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.