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."