BY RAILWAY TO THE LAND OF JUDEA
Take a seat with me this morning in the railroad car which is just about
leaving the seaport of Jaffa to go to Jerusalem. The distance by rail is
only fifty-four miles, but it will take us more than four hours. Crossing
the rich plains of Sharon, the road winds its way up the hills of Judea
until it brings us to the Holy City, about twenty-five hundred feet above
the sea.
The cars are comfortable, but we have had to fight with the tourists
and pilgrims for our seats near the windows. A German and a Greek on
the opposite side of the coach are still quarrelling for places, using
language not that of brotherly love. The German has just called the Greek
a swine, while the Greek has retaliated by simply calling the German a
dog. But now they are quiet and we can enjoy the scenery as we go on.
Leaving Jaffa we ride for some miles through orchards. There are orange
groves loaded with blossoms and fruit. There are orchards of olives,
pomegranates, and figs, and many gardens surrounded by cactus hedges
twice as high as our heads. Next we enter the rich plain where the
Philistines lived. The soil is brown and so fat that you have only to
tickle it with the plough and it laughs with the harvest. You do not
wonder that the Philistines fought for this fertile land.
Here is a green field of wheat. The stalks stand as thick as grass, and
rise and fall with the winds from the sea. There a native is ploughing
with a bullock and donkey harnessed together. The plough is the rude
implement of the Scriptures, and the dark-skinned farmer steadies it with
one hand, while he carries a goad in the other. Farther on are camels
dragging the ploughs. In places we see flocks of fat sheep, herded by
boys, and now and then pass a village of flat, white-walled houses with
thick roofs of thatch on which the grass grows. Nearly every house has
a roof of sod about a foot deep, and as we near the hills, the towns on
their sides rise up in green terraces.
Here some shepherds in sheep-skin coats, with the wool inside, are
watching their flocks, and there, pulling up bunches of grass for her
cattle, is a maiden who makes us think of Ruth gathering wheat in the
harvest-fields of Boaz. Here and there throughout the plains of Sharon
we see the watch-towers built for soldiers posted to ensure the Turkish
Sultan’s share of the farmers’ crops.
The landscape here is far different from that of the United States.
There are no houses or barns standing alone in the fields. There are no
outbuildings of any description, and no haystacks or strawstacks. The
people live in villages and go out to work in the fields. The only fences
are cactus hedges, but most of the holdings are not fenced in at all.
[Illustration: THE HOLY LAND]
The land is fertile clear to the mountains, a distance of perhaps twenty
miles. In the foothills there are patches of green, while higher up
fields are here and there cut out of the rocks, which are built up to
hold in the earth. I have never seen a country more rocky. The rough
lands of the Blue Ridge are Nile farms compared to the hills through
which our train climbs up to Jerusalem. In many places there is nothing
but rocks. The limestone strata are piled stone upon stone, looking like
mighty monuments rising on the hills. In some places mountains rise
in steps forming pyramids of white limestone, sparsely sprinkled with
patches of grass and red poppies.
As we begin to ascend the hills of Judea, we come into the real land of
the Israelites. Our railroad winds in and out among little mountains and
we can see that in the past the whole country was terraced and that not a
bit of land went to waste. What is now the grazing ground for sheep and
cattle was once a garden.
Palestine reminds us of other parts of the world. The rich fruit of the
orange groves of Jaffa makes us think of Florida. Were it not for the
lack of fences and barns, the plains of Sharon might be a slice out of
Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, or the rich fields of the Scioto Valley
in Ohio. These hills are very like Italy near Genoa, or south France
about Nice and Monte Carlo. The terraces are planted with olive trees and
we see gray-green olive orchards everywhere.
As we rise the air becomes purer and fresher. We pass the spot on which
David is said to have killed Goliath, and see in the distance the town
of Mizpah, where the Prophet anointed Saul king when the latter was out
hunting his father’s asses. When we see an old bearded and turbaned
Syrian riding along on his donkey, we wonder if he may not be a second
Balaam, and we almost expect his donkey to open its mouth and speak to
its master.
But let me tell you something about the railroad up to Jerusalem. The
track is narrow gauge, and the coaches are much like street cars, with
little racks for baggage along each side under the roof. Each carriage
is divided into compartments the sides of which are walled with windows.
The road has no tunnels, and it winds its way in and out as it climbs the
hills. There are five stations between Jaffa and Jerusalem.
The total cost of the railroad was two million dollars, or a little less
than forty thousand dollars per mile. The idea of the road was originated
by an American, a civil engineer named Zimpel, who came to Palestine as a
pedlar of a patent medicine which he called “Sunlight Pills.” He brought
the scheme before the Sultan at Constantinople, but failed to get the
concession to build it. After his death the matter was taken up by the
French, who put the line through.
This was the first railroad built in Syria, and it is the father of a
system which is now opening up a great part of the country. One section
is the road building from Damascus toward Mecca, and connected with it
are others which will eventually join the Holy Land to the valley of
the Euphrates, as well as to Asia Minor and Turkey. The rates for both
passengers and freight are much higher than in the United States.
As it goes up the mountains, the railway twists this way and that. It
crawls along the sides of the hills with horseshoe curves here and there.
The whole journey is over historic ground. We cross the plains where
Samson fought with the Philistines, slaying a thousand of them with the
jawbone of an ass. We see the place where he tied the firebrands to the
tails of three hundred foxes and let them loose to burn up the harvest. A
little farther on we enter the valley of Sorek, where the wicked Delilah
cut off the hair of the strong man as he lay asleep in her lap, and away
up on the side of the hill we can see the town of Zorah, where Samson was
born. At the station of Deir Aban, where Samuel raised his Ebenezer, a
crowd of children comes to the trains with bouquets of wild flowers. The
boys whine for _baksheesh_. We wonder whether there may not be an infant
Samson among them.
It was in Zorah that Samson was buried, and the guides will show you his
tomb. Farther along the road we pass through a great gorge in the cliffs,
on the north side of which, near the top, is a cave, where Samson lived,
and I verily believe if we should offer the guides sufficient reward they
would find us his bones or some pieces of brass from the gates of the
city of Gaza, which, you remember, he carried away on his shoulders.
In our ride up to Jerusalem we go by the ancient city of Gezer. It is
marked by a mound which has several buildings upon it, including the dome
of a Mohammedan mosque. The ground about it has been dug over and over,
and the ruins discovered have excited the religious and scientific world.
The excavations made by the Palestine Exploration Fund show it to be one
of the oldest of cities. The scientists have gone down into the earth at
this point, finding one city built upon the ruins of another, down to
the seventh city, which seems to have been occupied by the cave dwellers
of the Flint or Stone Age, a period before recorded history began. In
these cave dwellings pottery and flint instruments were discovered. A
burial place of that ancient race was opened up and remains were found
which show that the cave dwellers practised cremation. In one of the six
other cities, higher up, bronze tools were discovered, and higher still
the relics of an ancient Egyptian civilization. In one of the caves
were found large jars containing the skeletons of infants that had been
sacrificed to some pagan idol, probably during the Canaanite period. In
another was a cistern, the mouth of which was guarded by the skulls of
two young girls, and inside which were fourteen skeletons, one that of a
girl of sixteen who had been sawn asunder.
The King of Gezer was defeated by Joshua, and later the city was
captured by a king of Egypt, who was one of Solomon’s three hundred-odd
fathers-in-law. The story is that Pharaoh gave Gezer to Solomon as a
dowry with his daughter, and that Solomon rebuilt the city. At the time
of the Crusades Richard Cœur de Lion and Saladin fought over it, and it
was an important fortress at the time of the Maccabees.
The archæologists of the Palestine Exploration Fund have discovered
bronze pots, ivory tablets, statues, and jewels and other treasures
of a half-dozen different periods of history. In one of the cities a
complete olive press made of stone was unearthed, and in another an
Egyptian statuette about four thousand years old. The figure was that
of a man with a beard and a wig. Bronze tweezers were found as well as
many articles of Greek and Roman times. One of the most interesting
discoveries was a reservoir with a capacity of four million gallons.
Another was a place supposed to belong to one of the Maccabees.
[Illustration: Camels and donkeys, as well as bullocks, are hitched to
the low, one-handled wooden ploughs of Palestine, the same to-day as
centuries ago]
[Illustration: The children are what we like best in the Holy Land, even
though they have generally learned from their elders the habit of begging
for _backsheesh_]
[Illustration: The ass of this sheeted Balaam opens his mouth but only a
bray comes forth. The roads are so fearful that many places may not be
reached by wheeled vehicles and the sure-footed donkey is usually the
best mount]
The Palestine Exploration Fund is not a religious body, but rather a
scientific and historical society. It has spent about fourteen thousand
dollars a year on such work, most of the sums being collected in amounts
of five dollars or less from English and Americans all over the world.
The Fund has made great discoveries in Jerusalem. It has surveyed and
mapped a great part of Palestine and has added many Bible sites to those
already known.