style, a remnant of the Crusaders' occupation. The gloomy wady has
another association; a monkish tradition would have us believe it was
the birthplace of Jeremiah; if the prophet was born in such a hard
country it might account for his lamentations. As we pass out of this
wady, the German driver points to a forlorn village clinging to the
rocky slope of a hill to the right, and says,—
“That is where John Baptist was born.”
The information is sudden and seems improbable, especially as there are
other places where he was born.
“How do you know?” we ask.
“O, I know ganz wohl; I been five years in dis land, and I ought to
know.”
Descending into a deep ravine we cross a brook, which we are told is
the one that flows into the Valley of Elah, the valley of the
“terebinth” or button trees; and if so, it is the brook out of
which David took the stone that killed Goliath. It is a bright, dashing
stream. I stood upon the bridge, watching it dancing down the ravine,
and should have none but agreeable recollections of it, but that close
to the bridge stood a vile grog-shop, and in the doorway sat the most
villanous-looking man I ever saw in Judæa, rapacity and murder in his
eyes. The present generation have much more to fear from him and his
drugged liquors than the Israelite had from the giant of Gath.
While the wagon zigzags up the last long hill, I mount by a short path
and come upon a rocky plateau, across which runs a broad way, on the
bed rock, worn smooth by many centuries of travel: by the passing
of caravans and armies to Jerusalem, of innumerable generations of
peasants, of chariots, of horses, mules, and foot-soldiers; here went
the messengers of the king's pleasure, and here came the heralds and
legates of foreign nations; this great highway the kings and prophets
themselves must have trodden when they journeyed towards the sea; for Ï
cannot learn that the Jews ever had any decent roads, and perhaps
they never attained the civilization necessary to build them. We have
certainly seen no traces of anything like a practicable ancient highway
on this route.
Indeed, the greatest wonder to me in the whole East is that there has
not been a good road built from Jaffa to Jerusalem; that the city
sacred to more than half the world, to all the most powerful nations, to
Moslems, Jews, Greeks, Roman Catholics, Protestants, the desire of all
lands, and the object of pilgrimage with the delicate and the feeble as
well as the strong, should not have a highway to it over which one can
ride without being jarred and stunned and pounded to a jelly; that the
Jews should never have made a road to their seaport; that the Romans,
the road-builders, do not seem to have constructed one over this
important route. The Sultan began this one over which we have been
dragged, for the Empress Eugenie. But he did not finish it; most of the
way it is a mere rubble of stones. The track is well engineered, and
the road bed is well enough; soft stone is at hand to form an excellent
dressing, and it might be, in a short time, as good a highway as any in
Switzerland, if the Sultan would set some of his lazy subjects to work
out their taxes on it. Of course, it is now a great improvement over
the old path for mules; but as a carriage road it is atrocious. Imagine
thirty-six miles of cobble pavement, with every other stone gone and the
remainder sharpened!
Perhaps, however, it is best not to have a decent road to the Holy City
of the world. It would make going there easy, even for delicate ladies
and invalid clergymen; it would reduce the cost of the trip from Jaffa
by two thirds; it would take away employment from a lot of vagabonds
who harry the traveller over the route; it would make the pilgrimage
too much a luxury, in these days of pilgrimages by rail, and of little
faith, or rather of a sort of lacquer of faith which is only credulity.
Upon this plateau we begin to discern signs of the neighborhood of the
city, and we press forward with the utmost eagerness, disappointed at
every turn that a sight of it is not disclosed. Scattered settlements
extend for some distance out on the Jaffa road. We pass a school which
the Germans have established for Arab boys; an institution which does
not meet the approval of our restoration driver; the boys, when they
come out, he says, don't know what they are; they are neither Moslems
nor Christians. We go rapidly on over the swelling hill, but the city
will not reveal itself. We expect it any moment to rise up before us,
conspicuous on its ancient hills, its walls shining in the sun.
We pass a guard-house, some towers, and newly built private residences.
Our pulses are beating a hundred to the minute, but the city refuses to
“burst” upon us as it does upon other travellers. We have advanced
far enough to see that there is no elevation before us higher than that
we are on. The great sight of all our lives is only a moment separated
from us; in a few rods more our hearts will be satisfied by that
long-dreamed-of prospect. How many millions of pilgrims have hurried
along this road, lifting up their eyes in impatience for the vision!
But it does not come suddenly. We have already seen it, when the driver
stops, points with his whip, and cries,—
“Jerusalem!”
“What, that?”
We are above it and nearly upon it. What we see is chiefly this: the
domes and long buildings of the Russian Hospice, on higher ground than
the city and concealing a good part of it; a large number of new houses,
built of limestone prettily streaked with the red oxyde of iron; the
roofs of a few of the city houses, and a little portion of the wall that
overlooks the Valley of Hinnom. The remainder of the city of David is
visible to the imagination.
The suburb through which we pass cannot be called pleasing. Everything
outside the walls looks new and naked; the whitish glare of the stone is
relieved by little vegetation, and the effect is that of barrenness. As
we drive down along the wall of the Russian convent, we begin to meet
pilgrims and strangers, with whom the city overflows at this season;
many Russian peasants, unkempt, unsavory fellows, with long hair and
dirty apparel, but most of them wearing a pelisse trimmed with fur and a
huge fur hat. There are coffee-houses and all sorts of cheap booths
and shanty shops along the highway. The crowd is motley and far from
pleasant; it is sordid, grimy, hard, very different from the more
homogeneous, easy, flowing, graceful, and picturesque assemblage of
vagabonds at the gate of an Egyptian town. There are Russians, Cossacks,
Georgians, Jews, Armenians, Syrians. The northern dirt and squalor and
fanaticism do not come gracefully into the Orient. Besides, the rabble
is importunate and impudent.
We enter by the Jaffa and Hebron gate, a big square tower, with the
exterior entrance to the north and the interior to the east, and the
short turn is choked with camels and horses and a clamorous crowd.
Beside it stands the ruinous citadel of Saladin and the Tower of David,
a noble entrance to a mean street. Through the rush of footmen and
horsemen, beggars, venders of olive-wood, Moslems, Jews, and Greeks,
we make our way to the Mediterranean Hotel, a rambling new hostelry. In
passing to our rooms we pause a moment upon an open balcony to look down
into the green Pool of Hezekiah, and off over the roofs to the Mount of
Olives. Having secured our rooms, I hasten along narrow and abominably
cobbled streets, mere ditches of stone, lined with mean shops, to the
Centre of the Earth, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
II.—JERUSALEM.
IT was in obedience to a natural but probably mistaken impulse, that I
went straight to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre during my first hour
in the city. Perhaps it was a mistake to go there at all; certainly I
should have waited until I had become more accustomed to holy places.
When a person enters this memorable church, as I did, expecting to see
only two sacred sites, and is brought immediately face to face with
thirty-seven, his mind is staggered, and his credulity becomes so
enfeebled that it is practically useless to him thereafter in any part
of the Holy City. And this is a pity, for it is so much easier and
sweeter to believe than to doubt.
It would have been better, also, to have visited Jerusalem many
years ago; then there were fewer sacred sites invented, and scholarly
investigation had not so sharply questioned the authenticity of the few.
But I thought of none of these things as I stumbled along the narrow and
filthy streets, which are stony channels of mud and water, rather than
foot-paths, and peeped into the dirty little shops that line the way. I
thought only that I was in Jerusalem; and it was impossible, at
first, for its near appearance to empty the name of its tremendous
associations, or to drive out the image of that holy city,
“conjubilant with song.”
I had seen the dome of the church from the hotel balcony; the building
itself is so hemmed in by houses that only its south side, in which
is the sole entrance, can be seen from the street. In front of this
entrance is a small square; the descent to this square is by a flight
of steps down Palmer Street, a lane given up to the traffic in beads,
olive-wood, ivory-carving, and the thousand trinkets, most of them cheap
and inartistic, which absorb the industry of the Holy City. The little
square itself, surrounded by ancient buildings on three sides and by
the blackened walls of the church on the north, might be set down in a
mediæval Italian town without incongruity. And at the hour I first saw
it, you would have said that a market or fair was in progress there.
This, however, I found was its normal condition. It is always occupied
by a horde of more clamorous and impudent merchants than you will find
in any other place in the Orient.
It is with some difficulty that the pilgrim can get through the throng
and approach the portal. The pavement is covered with heaps of beads,
shells, and every species of holy fancy-work, by which are seated the
traders, men and women, in wait for customers. The moment I stopped to
look at the church, and it was discovered that I was a new-comer, a
rush was made at me from every part of the square, and I was at once the
centre of the most eager and hungry crowd. Sharp-faced Greeks, impudent
Jews, fair-faced women from Bethlehem, sleek Armenians, thrust strings
of rude olive beads and crosses into my face, forced upon my notice
trumpery carving in ivory, in nuts, in seeds, and screamed prices and
entreaties in chorus, bidding against each other and holding fast to me,
as if I were the last man, and this were the last opportunity they would
ever have of getting rid of their rubbish. Handfuls of beads rapidly
fell from five francs to half a franc, and the dealers insisted upon
my buying, with a threatening air; I remember one hard-featured and
rapacious wretch who danced about and clung to me, and looked into my
eyes with an expression that said plainly, “If you don't buy these
beads I 'll murder you.” My recollection is that I bought, for I
never can resist a persuasion of this sort. Whenever I saw the fellow in
the square afterwards, I always fancied that he regarded me with a sort
of contempt, but he made no further attempt on my life.
This is the sort of preparation that one daily has in approaching the
Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The greed and noise of traffic around it
are as fatal to sentiment as they are to devotion. You may be amused
one day, you may be indignant the next; at last you will be weary of the
importunate crowd; and the only consolation you can get from these daily
scenes of the desecration of the temple of pilgrimage is the proof they
afford that this is indeed Jerusalem, and that these are the legitimate
descendants of the thieves whom Christ scourged from the precincts of
the temple. Alas that they should thrive under the new dispensation as
they did under the old!
A considerable part of the present Church of the Holy Sepulchre is
not more than sixty years old; but the massive, carved, and dark south
portal, and the remains of the old towers and walls on this side, may be
eight hundred. There has been some sort of a church here ever since the
time of Constantine (that is, three centuries after the crucifixion of
our Lord), which has marked the spot that was then determined to be the
site of the Holy Sepulchre. Many a time the buildings have been swept
away by fire or by the fanaticism of enemies, but they have as often
been renewed. There would seem at first to have been a cluster of
buildings here, each of which arose to cover a newly discovered sacred
site. Happily, all the sacred places are now included within the walls
of this many-roofed, heterogeneous mass, of chapels, shrines, tombs, and
altars of worship of many warring sects, called the Church of the Holy
Sepulchre.
Happily also the exhaustive discussion of the question of the true site
of the sepulchre, conducted by the most devout and accomplished biblical
scholars and the keenest antiquarians of the age, relieves the ordinary
tourist from any obligation to enter upon an investigation that would
interest none but those who have been upon the spot. No doubt the larger
portion of the Christian world accepts this site as the true one.
I make with diffidence a suggestion that struck me, although it may not
be new. The Pool of Hezekiah is not over four hundred feet, measured
on the map, from the dome of the sepulchre. Under the church itself
are several large excavations in the rocks, which were once cisterns.
Ancient Jerusalem depended for its water upon these cisterns, which
took the drainage from the roofs, and upon a few pools, like that of
Hezekiah, which were fed from other reservoirs, such as Solomon's
Pool, at a considerable distance from the city. These cisterns under the
church may not date back to the time of our Lord, but if they do, they
were doubtless at that time within the walls. And of course the Pool of
Hezekiah, so near to this alleged site, cannot be supposed to have been
beyond the walls.
Within the door of the church, upon a raised divan at one side, as if
this were a bazaar and he were the merchant, sat a fat Turk, in official
dress, the sneering warden of this Christian edifice, and the perhaps
necessary guardian of peace within. His presence there, however, is
at first a disagreeable surprise to all those who rebel at owing an
approach to the holy place to the toleration of a Moslem; but I was
quite relieved of any sense of obligation when, upon coming out, the
Turk asked me for backsheesh!
Whatever one may think as to the site of Calvary, no one can approach
a spot which even claims to be it, and which has been for centuries the
object of worship of millions, and is constantly thronged by believing
pilgrims, without profound emotion. It was late in the afternoon when
I entered the church, and already the shades of evening increased the
artificial gloom of the interior. At the very entrance lies an object
that arrests one. It is a long marble slab resting upon the pavement,
about which candles are burning. Every devout pilgrim who comes in
kneels and kisses it, and it is sometimes difficult to see it for the
crowds who press about it. Underneath it is supposed to be the Stone of
Unction upon which the Lord's body was laid, according to the Jewish
fashion, for anointing, after he was taken from the cross.
I turned directly into the rotunda, under the dome of which is the stone
building enclosing the Holy Sepulchre, a ruder structure than that which
covers the hut and tomb of St. Francis in the church at Assisi. I met
in the way a procession of Latin monks, bearing candles, and chanting
as they walked. They were making the round of the holy places in the
church, this being their hour for the tour. The sects have agreed upon
certain hours for these little daily pilgrimages, so that there shall
be no collision. A rabble of pilgrims followed the monks. They had just
come from incensing and adoring the sepulchre, and the crowd of other
pilgrims who had been waiting their turn were now pressing in at the
narrow door. As many times as I have been there, I have always seen
pilgrims struggling to get in and struggling to get out. The proud and
the humble crowd there together; the greasy boor from beyond the Volga
jostles my lady from Naples, and the dainty pilgrim from America pushes
her way through a throng of stout Armenian peasants. But I have never
seen any disorder there, nor any rudeness, except the thoughtless
eagerness of zeal.
Taking my chance in the line, I passed into the first apartment, called
the Chapel of the Angel, a narrow and gloomy antechamber, which takes
its name from the fragment of stone in the centre, the stone upon which
the angel sat after it had been rolled away from the sepulchre. A stream
of light came through the low and narrow door of the tomb. Through the
passage to this vault only one person can enter at a time, and the tomb
will hold no more than three or four. Stooping along the passage, which
is cased with marble like the tomb, and may cover natural rock, I came
into the sacred place, and into a blaze of silver lamps, and candles.
The vault is not more than six feet by seven, and is covered by a low
dome. The sepulchral stone occupies all the right side, and is the
object of devotion. It is of marble, supposed to cover natural stone,
and is cracked and worn smooth on the edge by the kisses of millions of
people. The attendant who stood at one end opened a little trap-door,
in which lamp-cloths were kept, and let me see the naked rock, which is
said to be that of the tomb. While I stood there in that very centre of
the faith and longing of so many souls, which seemed almost to palpitate
with a consciousness of its awful position, pilgrim after pilgrim,
on bended knees, entered the narrow way, kissed with fervor or with
coldness the unresponsive marble, and withdrew in the same attitude.
Some approached it with streaming eyes and kissed it with trembling
rapture; some ladies threw themselves upon the cold stone and sobbed
aloud. Indeed, I did not of my own will intrude upon these acts of
devotion, which have the right of secrecy, but it was some time before
I could escape, so completely was the entrance blocked up. When I had
struggled out, I heard chanting from the hill of Golgotha, and saw the
gleaming of a hundred lights from chapel and tomb and remote recesses,
but I cared to see no more of the temple itself that day.
The next morning (it was the 7th of April) was very cold, and the
day continued so. Without, the air was keen, and within it was nearly
impossible to get warm or keep so, in the thick-walled houses, which
had gathered the damp and chill of dungeons. You might suppose that
the dirtiest and most beggarly city in the world could not be much
deteriorated by the weather, but it is. In a cheerful, sunny day
you find that the desolation of Jerusalem has a certain charm and
attraction: even a tattered Jew leaning against a ruined wall, or a
beggar on a dunghill, is picturesque in the sunshine; but if you put a
day of chill rain and frosty wind into the city, none of the elements of
complete misery are wanting. There is nothing to be done, day or night;
indeed, there is nothing ever to be done in the evening, except to read
your guide-book—that is, the Bible—and go to bed. You are obliged to
act like a Christian here, whatever you are.
Speaking of the weather, a word about the time for visiting Syria may
not be amiss. In the last part of March the snow was a foot deep in the
streets; parties who had started on their tour northward were snowed in
and forced to hide in their tents three days from the howling winter.
There is pleasure for you! We found friends in the city who had been
waiting two weeks after they had exhausted its sights, for settled
weather that would permit them to travel northward. To be sure, the
inhabitants say that this last storm ought to have been rain instead of
snow, according to the habit of the seasons; and it no doubt would have
been if this region were not twenty-five hundred feet above the sea. The
hardships of the Syrian tour are enough in the best weather, and I am
convinced that our dragoman is right in saying that most travellers
begin it too early in the spring.
Jerusalem is not a formidable city to the explorer who is content to
remain above ground, and is not too curious about its substructions and
buried walls, and has no taste, as some have, for crawling through its
drains. I suppose it would elucidate the history of the Jews if we
could dig all this hill away and lay bare all the old foundations, and
ascertain exactly how the city was watered. I, for one, am grateful to
the excellent man and great scholar who crawled on his hands and knees
through a subterranean conduit, and established the fact of a connection
between the Fountain of the Virgin and the Pool of Siloam. But I would
rather contribute money to establish a school for girls in the Holy
City, than to aid in laying bare all the aqueducts from Ophel to the
Tower of David. But this is probably because I do not enough appreciate
the importance of such researches among Jewish remains to the progress
of Christian truth and morality in the world. The discoveries hitherto
made have done much to clear up the topography of ancient Jerusalem;
I do not know that they have yielded anything valuable to art or to
philology, any treasures illustrating the habits, the social life, the
culture, or the religion of the past, such as are revealed beneath
the soil of Rome or in the ashes of Pompeii; it is, however, true that
almost every tourist in Jerusalem becomes speedily involved in all these
questions of ancient sites,—the identification of valleys that once
existed, of walls that are now sunk under the accumulated rubbish of two
thousand years, from thirty feet to ninety feet deep, and of foundations
that are rough enough and massive enough to have been laid by David and
cemented by Solomon. And the fascination of the pursuit would soon send
one underground, with a pickaxe and a shovel. But of all the diggings I
saw in the Holy City, that which interested me most was the excavation
of the church and hospital of the chivalric Knights of St. John;
concerning which I shall say a word further on.
The present walls were built by Sultan Suleiman in the middle of the
sixteenth century, upon foundations much older, and here and there, as
you can see, upon big blocks of Jewish workmanship. The wall is high
enough and very picturesque in its zigzag course and re-entering angles,
and, I suppose, strong enough to hitch a horse to; but cannon-balls
would make short work of it.
Having said thus much of the topography, gratuitously and probably
unnecessarily, for every one is supposed to know Jerusalem as well as he
knows his native town, we are free to look at anything that may chance
to interest us. I do not expect, however, that any words of mine can
convey to the reader a just conception of the sterile and blasted
character of this promontory and the country round about it, or of the
squalor, shabbiness, and unpicturesqueness of the city, always excepting
a few of its buildings and some fragments of antiquity built into modern
structures here and there. And it is difficult to feel that this spot
was ever the splendid capital of a powerful state, that this arid and
stricken country could ever have supplied the necessities of such a
capital, and, above all, that so many Jews could ever have been crowded
within this cramped space as Josephus says perished in the siege by
Titus, when ninety-seven thousand were carried into captivity and eleven
hundred thousand died by famine and the sword. Almost the entire Jewish
nation must have been packed within this small area.