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Discovering Diverse Content Through
Random Scribd Documents
chariot to visit Jeroboam in Samaria, there must have existed then a
better road, or else the king endured hard pounding for the sake of
the dignity of his conveyance. As soon as we left the gate we
encountered hills of stones and paths of the roughest description.
There are several rock tombs on this side of the city, but we entered
only one, that called by some the Tombs of the Kings, and by others,
with more reason, the Tomb of Helena, a heathen convert to
Judaism, who built this sepulchre for herself early in the first
century. The tomb, excavated entirely in the solid rock, is a spacious
affair, having a large court and ornamented vestibule and many
chambers, extending far into the rock, and a singular network of
narrow passages and recesses for the deposit of the dead. It had
one device that is worthy of the ancient Egyptians. The entrance
was closed by a heavy square stone, so hung that it would yield to
pressure from without, but would swing to its place by its own
weight, and fitted so closely that it could not be moved from the
inside. If any thief entered the tomb and left this slab unsecured, he
would be instantly caught in the trap and become a permanent
occupant. Large as the tomb is, its execution is mean compared with
the rock tombs of Egypt; but the exterior stone of the court, from its
exposure in this damp and variable climate, appears older than
Egyptian work which has been uncovered three times as long.
At the tomb we encountered a dozen students from the Latin
convent, fine-looking fellows in long blue-black gowns, red caps, and
red sashes. They sat upon the grass, on the brink of the excavation,
stringing rosaries and singing student songs, with evident enjoyment
of the hour's freedom from the school; they not only made a
picturesque appearance, but they impressed us also as a Jerusalem
group which was neither sinful nor dirty. Beyond this tomb we
noticed a handsome modern dwelling-house; you see others on
various eminences outside the city, and we noted them as the most
encouraging sign of prosperity about Jerusalem.
We returned over the hill and by the city wall, passing the Cave of
Jeremiah and the door in the wall that opens into the stone quarries
of Solomon. These quarries underlie a considerable portion of the
city, and furnished the stone for its ancient buildings. I will not
impose upon you a description of them; for it would be unfair to
send you into disagreeable places that I did not explore myself.
The so-called Grotto of Jeremiah is a natural cavern in the rocky
hill, vast in extent, I think thirty feet high and a hundred feet long by
seventy broad,—as big as a church. The tradition is that Jeremiah
lived and lamented here. In front of the cave are cut stones and
pieces of polished columns built into walls and seats; these
fragments seem to indicate the former existence here of a Roman
temple. The cave is occupied by an old dervish, who has a house in
a rock near by, and uses the cavern as a cool retreat and a stable for
his donkey. His rocky home is shared by his wife and family. He said
that it was better to live alone, apart from the world and its snares.
He, however, finds the reputation of Jeremiah profitable, selling
admission to the cave at a franc a head, and, judging by the women
and children about him, he seemed to have family enough not to be
lonely.
The sojourner in Jerusalem who does not care for antiquities can
always entertain himself by a study of the pilgrims who throng the
city at this season. We hear more of the pilgrimage to Mecca than of
that to Jerusalem; but I think the latter is the more remarkable
phenomenon of our modern life; I believe it equals the former, which
is usually overrated, in numbers, and it certainly equals it in zeal and
surpasses it in the variety of nationalities represented. The pilgrims
of the cross increase yearly; to supply their wants, to minister to
their credulity, to traffic on their faith, is the great business of the
Holy City. Few, I imagine, who are not in Palestine in the spring,
have any idea of the extent of this vast yearly movement of Christian
people upon the Holy Land, or of the simple zeal which characterizes
it. If it were in any way obstructed or hindered, we should have a
repetition of the Crusades, on a vaster scale and gathered from a
broader area than the wildest pilgrimage of the holy war. The
driblets of travel from America and from Western Europe are as
nothing in the crowds thronging to Jerusalem from Ethiopia to
Siberia, from the Baltic to the Ural Mountains. Already for a year
before the Easter season have they been on foot, slowly pushing
their way across great steppes, through snows and over rivers,
crossing deserts and traversing unfriendly countries; the old, the
infirm, women as well as men, their faces set towards Jerusalem. No
common curiosity moves this mass, from Ethiopia, from Egypt, from
Russia, from European Turkey, from Asia Minor, from the banks of
the Tagus and the Araxes; it is a true pilgrimage of faith, the one
event in a life of dull monotony and sordid cares, the one ecstasy of
poetry in an existence of poverty and ignorance.
We spent a morning in the Russian Hospice, which occupies the
hill to the northwest of the city. It is a fine pile of buildings, the most
conspicuous of which, on account of its dome, is the church, a large
edifice with a showy exterior, but of no great merit or interest. We
were shown some holy pictures which are set in frames incrusted
with diamonds, emeralds, rubies, and other precious gems, the
offerings of rich devotees, and displaying their wealth rather than
their taste.
The establishment has one building for the accommodation of rich
pilgrims, and a larger one set apart for peasants. The hospice
lodges, free of charge, all the Russian pilgrims. The exterior court
was full of them. They were sunning themselves, but not inclined to
lay aside their hot furs and heavy woollens. We passed into the
interior, entering room after room occupied by the pilgrims, who
regarded our intrusion with good-natured indifference, or frankly
returned our curiosity. Some of the rooms were large, furnished with
broad divans about the sides, which served for beds and lounging-
places, and were occupied by both sexes. The women, rosy-
cheeked, light-haired, broad, honest-looking creatures, were
mending their clothes; the men were snoozing on the divans, flat on
their backs, presenting to the spectator the bottoms of their
monstrous shoes, which had soles eight inches broad; a side of
leather would be needed for a pair. In these not very savory rooms
they cook, eat, and sleep. Here stood their stoves; here hung their
pilgrim knapsacks; here were their kits of shoemaker's tools, for
mending their foot-gear, which they had tugged thousands of miles;
here were household effects that made their march appear more like
an emigration than a pilgrimage; here were the staring pictures of
St. George and the Dragon, and of other saints, the beads and the
other relics, which they had bought in Jerusalem.
Although all these pilgrims owed allegiance to the Czar, they
represented a considerable variety of races. They came from
Archangel, from Tobolsk, from the banks of the Ural, from Kurland;
they had found their way along the Danube, the Dnieper, the Don. I
spoke with a group of men and women who had walked over two
thousand miles before they reached Odessa and took ship for Jaffa.
There were among them Cossacks, wild and untidy, light-haired
barbarians from the Caucasus, dark-skinned men and women from
Moscow, representatives from the remotest provinces of great
Russia; for the most part simple, rude, clumsy, honest boors. In an
interior court we found men and women seated on the sunny
flagging, busily occupied in arranging and packing the souvenirs of
their visit. There was rosemary spread out to dry; there were little
round cakes of blessed bread stamped with the image of the
Saviour; there were branches of palm, crowns of thorns, and stalks
of cane cut at the Jordan; there were tin cases of Jordan water;
there were long strips of cotton cloth stamped in black with various
insignia of death, to serve at home for coffin-covers; there were
skull-caps in red, yellow, and white, also stamped with holy images,
to be put on the heads of the dead. I could not but in mind follow
these people to their distant homes, and think of the pride with
which they would show these trophies of their pilgrimage; how the
rude neighbors would handle with awe a stick cut on the banks of
the Jordan, or eat with faith a bit of the holy bread. How sacred, in
those homes of frost and snow, will not these mementos of a land of
sun, of a land so sacred, become! I can see the wooden chest in the
cabin where the rosemary will be treasured, keeping sweet, against
the day of need, the caps and the shrouds.
These people will need to make a good many more pilgrimages,
and perhaps to quit their morose land altogether, before they can
fairly rank among the civilized of the earth. They were thickset,
padded-legged, short-bodied, unintelligent. The faces of many of
them were worn, as if storm-beaten, and some kept their eyes half
closed, as if they were long used to face the sleet and blasts of
winter; and I noticed that it gave their faces a very different
expression from that produced by the habit the Egyptians have of
drawing the eyelids close together on account of the glare of the
sun.
We took donkeys one lovely morning, and rode from the Jaffa
Gate around the walls on our way to the Mount of Olives. The
Jerusalem donkey is a good enough donkey, but he won't go. He is
ridden with a halter, and never so elegantly caparisoned as his more
genteel brother in Cairo. In order to get him along at all, it needs
one man to pull the halter and another to follow behind with a stick;
the donkey then moves by inches,—if he is in the humor. The animal
that I rode stopped at once, when he perceived that his driver was
absent. No persuasions of mine, such as kicks and whacks of a
heavy stick, could move him on; he would turn out of the road, put
his head against the wall, and pretend to go to sleep. You would not
suppose it possible for a beast to exhibit so much contempt for a
man.
On the high ground outside the wall were pitched the tents of
travellers, making a very pretty effect amid the olive-trees and the
gray rocks. Now and then an Arab horseman came charging down
the road, or a Turkish official cantered by; women, veiled, clad in
white balloon robes that covered them from head to foot, flitted
along in the sunshine, mere white appearances of women, to whom
it was impossible to attribute any such errand as going to market;
they seemed always to be going to or returning from the cemetery.
Our way lay down the rough path and the winding road to the
bottom of the Valley of Jehoshaphat. Leaving the Garden of
Gethsemane on our right, we climbed up the rugged, stony, steep
path to the summit of the hill. There are a few olive-trees on the
way, enough to hinder the view where the stone-walls would permit
us to see anything; importunate begging Moslems beset us; all along
the route we encountered shabbiness and squalor. The rural
sweetness and peace that we associate with this dear mount appear
to have been worn away centuries ago. We did not expect too much,
but we were not prepared for such a shabby show-place. If we could
sweep away all the filthy habitations and hideous buildings on the
hill, and leave it to nature, or, indeed, convert the surface into a
well-ordered garden, the spot would be one of the most attractive in
the world.
We hoped that when we reached the summit we should come into
an open, green, and shady place, free from the disagreeable
presence of human greed and all the artificiality that interposed itself
between us and the sentiment of the place. But the traveller need
not expect that in Palestine. Everything is staked out and made a
show of. Arrived at the summit, we could see little or nothing; it is
crowned with the dilapidated Chapel of the Ascension. We entered a
dirty court, where the custodian and his family and his animals live,
and from thence were admitted to the church. In the pavement is
shown the footprint of our ascending Lord, although the Ascension
was made at Bethany. We paid the custodian for permission to see
this manufactured scene of the Ascension. The best point of view to
be had here is the old tower of the deserted convent, or the narrow
passage to it on the wall, or the top of the minaret near the church.
There is no place on wall or tower where one can sit; there is no
place anywhere here to sit down, and in peace and quiet enjoy the
magnificent prospect, and meditate on the most momentous event
in human history. We snatched the view in the midst of annoyances.
The most minute features of it are known to every one who reads.
The portion of it I did not seem to have been long familiar with is
that to the east, comprising the Jordan valley, the mountains of
Moab, and the Dead Sea.
Although this mount is consecrated by the frequent presence of
Christ, who so often crossed it in going to and from Bethany, and
retired here to meditate and to commune with his loved followers,
everything that the traveller at present encounters on its summit is
out of sympathy with his memory. We escaped from the beggars and
the showmen, climbed some stone-walls, and in a rough field near
the brow of the hill, in a position neither comfortable nor private, but
the best that we found, read the chief events in the life of Christ
connected with this mount, the triumphal entry, and the last scenes
transacted on yonder hill. And we endeavored to make the divine
man live again, who so often and so sorrowfully regarded the then
shining city of Zion from this height.
To the south of the church and a little down the hill is the so-
called site of the giving of the Lord's Prayer. I do not know on what
authority it is thus named. A chapel is built to mark the spot, and a
considerable space is enclosed before it, in which are other objects
of interest, and these were shown to us by a pleasant-spoken lady,
who is connected with the convent, and has faith equal to the
demands of her position. We first entered a subterranean vaulted
room, with twelve rough half-pillars on each side, called the room
where the Apostles composed the creed. We then passed into the
chapel. Upon the four walls of its arcade is written, in great
characters, the Lord's Prayer in thirty-two languages; among them
the “Canadian.”
In a little side chapel is the tomb of Aurelia de Bossa, Princesse de
la Tour d'.uvergne, Duchesse de Bouillon, the lady whose
munificence established this chapel and executed the prayer in so
many tongues. Upon the side of the tomb this fact of her
benevolence is announced, and the expectation is also expressed, in
French, that “God will overwhelm her with blessing for ever and ever
for her good deed.” Stretched upon the sarcophagus is a beautiful
marble effigy of the princess; the figure is lovely, the face is sweet
and seraphic, and it is a perfect likeness of her ladyship.
I do not speak at random. I happen to know that it is a perfect
likeness, for a few minutes after I saw it, I met her in the corridor, in
a semi-nunlike costume, with a heavy cross hanging by a long gold
chain at her side. About her forehead was bound a barbarous
frontlet composed of some two hundred gold coins, and ornaments
not unlike those worn by the ladies of the ancient Egyptians. This
incongruity of costume made me hesitate whether to recognize in
this dazzling vision of womanhood a priestess of Astarte or of Christ.
At the farther door, Aurelia de Bossa, Princesse de la Tour
d'.uvergne, Duchesse de Bouillon, stopped and blew shrilly a silver
whistle which hung at her girdle, to call her straying poodle, or to
summon a servant. In the rear of the chapel this lady lives in a very
pretty house, and near it she was building a convent for Carmelite
nuns. I cannot but regard her as the most fortunate of her sex. She
enjoys not only this life, but, at the same time, all the posthumous
reputation that a lovely tomb and a record of her munificence
engraved thereon can give. We sometimes hear of, but we seldom
see, a person, in these degenerate days, living in this world as if
already in the other.
We went on over the hill to Bethany; we had climbed up by the
path on which David fled from Absalom, and we were to return by
the road of the Triumphal Entry. All along the ridge we enjoyed a
magnificent panorama: a blue piece of the Dead Sea, the Jordan
plain extending far up towards Herraon with the green ribbon of the
river winding through it, and the long, even range of the Moab hills,
blue in the distance. The prospect was almost Swiss in its character,
but it is a mass of bare hills, with scarcely a tree except in the
immediate foreground, and so naked and desolate as to make the
heart ache; it would be entirely desolate but for the deep blue of the
sky and an atmosphere that bathes all the great sweep of peaks and
plains in color.
Bethany is a squalid hamlet clinging to the rocky hillside, with only
one redeeming feature about it,—the prospect. A few wretched one-
story huts of stone, and a miserable handful of Moslems, occupy this
favorite home and resting-place of our Lord. Close at hand, by the
roadside, cut in the rock and reached by a steep descent of twenty-
six steps, is the damp and doubtful tomb of Lazarus, down into
which any one may go for half a franc paid to the Moslem guardian.
The house of Mary and Martha is exhibited among the big rocks and
fragments of walls; upon older foundations loose walls are laid,
rudely and recently patched up with cut stones in fragments, and
pieces of Roman columns. The house of Simon the leper, overlooking
the whole, is a mere heap of ruins. It does not matter, however, that
all these dwellings are modern; this is Bethany, and when we get
away from its present wretchedness we remember only that we have
seen the very place that Christ loved.
We returned along the highway of the Entry slowly, pausing to
identify the points of that memorable progress, up to the crest
where Jerusalem broke upon the sight of the Lord, and whence the
procession, coming round the curve of the hill, would have the full
view of the city. He who rides that way to-day has a grand prospect.
One finds Jerusalem most poetic when seen from Olivet, and Olivet
most lovely when seen from the distance of the city walls.
At the foot of the descent we turned and entered the enclosure of
the Garden of Gethsemane. Three stone-wall enclosures here claim
to be the real garden; one is owned by the Greeks, another by the
Armenians, the third by the Latins. We chose the last, as it is the
largest and pleasantest; perhaps the garden, which was certainly in
this vicinity, once included them all. After some delay we were
admitted by a small door in the wall, and taken charge of by a Latin
monk, whose young and sweet face was not out of sympathy with
the place. The garden contains a few aged olive-trees, and some
small plots of earth, fenced about and secured by locked gates, in
which flowers grow. The guardian gave us some falling roses, and
did what he could to relieve the scene of its artificial appearance;
around the wall, inside, are the twelve stations of the Passion, in the
usual tawdry style.
But the birds sang sweetly in the garden, the flowers of spring
were blooming, and, hemmed in by the high wall, we had some
moments of solemn peace, broken only by the sound of a Moslem
darabooka drum throbbing near at hand. Desecrated as this spot is,
and made cheap by the petty creations of superstition, one cannot
but feel the awful significance of the place, and the weight of history
crowding upon him, where battles raged for a thousand years, and
where the greatest victory of all was won when Christ commanded
Peter to put up his sword. Near here Titus formed his columns which
stormed the walls and captured the heroic city after its houses, and
all this valley itself, were filled with Jewish dead; but all this is as
nothing to the event of that awful night when the servants of the
high-priest led away the unresisting Lord.
It is this event, and not any other, that puts an immeasurable gulf
between this and all other cities, and perhaps this difference is more
felt the farther one is from Jerusalem. The visitor expects too much;
he is unreasonably impatient of the contrast between the mean
appearance of the theatre and the great events that have been
enacted on it; perhaps he is not prepared for the ignorance, the
cupidity, the credulity, the audacious impostures under Christian
names, on the spot where Christianity was born.
When one has exhausted the stock sights of Jerusalem, it is
probably the dullest, least entertaining city of the Orient; I mean, in
itself, for its pilgrims and its religious fêtes, in the spring of the year,
offer always some novelties to the sight-seer; and, besides, there is
a certain melancholy pleasure to be derived from roaming about
outside the walls, enveloped in a historic illusion that colors and
clothes the nakedness of the landscape.
The chief business of the city and the region seems to be the
manufacture of religious playthings for the large children who come
here. If there is any factory of relics here I did not see it. Nor do I
know whether the true cross has still the power of growing, which it
had in the fourth century, to renew itself under the constant demand
for pieces of it. I did not go to see the place where the tree grew of
which it was made; the exact spot is shown in a Greek convent
about a mile and a half west of the city. The tree is said to have
been planted by Abraham and Noah. This is evidently an error; it
may have been planted by Adam and watered by Noah.
There is not much trade in antiquities in the city; the shops offer
little to tempt the curiosity-hunter. Copper coins of the Roman period
abound, and are constantly turned up in the fields outside the city,
most of them battered and defaced beyond recognition. Jewish
mites are plenty enough, but the silver shekel would be rare if the
ingenious Jews did not keep counterfeits on hand. The tourist is
waited on at his hotel by a few patient and sleek sharks with cases
of cheap jewelry and doubtful antiques, and if he seeks the shops of
the gold and silver bazaars he will find little more. I will not say that
he will not now and then pick up a piece of old pottery that has
made the journey from Central Asia, or chance upon a singular stone
with a talismanic inscription. The hope that he may do so carries the
traveller through a great many Eastern slums. The chief shops,
however, are those of trinkets manufactured for the pilgrims, of
olive-wood, ivory, bone, camels' teeth, and all manner of nuts and
seeds. There are more than fifty sorts of beads, strung for profane
use or arranged for rosaries, and some of them have pathetic
names, like “Job's tears.” Jerusalem is entitled to be called the City
of Beads.
There is considerable activity in Jewish objects that are old and
rather unclean; and I think I discovered something like an attempt
to make a “corner” in phylacteries, that is, in old ones, for the new
are made in excess of the demand. If a person desires to carry
home a phylactery to exhibit to his Sunday school, in illustration of
the religion of the Jews, he wants one that has been a long time in
use. I do not suppose it possible that the education of any other
person is as deficient as mine was in the matter of these ornamental
aids in worship. But if there is one, this description is for him: the
phylactery, common size, is a leathern box about an inch and a half
square, with two narrow straps of leather, about three feet long,
sewed to the bottom corners. The box contains a parchment roll of
sacred writing. When the worshipper performs his devotions in the
synagogue, he binds one of the phylacteries about his left arm and
the other about his head, so that the little box has something of the
appearance of a leathern horn sprouting out of his forehead.
Phylacteries are worn only in the synagogue, and in this respect
differ from the greasy leathern talismans of the Nubians, which
contain scraps from the Koran, and are never taken off. Whatever
significance the phylactery once had to the Jew it seems now to
have lost, since he is willing to make it an article of merchandise.
Perhaps it is poverty that compels him also to sell his ancient
scriptures; parchment rolls of favorite books, such as Esther, that are
some centuries old, are occasionally to be bought, and new rolls,
deceitfully doctored into an appearance of antiquity, are offered
freely.
A few years ago the antiquarian world was put into a ferment by
what was called the “Shoepira collection,” a large quantity of clay
pottery,—gods, votive offerings, images, jars, and other vessels,—
with inscriptions in unknown characters, which was said to have
been dug up in the land of Moab, beyond the Jordan, and was
expected to throw great light upon certain passages of Jewish
history, and especially upon the religion of the heathen who
occupied Palestine at the time of the conquest. The collection was
sent to Berlin; some eminent German savans pronounced it genuine;
nearly all the English scholars branded it as an impudent imposture.
Two collections of the articles have been sent to Berlin, where they
are stored out of sight of the public generally, and Mr. Shoepira has
made a third collection, which he still retains.
Mr. Shoepira is a Hebrew antiquarian and bookseller, of somewhat
eccentric manners, but an enthusiast. He makes the impression of a
man who believes in his discoveries, and it is generally thought in
Jerusalem that if his collection is a forgery, he himself is imposed on.
The account which he gives of the places where the images and
utensils were found is anything but clear or definite. We are required
to believe that they have been dug up in caves at night and by
stealth, and at the peril of the lives of the discoverers, and that it is
not safe to visit these caves in the daytime on account of the
Bedaween. The fresh-baked appearance of some of the articles is
admitted, and it is said that it was necessary to roast them to
prevent their crumbling when exposed to the air. Our theory in
regard to these singular objects is that a few of those first shown
were actually discovered, and that all the remainder have been
made in imitation of them. Of the characters (or alphabet) of the
inscriptions, Mr. Schepira says he has determined twenty-three;
sixteen of these are Phoenician, and the others, his critics say, are
meaningless. All the objects are exceedingly rude and devoid of the
slightest art; the images are many of them indecent; the jars are
clumsy in shape, but the inscriptions are put on with some skill. The
figures are supposed to have been votive offerings, and the jars
either memorial or sepulchral urns.
The hideous collection appeared to me sui generis, although some
of the images resemble the rudest of those called Phoenician which
General di Cesnola unearthed in Cyprus. Without merit, they seem to
belong to a rude age rather than to be the inartistic product of this
age. That is, supposing them to be forgeries, I cannot see how these
figures could be conceived by a modern man, who was capable of
inventing a fraud of this sort. He would have devised something
better, at least something less simple, something that would have
somewhere betrayed a little modern knowledge and feeling. All the
objects have the same barbarous tone, a kind of character that is
distinct from their rudeness, and the same images and designs are
repeated over and over again. This gives color to the theory that a
few genuine pieces of Moabite pottery were found, which gave the
idea for a large manufacture of them. And yet, there are people who
see these things, and visit all the holy places, and then go away and
lament that there are no manufactories in Jerusalem.
Jerusalem attracts while it repels; and both it and all Palestine
exercise a spell out of all proportion to the consideration they had in
the ancient world. The student of the mere facts of history,
especially if his studies were made in Jerusalem itself, would be at a
loss to account for the place that the Holy City occupies in the
thought of the modern world, and the importance attached to the
history of the handful of people who made themselves a home in
this rocky country. The Hebrew nation itself, during the little time it
was a nation, did not play a part in Oriental affairs at all
commensurate with its posthumous reputation. It was not one of the
great kingdoms of antiquity, and in that theatre of war and conquest
which spread from Ethiopia to the Caspian Sea, it was scarcely an
appreciable force in the great drama.
The country the Hebrews occupied was small; they never
conquered or occupied the whole of the Promised Land, which
extended from the Mediterranean Sea to the Arabian plain, from
Hamath to Sinai. Their territory in actual possession reached only
from Dan to Beersheba. The coast they never subdued; the
Philistines, who came from Crete and grew to be a great people in
the plain, held the lower portion of Palestine on the sea, and the
Phoenicians the upper. Except during a brief period in their history,
the Jews were confined to the hill-country. Only during the latter
part of the reign of David and two thirds of that of Solomon did the
Jewish kingdom take on the proportions of a great state. David
extended the Israelitish power from the Gulf of Akaba to the
Euphrates; Damascus paid him tribute; he occupied the cities of his
old enemies, the Philistines, but the kingdom of Tyre, still in the
possession of Hiram, marked the limit of Jewish sway in that
direction. This period of territorial consequence was indeed brief.
Before Solomon was in his grave, the conquests bequeathed to him
by his father began to slip from his hand. The life of the Israelites as
a united nation, as anything but discordant and warring tribes, after
the death of Joshua, is all included in the reigns of David and
Solomon,—perhaps sixty or seventy years.
The Israelites were essentially highlanders. Some one has noticed
their resemblance to the Scotch Highlanders in modes of warfare. In
fighting they aimed to occupy the heights. They descended into the
plain reluctantly; they made occasional forays into the lowlands, but
their hills were their strength, as the Psalmist said; and they found
security among their crags and secluded glens from the agitations
which shook the great empires of the Eastern world. Invasions,
retreats, pursuits, the advance of devouring hosts or the flight of
panic-stricken masses, for a long time passed by their ridge of
country on either side, along the Mediterranean or through the land
of Moab. They were out of the track of Oriental commerce as well as
of war. So removed were they from participation in the stirring
affairs of their era that they seem even to have escaped the
omnivorous Egyptian conquerors. Eor a long period conquest passed
them by, and it was not till their accumulation of wealth tempted the
avarice of the great Asiatic powers that they were involved in the
conflicts which finally destroyed them. The small kingdom of Judah,
long after that of Israel had been utterly swept away, owed its
continuance of life to its very defensible position. Solomon left
Jerusalem a strong city, well supplied with water, and capable of
sustaining a long siege, while the rugged country around it offered
little comfort to a besieging army.
For a short time David made the name of Israel a power in the
world, and Solomon, inheriting his reputation, added the triumphs of
commerce to those of conquest. By a judicious heathen alliance with
Hiram of Tyre he was able to build vessels on the Red Sea and man
them with Phoenician sailors, for voyages to India and Ceylon; and
he was admitted by Hiram to a partnership in his trading adventures
to the Pillars of Hercules. But these are only episodes in the Jewish
career; the nation's part in Oriental history is comparatively
insignificant until the days of their great calamities. How much
attention its heroism and suffering attracted at that time we do not
know.
Though the Israelites during their occupation of the hill-country of
Palestine were not concerned in the great dynastic struggles of the
Orient, they were not, however, at peace. Either the tribes were
fighting among themselves or they were involved in sanguinary
fights with the petty heathen chiefs about them. We get a lively
picture of the habits of the time in a sentence in the second book of
Samuel: “And it came to pass, after the year was expired, at the
time when kings go forth to battle, that David sent Joab and his
servants with him, and all Israel; and they destroyed the children of
Ammon, and besieged Rabbah.” It was a pretty custom. In that
season when birds pair and build their nests, when the sap mounts
in the trees and travellers long to go into far countries, kings felt a
noble impulse in their veins to go out and fight other kings. But this
primitive simplicity was mingled with shocking barbarity; David once
put his captives under the saw, and there is nothing to show that the
Israelites were more moved by sentiments of pity and compassion
than their heathen neighbors. There was occasionally, however, a
grim humor in their cruelty. When Judah captured King Adoni-bezek,
in Bezek, he cut off his great toes and his thumbs. Adoni-bezek, who
could appreciate a good thing, accepted the mutilation in the spirit in
which it was offered, and said that he had himself served seventy
kings in that fashion; “threescore and ten kings, having their thumbs
and great toes cut off, gathered their meat under my table.”
From the death of Joshua to the fall of Samaria, the history of the
Jews is largely a history of civil war. From about seven hundred
years before Christ, Palestine was essentially a satrapy of the
Assyrian kings, as it was later to become one of the small provinces
of the Roman empire. At the time when Sennacherib was waiting
before Jerusalem for Hezekiah to purchase his withdrawal by
stripping the gold from the doors of the Temple, the foundations of a
city were laid on the banks of the Tiber, which was to extend its
sway over the known world, to whose dominion the utmost power of
Jerusalem was only a petty sovereignty, and which was destined to
rival Jerusalem itself as the spiritual capital of the earth.
If we do not find in the military power or territorial consequence
of the Jews an explanation of their influence in the modern world,
still less do we find it in any faithfulness to a spiritual religion, the
knowledge of which was their chief distinction among the tribes
about them. Their lapses from the worship of Jehovah were so
frequent, and of such long duration, that their returns to the worship
of the true God seem little more than breaks in their practice of
idolatry. And these spasmodic returns were due to calamities, and
fears of worse judgments. Solomon sanctioned by national authority
gross idolatries which had been long practised. At his death, ten of
the tribes seceded from the dominion of Judah and set up a
kingdom in which idolatry was made and remained the state religion,
until the ten tribes vanished from the theatre of history. The
kingdom of Israel, in order to emphasize its separation from that of
Judah, set up the worship of Jehovah in the image of a golden calf.
Against this state religion of image-worship the prophets seem to
have thought it in vain to protest; they contented themselves with
battling against the more gross and licentious idolatries of Baal and
Ashtaroth; and Israel always continued the idol-worship established
by Jeroboam. The worship of Jehovah was the state religion of the
little kingdom of Judah, but during the period of its existence, before
the Captivity, I think that only four of its kings were not idolaters.
The people were constantly falling away into the heathenish
practices of their neighbors.
If neither territorial consequence nor religious steadfastness gave
the Jews rank among the great nations of antiquity, they would
equally fail of the consideration they now enjoy but for one thing,
and that is, after all, the chief and enduring product of any
nationality; we mean, of course, its literature. It is by that, that the
little kingdoms of Judah and Israel hold their sway over the world. It
is that which invests ancient Jerusalem with its charm and dignity.
Not what the Jews did, but the songs of their poets, the warnings
and lamentations of their prophets, the touching tales of their story-
tellers, draw us to Jerusalem by the most powerful influences that
affect the human mind. And most of this unequalled literature is the
product of seasons of turbulence, passion, and insecurity. Except the
Proverbs and Song of Solomon, and such pieces as the poem of Job
and the story of Ruth, which seem to be the outcome of literary
leisure, the Hebrew writings were all the offspring of exciting
periods. David composed his Psalms—the most marvellous
interpreters of every human aspiration, exaltation, want, and passion
—with his sword in his hand; and the prophets always appear to ride
upon a whirlwind. The power of Jerusalem over the world is as truly
a literary one as that of Athens is one of art. That literature was
unknown to the ancients, or unappreciated: otherwise contemporary
history would have considered its creators of more consequence
than it did.
We speak, we have been speaking, of the Jerusalem before our
era, and of the interest it has independent of the great event which
is, after all, its chief claim to immortal estimation. It becomes sacred
ground to us because there, in Bethlehem, Christ was born; because
here—not in these streets, but upon this soil—he walked and talked
and taught and ministered; because upon Olivet, yonder, he often
sat with his disciples, and here, somewhere,—it matters not where,
—he suffered death and conquered death.
 This is the scene of these transcendent events. We say it to
ourselves while we stand here. We can clearly conceive it when we
are at a distance. But with the actual Jerusalem of to-day before our
eyes, its naked desolation, its superstition, its squalor, its vivid
contrast to what we conceive should be the City of our King, we find
it easier to feel that Christ was born in New England than in Judæa.
 V.—GOING DOWN TO JERICHO.

I
T is on a lovely spring morning that we set out through the land
of Benjamin to go down among the thieves of Jericho, and to
the Jordan and the Dead Sea. For protection against the thieves
we take some of them with us, since you cannot in these days rely
upon finding any good Samaritans there.
For some days Abd-el-Atti has been in mysterious diplomatic
relations with the robbers of the wilderness, who live in Jerusalem,
and farm out their territory. “Thim is great rascals,” says the
dragoman; and it is solely on that account that we seek their
friendship: the real Bedawee is never known to go back on his word
to the traveller who trusts him, so long as it is more profitable to
keep it than to break it. We are under the escort of the second
sheykh, who shares with the first sheykh the rule of all the
Bedaween who patrol the extensive territory from Hebron to the
fords of the Jordan, including Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Mar Saba, and
the shores of the Dead Sea; these rulers would have been called
kings in the old time, and the second sheykh bears the same relation
to the first that the Cæsar did to the Augustus in the Roman Empire.
Our train is assembled in the little market-place opposite the hotel,
or rather it is assembling, for horses and donkeys are slow to arrive,
saddles are wanting, the bridles are broken, and the unpunctuality
and shiftlessness of the East manifest themselves. Abd-el-Atti is in
fierce altercation with a Koorland nobleman about a horse, which
you would not say would be likely to be a bone of contention with
anybody. They are both endeavoring to mount at once. Friends are
backing each combatant, and the air is thick with curses in guttural
German and maledictions in shrill Arabic. Unfortunately I am
appealed to.
“What for this Dutchman, he take my horse?”
 “Perhaps he hired it first?”
“P'aps not. I make bargain for him with the owner day before
yesterday.”
“I have become dis pferd for four days,” cries the Baron.
There seems to be no reason to doubt the Baron's word; he has
ridden the horse to Bethlehem, and become accustomed to his jolts,
and no doubt has the prior lien on the animal. The owner has let
him to both parties, a thing that often happens when the second
comer offers a piastre more. Another horse is sent for, and we
mount and begin to disentangle ourselves from the crowd. It is no
easy matter, especially for the ladies. Our own baggage-mules head
in every direction. Donkeys laden with mountains of brushwood push
through the throng, scraping right and left; camels shamble against
us, their contemptuous noses in the air, stretching their long necks
over our heads; market-women from Bethlehem scream at us; and
greasy pilgrims block our way and curse our horses' hoofs.
One by one we emerge and get into a straggling line, and begin to
comprehend the size of our expedition. Our dragoman has made as
extensive preparations as if we were to be the first to occupy Gilgal
and Jericho, and that portion of the Promised Land. We are
equipped equally well for fighting and for famine. A party of Syrians,
who desire to make the pilgrimage to the Jordan, have asked
permission to join us, in order to share the protection of our sheykh,
and they add both picturesqueness and strength to the grand
cavalcade which clatters out of Jaffa Gate and sweeps round the city
wall. Heaven keep us from undue pride in our noble appearance!
Perhaps our train would impress a spectator as somewhat mixed,
and he would be unable to determine the order of its march. It is
true that the horses and the donkeys and the mules all have
different rates of speed, and that the Syrian horse has only two
gaits,—a run and a slow walk. As soon as we gain the freedom of
the open country, these differences develop. The ambitious
dragomen and the warlike sheykh put their horses into a run and
scour over the hills, and then come charging back upon us, like Don
Quixote upon the flock of sheep. The Syrians imitate this madness.
The other horses begin to agitate their stiff legs; the donkeys stand
still and protest by braying; the pack-mules get temporarily crazy,
charge into us with the protruding luggage, and suddenly wheel into
the ditch and stop. This playfulness is repeated in various ways, and
adds to the excitement without improving the dignity of our march.
We are of many nationalities. There are four Americans, two of
them ladies. The Doctor, who is accustomed to ride the mustangs of
New Mexico and the wild horses of the Western deserts, endeavors
to excite a spirit of emulation in his stiff-kneed animal, but with little
success. Our dragoman is Egyptian, a decidedly heavy weight, and
sits his steed like a pyramid.
The sheykh is a young man, with the treacherous eye of an eagle;
a handsome fellow, who rides a lean white horse, anything but a
beauty, and yet of the famous Nedjed breed from Mecca. This desert
warrior wears red boots, white trousers and skirt, blue jacket, a
yellow kufia, confined about the head by a black cord and falling
upon his shoulders, has a long rifle slung at his back, an immense
Damascus sword at his side, and huge pistols, with carved and inlaid
stocks, in his belt. He is a riding arsenal and a visible fraud, this
Bedawee sheykh. We should no doubt be quite as safe without him,
and perhaps less liable to various extortions. But on the road, and
from the moment we set out, we meet Bedaween, single and in
squads, savage-looking vagabonds, every one armed with a gun, a
long knife, and pistols with blunderbuss barrels, flaring in such a
manner as to scatter shot over an acre of ground. These scarecrows
are apparently paraded on the highway to make travellers think it is
insecure. But I am persuaded that none of them would dare molest
any pilgrim to the Jordan.
Our allies, the Syrians, please us better. There is a Frenchified
Syrian, with his wife, from Mansura, in the Delta of Egypt. The wife
is a very pretty woman (would that her example were more
generally followed in the East), with olive complexion, black eyes,
and a low forehead-; a native of Sidon. She wears a dark green
dress, and a yellow kufia on her head, and is mounted upon a mule,
man-fashion, but upon a saddle as broad as a feather-bed. Her
husband, in semi-Syrian costume, with top-boots, carries a gun at
his back and a frightful knife in his belt. Her brother, who is from
Sidon, bears also a gun, and wears an enormous sword. Very
pleasant people these, who have armed themselves in the spirit of
the hunter rather than of the warrior, and are as completely
equipped for the chase as any Parisian who ventures in pursuit of
game into any of the dangerous thickets outside of Paris.
The Sidon wife is accompanied by two servants, slaves from
Soudan, a boy and a girl, each about ten years old,—two grinning,
comical monkeys, who could not by any possibility be of the slightest
service to anybody, unless it is a relief to their pretty mistress to vent
her ill-humor upon their irresponsible persons. You could n't call
them handsome, though their skins are of dazzling black, and their
noses so flat that you cannot see them in profile. The girl wears a
silk gown, which reaches to her feet and gives her the quaint
appearance of an old woman, and a yellow vest; the boy is clad in
motley European clothes, bought second-hand with reference to his
growing up to them,—upon which event the trousers-legs and cuffs
of his coat could be turned down,—and a red fez contrasting finely
with his black face. They are both mounted on a decrepit old horse,
whose legs are like sled-stakes, and they sit astride on top of a pile
of baggage, beds, and furniture, with bottles and camp-kettles
jingling about them. The girl sits behind the boy and clings fast to
his waist with one hand, while with the other she holds over their
heads a rent white parasol, to prevent any injury to their jet
complexions. When the old baggage-horse starts occasionally into a
hard trot, they both bob up and down, and strike first one side and
then the other, but never together; when one goes up the other
goes down, as if they were moved by different springs; but both
show their ivory and seem to enjoy themselves. Heaven knows why
they should make a pilgrimage to the Jordan.
Our Abyssinian servant, Abdallah, is mounted, also on a pack-
horse, and sits high in the air amid bags and bundles; he guides his
brute only by a halter, and when the animal takes a fancy to break
into a gallop, there is a rattling of dishes and kettles that sets the
whole train into commotion; the boy's fez falls farther than ever back
on his head, his teeth shine, and his eyes dance as he jolts into the
midst of the mules and excites a panic, which starts everything into
friskiness, waking up even the Soudan party, which begins to bob
about and grin. There are half a dozen mules loaded with tents and
bed furniture; the cook, and the cook's assistants, and the servants
of the kitchen and the camp are mounted on something, and the
train is attended besides by drivers and ostlers, of what nations it
pleases Heaven. But this is not all. We carry with us two hunting
dogs, the property of the Syrian. The dogs are not for use; they are
a piece of ostentation, like the other portion of the hunting outfit,
and contribute, as do the Soudan babies, to our appearance of
Oriental luxury.
We straggle down through the Valley of Jehoshaphat, and around
the Mount of Olives to Bethany; and from that sightly slope our
route is spread before us as if we were looking upon a map. It lies
through the “wilderness of Judæa.” We are obliged to revise our
Western notions of a wilderness as a region of gross vegetation. The
Jews knew a wilderness when they saw it, and how to name it. You
would be interested to know what a person who lived at Jerusalem,
or anywhere along the backbone of Palestine, would call a
wilderness. Nothing but the absolute nakedness of desolation could
seem to him dreary. But this region must have satisfied even a
person accustomed to deserts and pastures of rocks. It is a jumble
of savage hills and jagged ravines, a land of limestone rocks and
ledges, whitish gray in color, glaring in the sun, even the stones
wasted by age, relieved nowhere by a tree, or rejoiced by a single
blade of grass. Wild beasts would starve in it, the most industrious
bird could n't collect in its length and breadth enough soft material
to make a nest of; it is what a Jew of Hebron or Jerusalem or
Hamah would call a “wilderness”! This exhausts the language of
description. How vividly in this desolation stands out the figure of
the prophet of God, clothed with camel's hair and with a girdle of
skin about his loins, “the voice of one crying in the wilderness.”
 The road is thronged with Jordan pilgrims. We overtake them,
they pass us, we meet them in an almost continuous train. Most of
them are peasants from Armenia, from the borders of the Black Sea,
from the Caucasus, from Abyssinia. The great mass are on foot,
trudging wearily along with their bedding and provisions, the thick-
legged women carrying the heaviest loads; occasionally you see a
pilgrim asleep by the roadside, his pillow a stone. But the travellers
are by no means all poor or unable to hire means of conveyance,—
you would say that Judæa had been exhausted of its beasts of
burden of all descriptions for this pilgrimage, and that even the
skeletons had been exhumed to assist in it. The pilgrims are
mounted on sorry donkeys, on wrecks of horses, on mules,
sometimes an entire family on one animal. Now and then we
encounter a “swell” outfit, a wealthy Russian well mounted on a
richly caparisoned horse and attended by his servants; some ride in
palanquins, some in chairs. We overtake an English party, the central
figure of which is an elderly lady, who rides in a sort of high
cupboard slung on poles, and borne by a mule before and a mule
behind; the awkward vehicle sways and tilts backwards and
forwards, and the good woman looks out of the window of her coop
as if she were sea-sick of the world. Some ladies, who are
unaccustomed to horses, have arm-chairs strapped upon the horses'
backs, in which they sit. Now and then two chairs are strapped upon
one horse, and the riders sit back to back. Sometimes huge panniers
slung on the sides of the horse are used instead of chairs, the
passengers riding securely in them without any danger of falling out.
It is rather a pretty sight when each basket happens to be full of
children. There is, indeed, no end to the strange outfits and the odd
costumes. Nearly all the women who are mounted at all are perched
upon the top of all their household goods and furniture, astride of a
bed on the summit. There approaches a horse which seems to have
a sofa on its back, upon which four persons are seated in a row, as
much at ease as if at home; it is not, however, a sofa; four baskets
have been ingeniously fastened into a frame, so that four persons
can ride in them abreast. This is an admirable contrivance for the
riders, much better than riding in a row lengthwise on the horse,
when the one in front hides the view from those behind.
Diverted by this changing spectacle, we descend from Bethany. At
first there are wild-flowers by the wayside and in the fields, and
there is a flush of verdure on the hills, all of which disappears later.
The sky is deep blue and cloudless, the air is exhilarating; it is a day
for enjoyment, and everything and everybody we encounter are in a
joyous mood, and on good terms with the world. The only
unamiable exception is the horse with which I have been favored.
He is a stocky little stallion, of good shape, but ignoble breed, and
the devil—which is, I suppose, in the horse what the old Adam is in
man—has never been cast out of him. At first I am in love with his
pleasant gait and mincing ways, but I soon find that he has
eccentricities that require the closest attention on my part, and leave
me not a moment for the scenery or for biblical reflections. The
beast is neither content to go in front of the caravan nor in the rear
he wants society, but the instant he gets into the crowd he lets his
heels fly right and left. After a few performances of this sort, and
when he has nearly broken the leg of the Syrian, my company is not
desired any more by any one. No one is willing to ride within
speaking distance of me. This sort of horse may please the giddy
and thoughtless, but he is not the animal for me. By the time we
reach the fountain 'Ain el-Huad, I have quite enough of him, and
exchange steeds with the dragoman, much against the latter's fancy;
he keeps the brute the remainder of the day cantering over stones
and waste places along the road, and confesses at night that his
bridle-hand is so swollen as to be useless.
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
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