In The Levant 1

In The Levant 1

In The Levant

Twenty Fifth Impression

 

Author: Charles Dudley Warner

 

PREFACE

 

|IN the winter and spring of 1875 the writer made the tour of Egypt and

the Levant. The first portion of the journey is described in a volume

published last summer, entitled "My Winter on the Nile, among Mummies

and Moslems"; the second in the following pages. The notes of the

journey were taken and the books were written before there were any

signs of the present Oriental disturbances, and the observations made

are therefore uncolored by any expectation of the existing state of

affairs. Signs enough were visible of a transition period, extraordinary

but hopeful; with the existence of poverty, oppression, superstition,

and ignorance were mingling Occidental and Christian influences, the

faint beginnings of a revival of learning and the stronger pulsations of

awakening commercial and industrial life. The best hope of this revival

was their, as it is now, in peace and not in war.

 

C. D. W.

 

Hartford, November 10,1876.

 

 

 

 

IN THE LEVANT.

 

 

 

 

I.--FROM JAFFA TO JERUSALEM.

 

|SINCE Jonah made his short and ignominious voyage along the Syrian

coast, mariners have had the same difficulty in getting ashore that

the sailors experienced who attempted to land the prophet; his tedious

though safe method of disembarking was not followed by later navigators,

and the landing at Jaffa has remained a vexatious and half the time an

impossible achievement.

 

The town lies upon the open sea and has no harbor. It is only in

favorable weather that vessels can anchor within a mile or so from

shore, and the Mediterranean steamboats often pass the port without

being able to land either freight or passengers, In the usual condition

of the sea the big fish would have found it difficult to discharge Jonah

without stranding itself, and it seems that it waited three days for the

favorable moment. The best chance for landing nowadays is in the early

morning, in that calm period when the winds and the waves alike await

the movements of the sun. It was at that hour, on the 5th of April,

1875, that we arrived from Port Said on the French steamboat Erymanthe.

The night had been pleasant and the sea tolerably smooth, but not to the

apprehensions of some of the passengers, who always declare that they

prefer, now, a real tempest to a deceitful groundswell. On a recent trip

a party had been prevented from landing, owing to the deliberation

of the ladies in making their toilet; by the time they had attired

themselves in a proper manner to appear in Southern Palestine, the

golden hour had slipped away, and they were able only to look upon the

land which their beauty and clothes would have adorned. None of us were

caught in a like delinquency. At the moment the anchor went down we

were bargaining with a villain to take us ashore, a bargain in which the

yeasty and waxingly uneasy sea gave the boatman all the advantage.

 

Our little company of four is guided by the philosopher and dragoman

Mohammed Abd-el-Atti, of Cairo, who has served us during the long voyage

of the Nile. He is assisted in his task by the Abyssinian boy Ahman

Abdallah, the brightest and most faithful of servants. In making his

first appearance in the Holy Land he has donned over his gay Oriental

costume a blue Frank coat, and set his fez back upon his head at an

angle exceeding the slope of his forehead. His black face has an unusual

lustre, and his eyes dance with more than their ordinary merriment as he

points excitedly to the shore and cries, "Yâfa! Mist'r Dunham."

 

The information is addressed to Madame, whom Ahman, utterly regardless

of sex, invariably addresses by the name of one of our travelling

companions on the Nile.

 

"Yes, marm; you see him, Yâfa," interposed Abd-el-Atti; coming forward

with the air of brushing aside, as impertinent, the geographical

information of his subordinate; "not much, I tink, but him bery old. Let

us to go ashore."

 

Jaffa, or Yâfa, or Joppa, must have been a well-established city, since

it had maritime dealings with Tarshish, in that remote period in which

the quaint story of Jonah is set,--a piece of Hebrew literature that

bears internal evidence of great antiquity in its extreme _naivete_.

Although the Canaanites did not come into Palestine till about 2400 b.

c., that is to say, about the time of the twelfth dynasty in Egypt, yet

there is a reasonable tradition that Jaffa existed before the deluge.

For ages it has been the chief Mediterranean port of great Jerusalem.

Here Solomon landed his Lebanon timber for the temple. The town swarmed

more than once with the Roman legions on their way to crush a Jewish

insurrection. It displayed the banner of the Saracen host a few years

after the Hegira. And, later, when the Crusaders erected the standard of

the cross on its walls, it was the _dépôt_ of supplies which Venice and

Genoa and other rich cities contributed to the holy war. Great kingdoms

and conquerors have possessed it in turn, and for thousands of years

merchants have trusted their fortunes to its perilous roadstead. And

yet no one has ever thought it worth while to give it a harbor by the

construction of a mole, or a pier like that at Port Said. I should say

that the first requisite in the industrial, to say nothing of the moral,

regeneration of Palestine is a harbor at Jaffa.

 

The city is a cluster of irregular, flat-roofed houses, and looks from

the sea like a brown bowl turned bottom up; the roofs are terraces on

which the inhabitants can sleep on summer nights, and to which they

can ascend, out of the narrow, evil-smelling streets, to get a whiff of

sweet odor from the orange gardens which surround the town. The ordinary

pictures of Jaffa do it ample justice. The chief feature in the view is

the hundreds of clumsy feluccas tossing about in the aggravating waves,

diving endwise and dipping sidewise, guided a little by the long sweeps

of the sailors, but apparently the sport of the most uncertain billows.

A swarm of them, four or five deep, surrounds our vessel; they are

rising and falling in the most sickly motion, and dashing into each

other in the frantic efforts of their rowers to get near the gangway

ladder. One minute the boat nearest the stairs rises as if it would

mount into the ship, and the next it sinks below the steps into a

frightful gulf. The passengers watch the passing opportunity to jump on

board, as people dive into the "lift" of a hotel. Freight is discharged

into lighters that are equally frisky; and it is taken on and off

splashed with salt water and liable to a thousand accidents in the

violence of the transit.

 

Before the town stretches a line of rocks worn for ages, upon which the

surf is breaking and sending white jets into the air. It is through a

narrow opening in this that our boat is borne on the back of a great

wave, and we come into a strip of calmer water and approach the single

landing-stairs. These stairs are not so convenient as those of the

vessel we have just left, and two persons can scarcely pass on them. But

this is the only sea entrance to Jaffa; if the Jews attempt to return

and enter their ancient kingdom this way, it will take them a long time

to get in. A sea-wall fronts the town, fortified by a couple of rusty

cannon at one end, and the passage is through the one gate at the head

of these stairs.

 

It seems forever that we are kept waiting at the foot of this shaky

stairway. Two opposing currents are struggling to get up and down it:

excited travellers, porters with trunks and knapsacks, and dragomans who

appear to be pushing their way through simply to show their familiarity

with the country. It is a dangerous ascent for a delicate woman.

Somehow, as we wait at this gate where so many men of note have waited,

and look upon this sea-wall upon which have stood so many of the mighty

from Solomon to Origen, from Tiglath-Pileser to Richard Cour de Lion,

the historical figure which most pervades Jaffa is that of the whimsical

Jonah, whose connection with it was the slightest. There is no evidence

that he ever returned here. Josephus, who takes liberties with the

Hebrew scriptures, says that a whale carried the fugitive into the

Euxine Sea, and there discharged him much nearer to Nineveh than he

would have been if he had kept with the conveyance in which he first

took passage and landed at Tarsus. Probably no one in Jaffa noticed the

little man as he slipped through this gate and took ship, and yet his

simple embarkation from the town has given it more notoriety than any

other event. Thanks to an enduring piece of literature, the unheroic

Jonah and his whale are better known than St. Jerome and his lion;

they are the earliest associates and Oriental acquaintances of all

well-brought-up children in Christendom. For myself, I confess that the

strictness of many a New England Sunday has been relieved by the perusal

of his unique adventure. He in a manner anticipated the use of the

monitors and other cigar-shaped submerged sea-vessels.

 

When we have struggled up the slippery stairs and come through the gate,

we wind about for some time in a narrow passage on the side of the sea,

and then cross through the city, still on foot. It is a rubbishy place;

the streets are steep and crooked; we pass through archways, we ascend

steps, we make unexpected turns; the shops are a little like bazaars,

but rather Italian than Oriental; we pass a pillared mosque and a Moslem

fountain; we come upon an ancient square, in the centre of which is a

round fountain with pillars and a canopy of stone, and close about it

are the bazaars of merchants. This old fountain is profusely sculptured

with Arabic inscriptions; the stones are worn and have taken the rich

tint of age, and the sunlight blends it into harmony with the gay stuffs

of the shops and the dark skins of the idlers on the pavement. We come

into the great market of fruit and vegetables, where vast heaps of

oranges, like apples in a New England orchard, line the way and fill the

atmosphere with a golden tinge.

 

The Jaffa oranges are famous in the Orient; they grow to the size of

ostrich eggs, they have a skin as thick as the hide of a rhinoceros,

and, in their season, the pulp is sweet, juicy, and tender. It is a

little late now, and we open one golden globe after another before

we find one that is not dry and tasteless as a piece of punk. But one

cannot resist buying such magnificent fruit.