Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885

ROUGHING IT IN PALESTINE

Mohammed can do less than Mammon to-day for the infidel's ease and comfort in Palestine. The unholy little yellow god works his modern miracles even in the Holy Land. You have but to speak the word, and show your purse or letter of credit, in Beirut or Jaffa, and, as suddenly as if you had rubbed Aladdin's lamp, a retinue will be at your door to do your bidding. First a dragoman, with great baggy trousers of silk, a little gold-embroidered jacket over a colored vest, a girdle whose most ample folds form an arsenal of no mean proportions, and over the swarthy face, reposing among the black, glossy curls of a well-poised head, the red Turkish fez; or, if Ali has an ambition to be thought possessed of much piety of the orthodox Islamic type, the fez gives way to a turban, white, or green if he be a pilgrim from Mecca. Behind this important personage, as much a feature of the East as the Sphinx or the Pyramids, stand at a respectful distance, making profound salutations, a cook,—probably a Greek or Italian,—three muleteers, and a donkey-boy. Behind them still are two horses,—alas! not blooded Arabs madly champing their bits,—one for yourself and the other for Ali. Three mules bear patiently on their backs, always more or less raw, the canvas and poles of the two tents. In the rear is a small donkey, covered all over with culinary utensils, nibbling fat cactus-leaves with undisguised satisfaction. For a daily expenditure scarcely greater than is necessary to keep soul and body together at a fashionable New York hotel on the American plan, you become the commander of this company, within certain limits around which there are lines as definite and as impassable as if drawn by an Irish servant of some years' experience in the United States. You must not travel more than thirty miles a day; you must not change the route agreed upon, unless roads become impassable; and there are other, minor regulations, to which you are expected to submit, and, if you do, your progress through the land, if not triumphant, will be at least comfortable. You will find every day at noon, spread under some wide-armed tree, a cold lunch that even a somewhat difficult taste would consider fairly appetizing; and at nightfall you dismount before the door of your tent and sit down to a dinner of many courses, which to a stomach jounced for ten hours over a saddle seems a very fair dinner indeed. Your breakfast is what a Frenchman would call a déjeûner à la fourchette; and as you put down your napkin, your tent is folded almost as quickly and as silently, and you mount your horse, standing ready for another thirty miles. Yet, if you have just come from Egypt and three months on a dahabeah, you will not hesitate to call this luxurious mode of passing from Dan to Beersheba "roughing it in Palestine."

But it was my good fortune, after journeying from Beirut to Jerusalem with dragoman and muleteers and tents, like a prince, to go up through the country like a private citizen. I fell in with a young man in the Holy City, bora of American parents at Sidon, who had been educated in America and was now on his way back to his birthplace to spend his life in the sacred fields as a missionary. He was thoroughly equipped for roughing it, with a splendid physique and perfect health, imperturbable spirits, and a rare command of classic and vernacular Arabic. He wanted to go to Beirut with as few impedimenta as possible, and, after some talk, we merged our two parties into one. Our preparations for the journey were of the simplest sort. We agreed to dispense with dragomans and cooks and tents and trust to the land for food and shelter. We engaged three good horses and a muleteer. We strapped our baggage on the muleteer's horse, drew lots for the choice of the other two, and turned our faces northward.

It was long before daybreak, one Monday morning, when we stole quietly out of the Jaffa gate and took the road for Nablous. We were leaving behind us the most sacred spot on earth to Jew, Catholic, Greek, and Protestant; but from the road that stretches out before the Jaffa gate all the holy places of Jerusalem are invisible. The round dome over the Sepulchre was hidden behind the city's wall and the intervening houses. The Dome of the Rock, as the beautiful mosque of Omar is called, the most striking and brilliant object of the whole city from the Damascus gate, is beneath the hill of Golgotha. Only the Valley of Hinnom, and the Hill of Evil Counsel, and the slopes leading to Bethlehem, caught our parting gaze. But an American Protestant turns his back upon the Holy City with a very different feeling from that of the old Crusaders. He cannot see the Turkish Mohammedan soldiers guarding the tomb of Christ without a choking sensation in the throat, but he believes that life has nobler battles for him than fighting the unbeliever for the empty sepulchre of his Lord. The surroundings of all the sacred places are so inharmonious that, while he can never regret his pilgrimage, he can scarcely regret that it is over. We rose in our saddles, and, turning, took our last look at the Holy City with very mingled emotions, and then settled down to the hard day's work before us.

We were on the great pilgrim-route, which twenty centuries ago was annually crowded with pilgrims from the north hastening to Jerusalem for the Passover feast. The Child of Nazareth, when, at the age of twelve, he went for the first time to the Temple, must have pressed this road with his sacred feet, must have looked with deep, inquiring eyes upon these fields and hills. There was enough in the early hour and the associations of the scenes through which we were passing to keep us for a long time silent. My horse stumbled and brought us both back from Dreamland. A look ahead showed us—for the sun was now above the hills—that the worst piece of road in Palestine was just before us. It is wholly unartificial: for years no human hand has touched it, except as mine did when, on dismounting and undertaking to pick my way over the rocks, I found myself on all-fours. In fact, this Oriental boulevard is made up for some distance entirely of boulders, round and sharp, triangular and square, which the spring freshets of the last five or six decades were regretfully obliged to leave behind. After a short halt for lunch, about two o'clock, the muleteer assured us, on starting again, we had still five hours of steady pushing before us, and said something in the same breath about robbers. Men of his class all through the East are notorious cowards; but we had been told in Jerusalem that such dangers were not altogether imaginary, and, almost as our guide spoke, we heard shrieks, and for a moment we all thought the nefarious crew were at their work just ahead. The muleteer dropped mysteriously to the rear, and we rode on over a slight ascent, and there we saw a tall Samaritan exerting himself in a way most unlike the good one of the parable. He appeared to be a man of importance,—probably a sheik. His horse, tied to a little tree, was a very handsome one, and gayly decked out with red leather and ribbons. He had hold of the hind legs of a poor little goat, and was intent on pulling the creature away from a smaller man, much more poorly dressed, whose hands had a death-like grip of the horns. I was for setting lance in rest and charging to the rescue; but my more cautious friend put one or two questions to the sheik, who told, in a somewhat jerky style,—perhaps the result of the strugglings of the goat and the man at the other end of him,—as straightforward a story as was possible under the circumstances. He was the proprietor of the hut the owner of the goat lived in. He had come to collect his lawful rent, and he knew the money was ready, but he couldn't get it, and so had seized the only movable object of any value. The poor wretch, who still had the goat by the horns, denied the story, but in such a way that we feared he would only injure his conscience by other prevarications if we encouraged him. So we rode on; and in less than half an hour the sheik swept proudly by us, with no goat slung over his shoulders, but as he passed he shot out a single word, that told, like Caesar's vici, the whole story of his victory.

The muleteer of Palestine will start on a journey at almost any hour of the morning, but he has a superstitious dread of the darkness that falls after sunset, and our Hassan was now too frightened to make any answer to our questions except a short, tremulous half threat, half entreaty to hurry. We were riding along the valley between Gerizim and Ebal. We had left Joseph's tomb, and Jacob's well, where our Lord, wearied with his journey, as we were with ours, sat and rested as he talked with a woman who had come from the town toward which we were hurrying. The two mountains, their sides covered with fig-trees and olives, loomed up dimly out of the twilight on either side. We thought of the day when the hosts of Israel were encamped here and the antiphonal choirs chanted blessings from Gerizim and curses from Ebal in the ears of the vastest congregation ever gathered on earth. There was no sound now of blessing or cursing. The very stillness was oppressive. Hassan almost ceased to breathe, and it was not till our horses' hoofs rang on the rough pavement of Nablous—the ancient Shechem—that he relaxed his muscles and gave a long sigh of relief.

We rode at once to the Latin convent, where we felt sure of a cordial reception and a comfortable bed. There was no light anywhere in the gloomy building; but Hassan knocked at the great door, confidently at first, and then angrily. At last came an Arab youth about nineteen, who stuck one eye in the crack of the door, and asked our business.

"Yes," he said, "you stay here all night, but go away early in the morning."

This was definite, if not hospitable; but we went in, and asked to see the monks.

"None here," said the Arab, with a chuckle: "all gone to Tiberias." We ordered dinner, and, after half an hour, the Arab brought a saucer holding two boiled eggs, put it on a chair, and said, "There's your dinner." We were indignant, but it did no good: this boy was the head of the house for the time, and neither promises nor threats were of any avail to add anything, besides a little salt and pepper, to the dinner he had prepared. We went to bed very hungry, but very tired, and in the morning, before breakfast, hunted out the house of an English missionary, who took pity on us and gave us to eat. But it is an unusual thing for any one to leave Nablous without having an experience of some sort more or less disagreeable to fasten the name of the place in his recollection. When the brilliant author of "Eothen" sojourned for a day or two in this "hot furnace of Mohammedanism," as he calls it, the whole Greek population chose him as an involuntary deliverer of a young Christian maiden who had been perverted by rich gifts to the faith of Islam, or at least to a belief that a rich Mohammedan was to be preferred as a husband to a poor Christian. They stare upon you now, as they did then, as you walk through the streets and bazaars, "with fixed, glassy look, which seemed to say, God is God, but how marvellous and inscrutable are his ways, that thus he permits the white-faced dog of a Christian to hunt through the paths of the faithful!"

We went, of course, to the little Samaritan synagogue, to see the famous copy of the Pentateuch, whose age no man knoweth. We rode up the steep slopes of Gerizim to the ruins of the temple where the woman of Samaria said her fathers had always worshipped, and then, in a pouring rain, we started for Jenin. Hassan sunk his head down in a huge Oriental cloak, undoubtedly manufactured in Birmingham or Manchester, and his horse, left to himself, lost his way, for a Palestine road may at any time, like a Western trail, turn into a squirrel's track and run up a tree. When we found ourselves again we were all wet and not in the best of humor, but in sight of the old city of Samaria on her high hills.

The magnificent capital of Ahab and Jezebel, we saw at a glance, is now only a ruined, dirty village, where a European could not hope for shelter for a night. The hills sank into a heavy plain that seemed interminable. The short twilight faded into untempered darkness. Hassan was again in the rear. He would have fled incontinently at the first sign of danger. Our only consolation was that his horse was tired and he couldn't get very far away from us under any circumstances. I had a letter to a Christian at Jenin that was thought to be good for supper and lodging. We filed through the muddy streets to the door of the Christian's house, sent in the letter by Hassan, and a man came out, saluted us, told us to follow and he would take us to "a most comfortable place." When we stopped, it was before the door of a little mud hut. An old woman opened it, but, before letting us in, fixed the price we were to pay. We entered a room that did service for the entire wants of our hostess. It was very small, but it could not have been made larger without knocking out the sidewalls of her house. The floor was of dry mud, and there was nothing to sit upon except our saddles. We supped from the bread and meat our good missionary friend had given us, and, rolling ourselves in our blankets, we slept; but not long. The mud beneath us was not that dull, inanimate, clog-like thing we trample thoughtlessly under our feet along our country roads: it was that sort of matter in which Tyndale thought he could discern "the form and potency of life." They were both there, and in the still darkness they made themselves felt. My friend, for some mysterious reason, was left untouched, but the regiments that should have quartered on him joined those that were banqueting on my too unsolid flesh. My sufferings were but slightly mitigated by the remembrance that probably the progenitors of these fierce feeders on human blood may have dined as sumptuously on prophets and apostles, and that, intense as my anguish was, the chances were against any fatal termination. I rose often and went to the door, hoping for the morning, but it came not. Each time on returning to my couch I found the number of my tormentors had been augmented: so I kept still, like an Indian at the stake, and only refrained for my friend's sake from singing a triumphant song as I found myself growing used to the pain and at last able to sleep a troubled sort of sleep, such as Damiens may have had on the rack. When I showed my arms in the morning to Hassan, he lifted his eyes to heaven and muttered a prayer to Allah, of which I thought I could divine the meaning.

Our ride that day was across the great plain of Esdraelon. We were charitable enough to believe that travellers who have raved over the exquisite beauty of this valley, who tell of "the green meadow-land flaming with masses of red anemones," of "myriads of nodding daisies," and of "sheets of burning azure in the sun," did actually look upon all these splendors in the early spring; but it was January now, and we seemed to be pushing our way through a sea of dull, dead brown. The ground was soft with the winter rains, and our horses' feet sank to the fetlocks and gathered huge balls of the thick adhesive earth, deposited every hundred yards or so to give place to others. We rode through the dirty little village of Nain, where once a widow's son, carried out to burial, heard the only voice that reaches the dead and rose from his bier; but all solemn and tender thoughts were frightened away by the crowd of maimed and blind and ragged and hungry men, women, and children that came pouring out of the huts, crying, begging, demanding backsheesh. "This," one of our American consuls said, "is the language of Canaan now;" and it is one of the least melodious of earth. We lunched on the dry grass in the sun in full sight of Tabor, on the remnants of what the good missionary at Nablous had given us, and, tightening our saddle-girths, we began the ascent of the mountain. We clambered up the rude bridle-path, covered with loose stones, and knocked timidly, with the remembrance of our Nablous experiences, at the door of a large and very sightly monastery. Almost immediately a monk of kindly face and soft black Italian eyes gave us a cordial greeting, and the unexpectedness of it nearly enticed us into throwing our arms around his neck and leaving an Oriental salutation upon his cheek. He led us into a large, clean refectory, and then into two clean rooms. I might use other epithets, but none other means so much in the East. After a very satisfying supper, the good monk—he was so good to us, we tried to think he was as clean within as the rooms of his monastery—took us out to the pinnacle of the mountain and enjoyed our enthusiasm over the magnificent view that was spread out before us. Almost the whole of Palestine was within sight beneath us. We looked southward, across the plain we had struggled over so laboriously, to the mountains behind Jerusalem. We could see the depression where the Dead Sea lay in its bowl, encircled by the hills of Moab. To the west we were looking upon Carmel, at whose base the blue waves of the Mediterranean sigh, and moan, and thunder. To the east, across the Jordan, from which the mists of evening were already rising, we could distinguish the wild, deep ravines of the land of the Bedawin; and in the north, grandest of all, stood Hermon, his great white head touched with the crimson of the setting sun, just plunging, like an old Moabite deity, into the mountains of Lebanon beyond. By almost common consent it is agreed among the Biblical scholars of our day that not here on Tabor where we stood, but northward, there on one of the peaks of Hermon, was the place where our Lord was transfigured; but the Christian imagination, like the Christian consciousness, is not always submissive to fact, and we shall continue, with the larger part of the Christian world, to think of Tabor as the Mount of Transfiguration, while we speak of Hermon as the true site.

We had an easy ride the next morning to Nazareth, and a kindly reception from the monks. The hospitality at all these convents is untrammelled by pecuniary conditions; but all travellers who have purses and hearts and consciences do, in fact, on their departure, present the Superior with a sum about equal to the charges for the same length of time at an Eastern hotel. I mention this in the interests of historic truth, and not with any desire to throw a garish light of self-interest upon the cordiality of these Latin "religious." We were in the heart of the little city where He whom millions of human beings call their Saviour and God lived for more than twenty years. Somewhere among these houses that fill the valley and cling to the hill-side was Joseph's home. Not a house, of course, is here now that was here then; all the sacred places they show you—the Virgin's home, the place of the Annunciation, the workshop of Joseph—must be unauthentic; but these hills are what they were. They shut out the great world He had come to redeem, but not the heavens above Him or the sinfulness and needs of the segment of humanity around Him. When we rode toward Tiberias in the early morning there were a dozen or more of the girls of Nazareth going out to Mary's spring, as the fountain at the entrance of the town is called; but their garments were ragged and uncleanly and their swarthy faces heavily tattooed, and, while we were ready to accept the season of the year as an excuse for any deficiency in the attractiveness of the landscape, we could not admit it in extenuation of the uncomeliness of the maidens of Palestine. Their beauty we believe to be almost entirely a fiction of the tourist's imagination.