Mohammed can do less than Mammon to-day for the infidel's ease and
comfort in Palestine. The unholy little yellow god works his modern
miracles even in the Holy Land. You have but to speak the word, and show
your purse or letter of credit, in Beirut or Jaffa, and, as suddenly as
if you had rubbed Aladdin's lamp, a retinue will be at your door to do
your bidding. First a dragoman, with great baggy trousers of silk, a
little gold-embroidered jacket over a colored vest, a girdle whose most
ample folds form an arsenal of no mean proportions, and over the swarthy
face, reposing among the black, glossy curls of a well-poised head, the
red Turkish fez; or, if Ali has an ambition to be thought possessed of
much piety of the orthodox Islamic type, the fez gives way to a turban,
white, or green if he be a pilgrim from Mecca. Behind this important
personage, as much a feature of the East as the Sphinx or the Pyramids,
stand at a respectful distance, making profound salutations, a
cook,--probably a Greek or Italian,--three muleteers, and a donkey-boy.
Behind them still are two horses,--alas! not blooded Arabs madly
champing their bits,--one for yourself and the other for Ali. Three
mules bear patiently on their backs, always more or less raw, the canvas
and poles of the two tents. In the rear is a small donkey, covered all
over with culinary utensils, nibbling fat cactus-leaves with undisguised
satisfaction. For a daily expenditure scarcely greater than is necessary
to keep soul and body together at a fashionable New York hotel on the
American plan, you become the commander of this company, within certain
limits around which there are lines as definite and as impassable as if
drawn by an Irish servant of some years' experience in the United
States. You must not travel more than thirty miles a day; you must not
change the route agreed upon, unless roads become impassable; and there
are other, minor regulations, to which you are expected to submit, and,
if you do, your progress through the land, if not triumphant, will be at
least comfortable. You will find every day at noon, spread under some
wide-armed tree, a cold lunch that even a somewhat difficult taste would
consider fairly appetizing; and at nightfall you dismount before the
door of your tent and sit down to a dinner of many courses, which to a
stomach jounced for ten hours over a saddle seems a very fair dinner
indeed. Your breakfast is what a Frenchman would call a _déjeûner à la
fourchette_; and as you put down your napkin, your tent is folded almost
as quickly and as silently, and you mount your horse, standing ready for
another thirty miles. Yet, if you have just come from Egypt and three
months on a dahabeah, you will not hesitate to call this luxurious mode
of passing from Dan to Beersheba "roughing it in Palestine."
But it was my good fortune, after journeying from Beirut to Jerusalem
with dragoman and muleteers and tents, like a prince, to go up through
the country like a private citizen. I fell in with a young man in the
Holy City, bora of American parents at Sidon, who had been educated in
America and was now on his way back to his birthplace to spend his life
in the sacred fields as a missionary. He was thoroughly equipped for
roughing it, with a splendid physique and perfect health, imperturbable
spirits, and a rare command of classic and vernacular Arabic. He wanted
to go to Beirut with as few _impedimenta_ as possible, and, after some
talk, we merged our two parties into one. Our preparations for the
journey were of the simplest sort. We agreed to dispense with dragomans
and cooks and tents and trust to the land for food and shelter. We
engaged three good horses and a muleteer. We strapped our baggage on
the muleteer's horse, drew lots for the choice of the other two, and
turned our faces northward.
It was long before daybreak, one Monday morning, when we stole quietly
out of the Jaffa gate and took the road for Nablous. We were leaving
behind us the most sacred spot on earth to Jew, Catholic, Greek, and
Protestant; but from the road that stretches out before the Jaffa gate
all the holy places of Jerusalem are invisible. The round dome over the
Sepulchre was hidden behind the city's wall and the intervening houses.
The Dome of the Rock, as the beautiful mosque of Omar is called, the
most striking and brilliant object of the whole city from the Damascus
gate, is beneath the hill of Golgotha. Only the Valley of Hinnom, and
the Hill of Evil Counsel, and the slopes leading to Bethlehem, caught
our parting gaze. But an American Protestant turns his back upon the
Holy City with a very different feeling from that of the old Crusaders.
He cannot see the Turkish Mohammedan soldiers guarding the tomb of
Christ without a choking sensation in the throat, but he believes that
life has nobler battles for him than fighting the unbeliever for the
empty sepulchre of his Lord. The surroundings of all the sacred places
are so inharmonious that, while he can never regret his pilgrimage, he
can scarcely regret that it is over. We rose in our saddles, and,
turning, took our last look at the Holy City with very mingled emotions,
and then settled down to the hard day's work before us.
We were on the great pilgrim-route, which twenty centuries ago was
annually crowded with pilgrims from the north hastening to Jerusalem for
the Passover feast. The Child of Nazareth, when, at the age of twelve,
he went for the first time to the Temple, must have pressed this road
with his sacred feet, must have looked with deep, inquiring eyes upon
these fields and hills. There was enough in the early hour and the
associations of the scenes through which we were passing to keep us for
a long time silent. My horse stumbled and brought us both back from
Dreamland. A look ahead showed us--for the sun was now above the
hills--that the worst piece of road in Palestine was just before us. It
is wholly unartificial: for years no human hand has touched it, except
as mine did when, on dismounting and undertaking to pick my way over the
rocks, I found myself on all-fours. In fact, this Oriental boulevard is
made up for some distance entirely of boulders, round and sharp,
triangular and square, which the spring freshets of the last five or six
decades were regretfully obliged to leave behind. After a short halt for
lunch, about two o'clock, the muleteer assured us, on starting again, we
had still five hours of steady pushing before us, and said something in
the same breath about robbers. Men of his class all through the East are
notorious cowards; but we had been told in Jerusalem that such dangers
were not altogether imaginary, and, almost as our guide spoke, we heard
shrieks, and for a moment we all thought the nefarious crew were at
their work just ahead. The muleteer dropped mysteriously to the rear,
and we rode on over a slight ascent, and there we saw a tall Samaritan
exerting himself in a way most unlike the good one of the parable. He
appeared to be a man of importance,--probably a sheik. His horse, tied
to a little tree, was a very handsome one, and gayly decked out with red
leather and ribbons. He had hold of the hind legs of a poor little goat,
and was intent on pulling the creature away from a smaller man, much
more poorly dressed, whose hands had a death-like grip of the horns. I
was for setting lance in rest and charging to the rescue; but my more
cautious friend put one or two questions to the sheik, who told, in a
somewhat jerky style,--perhaps the result of the strugglings of the goat
and the man at the other end of him,--as straightforward a story as was
possible under the circumstances. He was the proprietor of the hut the
owner of the goat lived in. He had come to collect his lawful rent, and
he knew the money was ready, but he couldn't get it, and so had seized
the only movable object of any value. The poor wretch, who still had
the goat by the horns, denied the story, but in such a way that we
feared he would only injure his conscience by other prevarications if we
encouraged him. So we rode on; and in less than half an hour the sheik
swept proudly by us, with no goat slung over his shoulders, but as he
passed he shot out a single word, that told, like Caesar's _vici_, the
whole story of his victory.
The muleteer of Palestine will start on a journey at almost any hour of
the morning, but he has a superstitious dread of the darkness that falls
after sunset, and our Hassan was now too frightened to make any answer
to our questions except a short, tremulous half threat, half entreaty to
hurry. We were riding along the valley between Gerizim and Ebal. We had
left Joseph's tomb, and Jacob's well, where our Lord, wearied with his
journey, as we were with ours, sat and rested as he talked with a woman
who had come from the town toward which we were hurrying. The two
mountains, their sides covered with fig-trees and olives, loomed up
dimly out of the twilight on either side. We thought of the day when the
hosts of Israel were encamped here and the antiphonal choirs chanted
blessings from Gerizim and curses from Ebal in the ears of the vastest
congregation ever gathered on earth. There was no sound now of blessing
or cursing. The very stillness was oppressive. Hassan almost ceased to
breathe, and it was not till our horses' hoofs rang on the rough
pavement of Nablous--the ancient Shechem--that he relaxed his muscles
and gave a long sigh of relief.
We rode at once to the Latin convent, where we felt sure of a cordial
reception and a comfortable bed. There was no light anywhere in the
gloomy building; but Hassan knocked at the great door, confidently at
first, and then angrily. At last came an Arab youth about nineteen, who
stuck one eye in the crack of the door, and asked our business.
"Yes," he said, "you stay here all night, but go away early in the
morning."
This was definite, if not hospitable; but we went in, and asked to see
the monks.
"None here," said the Arab, with a chuckle: "all gone to Tiberias." We
ordered dinner, and, after half an hour, the Arab brought a saucer
holding two boiled eggs, put it on a chair, and said, "There's your
dinner." We were indignant, but it did no good: this boy was the head of
the house for the time, and neither promises nor threats were of any
avail to add anything, besides a little salt and pepper, to the dinner
he had prepared. We went to bed very hungry, but very tired, and in the
morning, before breakfast, hunted out the house of an English
missionary, who took pity on us and gave us to eat. But it is an unusual
thing for any one to leave Nablous without having an experience of some
sort more or less disagreeable to fasten the name of the place in his
recollection. When the brilliant author of "Eothen" sojourned for a day
or two in this "hot furnace of Mohammedanism," as he calls it, the whole
Greek population chose him as an involuntary deliverer of a young
Christian maiden who had been perverted by rich gifts to the faith of
Islam, or at least to a belief that a rich Mohammedan was to be
preferred as a husband to a poor Christian. They stare upon you now, as
they did then, as you walk through the streets and bazaars, "with fixed,
glassy look, which seemed to say, God is God, but how marvellous and
inscrutable are his ways, that thus he permits the white-faced dog of a
Christian to hunt through the paths of the faithful!"
We went, of course, to the little Samaritan synagogue, to see the famous
copy of the Pentateuch, whose age no man knoweth. We rode up the steep
slopes of Gerizim to the ruins of the temple where the woman of Samaria
said her fathers had always worshipped, and then, in a pouring rain, we
started for Jenin. Hassan sunk his head down in a huge Oriental cloak,
undoubtedly manufactured in Birmingham or Manchester, and his horse,
left to himself, lost his way, for a Palestine road may at any time,
like a Western trail, turn into a squirrel's track and run up a tree.
When we found ourselves again we were all wet and not in the best of
humor, but in sight of the old city of Samaria on her high hills.
The magnificent capital of Ahab and Jezebel, we saw at a glance, is now
only a ruined, dirty village, where a European could not hope for
shelter for a night. The hills sank into a heavy plain that seemed
interminable. The short twilight faded into untempered darkness. Hassan
was again in the rear. He would have fled incontinently at the first
sign of danger. Our only consolation was that his horse was tired and he
couldn't get very far away from us under any circumstances. I had a
letter to a Christian at Jenin that was thought to be good for supper
and lodging. We filed through the muddy streets to the door of the
Christian's house, sent in the letter by Hassan, and a man came out,
saluted us, told us to follow and he would take us to "a most
comfortable place." When we stopped, it was before the door of a little
mud hut. An old woman opened it, but, before letting us in, fixed the
price we were to pay. We entered a room that did service for the entire
wants of our hostess. It was very small, but it could not have been made
larger without knocking out the sidewalls of her house. The floor was of
dry mud, and there was nothing to sit upon except our saddles. We supped
from the bread and meat our good missionary friend had given us, and,
rolling ourselves in our blankets, we slept; but not long. The mud
beneath us was not that dull, inanimate, clog-like thing we trample
thoughtlessly under our feet along our country roads: it was that sort
of matter in which Tyndale thought he could discern "the form and
potency of life." They were both there, and in the still darkness they
made themselves felt. My friend, for some mysterious reason, was left
untouched, but the regiments that should have quartered on him joined
those that were banqueting on my too unsolid flesh. My sufferings were
but slightly mitigated by the remembrance that probably the progenitors
of these fierce feeders on human blood may have dined as sumptuously on
prophets and apostles, and that, intense as my anguish was, the chances
were against any fatal termination. I rose often and went to the door,
hoping for the morning, but it came not. Each time on returning to my
couch I found the number of my tormentors had been augmented: so I kept
still, like an Indian at the stake, and only refrained for my friend's
sake from singing a triumphant song as I found myself growing used to
the pain and at last able to sleep a troubled sort of sleep, such as
Damiens may have had on the rack. When I showed my arms in the morning
to Hassan, he lifted his eyes to heaven and muttered a prayer to Allah,
of which I thought I could divine the meaning.
Our ride that day was across the great plain of Esdraelon. We were
charitable enough to believe that travellers who have raved over the
exquisite beauty of this valley, who tell of "the green meadow-land
flaming with masses of red anemones," of "myriads of nodding daisies,"
and of "sheets of burning azure in the sun," did actually look upon all
these splendors in the early spring; but it was January now, and we
seemed to be pushing our way through a sea of dull, dead brown. The
ground was soft with the winter rains, and our horses' feet sank to the
fetlocks and gathered huge balls of the thick adhesive earth, deposited
every hundred yards or so to give place to others. We rode through the
dirty little village of Nain, where once a widow's son, carried out to
burial, heard the only voice that reaches the dead and rose from his
bier; but all solemn and tender thoughts were frightened away by the
crowd of maimed and blind and ragged and hungry men, women, and children
that came pouring out of the huts, crying, begging, demanding
_backsheesh_. "This," one of our American consuls said, "is the language
of Canaan now;" and it is one of the least melodious of earth. We
lunched on the dry grass in the sun in full sight of Tabor, on the
remnants of what the good missionary at Nablous had given us, and,
tightening our saddle-girths, we began the ascent of the mountain. We
clambered up the rude bridle-path, covered with loose stones, and
knocked timidly, with the remembrance of our Nablous experiences, at the
door of a large and very sightly monastery. Almost immediately a monk of
kindly face and soft black Italian eyes gave us a cordial greeting, and
the unexpectedness of it nearly enticed us into throwing our arms around
his neck and leaving an Oriental salutation upon his cheek. He led us
into a large, clean refectory, and then into two clean rooms. I might
use other epithets, but none other means so much in the East. After a
very satisfying supper, the good monk--he was so good to us, we tried to
think he was as clean within as the rooms of his monastery--took us out
to the pinnacle of the mountain and enjoyed our enthusiasm over the
magnificent view that was spread out before us. Almost the whole of
Palestine was within sight beneath us. We looked southward, across the
plain we had struggled over so laboriously, to the mountains behind
Jerusalem. We could see the depression where the Dead Sea lay in its
bowl, encircled by the hills of Moab. To the west we were looking upon
Carmel, at whose base the blue waves of the Mediterranean sigh, and
moan, and thunder. To the east, across the Jordan, from which the mists
of evening were already rising, we could distinguish the wild, deep
ravines of the land of the Bedawin; and in the north, grandest of all,
stood Hermon, his great white head touched with the crimson of the
setting sun, just plunging, like an old Moabite deity, into the
mountains of Lebanon beyond. By almost common consent it is agreed among
the Biblical scholars of our day that not here on Tabor where we stood,
but northward, there on one of the peaks of Hermon, was the place where
our Lord was transfigured; but the Christian imagination, like the
Christian consciousness, is not always submissive to fact, and we shall
continue, with the larger part of the Christian world, to think of Tabor
as the Mount of Transfiguration, while we speak of Hermon as the true
site.
We had an easy ride the next morning to Nazareth, and a kindly reception
from the monks. The hospitality at all these convents is untrammelled by
pecuniary conditions; but all travellers who have purses and hearts and
consciences do, in fact, on their departure, present the Superior with a
sum about equal to the charges for the same length of time at an Eastern
hotel. I mention this in the interests of historic truth, and not with
any desire to throw a garish light of self-interest upon the cordiality
of these Latin "religious." We were in the heart of the little city
where He whom millions of human beings call their Saviour and God lived
for more than twenty years. Somewhere among these houses that fill the
valley and cling to the hill-side was Joseph's home. Not a house, of
course, is here now that was here then; all the sacred places they show
you--the Virgin's home, the place of the Annunciation, the workshop of
Joseph--must be unauthentic; but these hills are what they were. They
shut out the great world He had come to redeem, but not the heavens
above Him or the sinfulness and needs of the segment of humanity around
Him. When we rode toward Tiberias in the early morning there were a
dozen or more of the girls of Nazareth going out to Mary's spring, as
the fountain at the entrance of the town is called; but their garments
were ragged and uncleanly and their swarthy faces heavily tattooed, and,
while we were ready to accept the season of the year as an excuse for
any deficiency in the attractiveness of the landscape, we could not
admit it in extenuation of the uncomeliness of the maidens of Palestine.
Their beauty we believe to be almost entirely a fiction of the tourist's
imagination.
On our way to the Sea of Galilee we passed through Cana, where they show
you still some of the water-pots in which "the conscious water blushed"
when it saw its Lord, and crossed the plain of Hattin, on one of whose
round, horn-like acclivities the Sermon on the Mount is said to have
been given. Here the Crusaders made their last stand against the
victorious army of Saladin; and when at nightfall their bugles sounded
the retreat, the Holy Land was given over to the unbeliever for
centuries:--who is prophet enough to say for how many? As we first saw
the lake that afternoon, with the sunlight on it, and the low Moabite
hills rising lonely and sad against the blue sky, and Hermon, cold and
regal, far away to the north, and yet standing out so prominently as to
be the most striking feature in the scene, we felt that Gennesaret had
been ruthlessly robbed of her rights by certain well-known critics who,
professing to be her best friends, have denied her all claim to beauty
except by association. Tiberias ranks with Jerusalem and Hebron and
Safed as one of the four holy cities of the Jews, but its houses are
filthy huts and its streets muddy lanes. Here we saw the Jew,
down-trodden, oppressed, wretched, but still proud, the unhappiest
creature, this Tiberian descendant of David, in all the Holy Land, with
his long yellow cloak, his hair hanging upon his shoulders in corkscrew
curls, and an expression on his wan, sallow face that would force tears
from your eyes if you did not know that his life is ordinarily as
contemptible as his condition is pitiable. We spent an hour or more in
one of the two boats that to-day make up the entire fishing-fleet of
Galilee, and then found hospitable shelter under the roof of the Latin
monastery, the last that was to open its doors to us in Palestine; and
when we rode away on Monday morning we made a vow in our hearts never to
speak ill of that part of the Romish Church which presides over the
convents of the Holy Land. As our muleteer confessed he was as ignorant
as any dog of a European Christian of the route we wished to take from
Tiberias to Banias and Deir Mimas, the monks advised us, to save time,
and perhaps our purses, perhaps our lives, by taking a Turkish soldier
as a combined guide and guard. We sent to the proper official, and two
savage-looking fellows came to the monastery. They swore by the beard of
Mohammed that our lives would be worth less than that of a Tiberian flea
if we went alone, or even with one soldier; they talked our few
remaining powers of resistance to death, and we took them at their own
price, less one-half, which was conceded to be very liberal on our part.
We felt we had a new lease of life, and spent the rest of the afternoon
in sweet unconcern and content; but late that evening word was sent that
one of the brave soldiers, in consideration of the great risk involved
in the enterprise, had concluded to raise his price, and of course his
companion, deeply as he regretted it, felt compelled to follow his
example. We at once sent back word that our poverty would not permit us
to accede to their most modest request, and threw ourselves on the
Superior of the convent to extricate us from our dilemma. A guard had
now become a necessity, for the poor muleteer was so badly frightened by
all the terrible things he had heard, that if we had promised him his
weight in gold to be delivered at Beirut he would not have stirred a
step unprotected. A request was sent to the commandant of the city, and
he was pleased to present us with a Kurdish cavalryman, who was to be
our slave for the next four days, if on our part we would agree to pay
him well and do as he said. We were now humble. We promised, and the
Kurd came riding to the gates of the convent the next morning at the
hour fixed for our departure. He was immensely long and lean. He looked
hungry all over. Even his musket, longer by some inches than himself,
had the appearance of existing on a very low diet of powder and ball. An
awful doubt of its efficacy crept into my heart, but we gave him the
matutinal greetings of the country, and our cavalcade followed at his
heels.
We rode along the lake at a fairly rapid walk to the little mud village
of Magdala, the home, it is supposed, of Mary Magdalene. We stopped to
breathe our horses at Khan Minyeh, the site, some scholars assert, of
the once beautiful city of Capernaum, and then rode along a rocky road
to Tel Hun, at the end of the lake, chosen by the best judgment of the
day as the actual spot where the city, exalted by her pride to heaven,
rested lightly on the earth. We picked our way in and out among fluted
marble columns, the very ruins, some insist, of the synagogue which the
good centurion built for the city he loved. Here, then, may have been
the home of our Lord during those earliest days of his public ministry,
the happiest days of his earthly life, before baffled hate had begun to
weave its net around him.
Our course now lay due north, away from the lake, across trackless
fields covered with round basaltic stones. The Kurd's horse was a better
one than ours, and it was all we could do to keep him in sight. The sun
was hot. What would it have been on those hills in midsummer? We threw
off our heavy coats, that had been more than comfortable in the early
morning along the lake, and pushed doggedly on. To our left, higher even
than the hill we climbed, was holy Safed, to which it is thought our
Lord may have pointed when he spoke of a city set upon a hill, that
cannot be hid; and straight before us, the object of our hopes and
efforts, was snow-clad Hermon, as beautiful, we thought, as an Alp. We
crossed the mountain at last, and, as our horses waded through a deep
brook on the other side, the Kurd bent slightly in his saddle, and,
reaching down, brought up great handfuls of water to stay his thirst,
without stopping for an instant. There was a sly twinkle of pleasure in
his eye when the muleteer told him we had admired his skill.
Late in the afternoon we came to the marshy lakes, "the waters of
Merom," where Joshua smote the kings of the north, who made a final
stand here with their united armies, "like the sands of the sea in
number." We should have been glad to find one of their royal palaces in
tolerable repair, for we were tired and wanted to stop for the night,
but there were no ruined regal mansions in sight, not even a mud hut
such as had given us shelter and hunting at Jenin. The sun had gone
down, and our horses shivered in the night air. The prospect was gloomy,
and grew no brighter as we went on. At last we saw some long black tents
across the plain sheltered by the hills; and, while we were wondering
what the chances might be of escaping robbery by the Bedawin at this
late hour of the night, the Kurd turned his horse out of the bridle-path
and headed for the largest tent. The probabilities seemed now about
equal that the Kurd was in league with these wild, wandering tribes, and
that they would pluck us, and torture us, and bury us without the aid of
undertaker or parson, or, on the other hand, that they might welcome us
to the few comforts within their command. The sheik was standing, with a
half-dozen of his leading men, at the door of his tent, and, as we
dismounted, he came forward with much grace and dignity and embraced my
friend, kissing him on each cheek. He only waved his hand to me, as a
younger and less important personage, and led us into his tent. Cushions
were thrown down for us on the bare earth, and we were told to be
seated. A little fire was burning just in front of the tent, and around
that the privileged persons of the tribe squatted, only the chief and
some of his great warriors being under the tent with ourselves. They
were as curious as civilized people to know where we were going, and
why; and they concealed with difficulty their surprise and suspicion
when they were told that our only object was to see the country. No
Oriental, much less a Bedawin, ranks that among possible reasons for
passing from one place to another. After more conversation than we
thought necessary before supper, a dish of rice was brought in, and with
it two wooden spoons; but how these came to be in a sheik's tent we
thought it wise not to ask. They looked on while we ate, refusing all
our entreaties to join with us; but when we had finished, they thrust
their hands into the bowl, and, with a deft movement, made round balls
as large as a lemon, and shot these with great skill into their mouths.
While they ate, my friend asked if he might read them a story. They
consented eagerly; and, taking out his Arabic Testament, he read them
the parable of the Prodigal Son. A more appreciative company never
listened to it. At each crisis of the narrative the sheik looked around
and said, "_Fayib ketir_,"--"Very good,"--and then, as if devoutly
making the responses, they all said, "_Fayib ketir_" I thought I saw one
of them brush away a tear as the story was finished: perhaps he was a
father with a prodigal son, or something in his heart may have told him
that he was a prodigal himself.
They all rose at a signal, and left us to our slumbers. We were to share
the tent with the sheik; and when we had laid ourselves down on the
cushions and covered ourselves with our overcoats, the sheik came
anxiously to my friend and asked "if we would not be very cold with
nothing over our heads." The Oriental lets his feet take care of
themselves if only his head is warm. The flap of the tent was not
lowered, and we could look from where we were lying on the Eastern hills
and the stars above them. It was long before I could sleep in such
surroundings. We were unprotected in the tent of a Bedawin sheik on the
waters of Merom, and all the past faded away: for the moment I did not
believe that there were such cities as New York and London and
Paris,--they were buried deep under the streets of Jerusalem and
Tiberias and Safed. I was no longer an American, but the son of this
sheik, destined to be the ruler of all the tribes that dwell in black
tents of hair-cloth. My friend lying at my side groaned in his sleep,
and the baseless fabric of my dream crumbled. I was myself again, and
felt a sharp blow from my own familiar conscience when I found myself
smiling with vengeful satisfaction at certain movements of my sleeping
friend that made it apparent he was being visited by certain inhabitants
of the night that find their way to Bedawin tents as well as peasants'
huts. He had been almost untouched when I suffered so at Jenin; and I
found my confidence increased in the law of compensation as I watched
his struggles, wholly unscathed myself.
Our next day's work was the longest and hardest we had yet had. We were
to crowd two days into one. We were well on our way before it was fairly
light. We crossed the Jordan on a little stone bridge, and rode straight
over the plain to Banias, the Caesarea Philippi of apostolic times. We
left our horses in the little village near which the Jordan comes
pouring out of a rocky opening in the hills, and, with an Arab boy,
hurried at our best pace up the mountain to the magnificent ruins of a
mediaeval castle, the finest of its class in the Holy Land. Our Kurd and
muleteer were waiting for us as we came down the hill like veritable
mountain-goats, and the latter pointed triumphantly to something wrapped
in an Arab newspaper under his arm. As soon as we were out of sight of
the village he stopped and displayed his prize: it was a chicken, cooked
in some unknown but most savory way. It was long since we had eaten
anything of the sort, and, leaping to the ground, with the help of a
clasp-knife bought in Nablous, the only eating-utensil our party could
boast, we bisected our dinner, and, sitting under a gray old gnarled
olive, ate it with such expressions of satisfaction as would not be
honest, even if allowable, at the grandest civilized banquets.
We sprang again into our saddles, crossed again the plain and the bridge
over the Jordan, and pushed over the hills toward Deir Mimas. Our horses
were used up even more completely than ourselves; and when the Kurd lost
the way, and took us a long and unnecessary _détour_, we felt it so
keenly that we said nothing. It was long after nightfall when we
dismounted at the door of a native Christian preacher's house at Deir
Mimas. But the struggles of the day were not ended. The Kurd stalked in,
and, saying that here his duties ended, demanded a sum at least a third
greater than that agreed upon. We fought him with everything but
weapons, and, when we separated, the Kurd's pockets were heavier and his
heart lighter than was consistent with the eternal fitness of things. We
had only to follow a well-made road the next day to Sidon; and there, as
we sat at a table spread with a clean, white cloth, on which were
plates, and knives and forks, and cups and saucers, and spoons, we
concluded that our roughing it in Palestine had at least convinced us
that civilized man makes himself want many convenient if not wholly
necessary things.