Haifa, Oct. 7.—The village of Mugheir, where we halted to rest after our
long and weary scramble from the Jordan valley, is one of the most
out-of-the-way places to be found in Palestine. It is not on the way
anywhere, but a sort of _Ultima Thule_—the last spot where ground fit
for cultivation is to be found. It stands on the margin of a charming
little plain, where there is a fine olive grove. Indeed, looking
westward, the prospect is cheery enough, but eastward it is wild rock,
black, gloomy gorges, or less precipitous but equally barren valleys.
The sheik received us with great cordiality, albeit quite unused to the
visits of travellers, and spread before us such fare as he could, flat
Arab bread, roasted eggs, curdled goat's milk, and figs, butter, and
honey. I mention the last three together because you eat them together.
You first dip your dried fig into the butter, you then dip it into the
honey, and then put it into your mouth. I never tried the combination
before, but it is not bad. He also gave us a hot compound of flour and
sugar boiled together, which he seemed to think a great deal of, but,
beyond being sweet and sticky, it had no especial merit. His wife was
the fairest woman I ever saw for a pure-blooded fellahah peasant. In
fact, she could not have been fairer had she been a blue-eyed,
light-haired Swede or German.
After satisfying my hunger I went to look for antiquities, and found
several rock-cut tombs and cisterns, a fine rock-hewn wine-press, and
four towers all in a good state of preservation, and three of them
inhabited. They measured thirty feet square and as many in height. The
basement stones were massive enough to be the masonry of a former
period, but exactly of what date I am unable to say, possibly not
earlier than the crusades; though I found some foundations of walls
which I am inclined to ascribe to a much older date. There has been
probably a town or village here from time immemorial, though I am unable
to identify it with any Biblical site.
The sheik insisted upon accompanying us himself as guide to a place
called Singil, which we had fixed upon as our night quarters. Our way
led us through a small, depressed plain. After passing some remains of
no special interest we reached a very remarkable ruin, called El-Habs.
It is a tower on a rocky scarp, with walls built partly of masonry,
partly of rock, which measure about sixty feet by thirty. The stones of
which these walls are composed are of immense size, measuring from
twelve feet up to eighteen feet in length, with a height of from three
to four feet each. The masonry is thus quite equal to the average size
of the temple stones in Jerusalem. The tower has two entrances. Near it
are the remains of another large building of about one hundred feet
square outside measurement, and with walls six feet thick. Its interior
is divided into four parallel chambers, running east and west, of
various breadth. One of the partition walls has archways through it,
with piers between. All round these buildings are the foundations of
ancient walls and houses and bell-mouthed cisterns. The whole place
bears the marks of extreme antiquity. It has been examined by the
officers of the Palestine Survey, but is not mentioned in any
guide-book, and I am unable to form any conjecture in regard to it.
Our road now lay through a fertile plain, called The Meadow of the
Feast, possibly in some connection with the yearly feast which used to
be held by the Jews in old times at Shiloh, from which historical site
we were not far distant. It is a comfort now and then to come upon a
Biblical site about the identity of which there is not the slightest
doubt, and such is the case with Seilun, the modern name for Shiloh. It
stands in an extremely retired valley, and on our way to it we put up
the third batch of gazelles we had started in one day. This was the spot
where the Tabernacle was first permanently set up in Canaan, and where
the Israelites assembled to allot the Promised Land. They were probably
encamped hard by on The Meadow of the Feast, across which we had just
been riding, and it was probably on this meadow, while the maidens were
dancing at the festival in honour of the ark, that the remnant of the
Benjamites concealed themselves among the vineyards on the hillsides and
carried off two hundred maidens. At present it is impossible to be
certain whether any of the remains now visible existed at the time when
the Tabernacle was there. The ruins which first strike the eye on the
hillside are evidently those of a comparatively modern village, with
here and there fragments of masonry which may date back to Crusading
times. Then there is a low, square building supported by two rows of
columns, which has been used as a mosque, but in early times may have
been a Christian church; but the most remarkable monument is a square
building of which only the walls remain. It is apparently of three
architectural periods, and it is just possible that the oldest may have
been Jewish. The original walls have been added to by a sloping scarp
having been built against them, so that the wall, which is about
fourteen feet high, is nine feet thick at the bottom, and about three
feet thick at the top. Inside are some fragments of columns, capitals,
and a door lintel, which has recently fallen from the principal
entrance, on which are carved two wreaths, flanked by two double-handled
pitchers, and in the centre an amphora.
There are no inhabitants at Shiloh now, so we pushed on to Singil, a
village situated about three thousand feet above the sea-level, and
commanding a most magnificent view. The villagers here showed me some
foundations of what they said had been an old castle built by a certain
King Sinbil, but I strongly suspect that they substituted the b for a g,
as the village takes its name from a certain Crusading hero, who was
afterwards canonized and became St. Gilles, and that here he built
himself a castle. The natives also sent me into a cave on a wild goose
chase after an inscription, which, after much scrambling with lighted
tapers, I failed to find.
We had now left Judea, and were entering ancient Samaria, which is
governed, not from Jerusalem, but Damascus, the seat of government being
Nablous, a large town of about twenty thousand inhabitants, whose
principal industry is the manufacture of soap, with which they supply
almost the whole country. The town is squeezed in between the lofty
hills of Ebal and Gerizim, both of which are over three thousand feet
above the sea-level. This is the valley of Shechem. Nothing can exceed
in picturesqueness the situation of this place and the beauty of its
surroundings, especially when the almond and peach trees are in bloom in
the valley. The steep hillsides seem to be a mass of huge cactuses;
these are used to line the terraces of the vineyards as hedges, but as
they are great absorbers of vitality from the soil, I should think they
must impoverish the land. In the autumn these ungainly plants are
thickly covered with fruit about the size of a large fig, when ripe of a
bright red. They are full of small seeds, but sweet and refreshing. The
natives gorge themselves upon them, as they are esteemed wholesome, but
they are traps to the unwary and inexperienced of the most painful kind,
being covered outside with diminutive and almost invisible prickly
hairs. The first time I ever tried to eat one I filled my mouth with
these unpleasant little spikes, and spent half an hour with my tongue
out, while a friend was engaged with a pair of tweezers extracting each
individual irritant, but then he only partially succeeded, and for the
rest of the day I felt as if I had tried to swallow half a chopped-up
hair-brush. The natives pick the fruit by digging a pronged iron into
them, with which they twitch them off the stalk; they then roll them on
the ground, so as to get the hairy prickles off, and then carefully peel
them. The great green leaves have spikes like pins half an inch long
upon them, which inflict a most vicious and poisonous prick. I once
tumbled into a cactus bush, and really suffered severely for many hours.
Under these circumstances it is something amazing to see camels munching
these leaves, prickles and all, with apparent relish; a donkey eating
thistles is a joke to it.
Nablous is also surrounded by extensive olive groves, and the oil is
celebrated throughout Palestine; it also exports cotton of native
growth. In fact, for a Moslem city, it may be considered an enterprising
and go-ahead place. At present it lacks the prime necessity of a
carriage road to the sea-coast. All its exports and imports have to be
conveyed on the backs of camels. If the long-projected railway from
Haifa to Damascus could ever be consummated, a wagon road could easily
be constructed in connection with it, and Haifa would then become the
port of Nablous, instead of Jaffa, which is slightly nearer to it. With
the exception of the long central street, which forms the principal
bazaar, the streets as a rule are more gloomy and tunnel-like than most
Oriental towns, though there are many handsome stone houses, and the
building of new ones afforded evidence of the growing wealth of the
inhabitants. The consequence is an improvement in the reputation of the
population, who have in former times been notorious for their turbulent
fanaticism, but of late years the Turkish government has succeeded in
establishing its authority on a firmer foundation and making its
exercise felt. Indeed, the superficial traveller in the Turkish empire,
who only sees the defects of the existing system of administration, is
hardly a fair judge of the progress that has been made in a certain
direction unless he is able to compare it with what has been.
There can be no doubt that during the last twenty years a great change
has been worked in the establishment of law and order and in the
security of life and property. If oppression has the disadvantage of
grinding the people and making their lives miserable, it, at all events,
has the merit of intimidating them and restraining them from acts of
violence and crime. If the unjust judge and extortionate tax-gatherer
are taking the heart out of the people, they are taking the pluck out of
them, too, and one result is that the stranger can now travel in safety
through regions where he was once sure of being plundered and possibly
murdered, and walk unmolested through Moslem crowds, where formerly he
might have been subjected to insult. Nor is this due to the direct
action of any foreign power or to the exercise of any diplomatic
pressure in favor of reform. On the contrary, the influence of foreign
powers was never so low as it is at present, and I am convinced that all
attempts on the part of foreign powers to enforce reforms on Turkey only
hinder them. The influence of the sultan and his government is not to be
maintained throughout Islam by any action in obedience to the dictates
of Christian powers. They resent it, just as the South used to resent
the interference of the North in the matter of slavery; but this does
not prevent their being alive to any advantages which accrue to the
empire by enforcing, as far as may be, a respect for law and order; and,
so far as it is possible, to develop its resources without being
beholden to foreign capital, or increasing the power and influence of
the native Christian population. The difficulty is that the instinct of
the Moslem is not in favor of progress, and that he is always
outstripped in the race by his Christian neighbour.
Again, the country can only be developed through the education and
enlightenment of the people; but where an administrative system is in
itself corrupt and unenlightened, the education and illumination of the
masses means their endowment with the faculty of perceiving abuses, and
possibly with a determination to resist them; and this danger is so
great that it must be averted, even at the cost of the national
prosperity. For this reason the government sets its face against the
education of Moslems in Christian schools, not because they are afraid
of the Moslems being converted to Christianity—there is not the
slightest danger of that—but because they are afraid of their imbibing
Western ideas of social and political life, which are opposed to the
conditions which characterize the existing administration of affairs. In
fact they are not opposed to reform, but it must be a reform not
suggested from without, nor imposed upon them from within; it must
neither be in obedience to diplomatic pressure nor to popular clamour;
it must be a reform of their own initiative, and as any such reform, to
be effectual, must begin by the authorities with whom it is to originate
reforming themselves, the process seems almost hopeless. Still, as I
have already remarked, there has distinctly been change, and change for
the better, so far as security for life and property and the extension
and enforcement of official authority are concerned, during the last
twenty years—security of property to the people, be it understood, from
their own mutual plundering propensities. Whether this security extends
to the demands of the tax-gatherer, and how far it has conduced to their
own material welfare and happiness, is quite another question.