CHAPTER V

CRUSADER

To tell even in barest outline the long story of the Crusades would be a

task as impossible as it would be thankless. The magic of Sir Walter

Scott’s _Talisman_ is happily not yet dead, and in some degree the

Crusader still lives as an actual and human figure in our imagination.

Many Christians who had come as pilgrims had settled in the land as its

inhabitants, and for four centuries after the Arabian conquest these

continued both their trade and their worship under the tolerably mild

Mohammedan rule. In the eleventh century all was changed by the Saracen

invasion. Pilgrims were extortionately taxed at the gates of Jerusalem;

their lives were imperilled, their persons and their devotions insulted.

The old commerce, which had grown to considerable proportions, was

ruined, and pilgrimage, from being a lucrative and pleasant service,

became an almost certain martyrdom.

It was this state of affairs which sent Peter the Hermit through Europe

on his great campaign in 1093, and those extraordinary wars that raged

in Syria through two centuries bore the complex character of the

motives which had prompted them. From the departure of that motley

rabble which followed the Hermit to the East in the first Crusade, down

to the pitiful expedition of French children who started 30,000 strong

from Vendôme in 1212, there stretches perhaps the most picturesque

period in all history.[28]

The mass of paradox and contradiction which that period presents is no

less striking. It was an invasion by the West, whose purpose was to

rehabilitate an Eastern faith. It was a religious war carried on by the

jealousies and ambitions of rival nations. It was the occasion of some

of the most statesmanlike government that the world has seen, and it was

accompanied from first to last by frequent outbursts of treachery,

massacre, and lust. It was the most airy dream and at the same time the

most effective practical force of its time. It was the expression of the

most ascetic severity and the most reckless luxury. Utterly futile,

commercially and socially disastrous, often wholly irreligious, it was

yet everywhere a massive and purposeful conception, in which the

determination and forcefulness of the West thrust their iron wedge clean

to the centre of this sleepy land. Its high idealism, curiously alloyed

with grosser elements both sensual and brutal, was yet able to preserve

through all the genuine spiritual fire of chivalry and of faith.

Our task is simply to ascertain what all this stands for in the history

of Palestine, and what it has left behind it there as its memorial. In

two words, it stands for the contact of the East and West, and for their

separateness. Into Europe the Crusades brought much from the East. It

was due to them more than to all other causes that there was so immense

an increase of Eastern merchandise in Western markets--not of Jerusalem

relics only, but of Damascus ware and of Persian and even Indian produce

from beyond the great rivers. Their influence on architecture, too, is a

well-known fact of Western history. The Mosque of Omar rose on at least

three European sites, and the plan of many another piece of Byzantine

building and Arabesque decoration was brought home by the Crusaders from

the wars. Into the East, again, the Crusades brought much from the West.

From north to south of Palestine one meets with the remains and

memorials of that invasion. Theirs are the footprints most visible

throughout the land. Everything in Syria has felt the touch of them and

retained its mark. At every turn one finds something recognisable and

homely to Western ears and eyes--the name of a castle, the chiselling of

a stone, the moulding of metal--they are strangely familiar as they are

met so far away from home. Yet they survive as wreckage, and as wreckage

only. He who hopes to westernise the East is attempting a task in which

all must fail, whether they be soldiers or priests, missionaries or

statesmen. The ancient Eastern life has long ago flowed back over the

relics of the Western occupation of Syria.

The surviving traces are of many kinds. There are the descendants of

Crusaders, sprung of intermarriages with Eastern women, and still

preserving a distinctively European type in little suggestive details of

feature or of hair. Names such as Belfort, Belvoir, Mirabel,

Blanchegarde, or Sinjil (St. Giles), coming without apology next to the

Hebrew and Arabic names of villages in Palestine, strike one with very

much the same shock as old Scottish place-names do, alternating with

incorporated aboriginal ones, on the railway stations of the Australian

bush. Relics like the sword and spurs of Godfrey de Bouillon may, like

most other relics, be discounted, but not so the wonderful masonry of

castles and of churches which everywhere overawes the man accustomed to

modern walls. Winding our way with tight rein along the narrow and

crooked streets of Tyre, we suddenly plunged into the darkness and foul

air of the Bazaar. At the other end of it, emerging under a Gothic

archway, we found ourselves in the courtyard of a khan, a very dirty and

unpleasant place. Seeing nothing but unclean stables, we imagined that

our horses were to be put up here and perhaps fed, and we pitied them.

Then, to our astonishment, we discovered that this was the old Crusader

Church, where these broken and discoloured arches had once echoed the

hymns and prayers of European chivalry; and that somewhere among them

lay the bones of the great emperor so famous in

[Illustration: ENTRANCE TO THE CHURCH OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE.]

history and legend--“Der alte Barbarossa, der Kaiser Friederich.” Not

less affecting in its way was the discovery of a little patch of

snapdragon flowers on the ruined walls of Belfort Castle. We were

informed that the plant is not elsewhere found in Syria, and the

likelihood is that some Crusader’s lady brought it from the garden of a

far-off French or English home.

The Crusader was at once the dreamer, the worshipper, and the fighter of

the Middle Age. The knight was not indeed the sort of man whom at first

sight we would suspect of dreaming. Could we see him riding down the

street to-day, we should probably be reminded of some village blacksmith

on a Clydesdale horse. Yet he had been dreaming dreams and seeing

visions. He was a gentleman and a man of feeling, though he had his own

rough ways of shewing it. Part of what had set him dreaming was the

instinct of travel and the literature of travel which in those days was

so quaint and picturesque. No doubt this travel literature was largely

due to pilgrims, but there were others then who could play no tune but

“Over the hills and far away.” Travellers’ half-remembered and

exaggerated adventures conspired with the fantastic imaginings of the

untravelled rustic to create that magic land beyond the horizon where

giants, monsters, and devils had their home. All the wistfulness, the

dream, and the desire of the ancient days are there. The chroniclers of

the time before the Norman Conquest are the most fascinating of

geographers, and the singers of Arthurian romance in the later days of

the Crusades arrived at a geography which was an utter bewilderment,

the result of ages of vague travel and rumours from the Syrian seat of

war. Babylon and Wales and places with names wholly unpronounceable are

in sublime confusion, and the geography in general is that of

Thackeray’s Little Billee, who saw from his mast-head “Jerusalem and

Madagascar and South Amerikee.”

Jerusalem always came first. “The Crusades,” as Sidonia says in

_Tancred_, “renovated the spiritual hold which Asia has always had upon

the North.” The spell of the East had come upon the West, and in that

there lay a reason for the Crusades deeper than any commercial or even

military attraction. The West was waiting for it. Behind the British men

of the twelfth century lay a heredity of patriotic legend connected

largely with the battle of Christianity against Paganism under Arthur.

There lay the foundation of much that was best in the crusading

enthusiasm. On their own soil they had followed the King and fought

under him for Christ. But to satisfy the hearts of these rough men it

needed more than all such practical life could yield them, even when

that life was so exciting as it was then. There is an infinite pathos in

the dream that was coming to clearness through those years. Discontented

with the glories even of Arthur’s court, longing for a spiritual

something which might give to chivalry its finest meaning, they sought

the Holy Grail. Until, well on in the twelfth century, the shadowy

figures of Walter Map and Robert de Borron formulate the romance,[29]

we see it growing out of old pagan legends baptized by Christian

missionaries and blended with Bible stories. It emerges at last in the

romances of the French Trouvères, the summit and flower of all past

idealisms, the spiritual secret and gist of life, and the chief end of

noble men. This is all well known to those who interest themselves in

that spiritual search which is the main business of choice souls in all

ages, and which in that age took literary form in the Grail Quest. But

to us it is specially interesting to note that the century whose later

years received the Trouvère legend from Chrétien de Troyes began with an

event but for which that legend would never have assumed the form in

which it appeared. In 1101 Cæssarea was besieged and taken by Baldwin I.

“It yielded a rich booty. Among other prizes was found a hexagonal vase

of green crystal, supposed to have been used at the administration of

the sacrament, and now preserved in Paris. This vase plays an important

part in mediæval poetry as the Holy Grail.” The visionary aspect of the

Crusades is that which continually obtrudes itself as one reads their

history. Tasso’s _Gerusalemme Liberata_ is full of it. Even so rough and

boisterous a hero as Richard is obviously a dreamer also. Nothing in all

this history is more striking than that fateful day when, after marching

to within seven leagues of Jerusalem, Richard commanded his army to

halt, and courted their murmurs during a month’s unaccountable

inaction. Performing unheard-of feats of valour in minor sallies, he

could only weep when he beheld the towers of the Holy City, and after

routing Saladin’s army in a great battle at Joppa, negotiated a truce

and wandered off to shipwreck and imprisonment, commending the Holy Land

to God, and praying that it might be granted him to return again and

recover it.[30]

As worshippers, the Crusaders are famous figures in the Holy Land. It is

hard to reconcile the tales of wild debauchery which followed almost all

their victories, with the obviously genuine religious enthusiasm that

swept the hosts down weeping on their knees when they caught first sight

of Jerusalem. Yet the worship was sincere, and there were pure and

gentle spirits among them whom victory did not demoralise. They are

always, indeed, armed worshippers--at first a religious soldiery,

afterwards a military priesthood, as Stebbing puts it. This composite

character is well brought out in the two orders of knights, the

Hospitallers and the Templars. The former, working for the sick in the

Holy City, wore a black robe with a white cross upon the breast of it,

but when there was fighting to be done they covered this with a surcoat

of scarlet on which a silver cross was embroidered. They lived simply,

contenting themselves with such lodging and fare as were offered them,

and they were bound to keep themselves provided with a light which must

always be kept burning while they slept. The Templars pledged

themselves in even stricter vows, and were warrior-priests in the most

literal sense of the term. On the summit of Mount Tabor there is the

ruin of a Crusader church, whose broken walls still enclose the sacred

space where once men worshipped. Spacious and strongly built, the ruin

has a severe grandeur of its own. In the chancel an altar has been

rebuilt, and an upturned Corinthian capital set upon it, in the centre

of which is fixed a heavy iron cross. That iron cross seems to sum up in

its grave symbolism the very spirit of the Crusades. Many of their

churches were reconstructions of older Christian edifices, and most of

them have been transmuted into mosques, so that their ecclesiastical

architecture still remaining is as composite as their character and

their enterprise. Yet enough remains of what is distinctively their own

to show at once the massive strength and the decorative beauty of their

buildings. Its strength is that of men who were accustomed to build

fortresses; the buttressed walls are of immense thickness, and the

mortar is sometimes harder than the stone. Its beauty has been defaced

by the mutilation of much fine work, but from what is left we know how

well they carved; and there is a certain high solemnity about their

arches and columns which tells of men whose minds were large, strong,

and real.

One curious fact, to which Conder often directs attention, is constantly

perplexing the traveller. Their identifications of sacred sites are

those of men whose enthusiasm far exceeded their knowledge. Had they

taken time to consult the Scriptures, or to read them with any

thoughtfulness, countless errors would have been avoided. But the

soldier instinct is very far from the critical, and they were impatient

to find the sites they wished to see. Anything was sufficient for a

clue. The name Jibrin suggested “Gabriel,” and a great church arose in

honour of the Archangel. Athlit was near the sea-shore, and the

Crusaders who lived there found Tyre and Capernaum in its immediate

neighbourhood. For reasons equally cogent, Shiloh was brought within a

mile or two of Jerusalem, Shechem became Sychar, and the heights of Ebal

and Gerizim were recognised as the Dan and Bethel of Jeroboam’s calves.

Most curious of all, the little hill of Jebel Duhy, on whose summit you

look down across the valley from the top of Tabor, was named Hermon, for

no other reason than that a psalm places the two together in its promise

that “Tabor and Hermon shall rejoice in Thy name.” Altogether, these

worshippers were in too great haste. “Crusading topography is more

remarkable than reliable.”

Great as the Crusaders were in dream and in worship, it is their

fighting that remains for ever most impressive and most characteristic.

Of no men in history is the verse truer, in spite of all their

extravagances--

Know that the men of great renown

Were men of simple needs:

Bare to the Lord they laid them down

And slept on mighty deeds.

Looked at from a distance, the Crusades very generally wear the aspect

of a stream of vivid colour--a spectacular progress of Europe through a

corner of Asia, whose main feature is its brilliant picturesqueness. On

the spot the quality in them which is by far the most impressive is

their stern reality and fighting weight. The Crusader was doubtless one

who in his time played many parts, but whatever else he was, no one who

has seen the remains of his work will question that he was at least “a

first-class fighting man.” The figure of Richard, as it is preserved for

us in the records of the older historians, may be more or less

apocryphal, but it is at least true enough to crusading ideals, which

must have found many an actual realisation in these strong and fearless

soldiers of the Cross. We read of amazing captures of booty; of single

combats in which “the King at one blow severs the head, right shoulder

and arm of his opponent from the rest of his body”; of a conflict in

which only one Christian perished, while “the Turks lost seven hundred

men and above fifteen hundred horses.” At Joppa the king leaps out of

his ship before it can reach land, and rushes on the enemy. Three days

later he and his knights are surprised and have to fight half-naked,

some in their shirts and some even barefoot; yet they win. At another

time we see Richard plunging alone into the midst of the hostile army,

and fighting until Saladin’s brother sends him a gift of two Arab

war-horses to enable him to fight it out. Altogether such a hero was he,

that the Moslems asserted “that even the horses bristled their manes at

the name of Richard.” No wonder if in the popular imagination he became

for England hardly distinguishable from that St. George who had already

been identified with Perseus, who on these same sands had fought the

dragon for Andromeda.

The grandeur of crusading warfare lingers in the mighty ruins of their

castles. Nothing could surpass the impressiveness of these castles, seen

on hill-tops from below, combing the sky with the sharp broken teeth of

their ruined towers, or rearing a black “mailed head of menace” against

the stars. Many of them are on the sites of older fortresses, and

actually stand on Jewish or Roman foundations. By far the most imposing

of such castles is that of Banias, which crowns that spur of Hermon at

which “Dan leaped from Bashan” long ago. It must have been capable of

quartering a small army, and the quantity of broken vessels confirms the

impression. Cisterns, vaulted and groined archways, mosaic floors,

dungeons, and every other luxury of their European homes had been

imported hither.

The Crusaders ran a line of fortresses along that western edge of the

Jordan valley where Israel, as we saw, failed to protect the mouths of

her gorges. Belvoir, “the Star of the Wind,” guards from its lofty

promontory the passes immediately south of the Sea of Galilee. Bethshan

itself, where the Canaanites lingered to the standing shame of Israel,

shows the well-preserved remains of a crusader bridge and fortress. Not

less striking is the sea-board line of castles. Not only in such old

localities as Tyre and Sidon, Cæsarea and Joppa, did fortresses arise,

but on at least two quite new sites--those of Athlit and Acre.

[Illustration: INTERIOR OF THE DOME OF THE CHAIN, LOOKING NORTH.]

Athlit is unmentioned in Scripture, and only the eye of seafaring

soldiers could have discovered how its little crease in the long

straight line of coast might be utilised for defence. Acre is “the Key

to Syria”; but it was left for the Crusaders to discover that fact.

Yet with all this might and purpose and strategic instinct manifest in

every mile of Syria, failure is written broad across the land in these

ruins. At two points the sense of it becomes especially acute. One is

the battlefield below the very mountain which tradition has assigned to

the preaching of the Sermon on the Mount. The horrors of that field were

such that even yet it is impossible to look without shuddering upon the

flattened top of Hattin, where the black basalt stands out from the

green slopes below. The Crusaders were rushed into the open plain, near

which Saladin’s cavalry were waiting for them, and they met his assault

unfed, unrested, and without even water to quench their thirst.

Throughout a long hot day they perished round the banner of the Cross, a

final element of horror being added when the Saracens set fire to the

scrub, and unhorsed knights were roasted alive in their armour. That was

the decisive battle of the Crusades, and Saladin marched after it

straight upon Jerusalem.

The other point at which the failure of the Crusades has set up its

monument is at their own Athlit. The creation of their genius, and for

solidity and massive strength perhaps the most characteristic ruin in

Syria, it is also the saddest thing of all they have left for a

memorial. Near its rocks King Louis IX. of France--most unfortunate and

yet most saintly of all crusading kings--was shipwrecked. Here, too, at

the end of the thirteenth century, the Knights Templars made their last

retreat after the fall of Acre, and it was from its castle that they

departed--the last to abandon the last Crusade. Seen from the sea, the

compact and rounded promontory of Athlit presents the appearance of a

clenched fist menacing and defiant. Its history grimly corroborates the

imagination that here through centuries of decay the land as it were

gathers itself together, and thrusts out this grim headland in perpetual

defiance of the Western world.

The Crusades stand for more in Palestine than it is easy to realise. The

comprehensiveness of their historical significance is by no means

exhausted when we have stated it in such paradoxes as those with which

our chapter began. They were indeed the greatest sham and at the same

time the greatest reality of Syrian history, but they were far more than

that. They were heirs to all the past of the country, and they did much

to perpetuate that past and to carry it on into the time to come. Even

from the Moslem life they wrestled with, they borrowed something. They,

and the chivalry which they fostered, are the most spectacular part of

Western history, and give a dash of brilliant colour to the grey life of

the Middle Ages. That brilliance is in part the splendour of the East.

The Crusader has borrowed from the Saracen at least a scarf for his

sword.

It is chiefly as builders that the Crusaders remain in Syria exposed to

modern eyes, and in their building they have perpetuated and utilised

the other three invasions. From the first Christians they took over

their churches and rebuilt them, retaining something and adding more.

From the older Jewish architects they had almost as great an

inheritance. There seems no incongruity in the heavy stone mangers and

far-driven iron rings which they fixed in the walls of those tremendous

vaults on which the Temple area rests; and it is by a not unnatural

transference that tradition has given to these the name of Solomon’s

Stables. Solomon’s vaults they may have been, but as stables they were

of crusading origin. Their own building is a rough imitation of the

drafted stones of the Jews. The rustic work is much the same, only

rougher, but the plain chiselling is very far from the minute fineness

of the older workmanship. Altogether, they were fighters first and

builders second. Like the men of Nehemiah’s time, “every one with one of

his hands wrought in the work, and with the other hand held a weapon....

Every one had his sword girded by his side, and so builded.” Nor did

they fail to utilise the work of Roman builders. At Cæsarea there is the

most striking instance of this, and one of the most suggestive facts in

the whole story of the Crusaders. Cæsarea was the most Roman of all

Syrian towns. Built as the seaport for Sebaste by Herod, it was the part

of Syria which travellers and governors sailing from Italy first

sighted, and it was designed to give them the impression of a land

Romanised. Herod’s delight in pillars is attested by the colonnades of

Sebaste, and the wealth of shaft and capital which marks the ruins of

all his cities. But in Cæsarea he seems to have excelled himself. The

Roman mole which forms the northern side of the harbour “is composed of

some sixty or seventy prostrate columns lying side by side in the water

like rows of stranded logs.”[31] On the long promontory south of the

mole stands the Crusader Castle, notable for the circumstance that the

Crusaders built hundreds of lighter and shorter columns into their walls

to thorough-bind them, so that, in Oliphant’s exact and graphic words,

“the butts project like rows of cannon from the side of a man-of-war.”

Which thing is for an allegory; and one of the most eloquent of all

sermons in stone it is. Rome did more for Christianity than all its

friends, while she was as yet its enemy. Without her courts of justice

Paul would have had short shrift from his countrymen. Her roads and her

citizenship gave to the first missionaries of the Cross their exit upon

the world and their opportunity. Her laws gave them not protection only,

but a groundwork for much that entered into that theology which

conquered the thought of the world. Paul appealed unto Cæsar, and he

wrote to the Romans his gospel expressed in the forms with which they

were most familiar. And it was at Cæsarea that he made his appeal, doing

in flesh and blood what his disciples a thousand years later did in

stone--thorough-binding the walls of the building of Christian faith

with Roman columns.

PART III

THE SPIRIT OF SYRIA

In the first and second parts of this book we have been collecting

impressions of the Land and its Invaders. It remains for us in the third

part to gather these together into something which may enable us to

realise more clearly the general meaning and quality of the spirit of

Syria. In the main two things must be noted, and the first of them is

religious. Whatever else Palestine may be, she is certainly a land with

a God. The meaning of Syria is disclosed in her Israelite and Christian

periods, whose great fact and characteristic process is the revelation

of God to men on earth. All her other invasions have to reckon with that

fact. Some of them were bitterly hostile to it, but they were powerless

to efface it. Others were indifferent, entering Syria for ends of their

own; but history shews them bent over to God’s purposes and

unconsciously made the instruments of working out His will. That will

brought Israel to her land, isolated her there, hemmed her in, bore her

and carried her in everlasting arms on through her centuries, finally

was incarnate in her life. For Jesus Christ was a Syrian, and we must

orientalise our thoughts of Him before we can rightly understand the

Christian revelation.

Not less clear is the second impression, which is that of the

unfinishedness and imperfection of all things Syrian. It is a place of

wreckage, new and old. But the peculiarity of that wreckage is that it

was always there, more or less. None of the ideals of the land were ever

quite realised. It was never completely conquered by the Israelites,

their ambition stopping short and their energy flagging before their

task was done. It was never completely cultivated, or made to yield its

full harvest of natural wealth. In countless small things this

incompleteness is evident. The contrast between the beauty of the

distant view and the disorder and slovenliness of the near has been

already noted. The post-office in Damascus is a quite good post-office,

so far as letters and telegrams go. But you inquire for these in a hall

which looks like a very dirty stable-yard with a very dirty fountain in

the middle of it, furnished with little rough-sawn wooden boxes for

private letters, such as no self-respecting grocer would pack with

oranges. Even the tombs, about which so much sacredness is supposed to

gather, are the untidiest of sepulchres. You may see a large and

expensive tombstone, shining white in the distance, with all the air of

aristocratic self-importance which man’s pride can lend to death; but

when you approach, it is railed off with bamboo and barbed wire which

might have been picked off a rubbish-heap. There are good roads in

places, but they lead to nowhere. Generally they collapse into mere

watercourses after a few miles, or they run on in a squared and measured

lane of sharp boulders down which no horse can walk. Nor is this

incompleteness a peculiarity of Turkish administration. Probably nothing

in Palestine is older than the landmarks which divide the fields. From

generation to generation these have been held sacred, laws against their

removal having been in force among the ancient Canaanites before the

conquest by Israel. So sacred are they that even murderers and thieves

will seldom dare to tamper with them. Yet through all the long past the

landmarks are said to have remained as the first men laid them

down--mere inconspicuous heaps of little stones, the easiest things in

the world to remove.

When we take the unfinishedness of the land along with the revelation

and consider them together, we can hardly fail to gain a lesson of

far-reaching meaning. The great incompleteness of Syria--the thing in

which her life has been most lamentably unfinished--was her response to

the revelation of her God. She never was at pains to understand it; she

never fully opened her heart to its new progress, nor felt her high

destiny as the bearer of good tidings to the world. She never seriously

set herself to obey its plainest ethical demands. The wreckage is her

price paid for the neglect. No man nor nation can finish any task to

perfection, who has not done justice to such revelation of God as his

heart and conscience have received. It is truth to the inward light that

keeps us from losing heart and enables us to feel that energy and

patience to the end are worth our while. Right dealing with revelation

is the secret of all efficient performance. The combination in

Palestine of such revelation and such defect in strenuous action shows

us a land that has just missed the most amazing destiny on earth.

It is in the remembrance of these thoughts that the chapters of this

part should be read. The Shadow of Death has fallen because these men

could not escape their knowledge of some greatness in death, more moving

than anything life had to show. The spectral is but a degenerate and

perverse form of their sense of God. The Cross gives its ethical

significance to the burden and sorrow of the land. Resurrection shows

signs even now that God has not yet done with Syria. But first, before

we treat these aspects of her spirit, let us look at it on its brighter

side--the smile and song of the land.

[Illustration: INTERIOR OF THE DOME OF THE ROCK (MOSQUE OF OMAR), FROM

THE SOUTH-EAST.]

CHAPTER I

THE LIGHTER SIDE OF THINGS

One easily forgets, among the many sorrows of the Holy Land, that there

is any lighter side to the picture there. Yet such a side there is, and

always has been. Nature is not always severe, nor the spirit of man

melancholy, in the East. Both nature and man are sometimes found in

lighter vein here as elsewhere. Stevenson’s most charming good word for

the world he always defended so gallantly, is specially applicable to

the Syrian part of it.--“It is a shaggy world, and yet studded with

gardens; where the salt and tumbling sea receives rivers running from

among reeds and lilies.” Syria has always known the value of her

gardens, and felt the sweet enchantment of her reeds and lilies. Was not

her first story told of a garden where four such rivers flowed, and her

noblest sermon that whose text was “the lilies of the field” and “the

birds of the air”? What pleasantness of open nature there is in these

two latter expressions! What sense of field-breadth and sky-space, in

which the Preacher had room for breathing and for delight! Every

Israelite, sitting under his vine and fig tree, or going forth to

meditate in the fields at evening, knew this charm. From of old the

inhabitants have taken delight in exchanging roofs for bowers in their

fields and gardens, or for booths, built with green branches on their

house-roofs. Many a sweet vista is seen in Palestine framed in trellised

vines or in passion-flower swinging over a roofed fountain or a garden

house. The mountains were often bare and unhomely, for at no time can

any but a minor part of them have been cultivated; yet even the

wind-swept heights were inhabited by health and hope and gladness, and

when a shepherd passed by, or the reapers shouted in the harvest-fields,

the heart of the men of Israel sang aloud. In the words of the 65th

Psalm this exhilaration and childlike glee finds its most perfect

expression; we quote them in that old Scottish rhymed version which has

so singularly caught their spirit:--

They drop upon the pastures wide,

That do in deserts lie;

The little hills on ev’ry side

Rejoice right pleasantly.

With flocks the pastures clothed be,

The vales with corn are clad;

And now they shout and sing to thee,

For thou hast made them glad.

Similarly the Jordan, usually thought of with a certain gloom, and

rendered still more dismal by its persistent allegorical association

with death, is by no means so melancholy as it is supposed to be. Its

rise, indeed, was from a black cave, where ancient pagan worship erected

its shrines, seeing life issue there from the abyss of death. Its course

leads it far down, like the dark stream of classic fable, below the

surface of the earth and ocean. Yet there is no sense of all that as

one looks at it from any point in its course. The trees of Syria are

generally disappointing. For the most part solitary, or undersized where

there is a wood, many of them are decaying, and most of them are dull in

colour. But the vegetation of the Jordan is a bright exception. Even at

its lowest point, when it is hurrying over the last miles to the Dead

Sea, it flows through that rich boscage known as the “Swellings” or the

“Pride” of Jordan, where pilgrims cut their staves. It is to this part

of its course that the words in _Tancred_ apply most exactly, “The

beauty and abundance of the Promised Land may still be found ... ever by

the rushing waters of the bowery Jordan.” Warburton, describing the same

scene in early morning, speaks of the awakening of birds and beasts

there, and then the sunrise, adding, “I lingered long upon that

mountain’s brow, and thought that, so far from deserving all the dismal

epithets that had been bestowed upon it, I had not seen so cheerful or

attractive a scene in Palestine.”

The scents of the East add to the delightfulness of Nature on her

pleasant side. There are plenty of abominable smells there, but these

are in the towns and villages. The open country is continually

surprising and refreshing its travellers with new perfume. That this is

fully appreciated by the natives, no reader of the Bible can forget.

There we have the scent of spices and of wine; of the field, of water,

and of Lebanon; of budding vines, mandrakes, apples; of ointment, of

incense, and of raiment. In such references we see the East inhaling the

fragrance of the land with an almost passionate delight. It is all

there still. The scent of the desert after rain has been already

referred to, but the same aromatic perfume may be enjoyed by climbing

the hills above Beyrout, where every ground-plant seems to breathe forth

spices. Again, there are the blossoming trees, the heavy perfume of

orange-flower, and the simple fragrance of roses. Best of all, there is

the clean smell of ripe grain in the cornfields, and the fresh, briny

exhilaration of breezes from the sea.

Such is the lighter side of Nature; and man is not by any means so far

out of touch with it as is often supposed. The severity of material

conditions and of historical experience has not been able quite to

suppress man’s gaiety. It is well that this has been so, for here

certainly the words of the Scots song are true enough: “Werena my heart

licht, I wad dee.” With so much of the darker powers of the universe

pressing hard upon them, one trembles to imagine what the spirit of

Syria would have been without those inexhaustible stores of gaiety that

break forth sometimes like her great river from the very darkness of the

abyss. Her laughter is not that of progressive lands looking to the

future in the great joy of an intelligent hope. It is rather a part of

her inalienable childhood, whose fresh sweetness and virginity have

somehow been permitted to remain through all her sorrows. Renan

describes the heroes of the Bible as “always young, healthy, and strong,

scarcely at all superstitious, passionate, simple, and grand.” There is

still some inheritance of such life, perpetually young and even

childish, in the Holy Land.

The first appearance of an Eastern is grave and solemn, with an element

of contempt in it rather trying to the would-be jester or too familiar

stranger. But this is not wholly due to any weight of gloom pressing on

his heart. It has, with singular ingenuity, been traced to quite minor

and apparently insignificant causes, such as the wearing of flowing

robes by the men and the burden-bearing of the women. There can be no

doubt that both clothes and burdens exercise a powerful influence on

character; and it may well be the case that the management of their

garment has taught dignity to the men, while the carrying of heavy

waterpots has helped to make the women graceful and erect. There is also

the instinct of self-defence, and the constant remembrance of danger.

Every Eastern, however prosperous, impresses one with the idea that his

table is spread for him in the presence of his enemies. This leads

him--especially if he be an Arab--to assume a show of superiority and a

bullying swagger, which seem to the uninitiated quite impervious to any

thought of fun. But the mask is easily laid aside, and the gravest and

most contemptuous Syrian will suddenly collapse into harsh laughter or

forget himself in childish interest.

It would be wonderful if it were otherwise. The East is full of

provocatives to mirth--not merely such as seem ridiculous to a stranger

because they are foreign, but things grotesque in themselves. Take the

one instance of the camel. Much has been written about him from many

points of view, but justice has never yet been done to the camel as a

humorous person. Yet he is the most humorous of all the inhabitants of

the East. Beside him, with his sardonic pleasantry, the monkey is a

mountebank and the donkey but a solemn little ass. He has been described

as “the tall, simple, smiling camel”; but on closer acquaintance he

turns out to be hardly so simple as he might be taken for, and if he

smiles, he is generally smiling at you. The camels you meet in Syria are

carrying barley with the air of kings, and regarding their human

companions with, at best, a sentiment of contemptuous tolerance. The

lower lip of a camel is one of the most expressive features in the whole

repertoire of natural history. The humours of this animal reached for us

their climax at Sheikh Miskin, while we were waiting for the Damascus

train. A camel had been persuaded to kneel in order to receive its load

of long poles brought by the railway. It was roaring steadily, in a

fiendish and yet conscientious manner. Ten men were loading it, of whom

one stood upon its near fore-leg, two fastened the poles upon its back,

and the remaining seven looked on and made remarks. The beast waited

until the poles were all but fixed--ten of them or so. Then it indulged

in a shake, which sent them rolling in all directions. Finally it was

loaded, with two of the sticks on one side and one on the other, their

ends projecting far out behind and in front. It rose, nearly ruining a

well-dressed Arab who had somehow got in among it. Just then the train

arrived and the camel fled incontinently, sidewise like a crab,

spreading the fear of death in man and beast for many yards around, and

dragging a terrified driver, who hung on to its head-rope, across

towards the distant east. A loaded camel behaving in this fashion is a

deadlier weapon than a loaded gun.

Now the native wit always appeared to us to have modelled itself on

camel drollery of this sort. It is generally personal, and its essential

function is to hit somebody. It lacks freshness, and has a certain

suggestion of a clown with “crow’s feet” under his eyes. Sometimes

indeed a Syrian indulges in jokes at his own expense, but more

frequently his facetiousness is at the expense of others, and it is

tolerably direct. The habit of nicknames lends itself to Oriental wit,

the lean man being described familiarly as “Father of Bones,” and the

stout man as “Full Moon of Religion.” Passing through a village some

distance off the usual route of travellers, we were surrounded with

villagers who asked the dragoman why we had come. “To take away your

country!” was the answer, and it was met with peals of laughter. Another

witticism which was immensely appreciated was the remark to some farmers

who were suffering from drought that we in England had stolen their rain

and it had made many people sick there. A boatman on the Sea of Galilee

was being chaffed unmercifully upon the fact that he had once tried to

commit suicide. He appealed, smiling, to one of the passengers as “My

Father,” and pled that he had been mad when he did that. A

fellow-boatman rebuked him for calling the gentleman “father of a

lunatic,” and the whole crew was dissolved in laughter, the victim

himself heartily joining in the chorus. In Damascus we found a time-worn

Joe Miller in the shout of the nosegay-seller--a very musical cry, which

the guide-book translates “Appease your mother-in-law,” _i.e._ by

presenting her with a bouquet.

From of old pleasure has been apt to degenerate in the luxurious East,

and the fun of Syrians shows abundant traces of such degeneration. Many

unpleasant elements mingle with it. One of the recognised forces in

Eastern life is _humbug_--barefaced bluff and transparent pretence,

which is apparently seen through and yet retains its potency. The

lengths to which this method may go are almost incredible, and cases are

on record of interpreters who have volubly translated a long English

address and afterwards confessed that they did not know a word of the

English language. At times, also, high spirits leads to savagery. The

men who were in charge of our animals were kind and even affectionate to

them, but their moods changed unaccountably. Your donkey-driver,

trotting behind his donkey, will sometimes encourage it with yelling

which would fill any animal less philosophical with the fear of instant

extermination, and he jocularly throws rocks at it until you stop him.

Worst of all, the Syrian humour constantly tends towards indecency of

the most bestial type. The song with which a musical donkey-boy relieves

the monotony of the journey is sometimes quite untranslatable. The

“body-dances,” which form the staple

[Illustration: THE MOUNT OF OLIVES, FROM A HOUSE-TOP ON MOUNT ZION.]

entertainment provided by wandering Arabs, are often pantomimic, and

their crude realism is unspeakably disgusting.

Yet there is a very innocent and cheerful vein in the human nature of

Syria. At times it is irrelevant and trying. The camp guards, _e.g._ who

are hired from the nearest village to watch the sleeping tents, are apt

to beguile the hours of darkness in a manner hardly conducive to repose.

In most of our camps they were silent figures, flitting about in an

almost ghostly fashion, with perfectly noiseless footsteps. But

MacGregor complains of having had to pay his Egyptian guards “for

sleeping very loud to keep away the robbers.” Our difficulties were not

exactly the same as his, but in some places the guards kept singing as

they paced to and fro, and shouted cheerily to one another along the

whole length of the encampment, or whistled incessantly, and

occasionally fired guns to prove their vigilance. There is a sense of

spontaneity and heartiness about the mirth of the East which throws into

strong contrast its subtler and more gloomy characteristics.

Irresponsible and gay, Syrians seem to be grown-up children, and they

retain the ways of childhood. We rarely saw children playing games, but

bands of full-grown men were seen at times playing schoolboys’ field

games with much shouting. Everybody in the cities appears to be either

selling or eating sweetmeats. Sport is rare, but men go forth with guns

to shoot little birds like sparrows. One of the most curious sights of

Damascus is that of shopkeepers and artisans who go about the streets

followed by pet lambs instead of dogs, the wool of these strange little

creatures being dyed in brilliant spots of blue or pink.

The kindliness of the East is as genuine and as pleasing as that of any

land in the West. It is not in evidence indeed when there is nothing to

call it forth. As you pass through the country, the villagers and

townsfolk regard you with indifference if not with scorn. But one must

remember the universal _acting_ of the East--its devotion to

appearances, and its very curious ideas as to which appearances are most

becoming. With that in mind, the indifference and the scorn become less

alarming. You may find the whole spirit of the situation suddenly change

to one of the kindliest. A traveller who has fallen victim to one of the

malarial fevers which are so common in Syria at certain periods, will

never forget the tenderness with which his camp-servants come about his

tent inquiring, “Ente mabsut?” (Are you happy, or well?). When he

returns the inquiry the answer is, “Ente mabsut, ana mabsut” (If you are

happy, I am happy). At Sidon we had just arrived and had the tents

pitched in the open space next the burying-ground. It was Thursday, and

the graves were crowded with visitors--Mohammedan women in black, white,

or light-coloured robes. They did not seem very sad, even beside the

most recent graves, but gossiped and enjoyed their half-holiday,

disappearing before sunset silently, like a flock of pigeons to their

dovecots. The spectacle was theatrical and almost unearthly. It was

difficult to persuade oneself that these flitting figures were really

women at all; they seemed rather to be animated bits of landscape. Just

while we were watching this, and feeling all its dreamy remoteness from

human life as we had ever known it, two new figures appeared. They were

the gardener of a neighbouring garden and his young daughter Wurda

(Rhoda, Rose). She was five years of age, a tiny vision of black eyes

and hair, the hair being arranged in two pigtails down her back. She

brought a little bunch of roses for each of us, and as she gave them

kissed our hands with as sweet a shyness as any child anywhere could

have done. The incident, like that on the hill of Samaria, lingers on

the memory, and bears witness to a world of gentleness and kindliness

such as we had little dreamed of. Altogether there are abundant signs

that in ancient days there must have been much of that Syrian life

described by one scholar as “gay and bright, festive and musical--the

very home of songs and dances.” It is pleasant to know that although the

fortunes of the land have saddened her so terribly, there still remains

something at least of her former gaiety.

Even the religion of Syria has its lighter side. Every student of the

Bible knows how much there was of rejoicing and fresh childlike

revelling in the situation, in the worship of ancient Israel. It is

peculiarly interesting to find that in the Semitic worship before and

apart from the invasion of Israel, so kindly and friendly a relation

subsisted between man and his gods. “The circle into which a man was

born was not simply a group of kinsfolk and fellow-citizens, but

embraced also certain divine beings, the gods of the family and of the

state, which to the ancient mind were as much a part of the particular

community with which they stood connected as the human members of the

social circle.”[32] Accordingly it would appear that among these ancient

Semites the conception of sacrifice was by no means so gloomy as it came

to be later, when the moral tragedy of life was more clearly realised.

The idea was that of “communion with the deity in a sacrificial meal of

holy food.” They “go on eating and drinking and rejoicing before their

god with the assurance that he and they are on the best of jovial good

terms.... Ancient religion assumes that through the help of the gods

life is so happy and satisfactory that ordinary acts of worship are all

brightness and hilarity, expressing no other idea than that the

worshippers are well content with themselves and with their divine

sovereign.”[33]

Of course the severer truth and cleaner conscience which Israel’s

revelation brought her gradually deepened the shadows on her religious

life. She substituted duty for happiness, the beauty of holiness for the

mere _joie de vivre_, and the tragic blessedness of forgiveness for the

careless pleasures of life. Yet to the end she retained and insisted on

the gladness of religion. The duty of joy was a command and not merely

an epigram for Israel. Dante himself was not more explicit in his

condemnation of perverse sullenness than was he who wrote, “Because

thou servedst not the Lord thy God with joyfulness, and with gladness of

heart, for the abundance of all things: therefore shalt thou serve thine

enemies.”[34]

It is surely a very striking fact that the spots which all travellers

select as those in which the gladness of the land dwells most freely

still are Nazareth and Bethlehem. For beauty of feature and of dress,

and for their general air of pleasant and light-hearted gaiety, these

are the acknowledged centres. It was of Bethlehem that we felt this most

true. Its name, signifying “House of Bread,” is significant of plenty

and of comfort. Its associations, even apart from the song of angels

there, are sweet and gracious. While approaching it, you look across a

pleasant and lightsome landscape to the dim blue mountains of Moab, and

remember how Ruth looked across these very fields, when the reapers of

Boaz were working in them, to her distant home in those mountains. Here

it was that King David in his boyhood played and tended the flocks of

his father, and it was the water of that sweet well for which he longed

in the days of his adversity. These and a hundred other memories prepare

the traveller for a place of gracious and kindly sweetness.

CHAPTER II

THE SHADOW OF DEATH

We now turn sharply to the other side of things, and it must be apparent

to every one that we are passing from the smaller to the vastly greater

element in the spirit of Syria. The text in Deuteronomy which we

quoted[35] shows us joy commanded at the sword’s point, as if the nation

were unwilling and unlikely to obey easily the happy command. Even when

Jesus Christ repeats the injunction in His great words, “Rejoice and be

exceeding glad,” it is a defiant gladness He enjoins. The context shows

that the rejoicing is that of persecuted and slandered men. A recent

writer has bitterly described our march through life in the words: “We

uphold our wayward steps with the promises and the commandments for

crutches, but on either side of us trudge the shadow Death and the

bacchanal Sex.”[36] The words sound profane to Western ears, but they

are not untrue of the spirit of Syria. It is of “the shadow Death” that

the present chapter treats.

As primitive religion decayed and men lost their sense of kinship and

their easy and friendly relations with the old gods, they were left

alone with death, which everywhere stared them in the face and claimed

them for its own. Next to God, death is the most impressive fact in

human experience, with sin for its sting. When old and defective views

of God are passing away, two courses are open to men. As death closes in

upon them, and they feel its grasp upon their unprotected souls, they

may appeal from it to God, and find Him revealing Himself, with eternal

life for them in the knowledge of Him. This was what the noblest of

Israel’s thinkers did, and the growing revelation of the Bible was their

reward. God showed Himself to them in ever-increasing clearness, until

one and another and another of them found that the hand that grasped

them was “not Death but Love.” But another course is open. They may

enthrone death in place of the broken gods--“Death is king, and vivat

rex!” They may “say to corruption, Thou art my father; to the worm, Thou

art my mother, and my sister.” Then the emphasis of thought will fall on

the grave, and all men’s imaginations will grow morbid.

The tombs of the Holy Land are of many patterns. In his _Haifa_,

Laurence Oliphant describes several different kinds of them, from the

cave-sepulchres, or the underground galleries, to the little wayside

graves or narrow holes driven into rock which seem such tightly-fitting

homes for the dead. There are, of course, the modern graves sacred to

the wives and children of missionaries who have laid down their lives

in the loving service of Christ and man. Buckle the historian sleeps in

the Christian burying-ground at Damascus, and Henriette Renan was laid

to rest in Byblus. These graves and others dear to the Western world

are, as graves have been since Abraham’s day, symbols of the strangers’

inheritance and lot in the Holy Land. From these, back to the tombs of

hoariest antiquity, the country is bound by an unbroken chain of death.

Through all the centuries the dead have been thrust upon the notice of

the living in a fashion so obtrusive as to make this the most obvious

impression of the land. Most of the graves are those of persons now

unknown and quite forgotten. Small and great, common men and heroes, are

alike conspicuous in death. Each of the invaders has left his memorial,

and the sites of ancient cities are traced by help of their

burying-grounds.

Moslem tombs are everywhere. Most of them are oblong structures of rude

but solid masonry erected over shallow graves. In some cases a painted

tarbush (fez-cap) marks the head and a little upright stone the feet. A

slight hollow is often cut in the flat top for birds to drink from.

Tombs are clustered among their iris-flowers beside the walls of

villages. They have crept up to the very summit of the hill which Gordon

identifies as Calvary. They have encroached on the palace of Herod’s

daughter at Samaria. They crowd the ground outside the built-up “Gate

Beautiful” at Jerusalem. There is, to our feelings, a certain indecency

in this promiscuous invasion of the grave: Mohammedans seem

[Illustration: THE CHURCH OF THE NATIVITY AT BETHLEHEM.

From a garden on the opposite hill.

]

to bury their dead anywhere. The Crusaders have left fewer memorials of

themselves in the shape of tombs than one might have expected.

Barbarossa’s tomb we have already visited. For the rest, their memorials

are mostly those great buildings whose ruins stand to this day. Early

Christianity, too, has left its tombs--catacombs and single graves,

especially in the southern part of the coast, and eastwards in Hauran.

People of importance have sometimes more than one tomb, like St. George,

who is buried both in Lydda and Damascus. But the graves of humbler

Christians are more precious than these, for their inscriptions remain,

breathing forth the faith and peace with which Christ had blessed the

world. Such memorials of victory over death are inextinguishable lamps

hung in the sepulchres of Syria. And these lamps are kindled at the

Great Light. Never was symbolism more appropriate than that of the Holy

Fire in the Church of the Sepulchre. The very heart and soul of Syria is

a tomb--the reputed grave of Jesus Christ. To this day the chief pilgrim

song repeats with exultant reiteration the words, “This is the tomb of

Christ.” It is a song which has never been silent in the land. In the

Crusader camps a herald closed the day with the loud cry, “Lord, succour

the Holy Sepulchre”; and the sentinels passed the word from post to

post, “Remember the Holy Sepulchre.”

It is not, however, the victory over death that impresses one as the

spirit of Syria. It is death itself, unconquered, mysterious, and dark.

Its Christian tombs are few and far between compared with the countless

multitude of sepulchres where there is no lamp alight. Most common and

most impressive of these are the Roman and Greek graves. The sands of

Tyre and Sidon are strewn with sarcophagi. Here a man’s magnificently

carved stone coffin serves for a drinking-trough, there a little child’s

stands alone and desolate near a river mouth. In Sidon the ancient

cemetery is on a scale whose rifled grandeur speaks volumes concerning

the vanity of earthly greatness. At Gadara, the eastward road is a

miniature Appian Way: hollow to the tread of horses as they cross the

excavated rock, and adorned with sarcophagi carved with crowns and

garlands, but bearing inscriptions without hope in them. Farther north,

on the eastern slopes of Hermon, we found a far older monument near one

of the Druse villages. We were crossing a little brook, when we noticed

that the bridge consisted of two huge monolithic slabs of limestone,

which, on examination, appeared to be the lids of ancient sarcophagi.

The carving on the ends was obviously intended to represent figures of

cherubim or some such winged creatures. The heads were gone, but the

plumage of the wings was very perfectly preserved. No one in the

locality knew anything about their origin. Their general appearance

seemed to connect them with the far East.

The Jewish tombs are those which impress the imagination most with the

bitterness of death in Syria. They are so sad, with their antique

solemnity--so severely simple and unadorned. Where there is carving it

is almost always of Roman or Christian workmanship. A few stones with

such symbols as the seven-branched candlestick engraved on them are the

only unquestionable remains of ornamental Jewish work. Few of the Jewish

sepulchres have escaped appropriation by Gentiles. The more famous of

them have been appropriated by the Mohammedans, and early Christian

tradition is responsible for many other indentifications. The saints and

heroes of Israel, claimed also by Mohammedans and Christians, have

achieved a kind of funereal immortality which makes the whole land seem

one vast graveyard. Every prospect is dotted with tombs. The tomb of

Jonas shines white from its hill-top north of Hebron, that of Samuel

north of Jerusalem, while Joseph’s tomb commands the view where the Vale

of Shechem opens on the wider valley of Makhnah. None of them, however,

is at all so impressive as the tomb of Rachel, where a modern house and

dome cover a rough block of stone worn smooth with the kisses of

centuries of Jewish women. The wailing, as we saw it there, is a

memorable custom. The women were mostly elderly or aged, but they were

weeping real tears and wailing bitterly as they kissed the stone. It is

an old story that consecrates that rough stone, but how eternal is its

human pathos: “And they journeyed from Bethel; and there was but a

little way to come to Ephrath: and Rachel travailed, and she had hard

labour.... And Rachel died, and was buried in the way to Ephrath, which

is Bethlehem.”[37]

The earlier fashion of Jewish work seems to have been the “pigeon-hole,”

in which the corpse was thrust into a little tunnel six feet long driven

at right angles to the rock face. Later, troughs were excavated to fit

the body along the line of the rock. In some instances these graves,

especially the former kind, are found in detached groups in wayside

rocks, whose perpendicular faces front the open air. For the most part

they are grouped in larger numbers within natural caves or subterranean

excavations, whose low doorway is blocked by a large circular stone

running in a groove. A later example of such a cave is that which is

shewn as the “new tomb” of Joseph of Arimathea, close to Gordon’s

Calvary. A few specimens of another sort, built of masonry without

cement, are to be found in Galilee.[38] Nothing could be gloomier than

the constantly repeated ruins of ancient Jewish graves in Syria. No

day’s journey is without them. They meet you casually, as it were, at

every turning. They are not, indeed, quite dark like the pagan tombs;

but the twilight, in which the hope of immortality just broke the

darkness for ancient Israel, is grey and cheerless, and the contribution

of Jewish graves to the spirit of Syria is a very sombre one.

The typical spot for this side of the spirit of Syria is the town of

Hebron.

The lanes and the dark bazaar are filthy and foul-smelling. The mosque

is an impressive building, suggestive of military rather than devotional

ideas. The Tomb of Abraham, which it covers, is one of the sights which

only a very few Christian eyes have seen. It is permitted to none but

Mohammedans to approach nearer the entrance to it than the seventh step

of the lane, or staircase, alongside its eastern wall. There is a hole

in that wall which is supposed to communicate with the cave below. Jews

write letters to Abraham, and place them in this hole, to tell him how

badly they are being treated by the Moslems. But the Moslem boys are

said to know that the hole has no great depth, and to collect these

letters and burn them before Abraham has seen them. The tomb is the very

heart and black centre of the Shadow of Death in Palestine.

There is no part of man’s faith in which it is more necessary to be

thoroughgoing than in his thoughts about immortality. Egypt and Greece

furnish examples of great significance here. Egypt held an elaborate

doctrine of the future life, and it dominated all her thought concerning

this life. Men built their tombs and kings their pyramids as the most

important of their life’s achievements. The earthly house of the

Egyptian was but an inn where he spent a little time in passing; his

tomb was his eternal house and real home. Thus the tombs were glorified

copies of the dwelling-houses, either of the present, or more often of a

former generation.[39] Greece, on the other hand, did not believe in a

life beyond the grave. Her funeral celebrations were full of

lamentation, and her inscriptions sound sad enough to us. But it was a

principle with Greece and Rome to decorate tombs exclusively with glad

symbols such as sculptured flowers and even dances.[40] The point to be

observed about these is that neither of them was morbid. Morbidness

appears to avoid a robust faith or a frank scepticism,[41] and to cling

about the thought which is neither sure of one thing nor another.

Israel’s position in regard to the belief in immortality is extremely

difficult to define. It was obviously with her a thing of gradual

development, as her revelation opened its broadening light upon life’s

problems. He would be a bold critic who would sum up the situation of

Isaiah’s time as Renan does in the statement, “not looking beyond the

world for reward and punishment,” the Hebrew life “has a heroic tension,

a sustained cry, an unceasing attention to the events of the world.”

Everything goes to shew that long before the faith in immortality had

grasped the imagination and the belief of the people in general it had

been revealed to chosen spirits. As for the others, it had been working

its way among them, occupying their minds in speculation, and leading

them, as it were, among the shades of the nether world. There was

something in the genius of the nation which rendered this interest in

death quite inevitable. The natural bearing of the people has a strange

solemnity about it, which finds constant expression in pose and

gesture, and often strikes the stranger with sudden vividness. Women may

be often seen, especially when clad in thin white garments on holidays,

who might stand just as you see them as models for monumental sculpture.

Along with all its activities, there is a distinct sympathy with death

in the genius of Israel.

This phenomenon is, of course, due to very complex causes. It is a

deep-rooted Semitic instinct, which seems to be not altogether unlike

that of the Egyptian feeling to the tomb as the real home. Some parts of

Arabia are very rich in sacred tombs and spots of holy ground, and

pilgrimages are made to these both by Moslems and by Jews. Long strings

of mules, laden with coffins, wend their way to such sacred places as

Nejf, and thousands of corpses are sent thither even from India.[42] Old

tombstones are held in peculiar veneration by the more devout Arabs. The

well-known reverence with which the Syrian Jews regard the tombs of

their ancestors may be in part explained on the ground of patriotic

loyalty. Such scenes as those which may be witnessed at the tomb of

Rachel, remind us that a sense of the pathos of human life and its

mortality is also developed strongly and enters as a very real factor

into the spirit of Syria.[43] Nor can there be any doubt that a certain

moral or didactic use of death is also characteristic of the East, such

as is expressed in the sententious rhymes of old graveyards in this

country. The reader will recall the famous instance of this, which Sir

Walter Scott has made familiar--the shroud which served for the banner

of Saladin, with its inscription, “Saladin must die.”[44]

If, however, such elements have entered into earlier thoughts of death,

it is to be feared that Palestine of the present day has little of them

left. The great light of Christ illuminated the sepulchres of Christian

Syria; but with the Mohammedan conquest darkness fell again, and all the

morbid fascination of the grave reasserted itself. There is little

reverence for the ordinary man’s place of burial now, whether it be of

ancient or of recent date. Dr. Merrill tells how he has found Arabs

actually stealing graves, i.e. clearing out old ones to make room for a

newly-deceased body, on the plea that “the dead man who was buried there

could not possibly want his grave any longer.”[45] On many a hillside

the rock tombs are rent and split, like pictures from Dante’s _Inferno_,

where they have been blasted open with gunpowder in the search for

treasure; and sometimes parties of natives may be seen prowling about a

hillside on that business. The find may consist of glass bracelets,

which have to be taken from the bone of a baby’s arm, or gold earrings

beside the skull whose face was once fair; but they excite no emotion

except that of money values. Laurence Oliphant had difficulty in

restraining the natives who searched with him from smashing the cinerary

urns they found, on

[Illustration: JERUSALEM--EXTERIOR OF THE GOLDEN, OR BEAUTIFUL, GATE.

This gate, which was walled up by the Arabs after the conquest of

Jerusalem, forms a tower projecting from the Eastern Wall of the Temple

Area. The tombs in the foreground are part of the great Mohammedan

Cemetery extending along the Eastern Wall of Jerusalem.]

the plea that “they are so very old that they are not worth anything.”

With the decay of reverence for the dead, however, there seems to have

been a recrudescence of that morbid and charnel-house interest in death

which marks the spirit of the land. At times one is shocked by the

apparently total indifference displayed--houses being built close to the

mouths of graves or even, it is said, upon the roofs of them. Yet any

one who has seen a festival at a holy tomb, whether Jewish or

Mohammedan, must have realised the strong attraction by which death and

the grave draw men. A curious instance of this is that of the “Jews’

Burning” at Tiberias.

Tiberias has been a Jewish centre since the time of Vespasian. Before

that time, Jews avoided the city, because in building it Herod had

disturbed a burial-place. To-day, by a strange coincidence, it is a tomb

that gives it its special popularity for the Jews--the grave of the

famous Rabbi Meir. Conveniently near the tomb there are large baths,

whose warm and sulphurous water is considered highly medicinal. At this

tomb a curious spectacle may be seen on the second day of May each year.

Jewish pilgrims from near and far assemble, bringing with them their

oldest garments, which are immersed in a great cauldron of oil, and then

piled up and burned. The honour of setting fire to the pile is sold to

the highest bidder, and the sum paid reaches £15 or more.

The same fascination of death, seen as it were past a byplay of

irreverence and grotesqueness, is felt in the burial customs as they are

seen to-day. At the Moslem funerals we saw there was no appearance of

mourning. The men were dressed in gay colours, and they trotted along

behind the corpse talking and gesticulating with an apparent gusto. It

may have been the unusual appearance of the thing which impressed

strangers more powerfully than natives; but to us it seemed that the

realism of death was here in more crude and aggressive consciousness

than in Western funerals. The corpse lay on a board, shoulder-high, with

a gorgeous crimson and purple pall covering his body and limbs instead

of a coffin. The head, wrapped tight in a napkin, rested on a pillow,

and the features of the face stood prominently out against the sky. The

man seemed, in an altogether gruesome way, to be _attending_ his own

funeral, and to be thrusting the fact of his presence on the spectators.

This may be subjective criticism, and it is always unfair to judge the

burial-customs of other peoples without intimate knowledge of their

origin and inner meaning. In one respect, however, it is certain enough

that the Shadow of Death rests upon the land of Syria. That is Fatalism.

We have all heard of the fatalism of the East; and strange stones have

become familiar, of soldiers selling cartridges to their enemies, of

villagers refusing to drain the swamp that was decimating them by its

malaria, or even to desist from poisoning their own springs with foul

water. “It is Allah!” ends all questioning and checks all energy. Yet

the constant recurrence of living instances of fatalism shocks the

traveller, however well he was prepared for them. A traveller asked a

Mohammedan in Damascus what they had done to the workman who upset his

brazier and burned the great mosque. “Oh nothing,” said he, “what should

we do?” “I should have thought you might have killed him.” “No,” he

replied; “in the West you say when such things happen, ‘It is the

devil’; in the East we say, ‘It is God!’” Still more impressive was a

conversation with one of the camp-servants during a long ride near

Jezreel. He had told the pathetic story of his life--how they had lived

comfortably till the father died, leaving no money; then came work,

begun too early and with no providence and little hope of success, until

it had come to be “eat, drink, sleep, then again, eat, drink,

sleep--then die and sleep, no more eat nor drink.” The Syrian character

of the present day has been well expressed on its negative side in three

traits. These are, want of concentration, want of will-power, and an

absolute want of the sense of sin. Of sin they literally do not

understand the meaning, the substitute for conscience being a dread of

the opinion of friends and of the public. They do not think about the

problem of evil as in any sense a practical problem. “The Lord said unto

Ahriman, I know why I have made thee, but thou knowest not”--that is

their philosophy of the moral mystery of things. Conder sums up the

situation in striking words: “Christian villages thrive and grow, while

the Moslem ones fall into decay; and this difference, though due perhaps

in part to the foreign protection which the native Christians enjoy, is

yet unmistakably connected with the listlessness of those who believe

that no exertions of their own can make them richer or better, that an

iron destiny decides all things, without reference to any personal

quality higher than that of submission to fate, and that God will help

those who have lost the will to help themselves.”[46]

The spirit of Syria is darkened by a shadow of death that has grown not

only familiar but congenial, as darkness does to all who choose it

rather than the light. Strange that Syria should thus have “made a

covenant with death,” she from whom shone forth once the Light of the

World. But that was long ago. These many centuries this has been one of

that sad multitude of nations and of individuals who have sent forth a

spirit that has inspired and moved the world, and who yet themselves sit

desolate and listless.

CHAPTER III

THE SPECTRAL

THE shadow of death is always haunted. A strong and pure faith peoples

it with angels, and is accompanied through its darkness by that Good

Shepherd whose rod and staff comfort the soul. When the faith is neither

strong nor pure, and when those who sit in darkness have been disloyal

to their faith, it is haunted by spectres, and its darkness becomes

poisonous. The fascination of the marvellous passes into “what French

writers call the _macabre_--that species of almost insane preoccupation

with our mouldering flesh, that luxury of disgust in gazing on

corruption.”[47] This unclean spectral element is a very real part of

the spirit of Syria.

The spell of the East is proverbial, and it is a more literal fact than

is sometimes realised. Even such a commonsense Englishman as the captain

of the _Rob Roy_ confesses to a nameless fear that came upon him in the

solitudes of the upper Jordan.[48] There is a well-known passage in

Eothen, where Kinglake describes the calculating merchant, the

inquisitive traveller, the wakeful post-captain all coming under the

spell of Asia.[49] The warmth and strangeness of the land may have

something to do with it; but the associations and the prevalent tone of

thought have more. Every one feels it whose imagination and heart are in

the least measure open to spiritual impressions.

To analyse it or to specify the causes which have produced it were an

impossible task. Three things have to do with it very specially. There

is the habit of the Eastern mind in dealing with matters of fact. Truth

is not to the Oriental the primary moral necessity which it is to the

West. Vividness and forcefulness of presentation count for at least as

much. The Arab story-teller is said to close his enumeration of various

legends with the sacramental formula, “God knows best where the truth

lies,”--the truth being a matter of God’s responsibility, while to man

is committed only responsibility for being interesting. Again, in the

East, terror is a recognised force between man and man; and the great

forces of nature and the more occult forces of magic are recognised and

taken as part of the natural order. Religion also has had her share in

the “Great Asian Mystery.” This land is, to most devout persons,

altogether isolated and apart, as the place of a divine revelation such

as no other part of earth has known. There is a passage in

_Pseudo-Aristeas_ where, describing his supposed embassy to Jerusalem,

he gazes at the constant waving of the veil in the Temple, which

screened from his view the holiest things of Israel. As it rippled and

swung in the wind it seemed to tantalise the gazer with the

never-fulfilled promise of a glimpse into the secret place.[50] The

wistful sense of mystery in that letter gives a hint which is of

extraordinary significance on this subject.

The geographical formation of the land and its strange colouring lend

themselves to the spectral and the uncanny. The Dead Sea presents the

most sinister landscape in the world. The opening paragraphs of Scott’s

_Talisman_, founded upon the description of Josephus, are certainly

overdrawn, yet in truth everything conspires to produce a sense of

ghostliness by these unearthly shores. A ring of “scalded hills”

encircles them, and a perpetual haze lies upon their waters. Their soil

is nitrous and their springs sulphurous. Blocks of asphalt lie among

their shingle; and fish, dead and salted, are cast up by the waves.

There is little life visible about them, whether of man or beast or

bird. Here and there the tempting Apple of Sodom grows, to appearance

the most luscious of fruits, but so dry that its core is combustible and

is used as tinder by the Arabs. A few feet above the summer level of the

sea runs an unbroken line of drift-wood washed down by winter floods and

left white and sparkling with crusted salt.

Yet it was not the Dead Sea that seemed to us most unearthly, but that

more famous lake of which one thinks so differently. It would be a

curious and instructive task to collect the various impressions which

the Sea of Galilee has made upon travellers. Romance and piety conspire

to furnish many of its visitors with a predisposition to find it

surpassingly beautiful; and not a little could be quoted which owes most

of its touches to the imagination of the writer. A natural rebellion

against this has led to no less exaggerated expressions of

disappointment, and to accusations of ugliness which are simply untrue.

The fact is that ordinary canons of description are of no avail here.

The Sea of Galilee, even so far as natural appearance goes, must be

judged by itself.

Journeying to it from Tabor, you ride across a rather characterless

tract of country. A jackal, a stray Circassian horseman, a low black

tent of the Bedawin, are the only signs of life. Suddenly the track,

sweeping up over the farther side of a shallow and rudely cultivated

valley, lands you on an unexpected edge, from which the ground falls

sheer away before you into the basin of the lake. This is not scenery;

it is tinted sculpture, it is jewel-work on a gigantic scale. The rosy

flush of sunset was on it when we caught the first glimpse. At our feet

lay a great flesh-coloured cup full of blue liquor; or rather the whole

seemed some lapidary’s quaint fancy in pink marble and blue-stone. There

was no translucency, but an aggressive opaqueness, in sea and shore

alike. The dry atmosphere showed everything in sharpest outline,

clear-cut and broken-edged. There was no shading or variety of colour,

but a strong and unsoftened contrast. To be

[Illustration: THE TOMB OF RACHEL.

On the road from Jerusalem to Hebron. It is stated in the 35th chapter

of Genesis that Rachel died and was buried in the way to Hebron

(Ephrath).]

quite accurate, there was one break--a splash of white, with the green

suggestion of trees and grass, lying on the water’s edge directly

beneath us--Tiberias.

When, next day, we sailed upon the lake, coasting along the western

shore from north to south, we found ourselves again as far removed from

anything we had seen or experienced before. A casual glance showed utter

and abject desolation, and a silence that might be heard oppressed the

spirit. As the eye grew more accustomed, villages were discerned. But

what villages! With the same exception of Tiberias, they were brown

slabs of flat-roofed cubical hovels--let into the slope of the shore or

the foot-hills. And as we skirted closer along the beach, we descried

everywhere traces of ruined architecture. It appeared to form a

continuous ring of towers; columns broken and tumbled, but showing

elaborately carved capitals; aqueducts and retaining walls; fragments of

all sorts, and apparently of widely different styles of architecture.

Foliage is scanty, save for the thorn-trees and bamboo canes in which

the carved stones are often half buried. Here and there a plantation of

orchard trees hides a trim little German garden. At Tiberias a few palm

trees lend their graceful suggestion of the Far East.

All this impresses one in a quite unique way. You try to reconstruct the

past--rebuild the castles and synagogues and palaces, and imagine the

life that sent forth its fleets upon the lake in the days of Jesus. Or

you more daringly attempt the future landscape, and imagine these

hillsides as scientific cultivation and the withdrawal of oppressive

government may yet make them. But from it all you are driven back upon

the extraordinary present--petrified, uncanny, spectral--a part of the

earth on which some spell has fallen, and over which some ghostly

influence broods, silencing the daylight, and whispering in the

darkness. If, however, this sense of the ghostly be intenser here than

elsewhere, it is but an exaggeration of the spirit of the whole land.

Nature in Syria seems always to have something of the supernatural about

her. Not only in the petrifactions of the Lejja and the silent stone

cities east of Jordan is this the case. The whole country offers you

stones when you ask for trees, and that mere fact of its stoniness is

enough to lend it the air of another world. As an indirect consequence

trees, when they are found, assume a factitious importance, and a

supernatural significance either for good or evil. Some of the fairest

plants of Syria are treacherous as they are fair. One of our company, in

gathering sprays of a peculiarly lovely creeper, somewhat resembling a

white passion-flower, had his hand wounded with invisible but virulent

needles which caused it to swell and gave great pain. The green spots,

where grass and trees abound, tempt the unwary to drink and rest in

them. But they are the most dangerous places in the land, and some of

them are deadly from malaria. On the other hand, a tree in a treeless

country is an object of preciousness inconceivable by any who have not

come upon it from the wilderness. In the distance it beckons the

traveller with the promise of shade and water. Arrived beneath its

branches, life takes on a new aspect; kindly voices are heard in the

rustle of its leaves, and gracious gifts seen in its shadow and its

fruit. It is said that our fleur-de-lis pattern, often supposed to

represent the flower of the lily or the iris, is really an Eastern

symbol. The central stem is the sacred date-palm, while the side-lines

and the horizontal band stand for ox-horns tied to the stem to avert the

evil eye. It is no wonder if by the ancient Semites trees were regarded

as demoniac beings, or as growing from the body of a buried god.[51]

Such traditions are no longer to be found in their ancient forms, but

they linger in a vague sense of the holiness of conspicuous trees, which

may be seen covered with rags of clothing hung on them by natives. A

like play of imagination has from time immemorial haunted the

pools--especially those whose dark waters made them seem

bottomless--with holy or unholy mystery. Still more terrible is the

superstitious dread with which the natives regard undrained morasses.

The Serbonian Bog on the south coast has from of old been regarded with

special fear, owing to its treacherous appearance of sound earth. The

marsh in which the Abana loses itself shares with the Serbonian Bog its

grim distinction, chiefly on account of its deep black wells, which the

natives take to be man-devouring whirlpools.

In her grander and more impressive features, Nature is in Syria

constantly suggestive of the play of occult powers. Earthquake has left

its mark in many a split rampart and broken tower, and that of itself

is enough to give a peculiarly ghostly tinge to the spirit of any land.

The unspeakable loneliness of the desert has its own magic--a melancholy

spell which has no parallel in other lands. In the desert, too, the sky

conspires with the earth in its bewitchment. The mirage has power to

arrest and overawe the spirit with something of the same sense of

helplessness as that felt in earthquake. In the one case earth, in the

other heaven, are turning ordinary procedure upside down, and the

bewildered mortal knows not what is to come next upon him. The writer

has had experience of both, though with an interval of several years

between them. The mirage he saw to the east of the Great Haj Road in

Hauran. For some time the rocky hills of the Lejja had been the horizon,

shimmering dimly through the heat-haze. Suddenly, on looking up, he was

amazed to find that the hills had disappeared, and in their place had

come a long string of camels on the sky-line, with an island, a lake,

and a grove of palm-trees floating in the air above them. The sudden

apparition recalled on the instant a day in the Antipodes when he felt,

though at a great distance, the tremble of the New Zealand earthquakes.

Either experience is unearthly enough to explain many superstitions.

In most lands the sea would have yielded a larger crop of unearthly

imaginations than has been the case in Palestine. For reasons which have

been already stated, Israel kept out of touch with the ocean. Yet, all

the more on that account, it is the case that almost every thought she

has of the sea is fearsome. Its immensity bewilders her with the

unhomely distances of the world, and the four winds strive savagely upon

it. The roar and surge of the shore are all she needs to remember in

order to impress herself with its terror. Now and then she thinks of the

Great Deep, and of its horrible inhabitants--leviathan unwieldily

sporting there, and other nameless monsters bred of the slime and ooze,

and the dead men who are waiting to float up from their places to the

Great Judgment, when their time shall come.