Letters from the Holy Land

Magdala is a tiny mud hamlet with a single palm. There are splendid fig-trees here. Herds of oxen and goats and flocks of sheep browse knee-deep in the rich grass.

Our dragoman took us this time through the whole length of the town of Tiberias. It happened to be a great Jewish festival, and the men had all freshly oiled and curled their side locks, which dangled from under immense round fur caps, and the women wore artificial flowers in their hair and were clothed in velvets of splendid hue. It was strange to see them thus attired, coming upon them so suddenly when entering the town from the wilderness. The lanes were stifling and unwholesome, the children pale and sickly, and all had that same blighted look I noticed at Jerusalem. None of them were tanned, but remained white under such a sun! It was a relief to come out at the other end and canter back along the margin of the “Sea” to our camp, for that ride through Tiberias had oppressed and saddened me.

Friday, 24th April.

An early start as the sun rose over those dark cliffs of the country of the Gadarenes down which the possessed swine careered to the abyss. Good-bye, blessed Sea of Galilee! We had our last look from the immense height near the “Mount of Beatitudes,” and thence we turned south-west on our way to Nazareth over the hills of Zebulon.

Young shepherds were piping on little fifes on the hills. The country became uninteresting

(comparatively!) after we left the immediate surroundings of the lake till we came to Cana of Galilee, where we halted, and where I made my only “failure” sketch.

It was a dear, holy, lovable landscape, but hillocky and green and impossible in that flat noontide light. At Cana is the fountain from which undoubtedly was drawn the water for the marriage feast, since there is absolutely no other spring in the place. It was a long journey to Nazareth. That holy town is very lovely, and so much superior in its buildings to the others – quite well-to-do and exquisitely situated on the slope of a cypress-topped hill, in terraces, like a tiny Genoa. Here culminated my disappointment in the faces of the women of Palestine, for the tattooing is simply outrageous, worse than anywhere else in the East. How can they be beautiful with blue lips and the mouth surrounded with blue trees, animals and birds? This spoilt my pleasure in coming upon the “Fountain of the Virgin,” where these maids and matrons were filling their pitchers amid a great chattering, at the entrance to the town. We walked, after arriving, to the Church of the Annunciation. There, in the “Holy House” (the front of which is at Loretto), far below the present surface of the earth, on the very spot where the angel saluted Mary, one can say the Angelus. This is the portion of the house which (as is the custom here) is excavated out of the rock; the fronts only are of masonry. We visited the “Mensa Christi,” which interested us but little, as it savours too much of the “pious fraud,” and then the site of Joseph’s workshop.

We were disappointed in the position of our camp, as other travellers had forestalled us in getting better places, and the best of all was bespoken for the great French pilgrimage expected on the morrow.

On this account we settled not to tarry at Nazareth and to send the heavy column back to Jerusalem in the morning. We are only one day’s journey from Caïfa, our place of embarkation. As I was looking at the town from our tent door at the time of the Angelus, the bells of the Church over Mary’s house suddenly rang out a carillon, and the tune was that very one we used to hear when A. and I were five and six years old on our dear Genoese Riviera! I had not heard that tune since those days. Later on I watched the full

moon rising over those mountain outlines which Our Lord looked on every day of His hidden life at Nazareth, and then turned and saw the town white in the moonbeams on its dark hillside.

Saturday, 25th April.

We started later than usual, as W. had to close accounts with the “heavy column” and send a telegram to Alexandria to warn them of our impending return. There was a heavy dew. I made a sunrise sketch of the town. A glorious ride we had to Carmel, steeped in the poetry of the Old Testament. Carmel is one mass of oak-trees. There we met the vast host of the French pilgrims coming from Caïfa and beginning their experiences of Palestine. We met amicably at the shady halting-place and exchanged a few words of camaraderie, and we watched them depart towards Nazareth, each company headed by a banner. On our way to Caïfa we crossed the Kishon again, now near its mouth, flowing through a lovely plain, bordered, near the sandhills that skirt the sea, with date-palms. Over the hills to our right towered Lebanon against the blue. As we came in sight of the bay the town of St. Jean d’Acre looked beautiful on the opposite side, and Caïfa appeared a bright little town at the foot of Carmel. There we put up at the German inn, and I parted with my dear little horse “Shiloh,” and W. with his nimble “Kishon,” our good little steeds that brought us so well through the Holy Land.

Sunday, 26th April.

A great rest and much letter-writing. The congregation at Mass was large, for there is a considerable Christian colony here. We shall make this our headquarters till Friday, when we must leave for Egypt.

Caïfa, Monday, 27th April 189-.

My… – We had a very enjoyable expedition to Acre, driving the whole way there and back in the sea. Where the waves break the sand is hard, whereas higher up the beach no wheeled vehicle could get through in the soft sand. We were often covered with spray, and the lean horses splashed along knee-deep in the surf. At the ferry across the Kishon, where it flows into the sea, our horses were unharnessed and swam alongside our punt, together with a string of camels that looked very comical swimming. The shivering horses were reharnessed on the farther shore, and away we went tearing through the waves. The poor beasts seemed to enjoy their oats at the end, if enjoyment is possible to such wretched, ill-treated creatures. I made a sketch as well as I could with the sun in my eyes from our shandrydan, about a quarter of a mile outside the one gate of Acre, on the white sandy strand, whilst W. went exploring all over the town. The military authorities molested us not at all, and the commandant only asked W. for backsheesh, although I was conspicuously sketching the fortifications and W. was scanning everything in a place so saturated with Napoleonic reminiscences. The same amphibious drive in the gloaming back to Caïfa.

Tuesday, 28th April 189-.

To-day we drove to remote Athlit, a long way down the coast to the south, and spent quiet hours amid the Gothic Crusader ruins on the wave-lashed rocks beyond Carmel. Acre and Athlit steep one’s mind in Crusader sentiment, which feels almost modern after so long a sojourn in the regions of the Bible. The majestic fragments of Northern Gothic we saw to-day seem strange to the eye in this Oriental land, but to the intellect they are full of touching meaning, for this was the point of departure for most of the Crusaders. Baffled, haggard, heart-broken, they took ship again from here.

Wednesday we spent in visiting the Carmelite Monastery, a perfect place to stay at instead of the rather dubious German inn. It is a fortress-like building commanding a sweeping view of the sea, south and west and north, and of the grand landscape eastward and south again. The whitewashed rooms are filled with the reflection from the light off the water and the land. The Abbot and monks, in the well-known white cloak and brown habit, are, as everywhere, kindly and hospitable, and glad to see you. What a place for study and for painting; what a place for a Retreat, where everything reminds you of Religion and not one single mundane, worrying, or ugly object comes within your ken! By “ugly” I always mean some modern eyesore; it is not a word applicable to the poor and the diseased who humbly mount the steep path for the daily alms and food the monastery has ready for them.

Somewhere amongst this series of oak-clad hills that forms Mount Carmel, Elijah built his altar to the True God, whereon the burnt-offering was consumed by fire from heaven in sight of the prophets of Baal. “Then the fire of the Lord fell, and consumed the holocaust, and the wood, and the stones, and the dust, and licked up the water that was in the trench,” III Kings xviii. 38. This was the scene of that mighty episode which is one of the most salient and impressive in one’s memory of the Old Testament, and look! down below rushes that same Kishon on whose banks Elijah, after the great drama on the mountain, slew the prophets of Baal in sight of all the children of Israel. A thrill runs through one when recalling such scenes as one stands on the very spot where they took place.

After seeing specimens of the ancient tombs in this country one can fully understand the words of St. Luke and St. John alluding to the new sepulchre of Joseph of Arimathea “wherein no man had yet been laid.” These tombs contain triple receptacles for the dead, as I showed you in the sketch plan at Jerusalem, and some I believe have more than three. Had the sepulchre at the foot of Calvary contained but one, the words of the Evangelists would be puzzling. This is an instance of the illumination that dispels certain obscurities in one’s mind as one journeys across the theatre of Bible history.

It seems a strange paradox, but it is a very weighty fact, that the possession of the Holy Land by the conservative Turk preserves all such tokens of the past for the elucidation of the Christian’s Bible. Were this land in possession of a “Christian” Power, I fear that the service of Mammon would soon necessitate the obliteration of these tokens so precious to our Faith. Railways, factories, mines and new towns “run” by greedy syndicates, would very soon make an end of them all. There was a Christian proposal a little while ago, I believe, to flood the whole of Palestine for commercial purposes. My ideal would be (oh, vain dream!) that some great confederation of earnest people whose God is not the Dollar, belonging to the various European Powers and America, should purchase the little Holy Land as a possession “for ever” for Christendom —real Christendom.

To-day, Thursday, we saw the “School of the Prophets,” a curious and awesome cavern in the side of the mountain. These have been quiet days, wherein I have been able to write much and assimilate the events of our glorious journey.

Looking back along these days of travel, many flitting thoughts that came and went as we journeyed on, return to one’s mind in the stillness of repose. One of the facts that have struck us most in this ancient land which is yet so fresh – so fresh in its surprises and in its stirrings of the heart – is the fact that no book of human authorship dealing with the subject is readable on the spot. You may take with you Dean Stanley, Dr. Thomson (The Land and the Book), Miss Martineau, or any of the delightful works on Palestine that have fascinated you in times gone by: you will open them once but not again. The Bible is the only book you can read here! All the others are inadequate: no man can measure himself with the Infinite. (Such books as Père Didon’s sublime Jésus Christ or Father Gallwey’s Watches of the Passion I do not consider as being of human authorship, because they are illustrative accompaniments of the Scriptures.)

The feeling I have when on the point of leaving the Holy Land is one difficult to describe worthily. We seem to have been allowed a glimpse into the other world through this sacred portal. To have stood on the summit of Olivet whence Our Redeemer ascended into heaven in the form He reigns in now at the right hand of the Father, is as though one had touched heaven itself. And then the force with which one realises certain episodes of His revealed life on earth makes one see the Incarnation so vividly that the human mind bends beneath the might of the revelation.

When I saw our boatmen the other day on Galilee pulling with all their might, but in vain, against the sudden west wind, so peculiar to that particular lake, I saw before me the fishermen of Peter’s type, dressed in the same loose garments, going through the same dangerous work that he and his fellows had to face habitually. How easy it was, with that living illustration before me, to see the struggling boat’s crew on the night that Jesus, remaining to pray alone on the mountain on the eastern shore, sent them forward to Capernaum without Him, and how easy to see them trying to make their way as described in Matthew xiv. 24. “But the boat in the midst of the sea was tossed with the waves: for the wind was contrary.” And then the divine Figure following them, moving over those tossing waves, can be imagined, approaching, full of calm reassurance, to still their fears at His apparition – “It is I, be not afraid.” The direction in which the boat was steered, the mountain whence the divine Figure came forward and overtook the boat – all now appears to the mind’s eye in powerful vividness, in the setting of land and water that one has seen.

Again, the poor demoniacs that lived in the tombs that are cut out of the sides of those same mountains “over against Galilee” (there are outcast maniacs like them to-day in the deserts, if not “possessed” as these men were), – I fancy I can see the look of the wild animal in their faces as they met our Lord, and hear the quick, wild cry of one of them: “What have I to do with thee, Jesus, Son of the most high God?” – and the hoarse answer to Christ’s question, “My name is Legion!” I have before me the recollection of a strange creature I saw running out of a sepulchral chamber in a ruined temple on the Upper Nile, like the incarnation of Satan in some of the Old Masters’ pictures: the head bald, and of the same cinder-coloured hue as the evil face, with its large pointed ears, and the muscular body. I do not mean that the possessed man of the Gospel might have been like this dweller in tombs, but one sees strange beings in the deserts whose shelters are the resting-places of the dead.

I continue to be haunted by the feeling that the sight of the Holy Places is too easily and too unceremoniously obtained nowadays. I hope we do not feel less devoutly with regard to them than in the “Ages of Faith,” and that it is only our modern way to take these things as we do. Do you remember how history tells us that Richard Cœur de Lion, after his defeat by the Saracens some distance short of Jerusalem, falling back towards the coast, baffled in his heroic efforts to redeem the Holy Sepulchre from the Infidel, refused to look on the city which came in sight in the rear of his line of march as he and his knights crested a high hill near Emmaus? He would not look; he had failed; his eyes were too unworthy to rest upon the City of the Lord. And to-day, with the Infidel still in possession, the Christian tourist, nothing doubting, takes a good look through his binocular on sighting the same Jerusalem. I remember hearing that as some friends of ours, forming part of a mixed company,

came in sight of the city, one of their number dropped on his knees in as unobtrusive a manner as was possible under the circumstances. “I did not know your brother was a fanatic,” whispered an American to his sister.

As regards certain details of life in this country that so much embarrass and disappoint some travellers, do not imagine that I affectedly ignore their existence; but I do feel grateful that in my view of the whole scene they have everywhere kept their proper place. I know how disappointed some people are on their account, and I should be sorry if I was thought intolerant in my self-satisfaction at being so fortunate.

One lady, in a little book I once read, describing her journey, takes for her text: “He is not here, but is risen.” In bitter chagrin she acknowledges the fact that nowhere in Jerusalem could she see Our Lord through her surroundings. I asked a friend once if she would like to see the Holy Land: “Certainly not!” she exclaimed; “I have read Mark Twain’s book.” I inquired of an English traveller at Jaffa the other day, who was on his way home, how the Holy Places had impressed him. His answers were dispirited: the dirt, the flies, etc., etc., had annoyed him. His ears were still ringing with the ubiquitous “Baksheesh!”; the lepers had spoilt some of the best views – and so on. How much better it would have been for him not to come here, like the Mark Twain lady, and to have preserved his Oxford impressions of the Bible uncontaminated!

In Our Lord’s time, although the cities were splendid, the poor and the diseased were just as much en évidence as now, and where He was His poor clustered thickest. Yet who thinks of the merely squalid details of those crowds when reading the Gospel narrative? Why, then, dwell on them so much here to-day as we follow His footsteps on the very soil He trod? I must say any danger of distractions I may have felt has not come from what I have seen of the native element here. Not long ago a party of Christian (?) European trippers (I will not define their nationality) reaching the Jews’ Wailing Place at Jerusalem, charged with their donkeys all along the line of those preoccupied figures standing praying with their faces buried in their Testaments or pressed against the stones of the great wall, and knocked them over.

But “Many men many minds,” and as no country stirs the sincere heart as this one does, one must accept each thoughtful traveller’s account of his experiences as being genuinely felt.

I would warn intending tourists who are earnest and sensitive about this sacred land against forming large parties for the journey. Amongst the group of fellow-travellers there is sure to be at least one discordant unit. Facetious remarks, ignorant questions, thoughtless exclamations, are harder to bear here than elsewhere. Of course, if the party forms a religious pilgrimage these warnings do not apply; but even a pilgrimage in company has drawbacks, if the time is limited, and many inevitable distractions. Select as few companions as is practicable – one only, if possible, entirely one with you in faith and feeling. Also, any one in delicate health should not attempt the entire journey. I have seen more than one sad procession of returning tourists escorting a litter containing some poor collapsed lady, depending on the fore-and-aft mules that carried her for a smooth transit back to Jerusalem and the carriage road. Woe betide her if either of the beasts came down or even stumbled!

When I wrote to you from Jerusalem I told you how convincing one feels the traditional sites of Calvary and the Holy Sepulchre to be in spite of modern scepticism. But more modern still is the verification of their authenticity. It has lately been proved, by that “research” which we seem to require nowadays, that they stand outside the line of the city walls of our Lord’s time. The great stumbling-block to those who could not accept the word of Tradition consisted in the idea that those sites had always been within the city as now, for it is known that the Jewish law forbade places of execution and of burial within the walls. To show you how the shape of Jerusalem, marked out by its fortifications, has changed during its long history, I may mention that, whereas the house of the Last Supper stood within the lines in Our Lord’s time, it stands far outside the walls of to-day.

…

And now the last sunset we shall see from the Land of Promise is steeping Lebanon in rose and violet, and the slender shadows of the palms are lengthening across the sandy spaces of the plain. The sea has not a sail upon it, and the sky not even a cloud “the size of a man’s hand,” such as Elijah’s servant saw from the top of this Carmel which overshadows us.

Undisturbed by wind or cloud, the mind can dwell upon thoughts which the approaching hour of leave-taking renders more poignant.

…

The afterglow is now kindling its fires, and transfiguring a scene one had thought could not be rendered more beautiful. Of all the splendours of Nature the afterglow is the most surprising. I think in the East it comes more swiftly after sunset than in Italy, and it is more astonishing in its display of light. I have often, in Egypt, tried to paint it, but it is no easy matter, for, although the light seems so powerful it is really too low to allow one to see one’s work. The sky becomes a low-toned grey-green-blue … what shall I call it? – a tone of the greatest subtlety, against which the illuminated objects on the earth shine with the colours of flame rather than of the sun. There follows this last effort of the dying day what I may call the last sigh, – a few moments of delicate greys of infinite tenderness, and then night, – absolute night. They are ringing the Angelus up at the Carmelite Monastery on the wooded heights. Those monks live a lonely life on the mountain whence their Order takes its name. The author of The Land and the Book speaks of this lonely monastery with its monks “chanting Latin to nobody.” Only to the great God Who chose this little country wherein to testify His love for man; Who has trodden with weary feet those hills we have traversed in the journey that ends to-day!

Friday, 1st May.

At 1.30 this morning we left these blessed shores, deeply grateful for the privilege of treading the soil of Palestine which had been accorded us. We put off in boats for the Austrian Lloyd steamer lying in the offing by the light of a waning moon. By 8 A.M. we anchored off Jaffa, where we lay all day, and at sunset stood out to sea, soon losing sight of the Holy Land in the shades of night.