camp of Midian. (Judges vii:
+4-23.) Under the brow of the hill are the ancient wine-presses, cut in
+the rock, which belonged to the vineyard of Naboth, whom Jezebel
+assassinated. (I Kings xxi: 1-16.) From some window of her favourite
+palace on this eminence, that hard, old, painted queen looked down the
+broad valley of Jezreel, and saw Jehu in his chariot driving furiously
+from Gilead to bring vengeance upon her. On those dark ridges to the
+south the brave Jonathan was slain by the Philistines and the desperate
+Saul fell upon his own sword. (I Samuel xxxi: 1-6.) Through that open
+valley, which slopes so gently down to the Jordan at Bethshan, the
+hordes of Midian and the hosts of Damascus marched against Israel. By
+the pass of Jenîn, Holofernes led his army in triumph until he met
+Judith of Bethulia and <!-- Page 222 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page222"></a>[page 222]</span> lost his head. Yonder in the corner to
+the northward, at the base of Mount Tabor, Deborah and Barak gathered
+the tribes against the Canaanites under Sisera. (Judges iv: 4-22.) Away
+to the westward, in the notch of Megiddo, Pharaoh-Necho's archers
+pierced King Josiah, and there was great mourning for him in
+Hadad-rimmon. (II Chronicles xxxv: 24-25; Zechariah xii: 11.) Farther
+still, where the mountain spurs of Galilee approach the long ridge of
+Carmel, Elijah put the priests of Baal to death by the Brook Kishon. (I
+Kings xviii: 20-40.)</p>
+
+<p>All over that great prairie, which makes a broad break between the
+highlands of Galilee and the highlands of Samaria and Judea, and opens
+an easy pathway rising no more than three hundred feet between the
+Jordan and the Mediterranean&mdash;all over that fertile, blooming area
+and around the edges of it are sown the legends</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+<span class="i05">"Of old, unhappy, far-off things<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And battles long ago."</span></p>
+
+<p>But on this bright April day when we enter the plain of Armageddon,
+everything is tranquil and joyous.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 223 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page223"></a>[page 223]</span></p>
+
+<p>The fields are full of rustling wheat, and bearded barley, and
+blue-green stalks of beans, and feathery <i>kirsenneh</i>, camel-provender.
+The peasants in their gay-coloured clothing are ploughing the rich,
+red-brown soil for the late crop of <i>doura</i>. The newly built railway
+from <span class="correction" title="originally without accent">Haifâ</span> to Damascus lies like a yellow string across the prairie from
+west to east; and from north to south a single file of two hundred
+camels, with merchandise for Egypt, undulate along the ancient road of
+the caravans, turning their ungainly heads to look at the puffing engine
+which creeps toward them from the distance.</p>
+
+<p>Larks singing in the air, storks parading beside the watercourses,
+falcons poising overhead, poppies and pink gladioluses and blue
+corn-cockles blooming through the grain,&mdash;a little village on a
+swell of rising ground, built for their farm hands by the rich Greeks
+who have bought the land and brought it under cultivation,&mdash;an air
+so pure and soft that it is like a caress,&mdash;all seems to speak a
+language of peace and promise, as if one of the old prophets were
+telling of the day when Jehovah shall have compassion on His people
+Israel and restore them. "They that dwell <!-- Page 224 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page224"></a>[page 224]</span> under His shadow
+shall return; they shall revive as the grain, and blossom as the vine:
+the scent thereof shall be as the wine of Lebanon."</p>
+
+<p>It is, indeed, not impossible that wise methods of colonization, better
+agriculture and gardening, the development of fruit-orchards and
+vineyards, and above all, more rational government and equitable
+taxation may one day give back to Palestine something of her old
+prosperity and population. If the Jews really want it no doubt they can
+have it. Their rich men have the money and the influence; and there are
+enough of their poorer folk scattered through Europe to make any land
+blossom like the rose, if they have the will and the patience for the
+slow toil of the husbandman and the vine-dresser and the shepherd and
+the herdsman.</p>
+
+<p>But the proud kingdom of David and Solomon will never be restored; not
+even the tributary kingdom of Herod. For the land will never again stand
+at the crossroads, the four-corners of the civilized world. The Suez
+Canal to the south, and the railways through the Lebanon and Asia Minor
+to the north, have settled that. They have left Palestine in a corner,
+off the <!-- Page 225 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page225"></a>[page 225]</span> main-travelled roads. The best that she can hope for
+is a restoration to quiet fruitfulness, to placid and humble industry,
+to olive-crowned and vine-girdled felicity, never again to power.</p>
+
+<p>And if that lowly re-coronation comes to her, it will not be on the
+stony heights around Jerusalem: it will be in the Plain of Sharon, in
+the outgoings of Mount Ephraim, in the green pastures of Gilead, in the
+lovely region of "Galilee of the Gentiles." It will not be by the sword
+of Gideon nor by the sceptre of Solomon, but by the sign of peace on
+earth and good-will among men.</p>
+
+<p>With thoughts like these we make our way across the verdurous inland sea
+of Esdraelon, out of the Old Testament into the New. Landmarks of the
+country of the Gospel begin to appear: the wooded dome of Mount Tabor,
+the little village of Nain where Jesus restored the widow's only son.
+(Luke vii: 11-16.) But these lie far to our right. The beacon which
+guides us is a glimpse of white walls and red roofs, high on a shoulder
+of the Galilean hills: the outlying houses of Nazareth, where the boy
+Jesus dwelt with His parents after their return from <!-- Page 226 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page226"></a>[page 226]</span> the
+flight into Egypt, and was obedient to them, and grew in wisdom and
+stature, and in favour with God and men.</p>
+
+<hr />
+<h3>II<br /><br />
+THEIR OWN CITY NAZARETH</h3>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Our</span> camp in Nazareth is on a terrace among the olive-trees, on the
+eastern side of a small valley, facing the Mohammedan quarter of the
+town.</p>
+
+<p>This is distinctly the most attractive little city that we have seen in
+Palestine. The houses are spread out over a wider area than is usual in
+the East, covering three sides of a gentle depression high on the side
+of the Jebel es-Sikh, and creeping up the hill-slopes as if to seek a
+larger view and a purer air. Some of them have gardens, fair white
+walls, red-tiled roofs, balconies of stone or wrought iron. Even in the
+more closely built portion of the town the streets seem cleaner, the
+bazaars lighter and less malodorous, the interior courtyards into which
+we glance in passing more neat and homelike. Many of the doorways and
+living-rooms of the humbler houses are freshly <!-- Page 227 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page227"></a>[page 227]</span> whitewashed
+with a light-blue tint which gives them an immaculate air of
+cleanliness.</p>
+
+<p>The Nazarene women are generally good looking, and free and dignified in
+their bearing. The children, fairer in complexion than is common in
+Syria, are almost all charming with the beauty of youth, and among them
+are some very lovely faces of boys and girls. I do not mean to say that
+Nazareth appears to us an earthly paradise; only that it shines by
+contrast with places like Hebron and Jericho and Nablûs, even with
+Bethlehem, and that we find here far less of human squalor and misery to
+sadden us with thoughts of</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+<span class="i6">"What man has made of man."</span></p>
+
+<p>The population of the town is about eleven or twelve thousand, a quarter
+of them Mussulmans, and the rest Christians of various sects, including
+two or three hundred Protestants. The people used to have rather a bad
+reputation for turbulence; but we see no signs of it, either in the
+appearance of the city or in the demeanour of the inhabitants. The
+children and the townsfolk whom we meet in the streets, and <!-- Page
+228 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page228"></a>[page 228]</span> of whom we ask our way now and then, are civil and
+friendly. The man who comes to the camp to sell us antique coins and
+lovely vases of iridescent glass dug from the tombs of Tyre and Sidon,
+may be an inveterate humbug, but his manners are good and his prices are
+low. The soft-voiced women and lustrous-eyed girls who hang about the
+Lady's tent, persuading her to buy their small embroideries and
+lace-work and trinkets, are gentle and ingratiating, though persistent.</p>
+
+<p>I am honestly of the opinion that Christian mission-schools and
+hospitals have done a great deal for Nazareth. We go this morning to
+visit the schools of the English Church Missionary Society, where Miss
+Newton is conducting an admirable and most successful work for the girls
+of Nazareth. She is away on a visit to some of her outlying stations;
+but the dark-eyed, happy-looking Syrian teacher shows us all the
+classes. There are five of them, and every room is full and bright and
+orderly.</p>
+
+<p>On the Christian side, the older girls sing a hymn for us, in their high
+voices and quaint English accent, about Jesus stilling the storm on
+Galilee, and the intermediate <!-- Page 229 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page229"></a>[page 229]</span> girls and the tiny co-educated
+boys and girls in the kindergarten go through various pretty
+performances. Then the teacher leads us across the street to the two
+Moslem classes, and we cannot tell the difference between them and the
+Christian children, except that now the singing of "Jesus loves me" and
+the recitation of "The Lord is my Shepherd" are in Arabic. There is one
+blind girl who recites most perfectly and eagerly. Another girl of about
+ten years carries her baby-brother in her arms. Two little laggards,
+(they were among the group at our camp early in the morning), arrive
+late, weeping out their excuses to the teacher. She hears them with a
+kind, humorous look on her face, gives them a soft rebuke and a task,
+and sends them to their seats, their tears suddenly transformed to
+smiles.</p>
+
+<p>From the schools we go to the hospital of the British Medical Mission, a
+little higher up the hill. We find young Doctor Scrimgeour, who has
+lately come out from Edinburgh University, and his white-uniformed,
+cheerful, busy nurses, tasked to the limit of their strength by the
+pressure of their work, <!-- Page 230 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page230"></a>[page 230]</span> but cordial and simple in their
+welcome. As I walk with the doctor on his rounds I see every ward full,
+and all kinds of calamity and suffering waiting for the relief and help
+of his kind, skilful knife. Here are hernia, and tuberculous glands, and
+cataract, and stone, and bone tuberculosis, and a score of other
+miseries; and there, on the table, with pale, dark face and mysterious
+eyes, lies a man whose knee has been shattered by a ball from a Martini
+rifle in an affray with robbers.</p>
+
+<p>"Was he one of the robbers," I ask, "or one of the robbed?"</p>
+
+<p>"I really don't know," says the doctor, "but in a few minutes I am going
+to do my best for him."</p>
+
+<p>Is not this Christ's work that is still doing in Christ's town, this
+teaching of the children, this helping of the sick and wounded, for His
+sake, and in His name? Yet there are silly folk who say they do not
+believe in missions.</p>
+
+<p>There are a few so-called sacred places and shrines in
+Nazareth&mdash;the supposed scene of the Annunciation; the traditional
+Workshop of Joseph; the alleged <i>Mensa Christi</i>, a flat stone which He
+is <!-- Page 231 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page231"></a>[page 231]</span> said to have used as a table when He ate with His
+disciples; and so on. But all these uncertain relics and memorials, as
+usual, are inclosed in chapels, belit with lamps, and encircled with
+ceremonial. The very spring at which the Virgin Mary must have often
+filled her pitcher, (for it is the only flowing fountain in the town),
+now rises beneath the Greek Church of Saint Gabriel, and is conducted
+past the altar in a channel of stone where the pilgrims bathe their eyes
+and faces. To us, who are seeking our Holy Land out-of-doors, these
+shut-in shrines and altared memorials are less significant than what we
+find in the open, among the streets and on the surrounding hillsides.</p>
+
+<p>The Virgin's Fountain, issuing from the church, flows into a big, stone
+basin under a round arch. Here, as often as we pass, we see the maidens
+and the mothers of Nazareth, with great earthern vessels poised upon
+their shapely heads, coming with merry talk and laughter, to draw water.
+Even so the mother of Jesus must have come to this fountain many a time,
+perhaps with her wondrous boy running beside her, clasping her hand or a
+fold of her <!-- Page 232 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page232"></a>[page 232]</span> bright-coloured garment. Perhaps, when the child
+was little she carried Him on her shoulder, as the women carry their
+children to-day.</p>
+
+<p>Passing through a street, we look into the interior of a carpenter-shop,
+with its simple tools, its little pile of new lumber, its floor littered
+with chips and shavings, and its air full of the pleasant smell of
+freshly cut wood. There are a few articles of furniture which the
+carpenter has made: a couple of chairs, a table, a stool: and he
+himself, with his leg stretched out and his piece of wood held firmly by
+his naked toes, is working busily at a tiny bed which needs only a pair
+of rockers to become a cradle. Outside the door of the shop a boy of ten
+or twelve is cutting some boards and slats, and putting them neatly
+together. We ask him what he is making. "A box," he answers, "a box for
+some doves"&mdash;and then bends his head over his absorbing task. Even
+so Jesus must have worked at the shop of Joseph, the carpenter, and
+learned His handicraft.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 330px; ">
+<img src="images/illus08.jpg" width="330" height="500" alt="The Virgin's Fountain, Nazareth." title="The Virgin's Fountain, Nazareth." />
+<span class="caption">The Virgin's Fountain, Nazareth.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Let us walk up, at eventide, to the top of the hill behind the town.
+Here is one of the loveliest views in all Palestine. The sun is setting
+and the clear-obscure <!-- Page 233 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page233"></a>[page 233]</span> of twilight already rests over the
+streets and houses, the minarets and spires, the slender cypresses and
+round olive-trees and grotesque hedges of cactus. But on the heights the
+warm radiance from the west pours its full flood, lighting up all the
+flowerets of delicate pink flax and golden chrysanthemum and blue
+campanula with which the grass is broidered. Far and wide that roseate
+illumination spreads itself; changing the snowy mantle of distant
+Hermon, the great Sheikh of Mountains, from ermine to flamingo feathers;
+making the high hills of Naphtali and the excellency of Carmel glow as
+if with soft, transfiguring, inward fire; touching the little town of
+Saffûriyeh below us, where they say that the Virgin Mary was born, and
+the city of Safed, thirty miles away on the lofty shoulder of Jebel
+Jermak; suffusing the haze that fills the Valley of the Jordan, and the
+long bulwarks of the Other-Side, with hues of mauve and purple; and
+bathing the wide expanse of the western sea with indescribable
+splendours, over which the flaming sun poises for a moment beneath the
+edge of a low-hung cloud.</p>
+
+<p>On this hilltop, I doubt not, the boy Jesus often <!-- Page 234 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page234"></a>[page 234]</span> filled His
+hands with flowers. Here He could watch the creeping caravans of Arabian
+merchants, and the glittering legions of Roman soldiers, and the slow
+files of Jewish pilgrims, coming up from the Valley of Jezreel and
+stretching out across the Plain of Esdraelon. Hither, at the evening
+hour, He came as a youth to find the blessing of wide and tranquil
+thought. Here, when the burden of manhood pressed upon Him, He rested
+after the day's work, free from that sadness which often touches us in
+the vision of earth's transient beauty, because He saw far beyond the
+horizon into the spirit-world, where there is no night, nor weariness,
+nor sin, nor death.</p>
+
+<p>For nearly thirty years He must have lived within sight of this hilltop.
+And then, one day, He came back from a journey to the Jordan and
+Jerusalem, and entered into the little synagogue at the foot of this
+hill, and began to preach to His townsfolk His glad tidings of spiritual
+liberty and brotherhood and eternal life.</p>
+
+<p>But they were filled with scorn and wrath. His words rebuked them, stung
+them, inflamed them with hatred. They laid violent hands on Him, and
+<!-- Page 235 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page235"></a>[page 235]</span> led Him out to the brow of the hill,&mdash;perhaps it was
+yonder on that steep, rocky peak to the south of the town, looking back
+toward the country of the Old Testament,&mdash;to cast Him down
+headlong.</p>
+
+<p>Yet I think there must have been a few friends and lovers of His in that
+disdainful and ignorant crowd; for He passed through the midst of them
+unharmed, and went His way to the home of Peter and Andrew and John and
+Philip, beside the Sea of Galilee, never to come back to Nazareth.</p>
+
+<hr />
+<h3>III<br /><br />
+A WEDDING IN CANA OF GALILEE</h3>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">We</span> thought to save a little time on our journey, and perhaps to spare
+ourselves a little jolting on the hard high-road, by sending the
+saddle-horses ahead with the caravan, and taking a carriage for the
+sixteen-mile drive to Tiberias. When we came to the old sarcophagus
+which serves as a drinking trough at the spring outside the village of
+Cana, a strange thing befell us.</p>
+
+<p>We had halted for a moment to refresh the horses. <!-- Page 236 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page236"></a>[page 236]</span> Suddenly
+there was a sound of furious galloping on the road behind us. A score of
+cavaliers in Bedouin dress, with guns and swords, came after us in hot
+haste. The leaders dashed across the open space beside the spring,
+wheeled their foaming horses and dashed back again.</p>
+
+<p>"Is this our affair with robbers, at last?" we asked George.</p>
+
+<p>He laughed a little. "No," said he, "this is the beginning of a wedding
+in Kafr Kennâ. The bridegroom and his friends come over from some other
+village where they live, to show off a bit of <i>fantasia</i> to the bride
+and her friends. They carry her back with them after the marriage. We
+wait a while and see how they ride."</p>
+
+<p>The horses were gayly caparisoned with ribbons and tassels and
+embroidered saddle-cloths. The riders were handsome, swarthy fellows
+with haughty faces. Their eyes glanced sideways at us to see whether we
+were admiring them, as they shouted their challenges to one another and
+raced wildly up and down the rock-strewn course, with their robes flying
+and their horses' sides bloody with spurring. One <!-- Page 237 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page237"></a>[page 237]</span> of the men
+was a huge coal-black Nubian who brandished a naked sword as he rode.
+Others whirled their long muskets in the air and yelled furiously. The
+riding was cruel, reckless, superb; loose reins and loose stirrups on
+the headlong gallop; then the sharp curb brought the horse up suddenly,
+the rein on his neck turned him as if on a pivot, and the pressure of
+the heel sent him flying back over the course.</p>
+
+<p>Presently there was a sound of singing and clapping hands behind the
+high cactus-hedges to our left, and from a little lane the bridal
+procession walked up to take the high-road to the village. There were a
+dozen men in front, firing guns and shouting, then came the women, with
+light veils of gauze over their faces, singing shrilly, and in the midst
+of them, in gay attire, but half-concealed with long, dark mantles, the
+bride and "the virgins, her companions, in raiment of needlework."</p>
+
+<p>As they saw the photographic camera pointed at them they laughed, and
+crowded closer together, and drew the ends of their dark mantles over
+their heads. So they passed up the road, their shrill song <!-- Page 238 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page238"></a>[page 238]</span>
+broken a little by their laughter; and the company of horsemen, the
+bridegroom and his friends, wheeled into line, two by two, and trotted
+after them into the village.</p>
+
+<p>This was all that we saw of the wedding at Kafr Kennâ&mdash;just a
+vivid, mysterious flash of human figures, drawn together by the primal
+impulse and longing of our common nature, garbed and ordered by the
+social customs which make different lands and ages seem strange to each
+other, and moving across the narrow stage of Time into the dimness of
+that Arab village, where Jesus and His mother and His disciples were
+guests at a wedding long ago.</p>
+
+<hr />
+<h3>IV<br /><br />
+TIBERIAS</h3>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">It</span> is one of the ironies of fate that the lake which saw the greater
+part of the ministry of Jesus, should take its modern name from a city
+built by Herod Antipas, and called after one of the most infamous of the
+Roman Emperors,&mdash;"the Sea of Tiberias."</p>
+
+<p>Our road to this city of decadence leads gradually <!-- Page 239 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page239"></a>[page 239]</span> downward,
+through a broad, sinking moorland, covered with weeds and wild
+flowers&mdash;rich, monotonous, desolate. The broidery of pink flax and
+yellow chrysanthemums and white marguerites still follows us; but now
+the wider stretches of thistles and burdocks and daturas and cockleburs
+and water-plantains seem to be more important. The landscape saddens
+around us, under the deepening haze of the desert-wind, the sombre
+Sherkîyeh. There are no golden sunbeams, no cool cloud-shadows, only a
+gray and melancholy illumination growing ever fainter and more nebulous
+as the day declines, and the outlines of the hills fade away from the
+dim, silent, forsaken plain through which we move.</p>
+
+<p>We are crossing the battlefield where the soldiers of Napoleon, under
+the brave Junot, fought desperately against the overwhelming forces of
+the Turks. Yonder, away to the left, in the mysterious haze, the double
+"Horns of Hattin" rise like a shadowy exhalation.</p>
+
+<p>That is said to be the mountain where Jesus gathered the multitude
+around Him and spoke His new beatitudes on the meek, the merciful, the
+<!-- Page 240 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page240"></a>[page 240]</span> peacemakers, the pure in heart. It is certainly the place
+where the hosts of the Crusaders met the army of Saladin, in the fierce
+heat of a July day, seven hundred years ago, and while the burning grass
+and weeds and brush flamed around them, were cut to pieces and trampled
+and utterly consumed. There the new Kingdom of Jerusalem,&mdash;the last
+that was won with the sword,&mdash;went down in ruin around the relics
+of "the true cross," which its soldiers carried as their talisman; and
+Guy de Lusignan, their King, was captured. The noble prisoners were
+invited by Saladin to his tent, and he offered them sherbets, cooled
+with snow from Hermon, to slake their feverish thirst. When they were
+refreshed, the conqueror ordered them to be led out and put to the
+sword,&mdash;just yonder at the foot of the Mount of Beatitudes.</p>
+
+<p>From terrace to terrace of the falling moor we roll along the winding
+road through the brumous twilight, until we come within sight of the
+black, ruined walls, the gloomy towers, the huddled houses of the
+worn-out city of Tiberias. She is like an ancient beggar sitting on a
+rocky cape beside the lake and <!-- Page 241 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page241"></a>[page 241]</span> bathing her feet in the
+invisible water. The gathering dusk lends a sullen and forlorn aspect to
+the place. Behind us rise the shattered volcanic crags and cliffs of
+basalt; before us glimmer pallid and ghostly touches of light from the
+hidden waves; a few lamps twinkle here and there in the dormant town.</p>
+
+<p>This was the city which Herod Antipas built for the capital of his
+Province of Galilee. He laid its foundations in an ancient graveyard,
+and stretched its walls three miles along the lake, adorning it with a
+palace, a forum, a race-course, and a large synagogue. But to strict
+Jews the place was unclean, because it was defiled with Roman idols, and
+because its builders had polluted themselves by digging up the bones of
+the dead. Herod could get few Jews to live in his city, and it became a
+catch-all for the off-scourings of the land, people of all creeds and
+none, aliens, mongrels, soldiers of fortune, and citizens of the
+high-road. It was the strongest fortress and probably the richest town
+of Galilee in Christ's day, but so far as we know He never entered it.</p>
+
+<p>After the fall of Jerusalem, strangely enough, the Jews made it their
+favourite city, the seat of their <!-- Page 242 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page242"></a>[page 242]</span> Sanhedrim and the centre of
+rabbinical learning. Here the famous Rabbis Jehuda and Akîba and the
+philosopher Maimonides taught. Here the Mishna and the Gemara were
+written. And here, to-day, two-thirds of the five thousand inhabitants
+are Jews, many of them living on the charity of their kindred in Europe,
+and spending their time in the study of the Talmud while they wait for
+the Messiah who shall restore the kingdom to Israel. You may see their
+flat fur caps, dingy gabardines, long beards and melancholy faces on
+every street in the drowsy little city, dreaming (among fleas and
+fevers) of I know not what impossible glories to come.</p>
+
+<p>You may see, also, on the hill near the <span class="correction" title="originally without accent">Serâi</span>, the splendid Mission
+Hospital of the United Free Church of Scotland, where for twenty-three
+years Doctor Torrance has been ministering to the body and soul of
+Tiberias in the name of Jesus. Do you find the building too large and
+fine, the lovely garden too beautiful with flowers, the homes of the
+doctors, and teachers, and helpers of the sick and wounded, too clean
+and healthful and orderly? Do you say "To what purpose is this waste?"
+Then I know <!-- Page 243 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page243"></a>[page 243]</span> not how to measure your ignorance. For you have
+failed to see that this is the embassy of the only King who still cares
+for the true welfare of this forsaken, bedraggled, broken-down Tiberias.</p>
+
+<p>On the evening of our arrival, however, all these things are hidden from
+us in the dusk. We drive past the ruined gate of the city, a mile along
+the southern road toward the famous Hot Baths. Here, on a little terrace
+above the lake, between the road and the black basalt cliffs, our camp
+is pitched, and through the darkness</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+<span class="i05">'We hear the water lapping on the crag,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the long ripple washing in the reeds.'</span></p>
+
+<p>In the freshness of the early morning the sunrise pours across the lake
+into our tents. There is a light, cool breeze blowing from the north,
+rippling the clear, green water, (of a hue like the stone called <i>aqua
+marina</i>), with a thousand flaws and wrinkles, which catch the flashing
+light and reflect the deep blue sky, and change beneath the shadow of
+floating clouds to innumerable colours of lapis lazuli, and violet, and
+purple, and peacock blue.</p> <p><!-- Page 244 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page244"></a>[page 244]</span></p> <p>The old comparison of the shape of
+the lake to a lute, or a harp, is not clear to us from the point at
+which we stand: for the northwestward sweep of the bay of Gennesaret,
+which reaches a breadth of nearly eight miles from the eastern shore, is
+hidden from us by a promontory, where the dark walls and white houses of
+Tiberias slope to the water. But we can see the full length of the lake,
+from the depression of the Jordan Valley at the southern end, to the
+shores of Bethsaida and Capernaum at the foot of the northern hills,
+beyond which the dazzling whiteness of Hermon is visible.</p>
+
+<p>Opposite rise the eastern heights of the Jaulân, with almost level top
+and steep flanks, furrowed by rocky ravines, descending precipitously to
+a strip of smooth, green shore. Behind us the mountains are more broken
+and varied in form, lifted into sharper peaks and sloped into broader
+valleys. The whole aspect of the scene is like a view in the English
+Lake country, say on Windermere or Ullswater; only there are no forests
+or thickets to shade and soften it. Every edge of the hills is like a
+silhouette against the sky; every curve of the shore clear and distinct.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 245 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page245"></a>[page 245]</span></p>
+
+<p>Of the nine rich cities which once surrounded the lake, none is left
+except this ragged old Tiberias. Of the hundreds of fishing boats and
+passenger vessels which once crossed its waters, all have vanished
+except half a dozen little pleasure skiffs kept for the use of tourists.
+Of the armies and caravans which once travelled these shores, all have
+passed by into the eternal far-away, except the motley string of
+visitors to the Hot Springs, who were coming up to bathe in the
+medicinal waters in the days of Joshua when the place was called
+Hammath, and in the time of the Greeks when it was named Emmaus, and who
+are still trotting along the road in front of our camp toward the big,
+white dome and dirty bath-houses of Hummam. They come from all parts of
+Syria, from Damascus and the sea-coast, from Judea and the Haurân;
+Greeks and Arabs and Turks and Maronites and Jews; on foot, on
+donkey-back, and in litters. Now, it is a cavalcade of Druses from the
+Lebanon, men, women and children, riding on tired horses. Now, it is a
+procession of Hebrews walking with a silken canopy over the sacred books
+of their law.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 246 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page246"></a>[page 246]</span></p>
+
+<p>In the morning we visit Tiberias, buy some bread and fish in the market,
+and go through the Mission Hospital, where one of the gentle nurses
+binds up a foolish little wound on my wrist.</p>
+
+<p>In the afternoon we sail on the southern part of the lake. The boatmen
+laugh at my fruitless fishing with artificial flies, and catch a few
+small fish for us with their nets in the shallow, muddy places along the
+shore. The wind is strange and variable, now sweeping down in violent
+gusts that bend the long arm of the lateen sail, now dying away to a
+dead calm through which we row lazily home.</p>
+
+<p>I remember a small purple kingfisher poising in the air over a shoal,
+his head bent downward, his wings vibrating swiftly. He drops like a
+shot and comes up out of the water with a fish held crosswise in his
+bill. With measured wing-strokes he flits to the top of a rock to eat
+his supper, and a robber-gull flaps after him to take it away. But the
+industrious kingfisher is too quick to be robbed. He bolts his fish with
+a single gulp. We eat ours in more leisurely fashion, by the light of
+the candles in our peaceful tent.</p>
+
+<hr />
+<p><!-- Page 247 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page247"></a>[page 247]</span></p>
+
+<h3>V<br /><br />
+MEMORIES OF THE LAKE</h3>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">A hundred</span> little points of illumination flash into memory as I look back
+over the hours that we spent beside the Sea of Galilee. How should I
+write of them all without being tedious? How, indeed, should I hope to
+make them visible or significant in the bare words of description?</p>
+
+<p>Never have I passed richer, fuller hours; but most of their wealth was
+in very little things: the personal look of a flower growing by the
+wayside; the intimate message of a bird's song falling through the sunny
+air; the expression of confidence and appeal on the face of a wounded
+man in the hospital, when the good physician stood beside his cot; the
+shadows of the mountains lengthening across the valleys at sunset; the
+laughter of a little child playing with a broken water pitcher; the
+bronzed profiles and bold, free ways of our sunburned rowers; the sad
+eyes of an old Hebrew lifted from the book that he was reading; the
+ruffling breezes and sudden squalls that changed the surface of the
+lake; the <!-- Page 248 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page248"></a>[page 248]</span> single palm-tree that waved over the mud hovels of
+Magdala; the millions of tiny shells that strewed the beach of Capernaum
+and Bethsaida; the fertile sweep of the Plain of Gennesaret rising from
+the lake; and the dark precipices of the "Robbers' Gorge" running back
+into the western mountains.</p>
+
+<p>The written record of these hours is worth little; but in experience and
+in memory they have a mystical meaning and beauty, because they belong
+to the country where Jesus walked with His fishermen-disciples, and took
+the little children in His arms, and healed the sick, and opened blind
+eyes to behold ineffable things.</p>
+
+<p>Every touch that brings that country nearer to us in our humanity and
+makes it more real, more simple, more vivid, is precious. For the one
+irreparable loss that could befall us in religion,&mdash;a loss that is
+often threatened by our abstract and theoretical ways of thinking and
+speaking about Him,&mdash;would be to lose Jesus out of the lowly and
+familiar ways of our mortal life. He entered these lowly ways as the Son
+of Man in order to make us sure that we are the children of God.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 249 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page249"></a>[page 249]</span></p>
+
+<p>Therefore I am glad of every hour spent by the Lake of Galilee.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>I remember, when we came across in our boat to Tell Hûm, where the
+ancient city of Capernaum stood, the sun was shining with a fervent heat
+and the air of the lake, six hundred and eighty feet below the level of
+the sea, was soft and languid. The gray-bearded German monk who came to
+meet us at the landing and admitted us to the inclosure of his little
+monastery where he was conducting the excavation of the ruins, wore a
+cork helmet and spectacles. He had been heated, even above the ninety
+degrees Fahrenheit which the thermometer marked, by the rudeness of a
+couple of tourists who had just tried to steal a photograph of his work.
+He had foiled them by opening their camera and blotting the film with
+sunlight, and had then sent them away with fervent words. But as he
+walked with us among his roses and Pride of India trees, his spirit
+cooled within him, and he showed himself a learned and accomplished man.</p>
+
+<p>He told us how he had been working there for two <!-- Page 250 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page250"></a>[page 250]</span> or three
+years, keeping records and drawings and photographs of everything that
+was found; going back to the Franciscan convent at Jerusalem for his
+short vacation in the heat of mid-summer; putting his notes in order,
+reading and studying, making ready to write his book on Capernaum. He
+showed us the portable miniature railway which he had made; and the
+little iron cars to carry away the great piles of rubbish and earth; and
+the rich columns, carved lintels, marble steps and shell-niches of the
+splendid building which his workmen had uncovered. The outline was clear
+and perfect. We could see how the edifice of fine, white limestone had
+been erected upon an older foundation of basalt, and how an earthquake
+had twisted it and shaken down its pillars. It was undoubtedly a
+synagogue, perhaps the very same which the rich Roman centurion built
+for the Jews in Capernaum (Luke vii: 5), and where Jesus healed the man
+who had an unclean spirit. (Luke iv: 31-37.) Of all the splendours of
+that proud city of the lake, once spreading along a mile of the shore,
+nothing remained but these tumbled ruins in a lonely, fragrant garden,
+where the patient father was digging <!-- Page 251 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page251"></a>[page 251]</span> with his Arab workmen
+and getting ready to write his book.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Weh dir, Capernaum</i>" I quoted. The <i>padre</i> nodded his head gravely.
+"<i>Ja, ja,</i>" said he, "<i>es ist buchstäblich erfüllt!</i>"</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>I remember the cool bath in the lake, at a point between Bethsaida and
+Capernaum, where a tangle of briony and honeysuckle made a shelter
+around a shell-strewn beach, and the rosy oleanders bloomed beside an
+inflowing stream. I swam out a little way and floated, looking up into
+the deep sky, while the waves plashed gently and caressingly around my
+face.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>I remember the old Arab fisherman, who was camped with his family in a
+black tent on a meadow where several lively brooks came in (one of them
+large enough to turn a mill). I persuaded him by gestures to wade out
+into the shallow part of the lake and cast his bell-net for fish. He
+gathered the net in his hand, and whirled it around his head. The leaden
+weights around the bottom spread out in a wide circle and splashed into
+the water. He drew the net toward him by the cord, the ring of sinkers
+<!-- Page 252 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page252"></a>[page 252]</span> sweeping the bottom, and lifted it slowly,
+carefully&mdash;but no fish!</p>
+
+<p>Then I rigged up my pocket fly-rod with a gossamer leader and two tiny
+trout-flies, a Royal Coach-man and a Queen of the Water, and began to
+cast along the crystal pools and rapids of the larger stream. How
+merrily the fish rose there, and in the ripples where the brooks ran out
+into the lake. There were half a dozen different kinds of fish, but I
+did not know the name of any of them. There was one that looked like a
+black bass, and others like white perch and sunfish; and one kind was
+very much like a grayling. But they were not really of the <i>salmo</i>
+family, I knew, for none of them had the soft fin in front of the tail.
+How surprised the old fisherman was when he saw the fish jumping at
+those tiny hooks with feathers; and how round the eyes of his children
+were as they looked on; and how pleased they were with the <i>bakhshîsh</i>
+which they received, including a couple of baithooks for the eldest boy!</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>I remember the place where we ate our lunch in a small grove of
+eucalyptus-trees, with sweet-smelling <!-- Page 253 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page253"></a>[page 253]</span> yellow acacias
+blossoming around us. It was near the site which some identify with the
+ancient Bethsaida, but others say that it was farther to the east, and
+others again say that Capernaum was really located here. The whole
+problem of these lake cities, where they stood, how they supported such
+large populations (not less than fifteen thousand people in each), is
+difficult and may never be solved. But it did not trouble us deeply. We
+were content to be beside the same waters, among the same hills, that
+Jesus knew and loved.</p>
+
+<p>It was here, along this shore, that He found Simon and his brother
+Andrew casting their net, and James and his brother John mending theirs,
+and called them to come with Him. These fishermen, with their frank and
+free hearts unspoiled by the sophistries of the Pharisees, with their
+minds unhampered by social and political ambitions, followers of a
+vocation which kept them out of doors and reminded them daily of their
+dependence on the bounty of God,&mdash;these children of nature, and
+others like them, were the men whom He chose for His disciples, the
+listeners who had ears to hear His marvellous gospel.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 254 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page254"></a>[page 254]</span></p>
+
+<p>It was here, on these pale, green waves, that He sat in a little boat,
+near the shore, and spoke to the multitude who had gathered to hear Him.</p>
+
+<p>He spoke of the deep and tranquil confidence that man may learn from
+nature, from the birds and the flowers.</p>
+
+<p>He spoke of the infinite peace of the heart that knows the true meaning
+of love, which is giving and blessing, and the true secret of courage,
+which is loyalty to the truth.</p>
+
+<p>He spoke of the God whom we can trust as a child trusts its father, and
+of the Heaven which waits for all who do good to their fellowmen.</p>
+
+<p>He spoke of the wisdom whose fruit is not pride but humility, of the
+honour whose crown is not authority but service, of the purity which is
+not outward but inward, and of the joy which lasts forever.</p>
+
+<p>He spoke of forgiveness for the guilty, of compassion for the weak, of
+hope for the desperate.</p>
+
+<p>He told these poor and lowly folk that their souls were unspeakably
+precious, and that He had come to save them and make them inheritors of
+an eternal <!-- Page 255 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page255"></a>[page 255]</span> kingdom. He told them that He had brought this
+message from God, their Father and His Father.</p>
+
+<p>He spoke with the simplicity of one who knows, with the assurance of one
+who has seen, with the certainty and clearness of one for whom doubt
+does not exist.</p>
+
+<p>He offered Himself, in His stainless purity, in His supreme love, as the
+proof and evidence of His gospel, the bread of Heaven, the water of
+life, the Saviour of sinners, the light of the world. "Come unto Me," He
+said, "and I will give you rest."</p>
+
+<p>This was the heavenly music that came into the world by the Lake of
+Galilee. And its voice has spread through the centuries, comforting the
+sorrowful, restoring the penitent, cheering the despondent, and telling
+all who will believe it, that our human life is worth living, because it
+gives each one of us the opportunity to share in the Love which is
+sovereign and immortal.</p>
+
+<hr />
+<p><!-- Page 256 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page256"></a>[page 256]</span></p>
+
+<h4><i>A PSALM OF THE GOOD TEACHER</i></h4>
+
+<p class="noind"><i>The Lord is my teacher:<br />
+I shall not lose the way to wisdom.</i><br />
+<br />
+<i>He leadeth me in the lowly path of learning,<br />
+He prepareth a lesson for me every day;<br />
+He findeth the clear fountains of instruction,<br />
+Little by little he showeth me the beauty of the truth.</i><br />
+<br />
+<i>The world is a great book that he hath written,<br />
+He turneth the leaves for me slowly;<br />
+They are all inscribed with images and letters,<br />
+His face poureth light on the pictures and the words.</i><br />
+<br />
+<i>Then am I glad when I perceive his meaning,<br />
+He taketh me by the hand to the hill-top of vision;<br />
+In the valley also he walketh beside me,<br />
+And in the dark places he whispereth to my heart.</i><br />
+<br />
+<i>Yea, though my lesson be hard it is not hopeless,<br />
+For the Lord is very patient with his slow scholar;<br />
+He will wait awhile for my weakness,<br />
+He will help me to read the truth through tears.</i><br />
+<br />
+
+<!-- Page 257 --><span class="pagenum2"><a name="page257"></a>[page 257]</span>
+
+<i>Surely thou wilt enlighten me daily by joy and by sorrow:<br />
+And lead me at last, O Lord, to the perfect knowledge of thee.</i></p>
+
+<hr />
+<p><!-- Page 258 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page258"></a>[page 258]</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p><!-- Page 259 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page259"></a>[page 259]</span></p>
+
+<h2>XI<br /><br />
+THE SPRINGS OF JORDAN</h2>
+<hr />
+
+<p><!-- Page 260 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page260"></a>[page 260]</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p><!-- Page 261 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page261"></a>[page 261]</span></p>
+
+<h3>I<br /><br />
+THE HILL-COUNTRY OF NAPHTALI</h3>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Naphtali</span> was the northernmost of the tribes of Israel, a bold and free
+highland clan, inhabiting a country of rugged hills and steep
+mountainsides, with fertile vales and little plains between.</p>
+
+<p>"Naphtali is a hind let loose," said the old song of the Sons of Jacob
+(Genesis xlix: 21); and as we ride up from the Lake of Galilee on our
+way northward, we feel the meaning of the poet's words. A people
+dwelling among these rock-strewn heights, building their fortress-towns
+on sharp pinnacles, and climbing these steep paths to the open fields of
+tillage or of war, would be like wild deer in their spirit of liberty,
+and they would need to be as nimble and sure-footed.</p>
+
+<p>Our good little horses are shod with round plates of iron, and they
+clatter noisily among the loose stones and slip on the rocky ledges, as
+we strike over the hills from Capernaum, without a path, to join the
+main trail at Khân Yubb Yûsuf.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 262 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page262"></a>[page 262]</span></p>
+
+<p>We are skirting fields of waving wheat and barley, but there are no
+houses to be seen. Far and wide the sea of verdure rolls around us,
+broken only by ridges of grayish rock and scarped cliffs of reddish
+basalt. We wade saddle-deep in herbage; broad-leaved fennel and
+trembling reeds; wild asparagus and artichokes; a hundred kinds of
+flowering weeds; acres of last year's thistles, standing blanched and
+ghostlike in the summer sunshine.</p>
+
+<p>The phantom city of Safed gleams white from its far-away
+hilltop,&mdash;the latest and perhaps the last of the famous seats of
+rabbinical learning. It is one of the sacred places of modern Judaism.
+No Hebrew pilgrim fails to visit it. Here, they say, the Messiah will
+one day reveal himself, and after establishing His kingdom, will set out
+to conquer the world.</p>
+
+<p>But it is not to the city, shining like a flake of mica from the
+greenness of the distant mountain, that our looks and thoughts are
+turning. It is backward to the lucent sapphire of the Lake of Galilee,
+upon whose shores our hearts have seen the secret vision, heard the
+inward message of the Man of Nazareth.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 263 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page263"></a>[page 263]</span></p>
+
+<p>Ridge after ridge reveals new outlooks toward its tranquil loveliness.
+Turn after turn, our winding way leads us to what we think must be the
+parting view. Sleeping in still, forsaken beauty among the sheltering
+hills, and open to the cloudless sky which makes its water like a little
+heaven, it seems to silently return our farewell looks with pleading for
+remembrance. Now, after one more round among the inclosing ridges,
+another vista opens, the widest and the most serene of all.</p>
+
+<p>Farewell, dear Lake of Jesus! Our eyes may never rest on thee again; but
+surely they will not forget thee. For now, as often we come to some fair
+water in the Western mountains, or unfold the tent by some lone lakeside
+in the forests of the North, the lapping of thy waves will murmur
+through our thoughts; thy peaceful brightness will arise before us; we
+shall see the rose-flush of thy oleanders, and the waving of thy reeds;
+the sweet, faint smell of thy gold-flowered acacias will return to us
+from purple orchids and white lilies. Let the blessing that is thine go
+with us everywhere in God's great out-of-doors, and our hearts never
+lose the comradeship <!-- Page 264 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page264"></a>[page 264]</span> of Him who made thee holiest among all
+the waters of the world!</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>The Khân of Joseph's Pit is a ruin; a huge and broken building deserted
+by the caravans which used to throng this highway from Damascus to the
+cities of the lake, and to the ports of Acre and Joppa, and to the
+metropolis of Egypt. It is hard to realize that this wild moorland path
+by which we are travelling was once a busy road, filled with camels,
+horses, chariots, foot-passengers, clanking companies of soldiers; that
+these crumbling, cavernous walls, overgrown with thorny capers and wild
+marjoram and mandragora, were once crowded every night with a motley mob
+of travellers and merchants; that this pool of muddy water, gloomily
+reflecting the ruins, was once surrounded by flocks and herds and beasts
+of burden; that only a few hours to the southward there was once a ring
+of splendid, thriving, bustling towns around the shores of Galilee, out
+of which and into which the multitudes were forever journeying. Now they
+are all gone from the road, and the vast wayside caravanserai is <!--
+Page 265 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page265"></a>[page 265]</span> sleeping into decay&mdash;a dormitory for bats
+and serpents.</p>
+
+<p>What is it that makes the wreck of an inn more lonely and forbidding
+than any other ruin?</p>
+
+<p>A few miles more of riding along the flanks of the mountains bring us to
+a place where we turn a corner suddenly, and come upon the full view of
+the upper basin of the Jordan; a vast oval green cup, with the little
+Lake of Huleh lying in it like a blue jewel, and the giant bulk of Mount
+Hermon towering beyond it, crowned and cloaked with silver snows.</p>
+
+<p>Up the steep and slippery village street of Rosh Pinnah, a modern Jewish
+colony founded by the Rothschilds in 1882, we scramble wearily to our
+camping-ground for the night. Above us on a hilltop is the old Arab
+village of Jaûneh, brown, picturesque, and filthy. Around us are the
+colonists' new houses, with their red-tiled roofs and white walls. Two
+straight streets running in parallel lines up the hillside are roughly
+paved with cobble-stones and lined with trees; mulberries,
+white-flowered acacias, eucalyptus, feathery pepper-trees, and
+rose-bushes. Water runs down through pipes from a copious <!-- Page 266 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page266"></a>[page 266]</span>
+spring on the mountain, and flows abundantly into every house, plashing
+into covered reservoirs and open stone basins for watering the cattle.
+Below us the long avenues of eucalyptus, the broad vineyards filled with
+low, bushy vines, the immense orchards of pale-green almond-trees, the
+smiling wheat-fields, slope to the lake and encircle its lower end.</p>
+
+<p>The children who come to visit our camp on the terrace wear shoes and
+stockings, carry school-books in their bags, and bring us offerings of
+little bunches of sweet-smelling garden roses and pendulous
+locust-blooms. We are a thousand years away from the Khân of Joseph's
+Pit; but we can still see the old mud village on the height against the
+sunset, and the camp-fires gleaming in front of the black Bedouin tents
+far below, along the edge of the marshes. We are perched between the old
+and the new, between the nomad and the civilized man, and the unchanging
+white head of Hermon looks down upon us all.</p>
+
+<p>In the morning, on the way down, I stop at the door of a house and fall
+into talk with an intelligent, schoolmasterish sort of man, a Roumanian,
+who <!-- Page 267 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page267"></a>[page 267]</span> speaks a little weird German. Is the colony prospering?
+Yes, but not so fast that it makes them giddy. What are they raising?
+Wheat and barley, a few vegetables, a great deal of almonds and grapes.
+Good harvests? Some years good, some years bad; the Arabs bad every
+year, terrible thieves; but the crops are plentiful most of the time.
+Are the colonists happy, contented? A thin smile wrinkles around the
+man's lips as he answers with the statement of a world-wide truth,
+"<i>Ach, Herr, der Ackerbauer ist nie zufrieden.</i>" ("Ah, Sir, the farmer
+is never contented.")</p>
+
+<hr />
+<h3>II<br /><br />
+THE WATERS OF MEROM</h3>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">All</span> day we ride along the hills skirting the marshy plain of Huleh. Here
+the springs and parent streams of Jordan are gathered, behind the
+mountains of Naphtali and at the foot of Hermon, as in a great green
+basin about the level of the ocean, for the long, swift rush down the
+sunken trench which leads to the deep, sterile bitterness of the Dead
+Sea. <!-- Page 268 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page268"></a>[page 268]</span> Was there ever a river that began so fair and ended in
+such waste and desolation?</p>
+
+<p>Here in this broad, level, well-watered valley, along the borders of
+these vast beds of papyrus and rushes intersected by winding, hidden
+streams, Joshua and his fierce clans of fighting men met the Kings of
+the north with their horses and chariots, "at the waters of Merom," in
+the last great battle for the possession of the Promised Land. It was a
+furious conflict, the hordes of footmen against the squadrons of
+horsemen; but the shrewd command that came from Joshua decided it:
+"Hough their horses and burn their chariots with fire." The Canaanites
+and the Amorites and the Hittites and the Hivites were swept from the
+field, driven over the western mountains, and the Israelites held the
+Jordan from Jericho to Hermon. (Joshua xi:1-15.)</p>
+
+<p>The springs that burst from the hills to the left of our path and run
+down to the sluggish channels of the marsh on our right are abundant and
+beautiful.</p>
+
+<p>Here is 'Ain Mellâha, a crystal pool a hundred yards wide, with wild
+mint and watercress growing around it, white and yellow lilies floating
+on its <!-- Page 269 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page269"></a>[page 269]</span> surface, and great fish showing themselves in the
+transparent open spaces among the weeds, where the water bubbles up from
+the bottom through dancing hillocks of clean, white sand and shining
+pebbles.</p>
+
+<p>Here is 'Ain el-Belâta, a copious stream breaking forth from the rocks
+beneath a spreading terebinth-tree, and rippling down with merry rapids
+toward the jungle of rustling reeds and plumed papyrus.</p>
+
+<p>While luncheon is preparing in the shade of the terebinth, I wade into
+the brook and cast my fly along the ripples. A couple of ragged,
+laughing, bare-legged Bedouin boys follow close behind me, watching the
+new sport with wonder. The fish are here, as lively and gamesome as
+brook trout, plump, golden-sided fellows ten or twelve inches long. The
+feathered hooks tempt them, and they rise freely to the lure. My
+tattered pages are greatly excited, and make impromptu pouches in the
+breast of their robes, stuffing in the fish until they look quite fat.
+The catch is enough for a good supper for their whole family, and a
+dozen more for a delicious fish-salad at our camp that night. What kind
+of fish are they? <!-- Page 270 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page270"></a>[page 270]</span> I do not know: doubtless something
+Scriptural and Oriental. But they taste good; and so far as there is any
+record, they are the first fish ever taken with the artificial fly in
+the sources of the Jordan.</p>
+
+<p>The plain of Huleh is full of life. Flocks of waterfowl and solemn
+companies of storks circle over the swamps. The wet meadows are covered
+with herds of black buffaloes, wallowing in the ditches, or staring at
+us sullenly under their drooping horns. Little bunches of horses, and
+brood mares followed by their long-legged, awkward foals, gallop beside
+our cavalcade, whinnying and kicking up their heels in the joy of
+freedom. Flocks of black goats clamber up the rocky hillsides, following
+the goatherd who plays upon his rustic pipe quavering and fantastic
+music, softened by distance into a wild sweetness. Small black cattle
+with white faces march in long files across the pastures, or wander
+through the thickets of bulrushes and papyrus and giant fennel,
+appearing and disappearing as the screen of broad leaves and trembling
+plumes close behind them.</p>
+
+<p>A few groups of huts made out of wattled reeds stand beside the sluggish
+watercourses, just as they <!-- Page 271 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page271"></a>[page 271]</span> did when Macgregor in his Rob Roy
+canoe attempted to explore this impenetrable morass forty years ago.
+Along the higher ground are lines of black Bedouin tents, arranged in
+transitory villages.</p>
+
+<p>These flitting habitations of the nomads, who come down from the hills
+and lofty deserts to fatten their flocks and herds among unfailing
+pasturage, are all of one pattern. The low, flat roof of black goats'
+hair is lifted by the sticks which support it, into half a dozen little
+peaks, perhaps five or six feet from the ground. Between these peaks the
+cloth sags down, and is made fast along the edges by intricate and
+confusing guy-ropes. The tent is shallow, not more than six feet deep,
+and from twelve to thirty feet long, according to the wealth of the
+owner and the size of his family,&mdash;two things which usually
+correspond. The sides and the partitions are sometimes made of woven
+reeds, like coarse matting. Within there is an apartment (if you can
+call it so) for the family, a pen for the chickens, and room for dogs,
+cats, calves and other creatures to find shelter. The fireplace of flat
+stones is in the centre, and the smoke oozes out through the roof and
+sides.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 272 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page272"></a>[page 272]</span></p>
+
+<p>The Bedouin men, in flowing <i>burnous</i> and <i>keffiyeh</i>, with the <i>'agâl</i>
+of dark twisted camel's hair like a crown upon their heads, are almost
+all handsome: clean-cut, haughty faces, bold in youth and dignified in
+old age. The women look weatherbeaten and withered beside them. Even
+when you see a fine face in the dark blue mantle or under the white
+head-dress, it is almost always disfigured by purplish tattooing around
+the lips and chin. Some of the younger girls are beautiful, and most of
+the children are entrancing.</p>
+
+<p>They play games in a ring, with songs and clapping hands; the boys
+charge up and down among the tents with wild shouts, driving a round
+bone or a donkey's hoof with their shinny-sticks; the girls chase one
+another and hide among the bushes in some primeval form of "tag" or
+"hide-and-seek."</p>
+
+<p>A merry little mob pursues us as we ride through each encampment, with
+outstretched hands and half-jesting, half-plaintive cries of
+"<i><span class="correction" title="originally without accent">Bakhshîsh</span>! <span class="correction" title="originally without accent">bakhshîsh</span>!</i>" They do not really expect anything. It is only
+a part of the game. And when the Lady holds out her open hand to them
+and smiles as she <!-- Page 273 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page273"></a>[page 273]</span> repeats, "<i>Bakhshîsh! bakhshîsh!</i>" they
+take the joke quickly, and run away, laughing, to their sports.</p>
+
+<p>At one village, in the dusk, there is an open-air wedding: a row of men
+dancing; a ring of women and girls looking on; musicians playing the
+shepherd's pipe and the drum; maidens running beside us to beg a present
+for the invisible bride: a rude charcoal sketch of human society,
+primitive, irrepressible, confident, encamped for a moment on the
+shadowy border of the fecund and unconquerable marsh.</p>
+
+<p>Thus we traverse the strange country of Bedouinia, travelling all day in
+the presence of the Great Sheikh of Mountains, and sleep at night on the
+edge of a little village whose name we shall never know. A dozen times
+we ask George for the real name of that place, and a dozen times he
+repeats it for us with painstaking courtesy; it sounds like a compromise
+between a cough and a sneeze.</p>
+
+<hr />
+<p><!-- Page 274 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page274"></a>[page 274]</span></p>
+
+<h3>III<br /><br />
+WHERE JORDAN RISES</h3>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> Jordan is assembled in the northern end of the basin of Huleh under
+a mysterious curtain of tall, tangled water-plants. Into that ancient
+and impenetrable place of hiding and blending enter many little springs
+and brooks, but the main sources of the river are three.</p>
+
+<p>The first and the longest is the Hasbâni, a strong, foaming stream that
+comes down with a roar from the western slope of Hermon. We cross it by
+the double arch of a dilapidated Saracen bridge, looking down upon
+thickets of oleander, willow, tamarisk and woodbine.</p>
+
+<p>The second and largest source springs from the rounded hill of Tel
+el-Kâdi, the supposed site of the ancient city of Dan, the northern
+border of Israel. Here the wandering, landless Danites, finding a
+country to their taste, put the too fortunate inhabitants of Leshem to
+the sword and took possession. And here King Jereboam set up one of his
+idols of the golden calf.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 275 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page275"></a>[page 275]</span></p>
+
+<p>There is no vestige of the city, no trace of the idolatrous shrine, on
+the huge mound which rises thirty or forty feet above the plain. But it
+is thickly covered with trees: poplars and oaks and wild figs and
+acacias and wild olives. A pair of enormous veterans, a valonia oak and
+a terebinth, make a broad bower of shade above the tomb of an unknown
+Mohammedan saint, and there we eat our midday meal, with the murmur of
+running waters all around us, a clear rivulet singing at our feet, and
+the chant of innumerable birds filling the vault of foliage above our
+heads.</p>
+
+<p>After lunch, instead of sleeping, two of us wander into the dense grove
+that spreads over the mound. Tiny streams of water trickle through it:
+blackberry-vines and wild grapes are twisted in the undergrowth; ferns
+and flowery nettles and mint grow waist-high. The main spring is at the
+western base of the mound. The water comes bubbling and whirling out
+from under a screen of wild figs and vines, forming a pool of palest,
+clearest blue, a hundred feet in diameter. Out of this pool the new-born
+river rushes, foaming and shouting down the hillside, <!-- Page 276 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page276"></a>[page 276]</span> through
+lines of flowering styrax and hawthorn and willows trembling over its
+wild joy.</p>
+
+<p>The third and most impressive of the sources of Jordan is at Bâniyâs, on
+one of the foothills of Hermon. Our path thither leads us up from Dan,
+through high green meadows, shaded by oak-trees, sprinkled with
+innumerable blossoming shrubs and bushes, and looking down upon the
+lower fields blue with lupins and vetches, or golden with yellow
+chrysanthemums beneath which the red glow of the clover is dimly burning
+like a secret fire.</p>
+
+<p>Presently we come, by way of a broad, natural terrace where the white
+encampment of the Moslem dead lies gleaming beneath the shade of mighty
+oaks and terebinths, and past the friendly olive-grove where our own
+tents are standing, to a deep ravine filled to the brim with luxuriant
+verdure of trees and vines and ferns. Into this green cleft a little
+river, dancing and singing, suddenly plunges and disappears, and from
+beneath the veil of moist and trembling leaves we hear the sound of its
+wild joy, a fracas of leaping, laughing waters.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px; ">
+<img src="images/illus09.jpg" width="500" height="344" alt="The Approach to Bâniyâs." title="The Approach to Bâniyâs." />
+<span class="caption">The Approach to <span class="correction" title="originally without accents">Bâniyâs</span>.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>An old Roman bridge spans the stream on the <!-- Page 277 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page277"></a>[page 277]</span> brink of its
+downward leap. Crossing over, we ride through the ruined gateway of the
+town of Bâniyâs, turn to right and left among its dirty, narrow streets,
+pass into a leafy lane, and come out in front of a cliff of ruddy
+limestone, with niches and shrines carved on its face, and a huge, dark
+cavern gaping in the centre.</p>
+
+<p>A tumbled mass of broken rocks lies below the mouth of the cave. From
+this slope of débris, sixty or seventy feet long, a line of springs gush
+forth in singing foam. Under the shadow of trembling poplars and
+broad-boughed sycamores, amid the lush greenery of wild figs and grapes,
+bracken and briony and morning-glory, drooping maidenhair and
+flower-laden styrax, the hundred rills swiftly run together and flow
+away with one impulse, a full-grown little river.</p>
+
+<p>There is an immemorial charm about the <span class="correction" title="added period after 'place'">place</span>. Mysteries of grove and
+fountain, of cave and hilltop, bewitch it with the magic of Nature's
+life, ever springing and passing, flowering and fading, basking in the
+open sunlight and hiding in the secret places of the earth. It is such a
+place as Claude Lorraine <!-- Page 278 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page278"></a>[page 278]</span> might have imagined and painted as
+the scene of one of his mythical visions of Arcadia; such a place as
+antique fancy might have chosen and decked with altars for the worship
+of unseen dryads and nymphs, oreads and naiads. And so, indeed, it was
+chosen, and so it was decked.</p>
+
+<p>Here, in all probability, was Baal-Gad, where the Canaanites paid their
+reverence to the waters that spring from underground. Here, certainly,
+was Paneas of the Greeks, where the rites of Pan and all the nymphs were
+celebrated. Here Herod the Great built a marble temple to Augustus the
+Tolerant, on this terrace of rock above the cave. Here, no doubt, the
+statue of the Emperor looked down upon a strange confusion of revelries
+and wild offerings in honour of the unknown powers of Nature.</p>
+
+<p>All these things have withered, crumbled, vanished. There are no more
+statues, altars, priests, revels and sacrifices at Bâniyâs&mdash;only
+the fragment of an inscription around one of the votive niches carved on
+the cliff, which records the fact that the niche was made by a certain
+person who at that time was "Priest of Pan." <i>But the name of this</i> <!--
+Page 279 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page279"></a>[page 279]</span> <i>person who wished to be remembered is precisely
+the part of the carving which is illegible.</i></p>
+
+<p>Ironical inscription! Still the fountains gush from the rocks, the
+poplars tremble in the breeze, the sweet incense rises from the
+orange-flowered styrax, the birds chant the joy of living, the sunlight
+and the moonlight fall upon the sparkling waters, and the liquid
+starlight drips through the glistening leaves. But the Priest of Pan is
+forgotten, and all that old interpretation and adoration of Nature,
+sensuous, passionate, full of mingled cruelty and ecstasy, has melted
+like a mist from her face, and left her serene and pure and lovely as
+ever.</p>
+
+<p>Here at Paneas, after the city had been rebuilt by Philip the Tetrarch
+and renamed after him and his Imperial master, there came one day a
+Peasant of Galilee who taught His disciples to draw near to Nature, not
+with fierce revelry and superstitious awe, but with tranquil confidence
+and calm joy. The goatfoot god, the god of panic, the great god Pan,
+reigns no more beside the upper springs of Jordan. The name that we
+remember here, the name that makes the message of flowing stream and
+sheltering <!-- Page 280 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page280"></a>[page 280]</span> tree and singing bird more clear and cool and
+sweet to our hearts, is the name of Jesus of Nazareth.</p>
+
+<hr />
+<h3>IV<br />
+<br />
+CÆSAREA PHILIPPI</h3>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Yes</span>, this little Mohammedan town of Bâniyâs, with its twoscore wretched
+houses built of stones from the ancient ruins and huddled within the
+broken walls of the citadel, is the ancient site of Cæsarea Philippi. In
+the happy days that we spend here, rejoicing in the most beautiful of
+all our camps in the Holy Land, and yielding ourselves to the full charm
+of the out-of-doors more perfectly expressed than we had ever thought to
+find it in Palestine,&mdash;in this little paradise of friendly trees
+and fragrant flowers,<br /><br />
+
+<span style="margin-left: 7em; font-size: 90%; ">"at snowy Hermon's foot,<br /></span>
+<span style="margin-left: 5em; font-size: 90%; ">Amid the music of his waterfalls,"&mdash;</span><br /><br />
+
+the thought of Jesus is like the presence of a comrade, while the
+memories of human grandeur and transience, of man's long toil, unceasing
+conflict, <!-- Page 281 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page281"></a>[page 281]</span> vain pride and futile despair, visit us only as
+flickering ghosts.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>We climb to the top of the peaked hill, a thousand feet above the town,
+and explore the great Crusaders' Castle of Subeibeh, a ruin vaster in
+extent and nobler in situation than the famous <i>Schloss</i> of Heidelberg.
+It not only crowns but completely covers the summit of the steep ridge
+with the huge drafted stones of its foundations. The immense round
+towers, the double-vaulted gateways, are still standing. Long flights of
+steps lead down to subterranean reservoirs of water. Spacious
+courtyards, where the knights and men-at-arms once exercised, are
+transformed into vegetable gardens, and the passageways between the
+north citadel and the south citadel are travelled by flocks of lop-eared
+goats.</p>
+
+<p>From room to room we clamber by slopes of crumbling stone, discovering
+now a guard-chamber with loopholes for the archers, and now an arched
+chapel with the plaster intact and faint touches of colour still showing
+upon it. Perched on the high battlements we look across the valley of
+Huleh and <!-- Page 282 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page282"></a>[page 282]</span> the springs of Jordan to Kal'at Hûnîn on the
+mountains of Naphtali, and to Kal'at esh-Shakîf above the gorge of the
+River Lîtânî.</p>
+
+<p>From these three great fortresses, in the time of the Crusaders, flashed
+and answered the signal-fires of the chivalry of Europe fighting for
+possession of Palestine. What noble companies of knights and ladies
+inhabited these castles, what rich festivals were celebrated within
+these walls, what desperate struggles defended them, until at last the
+swarthy hordes of Saracens stormed the gates and poured over the
+defences and planted the standard of the crescent on the towers and lit
+the signal-fires of Islam from citadel to citadel.</p>
+
+<p>All the fires have gone out now. The yellow whin blazes upon the
+hillsides. The wild fig-tree splits the masonry. The scorpion lodges in
+the deserted chambers. On the fallen stone of the Crusaders' gate, where
+the Moslem victor has carved his Arabic inscription, a green-gray lizard
+poises motionless, like a bronze figure on a paper-weight.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px; ">
+<img src="images/illus10.jpg" width="500" height="343" alt="Bridge Over the River Lîtânî." title="Bridge Over the River Lîtânî." />
+<span class="caption">Bridge Over the River <span class="correction" title="originally without accents">Lîtânî</span>.</span>
+</div>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>We pass through the southern entrance of the village of Bâniyâs, a
+massive square portal, rebuilt <!-- Page 283 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page283"></a>[page 283]</span> by some Arab ruler, and go out
+on the old Roman bridge which spans the ravine. The aqueduct carried by
+the bridge is still full of flowing water, and the drops which fall from
+it in a fine mist make a little rainbow as the afternoon sun shines
+through the archway draped with maidenhair fern. On the stone pavement
+of the bridge we trace the ruts worn two thousand years ago by the
+chariots of the men who conquered the world. The chariots have all
+rolled by. On the broken edge of the tower above the gateway sits a
+ragged Bedouin boy, making shrill, plaintive music with his pipe of
+reeds.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>We repose in front of our tents among the olive-trees at the close of
+the day. The cool sound of running streams and rustling poplars is on
+the moving air, and the orange-golden sunset enchants the orchard with
+mystical light. All the swift visions of striving Saracens and
+Crusaders, of conquering Greeks and Romans, fade away from us, and we
+see the figure of the Man of Nazareth with His little company of friends
+and disciples coming up from Galilee.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 284 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page284"></a>[page 284]</span></p>
+
+<p>It was here that Jesus retreated with His few faithful followers from
+the opposition of the Scribes and Pharisees. This was the northernmost
+spot of earth ever trodden by His feet, the longest distance from
+Jerusalem that He ever travelled. Here in this exquisite garden of
+Nature, in a region of the Gentiles, within sight of the shrines devoted
+to those Greek and Roman rites which were so luxurious and so tolerant,
+four of the most beautiful and significant events of His life and
+ministry took place.</p>
+
+<p>He asked His disciples plainly to tell their secret thought of
+Him&mdash;whom they believed their Master to be. And when Peter answered
+simply: "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God," Jesus blessed
+him for the answer, and declared that He would build His church upon
+that rock.</p>
+
+<p>Then He took Peter and James and John with Him and climbed one of the
+high and lonely slopes of Hermon. There He was transfigured before them,
+His face shining like the sun and His garments glistening like the snow
+on the mountain-peaks. But when they begged to stay there with Him, He
+led <!-- Page 285 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page285"></a>[page 285]</span> them down to the valley again, among the sinning and
+suffering children of men.</p>
+
+<p>At the foot of the mount of transfiguration He healed the demoniac boy
+whom his father had brought to the other disciples, but for whom they
+had been unable to do anything; and He taught them that the power to
+help men comes from faith and prayer.</p>
+
+<p>And then, at last, He turned His steps from this safe and lovely refuge,
+(where He might surely have lived in peace, or from which He might have
+gone out unmolested into the wide Gentile world), backward to His own
+country, His own people, the great, turbulent, hard-hearted Jewish city,
+and the fate which was not to be evaded by One who loved sinners and
+came to save them. He went down into Galilee, down through Samaria and
+Perea, down to Jerusalem, down to Gethsemane and to
+Golgotha,&mdash;fearless, calm,&mdash;sustained and nourished by that
+secret food which satisfied His heart in doing the will of God.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>It was in the quest of this Jesus, in the hope of somehow drawing nearer
+to Him, that we made our <!-- Page 286 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page286"></a>[page 286]</span> pilgrimage to the Holy Land. And
+now, in the cool of the evening at Cæsarea Philippi, we ask ourselves
+whether our desire has been granted, our hope fulfilled?</p>
+
+<p>Yes, more richly, more wonderfully than we dared to dream. For we have
+found a new vision of Christ, simpler, clearer, more satisfying, in the
+freedom and reality of God's out-of-doors.</p>
+
+<p>Not through the mists and shadows of an infinite regret, the sadness of
+sweet, faded dreams and hopes that must be resigned, as Pierre Loti saw
+the phantom of a Christ whose irrevocable disappearance has left the
+world darker than ever!</p>
+
+<p>Not amid strange portents and mysterious rites, crowned with I know not
+what aureole of traditionary splendours, founder of elaborate ceremonies
+and centre of lamplit shrines, as Matilde Serao saw the image of that
+Christ whom the legends of men have honoured and obscured!</p>
+
+<p>The Jesus whom we have found is the Child of Nazareth playing among the
+flowers; the Man of Galilee walking beside the lake, healing the sick,
+comforting the sorrowful, cheering the lonely and <!-- Page 287 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page287"></a>[page 287]</span> despondent;
+the well-beloved Son of God transfigured in the sunset glow of snowy
+Hermon, weeping by the sepulchre in Bethany, agonizing in the moonlit
+garden of Gethsemane, giving His life for those who did not understand
+Him, though they loved Him, and for those who did not love Him because
+they did not understand Him, and rising at last triumphant over
+death,&mdash;such a Saviour as all men need and as no man could ever
+have imagined if He had not been real.</p>
+
+<p>His message has not died away, nor will it ever die. For confidence and
+calm joy He tells us to turn to Nature. For love and sacrifice He bids
+us live close to our fellowmen. For comfort and immortal hope He asks us
+to believe in Him and in our Father, God.</p>
+
+<p>That is all.</p>
+
+<p>But the bringing of that heavenly message made the country to which it
+came the Holy Land. And the believing of that message, to-day, will lead
+any child of man into the kingdom of heaven. And the keeping of that
+faith, the following of that Life, will transfigure any country beneath
+the blue sky into a holy land.</p>
+
+<hr />
+<p><!-- Page 288 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page288"></a>[page 288]</span></p>
+
+<h4><i>THE PSALM OF A SOJOURNER</i></h4>
+
+<p class="noind"><i>Thou hast taken me into the tent of the world, O God:<br />
+Beneath thy blue canopy I have found shelter:<br />
+Therefore thou wilt not deny me the right of a guest.</i><br />
+<br />
+<i>Naked and poor I arrived at the door before sunset:<br />
+Thou hast refreshed me with beautiful bowls of milk:<br />
+As a great chief thou hast set forth food in abundance.</i><br />
+<br />
+<i>I have loved the daily delights of thy dwelling:<br />
+Thy moon and thy stars have lighted me to my bed:<br />
+In the morning I have found joy with thy servants.</i><br />
+<br />
+<i>Surely thou wilt not send me away in the darkness?<br />
+There the enemy Death is lying in wait for my soul:<br />
+Thou art the host of my life and I claim thy protection.</i><br />
+<br />
+<i>Then the Lord of the tent of the world made answer:<br />
+The right of a guest endureth but for an appointed time:<br />
+After three days and three nights cometh the day of departure.</i><br />
+<br />
+
+<!-- Page 289 --><span class="pagenum2"><a name="page289"></a>[page 289]</span>
+
+<i>Yet hearken to me since thou fearest the foe in the dark:<br />
+I will make with thee a new covenant of everlasting hospitality:<br />
+Behold I will come unto thee as a stranger and be thy guest.</i><br />
+<br />
+<i>Poor and needy will I come that thou mayest entertain me:<br />
+Meek and lowly will I come that thou mayest find a friend:<br />
+With mercy and with truth will I come to give thee comfort.</i><br />
+<br />
+<i>Therefore open the door of thy heart and bid me welcome:<br />
+In this tent of the world I will be thy brother of the bread:<br />
+And when thou farest forth I will be thy companion forever.</i><br />
+<br />
+<i>Then my soul rested in the word of the Lord:<br />
+And I saw that the curtains of the world were shaken,<br />
+But I looked beyond them to the eternal camp-fires of my friend.</i></p>
+
+<hr />
+<p><!-- Page 290 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page290"></a>[page 290]</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p><!-- Page 291 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page291"></a>[page 291]</span></p>
+
+<h2>XII<br /><br />
+THE ROAD TO DAMASCUS</h2>
+
+<hr />
+<p><!-- Page 292 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page292"></a>[page 292]</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p><!-- Page 293 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page293"></a>[page 293]</span></p>
+
+<h3>I<br /><br />
+THROUGH THE LAND OF THE DRUSES</h3>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">You</span> may go to Damascus now by rail, if you like, and have a choice
+between two rival routes, one under government ownership, the other
+built and managed by a corporation. But to us encamped among the silvery
+olives at Bâniyâs, beside the springs of Jordan, it seemed a happy
+circumstance that both railways were so far away that it would have
+taken longer to reach them than to ride our horses straight into the
+city. We were delivered from the modern folly of trying to save time by
+travelling in a conveyance more speedy than picturesque, and left free
+to pursue our journey in a leisurely, independent fashion and by the
+road that would give us most pleasure. So we chose the longer way, the
+northern path around Mount Hermon, through the country of the Druses,
+instead of the more frequented road to the east by Kafr Hawar.</p>
+
+<p>How delightful is the morning of such a journey! <!-- Page 294 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page294"></a>[page 294]</span> The fresh
+face of the world bathed in sparkling dew; the greetings from tent to
+tent as we four friends make our rendezvous from the far countries of
+sleep; the relish of breakfast in the open air; the stir of the camp in
+preparation for a flitting; canvas sinking to the ground, bales and
+boxes heaped together, mule-bells tinkling through the grove, horses
+refreshed by their long rest whinnying and nipping at each other in
+play&mdash;all these are charming variations and accompaniments to the
+old tune of "Boots and Saddles."</p>
+
+<p>The immediate effect of such a setting out for a day's ride is to renew
+in the heart those "vital feelings of delight" which make one simply and
+inexplicably glad to be alive. We are delivered from those morbid
+questionings and exorbitant demands by which we are so often possessed
+and plagued as by some strange inward malady. We feel a sense of health
+and harmony diffused through body and mind as we ride over the beautiful
+terrace which slopes down from Bâniyâs to Tel-el Kâdi.</p>
+
+<p>We are glad of the green valonia oaks that spread <!-- Page 295 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page295"></a>[page 295]</span> their shade
+over us, and of the blossoming hawthorns that scatter their flower-snow
+on the hillside. We are glad of the crested larks that rise warbling
+from the grass, and of the buntings and chaffinches that make their
+small merry music in every thicket, and of the black and white chats
+that shift their burden of song from stone to stone beside the path, and
+of the cuckoo that tells his name to us from far away, and of the
+splendid bee-eaters that glitter over us like a flock of winged emeralds
+as we climb the rocky hill toward the north. We are glad of the broom in
+golden flower, and of the pink and white rock-roses, and of the spicy
+fragrance of mint and pennyroyal that our horses trample out as they
+splash through the spring holes and little brooks. We are glad of the
+long, wide views westward over the treeless mountains of Naphtali and
+the southern ridges of the Lebanon, and of the glimpses of the ruined
+castles of the Crusaders, Kal'at esh-Shakîf and Hûnîn, perched like
+dilapidated eagles on their distant crags. Everything seems to us like a
+personal gift. We have the feeling of ownership for this day of all the
+world's beauty. We <!-- Page 296 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page296"></a>[page 296]</span> could not explain or justify it to any sad
+philosopher who might reproach us for unreasoning felicity. We should be
+defenceless before his arguments and indifferent to his scorn. We should
+simply ride on into the morning, reflecting in our hearts something of
+the brightness of the birds' plumage, the cheerfulness of the brooks'
+song, the undimmed hyaline of the sky, and so, perhaps, fulfilling the
+Divine Intention of Nature as well as if we chose to becloud our mirror
+with melancholy thoughts.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>We are following up the valley of the longest and highest, but not the
+largest, of the sources of the Jordan: the little River Hâsbânî, a
+strong and lovely stream, which rises somewhere in the northern end of
+the Wâdi et-Teim, and flows along the western base of Mount Hermon,
+receiving the tribute of torrents which burst out in foaming springs far
+up the ravines, and are fed underground by the melting of the perpetual
+snow of the great mountain. Now and then we have to cross one of these
+torrents, by a rude stone bridge or by wading. All along the way Hermon
+<!-- Page 297 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page297"></a>[page 297]</span> looks down upon us from his throne, nine thousand feet in
+air. His head is wrapped in a turban of spotless white, like a Druse
+chieftain, and his snowy winter cloak still hangs down over his
+shoulders, though its lower edges are already fringed and its seams
+opened by the warm suns of April.</p>
+
+<p>Presently we cross a bridge to the west bank of the Hâsbânî, and ride up
+the delightful vale where poplars and mulberries, olives, almonds, vines
+and figs, grow abundantly along the course of the river. There are low
+weirs across the stream for purposes of irrigation, and a larger dam
+supplies a mill with power. To the left is the sharp barren ridge of the
+Jebel ez-Zohr separating us from the gorge of the River <span class="correction" title="orginally with one accent only">Lîtânî</span>. Groups
+of labourers are at work on the watercourses among the groves and
+gardens. Vine-dressers are busy in the vineyards. Ploughmen are driving
+their shallow furrows through the stony fields on the hillside. The
+little river, here in its friendliest mood, winds merrily among the
+plantations and orchards which it nourishes, making a cheerful noise
+over beds of pebbles, and humming <!-- Page 298 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page298"></a>[page 298]</span> a deeper note where the
+clear green water plunges over a weir.</p>
+
+<p>We have now been in the saddle five hours; the sun is ardent; the
+temperature is above eighty-five degrees in the shade, and along the
+bridle-path there is no shade. We are hungry, thirsty, and tired. As we
+cross the river again, splashing through a ford, our horses drink
+eagerly and attempt to lie down in the cool water. We have to use strong
+persuasion not only with them, but also with our own spirits, to pass by
+the green grass and the sheltering olive-trees on the east bank and push
+on up the narrow, rocky defile in which Hâsbeiyâ is hidden. The
+bridle-path is partly paved with rough cobblestones, hard and slippery,
+which make the going weariful. The heat presses on us like a burden.
+Things that would have delighted us in the morning now give us no
+pleasure. We have made the greedy traveller's mistake of measuring our
+march by the extent of our endurance instead of by the limit of our
+enjoyment.</p>
+
+<p>Hâsbeiyâ proves to be a rather thriving and picturesque town built
+around the steep sides of a bay <!-- Page 299 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page299"></a>[page 299]</span> or opening in the valley. The
+amphitheatre of hills is terraced with olive-orchards and vineyards.
+There are also many mulberry-trees cultivated for the silkworms, and the
+ever-present figs and almonds are not wanting. The stone houses of the
+town rise, on winding paths, one above the other, many of them having
+arched porticoes, red-tiled roofs, and green-latticed windows. It is a
+place of about five thousand population, now more than half Christian,
+but formerly one of the strongholds and capitals of the mysterious Druse
+religion.</p>
+
+<p>Our tents are pitched at the western end of the town, on a low terrace
+where olive-trees are growing. When we arrive we find the camp
+surrounded and filled with curious, laughing children. The boys are a
+little troublesome at first, but a word from an old man who seems to be
+in charge brings them to order, and at least fifty of them, big and
+little, squat in a semicircle on the grass below the terrace, watching
+us with their lustrous brown eyes.</p>
+
+<p>They look full of fun, those young Druses and Maronites and Greeks and
+Mohammedans, so I try a mild joke on them, by pretending that they <!--
+Page 300 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page300"></a>[page 300]</span> are a class and that I am teaching them a lesson.
+"A, B, C," I chant, and wait for them to repeat after me. They promptly
+take the lesson out of my hands and recite the entire English alphabet
+in chorus, winding up with shouts of "Goot mornin'! How you do?" and
+merry laughter. They are all pupils from the mission schools which have
+been established since the great Massacre of 1860, and which are
+helping, I hope, to make another forever impossible.</p>
+
+<p>One of our objects in coming to Hâsbeiyâ was to ascend Mount Hermon. We
+send for the Druse guide and the Christian guide; both of them assure us
+that the adventure is impossible on account of the deep snow, which has
+increased during the last fortnight. We can not get within a mile of the
+summit. The snow will be waist-deep in the hollows. The mountain is
+inaccessible until June. So, after exchanging visits with the
+missionaries and seeing something of their good work, we ride on our way
+the next morning.</p>
+
+<hr />
+<p><!-- Page 301 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page301"></a>[page 301]</span></p>
+
+<h3>II<br /><br />
+RÂSHEIYÂ AND ITS AMERICANISM</h3>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> journey to Râsheiyâ is like that of the preceding day, except that
+the bridle-paths are rougher and more precipitous, and the views wider
+and more splendid. We have crossed the Hâsbânî again, and leaving the
+Druses' valley, the Wâdi et-Teim, behind us, have climbed the high
+table-land to the west. We did not know why George Cavalcanty led us
+away from the path marked in our Baedeker, but we took it for granted
+that he had some good reason. It is well not to ask a wise dragoman all
+the questions that you can think of. Tell him where you want to go, and
+let him show you how to get there. Certainly we are not inclined to
+complain of the longer and steeper route by which he has brought us,
+when we sit down at lunch-time among the limestone crags and pinnacles
+of the wild upland and look abroad upon a landscape which offers the
+grandeur of immense outlines and vast distances, the beauty of a crystal
+clearness in all its infinitely <!-- Page 302 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page302"></a>[page 302]</span> varied forms, and the
+enchantment of gemlike colours, delicate, translucent, vivid, shifting
+and playing in hues of rose and violet and azure and purple and golden
+brown and bright green, as if the bosom of Mother Earth were the breast
+of a dove, breathing softly in the sunlight.</p>
+
+<p>As we climb toward Râsheiyâ we find ourselves going back a month or more
+into early spring. Here are the flowers that we saw in the Plain of
+Sharon on the first of April, gorgeous red anemones, fragrant purple and
+white cyclamens, delicate blue irises. The fig-tree is putting forth her
+tender leaf. The vines, lying flat on the ground, are bare and dormant.
+The springing grain, a few inches long, is in its first flush of almost
+dazzling green.</p>
+
+<p>The town, built in terraces on three sides of a rocky hill, 4,100 feet
+above the sea, commands an extensive view. Hermon is in full sight;
+snow-capped Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon face each other for forty miles;
+and the little lake of Kafr Kûk makes a spot of blue light in the
+foreground.</p>
+
+<p>We are camped on the threshing-floor, a level meadow beyond and below
+the town; and there the Râsheiyan <!-- Page 303 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page303"></a>[page 303]</span> gilded youth come riding
+their blooded horses in the afternoon, running races over the smooth
+turf and showing off their horsemanship for our benefit.</p>
+
+<p>There is something very attractive about these Arabian horses as you see
+them in their own country. They are spirited, fearless, sure-footed, and
+yet, as a rule, so docile that they may be ridden with a halter. They
+are good for a long journey, or a swift run, or a <i>fantasia</i>. The
+prevailing colour among them is gray, but you see many bays and sorrels
+and a few splendid blacks. An Arabian stallion satisfies the romantic
+ideal of how a horse ought to look. His arched neck, small head, large
+eyes wide apart, short body, round flanks, delicate pasterns, and little
+feet; the way he tosses his mane and cocks his flowing tail when he is
+on parade; the swiftness and spring of his gallop, the dainty grace of
+his walk&mdash;when you see these things you recognise at once the real,
+original horse which the painters used to depict in their "Portraits of
+General X on his Favourite Charger."</p>
+
+<p>I asked Calvalcanty what one of these fine creatures would cost. "A good
+horse, two or three hundred <!-- Page 304 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page304"></a>[page 304]</span> dollars; an extra-good one, four
+hundred; a fancy one, who knows?"</p>
+
+<p>We find Râsheiyâ full of Americanism. We walk out to take photographs,
+and at almost every street corner some young man who has been in the
+United States or Canada salutes us with: "How are you to-day? You
+fellows come from America? What's the news there? Is Bryan elected yet?
+I voted for McKinley. I got a store in Kankakee. I got one in Jackson,
+Miss." A beautiful dark-eyed girl, in a dreadful department-store dress,
+smiles at us from an open door and says: "Take my picture? I been at
+America."</p>
+
+<p>One talkative and friendly fellow joins us in our walk; in fact he takes
+possession of us, guiding us up the crooked alleys and out on the
+housetops which command the best views, and showing us off to his
+friends,&mdash;an old gentleman who is spinning goats' hair for the
+coarse black tents (St. Paul's trade), and two ladies who are grinding
+corn in a hand-mill, one pushing and the other pulling. Our self-elected
+guide has spent seven years in Illinois and Indiana, peddling and
+store-keeping. He has <!-- Page 305 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page305"></a>[page 305]</span> returned to Râsheiyâ as a successful
+adventurer and built a stone house with a red roof and an arched
+portico. Is he going to settle down there for life? "I not know," says
+he. "Guess I want sell my house now. This country beautiful; I like look
+at her. But America free&mdash;good government&mdash;good place to live.
+Gee whiz! I go back quick, you bet."</p>
+
+<hr />
+<h3>III<br /><br />
+ANTI-LEBANON AND THE RIVER<br />
+ABANA</h3>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Our</span> path the next day leads up to the east over the ridges of the slight
+depression which lies between Mount Hermon and the rest of the
+Anti-Lebanon range. We pass the disconsolate village and lake of Kafr
+Kûk. The water which shone so blue in the distance now confesses itself
+a turbid, stagnant pool, locked in among the hills, and breeding fevers
+for those who live beside it. The landscape grows wild and sullen as we
+ascend; the hills are strewn with shattered fragments of rock, or worn
+into battered and fantastic crags; the bottoms of the ravines <!-- Page
+306 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page306"></a>[page 306]</span> are soaked and barren as if the winter floods had just
+left them. Presently we are riding among great snowdrifts. It is the
+first day of May. We walk on the snow, and pack a basketful on one of
+the mules, and pelt each other with snowballs.</p>
+
+<p>We have gone back another month in the calendar and are now at the place
+where "winter lingers in the lap of spring." Snowdrops, crocuses, and
+little purple grape-hyacinths are blooming at the edge of the drifts.
+The thorny shrubs and bushes, and spiny herbs like astragalus and
+cousinia, are green-stemmed but leafless, and the birds that flutter
+among them are still in the first rapture of vernal bliss, the gay music
+that follows mating and precedes nesting. Big dove-coloured partridges,
+beautifully marked with black and red, are running among the rocks. We
+are at the turn of the year, the surprising season when the tide of
+light and life and love swiftly begins to rise.</p>
+
+<p>From this Alpine region we descend through two months in half a day. It
+is mid-March on a beautiful green plain where herds of horses were
+feeding around an encampment of black Bedouin <!-- Page 307 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page307"></a>[page 307]</span> tents; the
+beginning of April at Khân Meithelûn, on the post-road, where there are
+springs, and poplar-groves, in one of which we eat our lunch, with
+lemonade cooled by the snows of Hermon; the end of April at Dimas, where
+we find our tents pitched upon the threshing-floor, a levelled terrace
+of clay looking down upon the flat roofs of the village.</p>
+
+<p>Our camp is 3,600 feet above sea-level, and our morning path follows the
+telegraph-poles steeply down to the post-road, and so by a more gradual
+descent along the hard and dusty turnpike toward Damascus. The
+landscape, at first, is bare and arid: rounded reddish mountains, gray
+hillsides, yellowish plains faintly tinged with a thin green. But at
+El-Hâmi the road drops into the valley of the Baradâ, the far-famed
+River Abana, and we find ourselves in a verdant paradise.</p>
+
+<p>Tall trees arch above the road; white balconies gleam through the
+foliage; the murmur and the laughter of flowing streams surround us. The
+railroad and the carriage-road meet and cross each other down the vale.
+Country houses and cafés, some dingy and dilapidated, others new and
+trim, are half hidden <!-- Page 308 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page308"></a>[page 308]</span> among the groves or perched close
+beside the highway. Poplars and willows, plane-trees and lindens,
+walnuts and mulberries, apricots and almonds, twisted fig-trees and
+climbing roses, grow joyfully wherever the parcelled water flows in its
+many channels. Above this line, on the sides of the vale, everything is
+bare and brown and dry. But the depth of the valley is an embroidered
+sash of bloom laid across the sackcloth of the desert. And in the centre
+of this long verdure runs the parent river, a flood of clear green;
+rushing, leaping, curling into white foam; filling its channel of thirty
+or forty feet from bank to bank, and making the silver-leafed willows
+and poplars, that stand with their feet in the stream, tremble with the
+swiftness of its cool, strong current. Truly Naaman the Syrian was right
+in his boasting to the prophet Elisha: Abana, the river of Damascus, is
+better than all the waters of Israel.</p>
+
+<p>The vale narrows as we descend along the stream, until suddenly we pass
+through a gateway of steep cliffs and emerge upon an open plain beset
+with mountains on three sides. The river, parting <!-- Page 309 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page309"></a>[page 309]</span> into seven
+branches, goes out to water a hundred and fifty square miles of groves
+and gardens, and we follow the road through the labyrinth of rich and
+luscious green. There are orchards of apricots enclosed with high mud
+walls; and open gates through which we catch glimpses of crimson
+rose-trees and scarlet pomegranates and little fields of wheat glowing
+with blood-red poppies; and hedges of white hawthorn and wild brier; and
+trees, trees, trees, everywhere embowering us and shutting us in.</p>
+
+<p>Presently we see, above the leafy tops, a sharp-pointed minaret with a
+golden crescent above it. Then we find ourselves again beside the main
+current of the Baradâ, running swift and merry in a walled channel
+straight across an open common, where soldiers are exercising their
+horses, and donkeys and geese are feeding, and children are playing, and
+dyers are sprinkling their long strips of blue cotton cloth laid out
+upon the turf beside the river. The road begins to look like the
+commencement of a street; domes and minarets rise before us; there are
+glimpses of gray walls and towers, a few shops and open-air cafés, a
+couple of hotel <!-- Page 310 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page310"></a>[page 310]</span> signs. The river dives under a bridge and
+disappears by a hundred channels beneath the city, leaving us at the
+western entrance of Damascus.</p>
+
+<hr />
+<h3>IV<br /><br />
+THE CITY THAT A LITTLE RIVER<br />
+MADE</h3>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">I cannot</span> tell whether the river, the gardens, and the city would have
+seemed so magical and entrancing if we had come upon them in some other
+way or seen them in a different setting. You can never detach an
+experience from its matrix and weigh it alone. Comparisons with the
+environs of Naples or Florence visited in an automobile, or with the
+suburbs of Boston seen from a trolley-car, are futile and
+unilluminating.</p>
+
+<p>The point about the Baradâ is that it springs full-born from the barren
+sides of the Anti-Lebanon, swiftly creates a paradise as it runs, and
+then disappears absolutely in a wide marsh on the edge of the desert.</p>
+
+<p>The point about Damascus is that she flourishes <!-- Page 311 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page311"></a>[page 311]</span> on a secluded
+plain, the Ghûtah, seventy miles from the sea and twenty-three hundred
+feet above it, with no <i>hinterland</i> and no sustaining provinces, no
+political leadership, and no special religious sanctity, with nothing,
+in fact, to account for her distinction, her splendour, her populous
+vitality, her self-sufficing charm, except her mysterious and enduring
+quality as a mere city, a hive of men. She is the oldest living city in
+the world; no one knows her birthday or her founder's name. She has
+survived the empires and kingdoms which conquered her,&mdash;Nineveh,
+Babylon, Samaria, Greece, Egypt&mdash;their capitals are dust, but
+Damascus still blooms "like a tree planted by the rivers of water." She
+has given her name to the reddest of roses, the sweetest of plums, the
+richest of metalwork, and the most lustrous of silks; her streets have
+bubbled and eddied with the currents of<br /><br />
+
+<span style="margin-left: 8em; font-size: 90%; ">the multitudinous folk<br /></span>
+<span style="margin-left: 5em; font-size: 90%; ">That do inhabit her and make her great.</span><br /><br />
+
+She is the typical city, pure and simple, of the Orient, as New York or
+San Francisco is of the <!-- Page 312 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page312"></a>[page 312]</span> Occident: the open port on the edge
+of the desert, the trading-booth at the foot of the mountains, the
+pavilion in the heart of the blossoming bower,&mdash;the wonderful child
+of a little river and an immemorial Spirit of Place.</p>
+
+<p>Every time we go into the city, (whether from our tents on the terrace
+above an ancient and dilapidated pleasure-garden, or from our red-tiled
+rooms in the good Hôtel d'Orient, to which we had been driven by a
+plague of sand-flies in the camp), we step at once into a chapter of the
+"Arabian Nights' Entertainments."</p>
+
+<p>It is true, there are electric lights and there is a trolley-car
+crawling around the city; but they no more make it Western and modern
+than a bead necklace would change the character of the Venus of Milo.
+The driver of the trolley-car looks like one of "The Three Calenders,"
+and a gayly dressed little boy beside him blows loudly on an instrument
+of discord as the machine tranquilly advances through the crowd. (A man
+was run over a few months ago; his friends waited for the car to come
+around the next day, pulled the driver from his <!-- Page 313 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page313"></a>[page 313]</span> perch, and
+stuck a number of long knives through him in a truly Oriental manner.)</p>
+
+<p>The crowd itself is of the most indescribable and engaging variety and
+vivacity. The Turkish soldiers in dark uniform and red fez; the
+cheerful, grinning water-carriers with their dripping, bulbous goatskins
+on their backs; the white-turbaned Druses with their bold, clean-cut
+faces; the bronzed, impassive sons of the desert, with their flowing
+mantles and bright head-cloths held on by thick, dark rolls of camel's
+hair; the rich merchants in their silken robes of many colours; the
+picturesquely ragged beggars; the Moslem pilgrims washing their heads
+and feet, with much splashing, at the pools in the marble courtyards of
+the mosques; the merry children, running on errands or playing with the
+water that gushes from many a spout at the corner of a street or on the
+wall of a house; the veiled Mohammedan women slipping silently through
+the throng, or bending over the trinkets or fabrics in some open-fronted
+shop, lifting the veil for a moment to show an olive-tinted cheek and a
+pair of long, liquid brown eyes; the bearded Greek priests <!-- Page 314 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page314"></a>[page 314]</span> in
+their black robes and cylinder hats; the Christian women wrapped in
+their long white sheets, but with their pretty faces uncovered, and a
+red rose or a white jasmine stuck among their smooth, shining black
+tresses; the seller of lemonade with his gaily decorated glass vessel on
+his back and his clinking brass cups in his hand, shouting, "<i>A remedy
+for the heat</i>,"&mdash;"<i>Cheer up your hearts</i>,"&mdash;"<i>Take care of
+your teeth</i>;" the boy peddling bread, with an immense tray of thin, flat
+loaves on his head, crying continually to Allah to send him customers;
+the seller of turnip-pickle with a huge pink globe upon his shoulder
+looking like the inside of a pale watermelon; the donkeys pattering
+along between fat burdens of grass or charcoal; a much-bedizened
+horseman with embroidered saddle-cloth and glittering bridle, riding
+silent and haughty through the crowd as if it did not exist; a victoria
+dashing along the street at a trot, with whip cracking like a pack of
+firecrackers, and shouts of, "<i>O boy! Look out for your back! your foot!
+your side!</i>"&mdash;all these figures are mingled in a passing show of
+which we never grow weary.</p> <p><!-- Page 315 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page315"></a>[page 315]</span></p> <p>The long bazaars, covered with a
+round, wooden archway rising from the second story of the houses, are
+filled with a rich brown hue like a well-coloured meerschaum pipe; and
+through this mellow, brumous atmosphere beams of golden sunlight slant
+vividly from holes in the roof. An immense number of shops, small and
+great, shelter themselves in these bazaars, for the most part opening,
+without any reserve of a front wall or a door, in frank invitation to
+the street. On the earthen pavement, beaten hard as cement, camels are
+kneeling, while the merchants let down their corded bales and display
+their Persian carpets or striped silks. The cook-shops show their wares
+and their processes, and send up an appetising smell of lamb <i>kibâbs</i>
+and fried fish and stuffed cucumbers and stewed beans and okra, and many
+other dainties preparing on diminutive charcoal grills.</p>
+
+<p>In the larger and richer shops, arranged in semi-European fashion, there
+are splendid rugs, and embroideries old and new, and delicately
+chiselled brasswork, and furniture of strange patterns lavishly inlaid
+with mother-of-pearl; and there I go <!-- Page 316 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page316"></a>[page 316]</span> with the Lady to study
+the art of bargaining as practised between the trained skill of the
+Levant and the native genius of Walla Walla, Washington. In the smaller
+and poorer bazaars the high, arched roofs give place to tattered
+awnings, and sometimes to branches of trees; the brown air changes to an
+atmosphere of brilliant stripes and patches; the tiny shops, (hardly
+more than open booths), are packed and festooned with all kinds of
+goods, garments and ornaments: the chafferers conduct their negotiations
+from the street, (sidewalk there is none), or squat beside the
+proprietor on the little platform of his stall.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px; ">
+<img src="images/illus11.jpg" width="500" height="328" alt="A Small Bazaar in Damascus." title="A Small Bazaar in Damascus." />
+<span class="caption">A Small Bazaar in Damascus.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p>The custom of massing the various trades and manufactures adds to the
+picturesque joy of shopping or dawdling in Damascus. It is like passing
+through rows of different kinds of strange fruits. There is a region of
+dangling slippers, red and yellow, like cherries; a little farther on we
+come to a long trellis of clothes, limp and pendulous, like bunches of
+grapes; then we pass through a patch of saddles, plain and coloured,
+decorated with all sorts of beads and tinsel, velvet and morocco, lying
+<!-- Page 317 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page317"></a>[page 317]</span> on the ground or hung on wooden supports, like big, fantastic
+melons.</p>
+
+<p>In the coppersmiths' bazaar there is an incessant clattering of little
+hammers upon hollow metal. The goldsmiths sit silent in their pens
+within a vast, dim building, or bend over their miniature furnaces
+making gold and silver filigree. Here are the carpenters using their
+bare feet in their work almost as deftly as their fingers; and yonder
+the dyers festooning their long strips of blue cotton from their windows
+and balconies. Down there, on the way to the Great Mosque, the
+booksellers hold together: a dwindling tribe, apparently, for of the
+thirty or forty shops which were formerly theirs not more than half a
+dozen remain true to literature: the rest are full of red and yellow
+slippers. Damascus is more inclined to loafing or to dancing than to
+reading. It seems to belong to the gay, smiling, easy-going East of
+Scheherazade and Aladdin, not to the sombre and reserved Orient of
+fierce mystics and fanatical fatalists.</p>
+
+<p>Yet we feel, or imagine that we feel, the hidden presence of passions
+and possibilities that belong to <!-- Page 318 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page318"></a>[page 318]</span> the tragic side of life
+underneath this laughing mask of comedy. No longer ago than 1860, in the
+great Massacre, five thousand Christians perished by fire and shot and
+dagger in two days; the streets ran with blood; the churches were piled
+with corpses; hundreds of Christian women were dragged away to Moslem
+harems; only the brave Abd-el-Kader, with his body-guard of dauntless
+Algerine veterans, was able to stay the butchery by flinging himself
+between the blood-drunken mob and their helpless victims.</p>
+
+<p>This was the last wholesale assassination of modern times that a great
+city has seen, and prosperous, pleasure-loving, insouciant Damascus
+seems to have quite forgotten it. Yet there are still enough wild
+Kurdish shepherds, and fierce Bedouins of the desert, and riffraff of
+camel-drivers and herdsmen and sturdy beggars and homeless men, among
+her three hundred thousand people to make dangerous material if the
+tiger-madness should break loose again. A gay city is not always a safe
+city. The Lady and I saw a man stabbed to death at noon, not fifty feet
+away from us, in a street beside the Ottoman Bank.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 319 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page319"></a>[page 319]</span></p>
+
+<p>Nothing is safe until justice and benevolence and tolerance and mutual
+respect are diffused in the hearts of men. How far this inward change
+has gone in Damascus no one can tell. But that some advance has been
+made, by real reforms in the Turkish government, by the spread of
+intelligence and the enlightenment of self-interest, by the sense of
+next-doorness to Paris and Berlin and London, which telegraphs,
+railways, and steamships have produced, above all by the useful work of
+missionary hospitals and schools, and by the humanizing process which
+has been going on inside of all the creeds, no careful observer can
+doubt. I fear that men will still continue to kill each other, for
+various causes, privately and publicly. But thank God it is not likely
+to be done often, if ever again, in the name of Religion!</p>
+
+<p>The medley of things seen and half understood has left patterns
+damascened upon my memory with intricate clearness: immense droves of
+camels coming up from the wilderness to be sold in the market; factories
+of inlaid woodwork and wrought brasswork in which hundreds of young
+children, with beautiful <!-- Page 320 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page320"></a>[page 320]</span> and seeming-merry faces, are
+hammering and filing and cutting out the designs traced by the
+draughtsmen who sit at their desks like schoolmasters; vast mosques with
+rows of marble columns, and floors covered with bright-coloured rugs,
+and files of men, sometimes two hundred in a line, with a leader in
+front of them, making their concerted genuflections toward Mecca; costly
+interiors of private houses which outwardly show bare white-washed
+walls, but within welcome the stranger to hospitality of fruits, coffee,
+and sweetmeats, in stately rooms ornamented with rich tiles and precious
+marbles, looking upon arcaded courtyards fragrant with blossoming
+orange-trees and musical with tinkling fountains; tombs of Moslem
+warriors and saints,&mdash;Saladin, the Sultan Beibars, the Sheikh
+Arslân, the philosopher Ibn-el-Arabi, great fighters now quiet, and
+restless thinkers finally satisfied; public gardens full of rose-bushes,
+traversed by clear, swift streams, where groups of women sit gossiping
+in the shade of the trees or in little kiosques, the Mohammedans with
+their light veils not altogether hiding their olive faces and languid
+eyes, the <!-- Page 321 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page321"></a>[page 321]</span> Christians and Jewesses with bare heads, heavy
+necklaces of amber, flowers behind their ears, silken dresses of soft
+and varied shades; cafés by the river, where grave and important Turks
+pose for hours on red velvet divans, smoking the successive cigarette or
+the continuous nargileh. Out of these memory-pictures of Damascus I
+choose three.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>The Lady and I are climbing up from the great Mosque of the Ommayyades
+into the Minaret of the Bride, at the hour of 'Asr, or afternoon prayer.
+As we tread the worn spiral steps in the darkness we hear, far above,
+the chant of the choir of muezzins, high-pitched, long-drawn, infinitely
+melancholy, calling the faithful to their devotions.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Allah akbar! Allah akbar! Allah is great! I testify there is no God
+but Allah, and Mohammed is the prophet of Allah! Come to prayer!</i>"</p>
+
+<p>The plaintive notes float away over the city toward all four quarters of
+the sky, and quaver into silence. We come out from the gloom of the
+staircase into the dazzling light of the balcony which runs around the
+top of the minaret. For a few <!-- Page 322 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page322"></a>[page 322]</span> moments we can see little; but
+when the first bewilderment passes, we are conscious that all the charm
+and wonder of Damascus are spread at our feet.</p>
+
+<p>The oval mass of the city lies like a carving of old ivory, faintly
+tinged with pink, on a huge table of malachite. The setting of groves
+and gardens, luxuriant, interminable, deeply and beautifully green,
+covers a circuit of sixty miles. Beyond it, in sharpest contrast, rise
+the bare, fawn-coloured mountains, savage, intractable, desolate; away
+to the west, the snow-crowned bulk of Hermon; away to the east, the
+low-rolling hills and slumbrous haze of the desert. Under these flat
+roofs and white domes and long black archways of bazaars three hundred
+thousand folk are swarming. And there, half emerging from the huddle of
+decrepit modern buildings and partly hidden by the rounded shed of a
+bazaar, is the ruined top of a Roman arch of triumph, battered, proud,
+and indomitable.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>An hour later we are scrambling up a long, shaky ladder to the flat
+roofs of the joiners' bazaar, built close against the southern wall of
+the Mosque. We <!-- Page 323 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page323"></a>[page 323]</span> walk across the roofs and find the ancient
+south door of the Mosque, now filled up with masonry, and almost
+completely concealed by the shops above which we are standing. Only the
+entablature is visible, richly carved with garlands. Kneeling down, we
+read upon the lintel the Greek inscription in uncial letters, cut when
+the Mosque was a Christian church. The Moslems who are bowing and
+kneeling and stretching out their hands toward Mecca among the marble
+pillars below, know nothing of this inscription. Few even of the
+Christian visitors to Damascus have ever seen it with their own eyes,
+for it is difficult to find and read. But there it still endures and
+waits, the bravest inscription in the world: "<i>Thy kingdom, O Christ, is
+a kingdom of all ages, and Thy dominion lasts throughout all
+generations.</i>"</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>From this eloquent and forgotten stone my memory turns to the Hospital
+of the Edinburgh Medical Mission. I see the lovely garden full of roses,
+columbines, lilies, pansies, sweet-peas, strawberries just in bloom. I
+see the poor people coming in a <!-- Page 324 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page324"></a>[page 324]</span> steady stream to the neat,
+orderly dispensary; the sweet, clean wards with their spotless beds; the
+merciful candour and completeness of the operating-room; the patient,
+cheerful, vigorous, healing ways of the great Scotch doctor, who limps
+around on his broken leg to minister to the needs of other folk. I see
+the little group of nurses and physicians gathered on Sunday evening in
+the doctor's parlour for an hour of serious, friendly talk, hopeful and
+happy. And there, amid the murmur of Abana's rills, and close to the
+confused and glittering mystery of the Orient, I hear the music of a
+simple hymn:</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+<span class="i0">"Dear Lord and Father of mankind,</span><br />
+<span class="i2">Forgive our foolish ways!</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Reclothe us in our rightful mind,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">In purer lives thy service find,</span><br />
+<span class="i2">In deeper reverence, praise.</span><br /></p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+<span class="i0">"O Sabbath rest by Galilee!</span><br />
+<span class="i2">O calm of hills above,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Where Jesus knelt to share with Thee</span><br />
+<span class="i0">The silence of eternity</span><br />
+<span class="i2">Interpreted by love!</span><br /></p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 325 --><span class="pagenum"><a name="page325"></a>[page 325]</span></p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+<span class="i0">"Drop thy still dews of quietness,</span><br />
+<span class="i2">Till all our strivings cease;</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Take from our souls the strain and stress,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">And let our ordered lives confess</span><br />
+<span class="i2">The beauty of Thy peace."</span></p>
+
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr class="full" />
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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land, by Henry Van
+Dyke
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land
+       Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit
+
+
+Author: Henry Van Dyke
+
+
+
+Release Date: July 4, 2009  [eBook #29314]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OUT-OF-DOORS IN THE HOLY LAND***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Juliet Sutherland, Marius Borror, and the Project
+Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)
+
+
+
+Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
+      file which includes the original illustrations.
+      See 29314-h.htm or 29314-h.zip:
+      (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/29314/29314-h/29314-h.htm)
+      or
+      (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/29314/29314-h.zip)
+
+
+Transcriber's note:
+
+      Text enclosed between plus signs was in bold face in the
+      original (example: +bold+).
+
+      A few typographical errors have been corrected; they are
+      listed at the end of the text.
+
+
+
+
+
+OUT-OF-DOORS IN THE HOLY LAND
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+                       BOOKS BY HENRY VAN DYKE
+
+   PUBLISHED BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+
+   +THE RULING PASSION.+ Illustrated in color.      $1.50
+
+   +THE BLUE FLOWER.+ Illustrated in color.         $1.50
+
+          *       *       *       *       *
+
+   +OUTDOORS IN THE HOLY LAND.+ Illustrated in
+   color                                      _net_ $1.50
+
+   +DAYS OFF.+ Illustrated in color.                $1.50
+
+   +LITTLE RIVERS.+ Illustrated in color.           $1.50
+
+   +FISHERMAN'S LUCK.+ Illustrated in color.        $1.50
+
+          *       *       *       *       *
+
+   +THE BUILDERS, AND OTHER POEMS.+                 $1.00
+
+   +MUSIC, AND OTHER POEMS.+                  _net_ $1.00
+
+   +THE TOILING OF FELIX, AND OTHER POEMS.+         $1.00
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+[Illustration: The Gate of David, Jerusalem.]
+
+
+OUT-OF-DOORS IN THE HOLY LAND
+
+Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit
+
+by
+
+HENRY VAN DYKE
+
+Illustrated
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+New York
+Charles Scribner's Sons
+MDCCCCVIII
+
+Copyright, 1908, by Charles Scribner's Sons
+Published November, 1908
+
+
+
+                               To
+
+                      HOWARD CROSBY BUTLER
+
+                        MASTER OF MERWICK
+
+                   PROFESSOR OF ART AND ARCHAEOLOGY
+
+                  WHO WAS A FRIEND TO THIS JOURNEY
+
+                      THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED
+
+                          BY HIS FRIEND
+
+                           THE AUTHOR
+
+
+
+
+                            PREFACE
+
+
+For a long time, in the hopefulness and confidence of youth, I dreamed
+of going to Palestine. But that dream was denied, for want of money and
+leisure.
+
+Then, for a long time, in the hardening strain of early manhood, I was
+afraid to go to Palestine, lest the journey should prove a
+disenchantment, and some of my religious beliefs be rudely shaken,
+perhaps destroyed. But that fear was removed by a little voyage to the
+gates of death, where it was made clear to me that no belief is worth
+keeping unless it can bear the touch of reality.
+
+In that year of pain and sorrow, through a full surrender to the Divine
+Will, the hopefulness and confidence of youth came back to me. Since
+then it has been possible once more to wake in the morning with the
+feeling that the day might bring something new and wonderful and
+welcome, and to travel into the future with a whole and happy heart.
+
+This is what I call growing younger; though the years increase, yet the
+burden of them is lessened, and the fear that life will some day lead
+into an empty prison-house has been cast out by the incoming of the
+Perfect Love.
+
+So it came to pass that when a friend offered me, at last, the
+opportunity of going to Palestine if I would give him my impressions of
+travel for his magazine, I was glad to go. Partly because there was a
+piece of work,--a drama whose scene lies in Damascus and among the
+mountains of Samaria,--that I wanted to finish there; partly because of
+the expectancy that on such a journey any of the days might indeed bring
+something new and wonderful and welcome; but most of all because I
+greatly desired to live for a little while in the country of Jesus,
+hoping to learn more of the meaning of His life in the land where it was
+spent, and lost, and forever saved.
+
+Here, then, you have the history of this little book, reader: and if it
+pleases you to look further into its pages, you can see for yourself how
+far my dreams and hopes were realised.
+
+It is the record of a long journey in the spirit and a short voyage in
+the body. If you find here impressions that are lighter, mingled with
+those that are deeper, that is because life itself is really woven of
+such contrasted threads. Even on a pilgrimage small adventures happen.
+Of the elders of Israel on Sinai it is written, "They saw God and did
+eat and drink"; and the Apostle Paul was not too much engrossed with his
+mission to send for the cloak and books and parchments that he left
+behind at Troas.
+
+If what you read here makes you wish to go to the Holy Land, I shall be
+glad; and if you go in the right way, you surely will not be
+disappointed.
+
+But there are two things in the book which I would not have you miss.
+
+The first is the new conviction,--new at least to me,--that Christianity
+is an out-of-doors religion. From the birth in the grotto at Bethlehem
+(where Joseph and Mary took refuge because there was no room for them in
+the inn) to the crowning death on the hill of Calvary outside the city
+wall, all of its important events took place out-of-doors. Except the
+discourse in the upper chamber at Jerusalem, all of its great words,
+from the sermon on the mount to the last commission to the disciples,
+were spoken in the open air. How shall we understand it unless we carry
+it under the free sky and interpret it in the companionship of nature?
+
+The second thing that I would have you find here is the deepened sense
+that Jesus Himself is the great, the imperishable miracle. His words are
+spirit and life. His character is the revelation of the Perfect Love.
+This was the something new and wonderful and welcome that came to me in
+Palestine: a simpler, clearer, surer view of the human life of God.
+
+                                                   HENRY VAN DYKE.
+
+Avalon,
+June 10, 1908.
+
+
+
+
+                        CONTENTS
+
+
+   I. _Travellers' Joy_                          1
+
+  II. _Going up to Jerusalem_                   23
+
+ III. _The Gates of Zion_                       45
+
+  IV. _Mizpah and the Mount of Olives_          67
+
+   V. _An Excursion to Bethlehem and Hebron_    83
+
+  VI. _The Temple and the Sepulchre_           105
+
+ VII. _Jericho and Jordan_                     125
+
+VIII. _A Journey to Jerash_                    151
+
+  IX. _The Mountains of Samaria_               191
+
+   X. _Galilee and the Lake_                   217
+
+  XI. _The Springs of Jordan_                  259
+
+ XII. _The Road to Damascus_                   291
+
+
+
+
+                      ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+_The Gate of David, Jerusalem_             Frontispiece
+
+_Jaffa_                               Facing page    14
+_The port where King Solomon landed his cedar beams
+from Lebanon for the building of the Temple_
+
+_The Tall Tower of the Forty Martyrs at Ramleh_      28
+
+_A Street in Jerusalem_                              60
+
+_A Street in Bethlehem_                              86
+
+_The Market-place, Bethlehem_                        90
+
+_Great Monastery of St. George_                     136
+
+_Ruins of Jerash, Looking West_                     184
+  _Propyloeum and Temple terrace_
+
+_The Virgin's Fountain, Nazareth_                   232
+
+_The Approach to Baniyas_                           276
+
+_Bridge Over the River Litani_                      282
+
+_A Small Bazaar in Damascus_                        316
+
+
+
+
+                                      I
+
+
+                               TRAVELLERS' JOY
+
+
+I
+
+INVITATION
+
+
+Who would not go to Palestine?
+
+To look upon that little stage where the drama of humanity has centred
+in such unforgetable scenes; to trace the rugged paths and ancient
+highways along which so many heroic and pathetic figures have travelled;
+above all, to see with the eyes as well as with the heart
+
+                 "Those holy fields
+  Over whose acres walked those blessed feet
+  Which, nineteen hundred years ago, were nail'd
+  For our advantage on the bitter cross"--
+
+for the sake of these things who would not travel far and endure many
+hardships?
+
+It is easy to find Palestine. It lies in the south-east corner of the
+Mediterranean coast, where the "sea in the midst of the nations," makes
+a great elbow between Asia Minor and Egypt. A tiny land, about a hundred
+and fifty miles long and sixty miles wide, stretching in a fourfold
+band from the foot of snowy Hermon and the Lebanons to the fulvous crags
+of Sinai: a green strip of fertile plain beside the sea, a blue strip of
+lofty and broken highlands, a gray-and-yellow strip of sunken
+river-valley, a purple strip of high mountains rolling away to the
+Arabian desert. There are a dozen lines of steamships to carry you
+thither; a score of well-equipped agencies to conduct you on what they
+call "a _de luxe_ religious expedition to Palestine."
+
+But how to find the Holy Land--ah, that is another question.
+
+Fierce and mighty nations, hundreds of human tribes, have trampled
+through that coveted corner of the earth, contending for its possession:
+and the fury of their fighting has swept the fields as with fire.
+Temples and palaces have vanished like tents from the hillside. The
+ploughshare of havoc has been driven through the gardens of luxury.
+Cities have risen and crumbled upon the ruins of older cities. Crust
+after crust of pious legend has formed over the deep valleys; and
+tradition has set up its altars "upon every high hill and under every
+green tree." The rival claims of sacred places are fiercely disputed by
+churchmen and scholars. It is a poor prophet that has but one birthplace
+and one tomb.
+
+And now, to complete the confusion, the hurried, nervous, comfort-loving
+spirit of modern curiosity has broken into Palestine, with railways from
+Jaffa to Jerusalem, from Mount Carmel to the Sea of Galilee, from Beirut
+to Damascus,--with macadamized roads to Shechem and Nazareth and
+Tiberias,--with hotels at all the "principal points of interest,"--and
+with every facility for doing Palestine in ten days, without getting
+away from the market-reports, the gossip of the _table d'hote_, and all
+that queer little complex of distracting habits which we call
+civilization.
+
+But the Holy Land which I desire to see can be found only by escaping
+from these things. I want to get away from them; to return into the long
+past, which is also the hidden present, and to lose myself a little
+there, to the end that I may find myself again. I want to make
+acquaintance with the soul of that land where so much that is strange
+and memorable and for ever beautiful has come to pass: to walk quietly
+and humbly, without much disputation or talk, in fellowship with the
+spirit that haunts those hills and vales, under the influence of that
+deep and lucent sky. I want to feel that ineffable charm which breathes
+from its mountains, meadows and streams: that charm which made the
+children of Israel in the desert long for it as a land flowing with milk
+and honey; and the great Prince Joseph in Egypt require an oath of his
+brethren that they would lay his bones in the quiet vale of Shechem
+where he had fed his father's sheep; and the daughters of Jacob beside
+the rivers of Babylon mingle tears with their music when they remembered
+Zion.
+
+There was something in that land, surely, some personal and indefinable
+spirit of place, which was known and loved by prophet and psalmist, and
+most of all by Him who spread His table on the green grass, and taught
+His disciples while they walked the narrow paths waist-deep in rustling
+wheat, and spoke His messages of love from a little boat rocking on the
+lake, and found His asylum of prayer high on the mountainside, and kept
+His parting-hour with His friends in the moon-silvered quiet of the
+garden of olives. That spirit of place, that soul of the Holy Land, is
+what I fain would meet on my pilgrimage,--for the sake of Him who
+interprets it in love. And I know well where to find it,--out-of-doors.
+
+I will not sleep under a roof in Palestine, but nightly pitch my
+wandering tent beside some fountain, in some grove or garden, on some
+vacant threshing-floor, beneath the Syrian stars. I will not join myself
+to any company of labelled tourists hurrying with much discussion on
+their appointed itinerary, but take into fellowship three tried and
+trusty comrades, that we may enjoy solitude together. I will not seek to
+make any archaeological discovery, nor to prove any theological theory,
+but simply to ride through the highlands of Judea, and the valley of
+Jordan, and the mountains of Gilead, and the rich plains of Samaria, and
+the grassy hills of Galilee, looking upon the faces and the ways of the
+common folk, the labours of the husbandman in the field, the vigils of
+the shepherd on the hillside, the games of the children in the
+market-place, and reaping
+
+  "The harvest of a quiet eye
+  That broods and sleeps on his own heart."
+
+Four things, I know, are unchanged amid all the changes that have passed
+over the troubled and bewildered land. The cities have sunken into dust:
+the trees of the forest have fallen: the nations have dissolved. But the
+mountains keep their immutable outline: the liquid stars shine with the
+same light, move on the same pathways: and between the mountains and the
+stars, two other changeless things, frail and imperishable,--the flowers
+that flood the earth in every springtide, and the human heart where
+hopes and longings and affections and desires blossom immortally.
+Chiefly of these things, and of Him who gave them a new meaning, I will
+speak to you, reader, if you care to go with me out-of-doors in the Holy
+Land.
+
+
+II
+
+MOVING PICTURES
+
+Of the voyage, made with all the swiftness and directness of one who
+seeks the shortest distance between two points, little remains in memory
+except a few moving pictures, vivid and half-real, as in a
+kinematograph.
+
+First comes a long, swift ship, the _Deutschland_, quivering and rolling
+over the dull March waves of the Atlantic. Then the morning sunlight
+streams on the jagged rocks of the Lizard, where two wrecked steamships
+are hanging, and on the green headlands and gray fortresses of Plymouth.
+Then a soft, rosy sunset over the mole, the dingy houses, the tiled
+roofs, the cliffs, the misty-budded trees of Cherbourg. Then Paris at
+two in the morning: the lower quarters still stirring with
+somnambulistic life, the lines of lights twinkling placidly on the empty
+boulevards. Then a whirl through the _Bois_ in a motor-car, a breakfast
+at Versailles with a merry little party of friends, a lazy walk through
+miles of picture-galleries without a guide-book or a care. Then the
+night express for Italy, a glimpse of the Alps at sunrise, snow all
+around us, the thick darkness of the Mount Cenis tunnel, the bright
+sunshine of Italian spring, terraced hillsides, clipped and pollarded
+trees, waking vineyards and gardens, Turin, Genoa, Rome, arches of
+ruined aqueducts, snow upon the Southern Apennines, the blooming fields
+of Capua, umbrella-pines and silvery poplars, and at last, from my
+balcony at the hotel, the glorious curving panorama of the bay of
+Naples, Vesuvius without a cloud, and Capri like an azure lion couchant
+on the broad shield of the sea. So ends the first series of films, ten
+days from home.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After an intermission of twenty-four hours, the second series begins on
+the white ship _Oceana_, an immense yacht, ploughing through the
+tranquil, sapphire Mediterranean, with ten passengers on board, and the
+band playing three times a day just as usual. Then comes the low line of
+the African coast, the lighthouse of Alexandria, the top of Pompey's
+Pillar showing over the white, modern city.
+
+Half a dozen little rowboats meet us, well out at sea, buffeted and
+tossed by the waves: they are fishing: see! one of the men has a strike,
+he pulls in his trolling-line, hand over hand, very slowly, it seems, as
+the steamship rushes by. I lean over the side, run to the stern of the
+ship to watch,--hurrah, he pulls in a silvery fish nearly three feet
+long. Good luck to you, my Egyptian brother of the angle!
+
+Now a glimpse of the crowded, busy harbour of Alexandria, (recalling
+memories of fourteen years ago,) and a leisurely trans-shipment to the
+little Khedivial steamer, _Prince Abbas_, with her Scotch officers,
+Italian stewards, Maltese doctor, Turkish sailors, and freight-handlers
+who come from whatever places it has pleased Heaven they should be born
+in. The freight is variegated, and the third-class passengers are a
+motley crowd.
+
+A glance at the forward main-deck shows Egyptians in white cotton, and
+Turks in the red fez, and Arabs in white and brown, and coal-black
+Soudanese, and nondescript Levantines, and Russians in fur coats and
+lamb's-wool caps, and Greeks in blue embroidered jackets, and women in
+baggy trousers and black veils, and babies, and cats, and parrots. Here
+is a tall, venerable grandfather, with spectacles and a long gray beard,
+dressed in a black robe with a hood and a yellow scarf; grave,
+patriarchal, imperturbable: his little granddaughter, a pretty elf of a
+child, with flower-like face and shining eyes, dances hither and yon
+among the chaos of freight and luggage; but as the chill of evening
+descends she takes shelter between his knees, under the folds of his
+long robe, and, while he feeds her with bread and sweetmeats, keeps up a
+running comment of remarks and laughter at all around her, and the
+unspeakable solemnity of old Father Abraham's face is lit up, now and
+then, with the flicker of a resistless smile.
+
+Here are two bronzed Arabs of the desert, in striped burnoose and white
+kaftan, stretched out for the night upon their rugs of many colours.
+Between them lies their latest purchase, a brand-new patent
+carpet-sweeper, made in Ohio, and going, who knows where among the hills
+of Bashan.
+
+A child dies in the night, on the voyage; in the morning, at anchor in
+the mouth of the Suez Canal, we hear the carpenter hammering together a
+little pine coffin. All day Sunday the indescribable traffic of Port
+Said passes around us; ships of all nations coming and going; a big
+German Lloyd boat just home from India crowded with troops in khaki,
+band playing, flags flying; huge dredgers, sombre, oxlike-looking
+things, with lines of incredibly dirty men in fluttering rags running up
+the gang-planks with bags of coal on their backs; rowboats shuttling to
+and fro between the ships and the huddled, transient, modern town, which
+is made up of curiosity shops, hotels, business houses and dens of
+iniquity; a row of Egyptian sail boats, with high prows, low sides, long
+lateen yards, ranged along the entrance to the canal. At sunset we steam
+past the big statue of Ferdinand de Lesseps, standing far out on the
+break-water and pointing back with a dramatic gesture to his
+world-transforming ditch. Then we go dancing over the yellow waves into
+the full moonlight toward Palestine.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the early morning I clamber on deck into a thunderstorm: wild west
+wind, rolling billows, flying gusts of rain, low clouds hanging over the
+sand-hills of the coast: a harbourless shore, far as eye can see, a
+land that makes no concession to the ocean with bay or inlet, but cries,
+"Hitherto shalt thou come, but no farther; and here shall thy proud
+waves be stayed." There are the flat-roofed houses, and the orange
+groves, and the minaret, and the lighthouse of Jaffa, crowning its
+rounded hill of rock. We are tossing at anchor a mile from the shore.
+Will the boats come out to meet us in this storm, or must we go on to
+Haifa, fifty miles beyond? Rumour says that the police have refused to
+permit the boats to put out. But look, here they come, half a dozen open
+whale-boats, each manned by a dozen lusty, bare-legged, brown rowers,
+buffeting their way between the scattered rocks, leaping high on the
+crested waves. The chiefs of the crews scramble on board the steamer,
+identify the passengers consigned to the different tourist-agencies,
+sort out the baggage and lower it into the boats.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Illustration: Jaffa. The port where King Solomon landed his cedar beams
+from Lebanon for the building of the Temple.]
+
+My tickets, thus far, have been provided by the great Cook, and I fall
+to the charge of his head boatman, a dusky demon of energy. A slippery
+climb down the swaying ladder, a leap into the arms of two sturdy
+rowers, a stumble over the wet thwarts, and I find myself in the
+stern sheets of the boat. A young Dutchman follows with stolid
+suddenness. Two Italian gentlemen, weeping, refuse to descend more than
+half-way, climb back, and are carried on to Haifa. A German lady with a
+parrot in a cage comes next, and her anxiety for the parrot makes her
+forget to be afraid. Then comes a little Polish lady, evidently a bride;
+she shuts her eyes tight and drops into the boat, pale, silent, resolved
+that she will not scream: her husband follows, equally pale, and she
+clings indifferently to his hand and to mine, her eyes still shut, a
+pretty image of white courage. The boat pushes off; the rowers smite the
+waves with their long oars and sing "Halli--yallah--yah hallah"; the
+steersman high in the stern shouts unintelligible (and, I fear, profane)
+directions; we are swept along on the tops of the waves, between the
+foaming rocks, drenched by spray and flying showers: at last we bump
+alongside the little quay, and climb out on the wet, gliddery stones.
+
+The kinematograph pictures are ended, for I am in Palestine, on the
+first of April, just fifteen days from home.
+
+
+III
+
+RENDEZVOUS
+
+Will my friends be here to meet me, I wonder? This is the question which
+presses upon me more closely than anything else, I must confess, as I
+set foot for the first time upon the sacred soil of Palestine. I know
+that this is not as it should be. All the conventions of travel require
+the pilgrim to experience a strange curiosity and excitement, a profound
+emotion, "a supreme anguish," as an Italian writer describes it, "in
+approaching this land long dreamed about, long waited for, and almost
+despaired of."
+
+But the conventions of travel do not always correspond to the realities
+of the heart. Your first sight of a place may not be your first
+perception of it: that may come afterward, in some quiet, unexpected
+moment. Emotions do not follow a time-table; and I propose to tell no
+lies in this book. My strongest feeling as I enter Jaffa is the desire
+to know whether my chosen comrades have come to the rendezvous at the
+appointed time, to begin our long ride together.
+
+It is a remote and uncertain combination, I grant you. The Patriarch, a
+tall, slender youth of seventy years, whose home is beside the Golden
+Gate of California, was wandering among the ruins of Sicily when I last
+heard from him. The Pastor and his wife, the Lady of Walla Walla, who
+live on the shores of Puget Sound, were riding camels across the
+peninsula of Sinai and steamboating up the Nile. Have the letters, the
+cablegrams that were sent to them been safely delivered? Have the
+hundreds of unknown elements upon which our combination depended been
+working secretly together for its success? Has our proposal been
+according to the supreme disposal, and have all the roads been kept
+clear by which we were hastening from three continents to meet on the
+first day of April at the _Hotel du Parc_ in Jaffa?
+
+Yes, here are my three friends, in the quaint little garden of the
+hotel, with its purple-flowering vines of Bougainvillea, fragrant
+orange-trees, drooping palms, and long-tailed cockatoos drowsing on
+their perches. When people really know each other an unfamiliar
+meeting-place lends a singular intimacy and joy to the meeting. There
+is a surprise in it, no matter how long and carefully it has been
+planned. There are a thousand things to talk of, but at first nothing
+will come except the wonder of getting together. The sight of the
+desired faces, unchanged beneath their new coats of tan, is a happy
+assurance that personality is not a dream. The touch of warm hands is a
+sudden proof that friendship is a reality.
+
+Presently it begins to dawn upon us that there is something wonderful in
+the place of our conjunction, and we realise dimly,--very dimly, I am
+sure, and yet with a certain vague emotion of reverence,--where we are.
+
+"We came yesterday," says the Lady, "and in the afternoon we went to see
+the House of Simon the Tanner, where they say the Apostle Peter lodged."
+
+"Did it look like the real house?"
+
+"Ah," she answers smilingly, "how do I know? They say there are two of
+them. But what do I care? It is certain that we are here. And I think
+that St. Peter was here once, too, whether the house he lived in is
+standing yet, or not."
+
+Yes, that is reasonably certain; and this is the place where he had his
+strange vision of a religion meant for all sorts and conditions of men.
+It is certain, also, that this is the port where Solomon landed his
+beams of cedar from Lebanon for the building of the Temple, and that the
+Emperor Vespasian sacked the town, and that Richard Lionheart planted
+the banner of the crusade upon its citadel. But how far away and
+dreamlike it all seems, on this spring morning, when the wind is tossing
+the fronds of the palm-trees, and the gleams of sunshine are flying
+across the garden, and the last clouds of the broken thunderstorm are
+racing westward through the blue toward the highlands of Judea.
+
+Here is our new friend, the dragoman George Cavalcanty, known as
+"Telhami," the Bethlehemite, standing beside us in the shelter of the
+orange-trees: a trim, alert figure, in his belted suit of khaki and his
+riding-boots of brown leather.
+
+"Is everything ready for the journey, George?"
+
+"Everything is prepared, according to the instructions you sent from
+Avalon. The tents are pitched a little beyond Latrun, twenty miles away.
+The horses are waiting at Ramleh. After you have had your mid-day
+breakfast, we will drive there in carriages, and get into the saddle,
+and ride to our own camp before the night falls."
+
+
+_A PSALM OF THE DISTANT ROAD_
+
+_Happy is the man that seeth the face of a friend in a far country:
+The darkness of his heart is melted in the rising of an inward joy._
+
+_It is like the sound of music heard long ago and half forgotten:
+It is like the coming back of birds to a wood that winter hath made bare._
+
+_I knew not the sweetness of the fountain till I found it flowing in
+          the desert:
+Nor the value of a friend till the meeting in a lonely land._
+
+_The multitude of mankind had bewildered me and oppressed me:
+And I said to God, Why hast thou made the world so wide?_
+
+_But when my friend came the wideness of the world had no more terror:
+Because we were glad together among men who knew us not._
+
+_I was slowly reading a book that was written in a strange language:
+And suddenly I came upon a page in mine own familiar tongue._
+
+_This was the heart of my friend that quietly understood me:
+The open heart whose meaning was clear without a word._
+
+_O my God whose love followeth all thy pilgrims and strangers:
+I praise thee for the comfort of comrades on a distant road._
+
+
+
+
+                                  II
+
+                         GOING UP TO JERUSALEM
+
+
+I
+
+"THE EXCELLENCY OF SHARON"
+
+You understand that what we had before us in this first stage of our
+journey was a very simple proposition. The distance from Jaffa to
+Jerusalem is fifty miles by railway and forty miles by carriage-road.
+Thousands of pilgrims and tourists travel it every year; and most of
+them now go by the train in about four hours, with advertised stoppages
+of three minutes at Lydda, eight minutes at Ramleh, ten minutes at
+Sejed, and unadvertised delays at the convenience of the engine. But we
+did not wish to get our earliest glimpse of Palestine from a car-window,
+nor to begin our travels in a mechanical way. The first taste of a
+journey often flavours it to the very end.
+
+The old highroad, which is now much less frequented than formerly, is
+very fair as far as Ramleh; and beyond that it is still navigable for
+vehicles, though somewhat broken and billowy. Our plan, therefore, was
+to drive the first ten miles, where the road was flat and
+uninteresting, and then ride the rest of the way. This would enable us
+to avoid the advertised rapidity and the uncertain delays of the
+railway, and bring us quietly through the hills, about the close of the
+second day, to the gates of Jerusalem.
+
+The two victorias rattled through the streets of Jaffa, past the low,
+flat-topped Oriental houses, the queer little open shops, the
+orange-groves in full bloom, the palm-trees waving their plumes over
+garden-walls, and rolled out upon the broad highroad across the fertile,
+gently undulating Plain of Sharon. On each side were the neat,
+well-cultivated fields and vegetable-gardens of the German colonists
+belonging to the sect of the Templers. They are a people of antique
+theology and modern agriculture. Believing that the real Christianity is
+to be found in the Old Testament rather than in the New, they propose to
+begin the social and religious reformation of the world by a return to
+the programme of the Minor Prophets. But meantime they conduct their
+farming operations in a very profitable way. Their grain-fields, their
+fruit-orchards, their vegetable-gardens are trim and orderly, and they
+make an excellent wine, which they call "The Treasure of Zion." Their
+effect upon the landscape, however, is conventional.
+
+But in spite of the presence and prosperity of the Templers, the spirit
+of the scene through which we passed was essentially Oriental. The
+straggling hedges of enormous cactus, the rows of plumy
+eucalyptus-trees, the budding figs and mulberries, gave it a
+semi-tropical touch and along the highway we encountered fragments of
+the leisurely, dishevelled, dignified East: grotesque camels, pensive
+donkeys carrying incredible loads, flocks of fat-tailed sheep and
+lop-eared goats, bronzed peasants in flowing garments, and white-robed
+women with veiled faces.
+
+Beneath the tall tower of the forty martyrs at Ramleh (Mohammedan or
+Christian, their names are forgotten) we left the carriages, loaded our
+luggage on the three pack-mules, mounted our saddle-horses, and rode on
+across the plain, one of the fruitful gardens and historic battle-fields
+of the world. Here the hosts of the Israelites and the Philistines, the
+Egyptians and the Romans, the Persians and the Arabs, the Crusaders and
+the Saracens, have marched and contended. But as we passed through the
+sun-showers and rain-showers of an April afternoon, all was tranquillity
+and beauty on every side. The rolling fields were embroidered with
+innumerable flowers. The narcissus, the "rose of Sharon," had faded. But
+the little blue "lilies-of-the-valley" were there, and the pink and
+saffron mallows, and the yellow and white daisies, and the violet and
+snow of the drooping cyclamen, and the gold of the genesta, and the
+orange-red of the pimpernel, and, most beautiful of all, the glowing
+scarlet of the numberless anemones. Wide acres of young wheat and barley
+glistened in the light, as the wind-waves rippled through their short,
+silken blades. There were few trees, except now and then an
+olive-orchard or a round-topped carob with its withered pods.
+
+[Illustration: The Tall Tower of the Forty Martyrs at Ramleh.]
+
+The highlands of Judea lay stretched out along the eastern horizon, a
+line of azure and amethystine heights, changing colour and seeming
+almost to breathe and move as the cloud shadows fleeted over them, and
+reaching away northward and southward as far as eye could see. Rugged
+and treeless, save for a clump of oaks or terebinths planted here or
+there around some Mohammedan saint's tomb, they would have seemed
+forbidding but that their slopes were clothed with the tender herbage of
+spring, their outlines varied with deep valleys and blue gorges, and all
+their mighty bulwarks jewelled right royally with the opalescence of
+sunset.
+
+In a hollow of the green plain to the left we could see the white houses
+and the yellow church tower of Lydda, the supposed burial-place of Saint
+George of Cappadocia, who killed the dragon and became the patron saint
+of England. On a conical hill to the right shone the tents of the Scotch
+explorer who is excavating the ancient city of Gezer, which was the
+dowry of Pharaoh's daughter when she married King Solomon. City, did I
+say? At least four cities are packed one upon another in that grassy
+mound, the oldest going back to the flint age; and yet if you should
+examine their site and measure their ruins, you would feel sure that
+none of them could ever have amounted to anything more than what we
+should call a poor little town.
+
+It came upon us gently but irresistibly that afternoon, as we rode
+easily across the land of the Philistines in a few hours, that we had
+never really read the Old Testament as it ought to be read,--as a book
+written in an Oriental atmosphere, filled with the glamour, the imagery,
+the magniloquence of the East. Unconsciously we had been reading it as
+if it were a collection of documents produced in Heidelberg, Germany, or
+in Boston, Massachusetts: precise, literal, scientific.
+
+We had been imagining the Philistines as a mighty nation, and their land
+as a vast territory filled with splendid cities and ruled by powerful
+monarchs. We had been trying to understand and interpret the stories of
+their conflict with Israel as if they had been written by a Western
+war-correspondent, careful to verify all his statistics and meticulous
+in the exact description of all his events. This view of things melted
+from us with a gradual surprise as we realised that the more deeply we
+entered into the poetry, the closer we should come to the truth, of the
+narrative. Its moral and religious meaning is firm and steadfast as the
+mountains round about Jerusalem; but even as those mountains rose before
+us glorified, uplifted, and bejewelled by the vague splendours of the
+sunset, so the form of the history was enlarged and its colours
+irradiated by the figurative spirit of the East.
+
+There at our feet, bathed in the beauty of the evening air, lay the
+Valley of Aijalon, where Joshua fought with the "five kings of the
+Amorites," and broke them and chased them. The "kings" were head-men of
+scattered villages, chiefs of fierce and ragged tribes. But the fighting
+was hard, and as Joshua led his wild clansmen down upon them from the
+ascent of Beth-horon, he feared the day might be too short to win the
+victory. So he cheered the hearts of his men with an old war-song from
+the Book of Jasher.
+
+  "Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon;
+  And thou, moon, in the Valley of Aijalon.
+  And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed,
+  Until the nation had avenged themselves of their enemies."
+
+Does any one suppose that this is intended to teach us that the sun
+moves and that on this day his course was arrested? Must we believe that
+the whole solar system was dislocated for the sake of this battle? To
+understand the story thus is to misunderstand its vital spirit. It is
+poetry, imagination, heroism. By the new courage that came into the
+hearts of Israel with their leader's song, the Lord shortened the
+conflict to fit the day, and the sunset and the moonrise saw the Valley
+of Aijalon swept clean of Israel's foes.
+
+As we passed through the wretched, mud-built village of Latrun (said to
+be the birthplace of the Penitent Thief), a dozen long-robed Arabs were
+earnestly discussing some question of municipal interest in the grassy
+market-place. They were as grave as the storks, in their solemn plumage
+of black and white, which were parading philosophically along the edge
+of a marsh to our right. A couple of jackals slunk furtively across the
+road ahead of us in the dusk. A _kafila_ of long-necked camels undulated
+over the plain. The shadows fell more heavily over cactus-hedge and
+olive-orchard as we turned down the hill.
+
+In the valley night had come. The large, trembling stars were strewn
+through the vault above us, and rested on the dim ridges of the
+mountains, and shone reflected in the puddles of the long road like
+fallen jewels. The lights of Latrun, if it had any, were already out of
+sight behind us. Our horses were weary and began to stumble. Where was
+the camp?
+
+Look, there is a light, bobbing along the road toward us. It is
+Youssouf, our faithful major-domo, come out with a lantern to meet us. A
+few rods farther through the mud, and we turn a corner beside an acacia
+hedge and the ruined arch of an ancient well. There, in a little field
+of flowers, close to the tiniest of brooks, our tents are waiting for us
+with open doors. The candles are burning on the table. The rugs are
+spread and the beds are made. The dinner-table is laid for four, and
+there is a bright bunch of flowers in the middle of it. We have seen the
+excellency of Sharon and the moon is shining for us on the Valley of
+Aijalon.
+
+
+II
+
+"THE STRENGTH OF THE HILLS"
+
+It is no hardship to rise early in camp. At the windows of a house the
+daylight often knocks as an unwelcome messenger, rousing the sleeper
+with a sudden call. But through the roof and the sides of a tent it
+enters gently and irresistibly, embracing you with soft arms, laying
+rosy touches on your eyelids; and while your dream fades you know that
+you are awake and it is already day.
+
+As we lift the canvas curtains and come out of our pavilions, the sun is
+just topping the eastern hills, and all the field around us glittering
+with immense drops of dew. On the top of the ruined arch beside the camp
+our Arab watchman, hired from the village of Latrun as we passed, is
+still perched motionless, wrapped in his flowing rags, holding his long
+gun across his knees.
+
+"_Salam 'aleikum, ya ghafir!_" I say, and though my Arabic is doubtless
+astonishingly bad, he knows my meaning; for he answers gravely,
+"_'Aleikum essalam!_--And with you be peace!"
+
+It is indeed a peaceful day in which our journey to Jerusalem is
+completed. Leaving the tents and impedimenta in charge of Youssouf and
+Shukari the cook, and the muleteers, we are in the saddle by seven
+o'clock, and riding into the narrow entrance of the Wadi 'Ali. It is a
+long, steep valley leading into the heart of the hills. The sides are
+ribbed with rocks, among which the cyclamens grow in profusion. A few
+olives are scattered along the bottom of the vale, and at the tomb of
+the Imam 'Ali there is a grove of large trees. At the summit of the pass
+we rest for half an hour, to give our horses a breathing-space, and to
+refresh our eyes with the glorious view westward over the tumbled
+country of the Shephelah, the opalescent Plain of Sharon, the sand-hills
+of the coast, and the broad blue of the Mediterranean. Northward and
+southward and eastward the rocky summits and ridges of Judea roll away.
+
+Now we understand what the Psalmist means by ascribing "the strength of
+the hills" to Jehovah; and a new light comes into the song:
+
+  "As the mountains are round about Jerusalem,
+  So Jehovah is round about his people."
+
+These natural walls and terraces of gray limestone have the air of
+antique fortifications and watch-towers of the border. They are truly
+"munitions of rocks." Chariots and horsemen could find no field for
+their manoeuvres in this broken and perpendicular country. Entangled
+in these deep and winding valleys by which they must climb up from the
+plain, the invaders would be at the mercy of the light infantry of the
+highlands, who would roll great stones upon them as they passed through
+the narrow defiles, and break their ranks by fierce and sudden downward
+rushes as they toiled panting up the steep hillsides. It was this
+strength of the hills that the children of Israel used for the defence
+of Jerusalem, and by this they were able to resist and defy the
+Philistines, whom they could never wholly conquer.
+
+Yonder on the hillside, as we ride onward, we see a reminder of that old
+tribal warfare between the people of the highlands and the people of the
+plains. That gray village, perched upon a rocky ridge above thick
+olive-orchards and a deliciously green valley, is the ancient
+Kirjath-Jearim, where the Ark of Jehovah was hidden for twenty years,
+after the Philistines had sent back this perilous trophy of their
+victory over the sons of Eli, being terrified by the pestilence and
+disaster that followed its possession. The men of Beth-shemesh, to whom
+it was first returned, were afraid to keep it, because they also had
+been smitten with death when they dared to peep into this dreadful box.
+But the men of Kirjath-Jearim were at once bolder and wiser, so they
+"came and fetched up the Ark of Jehovah, and brought it into the house
+of Abinadab in the hill, and set apart Eleazar, his son, to keep the Ark
+of Jehovah."
+
+What strange vigils in that little hilltop cottage where the young man
+watches over this precious, dangerous, gilded coffer, while Saul is
+winning and losing his kingdom in a turmoil of blood and sorrow and
+madness, forgetful of Israel's covenant with the Most High! At last
+comes King David, from his newly won stronghold of Zion, seeking eagerly
+for this lost symbol of the people's faith. "Lo, we heard of it at
+Ephratah; we found it in the field of the wood." So the gray stone
+cottage on the hilltop gave up its sacred treasure, and David carried it
+away with festal music and dancing. But was Eleazar glad, I wonder, or
+sorry, that his long vigil was ended?
+
+To part from a care is sometimes like losing a friend.
+
+I confess that it is difficult to make these ancient stories of peril
+and adventure, (or even the modern history of Abu Ghosh the robber-chief
+of this village a hundred years ago), seem real to us to-day.
+Everything around us is so safe and tranquil, and, in spite of its
+novelty, so familiar. The road descends steeply with long curves and
+windings into the Wadi Beit Hanina. We meet and greet many travellers,
+on horseback, in carriages and afoot, natives and pilgrims, German
+colonists, French priests, Italian monks, English tourists and
+explorers. It is a pleasant game to guess from an approaching pilgrim's
+looks whether you should salute him with "_Guten Morgen_," or "_Buon'
+Giorno_," or "_Bon jour_, _m'sieur_." The country people answer your
+salutation with a pretty phrase: "_Neharak said umubarak_--May your day
+be happy and blessed."
+
+At Kaloniyeh, in the bottom of the valley, there is a prosperous
+settlement of German Jews; and the gardens and orchards are flourishing.
+There is also a little wayside inn, a rude stone building, with a
+terrace around it; and there, with apricots and plums blossoming beside
+us, we eat our lunch _al fresco_, and watch our long pack-train, with
+the camp and baggage, come winding down the hill and go tinkling past us
+toward Jerusalem.
+
+The place is very friendly; we are in no haste to leave it. A few miles
+to the southward, sheltered in the lap of a rounding hill, we can see
+the tall cypress-trees and quiet gardens of 'Ain Karim, the village
+where John the Baptist was born. It has a singular air of attraction,
+seen from a distance, and one of the sweetest stories in the world is
+associated with it. For it was there that the young bride Mary visited
+her older cousin Elizabeth,--you remember the exquisite picture of the
+"Visitation" by Albertinelli in the Uffizi at Florence,--and the joy of
+coming motherhood in these two women's hearts spoke from each to each
+like a bell and its echo. Would the birth of Jesus, the character of
+Jesus, have been possible unless there had been the virginal and
+expectant soul of such a woman as Mary, ready to welcome His coming with
+her song? "My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in
+God my Saviour." Does not the advent of a higher manhood always wait for
+the hope and longing of a nobler womanhood?
+
+The chiming of the bells of St. John floats faintly and silverly across
+the valley as we leave the shelter of the wayside rest-house and mount
+for the last stage of our upward journey. The road ascends steeply.
+Nestled in the ravine to our left is the grizzled and dilapidated
+village of Lifta, a town with an evil reputation.
+
+"These people sold all their land," says George the dragoman, "twenty
+years ago, sold all the fields, gardens, olive-groves. Now they are
+dirty and lazy in that village,--all thieves!"
+
+Over the crest of the hill the red-tiled roofs of the first houses of
+Jerusalem are beginning to appear. They are houses of mercy, it seems:
+one an asylum for the insane, the other a home for the aged poor.
+Passing them, we come upon schools and hospital buildings and other
+evidences of the charity of the Rothschilds toward their own people. All
+around us are villas and consulates, and rows of freshly built houses
+for Jewish colonists.
+
+This is not at all the way that we had imagined to ourselves the first
+sight of the Holy City. All here is half-European, unromantic, not very
+picturesque. It may not be "the New Jerusalem," but it is certainly a
+modern Jerusalem. Here, in these comfortably commonplace dwellings, is
+almost half the present population of the city; and rows of new houses
+are rising on every side.
+
+But look down the southward-sloping road. There is the sight that you
+have imagined and longed to see: the brown battlements, the white-washed
+houses, the flat roofs, the slender minarets, the many-coloured domes of
+the ancient city of David, and Solomon, and Hezekiah, and Herod, and
+Omar, and Godfrey, and Saladin,--but never of Christ. That great black
+dome is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The one beyond it is the
+Mosque of Omar. Those golden bulbs and pinnacles beyond the city are the
+Greek Church of Saint Mary Magdalen on the side of the Mount of Olives;
+and on the top of the lofty ridge rises the great pointed tower of the
+Russians from which a huge bell booms out a deep-toned note of welcome.
+
+On every side we see the hospices and convents and churches and palaces
+of the different sects of Christendom. The streets are full of people
+and carriages and beasts of burden. The dust rises around us. We are
+tired with the trab, trab, trab of our horses' feet upon the hard
+highroad. Let us not go into the confusion of the city, but ride quietly
+down to the left into a great olive-grove, outside the Damascus Gate.
+
+Here our white tents are pitched among the trees, with the dear flag of
+our home flying over them. Here we shall find leisure and peace to unite
+our hearts, and bring our thoughts into tranquil harmony, before we go
+into the bewildering city. Here the big stars will look kindly down upon
+us through the silvery leaves, and the sounds of human turmoil and
+contention will not trouble us. The distant booming of the bell on the
+Mount of Olives will mark the night-hours for us, and the long-drawn
+plaintive call of the muezzin from the minaret of the little mosque at
+the edge of the grove will wake us to the sunrise.
+
+
+_A PSALM OF THE WELCOME TENT_
+
+_This is the thanksgiving of the weary:
+The song of him that is ready to rest._
+
+_It is good to be glad when the day is declining:
+And the setting of the sun is like a word of peace._
+
+_The stars look kindly on the close of a journey:
+The tent says welcome when the day's march is done._
+
+_For now is the time of the laying down of burdens:
+And the cool hour cometh to them that have borne the heat._
+
+_I have rejoiced greatly in labour and adventure:
+My heart hath been enlarged in the spending of my strength._
+
+_Now it is all gone yet I am not impoverished:
+For thus only may I inherit the treasure of repose._
+
+_Blessed be the Lord that teacheth my hands to unclose and my fingers
+          to loosen:
+He also giveth comfort to the feet that are washed from the dust of
+          the way._
+
+_Blessed be the Lord that maketh my meat at nightfall savoury:
+And filleth my evening cup with the wine of good cheer._
+
+_Blessed be the Lord that maketh me happy to be quiet:
+Even as a child that cometh softly to his mother's lap._
+
+_O God thou faintest not neither is thy strength worn away with labour:
+But it is good for us to be weary that we may obtain thy gift of rest._
+
+
+
+
+                                    III
+
+                             THE GATES OF ZION
+
+
+I
+
+A CITY THAT IS SET ON A HILL
+
+Out of the medley of our first impressions of Jerusalem one fact emerges
+like an island from the sea: it is a city that is lifted up. No river;
+no harbour; no encircling groves and gardens; a site so lonely and so
+lofty that it breathes the very spirit of isolation and proud
+self-reliance.
+
+  "Beautiful in elevation, the joy of the whole earth
+  Is Mount Zion, on the sides of the north
+  The city of the great King."
+
+Thus sang the Hebrew poet; and his song, like all true poetry, has the
+accuracy of the clearest vision. For this is precisely the one beauty
+that crowns Jerusalem: the beauty of a high place and all that belongs
+to it: clear sky, refreshing air, a fine outlook, and that indefinable
+sense of exultation that comes into the heart of man when he climbs a
+little nearer to the stars.
+
+Twenty-five hundred feet above the level of the sea is not a great
+height; but I can think of no other ancient and world-famous city that
+stands as high. Along the mountainous plateau of Judea, between the
+sea-coast plain of Philistia and the sunken valley of the Jordan, there
+is a line of sacred sites,--Beersheba, Hebron, Bethlehem, Bethel,
+Shiloh, Shechem. Each of them marks the place where a town grew up
+around an altar. The central link in this chain of shrine-cities is
+Jerusalem. Her form and outline, her relation to the landscape and to
+the land, are unchanged from the days of her greatest glory. The
+splendours of her Temple and her palaces, the glitter of her armies, the
+rich colour and glow of her abounding wealth, have vanished. But though
+her garments are frayed and weather-worn, though she is an impoverished
+and dusty queen, she still keeps her proud position and bearing; and as
+you approach her by the ancient road along the ridges of Judea you see
+substantially what Sennacherib, and Nebuchadnezzar, and the Roman Titus
+must have seen.
+
+"The sides of the north" slope gently down to the huge gray wall of the
+city, with its many towers and gates. Within those bulwarks, which are
+thirty-eight feet high and two and a half miles in circumference,
+"Jerusalem is builded as a city that is compact together," covering with
+her huddled houses and crooked, narrow streets, the two or three rounded
+hills and shallow depressions in which the northern plateau terminates.
+South and east and west, the valley of the Brook Kidron and the Valley
+of Himmon surround the city wall with a dry moat three or four hundred
+feet deep.
+
+Imagine the knuckles of a clenched fist, extended toward the south: that
+is the site of Jerusalem, impregnable, (at least in ancient warfare),
+from all sides except the north, where the wrist joins it to the higher
+tableland. This northern approach, open to Assyria, and Babylon, and
+Damascus, and Persia, and Greece, and Rome, has always been the weak
+point of Jerusalem. She was no unassailable fortress of natural
+strength, but a city lifted up, a lofty shrine, whose refuge and
+salvation were in Jehovah,--in the faith, the loyalty, the courage which
+flowed into the heart of her people from their religion. When these
+failed, she fell.
+
+Jerusalem is no longer, and never again will be, the capital of an
+earthly kingdom. But she is still one of the high places of the world,
+exalted in the imagination and the memory of Jews and Christians and
+Mohammedans, a metropolis of infinite human hopes and longings and
+devotions. Hither come the innumerable companies of foot-weary pilgrims,
+climbing the steep roads from the sea-coast, from the Jordan, from
+Bethlehem,--pilgrims who seek the place of the Crucifixion, pilgrims who
+would weep beside the walls of their vanished Temple, pilgrims who
+desire to pray where Mohammed prayed. Century after century these human
+throngs have assembled from far countries and toiled upward to this
+open, lofty plateau, where the ancient city rests upon the top of the
+closed hand, and where the ever-changing winds from the desert and the
+sea sweep and shift over the rocky hilltops, the mute, gray battlements,
+and the domes crowned with the cross, the crescent, and the star.
+
+"The wind bloweth where it will, and thou hearest the voice thereof, but
+knowest not whence it cometh, nor whither it goeth; so is every one that
+is born of the Spirit."
+
+The mystery of the heart of mankind, the spiritual airs that breathe
+through it, the desires and aspirations that impel men in their
+journeyings, the common hopes that bind them together in companies, the
+fears and hatreds that array them in warring hosts,--there is no place
+in the world to-day where you can feel all this so deeply, so
+inevitably, so overwhelmingly, as at the Gates of Zion.
+
+It is a feeling of confusion, at first: a bewildering sense of something
+vast and old and secret, speaking many tongues, taking many forms, yet
+never fully revealing its source and its meaning. The Jews, Mohammedans,
+and Christians who flock to those gates are alike in their sincerity, in
+their devotion, in the spirit of sacrifice that leads them on their
+pilgrimage. Among them all there are hypocrites and bigots, doubtless,
+but there are also earnest and devout souls, seeking something that is
+higher than themselves, "a city set upon a hill." Why do they not
+understand one another? Why do they fight and curse one another? Do they
+not all come to humble themselves, to pray, to seek the light?
+
+Dark walls that embrace so many tear-stained, blood-stained, holy and
+dishonoured shrines! And you, narrow and gloomy gates, through whose
+portals so many myriads of mankind have passed with their swords, their
+staves, their burdens and their palm-branches! What songs of triumph you
+have heard, what yells of battle-rage, what moanings of despair, what
+murmurs of hopes and gratitude, what cries of anguish, what bursts of
+careless, happy laughter,--all borne upon the wind that bloweth where it
+will across these bare and rugged heights. We will not seek to enter yet
+into the mysteries that you hide. We will tarry here for a while in the
+open sunlight, where the cool breeze of April stirs the olive-groves
+outside the Damascus Gate. We will tranquillize our thoughts,--perhaps
+we may even find them growing clearer and surer,--among the simple cares
+and pleasures that belong to the life of every day; the life which must
+have food when it is hungry, and rest when it is weary, and a shelter
+from the storm and the night; the life of those who are all strangers
+and sojourners upon the earth, and whose richest houses and strongest
+cities are, after all, but a little longer-lasting tents and camps.
+
+
+II
+
+THE CAMP IN THE OLIVE-GROVE
+
+The place of our encampment is peaceful and friendly, without being
+remote or secluded. The grove is large and free from all undergrowth:
+the trunks of the ancient olive-trees are gnarled and massive, the
+foliage soft and tremulous. The corner that George has chosen for us is
+raised above the road by a kind of terrace, so that it is not too easily
+accessible to the curious passer-by. Across the road we see a gray stone
+wall, and above it the roof of the Anglican Bishop's house, and the
+schools, from which a sound of shrill young voices shouting in play or
+chanting in unison rises at intervals through the day. The ground on
+which we stand is slightly furrowed with the little ridges of last
+year's ploughing: but it has not yet been broken this spring, and it is
+covered with millions of infinitesimal flowers, blue and purple and
+yellow and white, like tiny pansies run wild.
+
+The four tents, each circular and about fifteen feet in diameter, are
+arranged in a crescent. The one nearest to the road is for the kitchen
+and service; there Shukari, our Maronite _chef_, in his white cap and
+apron, turns out an admirable six-course dinner on a portable charcoal
+range not three feet square. Around the door of this tent there is much
+coming and going: edibles of all kinds are brought for sale; visitors
+squat in sociable conversation; curious children hang about, watching
+the proceedings, or waiting for the favours which a good cook can
+bestow.
+
+The next tent is the dining-room; the huge wooden chests of the canteen,
+full of glass and china and table-linen and new Britannia-ware, which
+shines like silver, are placed one on each side of the entrance; behind
+the central tent-pole stands the dining-table, with two chairs at the
+back and one at each end, so that we can all enjoy the view through the
+open door. The tent is lofty and lined with many-coloured cotton cloth,
+arranged in elaborate patterns, scarlet and green and yellow and blue.
+When the four candles are lighted on the well-spread table, and Youssouf
+the Greek, in his embroidered jacket and baggy blue breeches, comes in
+to serve the dinner, it is quite an Oriental scene. His assistant,
+Little Youssouf, the Copt, squats outside of the tent, at one side of
+the door, to wash up the dishes and polish the Britannia-ware.
+
+The two other tents are of the same pattern and the same gaudy colours
+within: each of them contains two little iron bedsteads, two Turkish
+rugs, two washstands, one dressing-table, and such baggage as we had
+imagined necessary for our comfort, piled around the tent-pole,--this by
+way of precaution, lest some misguided hand should be tempted to slip
+under the canvas at night and abstract an unconsidered trifle lying near
+the edge of the tent.
+
+Of our own men I must say that we never had a suspicion, either of their
+honesty or of their good-humour. Not only the four who had most
+immediately to do with us, but also the two chief muleteers, Mohammed
+'Ali and Mousa, and the songful boy, Mohammed el Nasan, who warbled an
+interminable Arabian ditty all day long, and Faris and the two other
+assistants, were models of fidelity and willing service. They did not
+quarrel (except once, over the division of the mule-loads, in the
+mountains of Gilead); they got us into no difficulties and subjected us
+to no blackmail from humbugging Bedouin chiefs. They are of a
+picturesque motley in costume and of a bewildering variety in
+creed--Anglican, Catholic, Coptic, Maronite, Greek, Mohammedan, and one
+of whom the others say that "he belongs to no religion, but sings
+beautiful Persian songs." Yet, so far as we are concerned, they all do
+the things they ought to do and leave undone the things they ought not
+to do, and their way with us is peace. Much of this, no doubt, is due to
+the wisdom, tact, and firmness of George the Bethlehemite, the best of
+dragomans.
+
+We have many visitors at the camp, but none unwelcome. The American
+Consul, a genial scholar who knows Palestine by heart and has made
+valuable contributions to the archaeology of Jerusalem, comes with his
+wife to dine with us in the open air. George's gentle wife and his two
+bright little boys, Howard and Robert, are with us often. Missionaries
+come to tell us of their labours and trials. An Arab hunter, with his
+long flintlock musket, brings us beautiful gray partridges which he has
+shot among the near-by hills. The stable-master comes day after day
+with strings of horses galloping through the grove; for our first mounts
+were not to our liking, and we are determined not to start on our longer
+ride until we have found steeds that suit us. Peasants from the country
+round about bring all sorts of things to sell--vegetables, and lambs,
+and pigeons, and old coins, and embroidered caps.
+
+There are two men ploughing in a vineyard behind the camp, beyond the
+edge of the grove. The plough is a crooked stick of wood which scratches
+the surface of the earth. The vines are lying flat on the ground, still
+leafless, closely pruned: they look like big black snakes.
+
+Women of the city, dressed in black and blue silks, with black mantles
+over their heads, come out in the afternoon to picnic among the trees.
+They sit in little circles on the grass, smoking cigarettes and eating
+sweetmeats. If they see us looking at them they draw the corners of
+their mantles across the lower part of their faces; but when they think
+themselves unobserved they drop their veils and regard us curiously with
+lustrous brown eyes.
+
+One morning a procession of rustic women and girls, singing with shrill
+voices, pass the camp on their way to the city to buy the bride's
+clothes for a wedding. At nightfall they return singing yet more loudly,
+and accompanied by men and boys firing guns into the air and shouting.
+
+Another day a crowd of villagers go by. Their old Sheikh rides in the
+midst of them, with his white-and-gold turban, his long gray beard, his
+flowing robes of rich silk. He is mounted on a splendid white Arab
+horse, with arched neck and flaunting tail; and a beautiful, gaily
+dressed little boy rides behind him with both arms clasped around the
+old man's waist. They are going up to the city for the Mohammedan rite
+of circumcision.
+
+Later in the day a Jewish funeral comes hurrying through the grove: some
+twenty or thirty men in flat caps trimmed with fur and gabardines of
+cotton velvet, purple, or yellow, or pink, chanting psalms as they
+march, with the body of the dead man wrapped in linen cloth and carried
+on a rude bier on their shoulders. They seem in haste, (because the hour
+is late and the burial must be made before sunset), perhaps a little
+indifferent, or almost joyful. Certainly there is no sign of grief in
+their looks or their voices; for among them it is counted a fortunate
+thing to die in the Holy City and to be buried on the southern slope of
+the Valley of Jehoshaphat, where Gabriel is to blow his trumpet for the
+resurrection.
+
+
+III
+
+IN THE STREETS OF JERUSALEM
+
+Outside the gates we ride, for the roads which encircle the city wall
+and lead off to the north and south and east and west, are fairly broad
+and smooth. But within the gates we walk, for the streets are narrow,
+steep and slippery, and to attempt them on horseback is to travel with
+an anxious mind.
+
+Through the Jaffa Gate, indeed, you may easily ride, or even drive in
+your carriage: not through the gateway itself, which is a close and
+crooked alley, but through the great gap in the wall beside it, made for
+the German Emperor to pass through at the time of his famous imperial
+scouting-expedition in Syria in 1898. Thus following the track of the
+great William you come to the entrance of the Grand New Hotel, among
+curiosity-shops and tourist-agencies, where a multitude of bootblacks
+assure you that you need "a shine," and _valets de place_ press their
+services upon you, and ingratiating young merchants try to allure you
+into their establishments to purchase photographs or embroidered scarves
+or olive-wood souvenirs of the Holy Land.
+
+[Illustration: A Street in Jerusalem.]
+
+Come over to Cook's office, where we get our letters, and stand for a
+while on the little terrace with the iron railing, looking at the motley
+crowd which fills the place in front of the citadel. Groups of
+blue-robed peasant women sit on the curbstone, selling firewood and
+grass and vegetables. Their faces are bare and brown, wrinkled with the
+sun and the wind. Turkish soldiers in dark-green uniform, Greek priests
+in black robes and stove-pipe hats, Bedouins in flowing cloaks of brown
+and white, pale-faced Jews with velvet gabardines and curly ear-locks,
+Moslem women in many-coloured silken garments and half-transparent
+veils, British tourists with cork helmets and white umbrellas, camels,
+donkeys, goats, and sheep, jostle together in picturesque confusion.
+There is a water-carrier with his shiny, dripping, bulbous goat-skin
+on his shoulders. There is an Arab of the wilderness with a young
+gazelle in his arms.
+
+Now let us go down the greasy, gliddery steps of David Street, between
+the diminutive dusky shops with open fronts where all kinds of queer
+things to eat and to wear are sold, and all sorts of craftsmen are at
+work making shoes, and tin pans, and copper pots, and wooden seats, and
+little tables, and clothes of strange pattern. A turn to the left brings
+us into Christian Street and the New Bazaar of the Greeks, with its
+modern stores.
+
+A turn to the right and a long descent under dark archways and through
+dirty, shadowy alleys brings us to the Place of Lamentations, beside the
+ancient foundation wall of the Temple, where the Jews come in the
+afternoon of Fridays and festival-days to lean their heads against the
+huge stones and murmur forth their wailings over the downfall of
+Jerusalem. "For the majesty that is departed," cries the leader, and the
+others answer: "We sit in solitude and mourn." "We pray Thee have mercy
+on Zion," cries the leader, and the others answer: "Gather the children
+of Jerusalem." With most of them it seems a perfunctory mourning; but
+there are two or three old men with the tears running down their faces
+as they kiss the smooth-worn stones.
+
+We enter convents and churches, mosques and tombs. We trace the course
+of the traditional _Via Dolorosa_, and try to reconstruct in our
+imagination the probable path of that grievous journey from the
+judgment-hall of injustice to the Calvary of cruelty--a path which now
+lies buried far below the present level of the city.
+
+One impression deepens in my mind with every hour: this was never
+Christ's city. The confusion, the shallow curiosity, the self-interest,
+the clashing prejudices, the inaccessibility of the idle and busy
+multitudes were the same in His day that they are now. It was not here
+that Jesus found the men and women who believed in Him and loved Him,
+but in the quiet villages, among the green fields, by the peaceful
+lake-shores. And it is not here that we shall find the clearest traces,
+the most intimate visions of Him, but away in the big out-of-doors,
+where the sky opens free above us, and the landscapes roll away to far
+horizons.
+
+As we loiter about the city, now alone, now under the discreet and
+unhampering escort of the Bethlehemite; watching the Mussulmans at their
+dinner in some dingy little restaurant, where kitchen, store-room and
+banquet-hall are all in the same apartment, level and open to the
+street; pausing to bargain with an impassive Arab for a leather belt or
+with an ingratiating Greek for a string of amber beads; looking in
+through the unshuttered windows of the Jewish houses where the families
+are gathered in festal array for the household rites of Passover week;
+turning over the chaplets, and rosaries, and anklets, and bracelets of
+coloured glass and mother-of-pearl, and variegated stones, and curious
+beans and seed-pods in the baskets of the street-vendors around the
+Church of the Holy Sepulchre; stepping back into an archway to avoid a
+bag-footed camel, or a gaily caparisoned horse, or a heavy-laden donkey
+passing through a narrow street; exchanging a smile and an
+unintelligible friendly jest with a sweet-faced, careless child;
+listening to long disputes between buyers and sellers in that
+resounding Arab tongue which seems full of tragic indignation and wrath,
+while the eyes of the handsome brown Bedouins who use it remain
+unsearchable in their Oriental languor and pride; Jerusalem becomes to
+us more and more a symbol and epitome of that which is changeless and
+transient, capricious and inevitable, necessary and insignificant,
+interesting and unsatisfying, in the unfinished tragi-comedy of human
+life. There are times when it fascinates us with its whirling charm.
+There are other times when we are glad to ride away from it, to seek
+communion with the great spirit of some antique prophet, or to find the
+consoling presence of Him who spake the words of the eternal life.
+
+
+_A PSALM OF GREAT CITIES_
+
+_How wonderful are the cities that man hath builded:
+Their walls are compacted of heavy stones,
+And their lofty towers rise above the tree-tops._
+
+_Rome, Jerusalem, Cairo, Damascus,--
+Venice, Constantinople, Moscow, Pekin,--
+London, New York, Berlin, Paris, Vienna,--_
+
+_These are the names of mighty enchantments:
+They have called to the ends of the earth,
+They have secretly summoned an host of servants._
+
+_They shine from far sitting beside great waters:
+They are proudly enthroned upon high hills,
+They spread out their splendour along the rivers._
+
+_Yet are they all the work of small patient fingers:
+Their strength is in the hand of man,
+He hath woven his flesh and blood into their glory._
+
+_The cities are scattered over the world like ant-hills:
+Every one of them is full of trouble and toil,
+And their makers run to and fro within them._
+
+_Abundance of riches is laid up in their store-houses:
+Yet they are tormented with the fear of want,
+The cry of the poor in their streets is exceeding bitter._
+
+_Their inhabitants are driven by blind perturbations:
+They whirl sadly in the fever of haste,
+Seeking they know not what, they pursue it fiercely._
+
+_The air is heavy-laden with their breathing:
+The sound of their coming and going is never still,
+Even in the night I hear them whispering and crying._
+
+_Beside every ant-hill I behold a monster crouching:
+This is the ant-lion Death,
+He thrusteth forth his tongue and the people perish._
+
+_O God of wisdom thou hast made the country:
+Why hast thou suffered man to make the town?_
+
+_Then God answered, Surely I am the maker of man:
+And in the heart of man I have set the city._
+
+
+
+
+                                  IV
+
+                    MIZPAH AND THE MOUNT OF OLIVES
+
+
+I
+
+THE JUDGMENT-SEAT OF SAMUEL
+
+Mizpah of Benjamin stands to the northwest: the sharpest peak in the
+Judean range, crowned with a ragged, dusty village and a small mosque.
+We rode to it one morning over the steepest, stoniest bridle-paths that
+we had ever seen. The country was bleak and rocky, a skeleton of
+landscape; but between the stones and down the precipitous hillsides and
+along the hot gorges, the incredible multitude of spring flowers were
+abloom.
+
+It was a stiff scramble up the conical hill to the little hamlet at the
+top, built out of and among ruins. The mosque, evidently an old
+Christian church remodelled, was bare, but fairly clean, cool, and
+tranquil. We peered through a grated window, tied with many-coloured
+scraps of rags by the Mohammedan pilgrims, into a whitewashed room
+containing a huge sarcophagus said to be the tomb of Samuel. Then we
+climbed the minaret and lingered on the tiny railed balcony, feeding on
+the view.
+
+The peak on which we stood was isolated by deep ravines from the other
+hills of desolate gray and scanty green. Beyond the western range lay
+the Valley of Aijalon, and beyond that the rich Plain of Sharon with
+iridescent hues of green and blue and silver, and beyond that the yellow
+line of the sand-dunes broken by the white spot of Jaffa, and beyond
+that the azure breadth of the Mediterranean. Northward, at our feet, on
+the summit of a lower conical hill, ringed with gray rock, lay the
+village of El-Jib, the ancient Geba of Benjamin, one of the cities which
+Joshua gave to the Levites.
+
+This was the place from which Jonathan and his armour-bearer set out,
+without Saul's knowledge, on their daring, perilous scouting expedition
+against the Philistines. What fighting there was in olden days over that
+tumbled country of hills and gorges, stretching away north to the blue
+mountains of Samaria and the summits of Ebal and Gerizim on the horizon!
+
+There on the rocky backbone of Benjamin and Ephraim, was Ramallah
+(where we had spent Sunday in the sweet orderliness of the Friends'
+Mission School), and Beeroth, and Bethel, and Gilgal, and Shiloh.
+Eastward, behind the hills, we could trace the long, vast trench of the
+Jordan valley running due north and south, filled with thin violet haze
+and terminating in a glint of the Dead Sea. Beyond that deep line of
+division rose the mountains of Gilead and Moab, a lofty, unbroken
+barrier. To the south-east we could see the red roofs of the new
+Jerusalem, and a few domes and minarets of the ancient city. Beyond
+them, in the south, was the truncated cone of the Frank Mountain, where
+the crusaders made their last stand against the Saracens; and the hills
+around Bethlehem; and a glimpse, nearer at hand, of the tall cypresses
+and peaceful gardens of 'Ain Karim.
+
+This terrestrial paradise of vision encircled us with jewel-hues and
+clear, exquisite outlines. Below us were the flat roofs of Nebi Samwil,
+with a dog barking on every roof; the filthy courtyards and dark
+doorways, with a woman in one of them making bread; the ruined archways
+and broken cisterns with a pool of green water stagnating in one
+corner; peasants ploughing their stony little fields, and a string of
+donkeys winding up the steep path to the hill.
+
+Here, centuries ago, Samuel called all Israel to Mizpah, and offered
+sacrifice before Jehovah, and judged the people. Here he inspired them
+with new courage and sent them down to discomfit the Philistines. Hither
+he came as judge and ruler of Israel, making his annual circuit between
+Gilgal and Bethel and Mizpah. Here he assembled the tribes again, when
+they were tired of his rule, and gave them a King according to their
+desire, even the tall warrior Saul, the son of Kish.
+
+Do the bones of the prophet rest here or at Ramah? I do not know. But
+here, on this commanding peak, he began and ended his judgeship; from
+this aerie he looked forth upon the inheritance of the turbulent sons of
+Jacob; and here, if you like, today, a pale, clever young Mohammedan
+will show you what he calls the coffin of Samuel.
+
+
+II
+
+THE HILL THAT JESUS LOVED
+
+We had seen from Mizpah the sharp ridge of the Mount of Olives, rising
+beyond Jerusalem. Our road thither from the camp led us around the city,
+past the Damascus Gate, and the royal grottoes, and Herod's Gate, and
+the Tower of the Storks, and St. Stephen's Gate, down into the Valley of
+the Brook Kidron. Here, on the west, rises the precipitous Temple Hill
+crowned with the wall of the city, and on the east the long ridge of
+Olivet.
+
+There are several buildings on the side of the steep hill, marking
+supposed holy places or sacred events--the Church of the Tomb of the
+Virgin, the Latin Chapel of the Agony, the Greek Church of St. Mary
+Magdalen. On top of the ridge are the Russian Buildings, with the Chapel
+of the Ascension, and the Latin Buildings, with the Church of the Creed,
+the Church of the Paternoster, and a Carmelite Nunnery. Among the walls
+of these inclosures we wound our way, and at last tied our horses
+outside of the Russian garden. We climbed the two hundred and fourteen
+steps of the lofty Belvidere Tower, and found ourselves in possession of
+one of the great views of the world. There is Jerusalem, across the
+Kidron, spread out like a raised map below us. The mountains of Judah
+roll away north and south and east and west--the clean-cut pinnacle of
+Mizpah, the lofty plain of Rephaim, the dark hills toward Hebron, the
+rounded top of Scopus where Titus camped with his Roman legions, the
+flattened peak of Frank Mountain. Bethlehem is not visible; but there is
+the tiny village of Bethphage, and the first roof of Bethany peeping
+over the ridge, and the Inn of the Good Samaritan in a red cut of the
+long serpentine road to Jericho. The dark range of Gilead and Moab seems
+like a huge wall of lapis-lazuli beyond the furrowed, wrinkled,
+yellowish clay-hills and the wide gray trench of the Jordan Valley,
+wherein the river marks its crooked path with a line of deep green. The
+hundreds of ridges that slope steeply down to that immense depression
+are touched with a thousand hues of amethystine light, and the ravines
+between them filled with a thousand tones of azure shadow. At the end
+of the valley glitter the blue waters of the Dead Sea, fifteen miles
+away, four thousand feet below us, yet seeming so near that we almost
+expect to hear the sound of its waves on the rocky shores of the
+Wilderness of Tekoa.
+
+On this mount Jesus of Nazareth often walked with His disciples. On this
+widespread landscape His eyes rested as He spoke divinely of the
+invisible kingdom of peace and love and joy that shall never pass away.
+Over this walled city, sleeping in the sunshine, full of earthly dreams
+and disappointments, battlemented hearts and whited sepulchres of the
+spirit, He wept, and cried: "O Jerusalem, how often would I have
+gathered thy children together even as a hen gathereth her own brood
+under her wings, and ye would not!"
+
+
+III
+
+THE GARDEN OF GETHSEMANE
+
+Come down, now, from the mount of vision to the grove of olive-trees,
+the Garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus used to take refuge with His
+friends. It lies on the eastern slope of Olivet, not far above the
+Valley of Kidron, over against that city-gate which was called the
+Beautiful, or the Golden, but which is now walled up.
+
+The grove probably belonged to some friend of Jesus or of one of His
+disciples, who permitted them to make use of it for their quiet
+meetings. At that time, no doubt, the whole hillside was covered with
+olive-trees, but most of these have now disappeared. The eight aged
+trees that still cling to life in Gethsemane have been inclosed with a
+low wall and an iron railing, and the little garden that blooms around
+them is cared for by Franciscan monks from Italy.
+
+The gentle, friendly Fra Giovanni, in bare sandaled feet, coarse brown
+robe, and broad-brimmed straw hat, is walking among the flowers. He
+opens the gate for us and courteously invites us in, telling us in
+broken French that we may pick what flowers we like. Presently I fall
+into discourse with him in broken Italian, telling him of my visit years
+ago to the cradle of his Order at Assisi, and to its most beautiful
+shrine at La Verna, high above the Val d'Arno. His old eyes soften into
+youthful brightness as he speaks of Italy. It was most beautiful, he
+said, _bellisima!_ But he is happier here, caring for this garden, it is
+most holy, _santissima!_
+
+The bronzed Mohammedan gardener, silent, patient, absorbed in his task,
+moves with his watering-pot among the beds, quietly refreshing the
+thirsty blossoms. There are wall-flowers, stocks, pansies, baby's
+breath, pinks, anemones of all colours, rosemary, rue, poppies--all
+sorts of sweet old-fashioned flowers. Among them stand the scattered
+venerable trees, with enormous trunks, wrinkled and contorted, eaten
+away by age, patched and built up with stones, protected and tended with
+pious care, as if they were very old people whose life must be tenderly
+nursed and sheltered. Their boles hardly seem to be of wood; so dark, so
+twisted, so furrowed are they, of an aspect so enduring that they
+appear to be cast in bronze or carved out of black granite. Above each
+of them spreads a crown of fresh foliage, delicate, abundant, shimmering
+softly in the sunlight and the breeze, with silken turnings of the under
+side of the innumerable leaves. In the centre of the garden is a kind of
+open flower house with a fountain of flowing water, erected in memory of
+a young American girl. At each corner a pair of slender cypresses lift
+their black-green spires against the blanched azure of the sky.
+
+It is a place of refuge, of ineffable tranquillity, of unforgetful
+tenderness. The inclosure does not offend. How else could this sacred
+shrine of the out-of-doors be preserved? And what more fitting guardian
+for it than the Order of that loving Saint Francis, who called the sun
+and the moon his brother and his sister and preached to a joyous
+congregation of birds as his "little brothers of the air"? The flowers
+do not offend. Their antique fragrance, gracious order, familiar looks,
+are a symbol of what faithful memory does with the sorrows and
+sufferings of those who have loved us best--she treasures and
+transmutes them into something beautiful, she grows her sweetest flowers
+in the ground that tears have made holy.
+
+It is here, in this quaint and carefully tended garden, this precious
+place which has been saved alike from the oblivious trampling of the
+crowd and from the needless imprisonment of four walls and a roof, it is
+here in the open air, in the calm glow of the afternoon, under the
+shadow of Mount Zion, that we find for the first time that which we have
+come so far to seek,--the soul of the Holy Land, the inward sense of the
+real presence of Jesus.
+
+It is as clear and vivid as any outward experience. Why should I not
+speak of it as simply and candidly? Nothing that we have yet seen in
+Palestine, no vision of wide-spread landscape, no sight of ancient ruin
+or famous building or treasured relic, comes as close to our hearts as
+this little garden sleeping in the sun. Nothing that we have read from
+our Bibles in the new light of this journey has been for us so suddenly
+illumined, so deeply and tenderly brought home to us, as the story of
+Gethsemane.
+
+Here, indeed, in the moonlit shadow of these olives--if not of these
+very branches, yet of others sprung from the same immemorial stems--was
+endured the deepest suffering ever borne for man, the most profound
+sorrow of the greatest Soul that loved all human souls. It was not in
+the temptation in the wilderness, as Milton imagined, that the crisis of
+the Divine life was enacted and Paradise was regained. It was in the
+agony in the garden.
+
+Here the love of life wrestled in the heart of Jesus with the purpose of
+sacrifice, and the anguish of that wrestling wrung the drops of blood
+from Him like sweat. Here, for the only time, He found the cup of sorrow
+and shame too bitter, and prayed the Father to take it from His lips if
+it were possible--possible without breaking faith, without surrendering
+love. For that He would not do, though His soul was exceeding sorrowful,
+even unto death. Here He learned the frailty of human friendship, the
+narrowness and dulness and coldness of the very hearts for whom He had
+done and suffered most, who could not even watch with Him one hour.
+
+What infinite sense of the poverty and feebleness of mankind, the
+inveteracy of selfishness, the uncertainty of human impulses and
+aspirations and promises; what poignant questioning of the necessity,
+the utility of self-immolation must have tortured the soul of Jesus in
+that hour! It was His black hour. None can imagine the depth of that
+darkness but those who have themselves passed through some of its outer
+shadows, in the times when love seems vain, and sacrifice futile, and
+friendship meaningless, and life a failure, and death intolerable.
+
+Jesus met the spirit of despair in the Garden of Gethsemane; and after
+that meeting, the cross had no terrors for Him, because He had already
+endured them; the grave no fear, because He had already conquered it.
+How calm and gentle was the voice with which He wakened His disciples,
+how firm the step with which He went to meet Judas! The bitterness of
+death was behind Him in the shadow of the olive-trees. The peace of
+Heaven shone above Him in the silent stars.
+
+
+_A PSALM OF SURRENDER_
+
+_Mine enemies have prevailed against me, O God:
+Thou hast led me deep into their ambush._
+
+_They surround me with a hedge of spears:
+And the sword in my hand is broken._
+
+_My friends also have forsaken my side:
+From a safe place they look upon me with pity._
+
+_My heart is like water poured upon the ground:
+I have come alone to the place of surrender._
+
+_To thee, to thee only will I give up my sword:
+The sword which was broken in thy service._
+
+_Thou hast required me to suffer for thy cause:
+By my defeat thy will is victorious._
+
+_O my King show me thy face shining in the dark:
+While I drink the loving-cup of death to thy glory._
+
+
+
+
+                                    V
+
+                   AN EXCURSION TO BETHLEHEM AND HEBRON
+
+
+I
+
+BETHLEHEM
+
+A sparkling morning followed a showery night, and all the little red and
+white and yellow flowers were lifting glad faces to the sun as we took
+the highroad to Bethlehem. Leaving the Jaffa Gate on the left, we
+crossed the head of the deep Valley of Hinnom, below the dirty Pool of
+the Sultan, and rode up the hill on the opposite side of the vale.
+
+There was much rubbish and filth around us, and the sight of the
+Ophthalmic Hospital of the English Knights of Saint John, standing in
+the beauty of cleanness and order beside the road, did our eyes good.
+Blindness is one of the common afflictions of the people of Palestine.
+Neglect and ignorance and dirt and the plague of crawling flies spread
+the germs of disease from eye to eye, and the people submit to it with
+pathetic and irritating fatalism. It is hard to persuade these poor
+souls that the will of Allah or Jehovah in this matter ought not to be
+accepted until after it has been questioned. But the light of true and
+humane religion is spreading a little. We rejoiced to see the
+reception-room of the hospital filled with all sorts and conditions of
+men, women and children waiting for the good physicians who save and
+restore sight in the name of Jesus.
+
+To the right, a little below us, lay the ugly railway station; before
+us, rising gently southward, extended the elevated Plain of Rephaim
+where David smote the host of the Philistines after he had heard "the
+sound of a going in the tops of the mulberry-trees." The red soil was
+cultivated in little farms and gardens. The almond-trees were in leaf;
+the hawthorn in blossom; the fig-trees were putting forth their tender
+green.
+
+[Illustration: A Street in Bethlehem.]
+
+A slowly ascending road brought us to the hill of Mar Elyas, and the
+so-called Well of the Magi. Here the legend says the Wise Men halted
+after they had left Jerusalem, and the star reappeared to guide them on
+to Bethlehem. Certain it is that they must have taken this road; and
+certain it is that both Bethlehem and Jerusalem, hidden from each other
+by the rising ground, are clearly visible to one who stands in the
+saddle of this hill.
+
+There were fine views down the valleys to the east, with blue glimpses
+of the Dead Sea at the end of them. The supposed tomb of Rachel, a dingy
+little building with a white dome, interested us less than the broad
+lake of olive-orchards around the distant village of Beit Jala, and the
+green fields, pastures and gardens encircling the double hill of
+Bethlehem, the ancient "House of Bread." There was an aspect of
+fertility and friendliness about the place that seemed in harmony with
+its name and its poetic memories.
+
+In a walled kitchen-garden at the entrance of the town was David's Well.
+We felt no assurance, of course, as we looked down into it, that this
+was the veritable place. But at all events it served to bring back to us
+one of the prettiest bits of romance in the Old Testament. When the bold
+son of Jesse had become a chieftain of outlaws and was besieged by the
+Philistines in the stronghold of Adullam, his heart grew thirsty for a
+draught from his father's well, whose sweetness he had known as a boy.
+And when his three mighty men went up secretly at the risk of their
+lives, and broke through the host of their enemies, and brought their
+captain a vessel of this water, "he would not drink thereof, but poured
+it out unto Jehovah."
+
+There was a division of opinion in our party in regard to this act. "It
+was sheer foolishness," said the Patriarch, "to waste anything that had
+cost so much to get. What must the three mighty men have thought when
+they saw that for which they had risked their lives poured out upon the
+ground?" "Ah, no," said the Lady. "It was the highest gratitude, because
+it was touched with poetry. It was the best compliment that David could
+have given to his friends. Some gifts are too precious to be received in
+any other way than this." And in my heart I knew that she was right.
+
+Riding through the narrow streets of the town, which is inhabited almost
+entirely by Christians, we noted the tranquil good looks of the women, a
+distinct type, rather short of stature, round-faced, placid and kind of
+aspect. Not a few of them had blue eyes. They wore dark-blue skirts,
+dark-red jackets, and a white veil over their heads, but not over their
+faces. Under the veil the married women wore a peculiar cap of stiff,
+embroidered black cloth, about six inches high, and across the front of
+this cap was strung their dowry of gold or silver coins. Such a dress,
+no doubt, was worn by the Virgin Mary, and such tranquil, friendly
+looks, I think, were hers, but touched with a rarer light of beauty
+shining from a secret source within.
+
+A crowd of little boys and girls just released from school for their
+recess shouted and laughed and chased one another, pausing for a moment
+in round-eyed wonder when I pointed my camera at them. Donkeys and
+camels and sheep made our passage through the town slow, and gave us
+occasion to look to our horses' footing. At one corner a great white sow
+ran out of an alley-way, followed by a twinkling litter of pink pigs. In
+the market-place we left our horses in the shadow of the monastery wall
+and entered, by a low door, the lofty, bare Church of the Nativity.
+
+The long rows of immense marble pillars had some faded remains of
+painting on them. There were a few battered fragments of mosaic in the
+clerestory, dimly glittering. But the general effect of the whitewashed
+walls, the ancient brown beams and rafters of the roof, the large, empty
+space, was one of extreme simplicity.
+
+When we came into the choir and apse we found ourselves in the midst of
+complexity. The ownership of the different altars with their gilt
+ornaments, of the swinging lamps, of the separate doorways of the Greeks
+and the Armenians and the Latins, was bewildering. Dark, winding steps,
+slippery with the drippings from many candles, led us down into the
+Grotto of the Nativity. It was a cavern perhaps forty feet long and ten
+feet wide, lit by thirty pendent lamps (Greek, Armenian and Latin):
+marble floor and walls hung with draperies; a silver star in the
+pavement before the altar to mark the spot where Christ was born; a
+marble manger in the corner to mark the cradle in which Christ was laid;
+a never-ceasing stream of poor pilgrims, who come kneeling, and kissing
+the star and the stones and the altar for Christ's sake.
+
+[Illustration: The Market-place, Bethlehem.]
+
+We paused for a while, after we had come up, to ask ourselves whether
+what we had seen was in any way credible. Yes, credible, but not
+convincing. No doubt the ancient Khan of Bethlehem must have been
+somewhere near this spot, in the vicinity of the market-place of the
+town. No doubt it was the custom, when there were natural hollows or
+artificial grottos in the rock near such an inn, to use them as shelters
+and stalls for the cattle. It is quite possible, it is even probable,
+that this may have been one of the shallow caverns used for such a
+purpose. If so, there is no reason to deny that this may be the place of
+the wondrous birth, where, as the old French _Noel_ has it:
+
+  "_Dieu parmy les pastoreaux,
+  Sous la creche des toreaux,
+  Dans les champs a voulu naistre;
+  Et non parmy les arroys
+  Des grands princes et des roys,--
+  Lui des plus grands roys le maistre._"
+
+But to the eye, at least, there is no reminder of the scene of the
+Nativity in this close and stifling chapel, hung with costly silks and
+embroideries, glittering with rich lamps, filled with the smoke of
+incense and waxen tapers. And to the heart there is little suggestion
+of the lonely night when Joseph found a humble refuge here for his young
+bride to wait in darkness, pain and hope for her hour to come.
+
+In the church above, the Latins and Armenians and Greeks guard their
+privileges and prerogatives jealously. There have been fights here about
+the driving of a nail, the hanging of a picture, the sweeping of a bit
+of the floor. The Crimean War began in a quarrel between the Greeks and
+the Latins, and a mob-struggle in the Church of the Nativity. Underneath
+the floor, to the north of the Grotto of the Nativity, is the cave in
+which Saint Jerome lived peaceably for many years, translating the Bible
+into Latin. That was better than fighting.
+
+
+II
+
+ON THE ROAD TO HEBRON
+
+We ate our lunch at Bethlehem in a curiosity-shop. The table was spread
+at the back of the room by the open window. All around us were hanging
+innumerable chaplets and rosaries of mother-of-pearl, of carnelian, of
+carved olive-stones, of glass beads; trinkets and souvenirs of all
+imaginable kinds, tiny sheep-bells and inlaid boxes and carved fans
+filled the cases and cabinets. Through the window came the noise of
+people busy at Bethlehem's chief industry, the cutting and polishing of
+mother-of-pearl for mementoes. The jingling bells of our pack-train,
+passing the open door, reminded us that our camp was to be pitched miles
+away on the road to Hebron.
+
+We called for the horses and rode on through the town. Very beautiful
+and peaceful was the view from the southern hill, looking down upon the
+pastures of Bethlehem where "shepherds watched their flocks by night,"
+and the field of Boaz where Ruth followed the reapers among the corn.
+
+Down dale and up hill we journeyed; bright green of almond-trees, dark
+green of carob-trees, snowy blossoms of apricot-trees, rosy blossoms of
+peach-trees, argent verdure of olive-trees, adorning the valleys. Then
+out over the wilder, rockier heights; and past the great empty Pools of
+Solomon, lying at the head of the Wadi Artas, watched by a square ruined
+castle; and up the winding road and along the lofty flower-sprinkled
+ridges; and at last we came to our tents, pitched in the wide, green
+Wadi el-'Arrub, beside the bridge.
+
+Springs gushed out of the hillside here and ran down in a little
+laughing brook through lawns full of tiny pink and white daisies, and
+broad fields of tangled weeds and flowers, red anemones, blue iris,
+purple mallows, scarlet adonis, with here and there a strip of
+cultivated ground shimmering with silky leeks or dotted with young
+cucumbers. There was a broken aqueduct cut in the rock at the side of
+the valley, and the brook slipped by a large ruined reservoir.
+
+"George," said I to the Bethlehemite, as he sat meditating on the edge
+of the dry pool, "what do you think of this valley?"
+
+"I think," said George, "that if I had a few thousand dollars to buy the
+land, with all this runaway water I could make it blossom like a
+peach-tree."
+
+The cold, green sunset behind the western hills darkened into night. The
+air grew chilly, dropping nearly to the point of frost. We missed the
+blazing camp-fire of the Canadian forests, and went to bed early,
+tucking in the hot-water bags at our feet and piling on the blankets and
+rugs. All through the night we could hear the passers-by shouting and
+singing along the Hebron road. There was one unknown traveller whose
+high-pitched, quavering Arab song rose far away, and grew louder as he
+approached, and passed us in a whirlwind of lugubrious music, and
+tapered slowly off into distance and silence--a chant a mile long.
+
+The morning broke through flying clouds, with a bitter, wet, west wind
+rasping the bleak highlands. There were spiteful showers with intervals
+of mocking sunshine; it was a mischievous and prankish bit of weather,
+no day for riding. But the Lady was indomitable, so we left the
+Patriarch in his tent, wrapped ourselves in garments of mackintosh and
+took the road again.
+
+The country, at first, was wild and barren, a wilderness of rocks and
+thorn bushes and stunted scrub oaks. Now and then a Greek partridge, in
+its beautiful plumage of fawn-gray, marked with red and black about the
+head, clucked like a hen on the stony hillside, or whirred away in low,
+straight flight over the bushes. Flocks of black and brown goats, with
+pendulous ears, skipped up and down the steep ridges, standing up on
+their hind legs to browse the foliage of the little oak shrubs, or
+showing themselves off in a butting-match on top of a big rock. Marching
+on the highroad they seemed sedate, despondent, pattering along soberly
+with flapping ears. In the midst of one flock I saw a fierce-looking
+tattered pastor tenderly carrying a little black kid in his bosom--as
+tenderly as if it were a lamb. It seemed like an illustration of a
+picture that I saw long ago in the Catacombs, in which the infant church
+of Christ silently expressed the richness of her love, the breadth of
+her hope:
+
+  "On those walls subterranean, where she hid
+  Her head 'mid ignominy, death and tombs,
+  She her Good Shepherd's hasty image drew--
+  And on His shoulders, not a lamb, a kid."
+
+As we drew nearer to Hebron the region appeared more fertile, and the
+landscape smiled a little under the gleams of wintry sunshine. There
+were many vineyards; in most of them the vines trailed along the ground,
+but in some they were propped up on sticks, like old men leaning on
+crutches. Almond and apricot-trees flourished. The mulberries, the
+olives, the sycamores were abundant. Peasants were ploughing the fields
+with their crooked sticks shod with a long iron point. When a man puts
+his hand to such a plough he dares not look back, else it will surely go
+aside. It makes a scratch, not a furrow. (I saw a man in the hospital at
+Nazareth who had his thigh pierced clear through by one of these
+dagger-like iron plough points.)
+
+Children were gathering roots and thorn branches for firewood. Women
+were carrying huge bundles on their heads. Donkey-boys were urging their
+heavy-laden animals along the road, and cameleers led their deliberate
+strings of ungainly beasts by a rope or a light chain reaching from one
+nodding head to another.
+
+A camel's load never looks as large as a donkey's, but no doubt he often
+finds it heavy, and he always looks displeased with it. There is
+something about the droop of a camel's lower lip which seems to express
+unalterable disgust with the universe. But the rest of the world around
+Hebron appeared to be reasonably happy. In spite of weather and poverty
+and hard work the ploughmen sang in the fields, the children skipped and
+whistled at their tasks, the passers-by on the road shouted greetings to
+the labourers in the gardens and vineyards. Somewhere round about here
+is supposed to lie the Valley of Eshcol from which the Hebrew spies
+brought back the monstrous bunch of grapes, a cluster that reached from
+the height of a man's shoulder to the ground.
+
+
+III
+
+THE TENTING-GROUND OF ABRAHAM
+
+Hebron lies three thousand feet above the sea, and is one of the ancient
+market-places and shrines of the world. From time immemorial it has been
+a holy town, a busy town, and a turbulent town. The Hittites and the
+Amorites dwelt here, and Abraham, a nomadic shepherd whose tents
+followed his flocks over the land of Canaan, bought here his only piece
+of real estate, the field and cave of Machpelah. He bought it for a
+tomb,--even a nomad wishes to rest quietly in death,--and here he and
+his wife Sarah, and his children Isaac and Rebekah, and his
+grandchildren Jacob and Leah were buried.
+
+The modern town has about twenty thousand inhabitants, chiefly
+Mohammedans of a fanatical temper, and is incredibly dirty. We passed
+the muddy pool by which King David, when he was reigning here, hanged
+the murderers of Ishbosheth. We climbed the crooked streets to the
+Mosque which covers the supposed site of the cave of Machpelah. But we
+did not see the tomb of Abraham, for no "infidel" is allowed to pass
+beyond the seventh step in the flight of stairs which leads up to the
+doorway.
+
+As we went down through the narrow, dark, crowded Bazaar a violent storm
+of hail broke over the city, pelting into the little open shops and
+covering the streets half an inch deep with snowy sand and pebbles of
+ice. The tempest was a rude joke, which seemed to surprise the surly
+crowd into a good humour. We laughed with the Moslems as we took shelter
+together from our common misery under a stone archway.
+
+After the storm had passed we ate our midday meal on a housetop, which
+a friend of the dragoman put at our disposal, and rode out in the
+afternoon to the Oak of Abraham on the hill of Mamre. The tree is an
+immense, battered veteran, with a trunk ten feet in diameter, and
+wide-flung, knotted arms which still bear a few leaves and acorns. It
+has been inclosed with a railing, patched up with masonry, partially
+protected by a roof. The Russian monks who live near by have given it
+pious care, yet its inevitable end is surely near.
+
+The death of a great sheltering tree has a kind of dumb pathos. It seems
+like the passing away of something beneficent and helpless, something
+that was able to shield others but not itself.
+
+On this hill, under the oaks of Mamre, Abraham's tents were pitched many
+a year, and here he entertained the three angels unawares, and Sarah
+made pancakes for them, and listened behind the tent-flap while they
+were talking with her husband, and laughed at what they said. This may
+not be the very tree that flung its shadow over the tent, but no doubt
+it is a son or a grandson of that tree, and the acorns that still fall
+from it may be the seeds of other oaks to shelter future generations of
+pilgrims; and so throughout the world, the ancient covenant of
+friendship is unbroken, and man remains a grateful lover of the big,
+kind trees.
+
+We got home to our camp in the green meadow of the springs late in the
+afternoon, and on the third day we rode back to Jerusalem, and pitched
+the tents in a new place, on a hill opposite the Jaffa Gate, with a
+splendid view of the Valley of Hinnom, the Tower of David, and the
+western wall of the city.
+
+
+_A PSALM OF FRIENDLY TREES_
+
+_I will sing of the bounty of the big trees,
+They are the green tents of the Almighty,
+He hath set them up for comfort and for shelter._
+
+_Their cords hath he knotted in the earth,
+He hath driven their stakes securely,
+Their roots take hold of the rocks like iron._
+
+_He sendeth into their bodies the sap of life,
+They lift themselves lightly towards the heavens.
+They rejoice in the broadening of their branches._
+
+_Their leaves drink in the sunlight and the air,
+They talk softly together when the breeze bloweth,
+Their shadow in the noonday is full of coolness._
+
+_The tall palm-trees of the plain are rich in fruit,
+While the fruit ripeneth the flower unfoldeth,
+The beauty of their crown is renewed on high forever._
+
+_The cedars of Lebanon are fed by the snow,
+Afar on the mountain they grow like giants,
+In their layers of shade a thousand years are sighing._
+
+_How fair are the trees that befriend the home of man,
+The oak, and the terebinth, and the sycamore,
+The fruitful fig-tree and the silvery olive._
+
+_In them the Lord is loving to his little birds,--
+The linnets and the finches and the nightingales,--
+They people his pavilions with nests and with music._
+
+_The cattle are very glad of a great tree,
+They chew the cud beneath it while the sun is burning,
+There also the panting sheep lie down around their shepherd._
+
+_He that planteth a tree is a servant of God,
+He provideth a kindness for many generations,
+And faces that he hath not seen shall bless him._
+
+_Lord, when my spirit shall return to thee,
+At the foot of a friendly tree let my body be buried,
+That this dust may rise and rejoice among the branches._
+
+
+
+
+                                VI
+
+                   THE TEMPLE AND THE SEPULCHRE
+
+
+I
+
+THE DOME OF THE ROCK
+
+There is an upward impulse in man that draws him to a hilltop for his
+place of devotion and sanctuary of ascending thoughts. The purer air,
+the wider outlook, the sense of freedom and elevation, help to release
+his spirit from the weight that bends his forehead to the dust. A
+traveller in Palestine, if he had wings, could easily pass through the
+whole land by short flights from the summit of one holy hill to another,
+and look down from a series of mountain-altars upon the wrinkled map of
+sacred history without once descending into the valley or toiling over
+the plain. But since there are no wings provided in the human outfit,
+our journey from shrine to shrine must follow the common way of
+men,--which is also a symbol,--the path of up-and-down, and many
+windings, and weary steps.
+
+The oldest of the shrines of Jerusalem is the threshing-floor of Araunah
+the Jebusite, which David bought from him in order that it might be
+made the site of the Temple of Jehovah. No doubt the King knew of the
+traditions which connected the place with ancient and famous rites of
+worship. But I think he was moved also by the commanding beauty of the
+situation, on the very summit of Mount Moriah, looking down into the
+deep Valley of the Kidron.
+
+Our way to this venerable and sacred hill leads through the crooked
+duskiness of David Street, and across the half-filled depression of the
+Tyropoeon Valley which divides the city, and up through the dim,
+deserted Bazaar of the Cotton Merchants, and so through the central
+western gate of the Haram-esh-Sherif, "the Noble Sanctuary."
+
+This is a great inclosure, clean, spacious, airy, a place of refuge from
+the foul confusion of the city streets. The wall that shuts us in is
+almost a mile long, and within this open space, which makes an immediate
+effect of breadth and tranquil order, are some of the most sacred
+buildings of Islam and some of the most significant landmarks of
+Christianity.
+
+Slender and graceful arcades are outlined against the clear, blue sky:
+little domes are poised over praying-places and fountains of ablution:
+wide and easy flights of steps lead from one level to another, in this
+park of prayer.
+
+At the southern end, beyond the tall cypresses and the plashing fountain
+fed from Solomon's Pools, stands the long Mosque el-Aksa: to
+Mohammedans, the place to which Allah brought their prophet from Mecca
+in one night; to Christians, the Basilica which the Emperor Justinian
+erected in honor of the Virgin Mary. At the northern end rises the
+ancient wall of the Castle of Antonia, from whose steps Saint Paul,
+protected by the Roman captain, spoke his defence to the Jerusalem mob.
+The steps, hewn partly in the solid rock, are still visible; but the
+site of the castle is occupied by the Turkish barracks, beside which the
+tallest minaret of the Haram lifts its covered gallery high above the
+corner of the great wall.
+
+Yonder to the east is the Golden Gate, above the steep Valley of
+Jehoshaphat. It is closed with great stones; because the Moslem
+tradition says that some Friday a Christian conqueror will enter
+Jerusalem by that gate. Not far away we see the column in the wall from
+which the Mohammedans believe a slender rope, or perhaps a naked sword,
+will be stretched, in the judgment day, to the Mount of Olives opposite.
+This, according to them, will be the bridge over which all human souls
+must walk, while Christ sits at one end, Mohammed at the other, watching
+and judging. The righteous, upheld by angels, will pass safely; the
+wicked, heavy with unbalanced sins, will fall.
+
+Dominating all these wide-spread relics and shrines, in the centre of
+the inclosure, on a raised platform approached through delicate arcades,
+stands the great Dome of the Rock, built by Abd-el-Melik in 688 A.D., on
+the site of the Jewish Temple. The exterior of the vast octagon, with
+its lower half cased in marble and its upper half incrusted with Persian
+tiles of blue and green, its broad, round lantern and swelling black
+dome surmounted by a glittering crescent, is bathed in full sunlight;
+serene, proud, eloquent of a certain splendid simplicity. Within, the
+light filters dimly through windows of stained glass and falls on marble
+columns, bronzed beams, mosaic walls, screens of wrought iron and carved
+wood. We walk as if through an interlaced forest and undergrowth of
+rich entangled colours. It all seems visionary, unreal, fantastic, until
+we climb the bench by the end of the inner screen and look upon the Rock
+over which the Dome is built.
+
+This is the real thing,--a plain gray limestone rock, level and fairly
+smooth, the unchanged summit of Mount Moriah. Here the priest-king
+Melchizedek offered sacrifice. Here Abraham, in the cruel fervour of his
+faith, was about to slay his only son Isaac because he thought it would
+please Jehovah. Here Araunah the Jebusite threshed his corn on the
+smooth rock and winnowed it in the winds of the hilltop, until King
+David stepped over from Mount Zion, and bought the threshing-floor and
+the oxen of him for fifty shekels of silver, and built in this place an
+altar to the Lord. Here Solomon erected his splendid Temple and the
+Chaldeans burned it. Here Zerubbabel built the second Temple after the
+return of the Jews from exile, and Antiochus Epiphanes desecrated it,
+and Herod burned part of it and pulled down the rest. Here Herod built
+the third Temple, larger and more magnificent than the first, and the
+soldiers of the Emperor Titus burned it. Here the Emperor Hadrian built
+a temple to Jupiter and himself, and some one, perhaps the Christians,
+burned it. Here Mohammed came to pray, declaring that one prayer here
+was worth a thousand elsewhere. Here the Caliph Omar built a little
+wooden mosque, and the Caliph Abd-el-Melik replaced it with this great
+one of marble, and the Crusaders changed it into a Christian temple, and
+Saladin changed it back again into a mosque.
+
+This Haram-esh-Sherif is the second holiest place in the Moslem world.
+Hither come the Mohammedan pilgrims by thousands, for the sake of
+Mohammed. Hither come the Christian pilgrims by thousands, for the sake
+of Him who said: "Neither in this mountain nor in Jerusalem shall ye
+worship the Father." Hither the Jewish pilgrims never come, for fear
+their feet may unwittingly tread upon "the Holy of Holies," and defile
+it; but they creep outside of the great inclosure, in the gloomy trench
+beside the foundation stones of the wall, mourning and lamenting for the
+majesty that is departed and the Temple that is ground to powder.
+
+But amid all these changes and perturbations, here stands the good old
+limestone rock, the threshing-floor of Araunah, the capstone of the
+hill, waiting for the sun to shine and the dews to fall on it once more,
+as they did when the foundations of the earth were laid.
+
+The legend says that you can hear the waters of the flood roaring in an
+abyss underneath the rock. I laid my ear against the rugged stone and
+listened. What sound? Was it the voice of turbulent centuries and the
+lapsing tides of men?
+
+
+II
+
+GOLGOTHA
+
+"We ought to go again to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre," said the
+Lady in a voice of dutiful reminder, "we have not half seen it." So we
+went down to the heart of Jerusalem and entered the labyrinthine shrine.
+
+The motley crowd in the paved quadrangle in front of the double-arched
+doorway were buying and selling, bickering and chaffering and chattering
+as usual. Within the portal, on a slightly raised platform to the left,
+the Turkish guardians of the holy places and keepers of the peace
+between Christians were seated among their rugs and cushions, impassive,
+indolent, dignified, drinking their coffee or smoking their tobacco,
+conversing gravely or counting the amber beads of their comboloios. The
+Sultan owns the Holy Sepulchre; but he is a liberal host and permits all
+factions of Christendom to visit it and celebrate their rites in turn,
+provided only they do not beat or kill one another in their devotions.
+We saw his silent sentinels of tolerance scattered in every part of the
+vast, confused edifice.
+
+The interior was dim and shadowy. Opposite the entrance was the Stone of
+Unction, a marble slab on which it is said the body of Christ was
+anointed when it was taken down from the cross. Pilgrim after pilgrim
+came kneeling to this stone, and bending to kiss it, beneath the Latin,
+Greek, Armenian and Coptic lamps which hang above it by silver chains.
+
+The Chapel of the Crucifixion was on our right, above us, in the second
+story of the church. We climbed the steep flight of stairs and stood in
+a little room, close, obscure, crowded with lamps and icons and
+candelabra, incrusted with ornaments of gold and silver, full of strange
+odours and glimmerings of mystic light. There, they told us, in front of
+that rich altar was the silver star which marked the place in the rock
+where the Holy Cross stood. And on either side of it were the sockets
+which received the crosses of the two thieves. And a few feet away,
+covered by a brass slide, was the cleft in the rock which was made by
+the earthquake. It was lined with slabs of reddish marble and looked
+nearly a foot deep.
+
+Priests in black robes and tall, cylindrical hats, and others with brown
+robes, rope girdles and tonsured heads, were coming and going around us.
+Pilgrims were climbing and descending the stairs, kneeling and murmuring
+unintelligible devotions, kissing the star and the cleft in the rock and
+the icons. Underneath us, though we were supposed to stand on the hill
+called Golgotha, were the offices of the Greek clergy and the Chapel of
+Adam.
+
+We went around from chapel to chapel; into the opulent Greek cathedral
+where they show the "Centre of the World"; into the bare little Chapel
+of the Syrians where they show the tombs of Nicodemus and Joseph of
+Arimathaea; into the Chapel of the Apparition where the Franciscans say
+that Christ appeared to His mother after the resurrection. There was
+sweet singing in this chapel and a fragrant smell of incense. We went
+into the Chapel of Saint Helena, underground, which belongs to the
+Greeks; into the Chapel of the Parting of the Raiment which belongs to
+the Armenians. We were impartial in our visitation, but we did not have
+time to see the Abyssinian Chapel, the Coptic Chapel of Saint Michael,
+nor the Church of Abraham where the Anglicans are allowed to celebrate
+the eucharist twice a month.
+
+The centre of all this maze of creeds, ceremonies and devotions is the
+Chapel of the Holy Sepulchre, a little edifice of precious marbles,
+carved and gilded, standing beneath the great dome of the church, in the
+middle of a rotunda surrounded by marble pillars. We bought and lighted
+our waxen tapers and waited for a lull in the stream of pilgrims to
+enter the shrine. First we stood in the vestibule with its tall
+candelabra; then in the Angels' Chapel, with its fifteen swinging lamps,
+making darkness visible; then, stooping through a low doorway, we came
+into the tiny chamber, six feet square, which is said to contain the
+rock-hewn tomb in which the Saviour of the World was buried.
+
+Mass is celebrated here daily by different Christian sects. Pilgrims,
+rich and poor, come hither from all parts of the habitable globe. They
+kneel beneath the three-and-forty pendent lamps of gold and silver. They
+kiss the worn slab of marble which covers the tombstone, some of them
+smiling with joy, some of them weeping bitterly, some of them with
+quiet, business-like devotion as if they were performing a duty. The
+priest of their faith blesses them, sprinkles the relics which they lay
+on the altar with holy water, and one by one the pilgrims retire
+backward through the low portal.
+
+I saw a Russian peasant, sad-eyed, wrinkled, bent with many sorrows, lay
+his cheek silently on the tombstone with a look on his face as if he
+were a child leaning against his mother's breast. I saw a little
+barefoot boy of Jerusalem, with big, serious eyes, come quickly in, and
+try to kiss the stone; but it was too high for him, so he kissed his
+hand and laid it upon the altar. I saw a young nun, hardly more than a
+girl, slender, pale, dark-eyed, with a noble Italian face, shaken with
+sobs, the tears running down her cheeks, as she bent to touch her lips
+to the resting-place of the Friend of Sinners.
+
+This, then, is the way in which the craving for penitence, for
+reverence, for devotion, for some utterance of the nameless thirst and
+passion of the soul leads these pilgrims. This is the form in which the
+divine mystery of sacrificial sorrow and death appeals to them, speaks
+to their hearts and comforts them.
+
+Could any Christian of whatever creed, could any son of woman with a
+heart to feel the trouble and longing of humanity, turn his back upon
+that altar? Must I not go away from that mysterious little room as the
+others had gone, with my face toward the stone of remembrance, stooping
+through the lowly door?
+
+And yet--and yet in my deepest heart I was thirsty for the open air,
+the blue sky, the pure sunlight, the tranquillity of large and silent
+spaces.
+
+The Lady went with me across the crowded quadrangle into the cool,
+clean, quiet German Church of the Redeemer. We climbed to the top of the
+lofty bell tower.
+
+Jerusalem lay at our feet, with its network of streets and lanes,
+archways and convent walls, domes small and great--the black Dome of the
+Rock in the centre of its wide inclosure, the red dome and the green
+dome of the Jewish synagogues on Mount Zion, the seven gilded domes of
+the Russian Church of Saint Mary Magdalen, a hundred tiny domes of
+dwelling-houses, and right in front of us the yellow dome of the Greek
+"Centre of the World" and the black dome of the Holy Sepulchre.
+
+The quadrangle was still full of people buying and selling, but the
+murmur of their voices was faint and far away, less loud than the
+twittering of the thousands of swallows that soared and circled, with
+glistening of innumerable blue-black wings and soft sheen of white
+breasts, in the tender light of sunset above the facade of the gray
+old church.
+
+Westward the long ridge of Olivet was bathed in the rays of the
+declining sun.
+
+Northward, beyond the city-gate, the light fell softly on a little rocky
+hill, shaped like a skull, the ancient place of stoning for those whom
+the cruel city had despised and rejected and cast out. At the foot of
+that eminence there is a quiet garden and a tomb hewn in the rock.
+Rosemary and rue grow there, roses and lilies; birds sing among the
+trees. Is not that little rounded hill, still touched with the free
+light of heaven, still commanding a clear outlook over the city to the
+Mount of Olives--is not that the true Golgotha, where Christ was lifted
+up?
+
+As we were thinking of this we saw a man come out on the roof of the
+Greek "Centre of the World," and climb by a ladder up the side of the
+huge dome. He went slowly and carefully, yet with confidence, as if the
+task were familiar. He carried a lantern in one hand. He was going to
+the top of the dome to light up the great cross for the night. We spoke
+no word, but each knew the thought that was in the other's heart.
+
+Wherever the crucifixion took place, it was surely in the open air,
+beneath the wide sky, and the cross that stood on Golgotha has become
+the light at the centre of the world's night.
+
+
+_A PSALM OF THE UNSEEN ALTAR_
+
+_Man the maker of cities is also a builder of altars:
+Among his habitations he setteth tables for his god._
+
+_He bringeth the beauty of the rocks to enrich them:
+Marble and alabaster, porphyry, jasper and jade._
+
+_He cometh with costly gifts to offer an oblation:
+He would buy favour with the fairest of his flock._
+
+_Around the many altars I hear strange music arising:
+Loud lamentations and shouting and singing and sighs._
+
+_I perceive also the pain and terror of their sacrifices:
+I see the white marble wet with tears and with blood._
+
+_Then I said, These are the altars of ignorance:
+Yet they are built by thy children, O God, who know thee not._
+
+_Surely thou wilt have pity upon them and lead them:
+Hast thou not prepared for them a table of peace?_
+
+_Then the Lord mercifully sent his angel forth to lead me:
+He led me through the temples, the holy place that is hidden._
+
+_Lo, there are multitudes kneeling in the silence of the spirit:
+They are kneeling at the unseen altar of the lowly heart._
+
+_Here is plentiful forgiveness for the souls that are forgiving:
+And the joy of life is given unto all who long to give._
+
+_Here a Father's hand upholdeth all who bear each other's burdens:
+And the benediction falleth upon all who pray in love._
+
+_Surely this is the altar where the penitent find pardon:
+And the priest who hath blessed it forever is the Holy One of God._
+
+
+
+
+                                  VII
+
+                           JERICHO AND JORDAN
+
+
+I
+
+"GOING DOWN TO JERICHO"
+
+In the memory of every visitor to Jerusalem the excursion to Jericho is
+a vivid point. For this is the one trip which everybody makes, and it is
+a convention of the route to regard it as a perilous and exciting
+adventure. Perhaps it is partly this flavour of a not-too-dangerous
+danger, this shivering charm of a hazard to be taken without too much
+risk, that attracts the average tourist, prudently romantic, to make the
+journey to the lowest inhabited town in the world.
+
+Jericho has always had an ill name. Weak walls, weak hearts, weak morals
+were its early marks. Sweltering on the rich plain of the lower Jordan,
+eight hundred feet below the sea, at the entrance of the two chief
+passes into the Judean highlands, it was too indolent or cowardly to
+maintain its own importance. Stanley called it "the key of Palestine";
+but it was only a latch which any bold invader could lift. The people
+of Jericho were famous for light fingers and lively feet, great robbers
+and runners-away. Joshua blotted the city out with a curse; five
+centuries later Hiel the Bethelite rebuilt it with the bloody sacrifice
+of his two sons. Antony gave it to Cleopatra, and Herod bought it from
+her for a winter palace, where he died. Nothing fine or brave, so far as
+I can remember, is written of any of its inhabitants, except the good
+deed of Rahab, a harlot, and the honest conduct of Zacchaeus, a publican.
+To this day, at the _tables d'hote_ of Jerusalem the name of Jericho
+stirs up a little whirlwind of bad stories and warnings.
+
+Last night we were dining with friends at one of the hotels, and the
+usual topic came up for discussion. Imagine what followed.
+
+"That Jericho road is positively frightful," says a British female
+tourist in lace cap, lilac ribbons and a maroon poplin dress, "the heat
+is most extr'ordinary!"
+
+"No food fit to eat at the hotel," grumbles her husband, a rosy,
+bald-headed man in plaid knickerbockers, "no bottled beer; beastly
+little hole!"
+
+"A voyage of the most fatiguing, of the most perilous, I assure you,"
+says a little Frenchman with a forked beard. "But I rejoice myself of
+the adventure, of the romance accomplished."
+
+"I want to know," piped a lady in a green shirt-waist from Andover,
+Mass., "is there really and truly any danger?"
+
+"I guess not for us," answers the dominating voice of the conductor of
+her party. "There's always a bunch of robbers on that road, but I have
+hired the biggest man of the bunch to take care of us. Just wait till
+you see that dandy Sheikh in his best clothes; he looks like a museum of
+old weapons."
+
+"Have you heard," interposed a lady-like clergyman on the other side of
+the table, with gold-rimmed spectacles gleaming above his high, black
+waistcoat, "what happened on the Jericho road, week before last? An
+English gentleman, of very good family, imprudently taking a short cut,
+became separated from his companions. The Bedouins fell upon him, beat
+him quite painfully, deprived him of his watch and several necessary
+garments, and left him prostrate upon the earth, in an embarrassingly
+denuded condition. Just fancy! Was it not perfectly shocking?" (The
+clergyman's voice was full of delicious horror.) "But, after all," he
+resumed with a beaming smile, "it was most scriptural, you know, quite
+like a Providential confirmation of Holy Writ!"
+
+"Most unpleasant for the Englishman," growls the man in knickerbockers.
+"But what can you expect under this rotten Turkish government?"
+
+"I know a story about Jericho," begins a gentleman from Colorado, with a
+hay-coloured moustache and a droop in his left eyelid--and then follows
+a series of tales about that ill-reputed town and the road thither,
+which leave the lady in the lace cap gasping, and the man with the
+forked beard visibly swelling with pride at having made the journey, and
+the little woman in the green shirt-waist quivering with exquisite fears
+and mentally clinging with both arms to the personal conductor of her
+party, who looks becomingly virile, and exchanges a surreptitious wink
+with the gentleman from Colorado.
+
+Of course, I am not willing to make an affidavit to the correctness of
+every word in this conversation; but I can testify that it fairly
+represents the _Jericho-motif_ as you may hear it played almost any
+night in the Jerusalem hotels. It sounded to us partly like an echo of
+ancient legends kept alive by dragomans and officials for purposes of
+revenue, and partly like an outcrop of the hysterical habit in people
+who travel in flocks and do nothing without much palaver. In our quiet
+camp, George the Bethlehemite assured us that the sheikhs were
+"humbugs," and an escort of soldiers a nuisance. So we placidly made our
+preparations to ride on the morrow, with no other safeguards than our
+friendly dispositions and a couple of excellent American revolvers.
+
+But it was no brief _Ausflug_ to Jericho and return that we had before
+us: it was the beginning of a long and steady ride, weeks in the saddle,
+from six to nine hours a day.
+
+Imagine us then, morning after morning, mounting somewhere between six
+and eight o'clock, according to the weather and the length of the
+journey, and jingling out of camp, followed at a discreet distance by
+Youssouf on his white pony with the luncheon, and Paris on his tiny
+donkey, Tiddly-winks. About noon, sometimes a little earlier, sometimes
+a little later, the white pony catches up with us, and the tent and the
+rugs are spread for the midday meal and the _siesta_. It may be in our
+dreams, or while the Lady is reading from some pleasant book, or while
+the smoke of the afternoon pipe of peace is ascending, that we hear the
+musical bells of our long baggage-train go by us on the way to our
+night-quarters.
+
+The evening ride is always shorter than the morning, sometimes only an
+hour or two in the saddle; and at the end of it there is the surprise of
+a new camp ground, the comfortable tents, the refreshing bath tub, the
+quiet dinner by sunset-glow or candle-light. Then a bit of friendly talk
+over the walnuts and the "Treasure of Zion"; a cup of fragrant Turkish
+coffee; and George enters the door of the tent to report on the
+condition of things in general, and to discuss the plan of the next
+day's journey.
+
+
+II
+
+THE GOOD SAMARITAN'S ROAD
+
+It is strange how every day, no matter in what mood of merry jesting or
+practical modernity we set out, an hour of riding in the open air brings
+us back to the mystical charm of the Holy Land and beneath the spell of
+its memories and dreams. The wild hillsides, the flowers of the field,
+the shimmering olive-groves, the brown villages, the crumbling ruins,
+the deep-blue sky, subdue us to themselves and speak to us "rememberable
+things."
+
+We pass down the Valley of the Brook Kidron, where no water ever flows;
+and through the crowd of beggars and loiterers and pilgrims at the
+crossroads; and up over the shoulder of the Mount of Olives, past the
+wide-spread Jewish burying-ground, where we take our last look at the
+towers and domes and minarets and walls of Jerusalem. The road descends
+gently, on the other side of the hill, to Bethany, a disconsolate group
+of hovels. The sweet home of Mary and Martha is gone. It is a waste of
+time to look at the uncertain ruins which are shown here as sacred
+sites. Look rather at the broad landscape eastward and southward, the
+luminous blue sky, the joyful little flowers on the rocky slopes,--these
+are unchanged.
+
+Not far beyond Bethany, the road begins to drop, with great windings,
+into a deep, desolate valley, crowded with pilgrims afoot and on
+donkey-back and in ramshackle carriages,--Russians and Greeks returning
+from their sacred bath in the Jordan. Here and there, at first, we can
+see a shepherd with his flock upon the haggard hillside.
+
+  "As for the grass, it grew as scant as hair
+          In leprosy."
+
+Once the Patriarch and I, scrambling on foot down a short-cut, think we
+see a Bedouin waiting for us behind a rock, with his long gun over his
+shoulder; but it turns out to be only a brown little peasant girl,
+ragged and smiling, watching her score of lop-eared goats.
+
+As the valley descends the landscape becomes more and more arid and
+stricken. The heat broods over it like a disease.
+
+                "I think I never saw
+  Such starved, ignoble nature; nothing throve;
+  For flowers--as well expect a cedar grove!"
+
+We might be on the way with Childe Roland to the Dark Tower. But instead
+we come, about noon, through a savage glen beset with blood-red rocks
+and honeycombed with black caves on the other side of the ravine, to the
+so-called "Inn of the Good Samaritan."
+
+The local colour of the parable surrounds us. Here is a fitting scene
+for such a drama of lawless violence, cowardly piety, and unconventional
+mercy. In these caverns robbers could hide securely. On this wild road
+their victim might lie and bleed to death. By these paths across the
+glen the priest and the Levite could "pass by on the other side,"
+discreetly turning their heads away from any interruption to their
+selfish duties. And in some such wayside khan as this, standing like a
+lonely fortress among the sun-baked hills, the friendly half-heathen
+from Samaria could safely leave the stranger whom he had rescued,
+provided he paid at least a part of his lodging in advance.
+
+We eat our luncheon in one of the three big, disorderly rooms of the
+inn, and go on, in the cool of the afternoon, toward Jericho. The road
+still descends steeply, among ragged and wrinkled hills. On our left we
+look down into the Wadi el-Kelt, a gloomy gorge five or six hundred feet
+deep, with a stream of living water singing between its prison walls.
+Tradition calls this the Brook Cherith, where Elijah hid himself from
+Ahab, and was fed by Arabs of a tribe called "the Ravens." But the
+prophet's hiding-place was certainly on the other side of the Jordan,
+and this Wadi is probably the Valley of Achor, spoken of in the Book of
+Joshua. On the opposite side of the canyon, half-way down the face of the
+precipice, clings the monastery of Saint George, one of the pious
+penitentiaries to which the Greek Church assigns unruly and criminal
+monks.
+
+[Illustration: Great Monastery of St. George.]
+
+As we emerge from the narrow valley a great view opens before us: to the
+right, the blue waters of the Dead Sea, like a mirror of burnished
+steel; in front, the immense plain of the Jordan, with the dark-green
+ribbon of the river-jungle winding through its length and the purple
+mountains of Gilead and Moab towering beyond it; to the left, the
+furrowed gray and yellow ridges and peaks of the northern "wilderness"
+of Judea, the wild country into which Jesus retired alone after the
+baptism by John in the Jordan.
+
+One of these peaks, the Quarantana, is supposed to be the "high
+mountain" from which the Tempter showed Jesus the "kingdoms of the
+world." In the foreground of that view, sweeping from the snowy summits
+of Hermon in the north, past the Greek cities of Pella and Scythopolis,
+down the vast valley with its wealth of palms and balsams, must have
+stood the Roman city of Jericho, with its imperial farms and the
+palaces, baths and theatres of Herod the Great,--a visible image of what
+Christ might have won for Himself if He had yielded to the temptation
+and turned from the pathway of spiritual light to follow the shadows of
+earthly power and glory.
+
+Herod's Jericho has vanished; there is nothing left of it but the
+outline of one of the great pools which he built to irrigate his
+gardens. The modern Jericho is an unhappy little adobe village, lying a
+mile or so farther to the east. A mile to the north, near a copious
+fountain of pure water, called the Sultan's Spring, is the site of the
+oldest Jericho, which Joshua conquered and Hiel rebuilt. The spring,
+which is probably the same that Elisha cleansed with salt (II Kings ii:
+19-22), sends forth a merry stream to turn a mill and irrigate a group
+of gardens full of oranges, figs, bananas, grapes, feathery bamboos and
+rosy oleanders. But the ancient city is buried under a great mound of
+earth, which the German _Palaestina-Verein_ is now excavating.
+
+As we come up to the mound I pull out my little camera and prepare to
+take a picture of the hundred or so dusty Arabs--men, women and
+children--who are at work in the trenches. A German _gelehrter_ in a
+very excited state rushes up to me and calls upon me to halt, in the
+name of the Emperor. The taking of pictures by persons not imperially
+authorised is _streng verboten_. He is evidently prepared to be abusive,
+if not actually violent, until I assure him, in the best German that I
+can command, that I have no political or archaeological intentions, and
+that if the photographing of his picturesque work-people to him
+displeasing is, I will my camera immediately in its pocket put. This
+mollifies him, and he politely shows us what he is doing.
+
+A number of ruined houses, and a sort of central temple, with a rude
+flight of steps leading up to it, have been discovered. A portion of
+what seems to be the city-wall has just been laid bare. If there are any
+inscriptions or relics of any value they are kept secret; but there is
+plenty of broken pottery of a common kind. It is all very poor and
+beggarly looking; no carving nor even any hewn stones. The buildings
+seem to be of rubble, and "the walls of Jericho" are little better than
+the stone fences on a Connecticut farm. No wonder they fell down at the
+blast of Joshua's rams' horns and the rush of his fierce tribesmen.
+
+We ride past the gardens and through the shady lanes to our camp, on the
+outskirts of the modern village. The air is heavy and languid, full of
+relaxing influence, an air of sloth and luxury, seeming to belong to
+some strange region below the level of human duty and effort as far as
+it is below the level of the sea. The fragrance of the orange-blossoms,
+like a subtle incense of indulgence, floats on the evening breeze.
+Veiled figures pass us in the lanes, showing lustrous eyes. A sound of
+Oriental music and laughter and clapping hands comes from one of the
+houses in an inclosure hedged with acacia-trees. We sit in the door of
+our tent at sundown and dream of the vanished palm-groves, the gardens
+of Cleopatra, the palaces of Herod, the soft, ignoble history of that
+region of fertility and indolence, rich in harvests, poor in manhood.
+
+Then it seems as if some one were saying, "I will lift up mine eyes unto
+the hills, from whence cometh my help." There they stand, all about us:
+eastward, the great purple ranges of Gad and Reuben, from which Elijah
+the Tishbite descended to rebuke and warn Israel; westward, against the
+saffron sky, the ridges and peaks of Judea, among which Amos and
+Jeremiah saw their lofty visions; northward, the clear-cut pinnacle of
+Sartoba, and far away beyond it the dim outlines of the Galilean hills
+from which Jesus of Nazareth came down to open blind eyes and to
+shepherd wandering souls. With the fading of the sunset glow a deep blue
+comes upon all the mountains, a blue which strangely seems to grow
+paler as the sky above them darkens, sinking down upon them through
+infinite gradations of azure into something mysterious and
+indescribable, not a color, not a shadow, not a light, but a secret
+hyaline illumination which transforms them into aerial battlements and
+ramparts, on whose edge the great stars rest and flame, the watch-fires
+of the Eternal.
+
+
+III
+
+"PASSING OVER JORDAN"
+
+I have often wondered why the Jordan, which plays such an important part
+in the history of the Hebrews, receives so little honour and praise in
+their literature. Sentimental travellers and poets of other races have
+woven a good deal of florid prose and verse about the name of this
+river. There is no doubt that it is the chief stream of Palestine, the
+only one, in fact, that deserves to be called a river. Yet the Bible has
+no song of loving pride for the Jordan; no tender and beautiful words to
+describe it; no record of the longing of exiled Jews to return to the
+banks of their own river and hear again the voice of its waters. At
+this strange silence I have wondered much, not knowing the reason of it.
+Now I know.
+
+The Jordan is not a little river to be loved: it is a barrier to be
+passed over. From its beginning in the marshes of Huleh to its end in
+the Dead Sea, (excepting only the lovely interval of the Lake of
+Galilee), this river offers nothing to man but danger and difficulty,
+perplexity and trouble. Fierce and sullen and intractable, it flows
+through a long depression, at the bottom of which it has dug for itself
+a still deeper crooked ditch, along the Eastern border of Galilee and
+Samaria and Judea, as if it wished to cut them off completely. There are
+no pleasant places along its course, no breezy forelands where a man
+might build a house with a fair outlook over flowing water, no rich and
+tranquil coves where the cattle would love to graze, or stand knee-deep
+in the quiet stream. There is no sense of leisure, of refreshment, of
+kind companionship and friendly music about the Jordan. It is in a hurry
+and a secret rage. Yet there is something powerful, self-reliant,
+inevitable about it. In thousands of years it has changed less than any
+river in the world. It is a flowing, everlasting symbol of division, of
+separation: a river of solemn meetings and partings like that of Elijah
+and Elisha, of Jesus and John the Baptist: a type of the narrow stream
+of death. It seems to say to man, "Cross me if you will, if you can; and
+then go your way."
+
+The road that leads us from Jericho toward the river is pleasant enough,
+at first, for the early sunlight is gentle and caressing, and there is a
+cool breeze moving across the plain. It is hard to believe that we are
+eight hundred feet below the sea this morning, and still travelling
+downward. The lush fields of barley, watered by many channels from the
+brook Kelt, are waving and glistening around us. Quails are running
+along the edge of the road, appearing and disappearing among the thick
+grain-stalks. The bulbuls warble from the thorn-bushes, and a crested
+hoopoo croons in a jujube-tree. Larks are on the wing, scattering music.
+
+We are on the upper edge of that great belt of sunken land between the
+mountains of Gilead and the mountains of Ephraim and Judah, which
+reaches from the Lake of Galilee to the Dead Sea, and which the Arabs
+call _El-Ghor_, the "Rift." It is a huge trench, from three to fourteen
+miles wide, sinking from six hundred feet below the level of the
+Mediterranean, at the northern end, to thirteen hundred feet below, at
+the southern end. The surface is fairly level, sloping gently from each
+side toward the middle, and the soil is of an inexhaustible fertility,
+yielding abundant crops wherever it is patiently irrigated from the
+streams which flow out of the mountains east and west, but elsewhere
+lying baked and arid under the heavy, close, feverous air. No strong
+race has ever inhabited this trench as a home; no great cities have ever
+grown here, and its civilization, such as it had, was a hot-bed product,
+soon ripe and quickly rotten.
+
+We have passed beyond the region of greenness already; the little
+water-brooks have ceased to gleam through the grain: the wild grasses
+and weeds have a parched and yellow look: the freshness of the early
+morning has vanished, and we are descending through a desolate land of
+sour and leprous hills of clay and marl, eroded by the floods into
+fantastic shapes, furrowed and scarred and scabbed with mineral refuse.
+The gullies are steep and narrow: the heat settles on them like a curse.
+
+Through this battered and crippled region, the centre of the Jordan
+Valley, runs the Jordan Bed, twisting like a big green serpent. A dense
+half-tropical jungle, haunted by wild beasts and poisonous reptiles and
+insects, conceals, almost at every point, the down-rushing, swirling,
+yellow flood.
+
+It has torn and desolated its own shores with sudden spates. The feet of
+the pilgrims who bathe in it sink into the mud as they wade out
+waist-deep, and if they venture beyond the shelter of the bank the
+whirling eddies threaten to sweep them away. The fords are treacherous,
+with shifting bottom and changing currents. The poets and prophets of
+the Old Testament give us a true idea of this uninhabitable and
+unlovable river-bed when they speak of "the pride of Jordan," "the
+swellings of Jordan," where the lion hides among the reeds in his secret
+lair, a "refuge of lies," which the "overflowing scourge" shall sweep
+away.
+
+No, it was not because the Jordan was beautiful that John the Baptist
+chose it as the scene of his preaching and ministry, but because it was
+wild and rude, an emblem of violent and sudden change, of irrevocable
+parting, of death itself, and because in its one gift of copious and
+unfailing water, he found the necessary element for his deep baptism of
+repentance, in which the sinful past of the crowd who followed him was
+to be symbolically immersed and buried and washed away.
+
+At the place where we reach the water there is an open bit of ground; a
+miserable hovel gives shelter to two or three Turkish soldiers; an
+ungainly latticed bridge, stilted on piles of wood, straddles the river
+with a single span. The toll is three piastres, (about twelve cents,)
+for a man and horse.
+
+The only place from which I can take a photograph of the river is the
+bridge itself, so I thrust the camera through one of the diamond-shaped
+openings on the lattice-work and try to make a truthful record of the
+lower Jordan at its best. Imagine the dull green of the tangled
+thickets, the ragged clumps of reeds and water-grasses, the sombre and
+silent flow of the fulvous water sliding and curling down out of the
+jungle, and the implacable fervour of the pallid, searching sunlight
+heightening every touch of ugliness and desolation, and you will
+understand why the Hebrew poets sang no praise of the Jordan, and why
+Naaman the Syrian thought scorn of it when he remembered the lovely and
+fruitful rivers of Damascus.
+
+
+_A PSALM OF RIVERS_
+
+_The rivers of God are full of water:
+They are wonderful in the renewal of their strength:
+He poureth them out from a hidden fountain._
+
+_They are born among the hills in the high places:
+Their cradle is in the bosom of the rocks:
+The mountain is their mother and the forest is their father._
+
+_They are nourished among the long grasses:
+They receive the tribute of a thousand springs:
+The rain and the snow are a heritage for them._
+
+_They are glad to be gone from their birthplace:
+With a joyful noise they hasten away:
+They are going forever and never departed._
+
+_The courses of the rivers are all appointed:
+They roar loudly but they follow the road:
+The finger of God hath marked their pathway._
+
+_The rivers of Damascus rejoice among their gardens:
+The great river of Egypt is proud of his ships:
+The Jordan is lost in the Lake of Bitterness._
+
+_Surely the Lord guideth them every one in his wisdom:
+In the end he gathereth all their drops on high:
+He sendeth them forth again in the clouds of mercy._
+
+_O my God, my life runneth away like a river:
+Guide me, I beseech thee, in a pathway of good:
+Let me flow in blessing to my rest in thee._
+
+
+
+
+                                   VIII
+
+                           A JOURNEY TO JERASH
+
+
+I
+
+THROUGH THE LAND OF GILEAD
+
+I never heard of Jerash until my friend the Archaeologist told me about
+it, one night when we were sitting beside my study fire at Avalon. "It
+is the site of the old city of Gerasa," said he. "The most satisfactory
+ruins that I have ever seen."
+
+There was something suggestive and potent in that phrase, "satisfactory
+ruins." For what is it that weaves the charm of ruins? What do we ask of
+them to make their magic complete and satisfying? There must be an
+element of picturesqueness, certainly, to take the eye with pleasure in
+the contrast between the frailty of man's works and the imperishable
+loveliness of nature. There must also be an element of age; for new
+ruins are painful, disquieting, intolerable; they speak of violence and
+disorder; it is not until the bloom of antiquity gathers upon them that
+the relics of vast and splendid edifices attract us and subdue us with a
+spell, breathing tranquillity and noble thoughts. There must also be an
+element of magnificence in decay, of symmetry broken but not destroyed,
+a touch of delicate art and workmanship, to quicken the imagination and
+evoke the ghost of beauty haunting her ancient habitations. And beyond
+these things I think there must be two more qualities in a ruin that
+satisfies us: a clear connection with the greatness and glory of the
+past, with some fine human achievement, with some heroism of men dead
+and gone; and last of all, a spirit of mystery, the secret of some
+unexplained catastrophe, the lost link of a story never to be fully
+told.
+
+This, or something like it, was what the Archaeologist's phrase seemed to
+promise me as we watched the glowing embers on the hearth of Avalon. And
+it is this promise that has drawn me, with my three friends, on this
+April day into the Land of Gilead, riding to Jerash.
+
+The grotesque and rickety bridge by which we have crossed the Jordan
+soon disappears behind us, as we trot along the winding bridle-path
+through the river-jungle, in the stifling heat. Coming out on the open
+plain, which rises gently toward the east, we startle great flocks of
+storks into the air, and they swing away in languid circles, dappling
+the blaze of morning with their black-tipped wings. Grotesque, ungainly,
+gothic birds, they do not seem to belong to the Orient, but rather to
+have drifted hither out of some quaint, familiar fairy tale of the
+North; and indeed they are only transient visitors here, and will soon
+be on their way to build their nests on the roofs of German villages and
+clapper their long, yellow bills over the joy of houses full of little
+children.
+
+The rains of spring have spread a thin bloom of green over the plain.
+Tender herbs and light grasses partly veil the gray and stony ground.
+There is a month of scattered feeding for the flocks and herds. Away to
+the south, where the foot-hills begin to roll up suddenly from the
+Jordan, we can see a black line of Bedouin tents quivering through the
+heat.
+
+Now the trail divides, and we take the northern fork, turning soon into
+the open mouth of the Wadi Shaib, a broad, grassy valley between high
+and treeless hills. The watercourse that winds down the middle of it is
+dry: nothing but a tumbled bed of gray rocks,--the bare bones of a
+little river. But as we ascend slowly the flowers increase; wild
+hollyhocks, and morning-glories, and clumps of blue anchusa, and scarlet
+adonis, and tall wands of white asphodel.
+
+The morning grows hotter and hotter as we plod along. Presently we come
+up with three mounted Arabs, riding leisurely. Salutations are exchanged
+with gravity. Then the Arabs whisper something to each other and spur
+away at a great pace ahead of us--laughing. Why did they laugh?
+
+Ah, now we know. For here is a lofty cliff on one side of the valley,
+hanging over just far enough to make a strip of cool shade at its base,
+with ferns and deep grass and a glimmer of dripping water. And here our
+wise Arabs are sitting at their ease to eat their mid-day meal under
+"the shadow of a great rock in a weary land."
+
+Vainly we search the valley for another rock like that. It is the only
+one; and the Arabs laughed because they knew it. We must content
+ourselves with this little hill where a few hawthorn bushes offer us
+tiny islets of shade, beset with thorns, and separated by straits of
+intolerable glare. Here we eat a little, but without comfort; and sleep
+a little, but without refreshment; and talk a little, but restlessly. As
+soon as we dare, we get into the saddle again and toil up through the
+valley, now narrowing into a rugged gorge, crammed with ardent heat. The
+sprinkling of trees and bushes, the multitude of flowers, assure us that
+there must be moisture underground, along the bed of the stream; but
+above ground there is not a drop, and not a breath of wind to break the
+dead calm of the smothering air. Why did we come into this heat-trap?
+
+But presently the ravine leads us, by steep stairs of rock, up to a
+high, green table-land. A heavenly breeze from the west is blowing here.
+The fields are full of flowers--red anemones, white and yellow daisies,
+pink flax, little blue bell-flowers--a hundred kinds. One knoll is
+covered with cyclamens; another with splendid purple iris, immense
+blossoms, so dark that they look almost black against the grass; but
+hold them up to the sun and you will see the imperial colour. We have
+never found such wild flowers, not even on the Plain of Sharon; the
+hills around Jerusalem were but sparsely adorned in comparison with
+these highlands of bloom.
+
+And here are oak-trees, broad-limbed and friendly, clothed in glistening
+green. Let us rest for a while in this cool shade and forget the misery
+of the blazing noon. Below us lies the gray Jordan valley and the
+steel-blue mirror of the Dead Sea; and across that gulf we see the
+furrowed mountains of Judea and Samaria, and far to the north the peaks
+of Galilee. Around us is the Land of Gilead, a rolling hill-country,
+with long ridges and broad summits, a rounded land, a verdurous land, a
+land of rich pasturage. There are deep valleys that cut into it and
+divide it up. But the main bulk of it is lifted high in the air, and
+spread out nobly to the visitations of the wind. And see--far away
+there, to the south, across the Wadi Nimrin, a mountainside covered with
+wild trees, a real woodland, almost a forest!
+
+Now we must travel on, for it is still a long way to our night-quarters
+at Es Salt. We pass several Bedouin camps, the only kind of villages in
+this part of the world. The tents of goat's-hair are swarming with
+life. A score of ragged Arab boys are playing hockey on the green with
+an old donkey's hoof for a ball. They yell with refreshing vigour, just
+like universal human boys.
+
+The trail grows steeper and more rocky, ascending apparently impossible
+places, and winding perilously along the cliffs above little vineyards
+and cultivated fields where men are ploughing. Travel and traffic
+increase along this rude path, which is the only highway: evidently we
+are coming near to some place of importance.
+
+But where is Es Salt? For nine hours we have been in the saddle, riding
+steadily toward that mysterious metropolis of the Belka, the only living
+city in the Land of Gilead; and yet there is no trace of it in sight.
+Have we missed the trail? The mule-train with our tents and baggage
+passed us in the valley while we were sweltering under the hawthorns. It
+seems as if it must have vanished into the pastoral wilderness and left
+us travelling an endless road to nowhere.
+
+At last we top a rugged ridge and look down upon the solution of the
+mystery. Es Salt is a city that can be hid; for it is not set upon a
+hill, but tucked away in a valley that curves around three sides of a
+rocky eminence, and is sheltered from the view by higher ranges.
+
+Who can tell how this city came here, hidden in this hollow place almost
+three thousand feet above the sea? Who was its founder? What was its
+ancient name? It is a place without traditions, without antiquities,
+without a shrine of any kind; just a living town, thriving and
+prospering in its own dirty and dishevelled way, in the midst of a
+country of nomads, growing in the last twenty years from six thousand to
+fifteen thousand inhabitants, driving a busy trade with the surrounding
+country, exporting famous raisins and dye-stuff made from sumach, the
+seat of the Turkish Government of the Belka, with a garrison and a
+telegraph office--decidedly a thriving town of to-day; yet without a
+road by which a carriage can approach it; and old, unmistakably old!
+
+The castle that crowns the eminence in the centre is a ruin of unknown
+date. The copious spring that gushes from the castle-hill must have
+invited men for many centuries to build their habitations around it.
+The gray houses seem to have slipped and settled down into the curving
+valley, and to have crowded one another up the opposite slopes, as if
+hundreds of generations had found here a hiding-place and a city of
+refuge.
+
+We ride through a Mohammedan graveyard--unfenced, broken, neglected--and
+down a steep, rain-gulleyed hillside, into the filthy, narrow street.
+The people all have an Arab look, a touch of the wildness of the desert
+in their eyes and their free bearing. There are many fine figures and
+handsome faces, some with auburn hair and a reddish hue showing through
+the bronze of their cheeks. They stare at us with undisguised curiosity
+and wonder, as if we came from a strange world. The swarthy merchants in
+the doors of their little shops, the half-veiled women in the lanes, the
+groups of idlers at the corners of the streets, watch us with a gaze
+which seems almost defiant. Evidently tourists are a rarity
+here--perhaps an intrusion to be resented.
+
+We inquire whether our baggage-train has been seen, where our camp is
+pitched. No one knows, no one cares; until at last a ragged, smiling
+urchin, one of those blessed, ubiquitous boys who always know everything
+that happens in a town, offers to guide us. He trots ahead, full of
+importance, dodging through the narrow alleys, making the complete
+circuit of the castle-hill and leading us to the upper end of the
+eastern valley. Here, among a few olive-trees beside the road, our white
+tents are standing, so close to an encampment of wandering gypsies that
+the tent-ropes cross.
+
+Directly opposite rises a quarter of the town, tier upon tier of
+flat-roofed houses, every roof-top covered with people. A wild-looking
+crowd of visitors have gathered in the road. Two soldiers, with the
+appearance of partially reformed brigands, are acting as our guard, and
+keeping the inquisitive spectators at a respectful distance. Our mules
+and donkeys and horses are munching their supper in a row, tethered to a
+long rope in front of the tents. Shukari, the cook, in his white cap and
+apron, is gravely intent upon the operation of his little charcoal
+range. Youssouf, the major-domo, is setting the table with flowers and
+lighted candles in the dining-tent. After a while he comes to the door
+of our sleeping-tents to inform us, with due ceremony, that dinner is
+served; and we sit down to our repast in the midst of the swarming
+Edomites and the wandering Zingari as peacefully and properly as if we
+were dining at the Savoy.
+
+The night darkens around us. Lights twinkle, one above another, up the
+steep hillside of houses; above them are the tranquil stars, the lit
+windows of unknown habitations; and on the hill-top one great planet
+burns in liquid flame.
+
+The crowd melts away, chattering down the road; it forms again, from
+another quarter, and again dissolves. Meaningless shouts and cries and
+songs resound from the hidden city. In the gypsy camp beside us insomnia
+reigns. A little forge is clinking and clanking. Donkeys raise their
+antiphonal lament. Dogs salute the stars in chorus. First a leader, far
+away, lifts a wailing, howling, shrieking note; then the mysterious
+unrest that torments the bosom of Oriental dogdom breaks loose in a
+hundred, a thousand answering voices, swelling into a yapping, growling,
+barking, yelling discord. A sudden silence cuts the tumult short, until
+once more the unknown misery, (or is it the secret joy), of the canine
+heart bursts out in long-drawn dissonance.
+
+From the road and from the tents of the gypsies various human voices are
+sounding close around us all the night. Through our confused dreams and
+broken sleep we strangely seem to catch fragments of familiar speech,
+phrases of English or French or German. Then, waking and listening, we
+hear men muttering and disputing, women complaining or soothing their
+babies, children quarrelling or calling to each other, in Arabic, or
+Romany--not a word that we can understand--voices that tell us only that
+we are in a strange land, and very far away from home, camping in the
+heart of a wild city.
+
+
+II
+
+OVER THE BROOK JABBOK
+
+After such a night the morning is welcome, as it breaks over the eastern
+hill behind us, with rosy light creeping slowly down the opposite slope
+of houses. Before the sunbeams have fairly reached the bottom of the
+valley we are in the saddle, ready to leave Es Salt without further
+exploration.
+
+There is a general monotony about this riding through Palestine which
+yet leaves room for a particular variety of the most entrancing kind.
+Every day is like every other in its main outline, but the details are
+infinitely uncertain--always there is something new, some touch of a
+distinct and memorable charm.
+
+To-day it is the sense of being in the country of the nomads, the
+tent-dwellers, the masters of innumerable flocks and herds, whose wealth
+goes wandering from pasture to pasture, bleating and lowing and browsing
+and multiplying over the open moorland beneath the blue sky. This is the
+prevailing impression of this day: and the symbol of it is the thin,
+quavering music of the pastoral pipe, following us wherever we go,
+drifting tremulously and plaintively down from some rock on the
+hillside, or floating up softly from some hidden valley, where a brown
+shepherd or goatherd is minding his flock with music.
+
+What quaint and rustic melodies are these! Wild and unfamiliar to our
+ears; yet doubtless the same wandering airs that were played by the sons
+and servants of Jacob when he returned from his twenty years of
+profitable exile in Haran with his rich wages of sheep and goats and
+cattle and wives and maid-servants, the fruit of his hard labour and
+shrewd bargaining with his father-in-law Laban, and passed cautiously
+through Gilead on his way to the Promised Land.
+
+On the highland to the east of Es Salt we see a fine herd of horses,
+brood-mares and foals. A little farther on, we come to a muddy pond or
+tank at which a drove of asses are drinking. A steep and winding path,
+full of loose stones, leads us down into a grassy, oval plain, a great
+cup of green, eight or ten miles long and five or six miles wide,
+rimmed with bare hills from five to eight hundred feet high. This, we
+conjecture, is the fertile basin of El Buchaia, or Bekaa.
+
+Bedouin farmers are ploughing the rich, reddish soil. Their black
+tent-villages are tucked away against the feet of the surrounding hills.
+The broad plain itself is without sign of human dwelling, except that
+near each focus of the ellipse there is a pile of shattered ruins with a
+crumbling, solitary tower, where a shepherd sits piping to his lop-eared
+flock.
+
+In one place we pass through a breeding-herd of camels, browsing on the
+short grass. The old ones are in the process of the spring moulting;
+their thick, matted hair is peeling off in large flakes, like fragments
+of a ragged, moth-eaten coat. The young ones are covered with pearl-gray
+wool, soft and almost downy, like gigantic goslings with four legs.
+(What is the word for a young camel, I wonder; is it camelet or
+camelot?) But young and old have a family resemblance of ugliness.
+
+The camel is the most ungainly and stupid of God's useful beasts--an
+awkward necessity--the humpbacked ship of the desert. The Arabs have a
+story which runs thus: "What did Allah say when He had finished making
+the camel? He couldn't say anything; He just looked at the camel, and
+laughed, and laughed!"
+
+But in spite of his ridiculous appearance the camel seems satisfied with
+himself; in fact there is an expression of supreme contempt in his face
+when he droops his pendulous lower lip and wrinkles his nose, which has
+led the Arabs to tell another story about him: "Why does the camel
+despise his master? Because man knows only the ninety-nine common names
+of Allah; but the hundredth name, the wonderful name, the beautiful
+name, is a secret revealed to the camel alone. Therefore he scorns the
+whole race of men."
+
+The cattle that feed around the edges of this peaceful plain are small
+and nimble, as if they were used to long, rough journeys. The prevailing
+colour is black, or rusty brown. They are evidently of a degenerate and
+played-out stock. Even the heifers are used for ploughing, and they look
+but little larger than the donkeys which are often yoked beside them.
+They come around the grassy knoll when our luncheon-tent is pitched,
+and stare at us very much as the people stared in Es Salt.
+
+In the afternoon we pass over the rim of the broad vale and descend a
+narrower ravine, where oaks and terebinths, laurels and balsams,
+pistachios and almonds are growing. The grass springs thick and lush,
+tall weeds and trailing vines appear, a murmur of flowing water is heard
+under the tangled herbage at the bottom of the wadi. Presently we are
+following a bright little brook, crossing and recrossing it as it leads
+us toward our camp-ground.
+
+There are the tents, standing in a line on the flowery bank of the
+brook, across the water from the trail. A few steps lower down there is
+a well-built stone basin with a copious spring gushing into it from the
+hillside under an arched roof. Here the people of the village, (which is
+somewhere near us on the mountain, but out of sight), come to fill their
+pitchers and water-skins, and to let their cattle and donkeys drink. All
+through the late afternoon they are coming and going, plashing through
+the shallow ford below us, enjoying the cool, clear water, disappearing
+along the foot-paths that lead among the hills.
+
+These are very different cattle from the herds we saw among the Bedouins
+a couple of hours ago; fine large creatures, well bred and well fed,
+some cream-coloured, some red, some belted with white. And these men who
+follow them, on foot or on horseback, truculent looking fellows with
+blue eyes and light hair and broad faces, clad in long, close-fitting
+tunics, with belts around their waists and small black caps of fur, some
+of them with high boots--who are they?
+
+They are some of the Circassian immigrants who were driven out of Russia
+by the Czar after the Russo-Turkish War of 1877, and deported again
+after the Bulgarian atrocities, and whom the Turkish Government has
+colonized through eastern Palestine on land given by the Sultan. Nobody
+really knows to whom the land belongs, I suppose; but the Bedouins have
+had the habit, for many centuries, of claiming and using it as they
+pleased for their roaming flocks and herds. Now these northern invaders
+are taking and holding the most fertile places, the best springs, the
+fields that are well watered through the year.
+
+Therefore the Arab hates the Circassian, though he be of the same
+religion, far more than he hates the Christian, almost as much as he
+hates the Turk. But the Circassian can take care of himself; he is a
+fierce and hardy fighter; and in his rude way he understands how to make
+farming and stock-raising pay.
+
+Indeed, this Land of Gilead is a region in which twenty times the
+present population, if they were industrious and intelligent and had
+good government, might prosper. No wonder that the tribe of Gad and
+Reuben and the half-tribe of Manasseh, on the way to Canaan, "when they
+saw the land of Jazer and the land of Gilead, that, behold, the place
+was a place for cattle," (Numbers xxxii) fell in love with it, and
+besought Moses that they might have their inheritance there, and not
+westward of the Jordan. No wonder that they recrossed the river after
+they had helped Joshua to conquer the Canaanites, and settled in this
+high country, so much fairer and more fertile than Judea, or even than
+Samaria.
+
+It was here, in 1880, that Laurence Oliphant, the gifted English
+traveller and mystic, proposed to establish his fine scheme for the
+beginning of the restoration of the Jews to Palestine. A territory
+extending from the brook of Jabbok on the north to the brook of Arnon on
+the south, from the Jordan Valley on the west to the Arabian desert on
+the east; railways running up from the sea at Haifa, and down from
+Damascus, and southward to the Gulf of Akabah, and across to Ismailia on
+the Suez Canal; a government of local autonomy guaranteed and protected
+by the Sublime Porte; sufficient capital supplied by the Jewish bankers
+of London and Paris and Berlin and Vienna; and the outcasts of Israel
+gathered from all the countries where they are oppressed, to dwell
+together in peace and plenty, tending sheep and cattle, raising fruit
+and grain, pressing out wine and oil, and supplying the world with the
+balm of Gilead--such was Oliphant's beautiful dream.
+
+But it did not come true; because Russia did not like it, because Turkey
+was afraid of it, because the rest of Europe did not care for it,--and
+perhaps because the Jews themselves were not generally enthusiastic over
+it. Perhaps the majority of them would rather stay where they are.
+Perhaps they do not yearn passionately for Palestine and the simple
+life.
+
+But it is not of these things that we are thinking, I must confess, as
+the ruddy sun slowly drops toward the heights of Pennel, and we stroll
+out in the evening glow, along the edge of the wild ravine into which
+our little stream plunges, and look down into the deep, grand valley of
+the Brook Jabbok.
+
+Yonder, on the other side of the great gulf of heliotrope shadow,
+stretches the long bulk of the Jebel Ajlun, shaggy with oak-trees. It
+was somewhere on the slopes of that wooded mountain that one of the most
+tragic battles of the world was fought. For there the army of Absalom
+went out to meet the army of his father David. "And the battle was
+spread over the face of all the country, and the forest devoured more
+people that day than the sword devoured." It was there that the young
+man Absalom rode furiously upon his mule, "and the mule went under the
+thick boughs of a great oak, and his head caught hold of the oak, and he
+was taken up between heaven and earth." And a man came and told Joab,
+the captain of David's host, "Behold I saw Absalom hanging in the midst
+of an oak." Then Joab made haste; "and he took three darts in his hand,
+and thrust them through the heart of Absalom while he was yet alive in
+the midst of the oak." And when the news came to David, sitting in the
+gate of the city of Mahanaim, he went up into the chamber over the gate
+and wept bitterly, crying, "Would I had died for thee, O Absalom, my
+son!" (II Samuel xviii.)
+
+To remember a story like that is to feel the pathos with which man has
+touched the face of nature. But there is another story, more mystical,
+more beautiful, which belongs to the scene upon which we are looking.
+Down in the purple valley, where the smooth meadows spread so fair, and
+the little river curves and gleams through the thickets of oleander,
+somewhere along that flashing stream is the place where Jacob sent his
+wives and his children, his servants and his cattle, across the water in
+the darkness, and there remained all night long alone, for "there
+wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day."
+
+Who was this "man" with whom the patriarch contended at midnight, and
+to whom he cried, "I will not let thee go except thou bless me"? On the
+morrow Jacob was to meet his fierce and powerful brother Esau, whom he
+had wronged and outwitted, from whom he had stolen the birthright
+blessing twenty years before. Was it the prospect of this dreaded
+meeting that brought upon Jacob the night of lonely struggle by the
+Brook Jabbok? Was it the promise of reconciliation with his brother that
+made him say at dawn, "I have seen God face to face, and my life is
+saved"? Was it the unexpected friendliness and gentleness of that
+brother in the encounter of the morning that inspired Jacob's cry, "I
+have seen _thy face as one seeth the face of God_, and thou wast pleased
+with me"?
+
+Yes, that _is_ what the old story means, in its Oriental imagery. The
+midnight wrestling is the pressure of human enmity and strife. The
+morning peace is the assurance of human forgiveness and love. The face
+of God seen in the face of human kindness--that is the sunrise vision of
+the Brook Jabbok.
+
+Such are the thoughts with which we fall asleep in our tents beside the
+murmuring brook of Er Rumman. Early the next morning we go down, and
+down, and down, by ledge and terrace and grassy slope, into the Vale of
+Jabbok. It is sixty miles long, beginning on the edge of the mountain of
+Moab, and curving eastward, northward, westward, south-westward, between
+Gilead and Ajlun, until it opens into the Jordan Valley.
+
+Here is the famous little river, a swift, singing current of gray-blue
+water--Nahr ez-Zerka "blue river," the Arabs call it--dashing and
+swirling merrily between the thickets of willows and tamaracks and
+oleanders that border it. The ford is rather deep, for the spring flood
+is on; but our horses splash through gaily, scattering the water around
+them in showers which glitter in the sunshine.
+
+Is this the brook beside which a man once met God? Yes--and by many
+another brook too.
+
+
+III
+
+THE RUINS OF GERASA
+
+We are coming now into the region of the Decapolis, the Greek cities
+which sprang up along the eastern border of Palestine after the
+conquests of Alexander the Great.
+
+They were trading cities, undoubtedly, situated on the great roads which
+led from the east across the desert to the Jordan Valley, and so,
+converging upon the Plain of Esdraelon, to the Mediterranean Sea and to
+Greece and Italy. Their wealth tempted the Jewish princes of the
+Hasmonean line to conquer and plunder them; but the Roman general Pompey
+restored their civic liberties, B.C. 65, and caused them to be rebuilt
+and strengthened. By the beginning of the Christian era, they were once
+more rich and flourishing, and a league was formed of ten
+municipalities, with certain rights of communal and local government,
+under the protection and suzerainty of the Roman Empire.
+
+The ten cities which originally composed this confederacy for mutual
+defence and the development of their trade, were Scythopolis, Hippos,
+Damascus, Gadara, Raphana, Kanatha, Pella, Dion, Philadelphia and
+Gerasa. Their money was stamped with the image of Caesar. Their soldiers
+followed the Imperial eagles. Their traditions, their arts, their
+literature were Greek. But their strength and their new prosperity were
+Roman.
+
+Here in this narrow wadi through which we are climbing up from the Vale
+of Jabbok we find the traces of the presence of the Romans in the
+fragments of a paved military road and an aqueduct. Presently we
+surmount a rocky hill and look down into the broad, shallow basin of
+Jerash. Gently sloping, rock-strewn hills surround it; through the
+centre flows a stream, with banks bordered by trees; a water-fall is
+flashing opposite to us; on a cluster of rounded knolls about the middle
+of the valley, on the west bank of the stream, are spread the vast,
+incredible, complete ruins of the ancient city of Gerasa.
+
+They rise like a dream in the desolation of the wilderness, columns and
+arches and vaults and amphitheatres and temples, suddenly appearing in
+the bare and lonely landscape as if by enchantment.
+
+How came these monuments of splendour and permanence into this country
+of simplicity and transience, this land of shifting shepherds and
+drovers, this empire of the black tent, this immemorial region that has
+slept away the centuries under the spell of the pastoral pipe? What
+magical music of another kind, strong, stately and sonorous, music of
+brazen trumpets and shawms, of silver harps and cymbals, evoked this
+proud and potent city on the border of the desert, and maintained for
+centuries, amid the sweeping, turbulent floods of untamable tribes of
+rebels and robbers, this lofty landmark of
+
+    "the glory that was Greece
+  And the grandeur that was Rome"?
+
+What sudden storm of discord and disaster shook it all down again,
+loosened the sinews of majesty and power, stripped away the garments of
+beauty and luxury, dissolved the lovely body of living joy, and left
+this skeleton of dead splendour diffused upon the solitary ground?
+
+Who can solve these mysteries? It is all unaccountable,
+unbelievable,--the ghost of the dream of a dream,--yet here it is,
+surrounded by the green hills, flooded with the frank light of noon,
+neighboured by a dirty, noisy little village of Arabs and Circassians on
+the east bank of the stream, and with real goats and lean, black cattle
+grazing between the carved columns and under the broken architraves of
+Gerasa the Golden.
+
+Let us go up into the wrecked city.
+
+This triumphal arch, with its three gates and its lofty Corinthian
+columns, stands outside of the city walls: a structure which has no
+other use or meaning than the expression of Imperial pride: thus the
+Roman conquerors adorn and approach their vassal-town.
+
+Behind the arch a broad, paved road leads to the southern gate, perhaps
+a thousand feet away. Beside the road, between the arch and the gate,
+lie two buildings of curious interest. The first is a great pool of
+stone, seven hundred feet long by three hundred feet wide. This is the
+Naumachia, which is filled with water by conduits from the neighbouring
+stream, in order that the Greeks may hold their mimic naval combats and
+regattas here in the desert, for they are always at heart a seafaring
+people. Beyond the pool there is a Circus, with four rows of stone seats
+and an oval arena, for wild-beast shows and gladiatorial combats.
+
+The city walls have almost entirely disappeared and the South Gate is in
+ruins. Entering and turning to the left, we ascend a little hill and
+find the Temple (perhaps dedicated to Artemis), and close beside it the
+great South Theatre. There is hardly a break in the semicircular stone
+benches, thirty-two rows of seats rising tier above tier, divided into
+an upper and a lower section by a broader row of "boxes" or stalls,
+richly carved, and reserved, no doubt, for magnates of the city and
+persons of importance. The stage, over a hundred feet wide, is backed by
+a straight wall adorned with Corinthian columns and decorated niches.
+The theatre faces due north; and the spectator sitting here, if the play
+wearies him, can lift his eyes and look off beyond the proscenium over
+the length and breadth of Gerasa.
+
+  "But he looked upon the city, every side,
+                      Far and wide,
+  All the mountains topped with temples, all the glades
+                      Colonnades,
+  All the causeys, bridges, aqueducts,--and then,
+                      All the men!"
+
+In the hollow northward from this theatre is the Forum, or the
+Market-place, or the Hippodrome--I cannot tell what it is, but a
+splendid oval of Ionic pillars incloses an open space of more than three
+hundred feet in length and two hundred and fifty feet in width, where
+the Gerasenes may barter or bicker or bet, as they will.
+
+From the Forum to the North Gate runs the main street, more than half a
+mile long, lined with a double row of columns, from twenty to thirty
+feet high, with smooth shafts and acanthus capitals. At the intersection
+of the cross-streets there are tetrapylons, with domes, and pedestals
+for statues. The pavement of the roadway is worn into ruts by the
+chariot wheels. Under the arcades behind the columns run the sidewalks
+for foot-passengers. Turn to the right from the main street and you come
+to the Public Baths, an immense building like a palace, supplied with
+hot and cold water, adorned with marble and mosaic. On the left lies the
+Tribuna, with its richly decorated facade and its fountain of flowing
+water. A few yards farther north is the Propylaeum of the Great Temple; a
+superb gateway, decorated with columns and garlands and shell niches,
+opening to a wide flight of steps by which we ascend to the temple-area,
+a terrace nearly twice the size of Madison Square Garden, surrounded by
+two hundred and sixty columns, and standing clear above the level of the
+encircling city.
+
+The Temple of the Sun rises at the western end of this terrace, facing
+the dawn. The huge columns of the portico, forty-five feet high and five
+feet in diameter, with rich Corinthian capitals, are of rosy-yellow
+limestone, which seems to be saturated with the sunshine of a thousand
+years. Behind them are the walls of the Cella, or inner shrine, with its
+vaulted apse for the image of the god, and its secret stairs and
+passages in the rear wall for the coming and going of the priests, and
+the ascent to the roof for the first salutation of the sunrise over the
+eastern hills.
+
+Spreading our cloth between two pillars of the portico we celebrate the
+feast of noontide, and looking out over the wrecked magnificence of the
+city we try to reconstruct the past.
+
+[Illustration: Ruins of Jerash, Looking West. Propylaeum and Temple
+terrace.]
+
+It was in the days of Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius, in the latter
+part of the second century after Christ, that these temples and palaces
+and theatres were rising. Those were the palmy days of Graeco-Roman
+civilisation in Syria; then the shops along the Colonnade were filled
+with rich goods, the Forum listened to the voice of world-famous orators
+and teachers, and proud lords and ladies assembled in the Naumachia to
+watch the sham battles of the miniature galleys. A little later the new
+religion of Christianity found a foothold here, (see, these are the
+ruined outlines of a Christian church below us to the south, and the
+foundation of a great Basilica), and by the fifth century the pagan
+worship was dying out, and the Bishop of Gerasa had a seat in the
+Council of Chalcedon. It was no longer with the comparative merits of
+Stoicism and Epicureanism and Neo-Platonism, or with the rival literary
+fame of their own Ariston and Kerykos as against Meleager and Menippus
+and Theodorus of Gadara, that the Gerasenes concerned themselves. They
+were busy now with the controversies about Homoiousia and Homoousia,
+with the rivalry of the Eutychians and the Nestorians, with the
+conflicting, not to say combative, claims of such saints as Dioscurus of
+Alexandria and Theodoret of Cyrus. But trade continued brisk, and the
+city was as rich and as proud as ever. In the seventh century an Arabian
+chronicler named it among the great towns of Palestine, and a poet
+praised its fertile territory and its copious spring.
+
+Then what happened? Earthquake, pestilence, conflagration, pillage,
+devastation--who knows? A Mohammedan writer of the thirteenth century
+merely mentions it as "a great city of ruins"; and so it lay, deserted
+and forgotten, until a German traveller visited it in 1806; and so it
+lies to-day, with all its dwellings and its walls shattered and
+dissolved beside its flowing stream in the centre of its green valley,
+and only the relics of its temples, its theatres, its colonnades, and
+its triumphal arch remaining to tell us how brave and rich and gay it
+was in the days of old.
+
+Do you believe it? Does it seem at all real or possible to you? Look up
+at this tall pillar above us. See how the wild marjoram has thrust its
+roots between the joints and hangs like "the hyssop that springeth out
+of the wall." See how the weather has worn deep holes and crevices in
+the topmost drum, and how the sparrows have made their nests there. Lean
+your back against the pillar; feel it vibrate like "a reed shaken with
+the wind"; watch that huge capital of acanthus leaves swaying slowly to
+and fro and trembling upon its stalk "as a flower of the field."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+All the afternoon and all the next morning we wander through the ruins,
+taking photographs, deciphering inscriptions, discovering new points of
+view to survey the city. We sit on the arch of the old Roman bridge
+which spans the stream, and look down into the valley filled with
+gardens and orchards; tall poplars shiver in the breeze; peaches, plums,
+and cherries are in bloom; almonds clad in pale-green foliage; figs
+putting forth their verdant shoots; pomegranates covered with ruddy
+young leaves. We go up to see the beautiful spring which bursts from
+the hillside above the town and supplies it with water. Then we go back
+again to roam aimlessly and dreamily, like folk bewitched, among the
+tumbled heaps of hewn stones, the broken capitals, and the tall, rosy
+columns, soaked with sunbeams.
+
+The Arabs of Jerash have a bad reputation as robbers and extortionists;
+and in truth they are rather a dangerous-looking lot of fellows, with
+bold, handsome brown faces and inscrutable dark eyes. But although we
+have paid no tribute to them, they do not molest us. They seem to regard
+us with a contemptuous pity, as harmless idiots who loaf among the
+fallen stones and do not even attempt to make excavations.
+
+Our camp is in the inclosure of the North Theatre, a smaller building
+than that which stands beside the South Gate, but large enough to hold
+an audience of two or three thousand. The semicircle of seats is still
+unbroken; the arrangements of the stage, the stairways, the entries of
+the building can all be easily traced.
+
+There were gay times in the city when these two theatres were filled
+with people. What comedies of Plautus or Terence or Aristophanes or
+Menander; what tragedies of Seneca, or of the seven dramatists of
+Alexandria who were called the "Pleias," were presented here?
+
+Look up along those lofty tiers of seats in the pale, clear starlight.
+Can you see no shadowy figures sitting there, hear no light whisper of
+ghostly laughter, no thin ripple of clapping hands? What flash of wit
+amuses them, what nobly tragic word or action stirs them to applause?
+What problem of their own life, what reflection of their own heart, does
+the stage reveal to them? We shall never know. The play at Gerasa is
+ended.
+
+
+_A PSALM AMONG THE RUINS_
+
+_The lizard rested on the rock while I sat among the ruins;
+And the pride of man was like a vision of the night._
+
+_Lo, the lords of the city have disappeared into darkness;
+The ancient wilderness hath swallowed up all their work._
+
+_There is nothing left of the city but a heap of fragments;
+The bones of a carcass that a wild beast hath devoured._
+
+_Behold the desert waiteth hungrily for man's dwellings;
+Surely the tide of desolation returneth upon his toil._
+
+_All that he hath painfully lifted up is shaken down in a moment;
+The memory of his glory is buried beneath the billows of sand._
+
+_Then a voice said, Look again upon the ruins;
+These broken arches have taught generations to build._
+
+_Moreover the name of this city shall be remembered;
+Here a poor man spoke a word that shall not die._
+
+_This is the glory that is stronger than the desert;
+For God hath given eternity to the thought of man._
+
+
+
+
+                                   IX
+
+                        THE MOUNTAINS OF SAMARIA
+
+
+I
+
+JORDAN FERRY
+
+Look down from these tranquil heights of Jebel Osha, above the noiseful,
+squalid little city of Es Salt, and you see what Moses saw when he
+climbed Mount Pisgah and looked upon the Promised Land which he was
+never to enter.
+
+  "Could we but climb where Moses stood,
+        And view the landscape o'er,
+  Not Jordan's stream, nor death's cold flood,
+        Should fright us from the shore."
+
+Pisgah was probably a few miles south of the place where we are now
+standing, but the main features of the view are the same. These broad
+mountain-shoulders, falling steeply away to the west, clad in the
+emerald robe of early spring; this immense gulf at our feet, four
+thousand feet below us, a huge trough of gray and yellow, through which
+the dark-green ribbon of the Jordan jungle, touched with a few silvery
+gleams of water, winds to the blue basin of the Dead Sea; those scarred
+and wrinkled hills rising on the other side, the knotted brow of
+Quarantana, the sharp cone of Sartoba, the distant peak of Mizpeh, the
+long line of Judean, Samarian, and Galilean summits, Olivet, and Ebal,
+and Gerizim, and Gilboa, and Tabor, rolling away to the northward,
+growing ever fairer with the promise of fertile valleys between them and
+rich plains beyond them, and fading at last into the azure vagueness of
+the highlands round the Lake of Galilee.
+
+Why does that country toward which we are looking and travelling seem to
+us so much more familiar and real, so much more a part of the actual
+world, than this region of forgotten Greek and Roman glory, from which
+we are returning like those who awake from sleep? The ruined splendours
+of Jerash fade behind us like a dream. Samaria and Galilee, crowded with
+memories and associations which have been woven into our minds by the
+wonderful Bible story, draw us to them with the convincing touch of
+reality. Yet even while we recognise this strange difference between
+our feelings toward the Holy Land and those toward other parts of the
+ancient world, we know that it is not altogether true.
+
+Gerasa was as really a part of God's big world as Shechem or Jezreel or
+Sychar. It stood in His sight, and He must have regarded the human souls
+that lived there. He must have cared for them, and watched over them,
+and judged them equitably, dividing the just from the unjust, the
+children of love from the children of hate, even as He did with men on
+the other side of the Jordan, even as He does with all men everywhere
+to-day. If faith in a God who is the Father and Lord of all mankind
+means anything it means this: equal care, equal justice, equal mercy for
+all the world. Gerasa has been forgotten of men, but God never forgot
+it.
+
+What, then, is the difference? Just this: in the little land between the
+Jordan and the sea, things came to pass which have a more enduring
+significance than the wars and splendours, the wealth and culture of the
+Decapolis. Conflicts were fought there in which the eternal issues of
+good and evil were clearly manifest. Ideas were worked out there which
+have a permanent value to the spiritual life of man. Revelations were
+made there which have become the guiding stars of succeeding
+generations. This is why that country of the Bible seems more real to
+us: because its history is more significant, because it is Divinely
+inspired with a meaning for our faith and hope.
+
+Do you agree with this? I do not know. But at least if you were with us
+on this glorious morning, riding down from the heights of Jebel Osha you
+would feel the vivid beauty, the subduing grandeur of the scene. You
+would rejoice in the life-renewing air that blows softly around us and
+invites us to breathe deep,--in the pure morning faces of the flowers
+opening among the rocks,--in the light waving of silken grasses along
+the slopes by which we steeply descend.
+
+There is a young Gileadite running beside us, a fine fellow about
+eighteen years old, with his white robe girded up about his loins,
+leaving his brown legs bare. His head-dress is encircled with the black
+_'agal_ of camel's hair like a rustic crown. A long gun is slung over
+his back; a wicked-looking curved knife with a brass sheath sticks in
+his belt; his silver powder-horn and leather bullet-pouch hang at his
+waist. He strides along with a free, noble step, or springs lightly from
+rock to rock like a gazelle.
+
+His story is a short one, and simple,--if true. His younger brother has
+run away from the family tent among the pastures of Gilead, seeking his
+fortune in the wide world. And now this elder brother has come out to
+look for the prodigal, at Nablus, at Jaffa, at Jerusalem,--Allah knows
+how far the quest may lead! But he is afraid of robbers if he crosses
+the Jordan Valley alone. May he keep company with us and make the
+perilous transit under our august protection? Yes, surely, my brown son
+of Esau; and we will not inquire too closely whether you are really
+running after your brother or running away yourself.
+
+There may be a thousand robbers concealed along the river-bed, but we
+can see none of them. The valley is heat and emptiness. Even the jackal
+that slinks across the trail in front of us, droops and drags his tail
+in visible exhaustion. His lolling, red tongue is a signal of distress.
+In a climate like this one expects nothing from man or beast. Life
+degenerates, shrivels, stifles; and in the glaring open spaces a sullen
+madness lurks invisible.
+
+We are coming to the ancient fording-place of the river, called Adamah,
+where an event once happened which was of great consequence to the
+Israelites and which has often been misunderstood. They were encamped on
+the east side, opposite Jericho, nearly thirty miles below this point,
+waiting for their first opportunity to cross the Jordan. Then, says the
+record, "the waters which came down from above stopped, and were piled
+up in a heap, a great way off, at Adam, ... and the people passed over
+right against Jericho." (Joshua iii: 14-16.)
+
+Look at these great clay-banks overhanging the river, and you will
+understand what it was that opened a dry path for Israel into Canaan.
+One of these huge masses of clay was undermined, and slipped, and fell
+across the river, heaping up the waters behind a temporary natural dam,
+and cutting off the supply of the lower stream. It may have taken three
+or four days for the river to carve its way through or around that
+obstruction, and meantime any one could march across to Jericho without
+wetting his feet. I have seen precisely the same thing happen on a
+salmon river in Canada quite as large as the Jordan.
+
+The river is more open at this place, and there is a curious
+six-cornered ferry-boat, pulled to and fro with ropes by a half-dozen
+bare-legged Arabs. If it had been a New England river, the practical
+Western mind would have built a long boat with a flat board at each
+side, and rigged a couple of running wheels on a single rope. Then the
+ferryman would have had nothing to do but let the stern of his craft
+swing down at an angle with the stream, and the swift current would have
+pushed him from one side to the other at his will. But these Orientals
+have been running their ferry in their own way, no doubt, for many
+centuries; and who are we to break in upon their laborious indolence
+with new ideas? It is enough that they bring us over safely, with our
+cattle and our stuff, in several bands, with much tugging at the ropes
+and shouting and singing.
+
+We look in vain on the shore of the Jordan for a pleasant place to eat
+our luncheon. The big trees stand with their feet in the river, and the
+smaller shrubs are scraggly and spiny. At last we find a little patch of
+shade on a steep bank above the yellow stream, and here we make
+ourselves as comfortable as we can, with the thermometer at 110 deg., and
+the hungry gnats and mosquitoes swarming around us.
+
+Early in the afternoon we desperately resolve to brave the sun, and ride
+up from the river-bed into the open plain on the west. Here we catch our
+first clear view of Mount Hermon, with its mantle of glistening snow,
+hanging like a cloud on the northern horizon, ninety miles away, beyond
+the Lake of Galilee and the Waters of Merom; a vision of distance and
+coolness and grandeur.
+
+The fields, watered by the full streams descending from the Wadi Farah,
+are green with wheat and barley. Along our path are balsam-trees and
+thorny jujubes, from whose branches we pluck the sweet, insipid fruit as
+we ride beneath them. Herds of cattle are pasturing on the plain, and
+long rows of black Bedouin tents are stretched at the foot of the
+mountains. We cross a dozen murmuring watercourses embowered in the
+dark, glistening foliage of the oleanders glowing with great soft flames
+of rosy bloom.
+
+At the Serai on the hill which watches over this Jiftlik, or domain of
+the Sultan, there are some Turkish soldiers saddling their horses for an
+expedition; perhaps to collect taxes or to chase robbers. The peasants
+are returning, by the paths among the cornfields, to their huts. The
+lines of camp-fires begin to gleam from the transient Bedouin villages.
+Our white tents are pitched in a flowery meadow, beside a low-voiced
+stream, and as we fall asleep the night air is trembling with the
+shrill, innumerable _brek-ek-ek-coax-coax_ of the frog chorus.
+
+
+II
+
+MOUNT EPHRAIM AND JACOB'S WELL
+
+Samaria is a mountain land, but its characteristic features, as
+distinguished from Judea, are the easiness of approach through open
+gateways among the hills, and the fertility of the broad vales and level
+plains which lie between them. The Kingdom of Israel, in its brief
+season of prosperity, was richer, more luxurious, and weaker than the
+Kingdom of Judah. The poet Isaiah touched the keynote of the northern
+kingdom when he sang of "the crown of pride of the drunkards of
+Ephraim," and "the fading flower of his glorious beauty which is on the
+head of the fat valley." (Isaiah xxviii: 1-6.)
+
+We turn aside from the open but roundabout way of the well-tilled Wadi
+Farah and take a shorter, steeper path toward Shechem, through a deep,
+narrow mountain gorge. The day is hot and hazy, for the Sherkiyeh is
+blowing from the desert across the Jordan Valley: the breath of
+Jehovah's displeasure with His people, "a dry wind of the high places
+of the wilderness toward the daughter of my people, neither to fan nor
+to cleanse."
+
+At times the walls of rock come so close together that we have to wind
+through a passage not more than ten feet wide. The air is parched as in
+an oven. Our horses scramble wearily up the stony gallery and the rough
+stairways. One of our company faints under the fervent heat, and falls
+from his horse. But fortunately no bones are broken; a half-hour's rest
+in the shadow of a great rock revives him and we ride on.
+
+The wonderful flowers are blooming wherever they can find a foothold
+among the stones. Now and then we cross the mouth of some little lonely
+side-valley, full of mignonette and cyclamens and tall spires of pink
+hollyhock. Under the huge, dark sides of Eagle's Crag--bare and rugged
+as Ben Nevis--we pass into the fruitful plain of Makhna, where the
+silken grainfields rustle far and wide, and the rich olive-orchards on
+the hill-slopes offer us a shelter for our midday meal and siesta. Mount
+Ebal and Mount Gerizim now rise before us in their naked bulk; and, as
+we mount toward the valley which lies between them, we stay for a while
+to rest at Jacob's Well.
+
+There is a mystery about this ancient cistern on the side of the
+mountain. Why was it dug here, a hundred feet deep, although there are
+springs and streams of living water flowing down the valley, close at
+hand? Whence came the tradition of the Samaritans that Jacob gave them
+this well, although the Old Testament says nothing about it? Why did the
+Samaritan woman, in Jesus' time, come hither to draw water when there
+was a brook, not fifty yards away, which she must cross to get to the
+well?
+
+Who can tell? Certainly there must have been some use and reason for
+such a well, else the men of long ago would never have toiled to make
+it. Perhaps the people of Sychar had some superstition about its water
+which made them prefer it. Or perhaps the stream was owned and used for
+other purposes, while the water of the well was free.
+
+It makes no difference whether a solution of the problem is ever found.
+Its very existence adds to the touch of truth in the narrative of St.
+John's Gospel. Certainly this well was here in Jesus' day, close beside
+the road which He would be most likely to take in going from Jerusalem
+to Galilee. Here He sat, alone and weary, while the disciples went on to
+the village to buy food. And here, while He waited and thirsted, He
+spoke to an unknown, unfriendly, unhappy woman the words which have been
+a spring of living water to the weary and fevered heart of the world:
+"God is a spirit, and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit
+and in truth."
+
+
+III
+
+NABLUS AND SEBASTE
+
+About a mile from Jacob's Well, the city of Nablus lies in the hollow
+between Mount Gerizim on the south and Mount Ebal on the north. The side
+of Gerizim is precipitous and jagged; Ebal rises more smoothly, but very
+steeply, and is covered with plantations of thornless cactus, (_Opuntia
+cochinillifera_), cultivated for the sake of the cochineal insects which
+live upon the plant and from which a red dye is made.
+
+The valley is well watered, and is about a quarter of a mile wide. A
+little east of the city there are two natural bays or amphitheatres
+opposite to each other in the mountains. Here the tribes of Israel may
+have been gathered while the priests chanted the curses of the law from
+Ebal and the blessings from Gerizim. (Joshua viii: 30-35.) The cliffs
+were sounding-boards and sent the loud voices of blessing and cursing
+out over the multitude so that all could hear.
+
+It seems as if it were mainly the echo of the cursing of Ebal that
+greets us as we ride around the fierce little Mohammedan city of Nablus
+on Friday afternoon, passing through the open and dilapidated cemeteries
+where the veiled women are walking and gossiping away their holiday. The
+looks of the inhabitants are surly and hostile. The children shout
+mocking ditties at us, reviling the "Nazarenes." We will not ask our
+dragoman to translate the words that we catch now and then; it is easy
+to guess that they are not "fit to print."
+
+Our camp is close beside a cemetery, near the eastern gate of the town.
+The spectators who watch us from a distance while we dine are numerous;
+and no doubt they are passing unfavourable criticisms on our table
+manners, and on the Frankish custom of permitting one unveiled lady to
+travel with three husbands. The population of Nablus is about
+twenty-five thousand. It has a Turkish governor, a garrison, several
+soap factories, and a million dogs which howl all night.
+
+At half-past six the next morning we set out on foot to climb Mount
+Ebal, which is three thousand feet high. The view from the rocky summit
+sweeps over all Palestine, from snowy Hermon to the mountains round
+about Jerusalem, from Carmel to Nebo, from the sapphire expanse of the
+Mediterranean to the violet valley of the Jordan and the garnet wall of
+Moab and Gilead beyond.
+
+For us the view is veiled in mystery by the haze of the south wind. The
+ranges and peaks far away fade into cloudlike shadows. The depths below
+us seem to sink unfathomably. Nablus is buried in the gulf. On the
+summit of Gerizim, a Mohammedan _weli_, shining like a flake of mica,
+marks the plateau where the Samaritan Temple stood. Hilltop towns,
+Asiret, Talluza, Yasid, emerge like islands from the misty sea. In that
+great shadowy hollow to the west lie the ruins of the city of Samaria,
+which Caesar Augustus renamed Sebaste, in honour of his wife Augusta. If
+she could see the village of Sebastiyeh now she would not be proud of
+her namesake town. It is there that we are going to make our midday
+camp.
+
+King Omri acted as a wise man when he moved the capital of Israel from
+Shechem, an indefensible site, commanded by overhanging mountains and
+approached by two easy vales, to Shomron, the "watch-hill" which stands
+in the centre of the broad Vale of Barley.
+
+As we ride across the smiling corn-fields toward the isolated eminence,
+we see its strength as well as its beauty. It rises steeply from the
+valley to a height of more than three hundred feet. The encircling
+mountains are too far away to dominate it under the ancient conditions
+of warfare without cannons, and a good wall must have made it, as its
+name implied, an impregnable "stronghold," watching over a region of
+immense fertility.
+
+What pomps and splendours, what revels and massacres, what joys of
+victory and horrors of defeat, that round hill rising from the Vale of
+Barley has seen. Now there is nothing left of its crown of pride, but
+the broken pillars of the marble colonnade a mile long with which Herod
+the Great girdled the hill, and a few indistinguishable ruins of the
+temple which he built in honour of the divine Augustus and of the
+hippodrome which he erected for the people. We climb the terraces and
+ride through the olive-groves and ploughed fields where the street of
+columns once ran. A few of them are standing upright; others leaning or
+fallen, half sunken in the ground; fragments of others built into the
+stone walls which divide the fields. There are many hewn and carven
+stones imbedded in the miserable little modern village which crouches on
+the north end of the hill, and the mosque into which the Crusaders'
+Church of Saint John has been transformed is said to contain the tombs
+of Elisha, Obadiah and John the Baptist. This rumour does not concern us
+deeply and we will leave its truth uninvestigated.
+
+Let us tie our horses among Herod's pillars, and spread the rugs for our
+noontide rest by the ruined south gate of the city. At our feet lies the
+wide, level, green valley where the mighty host of Ben-hadad, King of
+Damascus, once besieged the starving city and waited for its surrender.
+(II Kings vii.) There in the twilight of long ago a panic terror
+whispered through the camp, and the Syrians rose and fled, leaving their
+tents and their gear behind them. And there four nameless lepers of
+Israel, wandering in their despair, found the vast encampment deserted,
+and entered in, and ate and drank, and picked up gold and silver, until
+their conscience smote them. Then they climbed up to this gate with the
+good news that the enemy had vanished, and the city was saved.
+
+
+IV
+
+DOTHAN AND THE GOODNESS OF THE SAMARITAN
+
+Over the steep mountains that fence Samaria to the north, down through
+terraced vales abloom with hawthorns and blood-red poppies, across
+hill-circled plains where the long, silvery wind-waves roll over the sea
+of grain from shore to shore, past little gray towns sleeping on the
+sunny heights, by paths that lead us near flowing springs where the
+village girls fill their pitchers, and down stony slopes where the
+goatherds in bright-coloured raiment tend their flocks, and over broad,
+moist fields where the path has been obliterated by the plough, and
+around the edge of marshes where the storks rise heavily on long
+flapping wings, we come galloping at sunset to our camp beside the
+little green hill of Dothan.
+
+Behind it are the mountains, swelling and softly rounded like breasts.
+It was among them that the servant of Elisha saw the vision of horses
+and chariots of fire protecting his master. (II Kings vi: 14-19.)
+
+North and east of Dothan the plain extends smooth and gently sloping,
+full of young harvest. There the chariot of Naaman rolled when he came
+down from Damascus to be healed by the prophet of Israel. (II Kings v:
+9.)
+
+On top of the hill is a spreading terebinth-tree, with some traces of
+excavation and rude ruins beneath it. There Joseph's envious brethren
+cast him into one of the dry pits, from which they drew him up again to
+sell him to a caravan of merchants, winding across the plain on their
+way from Midian into Egypt. (Genesis xxxvii.)
+
+Truly, many and wonderful things came to pass of old around this little
+green hill. And now, at the foot of it, there is a well-watered garden,
+with figs, oranges, almonds, vines, and tall, trembling poplars,
+surrounded by a hedge of prickly pear. Outside of the hedge a big, round
+spring of crystal water is flowing steadily over the rim of its basin of
+stones. There the flocks and herds are gathered, morning and evening, to
+drink. There the children of the tiny hamlet on the hillside come to
+paddle their feet in the running stream. There a caravan of Greek
+pilgrims, on their way from Damascus to Jerusalem for Easter, halt in
+front of our camp, to refresh themselves with a draught of the cool
+water.
+
+As we watch them from our tents there is a sudden commotion among them,
+a cry of pain, and then voices of dismay. George and two or three of our
+men run out to see what is the matter, and come hurrying back to get
+some cotton cloth and oil and wine. One of the pilgrims, an old woman of
+seventy, has fallen from her horse on the sharp stones beside the
+spring, breaking her wrist and cutting her head.
+
+I do not know whether the way in which they bound up that poor old
+stranger's wounds was surgically wise, but I know that it was humanly
+kind and tender. I do not know which of our various churches were
+represented among her helpers, but there must have been at least three,
+and the muleteer from Bagdad who "had no religion but sang beautiful
+Persian songs" was also there, and ready to help with the others. And so
+the parable which lighted our dusty way going down to Jericho is
+interpreted in our pleasant camp at Dothan.
+
+The paths of the Creeds are many and winding; they cross and diverge;
+but on all of them the Good Samaritan is welcome, and I think he travels
+to a happy place.
+
+
+_A PSALM OF THE HELPERS_
+
+_The ways of the world are full of haste and turmoil:
+I will sing of the tribe of helpers who travel in peace._
+
+_He that turneth from the road to rescue another,
+Turneth toward his goal:
+He shall arrive in due time by the foot-path of mercy,
+God will be his guide._
+
+_He that taketh up the burden of the fainting,
+Lighteneth his own load:
+The Almighty will put his arms underneath him,
+He shall lean upon the Lord._
+
+_He that speaketh comfortable words to mourners,
+Healeth his own heart:
+In his time of grief they will return to remembrance,
+God will use them for balm._
+
+_He that careth for the sick and wounded,
+Watcheth not alone:
+There are three in the darkness together,
+And the third is the Lord._
+
+_Blessed is the way of the helpers:
+The companions of the Christ._
+
+
+
+
+                                     X
+
+                            GALILEE AND THE LAKE
+
+
+I
+
+THE PLAIN OF ESDRAELON
+
+Going from Samaria into Galilee is like passing from the Old Testament
+into the New.
+
+There is indeed little difference in the outward landscape: the same
+bare lines of rolling mountains, green and gray near by, blue or purple
+far away; the same fertile valleys and emerald plains embosomed among
+the hills; the same orchards of olive-trees, not quite so large, nor so
+many, but always softening and shading the outlook with their touches of
+silvery verdure.
+
+It is the spirit of the landscape that changes; the inward view; the
+atmosphere of memories and associations through which we travel. We have
+been riding with fierce warriors and proud kings and fiery prophets of
+Israel, passing the sites of royal splendour and fields of ancient
+havoc, retracing the warpaths of the Twelve Tribes. But when we enter
+Galilee the keynote of our thoughts is modulated into peace. Issachar
+and Zebulon and Asher and Naphtali have left no trace or message for us
+on the plains and hills where they once lived and fought. We journey
+with Jesus of Nazareth, the friend of publicans and sinners, the
+shepherd of the lost sheep, the human embodiment of the Divine Love.
+
+This transition in our journey is marked outwardly by the crossing of
+the great Plain of Esdraelon, which we enter by the gateway of Jenin.
+There are a few palm-trees lending a little grace to the disconsolate
+village, and the Turkish captain of the military post, a grizzled
+veteran of Plevna, invites us into the guard-room to drink coffee with
+him, while we wait for a dilatory telegraph operator to send a message.
+Then we push out upon the green sea to a brown island: the village of
+Zer'in, the ancient Jezreel.
+
+The wretched hamlet of adobe huts, with mud beehives plastered against
+the walls, stands on the lowest bench of the foothills of Mount Gilboa,
+opposite the equally wretched hamlet of Sulem in a corresponding
+position at the base of a mountain called Little Hermon. The
+widespread, opulent view is haunted with old stories of battle, murder
+and sudden death.
+
+Down to the east we see the line of brighter green creeping out from the
+flanks of Mount Gilboa, marking the spring where Gideon sifted his band
+of warriors for the night-attack on the camp of Midian. (Judges vii:
+4-23.) Under the brow of the hill are the ancient wine-presses, cut in
+the rock, which belonged to the vineyard of Naboth, whom Jezebel
+assassinated. (I Kings xxi: 1-16.) From some window of her favourite
+palace on this eminence, that hard, old, painted queen looked down the
+broad valley of Jezreel, and saw Jehu in his chariot driving furiously
+from Gilead to bring vengeance upon her. On those dark ridges to the
+south the brave Jonathan was slain by the Philistines and the desperate
+Saul fell upon his own sword. (I Samuel xxxi: 1-6.) Through that open
+valley, which slopes so gently down to the Jordan at Bethshan, the
+hordes of Midian and the hosts of Damascus marched against Israel. By
+the pass of Jenin, Holofernes led his army in triumph until he met
+Judith of Bethulia and lost his head. Yonder in the corner to the
+northward, at the base of Mount Tabor, Deborah and Barak gathered the
+tribes against the Canaanites under Sisera. (Judges iv: 4-22.) Away to
+the westward, in the notch of Megiddo, Pharaoh-Necho's archers pierced
+King Josiah, and there was great mourning for him in Hadad-rimmon. (II
+Chronicles xxxv: 24-25; Zechariah xii: 11.) Farther still, where the
+mountain spurs of Galilee approach the long ridge of Carmel, Elijah put
+the priests of Baal to death by the Brook Kishon. (I Kings xviii:
+20-40.)
+
+All over that great prairie, which makes a broad break between the
+highlands of Galilee and the highlands of Samaria and Judea, and opens
+an easy pathway rising no more than three hundred feet between the
+Jordan and the Mediterranean--all over that fertile, blooming area and
+around the edges of it are sown the legends
+
+  "Of old, unhappy, far-off things
+  And battles long ago."
+
+But on this bright April day when we enter the plain of Armageddon,
+everything is tranquil and joyous.
+
+The fields are full of rustling wheat, and bearded barley, and
+blue-green stalks of beans, and feathery _kirsenneh_, camel-provender.
+The peasants in their gay-coloured clothing are ploughing the rich,
+red-brown soil for the late crop of _doura_. The newly built railway
+from Haifa to Damascus lies like a yellow string across the prairie from
+west to east; and from north to south a single file of two hundred
+camels, with merchandise for Egypt, undulate along the ancient road of
+the caravans, turning their ungainly heads to look at the puffing engine
+which creeps toward them from the distance.
+
+Larks singing in the air, storks parading beside the watercourses,
+falcons poising overhead, poppies and pink gladioluses and blue
+corn-cockles blooming through the grain,--a little village on a swell of
+rising ground, built for their farm hands by the rich Greeks who have
+bought the land and brought it under cultivation,--an air so pure and
+soft that it is like a caress,--all seems to speak a language of peace
+and promise, as if one of the old prophets were telling of the day when
+Jehovah shall have compassion on His people Israel and restore them.
+"They that dwell under His shadow shall return; they shall revive as
+the grain, and blossom as the vine: the scent thereof shall be as the
+wine of Lebanon."
+
+It is, indeed, not impossible that wise methods of colonization, better
+agriculture and gardening, the development of fruit-orchards and
+vineyards, and above all, more rational government and equitable
+taxation may one day give back to Palestine something of her old
+prosperity and population. If the Jews really want it no doubt they can
+have it. Their rich men have the money and the influence; and there are
+enough of their poorer folk scattered through Europe to make any land
+blossom like the rose, if they have the will and the patience for the
+slow toil of the husbandman and the vine-dresser and the shepherd and
+the herdsman.
+
+But the proud kingdom of David and Solomon will never be restored; not
+even the tributary kingdom of Herod. For the land will never again stand
+at the crossroads, the four-corners of the civilized world. The Suez
+Canal to the south, and the railways through the Lebanon and Asia Minor
+to the north, have settled that. They have left Palestine in a corner,
+off the main-travelled roads. The best that she can hope for is a
+restoration to quiet fruitfulness, to placid and humble industry, to
+olive-crowned and vine-girdled felicity, never again to power.
+
+And if that lowly re-coronation comes to her, it will not be on the
+stony heights around Jerusalem: it will be in the Plain of Sharon, in
+the outgoings of Mount Ephraim, in the green pastures of Gilead, in the
+lovely region of "Galilee of the Gentiles." It will not be by the sword
+of Gideon nor by the sceptre of Solomon, but by the sign of peace on
+earth and good-will among men.
+
+With thoughts like these we make our way across the verdurous inland sea
+of Esdraelon, out of the Old Testament into the New. Landmarks of the
+country of the Gospel begin to appear: the wooded dome of Mount Tabor,
+the little village of Nain where Jesus restored the widow's only son.
+(Luke vii: 11-16.) But these lie far to our right. The beacon which
+guides us is a glimpse of white walls and red roofs, high on a shoulder
+of the Galilean hills: the outlying houses of Nazareth, where the boy
+Jesus dwelt with His parents after their return from the flight into
+Egypt, and was obedient to them, and grew in wisdom and stature, and in
+favour with God and men.
+
+
+II
+
+THEIR OWN CITY NAZARETH
+
+Our camp in Nazareth is on a terrace among the olive-trees, on the
+eastern side of a small valley, facing the Mohammedan quarter of the
+town.
+
+This is distinctly the most attractive little city that we have seen in
+Palestine. The houses are spread out over a wider area than is usual in
+the East, covering three sides of a gentle depression high on the side
+of the Jebel es-Sikh, and creeping up the hill-slopes as if to seek a
+larger view and a purer air. Some of them have gardens, fair white
+walls, red-tiled roofs, balconies of stone or wrought iron. Even in the
+more closely built portion of the town the streets seem cleaner, the
+bazaars lighter and less malodorous, the interior courtyards into which
+we glance in passing more neat and homelike. Many of the doorways and
+living-rooms of the humbler houses are freshly whitewashed with a
+light-blue tint which gives them an immaculate air of cleanliness.
+
+The Nazarene women are generally good looking, and free and dignified in
+their bearing. The children, fairer in complexion than is common in
+Syria, are almost all charming with the beauty of youth, and among them
+are some very lovely faces of boys and girls. I do not mean to say that
+Nazareth appears to us an earthly paradise; only that it shines by
+contrast with places like Hebron and Jericho and Nablus, even with
+Bethlehem, and that we find here far less of human squalor and misery to
+sadden us with thoughts of
+
+  "What man has made of man."
+
+The population of the town is about eleven or twelve thousand, a quarter
+of them Mussulmans, and the rest Christians of various sects, including
+two or three hundred Protestants. The people used to have rather a bad
+reputation for turbulence; but we see no signs of it, either in the
+appearance of the city or in the demeanour of the inhabitants. The
+children and the townsfolk whom we meet in the streets, and of whom we
+ask our way now and then, are civil and friendly. The man who comes to
+the camp to sell us antique coins and lovely vases of iridescent glass
+dug from the tombs of Tyre and Sidon, may be an inveterate humbug, but
+his manners are good and his prices are low. The soft-voiced women and
+lustrous-eyed girls who hang about the Lady's tent, persuading her to
+buy their small embroideries and lace-work and trinkets, are gentle and
+ingratiating, though persistent.
+
+I am honestly of the opinion that Christian mission-schools and
+hospitals have done a great deal for Nazareth. We go this morning to
+visit the schools of the English Church Missionary Society, where Miss
+Newton is conducting an admirable and most successful work for the girls
+of Nazareth. She is away on a visit to some of her outlying stations;
+but the dark-eyed, happy-looking Syrian teacher shows us all the
+classes. There are five of them, and every room is full and bright and
+orderly.
+
+On the Christian side, the older girls sing a hymn for us, in their high
+voices and quaint English accent, about Jesus stilling the storm on
+Galilee, and the intermediate girls and the tiny co-educated boys and
+girls in the kindergarten go through various pretty performances. Then
+the teacher leads us across the street to the two Moslem classes, and we
+cannot tell the difference between them and the Christian children,
+except that now the singing of "Jesus loves me" and the recitation of
+"The Lord is my Shepherd" are in Arabic. There is one blind girl who
+recites most perfectly and eagerly. Another girl of about ten years
+carries her baby-brother in her arms. Two little laggards, (they were
+among the group at our camp early in the morning), arrive late, weeping
+out their excuses to the teacher. She hears them with a kind, humorous
+look on her face, gives them a soft rebuke and a task, and sends them to
+their seats, their tears suddenly transformed to smiles.
+
+From the schools we go to the hospital of the British Medical Mission, a
+little higher up the hill. We find young Doctor Scrimgeour, who has
+lately come out from Edinburgh University, and his white-uniformed,
+cheerful, busy nurses, tasked to the limit of their strength by the
+pressure of their work, but cordial and simple in their welcome. As I
+walk with the doctor on his rounds I see every ward full, and all kinds
+of calamity and suffering waiting for the relief and help of his kind,
+skilful knife. Here are hernia, and tuberculous glands, and cataract,
+and stone, and bone tuberculosis, and a score of other miseries; and
+there, on the table, with pale, dark face and mysterious eyes, lies a
+man whose knee has been shattered by a ball from a Martini rifle in an
+affray with robbers.
+
+"Was he one of the robbers," I ask, "or one of the robbed?"
+
+"I really don't know," says the doctor, "but in a few minutes I am going
+to do my best for him."
+
+Is not this Christ's work that is still doing in Christ's town, this
+teaching of the children, this helping of the sick and wounded, for His
+sake, and in His name? Yet there are silly folk who say they do not
+believe in missions.
+
+There are a few so-called sacred places and shrines in Nazareth--the
+supposed scene of the Annunciation; the traditional Workshop of Joseph;
+the alleged _Mensa Christi_, a flat stone which He is said to have used
+as a table when He ate with His disciples; and so on. But all these
+uncertain relics and memorials, as usual, are inclosed in chapels, belit
+with lamps, and encircled with ceremonial. The very spring at which the
+Virgin Mary must have often filled her pitcher, (for it is the only
+flowing fountain in the town), now rises beneath the Greek Church of
+Saint Gabriel, and is conducted past the altar in a channel of stone
+where the pilgrims bathe their eyes and faces. To us, who are seeking
+our Holy Land out-of-doors, these shut-in shrines and altared memorials
+are less significant than what we find in the open, among the streets
+and on the surrounding hillsides.
+
+The Virgin's Fountain, issuing from the church, flows into a big, stone
+basin under a round arch. Here, as often as we pass, we see the maidens
+and the mothers of Nazareth, with great earthern vessels poised upon
+their shapely heads, coming with merry talk and laughter, to draw water.
+Even so the mother of Jesus must have come to this fountain many a time,
+perhaps with her wondrous boy running beside her, clasping her hand or a
+fold of her bright-coloured garment. Perhaps, when the child was little
+she carried Him on her shoulder, as the women carry their children
+to-day.
+
+Passing through a street, we look into the interior of a carpenter-shop,
+with its simple tools, its little pile of new lumber, its floor littered
+with chips and shavings, and its air full of the pleasant smell of
+freshly cut wood. There are a few articles of furniture which the
+carpenter has made: a couple of chairs, a table, a stool: and he
+himself, with his leg stretched out and his piece of wood held firmly by
+his naked toes, is working busily at a tiny bed which needs only a pair
+of rockers to become a cradle. Outside the door of the shop a boy of ten
+or twelve is cutting some boards and slats, and putting them neatly
+together. We ask him what he is making. "A box," he answers, "a box for
+some doves"--and then bends his head over his absorbing task. Even so
+Jesus must have worked at the shop of Joseph, the carpenter, and learned
+His handicraft.
+
+[Illustration: The Virgin's Fountain, Nazareth.]
+
+Let us walk up, at eventide, to the top of the hill behind the town.
+Here is one of the loveliest views in all Palestine. The sun is setting
+and the clear-obscure of twilight already rests over the streets and
+houses, the minarets and spires, the slender cypresses and round
+olive-trees and grotesque hedges of cactus. But on the heights the warm
+radiance from the west pours its full flood, lighting up all the
+flowerets of delicate pink flax and golden chrysanthemum and blue
+campanula with which the grass is broidered. Far and wide that roseate
+illumination spreads itself; changing the snowy mantle of distant
+Hermon, the great Sheikh of Mountains, from ermine to flamingo feathers;
+making the high hills of Naphtali and the excellency of Carmel glow as
+if with soft, transfiguring, inward fire; touching the little town of
+Saffuriyeh below us, where they say that the Virgin Mary was born, and
+the city of Safed, thirty miles away on the lofty shoulder of Jebel
+Jermak; suffusing the haze that fills the Valley of the Jordan, and the
+long bulwarks of the Other-Side, with hues of mauve and purple; and
+bathing the wide expanse of the western sea with indescribable
+splendours, over which the flaming sun poises for a moment beneath the
+edge of a low-hung cloud.
+
+On this hilltop, I doubt not, the boy Jesus often filled His hands with
+flowers. Here He could watch the creeping caravans of Arabian merchants,
+and the glittering legions of Roman soldiers, and the slow files of
+Jewish pilgrims, coming up from the Valley of Jezreel and stretching out
+across the Plain of Esdraelon. Hither, at the evening hour, He came as a
+youth to find the blessing of wide and tranquil thought. Here, when the
+burden of manhood pressed upon Him, He rested after the day's work, free
+from that sadness which often touches us in the vision of earth's
+transient beauty, because He saw far beyond the horizon into the
+spirit-world, where there is no night, nor weariness, nor sin, nor
+death.
+
+For nearly thirty years He must have lived within sight of this hilltop.
+And then, one day, He came back from a journey to the Jordan and
+Jerusalem, and entered into the little synagogue at the foot of this
+hill, and began to preach to His townsfolk His glad tidings of spiritual
+liberty and brotherhood and eternal life.
+
+But they were filled with scorn and wrath. His words rebuked them, stung
+them, inflamed them with hatred. They laid violent hands on Him, and
+led Him out to the brow of the hill,--perhaps it was yonder on that
+steep, rocky peak to the south of the town, looking back toward the
+country of the Old Testament,--to cast Him down headlong.
+
+Yet I think there must have been a few friends and lovers of His in that
+disdainful and ignorant crowd; for He passed through the midst of them
+unharmed, and went His way to the home of Peter and Andrew and John and
+Philip, beside the Sea of Galilee, never to come back to Nazareth.
+
+
+III
+
+A WEDDING IN CANA OF GALILEE
+
+We thought to save a little time on our journey, and perhaps to spare
+ourselves a little jolting on the hard high-road, by sending the
+saddle-horses ahead with the caravan, and taking a carriage for the
+sixteen-mile drive to Tiberias. When we came to the old sarcophagus
+which serves as a drinking trough at the spring outside the village of
+Cana, a strange thing befell us.
+
+We had halted for a moment to refresh the horses. Suddenly there was a
+sound of furious galloping on the road behind us. A score of cavaliers
+in Bedouin dress, with guns and swords, came after us in hot haste. The
+leaders dashed across the open space beside the spring, wheeled their
+foaming horses and dashed back again.
+
+"Is this our affair with robbers, at last?" we asked George.
+
+He laughed a little. "No," said he, "this is the beginning of a wedding
+in Kafr Kenna. The bridegroom and his friends come over from some other
+village where they live, to show off a bit of _fantasia_ to the bride
+and her friends. They carry her back with them after the marriage. We
+wait a while and see how they ride."
+
+The horses were gayly caparisoned with ribbons and tassels and
+embroidered saddle-cloths. The riders were handsome, swarthy fellows
+with haughty faces. Their eyes glanced sideways at us to see whether we
+were admiring them, as they shouted their challenges to one another and
+raced wildly up and down the rock-strewn course, with their robes flying
+and their horses' sides bloody with spurring. One of the men was a huge
+coal-black Nubian who brandished a naked sword as he rode. Others
+whirled their long muskets in the air and yelled furiously. The riding
+was cruel, reckless, superb; loose reins and loose stirrups on the
+headlong gallop; then the sharp curb brought the horse up suddenly, the
+rein on his neck turned him as if on a pivot, and the pressure of the
+heel sent him flying back over the course.
+
+Presently there was a sound of singing and clapping hands behind the
+high cactus-hedges to our left, and from a little lane the bridal
+procession walked up to take the high-road to the village. There were a
+dozen men in front, firing guns and shouting, then came the women, with
+light veils of gauze over their faces, singing shrilly, and in the midst
+of them, in gay attire, but half-concealed with long, dark mantles, the
+bride and "the virgins, her companions, in raiment of needlework."
+
+As they saw the photographic camera pointed at them they laughed, and
+crowded closer together, and drew the ends of their dark mantles over
+their heads. So they passed up the road, their shrill song broken a
+little by their laughter; and the company of horsemen, the bridegroom
+and his friends, wheeled into line, two by two, and trotted after them
+into the village.
+
+This was all that we saw of the wedding at Kafr Kenna--just a vivid,
+mysterious flash of human figures, drawn together by the primal impulse
+and longing of our common nature, garbed and ordered by the social
+customs which make different lands and ages seem strange to each other,
+and moving across the narrow stage of Time into the dimness of that Arab
+village, where Jesus and His mother and His disciples were guests at a
+wedding long ago.
+
+
+IV
+
+TIBERIAS
+
+It is one of the ironies of fate that the lake which saw the greater
+part of the ministry of Jesus, should take its modern name from a city
+built by Herod Antipas, and called after one of the most infamous of the
+Roman Emperors,--"the Sea of Tiberias."
+
+Our road to this city of decadence leads gradually downward, through a
+broad, sinking moorland, covered with weeds and wild flowers--rich,
+monotonous, desolate. The broidery of pink flax and yellow
+chrysanthemums and white marguerites still follows us; but now the wider
+stretches of thistles and burdocks and daturas and cockleburs and
+water-plantains seem to be more important. The landscape saddens around
+us, under the deepening haze of the desert-wind, the sombre Sherkiyeh.
+There are no golden sunbeams, no cool cloud-shadows, only a gray and
+melancholy illumination growing ever fainter and more nebulous as the
+day declines, and the outlines of the hills fade away from the dim,
+silent, forsaken plain through which we move.
+
+We are crossing the battlefield where the soldiers of Napoleon, under
+the brave Junot, fought desperately against the overwhelming forces of
+the Turks. Yonder, away to the left, in the mysterious haze, the double
+"Horns of Hattin" rise like a shadowy exhalation.
+
+That is said to be the mountain where Jesus gathered the multitude
+around Him and spoke His new beatitudes on the meek, the merciful, the
+peacemakers, the pure in heart. It is certainly the place where the
+hosts of the Crusaders met the army of Saladin, in the fierce heat of a
+July day, seven hundred years ago, and while the burning grass and weeds
+and brush flamed around them, were cut to pieces and trampled and
+utterly consumed. There the new Kingdom of Jerusalem,--the last that was
+won with the sword,--went down in ruin around the relics of "the true
+cross," which its soldiers carried as their talisman; and Guy de
+Lusignan, their King, was captured. The noble prisoners were invited by
+Saladin to his tent, and he offered them sherbets, cooled with snow from
+Hermon, to slake their feverish thirst. When they were refreshed, the
+conqueror ordered them to be led out and put to the sword,--just yonder
+at the foot of the Mount of Beatitudes.
+
+From terrace to terrace of the falling moor we roll along the winding
+road through the brumous twilight, until we come within sight of the
+black, ruined walls, the gloomy towers, the huddled houses of the
+worn-out city of Tiberias. She is like an ancient beggar sitting on a
+rocky cape beside the lake and bathing her feet in the invisible water.
+The gathering dusk lends a sullen and forlorn aspect to the place.
+Behind us rise the shattered volcanic crags and cliffs of basalt; before
+us glimmer pallid and ghostly touches of light from the hidden waves; a
+few lamps twinkle here and there in the dormant town.
+
+This was the city which Herod Antipas built for the capital of his
+Province of Galilee. He laid its foundations in an ancient graveyard,
+and stretched its walls three miles along the lake, adorning it with a
+palace, a forum, a race-course, and a large synagogue. But to strict
+Jews the place was unclean, because it was defiled with Roman idols, and
+because its builders had polluted themselves by digging up the bones of
+the dead. Herod could get few Jews to live in his city, and it became a
+catch-all for the off-scourings of the land, people of all creeds and
+none, aliens, mongrels, soldiers of fortune, and citizens of the
+high-road. It was the strongest fortress and probably the richest town
+of Galilee in Christ's day, but so far as we know He never entered it.
+
+After the fall of Jerusalem, strangely enough, the Jews made it their
+favourite city, the seat of their Sanhedrim and the centre of
+rabbinical learning. Here the famous Rabbis Jehuda and Akiba and the
+philosopher Maimonides taught. Here the Mishna and the Gemara were
+written. And here, to-day, two-thirds of the five thousand inhabitants
+are Jews, many of them living on the charity of their kindred in Europe,
+and spending their time in the study of the Talmud while they wait for
+the Messiah who shall restore the kingdom to Israel. You may see their
+flat fur caps, dingy gabardines, long beards and melancholy faces on
+every street in the drowsy little city, dreaming (among fleas and
+fevers) of I know not what impossible glories to come.
+
+You may see, also, on the hill near the Serai, the splendid Mission
+Hospital of the United Free Church of Scotland, where for twenty-three
+years Doctor Torrance has been ministering to the body and soul of
+Tiberias in the name of Jesus. Do you find the building too large and
+fine, the lovely garden too beautiful with flowers, the homes of the
+doctors, and teachers, and helpers of the sick and wounded, too clean
+and healthful and orderly? Do you say "To what purpose is this waste?"
+Then I know not how to measure your ignorance. For you have failed to
+see that this is the embassy of the only King who still cares for the
+true welfare of this forsaken, bedraggled, broken-down Tiberias.
+
+On the evening of our arrival, however, all these things are hidden from
+us in the dusk. We drive past the ruined gate of the city, a mile along
+the southern road toward the famous Hot Baths. Here, on a little terrace
+above the lake, between the road and the black basalt cliffs, our camp
+is pitched, and through the darkness
+
+  'We hear the water lapping on the crag,
+  And the long ripple washing in the reeds.'
+
+In the freshness of the early morning the sunrise pours across the lake
+into our tents. There is a light, cool breeze blowing from the north,
+rippling the clear, green water, (of a hue like the stone called _aqua
+marina_), with a thousand flaws and wrinkles, which catch the flashing
+light and reflect the deep blue sky, and change beneath the shadow of
+floating clouds to innumerable colours of lapis lazuli, and violet, and
+purple, and peacock blue.
+
+The old comparison of the shape of the lake to a lute, or a harp, is not
+clear to us from the point at which we stand: for the northwestward
+sweep of the bay of Gennesaret, which reaches a breadth of nearly eight
+miles from the eastern shore, is hidden from us by a promontory, where
+the dark walls and white houses of Tiberias slope to the water. But we
+can see the full length of the lake, from the depression of the Jordan
+Valley at the southern end, to the shores of Bethsaida and Capernaum at
+the foot of the northern hills, beyond which the dazzling whiteness of
+Hermon is visible.
+
+Opposite rise the eastern heights of the Jaulan, with almost level top
+and steep flanks, furrowed by rocky ravines, descending precipitously to
+a strip of smooth, green shore. Behind us the mountains are more broken
+and varied in form, lifted into sharper peaks and sloped into broader
+valleys. The whole aspect of the scene is like a view in the English
+Lake country, say on Windermere or Ullswater; only there are no forests
+or thickets to shade and soften it. Every edge of the hills is like a
+silhouette against the sky; every curve of the shore clear and distinct.
+
+Of the nine rich cities which once surrounded the lake, none is left
+except this ragged old Tiberias. Of the hundreds of fishing boats and
+passenger vessels which once crossed its waters, all have vanished
+except half a dozen little pleasure skiffs kept for the use of tourists.
+Of the armies and caravans which once travelled these shores, all have
+passed by into the eternal far-away, except the motley string of
+visitors to the Hot Springs, who were coming up to bathe in the
+medicinal waters in the days of Joshua when the place was called
+Hammath, and in the time of the Greeks when it was named Emmaus, and who
+are still trotting along the road in front of our camp toward the big,
+white dome and dirty bath-houses of Hummam. They come from all parts of
+Syria, from Damascus and the sea-coast, from Judea and the Hauran;
+Greeks and Arabs and Turks and Maronites and Jews; on foot, on
+donkey-back, and in litters. Now, it is a cavalcade of Druses from the
+Lebanon, men, women and children, riding on tired horses. Now, it is a
+procession of Hebrews walking with a silken canopy over the sacred books
+of their law.
+
+In the morning we visit Tiberias, buy some bread and fish in the market,
+and go through the Mission Hospital, where one of the gentle nurses
+binds up a foolish little wound on my wrist.
+
+In the afternoon we sail on the southern part of the lake. The boatmen
+laugh at my fruitless fishing with artificial flies, and catch a few
+small fish for us with their nets in the shallow, muddy places along the
+shore. The wind is strange and variable, now sweeping down in violent
+gusts that bend the long arm of the lateen sail, now dying away to a
+dead calm through which we row lazily home.
+
+I remember a small purple kingfisher poising in the air over a shoal,
+his head bent downward, his wings vibrating swiftly. He drops like a
+shot and comes up out of the water with a fish held crosswise in his
+bill. With measured wing-strokes he flits to the top of a rock to eat
+his supper, and a robber-gull flaps after him to take it away. But the
+industrious kingfisher is too quick to be robbed. He bolts his fish with
+a single gulp. We eat ours in more leisurely fashion, by the light of
+the candles in our peaceful tent.
+
+
+V
+
+MEMORIES OF THE LAKE
+
+A hundred little points of illumination flash into memory as I look back
+over the hours that we spent beside the Sea of Galilee. How should I
+write of them all without being tedious? How, indeed, should I hope to
+make them visible or significant in the bare words of description?
+
+Never have I passed richer, fuller hours; but most of their wealth was
+in very little things: the personal look of a flower growing by the
+wayside; the intimate message of a bird's song falling through the sunny
+air; the expression of confidence and appeal on the face of a wounded
+man in the hospital, when the good physician stood beside his cot; the
+shadows of the mountains lengthening across the valleys at sunset; the
+laughter of a little child playing with a broken water pitcher; the
+bronzed profiles and bold, free ways of our sunburned rowers; the sad
+eyes of an old Hebrew lifted from the book that he was reading; the
+ruffling breezes and sudden squalls that changed the surface of the
+lake; the single palm-tree that waved over the mud hovels of Magdala;
+the millions of tiny shells that strewed the beach of Capernaum and
+Bethsaida; the fertile sweep of the Plain of Gennesaret rising from the
+lake; and the dark precipices of the "Robbers' Gorge" running back into
+the western mountains.
+
+The written record of these hours is worth little; but in experience and
+in memory they have a mystical meaning and beauty, because they belong
+to the country where Jesus walked with His fishermen-disciples, and took
+the little children in His arms, and healed the sick, and opened blind
+eyes to behold ineffable things.
+
+Every touch that brings that country nearer to us in our humanity and
+makes it more real, more simple, more vivid, is precious. For the one
+irreparable loss that could befall us in religion,--a loss that is often
+threatened by our abstract and theoretical ways of thinking and speaking
+about Him,--would be to lose Jesus out of the lowly and familiar ways of
+our mortal life. He entered these lowly ways as the Son of Man in order
+to make us sure that we are the children of God.
+
+Therefore I am glad of every hour spent by the Lake of Galilee.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I remember, when we came across in our boat to Tell Hum, where the
+ancient city of Capernaum stood, the sun was shining with a fervent heat
+and the air of the lake, six hundred and eighty feet below the level of
+the sea, was soft and languid. The gray-bearded German monk who came to
+meet us at the landing and admitted us to the inclosure of his little
+monastery where he was conducting the excavation of the ruins, wore a
+cork helmet and spectacles. He had been heated, even above the ninety
+degrees Fahrenheit which the thermometer marked, by the rudeness of a
+couple of tourists who had just tried to steal a photograph of his work.
+He had foiled them by opening their camera and blotting the film with
+sunlight, and had then sent them away with fervent words. But as he
+walked with us among his roses and Pride of India trees, his spirit
+cooled within him, and he showed himself a learned and accomplished man.
+
+He told us how he had been working there for two or three years,
+keeping records and drawings and photographs of everything that was
+found; going back to the Franciscan convent at Jerusalem for his short
+vacation in the heat of mid-summer; putting his notes in order, reading
+and studying, making ready to write his book on Capernaum. He showed us
+the portable miniature railway which he had made; and the little iron
+cars to carry away the great piles of rubbish and earth; and the rich
+columns, carved lintels, marble steps and shell-niches of the splendid
+building which his workmen had uncovered. The outline was clear and
+perfect. We could see how the edifice of fine, white limestone had been
+erected upon an older foundation of basalt, and how an earthquake had
+twisted it and shaken down its pillars. It was undoubtedly a synagogue,
+perhaps the very same which the rich Roman centurion built for the Jews
+in Capernaum (Luke vii: 5), and where Jesus healed the man who had an
+unclean spirit. (Luke iv: 31-37.) Of all the splendours of that proud
+city of the lake, once spreading along a mile of the shore, nothing
+remained but these tumbled ruins in a lonely, fragrant garden, where the
+patient father was digging with his Arab workmen and getting ready to
+write his book.
+
+"_Weh dir, Capernaum_" I quoted. The _padre_ nodded his head gravely.
+"_Ja, ja,_" said he, "_es ist buchstaeblich erfuellt!_"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I remember the cool bath in the lake, at a point between Bethsaida and
+Capernaum, where a tangle of briony and honeysuckle made a shelter
+around a shell-strewn beach, and the rosy oleanders bloomed beside an
+inflowing stream. I swam out a little way and floated, looking up into
+the deep sky, while the waves plashed gently and caressingly around my
+face.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I remember the old Arab fisherman, who was camped with his family in a
+black tent on a meadow where several lively brooks came in (one of them
+large enough to turn a mill). I persuaded him by gestures to wade out
+into the shallow part of the lake and cast his bell-net for fish. He
+gathered the net in his hand, and whirled it around his head. The leaden
+weights around the bottom spread out in a wide circle and splashed into
+the water. He drew the net toward him by the cord, the ring of sinkers
+sweeping the bottom, and lifted it slowly, carefully--but no fish!
+
+Then I rigged up my pocket fly-rod with a gossamer leader and two tiny
+trout-flies, a Royal Coach-man and a Queen of the Water, and began to
+cast along the crystal pools and rapids of the larger stream. How
+merrily the fish rose there, and in the ripples where the brooks ran out
+into the lake. There were half a dozen different kinds of fish, but I
+did not know the name of any of them. There was one that looked like a
+black bass, and others like white perch and sunfish; and one kind was
+very much like a grayling. But they were not really of the _salmo_
+family, I knew, for none of them had the soft fin in front of the tail.
+How surprised the old fisherman was when he saw the fish jumping at
+those tiny hooks with feathers; and how round the eyes of his children
+were as they looked on; and how pleased they were with the _bakhshish_
+which they received, including a couple of baithooks for the eldest boy!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I remember the place where we ate our lunch in a small grove of
+eucalyptus-trees, with sweet-smelling yellow acacias blossoming around
+us. It was near the site which some identify with the ancient Bethsaida,
+but others say that it was farther to the east, and others again say
+that Capernaum was really located here. The whole problem of these lake
+cities, where they stood, how they supported such large populations (not
+less than fifteen thousand people in each), is difficult and may never
+be solved. But it did not trouble us deeply. We were content to be
+beside the same waters, among the same hills, that Jesus knew and loved.
+
+It was here, along this shore, that He found Simon and his brother
+Andrew casting their net, and James and his brother John mending theirs,
+and called them to come with Him. These fishermen, with their frank and
+free hearts unspoiled by the sophistries of the Pharisees, with their
+minds unhampered by social and political ambitions, followers of a
+vocation which kept them out of doors and reminded them daily of their
+dependence on the bounty of God,--these children of nature, and others
+like them, were the men whom He chose for His disciples, the listeners
+who had ears to hear His marvellous gospel.
+
+It was here, on these pale, green waves, that He sat in a little boat,
+near the shore, and spoke to the multitude who had gathered to hear Him.
+
+He spoke of the deep and tranquil confidence that man may learn from
+nature, from the birds and the flowers.
+
+He spoke of the infinite peace of the heart that knows the true meaning
+of love, which is giving and blessing, and the true secret of courage,
+which is loyalty to the truth.
+
+He spoke of the God whom we can trust as a child trusts its father, and
+of the Heaven which waits for all who do good to their fellowmen.
+
+He spoke of the wisdom whose fruit is not pride but humility, of the
+honour whose crown is not authority but service, of the purity which is
+not outward but inward, and of the joy which lasts forever.
+
+He spoke of forgiveness for the guilty, of compassion for the weak, of
+hope for the desperate.
+
+He told these poor and lowly folk that their souls were unspeakably
+precious, and that He had come to save them and make them inheritors of
+an eternal kingdom. He told them that He had brought this message from
+God, their Father and His Father.
+
+He spoke with the simplicity of one who knows, with the assurance of one
+who has seen, with the certainty and clearness of one for whom doubt
+does not exist.
+
+He offered Himself, in His stainless purity, in His supreme love, as the
+proof and evidence of His gospel, the bread of Heaven, the water of
+life, the Saviour of sinners, the light of the world. "Come unto Me," He
+said, "and I will give you rest."
+
+This was the heavenly music that came into the world by the Lake of
+Galilee. And its voice has spread through the centuries, comforting the
+sorrowful, restoring the penitent, cheering the despondent, and telling
+all who will believe it, that our human life is worth living, because it
+gives each one of us the opportunity to share in the Love which is
+sovereign and immortal.
+
+
+_A PSALM OF THE GOOD TEACHER_
+
+_The Lord is my teacher:
+I shall not lose the way to wisdom._
+
+_He leadeth me in the lowly path of learning,
+He prepareth a lesson for me every day;
+He findeth the clear fountains of instruction,
+Little by little he showeth me the beauty of the truth._
+
+_The world is a great book that he hath written,
+He turneth the leaves for me slowly;
+They are all inscribed with images and letters,
+His face poureth light on the pictures and the words._
+
+_Then am I glad when I perceive his meaning,
+He taketh me by the hand to the hill-top of vision;
+In the valley also he walketh beside me,
+And in the dark places he whispereth to my heart._
+
+_Yea, though my lesson be hard it is not hopeless,
+For the Lord is very patient with his slow scholar;
+He will wait awhile for my weakness,
+He will help me to read the truth through tears._
+
+_Surely thou wilt enlighten me daily by joy and by sorrow:
+And lead me at last, O Lord, to the perfect knowledge of thee._
+
+
+
+
+                                XI
+
+                      THE SPRINGS OF JORDAN
+
+
+I
+
+THE HILL-COUNTRY OF NAPHTALI
+
+Naphtali was the northernmost of the tribes of Israel, a bold and free
+highland clan, inhabiting a country of rugged hills and steep
+mountainsides, with fertile vales and little plains between.
+
+"Naphtali is a hind let loose," said the old song of the Sons of Jacob
+(Genesis xlix: 21); and as we ride up from the Lake of Galilee on our
+way northward, we feel the meaning of the poet's words. A people
+dwelling among these rock-strewn heights, building their fortress-towns
+on sharp pinnacles, and climbing these steep paths to the open fields of
+tillage or of war, would be like wild deer in their spirit of liberty,
+and they would need to be as nimble and sure-footed.
+
+Our good little horses are shod with round plates of iron, and they
+clatter noisily among the loose stones and slip on the rocky ledges, as
+we strike over the hills from Capernaum, without a path, to join the
+main trail at Khan Yubb Yusuf.
+
+We are skirting fields of waving wheat and barley, but there are no
+houses to be seen. Far and wide the sea of verdure rolls around us,
+broken only by ridges of grayish rock and scarped cliffs of reddish
+basalt. We wade saddle-deep in herbage; broad-leaved fennel and
+trembling reeds; wild asparagus and artichokes; a hundred kinds of
+flowering weeds; acres of last year's thistles, standing blanched and
+ghostlike in the summer sunshine.
+
+The phantom city of Safed gleams white from its far-away hilltop,--the
+latest and perhaps the last of the famous seats of rabbinical learning.
+It is one of the sacred places of modern Judaism. No Hebrew pilgrim
+fails to visit it. Here, they say, the Messiah will one day reveal
+himself, and after establishing His kingdom, will set out to conquer the
+world.
+
+But it is not to the city, shining like a flake of mica from the
+greenness of the distant mountain, that our looks and thoughts are
+turning. It is backward to the lucent sapphire of the Lake of Galilee,
+upon whose shores our hearts have seen the secret vision, heard the
+inward message of the Man of Nazareth.
+
+Ridge after ridge reveals new outlooks toward its tranquil loveliness.
+Turn after turn, our winding way leads us to what we think must be the
+parting view. Sleeping in still, forsaken beauty among the sheltering
+hills, and open to the cloudless sky which makes its water like a little
+heaven, it seems to silently return our farewell looks with pleading for
+remembrance. Now, after one more round among the inclosing ridges,
+another vista opens, the widest and the most serene of all.
+
+Farewell, dear Lake of Jesus! Our eyes may never rest on thee again; but
+surely they will not forget thee. For now, as often we come to some fair
+water in the Western mountains, or unfold the tent by some lone lakeside
+in the forests of the North, the lapping of thy waves will murmur
+through our thoughts; thy peaceful brightness will arise before us; we
+shall see the rose-flush of thy oleanders, and the waving of thy reeds;
+the sweet, faint smell of thy gold-flowered acacias will return to us
+from purple orchids and white lilies. Let the blessing that is thine go
+with us everywhere in God's great out-of-doors, and our hearts never
+lose the comradeship of Him who made thee holiest among all the waters
+of the world!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Khan of Joseph's Pit is a ruin; a huge and broken building deserted
+by the caravans which used to throng this highway from Damascus to the
+cities of the lake, and to the ports of Acre and Joppa, and to the
+metropolis of Egypt. It is hard to realize that this wild moorland path
+by which we are travelling was once a busy road, filled with camels,
+horses, chariots, foot-passengers, clanking companies of soldiers; that
+these crumbling, cavernous walls, overgrown with thorny capers and wild
+marjoram and mandragora, were once crowded every night with a motley mob
+of travellers and merchants; that this pool of muddy water, gloomily
+reflecting the ruins, was once surrounded by flocks and herds and beasts
+of burden; that only a few hours to the southward there was once a ring
+of splendid, thriving, bustling towns around the shores of Galilee, out
+of which and into which the multitudes were forever journeying. Now they
+are all gone from the road, and the vast wayside caravanserai is
+sleeping into decay--a dormitory for bats and serpents.
+
+What is it that makes the wreck of an inn more lonely and forbidding
+than any other ruin?
+
+A few miles more of riding along the flanks of the mountains bring us to
+a place where we turn a corner suddenly, and come upon the full view of
+the upper basin of the Jordan; a vast oval green cup, with the little
+Lake of Huleh lying in it like a blue jewel, and the giant bulk of Mount
+Hermon towering beyond it, crowned and cloaked with silver snows.
+
+Up the steep and slippery village street of Rosh Pinnah, a modern Jewish
+colony founded by the Rothschilds in 1882, we scramble wearily to our
+camping-ground for the night. Above us on a hilltop is the old Arab
+village of Jauneh, brown, picturesque, and filthy. Around us are the
+colonists' new houses, with their red-tiled roofs and white walls. Two
+straight streets running in parallel lines up the hillside are roughly
+paved with cobble-stones and lined with trees; mulberries,
+white-flowered acacias, eucalyptus, feathery pepper-trees, and
+rose-bushes. Water runs down through pipes from a copious spring on the
+mountain, and flows abundantly into every house, plashing into covered
+reservoirs and open stone basins for watering the cattle. Below us the
+long avenues of eucalyptus, the broad vineyards filled with low, bushy
+vines, the immense orchards of pale-green almond-trees, the smiling
+wheat-fields, slope to the lake and encircle its lower end.
+
+The children who come to visit our camp on the terrace wear shoes and
+stockings, carry school-books in their bags, and bring us offerings of
+little bunches of sweet-smelling garden roses and pendulous
+locust-blooms. We are a thousand years away from the Khan of Joseph's
+Pit; but we can still see the old mud village on the height against the
+sunset, and the camp-fires gleaming in front of the black Bedouin tents
+far below, along the edge of the marshes. We are perched between the old
+and the new, between the nomad and the civilized man, and the unchanging
+white head of Hermon looks down upon us all.
+
+In the morning, on the way down, I stop at the door of a house and fall
+into talk with an intelligent, schoolmasterish sort of man, a Roumanian,
+who speaks a little weird German. Is the colony prospering? Yes, but
+not so fast that it makes them giddy. What are they raising? Wheat and
+barley, a few vegetables, a great deal of almonds and grapes. Good
+harvests? Some years good, some years bad; the Arabs bad every year,
+terrible thieves; but the crops are plentiful most of the time. Are the
+colonists happy, contented? A thin smile wrinkles around the man's lips
+as he answers with the statement of a world-wide truth, "_Ach, Herr, der
+Ackerbauer ist nie zufrieden._" ("Ah, Sir, the farmer is never
+contented.")
+
+
+II
+
+THE WATERS OF MEROM
+
+All day we ride along the hills skirting the marshy plain of Huleh. Here
+the springs and parent streams of Jordan are gathered, behind the
+mountains of Naphtali and at the foot of Hermon, as in a great green
+basin about the level of the ocean, for the long, swift rush down the
+sunken trench which leads to the deep, sterile bitterness of the Dead
+Sea. Was there ever a river that began so fair and ended in such waste
+and desolation?
+
+Here in this broad, level, well-watered valley, along the borders of
+these vast beds of papyrus and rushes intersected by winding, hidden
+streams, Joshua and his fierce clans of fighting men met the Kings of
+the north with their horses and chariots, "at the waters of Merom," in
+the last great battle for the possession of the Promised Land. It was a
+furious conflict, the hordes of footmen against the squadrons of
+horsemen; but the shrewd command that came from Joshua decided it:
+"Hough their horses and burn their chariots with fire." The Canaanites
+and the Amorites and the Hittites and the Hivites were swept from the
+field, driven over the western mountains, and the Israelites held the
+Jordan from Jericho to Hermon. (Joshua xi:1-15.)
+
+The springs that burst from the hills to the left of our path and run
+down to the sluggish channels of the marsh on our right are abundant and
+beautiful.
+
+Here is 'Ain Mellaha, a crystal pool a hundred yards wide, with wild
+mint and watercress growing around it, white and yellow lilies floating
+on its surface, and great fish showing themselves in the transparent
+open spaces among the weeds, where the water bubbles up from the bottom
+through dancing hillocks of clean, white sand and shining pebbles.
+
+Here is 'Ain el-Belata, a copious stream breaking forth from the rocks
+beneath a spreading terebinth-tree, and rippling down with merry rapids
+toward the jungle of rustling reeds and plumed papyrus.
+
+While luncheon is preparing in the shade of the terebinth, I wade into
+the brook and cast my fly along the ripples. A couple of ragged,
+laughing, bare-legged Bedouin boys follow close behind me, watching the
+new sport with wonder. The fish are here, as lively and gamesome as
+brook trout, plump, golden-sided fellows ten or twelve inches long. The
+feathered hooks tempt them, and they rise freely to the lure. My
+tattered pages are greatly excited, and make impromptu pouches in the
+breast of their robes, stuffing in the fish until they look quite fat.
+The catch is enough for a good supper for their whole family, and a
+dozen more for a delicious fish-salad at our camp that night. What kind
+of fish are they? I do not know: doubtless something Scriptural and
+Oriental. But they taste good; and so far as there is any record, they
+are the first fish ever taken with the artificial fly in the sources of
+the Jordan.
+
+The plain of Huleh is full of life. Flocks of waterfowl and solemn
+companies of storks circle over the swamps. The wet meadows are covered
+with herds of black buffaloes, wallowing in the ditches, or staring at
+us sullenly under their drooping horns. Little bunches of horses, and
+brood mares followed by their long-legged, awkward foals, gallop beside
+our cavalcade, whinnying and kicking up their heels in the joy of
+freedom. Flocks of black goats clamber up the rocky hillsides, following
+the goatherd who plays upon his rustic pipe quavering and fantastic
+music, softened by distance into a wild sweetness. Small black cattle
+with white faces march in long files across the pastures, or wander
+through the thickets of bulrushes and papyrus and giant fennel,
+appearing and disappearing as the screen of broad leaves and trembling
+plumes close behind them.
+
+A few groups of huts made out of wattled reeds stand beside the sluggish
+watercourses, just as they did when Macgregor in his Rob Roy canoe
+attempted to explore this impenetrable morass forty years ago. Along the
+higher ground are lines of black Bedouin tents, arranged in transitory
+villages.
+
+These flitting habitations of the nomads, who come down from the hills
+and lofty deserts to fatten their flocks and herds among unfailing
+pasturage, are all of one pattern. The low, flat roof of black goats'
+hair is lifted by the sticks which support it, into half a dozen little
+peaks, perhaps five or six feet from the ground. Between these peaks the
+cloth sags down, and is made fast along the edges by intricate and
+confusing guy-ropes. The tent is shallow, not more than six feet deep,
+and from twelve to thirty feet long, according to the wealth of the
+owner and the size of his family,--two things which usually correspond.
+The sides and the partitions are sometimes made of woven reeds, like
+coarse matting. Within there is an apartment (if you can call it so) for
+the family, a pen for the chickens, and room for dogs, cats, calves and
+other creatures to find shelter. The fireplace of flat stones is in the
+centre, and the smoke oozes out through the roof and sides.
+
+The Bedouin men, in flowing _burnous_ and _keffiyeh_, with the _'agal_
+of dark twisted camel's hair like a crown upon their heads, are almost
+all handsome: clean-cut, haughty faces, bold in youth and dignified in
+old age. The women look weatherbeaten and withered beside them. Even
+when you see a fine face in the dark blue mantle or under the white
+head-dress, it is almost always disfigured by purplish tattooing around
+the lips and chin. Some of the younger girls are beautiful, and most of
+the children are entrancing.
+
+They play games in a ring, with songs and clapping hands; the boys
+charge up and down among the tents with wild shouts, driving a round
+bone or a donkey's hoof with their shinny-sticks; the girls chase one
+another and hide among the bushes in some primeval form of "tag" or
+"hide-and-seek."
+
+A merry little mob pursues us as we ride through each encampment, with
+outstretched hands and half-jesting, half-plaintive cries of
+"_Bakhshish! bakhshish!_" They do not really expect anything. It is only
+a part of the game. And when the Lady holds out her open hand to them
+and smiles as she repeats, "_Bakhshish! bakhshish!_" they take the joke
+quickly, and run away, laughing, to their sports.
+
+At one village, in the dusk, there is an open-air wedding: a row of men
+dancing; a ring of women and girls looking on; musicians playing the
+shepherd's pipe and the drum; maidens running beside us to beg a present
+for the invisible bride: a rude charcoal sketch of human society,
+primitive, irrepressible, confident, encamped for a moment on the
+shadowy border of the fecund and unconquerable marsh.
+
+Thus we traverse the strange country of Bedouinia, travelling all day in
+the presence of the Great Sheikh of Mountains, and sleep at night on the
+edge of a little village whose name we shall never know. A dozen times
+we ask George for the real name of that place, and a dozen times he
+repeats it for us with painstaking courtesy; it sounds like a compromise
+between a cough and a sneeze.
+
+
+III
+
+WHERE JORDAN RISES
+
+The Jordan is assembled in the northern end of the basin of Huleh under
+a mysterious curtain of tall, tangled water-plants. Into that ancient
+and impenetrable place of hiding and blending enter many little springs
+and brooks, but the main sources of the river are three.
+
+The first and the longest is the Hasbani, a strong, foaming stream that
+comes down with a roar from the western slope of Hermon. We cross it by
+the double arch of a dilapidated Saracen bridge, looking down upon
+thickets of oleander, willow, tamarisk and woodbine.
+
+The second and largest source springs from the rounded hill of Tel
+el-Kadi, the supposed site of the ancient city of Dan, the northern
+border of Israel. Here the wandering, landless Danites, finding a
+country to their taste, put the too fortunate inhabitants of Leshem to
+the sword and took possession. And here King Jereboam set up one of his
+idols of the golden calf.
+
+There is no vestige of the city, no trace of the idolatrous shrine, on
+the huge mound which rises thirty or forty feet above the plain. But it
+is thickly covered with trees: poplars and oaks and wild figs and
+acacias and wild olives. A pair of enormous veterans, a valonia oak and
+a terebinth, make a broad bower of shade above the tomb of an unknown
+Mohammedan saint, and there we eat our midday meal, with the murmur of
+running waters all around us, a clear rivulet singing at our feet, and
+the chant of innumerable birds filling the vault of foliage above our
+heads.
+
+After lunch, instead of sleeping, two of us wander into the dense grove
+that spreads over the mound. Tiny streams of water trickle through it:
+blackberry-vines and wild grapes are twisted in the undergrowth; ferns
+and flowery nettles and mint grow waist-high. The main spring is at the
+western base of the mound. The water comes bubbling and whirling out
+from under a screen of wild figs and vines, forming a pool of palest,
+clearest blue, a hundred feet in diameter. Out of this pool the new-born
+river rushes, foaming and shouting down the hillside, through lines of
+flowering styrax and hawthorn and willows trembling over its wild joy.
+
+The third and most impressive of the sources of Jordan is at Baniyas, on
+one of the foothills of Hermon. Our path thither leads us up from Dan,
+through high green meadows, shaded by oak-trees, sprinkled with
+innumerable blossoming shrubs and bushes, and looking down upon the
+lower fields blue with lupins and vetches, or golden with yellow
+chrysanthemums beneath which the red glow of the clover is dimly burning
+like a secret fire.
+
+Presently we come, by way of a broad, natural terrace where the white
+encampment of the Moslem dead lies gleaming beneath the shade of mighty
+oaks and terebinths, and past the friendly olive-grove where our own
+tents are standing, to a deep ravine filled to the brim with luxuriant
+verdure of trees and vines and ferns. Into this green cleft a little
+river, dancing and singing, suddenly plunges and disappears, and from
+beneath the veil of moist and trembling leaves we hear the sound of its
+wild joy, a fracas of leaping, laughing waters.
+
+[Illustration: The Approach to Baniyas.]
+
+An old Roman bridge spans the stream on the brink of its downward
+leap. Crossing over, we ride through the ruined gateway of the town of
+Baniyas, turn to right and left among its dirty, narrow streets, pass
+into a leafy lane, and come out in front of a cliff of ruddy limestone,
+with niches and shrines carved on its face, and a huge, dark cavern
+gaping in the centre.
+
+A tumbled mass of broken rocks lies below the mouth of the cave. From
+this slope of debris, sixty or seventy feet long, a line of springs gush
+forth in singing foam. Under the shadow of trembling poplars and
+broad-boughed sycamores, amid the lush greenery of wild figs and grapes,
+bracken and briony and morning-glory, drooping maidenhair and
+flower-laden styrax, the hundred rills swiftly run together and flow
+away with one impulse, a full-grown little river.
+
+There is an immemorial charm about the place. Mysteries of grove and
+fountain, of cave and hilltop, bewitch it with the magic of Nature's
+life, ever springing and passing, flowering and fading, basking in the
+open sunlight and hiding in the secret places of the earth. It is such a
+place as Claude Lorraine might have imagined and painted as the scene
+of one of his mythical visions of Arcadia; such a place as antique fancy
+might have chosen and decked with altars for the worship of unseen
+dryads and nymphs, oreads and naiads. And so, indeed, it was chosen, and
+so it was decked.
+
+Here, in all probability, was Baal-Gad, where the Canaanites paid their
+reverence to the waters that spring from underground. Here, certainly,
+was Paneas of the Greeks, where the rites of Pan and all the nymphs were
+celebrated. Here Herod the Great built a marble temple to Augustus the
+Tolerant, on this terrace of rock above the cave. Here, no doubt, the
+statue of the Emperor looked down upon a strange confusion of revelries
+and wild offerings in honour of the unknown powers of Nature.
+
+All these things have withered, crumbled, vanished. There are no more
+statues, altars, priests, revels and sacrifices at Baniyas--only the
+fragment of an inscription around one of the votive niches carved on the
+cliff, which records the fact that the niche was made by a certain
+person who at that time was "Priest of Pan." _But the name of this_
+_person who wished to be remembered is precisely the part of the carving
+which is illegible._
+
+Ironical inscription! Still the fountains gush from the rocks, the
+poplars tremble in the breeze, the sweet incense rises from the
+orange-flowered styrax, the birds chant the joy of living, the sunlight
+and the moonlight fall upon the sparkling waters, and the liquid
+starlight drips through the glistening leaves. But the Priest of Pan is
+forgotten, and all that old interpretation and adoration of Nature,
+sensuous, passionate, full of mingled cruelty and ecstasy, has melted
+like a mist from her face, and left her serene and pure and lovely as
+ever.
+
+Here at Paneas, after the city had been rebuilt by Philip the Tetrarch
+and renamed after him and his Imperial master, there came one day a
+Peasant of Galilee who taught His disciples to draw near to Nature, not
+with fierce revelry and superstitious awe, but with tranquil confidence
+and calm joy. The goatfoot god, the god of panic, the great god Pan,
+reigns no more beside the upper springs of Jordan. The name that we
+remember here, the name that makes the message of flowing stream and
+sheltering tree and singing bird more clear and cool and sweet to our
+hearts, is the name of Jesus of Nazareth.
+
+
+IV
+
+CAESAREA PHILIPPI
+
+Yes, this little Mohammedan town of Baniyas, with its twoscore wretched
+houses built of stones from the ancient ruins and huddled within the
+broken walls of the citadel, is the ancient site of Caesarea Philippi. In
+the happy days that we spend here, rejoicing in the most beautiful of
+all our camps in the Holy Land, and yielding ourselves to the full charm
+of the out-of-doors more perfectly expressed than we had ever thought to
+find it in Palestine,--in this little paradise of friendly trees and
+fragrant flowers,
+
+      "at snowy Hermon's foot,
+  Amid the music of his waterfalls,"--
+
+the thought of Jesus is like the presence of a comrade, while the
+memories of human grandeur and transience, of man's long toil, unceasing
+conflict, vain pride and futile despair, visit us only as flickering
+ghosts.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We climb to the top of the peaked hill, a thousand feet above the town,
+and explore the great Crusaders' Castle of Subeibeh, a ruin vaster in
+extent and nobler in situation than the famous _Schloss_ of Heidelberg.
+It not only crowns but completely covers the summit of the steep ridge
+with the huge drafted stones of its foundations. The immense round
+towers, the double-vaulted gateways, are still standing. Long flights of
+steps lead down to subterranean reservoirs of water. Spacious
+courtyards, where the knights and men-at-arms once exercised, are
+transformed into vegetable gardens, and the passageways between the
+north citadel and the south citadel are travelled by flocks of lop-eared
+goats.
+
+From room to room we clamber by slopes of crumbling stone, discovering
+now a guard-chamber with loopholes for the archers, and now an arched
+chapel with the plaster intact and faint touches of colour still showing
+upon it. Perched on the high battlements we look across the valley of
+Huleh and the springs of Jordan to Kal'at Hunin on the mountains of
+Naphtali, and to Kal'at esh-Shakif above the gorge of the River Litani.
+
+From these three great fortresses, in the time of the Crusaders, flashed
+and answered the signal-fires of the chivalry of Europe fighting for
+possession of Palestine. What noble companies of knights and ladies
+inhabited these castles, what rich festivals were celebrated within
+these walls, what desperate struggles defended them, until at last the
+swarthy hordes of Saracens stormed the gates and poured over the
+defences and planted the standard of the crescent on the towers and lit
+the signal-fires of Islam from citadel to citadel.
+
+All the fires have gone out now. The yellow whin blazes upon the
+hillsides. The wild fig-tree splits the masonry. The scorpion lodges in
+the deserted chambers. On the fallen stone of the Crusaders' gate, where
+the Moslem victor has carved his Arabic inscription, a green-gray lizard
+poises motionless, like a bronze figure on a paper-weight.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Illustration: Bridge Over the River Litani.]
+
+We pass through the southern entrance of the village of Baniyas, a
+massive square portal, rebuilt by some Arab ruler, and go out on the
+old Roman bridge which spans the ravine. The aqueduct carried by the
+bridge is still full of flowing water, and the drops which fall from it
+in a fine mist make a little rainbow as the afternoon sun shines through
+the archway draped with maidenhair fern. On the stone pavement of the
+bridge we trace the ruts worn two thousand years ago by the chariots of
+the men who conquered the world. The chariots have all rolled by. On the
+broken edge of the tower above the gateway sits a ragged Bedouin boy,
+making shrill, plaintive music with his pipe of reeds.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We repose in front of our tents among the olive-trees at the close of
+the day. The cool sound of running streams and rustling poplars is on
+the moving air, and the orange-golden sunset enchants the orchard with
+mystical light. All the swift visions of striving Saracens and
+Crusaders, of conquering Greeks and Romans, fade away from us, and we
+see the figure of the Man of Nazareth with His little company of friends
+and disciples coming up from Galilee.
+
+It was here that Jesus retreated with His few faithful followers from
+the opposition of the Scribes and Pharisees. This was the northernmost
+spot of earth ever trodden by His feet, the longest distance from
+Jerusalem that He ever travelled. Here in this exquisite garden of
+Nature, in a region of the Gentiles, within sight of the shrines devoted
+to those Greek and Roman rites which were so luxurious and so tolerant,
+four of the most beautiful and significant events of His life and
+ministry took place.
+
+He asked His disciples plainly to tell their secret thought of Him--whom
+they believed their Master to be. And when Peter answered simply: "Thou
+art the Christ, the Son of the living God," Jesus blessed him for the
+answer, and declared that He would build His church upon that rock.
+
+Then He took Peter and James and John with Him and climbed one of the
+high and lonely slopes of Hermon. There He was transfigured before them,
+His face shining like the sun and His garments glistening like the snow
+on the mountain-peaks. But when they begged to stay there with Him, He
+led them down to the valley again, among the sinning and suffering
+children of men.
+
+At the foot of the mount of transfiguration He healed the demoniac boy
+whom his father had brought to the other disciples, but for whom they
+had been unable to do anything; and He taught them that the power to
+help men comes from faith and prayer.
+
+And then, at last, He turned His steps from this safe and lovely refuge,
+(where He might surely have lived in peace, or from which He might have
+gone out unmolested into the wide Gentile world), backward to His own
+country, His own people, the great, turbulent, hard-hearted Jewish city,
+and the fate which was not to be evaded by One who loved sinners and
+came to save them. He went down into Galilee, down through Samaria and
+Perea, down to Jerusalem, down to Gethsemane and to Golgotha,--fearless,
+calm,--sustained and nourished by that secret food which satisfied His
+heart in doing the will of God.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was in the quest of this Jesus, in the hope of somehow drawing nearer
+to Him, that we made our pilgrimage to the Holy Land. And now, in the
+cool of the evening at Caesarea Philippi, we ask ourselves whether our
+desire has been granted, our hope fulfilled?
+
+Yes, more richly, more wonderfully than we dared to dream. For we have
+found a new vision of Christ, simpler, clearer, more satisfying, in the
+freedom and reality of God's out-of-doors.
+
+Not through the mists and shadows of an infinite regret, the sadness of
+sweet, faded dreams and hopes that must be resigned, as Pierre Loti saw
+the phantom of a Christ whose irrevocable disappearance has left the
+world darker than ever!
+
+Not amid strange portents and mysterious rites, crowned with I know not
+what aureole of traditionary splendours, founder of elaborate ceremonies
+and centre of lamplit shrines, as Matilde Serao saw the image of that
+Christ whom the legends of men have honoured and obscured!
+
+The Jesus whom we have found is the Child of Nazareth playing among the
+flowers; the Man of Galilee walking beside the lake, healing the sick,
+comforting the sorrowful, cheering the lonely and despondent; the
+well-beloved Son of God transfigured in the sunset glow of snowy Hermon,
+weeping by the sepulchre in Bethany, agonizing in the moonlit garden of
+Gethsemane, giving His life for those who did not understand Him, though
+they loved Him, and for those who did not love Him because they did not
+understand Him, and rising at last triumphant over death,--such a
+Saviour as all men need and as no man could ever have imagined if He had
+not been real.
+
+His message has not died away, nor will it ever die. For confidence and
+calm joy He tells us to turn to Nature. For love and sacrifice He bids
+us live close to our fellowmen. For comfort and immortal hope He asks us
+to believe in Him and in our Father, God.
+
+That is all.
+
+But the bringing of that heavenly message made the country to which it
+came the Holy Land. And the believing of that message, to-day, will lead
+any child of man into the kingdom of heaven. And the keeping of that
+faith, the following of that Life, will transfigure any country beneath
+the blue sky into a holy land.
+
+
+_THE PSALM OF A SOJOURNER_
+
+_Thou hast taken me into the tent of the world, O God:
+Beneath thy blue canopy I have found shelter:
+Therefore thou wilt not deny me the right of a guest._
+
+_Naked and poor I arrived at the door before sunset:
+Thou hast refreshed me with beautiful bowls of milk:
+As a great chief thou hast set forth food in abundance._
+
+_I have loved the daily delights of thy dwelling:
+Thy moon and thy stars have lighted me to my bed:
+In the morning I have found joy with thy servants._
+
+_Surely thou wilt not send me away in the darkness?
+There the enemy Death is lying in wait for my soul:
+Thou art the host of my life and I claim thy protection._
+
+_Then the Lord of the tent of the world made answer:
+The right of a guest endureth but for an appointed time:
+After three days and three nights cometh the day of departure._
+
+_Yet hearken to me since thou fearest the foe in the dark:
+I will make with thee a new covenant of everlasting hospitality:
+Behold I will come unto thee as a stranger and be thy guest._
+
+_Poor and needy will I come that thou mayest entertain me:
+Meek and lowly will I come that thou mayest find a friend:
+With mercy and with truth will I come to give thee comfort._
+
+_Therefore open the door of thy heart and bid me welcome:
+In this tent of the world I will be thy brother of the bread:
+And when thou farest forth I will be thy companion forever._
+
+_Then my soul rested in the word of the Lord:
+And I saw that the curtains of the world were shaken,
+But I looked beyond them to the eternal camp-fires of my friend._
+
+
+
+
+                                XII
+
+                       THE ROAD TO DAMASCUS
+
+
+I
+
+THROUGH THE LAND OF THE DRUSES
+
+You may go to Damascus now by rail, if you like, and have a choice
+between two rival routes, one under government ownership, the other
+built and managed by a corporation. But to us encamped among the silvery
+olives at Baniyas, beside the springs of Jordan, it seemed a happy
+circumstance that both railways were so far away that it would have
+taken longer to reach them than to ride our horses straight into the
+city. We were delivered from the modern folly of trying to save time by
+travelling in a conveyance more speedy than picturesque, and left free
+to pursue our journey in a leisurely, independent fashion and by the
+road that would give us most pleasure. So we chose the longer way, the
+northern path around Mount Hermon, through the country of the Druses,
+instead of the more frequented road to the east by Kafr Hawar.
+
+How delightful is the morning of such a journey! The fresh face of the
+world bathed in sparkling dew; the greetings from tent to tent as we
+four friends make our rendezvous from the far countries of sleep; the
+relish of breakfast in the open air; the stir of the camp in preparation
+for a flitting; canvas sinking to the ground, bales and boxes heaped
+together, mule-bells tinkling through the grove, horses refreshed by
+their long rest whinnying and nipping at each other in play--all these
+are charming variations and accompaniments to the old tune of "Boots and
+Saddles."
+
+The immediate effect of such a setting out for a day's ride is to renew
+in the heart those "vital feelings of delight" which make one simply and
+inexplicably glad to be alive. We are delivered from those morbid
+questionings and exorbitant demands by which we are so often possessed
+and plagued as by some strange inward malady. We feel a sense of health
+and harmony diffused through body and mind as we ride over the beautiful
+terrace which slopes down from Baniyas to Tel-el Kadi.
+
+We are glad of the green valonia oaks that spread their shade over us,
+and of the blossoming hawthorns that scatter their flower-snow on the
+hillside. We are glad of the crested larks that rise warbling from the
+grass, and of the buntings and chaffinches that make their small merry
+music in every thicket, and of the black and white chats that shift
+their burden of song from stone to stone beside the path, and of the
+cuckoo that tells his name to us from far away, and of the splendid
+bee-eaters that glitter over us like a flock of winged emeralds as we
+climb the rocky hill toward the north. We are glad of the broom in
+golden flower, and of the pink and white rock-roses, and of the spicy
+fragrance of mint and pennyroyal that our horses trample out as they
+splash through the spring holes and little brooks. We are glad of the
+long, wide views westward over the treeless mountains of Naphtali and
+the southern ridges of the Lebanon, and of the glimpses of the ruined
+castles of the Crusaders, Kal'at esh-Shakif and Hunin, perched like
+dilapidated eagles on their distant crags. Everything seems to us like a
+personal gift. We have the feeling of ownership for this day of all the
+world's beauty. We could not explain or justify it to any sad
+philosopher who might reproach us for unreasoning felicity. We should be
+defenceless before his arguments and indifferent to his scorn. We should
+simply ride on into the morning, reflecting in our hearts something of
+the brightness of the birds' plumage, the cheerfulness of the brooks'
+song, the undimmed hyaline of the sky, and so, perhaps, fulfilling the
+Divine Intention of Nature as well as if we chose to becloud our mirror
+with melancholy thoughts.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We are following up the valley of the longest and highest, but not the
+largest, of the sources of the Jordan: the little River Hasbani, a
+strong and lovely stream, which rises somewhere in the northern end of
+the Wadi et-Teim, and flows along the western base of Mount Hermon,
+receiving the tribute of torrents which burst out in foaming springs far
+up the ravines, and are fed underground by the melting of the perpetual
+snow of the great mountain. Now and then we have to cross one of these
+torrents, by a rude stone bridge or by wading. All along the way Hermon
+looks down upon us from his throne, nine thousand feet in air. His head
+is wrapped in a turban of spotless white, like a Druse chieftain, and
+his snowy winter cloak still hangs down over his shoulders, though its
+lower edges are already fringed and its seams opened by the warm suns of
+April.
+
+Presently we cross a bridge to the west bank of the Hasbani, and ride up
+the delightful vale where poplars and mulberries, olives, almonds, vines
+and figs, grow abundantly along the course of the river. There are low
+weirs across the stream for purposes of irrigation, and a larger dam
+supplies a mill with power. To the left is the sharp barren ridge of the
+Jebel ez-Zohr separating us from the gorge of the River Litani. Groups
+of labourers are at work on the watercourses among the groves and
+gardens. Vine-dressers are busy in the vineyards. Ploughmen are driving
+their shallow furrows through the stony fields on the hillside. The
+little river, here in its friendliest mood, winds merrily among the
+plantations and orchards which it nourishes, making a cheerful noise
+over beds of pebbles, and humming a deeper note where the clear green
+water plunges over a weir.
+
+We have now been in the saddle five hours; the sun is ardent; the
+temperature is above eighty-five degrees in the shade, and along the
+bridle-path there is no shade. We are hungry, thirsty, and tired. As we
+cross the river again, splashing through a ford, our horses drink
+eagerly and attempt to lie down in the cool water. We have to use strong
+persuasion not only with them, but also with our own spirits, to pass by
+the green grass and the sheltering olive-trees on the east bank and push
+on up the narrow, rocky defile in which Hasbeiya is hidden. The
+bridle-path is partly paved with rough cobblestones, hard and slippery,
+which make the going weariful. The heat presses on us like a burden.
+Things that would have delighted us in the morning now give us no
+pleasure. We have made the greedy traveller's mistake of measuring our
+march by the extent of our endurance instead of by the limit of our
+enjoyment.
+
+Hasbeiya proves to be a rather thriving and picturesque town built
+around the steep sides of a bay or opening in the valley. The
+amphitheatre of hills is terraced with olive-orchards and vineyards.
+There are also many mulberry-trees cultivated for the silkworms, and the
+ever-present figs and almonds are not wanting. The stone houses of the
+town rise, on winding paths, one above the other, many of them having
+arched porticoes, red-tiled roofs, and green-latticed windows. It is a
+place of about five thousand population, now more than half Christian,
+but formerly one of the strongholds and capitals of the mysterious Druse
+religion.
+
+Our tents are pitched at the western end of the town, on a low terrace
+where olive-trees are growing. When we arrive we find the camp
+surrounded and filled with curious, laughing children. The boys are a
+little troublesome at first, but a word from an old man who seems to be
+in charge brings them to order, and at least fifty of them, big and
+little, squat in a semicircle on the grass below the terrace, watching
+us with their lustrous brown eyes.
+
+They look full of fun, those young Druses and Maronites and Greeks and
+Mohammedans, so I try a mild joke on them, by pretending that they are
+a class and that I am teaching them a lesson. "A, B, C," I chant, and
+wait for them to repeat after me. They promptly take the lesson out of
+my hands and recite the entire English alphabet in chorus, winding up
+with shouts of "Goot mornin'! How you do?" and merry laughter. They are
+all pupils from the mission schools which have been established since
+the great Massacre of 1860, and which are helping, I hope, to make
+another forever impossible.
+
+One of our objects in coming to Hasbeiya was to ascend Mount Hermon. We
+send for the Druse guide and the Christian guide; both of them assure us
+that the adventure is impossible on account of the deep snow, which has
+increased during the last fortnight. We can not get within a mile of the
+summit. The snow will be waist-deep in the hollows. The mountain is
+inaccessible until June. So, after exchanging visits with the
+missionaries and seeing something of their good work, we ride on our way
+the next morning.
+
+
+II
+
+RASHEIYA AND ITS AMERICANISM
+
+The journey to Rasheiya is like that of the preceding day, except that
+the bridle-paths are rougher and more precipitous, and the views wider
+and more splendid. We have crossed the Hasbani again, and leaving the
+Druses' valley, the Wadi et-Teim, behind us, have climbed the high
+table-land to the west. We did not know why George Cavalcanty led us
+away from the path marked in our Baedeker, but we took it for granted
+that he had some good reason. It is well not to ask a wise dragoman all
+the questions that you can think of. Tell him where you want to go, and
+let him show you how to get there. Certainly we are not inclined to
+complain of the longer and steeper route by which he has brought us,
+when we sit down at lunch-time among the limestone crags and pinnacles
+of the wild upland and look abroad upon a landscape which offers the
+grandeur of immense outlines and vast distances, the beauty of a crystal
+clearness in all its infinitely varied forms, and the enchantment of
+gemlike colours, delicate, translucent, vivid, shifting and playing in
+hues of rose and violet and azure and purple and golden brown and bright
+green, as if the bosom of Mother Earth were the breast of a dove,
+breathing softly in the sunlight.
+
+As we climb toward Rasheiya we find ourselves going back a month or more
+into early spring. Here are the flowers that we saw in the Plain of
+Sharon on the first of April, gorgeous red anemones, fragrant purple and
+white cyclamens, delicate blue irises. The fig-tree is putting forth her
+tender leaf. The vines, lying flat on the ground, are bare and dormant.
+The springing grain, a few inches long, is in its first flush of almost
+dazzling green.
+
+The town, built in terraces on three sides of a rocky hill, 4,100 feet
+above the sea, commands an extensive view. Hermon is in full sight;
+snow-capped Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon face each other for forty miles;
+and the little lake of Kafr Kuk makes a spot of blue light in the
+foreground.
+
+We are camped on the threshing-floor, a level meadow beyond and below
+the town; and there the Rasheiyan gilded youth come riding their
+blooded horses in the afternoon, running races over the smooth turf and
+showing off their horsemanship for our benefit.
+
+There is something very attractive about these Arabian horses as you see
+them in their own country. They are spirited, fearless, sure-footed, and
+yet, as a rule, so docile that they may be ridden with a halter. They
+are good for a long journey, or a swift run, or a _fantasia_. The
+prevailing colour among them is gray, but you see many bays and sorrels
+and a few splendid blacks. An Arabian stallion satisfies the romantic
+ideal of how a horse ought to look. His arched neck, small head, large
+eyes wide apart, short body, round flanks, delicate pasterns, and little
+feet; the way he tosses his mane and cocks his flowing tail when he is
+on parade; the swiftness and spring of his gallop, the dainty grace of
+his walk--when you see these things you recognise at once the real,
+original horse which the painters used to depict in their "Portraits of
+General X on his Favourite Charger."
+
+I asked Calvalcanty what one of these fine creatures would cost. "A good
+horse, two or three hundred dollars; an extra-good one, four hundred; a
+fancy one, who knows?"
+
+We find Rasheiya full of Americanism. We walk out to take photographs,
+and at almost every street corner some young man who has been in the
+United States or Canada salutes us with: "How are you to-day? You
+fellows come from America? What's the news there? Is Bryan elected yet?
+I voted for McKinley. I got a store in Kankakee. I got one in Jackson,
+Miss." A beautiful dark-eyed girl, in a dreadful department-store dress,
+smiles at us from an open door and says: "Take my picture? I been at
+America."
+
+One talkative and friendly fellow joins us in our walk; in fact he takes
+possession of us, guiding us up the crooked alleys and out on the
+housetops which command the best views, and showing us off to his
+friends,--an old gentleman who is spinning goats' hair for the coarse
+black tents (St. Paul's trade), and two ladies who are grinding corn in
+a hand-mill, one pushing and the other pulling. Our self-elected guide
+has spent seven years in Illinois and Indiana, peddling and
+store-keeping. He has returned to Rasheiya as a successful adventurer
+and built a stone house with a red roof and an arched portico. Is he
+going to settle down there for life? "I not know," says he. "Guess I
+want sell my house now. This country beautiful; I like look at her. But
+America free--good government--good place to live. Gee whiz! I go back
+quick, you bet."
+
+
+III
+
+ANTI-LEBANON AND THE RIVER ABANA
+
+Our path the next day leads up to the east over the ridges of the slight
+depression which lies between Mount Hermon and the rest of the
+Anti-Lebanon range. We pass the disconsolate village and lake of Kafr
+Kuk. The water which shone so blue in the distance now confesses itself
+a turbid, stagnant pool, locked in among the hills, and breeding fevers
+for those who live beside it. The landscape grows wild and sullen as we
+ascend; the hills are strewn with shattered fragments of rock, or worn
+into battered and fantastic crags; the bottoms of the ravines are
+soaked and barren as if the winter floods had just left them. Presently
+we are riding among great snowdrifts. It is the first day of May. We
+walk on the snow, and pack a basketful on one of the mules, and pelt
+each other with snowballs.
+
+We have gone back another month in the calendar and are now at the place
+where "winter lingers in the lap of spring." Snowdrops, crocuses, and
+little purple grape-hyacinths are blooming at the edge of the drifts.
+The thorny shrubs and bushes, and spiny herbs like astragalus and
+cousinia, are green-stemmed but leafless, and the birds that flutter
+among them are still in the first rapture of vernal bliss, the gay music
+that follows mating and precedes nesting. Big dove-coloured partridges,
+beautifully marked with black and red, are running among the rocks. We
+are at the turn of the year, the surprising season when the tide of
+light and life and love swiftly begins to rise.
+
+From this Alpine region we descend through two months in half a day. It
+is mid-March on a beautiful green plain where herds of horses were
+feeding around an encampment of black Bedouin tents; the beginning of
+April at Khan Meithelun, on the post-road, where there are springs, and
+poplar-groves, in one of which we eat our lunch, with lemonade cooled by
+the snows of Hermon; the end of April at Dimas, where we find our tents
+pitched upon the threshing-floor, a levelled terrace of clay looking
+down upon the flat roofs of the village.
+
+Our camp is 3,600 feet above sea-level, and our morning path follows the
+telegraph-poles steeply down to the post-road, and so by a more gradual
+descent along the hard and dusty turnpike toward Damascus. The
+landscape, at first, is bare and arid: rounded reddish mountains, gray
+hillsides, yellowish plains faintly tinged with a thin green. But at
+El-Hami the road drops into the valley of the Barada, the far-famed
+River Abana, and we find ourselves in a verdant paradise.
+
+Tall trees arch above the road; white balconies gleam through the
+foliage; the murmur and the laughter of flowing streams surround us. The
+railroad and the carriage-road meet and cross each other down the vale.
+Country houses and cafes, some dingy and dilapidated, others new and
+trim, are half hidden among the groves or perched close beside the
+highway. Poplars and willows, plane-trees and lindens, walnuts and
+mulberries, apricots and almonds, twisted fig-trees and climbing roses,
+grow joyfully wherever the parcelled water flows in its many channels.
+Above this line, on the sides of the vale, everything is bare and brown
+and dry. But the depth of the valley is an embroidered sash of bloom
+laid across the sackcloth of the desert. And in the centre of this long
+verdure runs the parent river, a flood of clear green; rushing, leaping,
+curling into white foam; filling its channel of thirty or forty feet
+from bank to bank, and making the silver-leafed willows and poplars,
+that stand with their feet in the stream, tremble with the swiftness of
+its cool, strong current. Truly Naaman the Syrian was right in his
+boasting to the prophet Elisha: Abana, the river of Damascus, is better
+than all the waters of Israel.
+
+The vale narrows as we descend along the stream, until suddenly we pass
+through a gateway of steep cliffs and emerge upon an open plain beset
+with mountains on three sides. The river, parting into seven branches,
+goes out to water a hundred and fifty square miles of groves and
+gardens, and we follow the road through the labyrinth of rich and
+luscious green. There are orchards of apricots enclosed with high mud
+walls; and open gates through which we catch glimpses of crimson
+rose-trees and scarlet pomegranates and little fields of wheat glowing
+with blood-red poppies; and hedges of white hawthorn and wild brier; and
+trees, trees, trees, everywhere embowering us and shutting us in.
+
+Presently we see, above the leafy tops, a sharp-pointed minaret with a
+golden crescent above it. Then we find ourselves again beside the main
+current of the Barada, running swift and merry in a walled channel
+straight across an open common, where soldiers are exercising their
+horses, and donkeys and geese are feeding, and children are playing, and
+dyers are sprinkling their long strips of blue cotton cloth laid out
+upon the turf beside the river. The road begins to look like the
+commencement of a street; domes and minarets rise before us; there are
+glimpses of gray walls and towers, a few shops and open-air cafes, a
+couple of hotel signs. The river dives under a bridge and disappears by
+a hundred channels beneath the city, leaving us at the western entrance
+of Damascus.
+
+
+IV
+
+THE CITY THAT A LITTLE RIVER MADE
+
+I cannot tell whether the river, the gardens, and the city would have
+seemed so magical and entrancing if we had come upon them in some other
+way or seen them in a different setting. You can never detach an
+experience from its matrix and weigh it alone. Comparisons with the
+environs of Naples or Florence visited in an automobile, or with the
+suburbs of Boston seen from a trolley-car, are futile and
+unilluminating.
+
+The point about the Barada is that it springs full-born from the barren
+sides of the Anti-Lebanon, swiftly creates a paradise as it runs, and
+then disappears absolutely in a wide marsh on the edge of the desert.
+
+The point about Damascus is that she flourishes on a secluded plain,
+the Ghutah, seventy miles from the sea and twenty-three hundred feet
+above it, with no _hinterland_ and no sustaining provinces, no political
+leadership, and no special religious sanctity, with nothing, in fact, to
+account for her distinction, her splendour, her populous vitality, her
+self-sufficing charm, except her mysterious and enduring quality as a
+mere city, a hive of men. She is the oldest living city in the world; no
+one knows her birthday or her founder's name. She has survived the
+empires and kingdoms which conquered her,--Nineveh, Babylon, Samaria,
+Greece, Egypt--their capitals are dust, but Damascus still blooms "like
+a tree planted by the rivers of water." She has given her name to the
+reddest of roses, the sweetest of plums, the richest of metalwork, and
+the most lustrous of silks; her streets have bubbled and eddied with the
+currents of
+
+            the multitudinous folk
+  That do inhabit her and make her great.
+
+She is the typical city, pure and simple, of the Orient, as New York or
+San Francisco is of the Occident: the open port on the edge of the
+desert, the trading-booth at the foot of the mountains, the pavilion in
+the heart of the blossoming bower,--the wonderful child of a little
+river and an immemorial Spirit of Place.
+
+Every time we go into the city, (whether from our tents on the terrace
+above an ancient and dilapidated pleasure-garden, or from our red-tiled
+rooms in the good Hotel d'Orient, to which we had been driven by a
+plague of sand-flies in the camp), we step at once into a chapter of the
+"Arabian Nights' Entertainments."
+
+It is true, there are electric lights and there is a trolley-car
+crawling around the city; but they no more make it Western and modern
+than a bead necklace would change the character of the Venus of Milo.
+The driver of the trolley-car looks like one of "The Three Calenders,"
+and a gayly dressed little boy beside him blows loudly on an instrument
+of discord as the machine tranquilly advances through the crowd. (A man
+was run over a few months ago; his friends waited for the car to come
+around the next day, pulled the driver from his perch, and stuck a
+number of long knives through him in a truly Oriental manner.)
+
+The crowd itself is of the most indescribable and engaging variety and
+vivacity. The Turkish soldiers in dark uniform and red fez; the
+cheerful, grinning water-carriers with their dripping, bulbous goatskins
+on their backs; the white-turbaned Druses with their bold, clean-cut
+faces; the bronzed, impassive sons of the desert, with their flowing
+mantles and bright head-cloths held on by thick, dark rolls of camel's
+hair; the rich merchants in their silken robes of many colours; the
+picturesquely ragged beggars; the Moslem pilgrims washing their heads
+and feet, with much splashing, at the pools in the marble courtyards of
+the mosques; the merry children, running on errands or playing with the
+water that gushes from many a spout at the corner of a street or on the
+wall of a house; the veiled Mohammedan women slipping silently through
+the throng, or bending over the trinkets or fabrics in some open-fronted
+shop, lifting the veil for a moment to show an olive-tinted cheek and a
+pair of long, liquid brown eyes; the bearded Greek priests in their
+black robes and cylinder hats; the Christian women wrapped in their long
+white sheets, but with their pretty faces uncovered, and a red rose or a
+white jasmine stuck among their smooth, shining black tresses; the
+seller of lemonade with his gaily decorated glass vessel on his back and
+his clinking brass cups in his hand, shouting, "_A remedy for the
+heat_,"--"_Cheer up your hearts_,"--"_Take care of your teeth_;" the boy
+peddling bread, with an immense tray of thin, flat loaves on his head,
+crying continually to Allah to send him customers; the seller of
+turnip-pickle with a huge pink globe upon his shoulder looking like the
+inside of a pale watermelon; the donkeys pattering along between fat
+burdens of grass or charcoal; a much-bedizened horseman with embroidered
+saddle-cloth and glittering bridle, riding silent and haughty through
+the crowd as if it did not exist; a victoria dashing along the street at
+a trot, with whip cracking like a pack of firecrackers, and shouts of,
+"_O boy! Look out for your back! your foot! your side!_"--all these
+figures are mingled in a passing show of which we never grow weary.
+
+The long bazaars, covered with a round, wooden archway rising from the
+second story of the houses, are filled with a rich brown hue like a
+well-coloured meerschaum pipe; and through this mellow, brumous
+atmosphere beams of golden sunlight slant vividly from holes in the
+roof. An immense number of shops, small and great, shelter themselves in
+these bazaars, for the most part opening, without any reserve of a front
+wall or a door, in frank invitation to the street. On the earthen
+pavement, beaten hard as cement, camels are kneeling, while the
+merchants let down their corded bales and display their Persian carpets
+or striped silks. The cook-shops show their wares and their processes,
+and send up an appetising smell of lamb _kibabs_ and fried fish and
+stuffed cucumbers and stewed beans and okra, and many other dainties
+preparing on diminutive charcoal grills.
+
+In the larger and richer shops, arranged in semi-European fashion, there
+are splendid rugs, and embroideries old and new, and delicately
+chiselled brasswork, and furniture of strange patterns lavishly inlaid
+with mother-of-pearl; and there I go with the Lady to study the art of
+bargaining as practised between the trained skill of the Levant and the
+native genius of Walla Walla, Washington. In the smaller and poorer
+bazaars the high, arched roofs give place to tattered awnings, and
+sometimes to branches of trees; the brown air changes to an atmosphere
+of brilliant stripes and patches; the tiny shops, (hardly more than open
+booths), are packed and festooned with all kinds of goods, garments and
+ornaments: the chafferers conduct their negotiations from the street,
+(sidewalk there is none), or squat beside the proprietor on the little
+platform of his stall.
+
+[Illustration: A Small Bazaar in Damascus.]
+
+The custom of massing the various trades and manufactures adds to the
+picturesque joy of shopping or dawdling in Damascus. It is like passing
+through rows of different kinds of strange fruits. There is a region of
+dangling slippers, red and yellow, like cherries; a little farther on we
+come to a long trellis of clothes, limp and pendulous, like bunches of
+grapes; then we pass through a patch of saddles, plain and coloured,
+decorated with all sorts of beads and tinsel, velvet and morocco, lying
+on the ground or hung on wooden supports, like big, fantastic melons.
+
+In the coppersmiths' bazaar there is an incessant clattering of little
+hammers upon hollow metal. The goldsmiths sit silent in their pens
+within a vast, dim building, or bend over their miniature furnaces
+making gold and silver filigree. Here are the carpenters using their
+bare feet in their work almost as deftly as their fingers; and yonder
+the dyers festooning their long strips of blue cotton from their windows
+and balconies. Down there, on the way to the Great Mosque, the
+booksellers hold together: a dwindling tribe, apparently, for of the
+thirty or forty shops which were formerly theirs not more than half a
+dozen remain true to literature: the rest are full of red and yellow
+slippers. Damascus is more inclined to loafing or to dancing than to
+reading. It seems to belong to the gay, smiling, easy-going East of
+Scheherazade and Aladdin, not to the sombre and reserved Orient of
+fierce mystics and fanatical fatalists.
+
+Yet we feel, or imagine that we feel, the hidden presence of passions
+and possibilities that belong to the tragic side of life underneath
+this laughing mask of comedy. No longer ago than 1860, in the great
+Massacre, five thousand Christians perished by fire and shot and dagger
+in two days; the streets ran with blood; the churches were piled with
+corpses; hundreds of Christian women were dragged away to Moslem harems;
+only the brave Abd-el-Kader, with his body-guard of dauntless Algerine
+veterans, was able to stay the butchery by flinging himself between the
+blood-drunken mob and their helpless victims.
+
+This was the last wholesale assassination of modern times that a great
+city has seen, and prosperous, pleasure-loving, insouciant Damascus
+seems to have quite forgotten it. Yet there are still enough wild
+Kurdish shepherds, and fierce Bedouins of the desert, and riffraff of
+camel-drivers and herdsmen and sturdy beggars and homeless men, among
+her three hundred thousand people to make dangerous material if the
+tiger-madness should break loose again. A gay city is not always a safe
+city. The Lady and I saw a man stabbed to death at noon, not fifty feet
+away from us, in a street beside the Ottoman Bank.
+
+Nothing is safe until justice and benevolence and tolerance and mutual
+respect are diffused in the hearts of men. How far this inward change
+has gone in Damascus no one can tell. But that some advance has been
+made, by real reforms in the Turkish government, by the spread of
+intelligence and the enlightenment of self-interest, by the sense of
+next-doorness to Paris and Berlin and London, which telegraphs,
+railways, and steamships have produced, above all by the useful work of
+missionary hospitals and schools, and by the humanizing process which
+has been going on inside of all the creeds, no careful observer can
+doubt. I fear that men will still continue to kill each other, for
+various causes, privately and publicly. But thank God it is not likely
+to be done often, if ever again, in the name of Religion!
+
+The medley of things seen and half understood has left patterns
+damascened upon my memory with intricate clearness: immense droves of
+camels coming up from the wilderness to be sold in the market; factories
+of inlaid woodwork and wrought brasswork in which hundreds of young
+children, with beautiful and seeming-merry faces, are hammering and
+filing and cutting out the designs traced by the draughtsmen who sit at
+their desks like schoolmasters; vast mosques with rows of marble
+columns, and floors covered with bright-coloured rugs, and files of men,
+sometimes two hundred in a line, with a leader in front of them, making
+their concerted genuflections toward Mecca; costly interiors of private
+houses which outwardly show bare white-washed walls, but within welcome
+the stranger to hospitality of fruits, coffee, and sweetmeats, in
+stately rooms ornamented with rich tiles and precious marbles, looking
+upon arcaded courtyards fragrant with blossoming orange-trees and
+musical with tinkling fountains; tombs of Moslem warriors and
+saints,--Saladin, the Sultan Beibars, the Sheikh Arslan, the philosopher
+Ibn-el-Arabi, great fighters now quiet, and restless thinkers finally
+satisfied; public gardens full of rose-bushes, traversed by clear, swift
+streams, where groups of women sit gossiping in the shade of the trees
+or in little kiosques, the Mohammedans with their light veils not
+altogether hiding their olive faces and languid eyes, the Christians
+and Jewesses with bare heads, heavy necklaces of amber, flowers behind
+their ears, silken dresses of soft and varied shades; cafes by the
+river, where grave and important Turks pose for hours on red velvet
+divans, smoking the successive cigarette or the continuous nargileh. Out
+of these memory-pictures of Damascus I choose three.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Lady and I are climbing up from the great Mosque of the Ommayyades
+into the Minaret of the Bride, at the hour of 'Asr, or afternoon prayer.
+As we tread the worn spiral steps in the darkness we hear, far above,
+the chant of the choir of muezzins, high-pitched, long-drawn, infinitely
+melancholy, calling the faithful to their devotions.
+
+"_Allah akbar! Allah akbar! Allah is great! I testify there is no God
+but Allah, and Mohammed is the prophet of Allah! Come to prayer!_"
+
+The plaintive notes float away over the city toward all four quarters of
+the sky, and quaver into silence. We come out from the gloom of the
+staircase into the dazzling light of the balcony which runs around the
+top of the minaret. For a few moments we can see little; but when the
+first bewilderment passes, we are conscious that all the charm and
+wonder of Damascus are spread at our feet.
+
+The oval mass of the city lies like a carving of old ivory, faintly
+tinged with pink, on a huge table of malachite. The setting of groves
+and gardens, luxuriant, interminable, deeply and beautifully green,
+covers a circuit of sixty miles. Beyond it, in sharpest contrast, rise
+the bare, fawn-coloured mountains, savage, intractable, desolate; away
+to the west, the snow-crowned bulk of Hermon; away to the east, the
+low-rolling hills and slumbrous haze of the desert. Under these flat
+roofs and white domes and long black archways of bazaars three hundred
+thousand folk are swarming. And there, half emerging from the huddle of
+decrepit modern buildings and partly hidden by the rounded shed of a
+bazaar, is the ruined top of a Roman arch of triumph, battered, proud,
+and indomitable.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+An hour later we are scrambling up a long, shaky ladder to the flat
+roofs of the joiners' bazaar, built close against the southern wall of
+the Mosque. We walk across the roofs and find the ancient south door of
+the Mosque, now filled up with masonry, and almost completely concealed
+by the shops above which we are standing. Only the entablature is
+visible, richly carved with garlands. Kneeling down, we read upon the
+lintel the Greek inscription in uncial letters, cut when the Mosque was
+a Christian church. The Moslems who are bowing and kneeling and
+stretching out their hands toward Mecca among the marble pillars below,
+know nothing of this inscription. Few even of the Christian visitors to
+Damascus have ever seen it with their own eyes, for it is difficult to
+find and read. But there it still endures and waits, the bravest
+inscription in the world: "_Thy kingdom, O Christ, is a kingdom of all
+ages, and Thy dominion lasts throughout all generations._"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+From this eloquent and forgotten stone my memory turns to the Hospital
+of the Edinburgh Medical Mission. I see the lovely garden full of roses,
+columbines, lilies, pansies, sweet-peas, strawberries just in bloom. I
+see the poor people coming in a steady stream to the neat, orderly
+dispensary; the sweet, clean wards with their spotless beds; the
+merciful candour and completeness of the operating-room; the patient,
+cheerful, vigorous, healing ways of the great Scotch doctor, who limps
+around on his broken leg to minister to the needs of other folk. I see
+the little group of nurses and physicians gathered on Sunday evening in
+the doctor's parlour for an hour of serious, friendly talk, hopeful and
+happy. And there, amid the murmur of Abana's rills, and close to the
+confused and glittering mystery of the Orient, I hear the music of a
+simple hymn:
+
+   "Dear Lord and Father of mankind,
+     Forgive our foolish ways!
+   Reclothe us in our rightful mind,
+   In purer lives thy service find,
+     In deeper reverence, praise.
+
+   "O Sabbath rest by Galilee!
+     O calm of hills above,
+   Where Jesus knelt to share with Thee
+   The silence of eternity
+     Interpreted by love!
+
+   "Drop thy still dews of quietness,
+     Till all our strivings cease;
+   Take from our souls the strain and stress,
+   And let our ordered lives confess
+     The beauty of Thy peace."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+Corrections made to printed original.
+
+p. 6, 'Eygpt' corrected to 'Egypt'.
+
+p. 167, 'is is camelet' corrected to 'is it camelet'.
+
+p. 182, 'acqueducts' corrected to 'aqueducts'.
+
+p. 190, added a period after 'generations to build'.
+
+p. 277, added a period after 'immemorial charm about the place'.
+
+
+
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