In The Levant 14

In The Levant 14

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'Auvergne, 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'Auvergne, 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