through Judæa was beheld after a night spent by the ladies of our party
in our tent pitched among the sands (and centipedes!) of the desert of
the Mar Saba. (Our gentlemen-friends were privileged to sleep in the
vast old monastery whence they brought us next morning the most
excellent _raki_.) As we rode out of the little valley of our encampment
and down by the convent of Mar Saba, we obtained a complete view of the
whole _hermit burrow_; for such it may properly be considered. Mar Saba
is the very ideal of a desert. It lies amid the wilderness of hills, not
grand enough to be sublime but only monotonous and hopelessly barren. So
white are these hills that at first they appear to be of chalk, but
further inspection shows them to be of whitish rock, with hardly a trace
of vegetation growing anywhere over it. On the hills there is sometimes
an inch of soil over the rock; in the valleys there are torrents of
stones over the inch of soil. Between our mid-day halt at Derbinerbeit
(the highest land in Judæa), and the evening rest at Mar Saba, our whole
march had been in utter solitude; not a village, a tent, a caravan, a
human being in sight. Not a tree or bush. Of living creatures hardly a
bird to break the dead silence of the world, only a large and venomous
snake crawling beside our track. Thus, far from human haunts, in the
heart of the wilderness, lies Mar Saba. Fit approach to such a shrine!
Through the arid, burning rocks a profound and sharply-cut chasm
suddenly opens and winds, forming a hideous valley, such as may exist in
the unpeopled moon, but which probably has not its equal in our world
for rugged and blasted desolation. There is no brook or stream in the
depths of the ravine. If a torrent may ever rush down it after the
thunderstorms with which the country is often visited, no traces of
water remain even in early spring. Barren, burning, glaring rocks alone
are to be seen on every side. Far up on the cliff, like a fortress,
stand the gloomy, windowless walls of the convent; but along the ravine
in an almost inaccessible gorge of the hills, are caves and holes
half-way down the precipice,—the dwellings of the hermits. Here, in a
den fit for a fox or a hyæna, one poor soul had died just before my
visit, after five-and-forty years of self-incarceration. Death had
released him, but many more remained; and we could see some of them from
the distant road as we passed, sitting at the mouth of their caverns, or
walking on the little ledges of rock which they had smoothed for
terraces. Their food (such as it is) is sent from the convent and let
down from the cliffs at needful intervals. Otherwise they live
absolutely alone,—alone in this hideous desolation of nature, with the
lurid, blasted desert for their sole share in God’s beautiful universe.
We are all, I suppose, accustomed to think of a hermit as our poets have
painted him, dwelling serene in
“A lodge in some vast wilderness,
Some boundless continuity of shade,”
undisturbed by all the ugly and jarring sights and sounds of our
grinding civilization; sleeping calmly on his bed of fern, feeding on
his pulse and cresses, and drinking the water from the brook.
“He kneels at morn at noon and eve,
He hath a cushion plump,
It is the moss that wholly hides
The rotted old oak stump.”
But the hermits of Mar Saba, how different are they from him who
assoiled the Ancient Mariner? No holy cloisters of the woods, and sound
of chanting brooks, and hymns of morning birds; only this silent,
burning waste, this “desolation deified.” It seemed as if some frightful
aberration of the religious sentiment could alone lead men to choose for
home, temple, prison, tomb, the one spot of earth where no flower
springs to tell of God’s tenderness, no soft dew or sweet sound ever
falls to preach faith and love.
There are many such hermits still in the Greek Church. I have seen their
eyries perched where only vultures should have their nests, on the
cliffs of Caramania, and among the caverns of the Cyclades. Anthony and
Stylites have indeed left behind them a track of evil glory, along which
many a poor wretch still “crawls to heaven along the devil’s trail.” Are
not lives wasted like these to be put into the account when we come to
estimate the _Gesta Christi_? Must we not, looking on these and on the
ten thousand, thousand hearts broken in monasteries and nunneries all
over Europe, admit that historical Christianity has not only done good
work in the world, but _bad_ work also: and that, diverging widely from
the Spirit of Christ, it has been far from uniformly beneficent?
It was while riding some hours from Mar Saba through the low hills
before coming out on the blighted flats of the Dead Sea, that one of
those pictures passed before me which are ever after hung up in the
mind’s gallery among the choicest of the spoils of Eastern travel. By
some chance I was alone, riding a few hundred yards in front of the
caravan, when, turning the corner of a hill, I met a man approaching me,
the only one I had seen for several hours since we passed a few black
tents eight or ten miles away. He was a noble-looking young shepherd,
dressed in the camel’s-hair robe, and with the lithesome, powerful limbs
and elastic step of the children of the desert. But the interest which
attached to him was the errand on which he had manifestly been engaged
on those Dead Sea plains from whence he was returning. Round his neck,
and with its little limbs held gently by his hand, lay a lamb he had
rescued and was doubtless carrying home. The little creature lay as if
perfectly contented and happy, and the man looked pleased as he strode
along lightly with his burden; and as I saluted him with the usual
gesture of pointing to heart and head and the “salaam alik!”, (Peace be
with you), he responded with a smile and a kindly glance at the lamb, to
which he saw my eyes were directed. It was actually the beautiful
parable of the gospel acted out before my sight. Every particular was
true to the story; the shepherd had doubtless left his “ninety-and-nine
in the wilderness,” round the black tents we had seen so far away, and
had sought for the lost lamb “till he found it,” where it must quickly
have perished without his help, among those blighted plains. Literally,
too, “when he had found it, he laid it on his shoulders, rejoicing.”
After this beautiful sight which I have longed ever since for a
painter’s power to place on canvas (a better subject a thousand-fold
than the cruel “_Scape-Goat_”), we reached the Dead Sea, and I managed
to dip into it, after wading out a very long way in the shallow, bitter,
biting water which stung my lips and nostrils, and tasted like a
horrible mixture of quinine and salt. From the shore, all strewed with
the white skeletons of trees washed down by the river, we made our way
(mostly galloping) in four hours to the Ford of Jordan; and there I had
the privilege of another dip, or rather of seven dips, taken in
commemoration of Naaman and to wash off the Dead Sea brine! It is the
spot supposed to have witnessed the transit of Joshua and the baptisms
of St. John. The following night our tents were pitched among the ruins
of Jericho. The wonder is, not that the once flourishing city should be
deserted and Herod’s great amphitheatre there a ruinous heap, but that a
town was ever built in such an insanitary place. Closed in by the
mountains on every side from whence a fresh breeze could blow upon it,
and open only to the unwholesome flats of the Dead Sea, the situation is
pestilential.
Next day we rode back to Jerusalem through the desolate mountains of the
Quarantania, where tradition places the mystic Fast and Temptation of
Christ; a dreary, lonely, burning desert. Here, also, is the supposed
scene of the parable of the Good Samaritan, and the ruins of a great
building, which may have been a Half-way House Inn beside the road, bear
out the tradition. I have often reflected that orthodox divines miss
half the point of that beautiful story when they omit to mark the fact
that the Samaritans were, in Christ’s time, boycotted by the Jews _as
heretics_; and that it was precisely one of these _heretics_ who was
made by Jesus the type for all time of genuine philanthropy,—in direct
and purposeful contrast to the representatives of Judaic orthodoxy, the
Priest and Levite.
The sun on my head during the latter hours of the ride became
intolerable; not like English heat, however excessive, but roasting my
very brains through all the folds of linen on my hat and of a damp
handkerchief within. It was like sitting before a kitchen fire with
one’s head in the position proper for a leg of mutton! I felt it was a
matter of life and death to escape, and galloped on by myself in advance
for many miles till suddenly I came, just under Bethany at the base of
the Mount of Olives, to a magnificent ancient fountain, with the cool
water gushing out, amid the massive old masonry. In a moment I leaped
from my equally eager horse, threw off my hat and bared my neck and put
my head under the blessed stream. Of course it was a perilous
proceeding, but it saved me from a sunstroke.
That evening in Jerusalem I wished good-bye to my pleasant
fellow-travellers, who were good enough to pass a vote of thanks to me
for my “unvarying pluck and hilarity during the fatigues and dangers of
the way!” I started next day for the two days’ ride to Jaffa,
accompanied only by a good Italian named Abengo, and a muleteer. There
was a small war going on between some of the tribes on the way, and a
certain chief named Aboo-Goosh (beneath whose robber’s castle I had been
pelted with stones on my way up to Jerusalem) was scouring the country.
We passed, in the valley of Ajalon, some wounded men borne home from a
battle, but otherwise encountered nothing alarming, and I obtained a
great deal of curious information from Abengo, who knew Palestine
intimately, and whose wife was a Christian woman of Nazareth. There is
no use in repeating now records of a state of things which has been
modified, no doubt, essentially in thirty years.
From Jaffa I sailed to Beyrout, and there, with kind help and advice
from the Consul, I obtained the services of an old Turk as a Dragoman,
and he and I and a muleteer laden with my bed and baggage started to
cross Lebanon and make our way to Baalbec and, as I hoped, also to
Damascus. The snows were still thick on the higher slopes of Lebanon,
and after the excessive heat I had just undergone in Syria, the cold was
trying. But the beauty and grandeur of those noble mountains, fringed
below with fig and olive, and with their snowy summits rising height
beyond height above, was compensation for all hardship. By a curious
chance, Lebanon was the first mountain range worthy of the name, which I
had ever crossed. It was an introduction, of course, to a whole world of
impressions and experiences.
I had a good many escapes in the course of my ride; there being nothing
to be called a road over much of the way, and such path as there was
being covered with snow or melting torrents. My strong little Syrian
horse walked and scrambled and stumbled up beds of streams running down
in cataracts over the rocks and boulders; and on one occasion he had to
bear me down a very steep descent, where we floundered forward,
sometimes up to his girths in the snow, in dread of descending with
irresistible impetus to the edge of a precipice which yawned at the
bottom. We did reach the verge in rather a shaky condition; but the good
beast struggled hard to save himself, and turned at the critical moment
safe along the edge.
A sad association belongs to my sojourn among the Maronites at Zachly; a
large village on the further side of Lebanon, on the slopes of the
Haraun. I slept there on my outward way in my tent pitched in an angle
of grass outside one of the first houses, and on my return journey I
obtained the use of the principal room of the same house from my kind
hosts, as the cold outside was too considerable for tent life in
comfort. Zachly was a very humble, simple place. The houses were all of
mud, with flat roofs made of branches laid across and covered with more
mud. A stem of a living tree usually stood in the middle of the house
supporting the whole erection, which was divided into two or three
chambers. A recess in the wall held piles of mats, and of the hard
cushions made of raw cotton, which form both seats, beds, and pillows.
The rough, unplaned door, with wooden lock, the window half stuffed up,
the abundant population of cocks and hens, cats and dogs and rosy little
boys and girls, strongly reminded me of Balisk! I was welcomed most
kindly after a brief negotiation with Hassan; and the simple women and
girls clustered round me with soft words and presents of carrots and
daffodils. One old woman having kissed my hands as a beginning,
proceeded to put her arms round my neck and embrace me in a most
motherly way. To amuse the party, I showed them my travelling bag,
luncheon and writing and drawing apparatus, and made them taste my
biscuits and smell my toilet vinegar. Screams of “Taib, Taib! Katiyeh!”
(good, very good) rewarded my small efforts, and then I made them tell
me all their names, which I wrote in my note-book. They were very
pretty: Helena, Mareen, Yasmeen, Myrrhi, Maroon, Georgi, Malachee,
Yussef, and several others, the last being Salieh, the young village
priest, a tall, grand-looking young man with high cylindrical black hat,
black robe and flowing brown hair. I made him a respectful salutation at
which he seemed pleased. On my second visit to Zachly I attended the
vesper service in his little chapel as the sun went down over Lebanon.
It was a plain quadrangle of mud walls, brown without and whitewashed
within; a flat roof of branches and mortar; a post for support in the
centre; a confessional at one side; a little lectern; an altar without
crucifix and only decorated by two candlesticks; a jar of fresh
daffodils; some poor prints; a blue tea-cup for sacramental plate, and a
little cottage-window into which the setting sun was shining
softly;—such was the chapel of Zachly. A few men knelt to the left, a
few women to the right; in front of the altar was a group of children,
also kneeling, and waiting to take their part in the service. At the
lectern stood the noble figure of young Papas Salieh, leaning on one of
the crutches which in all Eastern churches are provided to relieve the
fatigue of the attendants, who, like Abraham, “worship, leaning on the
top of a staff.” Beside the Papas stood a ragged but intelligent little
acolyte, who chanted very well, and on the other side of the lectern an
aged peasant, who also took his part. The prayers were, of course,
unintelligible to me, being in Arabic; but I recognised in the Gospel
the chapter of genealogies in Luke, over whose hard names the priest
helped his friend quite unaffectedly. The reading over, Papas Salieh
took off his black and red cap, and, kneeling before the altar,
commenced another chanted prayer, while the women beside me bowed till
they kissed the ground in Eastern prostration, beating their breasts
with resounding blows. The group of children made the responses at
intervals; and then the priest blessed us, and the simple service was
over, having occupied about twenty minutes. While we were departing, the
Papas seated himself in the confessional and a man went immediately into
the penitents’ place beside him. There was something very affecting to
me in this poor little church of clay, with its humble efforts at
cleanliness and flowers and music; all built and adorned by the
worshippers’ own hands, and served by the young peasant priest,
doubtless the son and brother of some of his own flock.
As I have said there are sad associations connected with this visit of
mine to Zachly. A very short time afterwards the Druses came down with
irresistible force,—massacred the greater number of the unhappy
Maronites and burned the village. The spot where I had been so kindly
received was left a heap of blackened ruins, and what became of sweet,
motherly Helena and her dear little children and good Papas Salieh and
the rest, I have never been able to learn.
It took six hours of hard riding in a bitter wind to carry me from
Zachly to Baalbec; but anticipation bore me on wings, and to beguile the
way I repeated to myself as my good memory permitted, the whole of
Moore’s poem of _Paradise and the Peri_, culminating in the scene which
the Peri beheld “When o’er the vale of Baalbec winging.” In vain,
however, I cross-questioned Hassan (we talked Italian _tant bien que
mal_) about Peris. He had never heard of such beings. But of Djinns in
general he knew only too much; and notably that they had built the vast
ruins of Baalbec, which no mortal hands _could_ have raised; and that to
the present time they haunt them so constantly and in such terrific
shape, that it is very perilous for anybody to go there alone and quite
impossible to do so after nightfall. I had reason to bless this belief
in the Djinns of Baalbec for it left me the undisturbed solitary
enjoyment of the mighty enclosure within the Saracenic walls for the
best part of two days, unvexed by the inquisitive presence or
observation of the population of the Arab village outside.
To pitch my tent among the ruins, however, was more than I could bring
Hassan to do by any cajoling, and I consented finally to sleep in a
small cabin consisting of a single chamber of which I could lock the
door inside. When I prepared for sleep on the hard cotton cushions laid
over a stone bench, and with the two unglazed windows admitting volumes
of cold air, I was frightened to find I had every symptom of approaching
fever. Into what an awful position,—I reflected,—had I put myself, with
no one but that old Turk Hassan, and the Arab from whom I had hired this
little house for the night, to take care of me should I have a real bad
fever, and be kept there between life and death for weeks! Reflecting
what I could possibly do to avert the danger, brought on, of course, by
cold and fatigue, I took from my bag the half-bottle of Raki (a very
pure spirit made from rice) which my travelling friends had brought from
the monastery at Mar Saba and had kindly shared with me; and to a large
dose of this I was able to add some hot water from a sort of coffee-pot
left, by good luck, in the yet warm brazier of charcoal in the middle of
my room. I drank my Raki-toddy to the last drop, and then slept the
sleep of the just,—to awaken quite well the next morning! And if any of
my teetotal friends think I did wrong to take it, I beg entirely to
differ from them on the subject.
The days which I spent in and around Baalbec were more than repayment
for the fatigues and perils of the passage of “Sainted Lebanon;” whose
famous Cedars, by the way, I was unable to visit; the region where they
stand being at that season too deeply covered with snow. Here is a
description I gave of Baalbec to Harriet St. Leger just after my visit:—
“I had two wonderful days indeed in Baalbec. The number of the vast
solitary ruins exceeded all my anticipations, and their grandeur
impresses one as no remains less completely isolated can do. Imagine a
space about that of Newbridge garden surrounded by enormous Saracenic
walls with a sweet, bright brook running round it, and then left to
entire solitude. A few cattle browse on the short grass, and now and
then, I suppose, some one enters by one or other of the different gaps
in the wall to look after them; but in the Temple of Jupiter, shut in
by its great walls, to which the displacement of a single stone makes
now the sole entrance, no one ever enters. The fear of Djinns renders
the place even doubly alarming! Among the most awful things in Baalbec
are stupendous subterranean tunnels running in various directions
under the ruined city. I groped through several of them, they opened
out with great doorways into others which, having no light, I would
not explore, but which seemed abysses of awe! The stones of all these
works are enormous. Those 5 or 6 feet and 12 or 15 feet long are among
the smallest. In the temple were some which I could not span with five
extensions of my arms, _i.e._, something like 30 feet, but there are
still larger elsewhere among the ruins.”
The shafts of the columns of the two Temples,—the six left standing of
the great Temple of the Sun which
“Stand sublime
Casting their shadows from on high
Like Dials which the wizard Time
Had raised to count his ages by”—
and those of the hypæthral temple of Zeus of which only a few have
fallen, are alike miracles of size and perfection of moulding. The
fragments of palaces reveal magnificence unparalleled. All these
enormous edifices are wrought with such lavish luxuriance of
imagination, such perfection of detail in harmony with the luscious
Corinthian style which pervades the whole, that the idea of the Arabs
that they are the work not of men but of Genii, seemed quite natural. I
recalled what Vitruvius (who wrote about the time in which the best of
these temples was erected), says of the methods by which, in his day,
the largest stones were moved from quarries and lifted to their places,
but I failed to comprehend how the colossal work was achieved here.
Passing out of the great ruined gateway I came to vast square and
hexagonal courts with walls forming exedræ, loaded with profusion of
ornaments; columns, entablatures, niches and seats overhung with
carvings of garlands of flowers and the wings of fanciful creatures.
Streets, gateways and palaces, hardly distinguishable in their ruin,
follow on beyond the courts and portico. I climbed up a shattered stair
to the summit of the Saracenic wall and felt a sort of shock to behold
the living world below me; the glittering brook, the almond trees in
blossom and Anti-Lebanon beyond. Here I caught sight of the well-known
exquisite little circular temple with its colonnade of six Corinthian
columns, of which the architraves are recurved inwards from column to
column. If I am not mistaken a reproduction of this lovely little
building was set up in Kew Gardens in the last century.
Last of all I returned to the Temple of Zeus—or of Baal as it is
sometimes called—to spend there in secure solitude (except for Djinns!)
the closing hours of that long, rich day. The large walls are almost
perfect; the colonnades of enormous pillars are mostly still standing.
From the inner portal with its magnificent lintel half fallen from its
place, the view is probably the finest of any fane of the ancient world,
and was to me impressive beyond description. Even the spot where the
statue of the god has stood can easily be traced. A great stone lying
overturned on the pavement was doubtless the pedestal. I remained for
hours in this temple; sometimes feebly trying to sketch what I saw,
sometimes lost in ponderings on the faiths and worships of the past and
present. A hawk, which probably had never before found a human visitor
at eventide in that weird place, came swooping over me; then gave a wild
shriek and flew away. A little later the moon rose over the walls. The
calm and silence and beauty of that scene can never be forgotten.
I was unable to pursue my journey to Damascus as I had designed. The
muleteer, with all my baggage, contrived to miss us on the road among
the hills in Anti-Lebanon; and, eventually, after another visit to the
ruins and to the quarries from whence the vast stones were taken, I rode
back to Zachly and thence (a two days’ ride) over Lebanon to Beyrout.
I remained a few days at the hotel which then existed a mile from the
town, while I waited for the steamer to take me to Athens, and much
enjoyed the lovely scene of rich mulberry and almond gardens beside the
shell-strewn strand, with snowy Lebanon behind, towering over the
fir-woods into the deep blue sky. The Syrian peasant women are sweet,
courteous creatures. One day as I sat under a cactus-hedge reading
Shelley, a pretty young mother came by, and after interchanging a “Peace
be with you,” proceeded unhesitatingly, and without a word of
explanation, to deposit her baby,—Mustapha by name,—in my lap. I was
very willing to nurse Mustapha, and we made friends at once as easily as
his mother had done; and my heart was the better for the encounter!