Haifa, April 30.—In my last letter I described the little-known hot
sulphur springs of Amatha, with their extensive ruins, which indicate
the celebrity they must have acquired in the days of the Romans. As the
river Yarmuk above this point had, so far as I know, never been
explored, I determined to push up the gorges through which it cleaves
its way from the highlands of the Hauran to the valley of the Jordan.
Some years ago I had crossed it about thirty miles higher up, where it
flows across a plateau at an elevation of 1800 feet above the sea. I was
now standing on its margin, 550 feet below the sea. In the course of
this thirty miles, therefore, it has a fall of 2350 feet. In other
words, it was a fair presumption that there was a waterfall somewhere
between those two points which had never been visited. The inquiries
which I made from the natives on the point were unsatisfactory in their
result. They seemed unable to discriminate between a rapid and a
waterfall, and although they told me of many places where the water
rushed with great violence, they seemed to know of none where it was
precipitous. Upon one point they were, unfortunately, all agreed, which
was that there was no path up the river-side, and that it would be found
impossible at this time of year, when the stream was flooded, to force a
way up. However, we determined to try. We thought we should be more free
in our movements if we were unhampered by a guide, and directed only by
our topographical instincts.
We therefore left our tents standing, as a sort of home on which to
retreat in case of need, and struck across the small plain upon which
the springs are situated, to a ford, which four days previously had been
impracticable, but which we were assured we might now risk with safety.
The stream was here a hundred yards broad, full of large rocks, and with
a swift, turbid current that was by no means reassuring. The water came
high up on our saddle-flaps, but we reached the other bank without
mishap, and found ourselves skirting a dense thicket of tropical
underwood, above which a grove of at least three hundred date-trees
reared their tufted crests. It was a spot unlike any other to be found
in Palestine, for, although the heat in the valley of the Jordan, owing
to its depression below the sea, is as great as this, and at its
southern extremity greater, nowhere throughout its length is to be found
a spot where the vegetation is so dense and luxuriant. Here were wild
orange, lemon, fig, almond, and mulberry trees, oleanders growing to a
gigantic size, besides butm, sidr, carob, and other trees peculiar to
the country, and thickets of cane twenty feet high, forming a splendid
cover for the wild boars with which we were assured this jungle abounds.
The Arabs come here at certain seasons to gather the dates, weave mats
from the reeds, and harvest the crops of the slopes behind, which were
now all waving with young grain. During that time they live in mud
hovels, partly excavated in the ground, which were now deserted. There
was only one inhabitant, and he ran a small mill, picturesquely situated
under some date-trees, which was turned by a stream of hot sulphur water
issuing from a copious spring, with a temperature of 112°. The Yarmuk,
which flows beneath a cliff of black basalt three hundred feet high,
half encircles this unique spot, and I regretted that I had not time to
explore it thoroughly; but the jungle was so impenetrable that it was
impossible to make any impression upon it without an axe, and then it
would have been a work of time.
We now followed a track which approached the river bank. The hills,
fortunately, on our side sloped back gradually. Midway up the sheer face
of the cliff opposite we saw here and there caves, which, from their
regular shape, appear at one time to have been inhabited, but if so, the
only approach could have been from above, by baskets lowered to the
mouths, similar to the method used by the robbers who inhabited the Wady
Hamam, behind the plain of Gennesareth, in days of old. Now, instead of
robbers in baskets, we saw immense eagles sailing in front of the cliff,
in the crevices of which they had placed their nests. Crossing a spur
which jutted into the river from the mountains on our right, and which
prevented our following it closely, we obtained a splendid view of its
course for some miles. To our left were basalt and limestone cliffs, and
above them steep, sloping grass lands, now carpeted with wild flowers.
Above them again were more crags and cliffs, and then the rim which
marked the edge of the plateau, fifteen hundred feet above us. To the
right the hills sloped back more slowly, cleft here and there by wild,
rocky valleys, while their summits were fringed with oak forests. Here
and there the river foamed between precipices on both sides, and we
began to perceive that the task of exploration was by no means easy. But
it was perhaps all the more interesting. We made our horses scramble
where only goats had been before, now along the base of the cliff over
huge boulders, now half-way up its precipitous side, when prudence
suggested that horse and rider should separate, and each be responsible
for his own life and limbs. Now we forced our way through tangled
thickets of flowering shrubs that clung to the rocky sides where they
were less steep, and now, utterly baffled, diverging from the river and
toiling up a steep grassy slope, only to slip and scramble down it again
on the other side so as to regain the margin of the stream.
Our progress was necessarily slow, not only owing to the natural
obstacles we encountered, but to the fact that we were mapping the
country as we advanced; but the scenery by which we were surrounded was
too romantic to be hurried over, and too interesting, from its novelty,
not to be carefully noted. At last we reached a point where there had
been a land-slide, leaving bare one precipice a thousand feet high,
while it formed another above the stream, which it had displaced.
Nothing remained for it but to attempt another ford, and try our luck on
the opposite bank. This, to the amazement of some Bedouins, who watched
us from it and waved us back, we succeeded in accomplishing, not without
a narrow escape on the part of one of our party who, boldly leading the
way, got entangled among the rocks and eddies. We were cordially
welcomed by an Arab sheik, as we scrambled like half-drowned rats up the
bank. He invited us to his tents, which were pitched a few hundred yards
back from the stream, on a small plain. Here mats were spread for us,
coffee roasted, pounded, and prepared, and, the young men gathering
around, we proceeded, under the influence of an abundant distribution of
cigarettes on my part, to exchange ideas. They told us they belonged to
a village two and a half hours distant, and were therefore not nomads.
They came hither at this season of the year to pasture their herds and
look after their crops. I hardly like to report the conversation of
these poor people as they came to confide their grievances to us,
without our in any way inviting their confidence. Suffice it to say that
the recent measure of the government by which it has been decided to
substitute for the dime, which has heretofore been the share of the
government in the entire produce of every village, an assessment based
on the highest five years' average, has produced the greatest discontent
among the rural population, whose poverty and distress, already extreme,
owing to the extortion of the tax-gatherers even under the old system,
and the withdrawal of the bone and sinew of the country by conscription,
especially during the recent Russo-Turkish war, will thus be
intensified. In fact, these poor people were driven to such desperation
that they were most unreserved in their language, and although they are
the most long-suffering and much-enduring of races, there is a point
where the crushed worm will turn. However great the financial exigencies
of the empire may be, they would better be met by a thorough
reorganization and reform in the whole system of tax-collecting, than in
adding to the burdens of the people, which are already greater than they
can bear.
Our hosts assured us that we should find any further attempt to ascend
the river impracticable, and that there was a place where the water fell
for a considerable height, but we could only reach it by making a
circuit, which would take a day. However, we determined to judge for
ourselves, and succeeded in getting about a mile farther, when we found
the river shut in by precipices on both sides. It was impossible to
descend to it from the brow of the cliff on which we stood, much less to
ford it afterwards, or to scramble up the precipice on the other side.
There was nothing for it but to make an ascent of at least fifteen
hundred feet, either to the high plateau of Jaulan, on the right, or to
recross the river where we had already forded it, and scramble up the
steep, wooded hillsides of Ajlun until we could find a path leading in
the desired direction. This latter course we determined to adopt; so we
returned to the Arabs tents, crossed the river more successfully than
before, warned by our previous experience, and braced ourselves for a
twelve-hundred-feet climb up the best track we could find, under the
guidance of one of our recent Arab acquaintances. I had been on the
lookout all through the day for ruins, and I was now cheered by the
intelligence that I should find some on the summit of the hill we were
climbing. Such proved to be the case. The situation, at an elevation by
my aneroid of about eleven hundred feet above the sea, would indicate
that in old time it was a fortress. It was supplied with water by
cisterns, the remains of which still exist, some of them
demijohn-shaped, and one about ten feet square and twenty feet to the
bottom, which, however, was much filled up. There were many piles of
huge blocks of drafted stone, but I did not observe any columns or
carving, and I think the remains date from a period anterior to the
Roman occupation. The modern name of the place is Tel el-Hösn, but its
existence has heretofore been unknown, except to the Arabs of the
neighborhood, and its discovery was some compensation to me for the
effort I had made to reach it.