gates--dwellers in the lands about. We entered and turned aside into
quiet streets, the twilight gathering about mysterious doorways and in
dim shops and stalls, where were bowed, turbaned men who never seemed to
sell anything, or to want to sell anything--who barely noticed us as we
passed through the Grand Bazaar, where it was getting dark, and all the
drowsy merchants of all the drowsy merchandise were like still shadows
that only moved a little to let us pass. Out again into streets that
were full of dusk, and dim flitting figures and subdued sounds.
All at once I caught sight of a black stone jar hanging at the door of a
very small and dusky booth. It was such a jar as is used in Damascus
to-day for water--was used there in the time of Abraham.
"Habib!"
I had wanted one of the pots from the first. The carriage stops
instantly.
"Habib! That black water-jar--a small one!"
I had meant to bargain for it myself, but Habib is ahead of me. He
scorns to bargain for such a trifle, and with such a merchant. He merely
seizes the jar, says a guttural word or two in whatever tongue the man
knows, flings him a paltry coin, and is back in the carriage, directing
our course along the darkening, narrow way.
What a wonderful life the dark is bringing out! There, in front of that
coffee-house, that row of men smoking nargileh--surely they are
magicians, every one. "That silent group with shaven faces and snowy
beards: who are they, Habib?"
"Mongolians," he says. "Pilgrims returning from Mecca. They live far
over to the north of China, but still are followers of the Prophet." The
scope of Islamism is wide--oh yes, very wide, and increasing. That group
gathered at the fountain--their dress, their faces--
"Habib!"
The horses come up with a jerk.
"A copper water-jar, Habib! An old, old man is filling it--such a
strange pattern"--
Habib is down instantly, and amid the crowd. Cautiously I follow. The
old man is stooped, wrinkled, travel-worn. His robe and his turban are
full of dust. He is listening to Habib and replying briefly.
Habib explains. The pilgrim is returning with it from Mecca; it is very
old; he cannot part with it. My heart sinks; every word adds value to
the treasure. Habib tries again, while I touch the ancient, curiously
wrought jar lovingly. The pilgrim draws away. He will hardly allow me
even this comfort.
We return to the carriage sadly. The driver starts. Some one comes
running behind, calling. Again we stop; a boy calls something to Habib.
"He will sell," Habib laughs, "and why not? He demands a napoleon. Of
course you will not give it!"
Oh, coward heart! I cannot, after that. I have the napoleon and the
desire, but I cannot appear a fool before Habib.
"No, it is too much. Drive on."
We dash forward; the East closes behind us; the opportunity is forever
lost.
If one could only be brave at the instant! All my days shall I recall
the group at the fountain: that bent, travel-stained pilgrim; that
strangely fashioned water-pot which perhaps came down to him from
patriarchal days. How many journeys to Mecca had it made; how many times
had it moistened the parching lips of some way-worn pilgrim dragging
across the burning sand; how many times had it furnished water for
absolution before the prayer in the desert! And all this could have been
mine. For a paltry napoleon I could have had the talisman for my
own--all the wonder of the East, its music, its mystery, its
superstition; I could have fondled it and gazed on it and re-created
each picture at a touch.
Oh, Habib, Habib, may the Prophet forgive you; for, alas, I never can!
At the station next morning a great horde of pilgrims were waiting for
the train which would bear them to Beirut--Mongolians, many of them, who
had been on the long, long, pilgrimage over land and sea. At Beirut, we
were told, seven steamers were waiting to take them on the next stage of
their homeward journey. What a weary way they had yet to travel!
They were all loaded down with baggage. They had their bundles,
clothing, quilts, water-bottles: and I wandered about among them vainly
hoping to find my pilgrim of the copper pot. Hopeless, indeed. There
were pots in plenty, but they were all new or unsightly things.
All the pilgrims were old men, for the Moslem, like most of the rest of
us, puts off his spiritual climax until he has acquired his material
account. He _has_ to, in fact; for, even going the poorest way and
mainly afoot, a journey of ten or twelve thousand miles across mountain
and desert, wilderness and wave cannot be made without substance.
We took a goodly number of them on our train. Freight-cars crowded with
them were attached behind, and we crawled across the mountains with that
cargo of holy men, who poured out at every other station and prostrated
themselves, facing Mecca, to pray for our destruction. At least, I
suppose they did that. I know they made a most imposing spectacle at
their devotions, and the Moslem would hardly overlook an enemy in such
easy praying distance.
However, we crossed the steeps, skirted the precipices safely enough,
and by-and-by a blue harbor lay below, and in it, like a fair picture,
the ship--home. We had been gone less than a week--it seemed a year.
XXX
WHERE PILGRIMS GATHER IN
At some time last night we crossed over the spot where the Lord stirred
up a mighty tempest and a great fish to punish Jonah, and this morning
at daybreak we were in the harbor of Jaffa, "the beautiful," from which
port Jonah sailed on that remarkable cruise.
We were not the only ones there. Two other great excursion steamers lay
at anchor, the _Arabic_ and the _Moltke_, their decks filled with our
fellow-countrymen, and I think the several parties of ship-dwellers took
more interest in looking at one another, and in comparing the appearance
of their respective vessels, than in the rare vision of Jaffa aglow with
morning. Three ship-loads at once! It seemed like a good deal of an
invasion to land on these sacred shores. But then we remembered how many
invasions had landed at Jaffa--how Alexander and Titus had been there
before us, besides all the crusades--so a modest scourge like ours would
hardly matter. As for that military butcher, Napoleon, who a little more
than a century ago murdered his way through this inoffending land, he
shot four thousand Turkish prisoners here on the Jaffa sands, after
accepting their surrender under guarantee of protection. We promised
ourselves that we would do nothing like that. We might destroy a pedler
now and then, or a baksheesh fiend; but four thousand, even of that
breed, would be too heavy a contract.
[Illustration: THE PATRIARCH KNEW ALL ABOUT JAFFA]
The Patriarch knew all about Jaffa. It is one of his special landmarks,
being the chief seaport of the Phoenicians, the one place they never
really surrendered. A large share of the vast traffic that went in and
out of Palestine in the old days went by Jaffa, and a great deal goes
that way still. The cedarwood from Lebanon, used in Solomon's Temple,
was brought by water to this port; the treasure and rich goods that went
down to Jerusalem in the day of her ancient glory all came this way; her
conquerors landed here. The blade and brand prepared for Jerusalem were
tried experimentally on Jaffa. According to Josephus, eighty thousand of
her inhabitants perished at one time. Yet Jaffa has survived. Her
harbor, which is not really a harbor at all, but merely an anchorage,
with a landing dangerous and uncertain, has still been sufficient to
keep her the chief seaport of Judea.
There is another reason for Jaffa's survival. Beyond her hills lie the
sacred cities of Jerusalem and Bethlehem. The fields that knew Ruth and
Benjamin and a man named Jesus lie also there. From Jaffa in every
direction stretch lands made memorable by stories and traditions in
which the God and the prophets of at least three religions are
intimately concerned. So during long centuries Jaffa has been a holy
gateway, and through its portals the tide of pilgrimage has never ceased
to flow.
Some of us who were to put in full time in Egypt would have only a few
days in the Holy Land, and we were off the ship presently, being pulled
through the turquoise water by boatmen who sang a barbaric chorus as
they bent over their huge, clumsy oars. Then we were ashore and in
carriages, and in another moment were "jumping through Jaffa," as one of
the party expressed it, in a way that made events and landmarks flit
together like the spokes of a wheel.
We visited the tomb of Dorcas, whom Peter raised from the dead, though
for some reason we did not feel a positive conviction that it was the
very tomb--perhaps because we did not have time to get up a
conviction--and we called at the house of Simon the Tanner. It was with
Simon, "whose house is by the seaside," that Peter lodged when he had
his "vision of tolerance," in which it was made known to him that "God
is no respecter of persons, but only of righteousness." It is truly by
the seaside, and there is an ancient tanner's vat in the court-yard. But
I hope the place was cleaner when Peter lodged there than it is now. One
had to step carefully, and, though it did not smell of a tanyard, it did
of several other things. Many travellers, including Dean Stanley, have
accepted this as the veritable house where Simon dwelt and St. Peter
lodged. Those people ought to get together and have it cleaned up. I
could believe in it then myself.
Jaffa, as a whole, could stand the scrub-brush and the hose. It is not
"the beautiful" from within. It is wretchedly unbeautiful, though just
as we were getting ready to leave it we did have one genuine vision.
From the enclosures of the Greek Church we looked across an interminable
orange-grove, in which the trees seemed mere shrubs, but were literally
massed with golden fruit--the whole blending away into tinted haze and
towering palms. No blight, no vileness, no inodorous breath, but only
the dreamlit mist and the laden trees--the Orient of our long ago.
* * * * *
One might reasonably suppose that, as often as parties like ours travel
over the railway that potters along from Jaffa to Jerusalem, there would
be no commotion, no controversy with the officials--that the guard would
only need to come in and check up our tickets and let us go.
Nothing of the kind; every such departure as ours is a function, an
occasion--an entirely new proposition, to be considered and threshed out
in a separate and distinct fashion. Before we were fairly seated in the
little coach provided, dark-skinned men came in one after another to
look us over and get wildly excited--over our beauty, perhaps; I could
discover nothing else unusual about us. They would wave their hands and
carry on, first inside and then on the platform, where they would seem
to settle it. When they had paid us several visits of this kind, they
locked us in and went away, and we expected to start.
Not at all; they came back presently and did it all over again, only
louder. Then our dragoman appeared, and bloodshed seemed imminent. When
they went away again he said it was nothing--just the usual business of
getting started.
By-and-by some of us discovered that our bags had not been put on the
train, so we drifted out to look for them. We found them here and there,
with from two to seven miscreants battling over each as to which should
have the piastre or two of baksheesh collectible for handing our things
from the carriage to the train. Such is the manner of graft in the Holy
Land. It lacks organization and does not command respect.
The station was a hot, thirsty place. We loaded up with baskets of
oranges, the great, sweet, juicy oranges of Jaffa--the finest oranges in
the world, I am sure--then we forgot all our delays and troubles, for we
were moving out through the groves and gardens of the suburbs, entering
the Plains of Sharon--"a fold for flocks, a fertile land, blossoming as
the rose."
That old phrase expresses it exactly. I have never seen a place that so
completely conveyed the idea of fertility as those teeming, haze-haunted
plains of Sharon. Level as a floor, the soil dark, loose, and loamy;
here green with young wheat, there populous with labor--men and women,
boys and girls, dressed in the old, old dress, tilling the fields in the
old, old manner; flocks and herds tended by such shepherds as saw the
Star rise over Bethlehem; girls carrying water-jars on their heads;
camel trains swinging across the horizon--a complete picture of primal
husbandry, it was--a vast allegory of increase. I have seen agricultural
and pastoral life on a large scale in America, where we do all of the
things with machinery and many of them with steam, and would find it
hard to plough with a camel and a crooked stick; but I have somehow
never felt such a sense of tillage and production--of communing with
mother earth and drawing life and sustenance from her bosom--as came to
me there crossing the Plains of Sharon, the garden of Syria.
It is a goodly tract for that country--about fifty miles long and from
six to fifteen wide. The tribes of Dan and Manasseh owned it in the old
days, and to look out of the car-window at their descendants is to see
those first families that Joshua settled there, for they have never
changed.
Our dragoman began to point out sites and landmarks. Here was the Plain
of Joshua, where Samson made firebrands of three hundred foxes and
destroyed the standing corn of the Philistines. The tower ahead is at
Ramleh, and was built by the crusaders nearly a thousand years
ago--Ramleh being the Arimathea where lived Joseph, who provided the
Saviour with a sepulchre. Also, it is said to be the place where in the
days when Samuel judged Israel the Jews besought him for a king, and
acquired Saul and the line of David and Solomon as a result. To the
eastward lies the Valley of Ajalon, where Joshua stopped the
astronomical clock for the only time in a million ages, that he might
slaughter some remaining Amorites before dark.
We are out of the Plains of Sharon by this time, running through a
profitless-looking country, mostly rock and barren, hardly worth
fighting over, it would seem. Yet there were plenty of people to be
killed here in the old days, and as late as fifteen hundred years after
Joshua the Roman Emperor Hadrian slaughtered so many Jews at Bittir (a
place we shall pass presently) that the horses waded to their nostrils
in blood, and a stone weighing several pounds was swept along by the
ruby tide. The guide told us this, and said if we did not believe it he
could produce the stone.
Landmarks fairly overlap one another. Here, at Hill Gezer, are the ruins
of an ancient city presented to Solomon by one of his seven hundred
fathers-in-law. Yonder at Ekron so much history has been made that a
chapter would be required to record even a list of the events. Ekron was
one of the important cities which Joshua did not capture, perhaps
because he could not manage the solar system permanently. The whole
route fairly bristles with Bible names, and we are variously affected.
When we are shown the footprints of Joshua and Jacob and David and
Solomon we are full of interest. When we recall that this is also the
land of Phut and Cush and Buz and Jidlaph and Pildash we are moved
almost to tears.
For those last must have been worthy men. The Bible records nothing
against them, which is more than can be said of the others named. Take
Jacob, for instance. I have searched carefully, and I fail to find
anything to his credit beyond the fact that he procreated the Lord's
chosen people. I do find that he deceived his father, defrauded his
brother, outmanoeuvred his rascally father-in-law, and was a craven at
last before Esau, who had been rewarded for his manhood and forgiveness
and wrongs by being classed with the Ishmaelites, a name that carries
with it a reproach to this day.
Then there is Solomon. We need not go into the matter of his thousand
wives and pretty favorites. Long ago we condoned that trifling
irregularity as incident to the period--related in some occult but
perfectly reasonable way to great wisdom. No, the wives are all
right--also the near-wives, we have swallowed those, too; but then there
comes in his heresy, his idolatry--all those temples built to heathen
gods when he had become magnificent and mighty and full of years. There
was that altar which he set up to Moloch on the hill outside of
Jerusalem (called to this day the Hill of Offence), an altar for the
_sacrifice of children by fire_. Even Tiberius Caesar and Nero did not go
as far as that. I'm sorry, and I shall be damned for it, no doubt, but
I think, on the whole, in the language of the Diplomat, I shall have to
"pass Solomon up." Never mind about the other two. Joshua's record is
good enough if one cares for a slayer of women and children, and David
was a poet--a supreme poet, a divine poet--which accounts for a good
deal. Still, he did not need to put the captured Moabites under saws and
harrows of iron and make them walk through brick-kilns, as described in
II. Samuel xii: 31, to be picturesque. Neither did he need to kill Uriah
the Hittite in order to take his wife away from him. Uriah would
probably have parted with her on easier terms.
It is sad enough to reflect that the Bible, in its good, old, relentless
way, found it necessary to record such things as these against our
otherwise Sunday-school heroes and models. Nothing of the sort is set
down against Buz and Cush and Phut and Pildash and Jidlaph. Very likely
they were about perfect. I wish I knew where they sleep.
The nearer one approaches Jerusalem the more barren and unproductive
becomes the country. There are olive-groves and there are cultivated
fields, but there are more of flinty hillsides and rocky steeps. The
habitations are no longer collected in villages, in the Syrian fashion,
but are scattered here and there, with wide sterile places between.
There would seem to be not enough good land in any one place to support
a village.
I suppose this is the very home of baksheesh. I know at every station
mendicants, crippled and blind--always blind--come swarming about,
holding up piteous hands and repeating endlessly the plaintive wail,
"Baksheesh! bak-sheesh!" One's heart grows sick and hard by turns. There
are moments when you long for the wealth of a Rockefeller to give all
these people a financial standing, and there are moments when you long
for a Gatling-gun to turn loose in their direction. We are only weak and
human. We may pity the hungry fly ever so much, but we destroy him.
I think, by-the-way, some of these beggars only cry baksheesh from
habit, and never expect to get anything. I think so, because here and
there groups of them stand along the railway between stations, and hold
out their hands, and voice the eternal refrain as we sweep by. It is
hardly likely that any one ever flings anything out of a car-window.
Pity becomes too sluggish in the East to get action as promptly as that.
It was toward evening when we ran into a rather modern little railway
station, and were told that we were "there." We got out of the train
then, and found ourselves in such a howling mob of humanity as I never
dreamed could gather in this drowsy land. We were about the last party
of the season, it seems, and the porters and beggars and cabmen and
general riffraff were going to make the most of us. We were seized and
dragged and torn and lifted--our dragoman could keep us together about
as well as one cowboy could handle a stampeded herd. I have no distinct
recollection of how we managed to reach the carriages, but the first
words I heard after regaining consciousness were:
"That pool down there is where Solomon was anointed king."
I began to take notice then. We were outside a range of lofty
battlemented walls, approaching a wide gate flanked by an imposing tower
that might belong to the Middle Ages. We looked down on the squalid pool
of Gihon, and I tried to visualize the scene of Solomon's coronation
there, which I confess I found difficult. Then we turned to the tower
and the entrance to the Holy City.
We were entering Jerusalem by the Jaffa gate, and the tower was the
Tower of David.
XXXI
THE HOLY CITY
Thirty-nine hundred years ago it was called merely Salem, and was ruled
over by Melchisedek, who feasted Abraham when he returned from punishing
the four kings who carried off his nephew, Lot. Five hundred years
later, when Joshua ravaged Canaan, the place was known as Jebusi, the
stronghold of the Jebusites, a citadel "enthroned on a mountain
fastness" which Joshua failed to conquer, in spite of the traditional
promise to Israel. Its old name had been not altogether dropped, and the
transition from Jebusi-salem to Jebu-salem and Jerusalem naturally
followed.
It was four hundred years after Joshua's time that David brought the
head of Goliath to Jerusalem, and fifteen years later, when he had
become king, he took the "stronghold of Zion," smote the difficult
Jebusite even to the blind and the lame, and named the place the City of
David.
"And David said on that day, whosoever getteth up to the
gutter and smiteth the Jebusites, and the lame and the
blind, _that are_ hated of David's soul, he shall be chief
and captain."
That is not as cruel as it sounds. Those incapables had no doubt been
after David for baksheesh, and he felt just that way. I would like to
appoint a few chiefs and captains of Jerusalem on the same terms.
But I digress. The Bible calls it a "fort," and it was probably not much
more than that until David "built round about" and turned it into a
city, the fame of which extended to Hiram, King of Tyre, who sent
carpenters and masons and materials to David and built him a house.
After which "David took him some more concubines and wives out of
Jerusalem," brought up the Ark of the Covenant from Kirjath-jearim, and
prepared to live happy ever after. The Ark was, of course, very sacred,
and one Uzzah was struck dead on the way up from Kirjath for putting out
his hand to save it when it was about to roll into a ditch.
It was with David that the glory of Jerusalem as a city began. Then came
Solomon--David's second son by Uriah's wife--wise, masterful, and
merciless, and Jerusalem became one of the magnificent cities of the
world. Under Solomon the Hebrew race became more nearly a nation then
ever before or since. Solomon completed the Temple begun by David on
Mount Moriah; the Ark of the Covenant was duly installed. Judaism had
acquired headquarters--Israel, organization, and a capital.
The fame of the great philosopher-poet-king spread to the ends of the
earth. The mighty from many lands came to hear his wisdom and to gaze
upon the magnificence of his court. The Queen of Sheba drifted in from
her far sunlit kingdom with offerings of gold, spices, and precious
stones. And "she communed with him of all that was in her heart." That
was more than a thousand years before Christ. Greece had no history
then. Rome had not been even considered. Culture and splendor were at
high-tide in the Far East. It was the golden age of Jerusalem.
The full tide must ebb, and the waning in Jerusalem began early.
Solomon's reign was a failure at the end. Degenerating into a sensualist
and an idolater, his enemies prevailed against him. The Lord "stirred up
an adversary" in Hadad the Edomite, who had an old grudge. Also others,
and trouble followed. The nation was divided. Revolt, civil wars, and
abounding iniquities dragged the people down. That which would come to
Rome a thousand years later came now on a smaller scale to Israel.
Egyptian and Arabian ravaged it by turns, and the Assyrian came down
numerously. It became the habit of adjoining nations to go over and
plunder and destroy Jerusalem.
Four hundred years after Solomon, Josiah undertook to rehabilitate the
nation and restore its ancient faith. He pulled down the heathen altars
which Solomon had constructed, "that no man might make his son or
daughter pass through the fire to Moloch"; he drove out and destroyed
the iniquitous priests; he burned the high places of pollution and
stamped the powder in the dust.