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?