In The Levant

We descend a steep hill to this fountain, which flows from a broken Saracenic arch, and waters a valley that is altogether stony and unfertile except in some patches of green. It is a general halting-place for travellers, and presents a most animated appearance when we arrive. Horses, mules, and men are struggling together about the fountain to slake their thirst; but there is no trough nor any pool, and the only mode to get the water is to catch it in the mouth as it drizzles from the hole in the arch. It is difficult for a horse to do this, and the poor things are beside themselves with thirst. Near by are some stone ruins in which a man and woman have set up a damp coffee-shop, sherbet-shop, and smoking station. From them I borrow a shallow dish, and succeed in getting water for my horse, an experiment which seems to surprise all nations. The shop is an open stone shed with a dirt floor, offering only stools to the customers; yet when the motley crowd are seated in and around it, sipping coffee and smoking the narghilehs (water-pipes) with an air of leisure as if to-day would last forever, you have a scene of Oriental luxury.

Our way lies down a winding ravine. The country is exceedingly rough, like the Wyoming hills, but without trees or verdure. The bed of the stream is a mass of rock in shelving ledges; all the rock in sight is a calcareous limestone. After an hour of this sort of secluded travel we ascend again and reach the Red Khan, and a scene still more desolate because more extensive. The khan takes its name from the color of the rocks; perched upon a high ledge are the ruins of this ancient caravansary, little more now than naked walls. We take shelter for lunch in a natural rock grotto opposite, exactly the shadow of a rock longed for in a weary land. Here we spread our gay rugs, the servants unpack the provision hampers, and we sit and enjoy the wide view of barrenness and the picturesque groups of pilgrims. The spot is famous for its excellent well of water. It is, besides, the locality usually chosen for the scene of the adventure of the man who went down to Jericho and fell among thieves, this being the khan at which he was entertained for twopence. We take our siesta here, reflecting upon the great advance in hotel prices, and endeavoring to re-create something of that past when this was the highway between great Jerusalem and the teeming plain of the Jordan. The Syro-Phoenician woman smoked a narghileh, and, looking neither into the past nor the future, seemed to enjoy the present.

From this elevation we see again the brown Jordan Valley and the Dead Sea. Our road is downward more precipitously than it has been before. The rocks are tossed about tumultuously, and the hills are rent, but there is no evidence of any volcanic action. Some of the rock strata are bent, as you see the granite in the White Mountains, but this peculiarity disappears as we approach nearer to the Jordan. The translator of M. François Lenormant’s “Ancient History of the East” says that “the miracles which accompanied the entrance of the Israelites into Palestine seem such as might have been produced by volcanic agency.” No doubt they might have been; but this whole region is absolutely without any appearance of volcanic disturbance.

As we go on, we have on our left the most remarkable ravine in Palestine; it is in fact a canon in the rocks, some five hundred feet deep, the sides of which are nearly perpendicular. At the bottom of it flows the brook Cherith, finding its way out into the Jordan plain. We ride to the brink and look over into the abyss. It was about two thousand seven hundred and eighty-nine years ago, and probably about this time of the year (for the brook went dry shortly after), that Elijah, having incurred the hostility of Ahab, who held his luxurious court at Samaria, by prophesying against him, came over from Gilead and hid himself in this ravine.

“Down there,” explains Abd-el-Atti, “the prophet Elijah fed him the ravens forty days. Not have that kind of ravens now.”

Unattractive as this abyss is for any but a temporary summer residence, the example of Elijah recommended it to a great number of people in a succeeding age. In the wall of the precipice are cut grottos, some of them so high above the bed of the stream that they are apparently inaccessible, and not unlike the tombs in the high cliffs along the Nile. In the fourth and fifth centuries monks swarmed in all the desert places of Egypt and Syria like rabbits; these holes, near the scene of Elijah’s miraculous support, were the abodes of Christian hermits, most of whom starved themselves down to mere skin and bones waiting for the advent of the crows. On the ledge above are the ruins of ancient chapels, which would seem to show that this was a place of some resort, and that the hermits had spectators of their self-denial. You might as well be a woodchuck and sit in a hole as a monk, unless somebody comes and looks at you.

As we advance, the Jordan valley opens more broadly upon our sight. At this point, which is the historical point, the scene of the passage of the Jordan and the first appearance of the Israelitish clans in the Promised Land, the valley is ten miles broad. It is by no means a level plain; from the west range of mountains it slopes to the river, and the surface is broken by hillocks, ravines, and water-courses. The breadth is equal to that between the Connecticut River at Hartford and the Talcott range of hills. To the north we have in view the valley almost to the Sea of Galilee, and can see the white and round summit of Hermon beyond; on the east and on the west the barren mountains stretch in level lines; and on the south the blue waters of the Dead Sea continue the valley between ranges of purple and poetic rocky cliffs.

The view is magnificent in extent, and plain and hills glow with color in this afternoon light. Yonder, near the foot of the eastern hills, we trace the winding course of the Jordan by a green belt of trees and bushes. The river we cannot see, for the “bottom” of the river, to use a Western phrase, from six hundred to fifteen hundred feet in breadth, is sunk below the valley a hundred feet and more. This bottom is periodically overflowed. The general aspect of the plain is that of a brown desert, the wild vegetation of which is crisped by the scorching sun. There are, however, threads of verdure in it, where the brook Cherith and the waters from the fountain ‘Ain es-Sultan wander through the neglected plain, and these strips of green widen into the thickets about the little village of Rîha, the site of ancient Gilgal. This valley is naturally fertile; it may very likely have been a Paradise of fruit-trees and grass and sparkling water when the Jews looked down upon it from the mountains of Moab; it certainly bloomed in the Roman occupation; and the ruins of sugar-mills still existing show that the crusading Christians made the cultivation of the sugar-cane successful here; it needs now only the waters of the Jordan and the streams from the western foot-hills directed by irrigating ditches over its surface, moistening its ashy and nitrous soil, to become again a fair and smiling land.

Descending down the stony and precipitous road, we turn north, still on the slope of the valley. The scant grass is already crisped by the heat, the bushes are dry skeletons. A ride of a few minutes brings us to some artificial mounds and ruins of buildings upon the bank of the brook Cherith. The brickwork is the fine reticulated masonry such as you see in the remains of Roman villas at Tusculum. This is the site of Herod’s Jericho, the Jericho of the New Testament. But the Jericho which Joshua destroyed and the site of which he cursed, the Jericho which Hiel rebuilt in the days of the wicked Ahab, and where Elisha abode after the translation of Elijah, was a half-mile to the north of this modern town.

We have some difficulty in fording the brook Cherith, for the banks are precipitous and the stream is deep and swift; those who are mounted upon donkeys change them for horses, the Arab attendants wade in, guiding the stumbling animals which the ladies ride, the lumbering beast with the Soudan babies comes splashing in at the wrong moment, to the peril of those already in the torrent, and is nearly swept away; the sheykh and the servants who have crossed block the narrow landing; but with infinite noise and floundering about we all come safely over, and gallop along a sort of plateau, interspersed with thorny nubk and scraggy bushes. Going on for a quarter of an hour, and encountering cultivated spots, we find our tents already pitched on the bushy bank of a little stream that issues from the fountain of ‘Ain es-Sultan a few rods above. Near the camp is a high mound of rubbish. This is the site of our favorite Jericho, a name of no majesty like that of Rome, and endeared to us by no associations like Jerusalem, but almost as widely known as either; probably even its wickedness would not have preserved its reputation, but for the singular incident that attended its first destruction. Jericho must have been a city of some consequence at the time of the arrival of the Israelites; we gain an idea of the civilization of its inhabitants from the nature of the plunder that Joshua secured; there were vessels of silver and of gold, and of brass and iron; and this was over fourteen hundred years before Christ.

Before we descend to our encampment, we pause for a survey of this historic region. There, towards Jordan, among the trees, is the site of Gilgal (another name that shares the half-whimsical reputation of Jericho), where the Jews made their first camp. The king of Jericho, like his royal cousins roundabout, had “no more spirit in him” when he saw the Israelitish host pass the Jordan. He shut himself up in his insufficient walls, and seems to have made no attempt at a defence. Over this upland the Jews swarmed, and all the armed host with seven priests and seven ram’s-horns marched seven days round and round the doomed city, and on the seventh day the people shouted the walls down. Every living thing in the city was destroyed except Rahab and her family, the town was burned, and for five hundred years thereafter no man dared to build upon its accursed foundations. Why poor Jericho was specially marked out for malediction we are not told.

When it was rebuilt in Ahab’s time, the sons of the prophets found it an agreeable place of residence; large numbers of them were gathered here while Elijah lived, and they conversed with that prophet when he was on his last journey through this valley, which he had so often traversed, compelled by the Spirit of the Lord. No incident in the biblical story so strongly appeals to the imagination, nor is there anything in the poetical conception of any age so sublime as the last passage of Elijah across this plain and his departure into heaven beyond Jordan. When he came from Bethel to Jericho, he begged Elisha, his attendant, to tarry here; but the latter would not yield either to his entreaty or to that of the sons of the prophets. We can see the way the two prophets went hence to Jordan. Fifty men of the sons of the prophets went and stood to view them afar off, and they saw the two stand by Jordan. Already it was known that Elijah was to disappear, and the two figures, lessening in the distance, were followed with a fearful curiosity. Did they pass on swiftly, and was there some premonition, in the wind that blew their flowing mantles, of the heavenly gale? Elijah smites the waters with his mantle, the two pass over dry-shod, and “as they still went on and talked, behold there appeared a chariot of fire, and horses of fire, and parted them both asunder; and Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven. And Elisha saw it, and he cried, ‘My father, my father, the chariot of Israel and the horsemen thereof.’ And he saw him no more.”

Elislia returned to Jericho and abode there while the sons of the prophets sought for Elijah beyond Jordan three days, but did not find him. And the men of the city said to Elisha, “Behold, I pray thee, the situation of this city is pleasant, as my lord seeth, but the water is naught and the ground is barren.” Then Elisha took salt and healed the spring of water; and ever since, to this day, the fountain, now called ‘Ain es-Sultan, has sent forth sweet water.

Turning towards the northwest, we see the passage through the mountain, by the fountain ‘Ain Duk, to Bethel. It was out of some woods there, where the mountain is now bare, that Elisha called the two she-bears which administered that dreadful lesson to the children who derided his baldness. All the region, indeed, recalls the miracles of Elisha. It was probably here that Naaman the Syrian came to be healed; there at Gilgal Elisha took the death out of the great pot in which the sons of the prophets were seething their pottage; and it was there in the Jordan that he made the iron axe to swim.

Of all this celebrated and ill-fated Jericho, nothing now remains but a hillock and Elisha’s spring. The wild beasts of the desert prowl about it, and the night-bird hoots over its fall,—a sort of echo of the shouts that brought down its walls. Our tents are pitched near the hillock, and the animals are picketed on the open ground before them by the stream. The Syrian tourist in these days travels luxuriously. Our own party has four tents,—the kitchen tent, the dining tent, and two for lodging. They are furnished with tables, chairs, all the conveniences of the toilet, and carpeted with bright rugs. The cook is an artist, and our table is one that would have astonished the sons of the prophets. The Syrian party have their own tents; a family from Kentucky has camped near by; and we give to Jericho a settled appearance. The elder sheykh accompanies the other party of Americans, so that we have now all the protection possible.

The dragoman of the Kentuckians we have already encountered in Egypt and on the journey, and been impressed by his respectable gravity. It would perhaps be difficult for him to tell his nationality or birthplace; he wears the European dress, and his gold spectacles and big stomach would pass him anywhere for a German professor. He seems out of place as a dragoman, but if any one desired a savant as a companion in the East, he would be the man. Indeed, his employers soon discover that his forte is information, and not work. While the other servants are busy about the camps Antonio comes over to our tent, and opens up the richness of his mind, and illustrates his capacity as a Syrian guide.

“You know that mountain, there, with the chapel on top?” he asks.

“No.”

“Well, that is Mt. Nebo, and that one next to it is Pisgah, the mountain of the prophet Moses.”

Both these mountains are of course on the other side of the Jordan in the Moab range, but they are not identified,—except by Antonio. The sharp mountain behind us is Quarantania, the Mount of Christ’s Temptation. Its whole side to the summit is honey-combed with the cells of hermits who once dwelt there, and it is still the resort of many pilgrims.

The evening is charming, warm but not depressing; the atmosphere is even exhilarating, and this surprises us, since we are so far below the sea level. The Doctor says that it is exactly like Colorado on a July night. We have never been so low before, not even in a coal-mine. We are not only about thirty-seven hundred feet below Jerusalem, we are over twelve hundred below the level of the sea. Sitting outside the tent under the starlight, we enjoy the novelty and the mysteriousness of the scene. Tents, horses picketed among the bushes, the firelight, the groups of servants and drivers taking their supper, the figure of an Arab from Gilgal coming forward occasionally out of the darkness, the singing, the occasional violent outbreak of kicking and squealing among the ill-assorted horses and mules, the running of loose-robed attendants to the rescue of some poor beast, the strong impression of the locality upon us, and I know not what Old Testament flavor about it all, conspire to make the night memorable.

“This place very dangerous,” says Antonio, who is standing round, bursting with information. “Him berry wise,” is Abdel-Atti’s opinion of him. “Know a great deal; I tink him not live long.”

“What is the danger?” we ask.

“Wild beasts, wild boars, hyenas,—all these bush full of them. It was three years now I was camped here with Baron Kronkheit. ‘Bout twelve o’clock I heard a noise and came out. Right there, not twenty feet from here, stood a hyena as big as a donkey, his two eyes like fire. I did not shoot him for fear to wake up the Baron.”

“Did he kill any of your party?”

“Not any man. In the morning I find he has carried off our only mutton.”

Notwithstanding these dangers, the night passes without alarm, except the barking of jackals about the kitchen tent. In the morning I ask Antonio if he heard the hyenas howling in the night. “Yes, indeed, plenty of them; they came very near my tent.”

We are astir at sunrise, breakfast, and start for the Jordan. It is the opinion of the dragoman and the sheykh that we should go first to the Dead Sea. It is the custom. Every tourist goes to the Dead Sea first, bathes, and then washes off the salt in the Jordan. No one ever thought of going to the Jordan first. It is impossible. We must visit the Dead Sea, and then lunch at the Jordan. We wished, on the contrary, to lunch at the Dead Sea, at which we should otherwise only have a very brief time. We insisted upon our own programme, to the great disgust of all our camp attendants, who predicted disaster.

The Jordan is an hour and a half from Jericho; that is the distance to the bathing-place of the Greek pilgrims. We descend all the way. Wild vegetation is never wanting; wild-flowers abound; we pass through thickets of thorns, bearing the yellow “apples of the Dead Sea,” which grow all over this plain. At Gilgal (now called Biha) we find what is probably the nastiest village in the world, and its miserable inhabitants are credited with all the vices of Sodom. The wretched huts are surrounded by a thicket of nubk as a protection against the plundering Bedaween. The houses are rudely built of stone, with a covering of cane or brush, and each one is enclosed in a hedge of thorns. These thorns, which grow rankly on the plain, are those of which the “crown of thorns” was plaited, and all devout pilgrims carry away some of them. The habitations within these thorny enclosures are filthy beyond description, and poverty-stricken. And this is in a watered plain which would bloom with all manner of fruits with the least care. Indeed, there are a few tangled gardens of the rankest vegetation; in them we see the orange, the fig, the deceptive pomegranate with its pink blossoms, and the olive. As this is the time of pilgrimage, a company of Turkish soldiers from Jerusalem is encamped at the village, and the broken country about it is covered with tents, booths, shops, kitchens, and presents the appearance of a fair and a camp-meeting combined. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of pilgrims, who go every morning, as long as they remain here, to dip in the Jordan. Near the village rises the square tower of an old convent, probably, which is dignified with the name of the “house of Zacchæus.” This plain was once famed for its fertility; it was covered with gardens and palm-groves; the precious balsam, honey, and henna were produced here; the balsam gardens were the royal gift of Antony to Cleopatra, who transferred the balsam-trees to Heliopolis in Egypt.

As we ride away from Gilgal and come upon a more open and desert plain, I encounter an eagle sitting on the top of a thorn-tree, not the noblest of his species, but, for Palestine, a very fair eagle. Here is a chance for the Syrian hunter; he is armed with gun and pistols; he has his dogs; now, if ever, is the time for him to hunt, and I fall back and point out his opportunity. He does not embrace it. It is an easy shot; perhaps he is looking for wild boars; perhaps he is a tender-minded hunter. At any rate, he makes no effort to take the eagle, and when I ride forward the bird gracefully rises in the air, sweeping upward in magnificent circles, now veering towards the Mount of Temptation, and now towards Nebo, but always as serene as the air in which he floats.

And now occurs one of those incidents which are not rare to travellers in Syria, but which are rare and scarcely believed elsewhere. As the eagle hangs for a second motionless in the empyrean far before me, he drops a feather. I see the gray plume glance in the sun and swirl slowly down in the lucid air. In Judæa every object is as distinct as in a photograph. You can see things at a distance you can make no one believe at home. The eagle plume, detached from the noble bird, begins its leisurely descent.

I see in a moment my opportunity. I might never have another. All travellers in Syria whose books I have ever read have one or more startling adventures. Usually it is with a horse. I do not remember any with a horse and an eagle. I determine at once to have one. Glancing a moment at the company behind me, and then fixing my eye on the falling feather, I speak a word to my steed, and dart forward.

A word was enough. The noble animal seemed to comprehend the situation. He was of the purest Arab breed; four legs, four white ankles, small ears, slender pasterns, nostrils thin as tissue paper, and dilating upon the fall of a leaf; an eye terrible in rage, but melting in affection; a round barrel; gentle as a kitten, but spirited as a game-cock. His mother was a Nedjed mare from Medina, who had been exchanged by a Bedawee chief for nine beautiful Circassians, but only as a compromise after a war by the Pasha of Egypt for her possession. Her father was one of the most respectable horses in Yemen. Neither father, mother, nor colt had ever eaten anything but selected dates.

At the word, Abdallah springs forward, bounding over the sand, skimming over the thorn bushes, scattering the Jordan pilgrims right and left. He does not seem to be so much a horse as a creation of the imagination,—a Pegasus. At every leap we gain upon the feather, but it is still far ahead of us, and swirling down, down, as the air takes the plume or the weight of gravity acts upon the quill. Abdallah does not yet know the object of our fearful pace, but his docility is such that every time I speak to him he seems to shoot out of himself in sudden bursts of enthusiasm. The terrible strain continues longer than I had supposed it would, for I had undercalculated both the height at which the feather was cast and my distance to the spot upon which it must fall. None but a horse fed on dates could keep up the awful gait. We fly and the feather falls; and it falls with increasing momentum. It is going, going to the ground, and we are not there. At this instant, when I am in despair, the feather twirls, and Abdallah suddenly casts his eye up and catches the glint of it. The glance suffices to put him completely in possession of the situation. He gives a low neigh of joy; I plunge both spurs into his flanks about six or seven inches; he leaps into the air, and sails like a bird,—of course only for a moment; but it is enough; I stretch out my hand and catch the eagle’s plume before it touches the ground. We light on the other side of a clump of thorns, and Abdallah walks on as quietly as if nothing had happened; he was not blown; not a hair of his glossy coat was turned. I have the feather to show.

Pilgrims are plenty, returning from the river in a continuous procession, in numbers rivalling the children of Israel when they first camped at Gilgal. We descend into the river-bottom, wind through the clumps of tangled bushes, and at length reach an open place where the river for a few rods is visible. The ground is trampled like a watering-spot for cattle; the bushes are not large enough to give shade; there are no trees of size except one or two at the water’s edge; the banks are slimy, there seems to be no comfortable place to sit except on your horse—on Jordan’s stormy banks I stand and cast a wistful eye; the wistful eye encounters nothing agreeable.

The Jordan here resembles the Arkansas above Little Rock, says the Doctor; I think it is about the size of the Concord where it flows through the classic town of that name in Massachusetts; but it is much swifter. Indeed, it is a rapid current, which would sweep away the strongest swimmer. The opposite bank is steep, and composed of sandy loam or marl. The hither bank is low, but slippery, and it is difficult to dip up water from it. Close to the shore the water is shallow, and a rope is stretched out for the protection of the bathers. This is the Greek bathing-place, but we are too late to see the pilgrims enter the stream; crowds of them are still here, cutting canes to carry away, and filling their tin cans with the holy water. We taste the water, which is very muddy, and find it warm but not unpleasant. We are glad that we have decided to lunch at the Dead Sea, for a more uninviting place than this could not he found; above and below this spot are thickets and boggy ground. It is beneath the historical and religious dignity of the occasion to speak of lunch, but all tourists know what importance it assumes on such an excursion, and that their high reflections seldom come to them on the historical spot. Indeed, one must be removed some distance from the vulgar Jordan before he can glow at the thought of it. In swiftness and volume it exceeds our expectations, but its beauty is entirely a creation of the imagination.