Daliet-el-Carmel, Sept. 11.—There is no fact at first more puzzling to
the traveller in Palestine than the contrast between the misery and
poverty of the fellahin and the extent and fertility of land owned by
each village. This is, however, the inevitable result of the various
fiscal devices to which the government has been compelled to resort, in
order to provide a revenue which shall meet the needs of its internal
administration, and the claims of its foreign bondholders. These press
more severely on the peasant class than on any other in the community,
and as the financial necessities of the empire increase, new methods are
being constantly devised to meet them. Thus the latest arrangement
requires the taxes to be paid in money instead of in kind, as
heretofore, the amount being assessed on an average of the crops
extending over a period of five years. This has produced the greatest
consternation among the peasantry throughout the country, who find
themselves quite unable to meet this new demand, and who are compelled,
in consequence, to resort to extortionate money-lenders, who charge from
thirty to forty per cent. for their advances, thus ruining the fellahin,
whose villages are all destined by this process to fall into the hands
of these grasping usurers, while the peasants remain upon them as serfs,
merely receiving so much of the crop as will keep them from starving.
Thus it happened that, in the belief that I had more bowels of
compassion than their own countrymen, I was applied to by the villagers
in all directions; among others, by those who owned the lands of Lejjun,
or the biblical Megiddo. This is generally supposed to be identical with
Armageddon, and the notion of becoming the proprietor of a battle-field
which possesses such interesting historical associations in the past, to
say nothing of the future, which may be mythical or not, according to
theological fancy, induced me to pay a visit to that celebrated
locality. Its position was as tempting as its sentimental considerations
were remarkable. Here, jutting out into the plain of Esdrælon, of which
it commands an extensive view, stands the Tell et Mutsellim, or
governor's hill, upon which the traces of what may have been a palace
are distinctly visible. Right opposite to us across the plain, about
twelve miles distant, the houses of Nazareth gleam upon the lofty
hillside; to the right are Tabor, Little Hermon, and Mount Gilboa, with
the mountains of Gilead in the rear. Beneath, circling round the base of
the mound, are “the waters of Megiddo,” a copious stream, turning two
water-mills and irrigating an extensive tract of plain. Behind us is an
undulating plateau covered with the ruins of the ancient city. Here are
fragments of columns, carved capitals and cornices, and I found some
subterranean chambers into which I crawled, and which, as they connected
with the stream by stone conduits, I assume must, in old times, have
been baths. The peasants have found antiques of various kinds, and I was
shown the hand and forearm of a female figure, life-size, and
beautifully carved in marble, which they had dug up. There is no saying
what treasures the fortunate proprietor of this place may not unearth,
and with the wealth of water at his command, of which but little
advantage is now taken, he might have extensive gardens and orange
groves. From this point a great military road passed, in the most
ancient times, connecting Galilee with the coast road. Along it, before
the conquest of Canaan by the Israelites, Thothmes, the King of Egypt,
led his invading hosts into Syria. Here, by “the waters of Megiddo,” was
fought the great battle between Barak and Sisera, when the stars in
their courses fought against Sisera; and on the same ground, six
centuries later, the hosts of Pharaoh Necho met the army of Josiah, King
of Judah, and vanquished it, while the king himself, being “sore
wounded” as he rode in his chariot, was carried away to Jerusalem to
die.
On making inquiries of a practical kind in regard to the present
financial position of this property and its peasant owners, I began to
suspect that any foreigner who desired to become its possessor would
find himself involved in a struggle of a different kind from that of
which in past times it has been the scene, and one more consonant with
the spirit of the age in which we live. The invasion of Palestine of
late years by foreigners of all religions and nationalities, the
constant influx of Jews, and the increasing attention which the Holy
Land is concentrating upon itself, has so far alarmed the Porte that
foreigners are practically prohibited from purchasing any more land in
the country; and the peasantry of the villages who applied to me for
assistance were informed that, even if I were prepared to lend them
money, they were not to be allowed to borrow. I was thus relieved of the
great annoyance of having constantly to refuse applications, which,
under any circumstances, I could not have satisfied.
From Megiddo I followed the historical highway through the mountain,
which, in the days of Christ, when Cæsarea was rising into its grandeur,
must have been one of the most frequented routes in the country. The
road led through charmingly diversified scenery. I turned off from it to
ascend to the town of Umm-el-Fahm, an important place, containing about
two thousand inhabitants, situated on copse-clothed hills, at an
elevation of fifteen hundred feet above the level of the sea, and
commanding extensive views. Here I was the guest of a local millionaire,
noted for his penurious habits and his grasping nature. His ragged
appearance and humble establishment did not belie his reputation. I had,
however, no reason to complain, for, if the accommodation was rough, his
intentions were certainly hospitable.
The romantic valleys by which the village is surrounded are thickly
planted with olive groves, which contain over a hundred thousand trees,
and are a great source of revenue. While, when they are too far from the
village for the protection of any crop, the hillsides and summits are
clothed with a dense undergrowth of scrub oak, terebinth, and other
shrubs, which are only prevented from becoming forest trees by the
charcoal-burners; but their quick growth testifies to the richness of
the soil. To the north the range extends for fifteen miles, to the base
of Carmel. The woodland disappears, and is succeeded by rolling chalk
downs, affording magnificent pasturage and good arable land, for it is
well watered, and from its temperate and healthy climate is called the
“breezy land.”
The villages here are small, few, and far between, and there is room for
a large population; but the most tempting land of all is the tract
between Umm-el-Fahm and the sea, where the oak-trees which are scattered
over the pastures and cornfields attain a large growth, and the country
presents the appearance of an immense park. From an artistic point of
view the woods and the farm lands are so combined as to form the most
perfectly diversified scenery, just where the rolling hills slope gently
down into the plain of Sharon. It was across this country that our road
lay to Cæsarea, which was our objective point, first, through the thick
copse of the upper valleys, and so out upon the park-like uplands, where
the whole population was out in the fields gathering the crops, which
strings of camels were conveying to the village threshing-floors. Here
and there was a money-lender from Acre or Beyrout, squatting under an
umbrella, to see that the peasantry did not rob him of his share. This
is a busy time with these gentry, who are the bloodsuckers of the
fellahin, to whom they advance money at exorbitant rates of interest,
while the latter, in revenge, resort to every conceivable device to
conceal from them the real extent of the crop, and to make the
proportion coming to them as small as possible.
At one village called Arareh I found three old Roman arches, a fine
fragment of a column, and some rock-cut tombs, which seem hitherto to
have escaped observation. The remains indicate that it must have been a
place of considerable importance, but I have not yet been able to
identify it. The plain of Sharon, where we struck it, is being by
degrees brought into cultivation, partly by colonists, Circassian and
Bosnian, and partly by native capitalists. The peasantry themselves are
rapidly losing all proprietorship in the soil, unable to contend against
the exactions of the government tax-gatherer, on the one hand, and of
the usurious money-lender, on the other; but while they are yearly
becoming more impoverished and dependent, the wealth of the country is
steadily increasing, and its development must follow as a matter of
course, though, in accordance with the tendencies of modern
civilization, it will be at the expense of the masses.
I went to lunch with the largest of these local magnates. He was a Turk,
and spoke Turkish in preference to Arabic. He had, as may be supposed,
little sympathy with the Arab peasantry, who were practically his serfs,
and their condition was by no means improved by their lands having
fallen into his hands. On the other hand, they never would have
introduced the civilized iron ploughs with which he was bringing land
into cultivation. His farm-house was a large, straggling, isolated
building, which stood on a hillock in the plain, with extensive
outhouses and dependencies, not unlike the residence of a Southern
planter, while, curiously enough, a large proportion of his farm hands
consisted of African negroes located in a village hard by—but he had
none of the lavish hospitality which characterized the landed
proprietors of the South.
A ride of an hour over a part of the plain which, from the peculiar
quality of its soil, is exclusively devoted to the growth of
water-melons, hitherto the sole export of the little haven of Cæsarea,
brought me to that spot. Although the remains of the old port have been
used as a harbour for coasting craft, these ruins have not been
inhabited since they were evacuated by the crusaders at the end of the
thirteenth century. Indeed, there is a curious prediction connected with
them, to the effect that the rebuilding of a town here would immediately
precede a great disaster to Islam. It has been in consequence of this,
as I have understood, that while villages have sprung up on all the
other crusading ruins on the coast, this one alone has remained
untenanted. However this may be, the spell is broken now, for about six
months ago the first instalment of a band of refugees from Bosnia and
Herzegovina arrived here, having been allotted this ruin and the lands
surrounding it by the government, as the nucleus of a new colony.
Apart from the great interest which these extensive ruins must ever have
from an antiquarian point of view, I was anxious to visit Cæsarea to
judge for myself of the prospects of this embryo colony, and make
personal acquaintance with this new and interesting class of immigrants.
Moreover, as the new town is to be built upon the ruins of the old, it
was evident that I should never have another chance of seeing what these
were like. They have already during the last twenty years served as a
quarry from whence the magnificent building-stones, cut originally by
Herod the Great when he built the town, have been transported in
thousands of boat-loads to Acre and Jaffa. The ruins have therefore lost
much of the pristine grandeur which is described in the records of
travellers in the early part of the present century. In a few years more
they will probably have disappeared altogether. The subterranean
treasures, whatever they may be, will, however, remain untouched, and
the Schliemann of a future age will find here the traces of five
successive epochs of civilization. On the top he will find the ruins of
the stone houses of the Bosnians and Herzegovinians, now in process of
erection; below them the foundations of the great Crusading fortress,
and below them again the remains of the first Mohammedan period; beneath
them, traces of the Byzantine period, and, at the bottom, the
tessellated pavements, the fragments of carved marble, the statuary, and
the coins of the Roman period.
Meantime it is a singular fact that the strip of coast from Haifa to
Cæsarea seems to have become a centre of influx of colonists and
strangers of the most diverse races. The new immigrants to Cæsarea are
Slavs. Some of them speak a little Turkish. Arabic is an unknown tongue
to them, which they are learning. Their own language is a Slav dialect.
When the troubles in the provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina first broke
out, which led to the Russo-Turkish war, a howl of indignation went up
from the philanthropists on both sides of the Atlantic, but especially
from the Radical party in England, against the Turkish government, for
its persecution of the Slav population of the Danubian provinces. Nor do
I think that the general public have yet realized the fact that of these
Slavs more than half were Moslem, and that the Turkish government was
not persecuting them more than it was persecuting any other of its
subjects, but that the persecutors of the Slav peasantry, who were
Christian, were the Slav aristocracy, who were Moslem. It was, in fact,
not a question of an oppressed nationality, but a strictly agrarian
question between people of the same race. When it was settled by handing
over the provinces to Austria, the Slav-Moslem aristocracy, finding
themselves in their turn persecuted by their former peasants and the
Christian power which protected them, migrated to the more congenial
rule of the sultan. So the curious spectacle is presented of a Slav
population migrating from Austrian rule to Asia, in order to be under a
Moslem government.
Close beside the new Bosnian colony there are planted in the plain of
Sharon two or three colonies of Circassians. These are the people who
committed the Bulgarian atrocities. The irony of fate has now placed
them within three or four miles of colonists belonging to the very race
they massacred. They, too, fleeing from government by Christians, have
sought refuge under the sheltering wing of the sultan, where, I regret
to say, as I described in a former letter, they still indulge in their
predatory propensities. In immediate proximity to them are the black
tents of a tribe of Turcomans. They belong to the old Seljuk stock, and
the cradle of their tribe gave birth to the present rulers of the
Turkish Empire. They have been here for about three hundred years, and
have forgotten the Turkish language, but a few months ago a new
migration arrived from the mountains of Mesopotamia. These nomads spoke
nothing but Turkish, and hoped to find a warm welcome from their old
tribesmen on the plain of Sharon. In this they were disappointed, and
they have now, to my disgust, pitched their tents on some of the spurs
of Carmel, where their great hairy camels and their own baggy breeches
contrast curiously with the camels and costumes of the Bedouins with
whom we are familiar.
Besides the Slavs, the Circassians, and the Turcomans, we have the
Jewish colony of Zimmarin, distant about ten miles from Cæsarea; the
German colony at Haifa, and the Druse villages on Carmel, making, with
the Bedouins, the negroes, and the native fellahin, no fewer than nine
different races engaged in the cultivation of the soil in this
neighbourhood.