Letters from the Holy Land

Jerusalem, 8th April 189-.

My… – To-day was exquisitely bright and full of heart-stirring sights to us. Those who have not been here can scarcely, I think, realise the sensation of living in daily intimacy with the scenes of Our Lord’s Passion. Think of lying down at night under the shadow of the Cross. To-day we first visited the Wailing Place of the Jews. Strange and pathetic sight, these weird men and women and children weeping and moaning, with their faces against the gigantic stones of the wall that forms the only remaining portion of the foundation of their vanished Temple, praying Jehovah for its restoration to Israel; and over their heads rises in its strong beauty the Moslem Mosque of Omar, standing in the place of the “Holy of Holies,” the varnished tiles of its dome ablaze with green and blue in the resplendent sun! Jews below, Moslems above, yet to the Christian, Christ everywhere!

Then we followed the “Via Dolorosa,” which winds through the dense town, starting from the Turkish barracks on the site of Pilate’s house. Of course, I need not say that the surface of Jerusalem being sixty to eighty feet higher than it was in Our Lord’s time, the real Via Dolorosa is buried far below, but the general direction may be the true one. Strange to see the Stations of the Cross appearing at intervals on the walls of alleys crowded with Jews and Mahometans. There are no evidences of Turkish intolerance in Palestine that I can see! The last stations are, of course, in the great Church. We followed the walls from Mount Moriah to Zion and round by Accra to the Damascus Gate, outside which stands General Gordon’s “Skull Hill,” which he so tenaciously clung to as the real Calvary (on account of its resemblance to a gigantic skull), together with the sepulchre in a garden at the foot of the mound, which he held was that of Joseph of Arimathea. As far as my eye can tell, the distance between “Skull Hill” and this sepulchre is much the same as between Calvary and the sepulchre that tradition hallows. I send you a sketch that I made on the spot of Gordon’s “sepulchre,” to show you the universal plan of these burial-places. You will see three tombs (their lids are gone) in the inner chamber. At the Holy Sepulchre only Our Lord’s is preserved, tallying with the one I have marked with a cross; the other two have been cut away.

I made a very hurried sketch of Jerusalem, with the Mount of Olives and a glimpse of the mountains of Moab, from the hotel roof. Had I been perched a little higher I could have shown the head of the Dead Sea. We visited the Mosque of Omar, one of the great sights of the world. The immense plateau on which the Temple stood is partly occupied by this, the second oldest of mosques, and by great open spaces planted with gigantic and ancient cypresses and by a smaller mosque. The whole group is surpassingly beautiful, but what thoughts rush into one’s mind in this place! A vision of Herod’s Temple fills the whole space for a few moments with its white and golden splendour, its forest of shining pinnacles flashing in the sun, and its tiers of pillared courts culminating in the Holy of Holies. And then the reality lies before us again – great empty spaces and two pagan mosques. From thence we went out by St. Stephen’s Gate, and looked down on Gethsemane on the opposite side of the Valley of Jehoshaphat. Very dusty and stony looked that part of the Mount of Olives, and the excavations for the building of numerous churches by various sects have greatly spoilt its repose and beauty and disturbed its seclusion. But one must not complain. All Christians naturally long to have a place of worship there.

I cannot describe to you the charm of life here. All one’s time is filled to overflowing with what I may call the “holy fascination” of the place, and though all this continual walking and standing about may be somewhat fatiguing in a physical sense, the mind never is weary and the fatigue is pleasant. At night, sound sleep, born of profound contentment at the day’s doings, so full of keen interest without excitement, renews one’s vitality for the succeeding day’s enjoyment.

9th April 189-.

This has been a day of clear loveliness, much hotter and altogether exquisite. In the morning we first went to the “Cenaculum,” the rambling building erected over the site of the house of the Last Supper, which St. Helena found and enclosed in a chapel, and also including the undoubted Tomb of David, jealously guarded from us by the Mahometans. The Cenaculum stands out lonely and impressive, looking towards the mountains of Moab and the dim regions to the south of the Dead Sea. I will show you a sunset sketch of this.

I was not pleased to feel hurried through those rooms and narrow passages and stairs by the guide in a rather nervous manner, when I perceived that the reason was the unfriendly looks of the Mahometans who moved about us, and who evidently resent the presence of Christians so near the royal tomb. I was too much distracted to realise where I was, and indeed, not till we get away from the noise and bustle of town life into the solitudes shall we be able to fix our thoughts as we would wish.

From the Cenaculum we walked half-way down to the valley through which the brook Cedron flows, and by very much the same path that Our Lord must have followed to go to Gethsemane after the Last Supper. Down to our right was the desolate Gehenna – the Pit of Tophet – now only inhabited by lepers, and a ghastly hollow it looked. Beyond rose that hill where once sat Moloch of the red-hot hands, and deep down on the declivity between us and these landmarks of terror lay the Potter’s Field. When looking from some commanding height

over the city and its surroundings the mind staggers at the thought of the appalling catastrophes that have burst upon this narrow area – the human agony that has been concentrated here through so many ages, of which we read in the Old Testament and in the writings of the early historians of our era. Twenty-five fierce sieges has this mountain fastness endured. No other city ever went through such sufferings. If we could really concentrate our thoughts upon the events that have passed upon this ground which, from such a standpoint as ours of this morning, the sight can compass in one sweep of vision, it would be too painful to be endured. Perhaps if I could see the place on some bleak twilight or in a sounding thunderstorm I might dimly appreciate the long agony of Jerusalem, but to-day the April air was full of scents of flowers and aromatic shrubs, and the bees were humming; there were little butterflies amongst the anemones, and the lark was in full song. The very spirit of the Gospel peace seemed to float in the gentle air of spring. I was glad I could not concentrate my thoughts on the gloomy side of that wondrous prospect.

From the cave whither St. Peter crept away to weep after the denial of Our Lord is certainly the finest view of the site of the Temple to be obtained anywhere. This cave is some distance down the path from the Cenaculum and the house of Caiaphas, which latter we had also visited, now a beautiful chapel.

In the afternoon we had our first ride, and went by the old stony track so often trodden by the Saviour to Bethany. Never shall I forget the view of the Dead Sea, Jordan, and mountains of Moab which burst upon us as we crested the summit of the Mount of Olives and passed by the traditional site of the Ascension. The ride down to Bethany, on the reverse slope of the Mount, was enchanting, and how solemn all was to us – the deep black “tomb of Lazarus,” the site of the house (now a ruined chapel) where Jesus so often stayed. We returned by the lower, or new, road from Jericho, and had at sunset that grand view of Jerusalem from the lower slopes of Olivet which has so often been painted. We reserved Gethsemane for another time, but visited the ancient Church of the Assumption on our way home.

Jerusalem, 10th April.

My… – We spent the whole morning in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, I remaining alone for an hour after W. left to write letters at the hotel. There was hardly another soul in that vast building, except a few priests and the monk who keeps watch over the Tomb. I find I can write least about this, the climax of what makes Palestine the Holy Land.

At two o’clock I went to Gethsemane, escorted by Isaac, where I sketched till six. I would have preferred a moonlight sketch of that garden, but I had to be content with a very hot daylight one. It was blissful sitting there undisturbed under the old olives whose trunks are as hard as stone, and I pleased myself with the idea that they might be offshoots of offshoots of the trees that shaded Our Lord. When Titus had all the trees around Jerusalem cut down, some saplings may have been overlooked! My protecting dragoman was somewhere out of sight, and the Franciscan monks who own this most sacred “God’s Acre” were unobtrusively tending the flowers somewhere about. Insects hummed amid the flowers, all the little burrings of a hot day were in the air, it was a place of profound peace. As I returned, towards sunset, and climbed the steep sides of the Valley of Jehoshaphat up to St. Stephen’s Gate – the shortest way to the City – I looked back towards the scene of my happy labours, and a sight lay there below me which impressed me, I am sure, for life. The western sides of the abyss which I was climbing were already in the shades of night, for twilight hardly exists here, but the opposite slopes received the red sunset light in its fullest force, and in that scarlet gleam shone out in intense relief thousands upon thousands of flat tombstones that cover the bones of countless Jews who have, at their devout request, been buried there to await, on the spot, the Last Judgment which they and we and the Mahometans all believe will take place in that valley. Had I more time I would much like to make a study of this truly awful place in that last ray of the vanishing sun, for nothing could be more impressive and more touching, but higher-standing subjects claim all the time I can spare. My intention is to use all my sketching moments for scenes connected with Our Lord’s revealed life. I resolutely deny

myself the indulgence of elaborately sketching the people and animals that seem to call out to the artist at every turn, though I have outlined some in my note-book. Anywhere else our fellow-travellers at the hotel would be too tempting in my lighter moments, so comical they look in their sun-proof costumes. Why such preparations against the April sun? But one is too “detached” here to be much distracted by their unspeakable outlines. And, talking of distractions, I really do not find the drawbacks of Jerusalem, which so many travellers give prominence to in accounts of their experiences, so very bad. Indeed our life here is without a single drawback, to my thinking.

Saturday, 11th April 189-.

The heat is greatly increasing. At 1.30 we drove to Bethlehem with our friend, Frère Benoît. The hill country we passed through was very stony and rocky, and only cultivated here and there. Again olives and stones, stones and olives everywhere. The inhabitants are a splendid race, the men athletic, the women graceful, though their faces are sadly disfigured by tattooing. We were on the look-out for the little city of David long before it appeared, and very beautiful it looked as we beheld it from a high hill, crowning a slightly lower one amid a billowing sea of other hill-tops. It has a majestic appearance on its rocky throne, and its large, massive conventual buildings add greatly to its stateliness. We passed that pathetic monument, Rachel’s Tomb, at the cross roads, our road leading to the left, and the other diving down to the right towards Hebron. We ascended Bethlehem’s hill and were soon in its steep, narrow, slippery stone lanes, utterly unfitted for a carriage. We drove at once to the Franciscan Convent and then to the Church built over the site of the Nativity, and had the happiness of kneeling at the sacred spot where the manger stood, which is shown in the rocky vaults below, and marked with a white star inlaid in the floor. The cave was rich and lovely with votive lamps and gold and silver gifts. Little by little the dislike I had to the too precise localisation of the events we love most in the Bible is disappearing. Speaking for myself, I find that, on the spot, the mind demands it. But I know that many people regret it. I only wish that, in their separate and individual ways, all

who come here may feel the happiness that I do.

In a very dark niche in the rocks close to where the white star shone out in the floor I perceived the figure of a Turkish sentry, breech-loading rifle and all, standing on his little wooden stool, motionless. Well, do you know, though my eyes saw him my mind was not thereby disturbed any more than it was by the Turkish guard at the door of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. I could not bring my thoughts down to that figure and the reason of its being there.

We visited St. Jerome’s Cave, close by, where he worked, near the scene of his Redeemer’s birth, giving to the world the translation into the Vulgate of the Holy Scriptures. Then we walked down to the field of Boaz, full of waving green wheat, in the midst of which stands the sheepfold surrounded by a stone wall. You must imagine the shepherds looking up to Bethlehem from there on that Christmas eve. The little city is seen from the sheepfold high up against the sky to the west about two miles off. I had only time for a pencil outline of this view, hoping to colour it on a future occasion. All the country round was very pastoral, and just such a one as one would expect. Wildflowers in great quantities, and larks – little tame things with crests on their heads – enjoying the sun and the breeze, quite unmolested; lovely sweeps of corn in the valleys, olive-clad or quite grassless hills bounding the horizon all round – can you see it? How many figures of Our Lady we saw about the fields and lanes with babes in their arms! Surely the old masters got their facts about the drapery of their Madonnas from here, where all the women wear blue and red robes, exactly as the Italian painters have them.

Sunday, 12th April.

We went to seven o’clock mass at the Latin Altar on Calvary. We were in a dense knot of people, who were kneeling on the floor in that dark, low-roofed chapel, lit by the soft light of lamps hanging before each shrine. How often we say in our prayers, “Here, at the foot of Thy Cross.” We were literally there. After breakfast with the prior at the Casa Nova Monastery, which used to be the hostelry for travellers before the hotel was in existence, we drove with Frère Benoît to the reputed birthplace of John the Baptist, Ain Kareem in the Judean Hills. I believe there is considerable doubt as to this site, but there is the possibility. It was a very poetical landscape that we passed through, and there were many flowering apricot, pear, and almond trees as we neared St. Elizabeth’s mountain home. We first visited the site of the Baptist’s birth high up in the north end of the village, now covered by a church, and then we crossed over to the south side of the valley to St. Elizabeth’s country house, also now a chapel, where her cousin visited her. There is a deep well of most cool crystal water at the side of the altar in this “Chapel of the Visitation,” which belongs to the Spanish monks. From the roof of the convent over this chapel I made a sketch of the little town on its hillside planted with cypress trees. The heat here in this enclosed valley was very great.

Monday, 13th April.

We were up at five for our drive to Hebron. I longed to see this most ancient city and that mosque which, without any doubt whatever, covers the “double Cave of Machpelah” which Abraham bought for his own and his descendants’ burying-place. “There,” said Jacob when dying, “they buried Abraham and Sarah his wife; there they buried Isaac and Rebekah his wife; and there I buried Leah,” and there also they buried Jacob. Think of it! If we could look into those tombs and see the very bones of Abraham and Isaac and the mummy of Jacob, for the Bible tells us he was embalmed according to the manner of the Egyptians. Altogether, though, our visit to Hebron has rather given me the horrors. Near Rachel’s tomb we left the Bethlehem road and dived down to the “Vale of Hebron,” the heat increasing greatly as we descended. We halted for the mid-day refection (how more than usually horrid the word “lunch” sounds here!) and rested in the “shadow of a rock in a thirsty land,” where tradition says Philip met the Eunuch journeying from far-off Meroe on the Upper Nile. It was a wilderness of stones, where the big lizards of Palestine were in strong force, panting over the top of every rock, their black heads and goggle eyes upturned to the burning sky in a very comical way. Close to Hebron is a nice cool German hostelry, where we rested before descending to the gloomiest town I have ever seen in the East, with

some of its bazaars like tunnels, into which scarcely any light could enter. Here in the gloom we met insolent-looking Moslems and spectral Jews, their strongly-contrasted figures and faces appearing for a moment in the twilight as they passed us. And outside it was blinding noontide sunlight. We went all round the huge mosque that guards the precious tombs of the patriarchs, but had we attempted to enter we should have had a bad quarter of an hour from the Mahometans. These sons of the Bondwoman would stone any son of the Free who would attempt an entry. There is a little black hole in the wall, which I am sure does not pierce it through, which we are told we can look through and see the tombs from outside, but I saw nothing in the hole but the beady eye of a lizard. We do not feel as though we would care to revisit Hebron.

We drove back to the German khan which was full of exhausted Americans who had also returned from the oven of Hebron. Most of them had been trying to combine botany with Biblical research, and near many of the figures that lay prone on the divans I saw Bibles and limp flora on the floor.

Towards evening we drove from this place of rest a long way back on the road to Jerusalem, but not far short of Bethlehem we came in sight of our camp! How charming and inspiriting that sight was – three snowy tents pitched by the Pools of Solomon under the walls of a Crusader Castle, with some fifteen saddle and baggage animals picketed close by, and the dear old Union Jack flying from the central tent! I was delighted at the fact that our camp life was to begin that night. Everything struck us as in excellent order, our horses, saddles and bridles, the tents, the servants and all. Those Pools of Solomon are three immense reservoirs of water which the Wise King made to supply the Temple at Jerusalem. Myriads of frogs were enlivening the evening air with their multitudinous croakings which increased to deafening proportions as night closed in. I took a hasty sketch. Much hyssop grows here, “Asperges me, Domine, hyssopo et mundabor.”

14th April.

I was greatly pleased with my first night under canvas. To have grass and stones and little aromatic herbs for a bedroom carpet was a

new and delightful sensation to me. We started this morning at sunrise, my sketching things handily strapped to my saddle by W.’s directions, in a flat straw aumonière. Isaac had swathed his tarboush in a magnificent “cufia,” and our retinue wore the baggy garb of Syria. W. rode a steel-grey Arab, I a silver-grey, Isaac a roan-grey, and the man, whom we call the “flying column,” because he is to accompany us with the lunch bags, while the heavy column with baggage, tents, etc., goes on ahead by short-cuts, rode a chestnut. We passed through Bethlehem and down to the Field of the Shepherds, where I completed, as well as I could in the heat and glare, my sketch begun the other day. A group of some twenty Russian pilgrims arrived as we did, and we saw them in the grotto of the sheepfold, each holding a lighted taper and responding to the chant of their old priest, who had a head which would do admirably for a picture of Abraham. These poor men were in fur coats and high clumsy boots, and one told us he had come from Tobolsk, and had been two years on that tramp. He assured us he could manage his return journey in no time, only ten months or so. Their devotion was profound, as it always is, and was utterly un-self-conscious. I think we English are too apt to suppose that because devotion is demonstrative it is not deep. Great pedestrians as we are, how many Englishmen would walk for two years to visit this sheepfold? That two years’ test borne by the Russian peasant must have gone very deep.

I remember reading with much approval, when a child, with a child’s narrow-mindedness, Miss Martineau’s shocked description of the demonstrative piety of a noble Russian lady on Calvary, who repeatedly laid her head in the hole where the Cross had been, weeping and praying and behaving altogether in a most un-English manner. The memory of that passage came back to me to-day as I saw these rough peasants, so supremely unconscious of our presence, throwing themselves heart and soul into their adoration of God, and I thought of Mary Magdalene and her prostrations and tears.

After the service for the Russian pilgrims “father Abraham” fell asleep under an olive-tree, with his hoary head on a stone which he had cushioned with dock leaves, and the younger priest who had taken part in the service went back to his ploughing, which he had left on the approach of the pilgrims. They both had their Fellaheen clothes under their cassocks, and they wore the tall Greek sacerdotal cap. They were natives of Bethlehem. “Abraham” blessed our meal, but refused to partake of it, except the fruit, as this is the Greek Lent. We had a long talk with him through Isaac, and a lively theological argument, which had the usual success of such undertakings, enhanced by its filtration through a Mahometan interpreter converted to Protestantism by the American Baptist Mission at Jaffa. That old patriarch was a magnificent study as he sat, pointing heavenwards under the olive-trees and discoursing of his Faith, with Bethlehem rising in the distance behind his most venerable head. He made some coffee for us, a return civility for the fruit, and as we rode off many were the parting salutations between us and the group of people who had been the audience of our theological arguments, made unintelligible by Isaac. Among the crowd was an ex-Papal Zouave who turned out to have been orderly to a friend of ours in the old days at Rome.

We rode along a track in the field of Boaz, now knee-deep in corn, a cavalry soldier, who had been sent to escort us through the “dangerous” region, leading the way. His escorting seems to consist of periodical “fantasia” manœuvres, when he shakes his horse out at full gallop, picking a flower in mid-career and circling back to present it to me, – a picturesque proceeding in that floating caftan and white and brown striped burnous. I am pleased to see this figure in our foreground caracoling, curveting, and careering. He is in such pleasing harmony with his native landscape. He and Isaac are all over pistols and weapons of various sorts, but W. says that the necessity for arms in Palestine is now a thing of the past, and only a bogey.

Our course lay south-east, as we wished to visit the far-famed Greek monastery of Mar Saba on our way to our camp. Formerly there was great danger and difficulty in going to this extraordinary place, owing to the fierce robber Bedouins that haunted these regions, and in many accounts of Palestine travel I have read of the disappointment of the writers at the impossibility of making this visit. It is an awe-inspiring place. The

monks have even denied themselves that great earthly consolation of natural beauty which our monasteries, as a rule, are so well situated to enjoy. On the edge of an abyss of rock, through which the now dry Cedron once rushed to the Dead Sea, and facing the opposite rock pierced with the caves of former hermits, it is so placed as to have not one beautiful thing within sight, and as little of even the light of the sky above to give a ray of cheerfulness. We saw pigeons and paddy birds arriving in flocks to the rock ledges, and had glimpses of furtive furry things coming round corners. We marvelled at the presence of the paddy birds so far from water till we were told the pleasing fact that all these wild things since time immemorial have been in the habit of congregating here to the sound of the bugle, to be fed by those Greek monks. They were waiting for their dinner-bell!