In The Levant 19

In The Levant 19

Notwithstanding these dangers, the night passes without alarm, except

the barking of jackals about the kitchen tent. In the morning I ask

Antonio if he heard the hyenas howling in the night. "Yes, indeed,

plenty of them; they came very near my tent."

 

We are astir at sunrise, breakfast, and start for the Jordan. It is the

opinion of the dragoman and the sheykh that we should go first to the

Dead Sea. It is the custom. Every tourist goes to the Dead Sea first,

bathes, and then washes off the salt in the Jordan. No one ever thought

of going to the Jordan first. It is impossible. We must visit the Dead

Sea, and then lunch at the Jordan. We wished, on the contrary, to lunch

at the Dead Sea, at which we should otherwise only have a very brief

time. We insisted upon our own programme, to the great disgust of all

our camp attendants, who predicted disaster.

 

The Jordan is an hour and a half from Jericho; that is the distance to

the bathing-place of the Greek pilgrims. We descend all the way. Wild

vegetation is never wanting; wild-flowers abound; we pass through

thickets of thorns, bearing the yellow "apples of the Dead Sea," which

grow all over this plain. At Gilgal (now called Biha) we find what

is probably the nastiest village in the world, and its miserable

inhabitants are credited with all the vices of Sodom. The wretched

huts are surrounded by a thicket of _nubk_ as a protection against

the plundering Bedaween. The houses are rudely built of stone, with

a covering of cane or brush, and each one is enclosed in a hedge of

thorns. These thorns, which grow rankly on the plain, are those of which

the "crown of thorns" was plaited, and all devout pilgrims carry away

some of them. The habitations within these thorny enclosures are filthy

beyond description, and poverty-stricken. And this is in a watered plain

which would bloom with all manner of fruits with the least care. Indeed,

there are a few tangled gardens of the rankest vegetation; in them

we see the orange, the fig, the deceptive pomegranate with its pink

blossoms, and the olive. As this is the time of pilgrimage, a company

of Turkish soldiers from Jerusalem is encamped at the village, and the

broken country about it is covered with tents, booths, shops, kitchens,

and presents the appearance of a fair and a camp-meeting combined. There

are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of pilgrims, who go every morning, as

long as they remain here, to dip in the Jordan. Near the village rises

the square tower of an old convent, probably, which is dignified with

the name of the "house of Zacchæus." This plain was once famed for its

fertility; it was covered with gardens and palm-groves; the precious

balsam, honey, and henna were produced here; the balsam gardens were the

royal gift of Antony to Cleopatra, who transferred the balsam-trees to

Heliopolis in Egypt.

 

As we ride away from Gilgal and come upon a more open and desert plain,

I encounter an eagle sitting on the top of a thorn-tree, not the noblest

of his species, but, for Palestine, a very fair eagle. Here is a chance

for the Syrian hunter; he is armed with gun and pistols; he has his

dogs; now, if ever, is the time for him to hunt, and I fall back and

point out his opportunity. He does not embrace it. It is an easy shot;

perhaps he is looking for wild boars; perhaps he is a tender-minded

hunter. At any rate, he makes no effort to take the eagle, and when I

ride forward the bird gracefully rises in the air, sweeping upward in

magnificent circles, now veering towards the Mount of Temptation, and

now towards Nebo, but always as serene as the air in which he floats.

 

And now occurs one of those incidents which are not rare to travellers

in Syria, but which are rare and scarcely believed elsewhere. As the

eagle hangs for a second motionless in the empyrean far before me, he

drops a feather. I see the gray plume glance in the sun and swirl slowly

down in the lucid air. In Judæa every object is as distinct as in a

photograph. You can see things at a distance you can make no one believe

at home. The eagle plume, detached from the noble bird, begins its

leisurely descent.

 

I see in a moment my opportunity. I might never have another. All

travellers in Syria whose books I have ever read have one or more

startling adventures. Usually it is with a horse. I do not remember any

with a horse and an eagle. I determine at once to have one. Glancing a

moment at the company behind me, and then fixing my eye on the falling

feather, I speak a word to my steed, and dart forward.

 

A word was enough. The noble animal seemed to comprehend the situation.

He was of the purest Arab breed; four legs, four white ankles, small

ears, slender pasterns, nostrils thin as tissue paper, and dilating upon

the fall of a leaf; an eye terrible in rage, but melting in affection;

a round barrel; gentle as a kitten, but spirited as a game-cock. His

mother was a Nedjed mare from Medina, who had been exchanged by a

Bedawee chief for nine beautiful Circassians, but only as a compromise

after a war by the Pasha of Egypt for her possession. Her father was

one of the most respectable horses in Yemen. Neither father, mother, nor

colt had ever eaten anything but selected dates.

 

At the word, Abdallah springs forward, bounding over the sand, skimming

over the thorn bushes, scattering the Jordan pilgrims right and left. He

does not seem to be so much a horse as a creation of the imagination,--a

Pegasus. At every leap we gain upon the feather, but it is still far

ahead of us, and swirling down, down, as the air takes the plume or the

weight of gravity acts upon the quill. Abdallah does not yet know the

object of our fearful pace, but his docility is such that every time

I speak to him he seems to shoot out of himself in sudden bursts of

enthusiasm. The terrible strain continues longer than I had supposed it

would, for I had undercalculated both the height at which the feather

was cast and my distance to the spot upon which it must fall. None but a

horse fed on dates could keep up the awful gait. We fly and the feather

falls; and it falls with increasing momentum. It is going, going to the

ground, and we are not there. At this instant, when I am in despair, the

feather twirls, and Abdallah suddenly casts his eye up and catches the

glint of it. The glance suffices to put him completely in possession of

the situation. He gives a low neigh of joy; I plunge both spurs into his

flanks about six or seven inches; he leaps into the air, and sails like

a bird,--of course only for a moment; but it is enough; I stretch out my

hand and catch the eagle's plume before it touches the ground. We light

on the other side of a clump of thorns, and Abdallah walks on as quietly

as if nothing had happened; he was not blown; not a hair of his glossy

coat was turned. I have the feather to show.

 

Pilgrims are plenty, returning from the river in a continuous

procession, in numbers rivalling the children of Israel when they first

camped at Gilgal. We descend into the river-bottom, wind through the

clumps of tangled bushes, and at length reach an open place where

the river for a few rods is visible. The ground is trampled like a

watering-spot for cattle; the bushes are not large enough to give shade;

there are no trees of size except one or two at the water's edge; the

banks are slimy, there seems to be no comfortable place to sit except on

your horse--on Jordan's stormy banks I _stand_ and cast a wistful eye;

the wistful eye encounters nothing agreeable.

 

The Jordan here resembles the Arkansas above Little Rock, says the

Doctor; I think it is about the size of the Concord where it flows

through the classic town of that name in Massachusetts; but it is much

swifter. Indeed, it is a rapid current, which would sweep away the

strongest swimmer. The opposite bank is steep, and composed of sandy

loam or marl. The hither bank is low, but slippery, and it is difficult

to dip up water from it. Close to the shore the water is shallow, and

a rope is stretched out for the protection of the bathers. This is the

Greek bathing-place, but we are too late to see the pilgrims enter the

stream; crowds of them are still here, cutting canes to carry away, and

filling their tin cans with the holy water. We taste the water, which

is very muddy, and find it warm but not unpleasant. We are glad that we

have decided to lunch at the Dead Sea, for a more uninviting place than

this could not he found; above and below this spot are thickets and

boggy ground. It is beneath the historical and religious dignity of the

occasion to speak of lunch, but all tourists know what importance it

assumes on such an excursion, and that their high reflections seldom

come to them on the historical spot. Indeed, one must be removed some

distance from the vulgar Jordan before he can glow at the thought of it.

In swiftness and volume it exceeds our expectations, but its beauty is

entirely a creation of the imagination.

 

We had the opportunity of seeing only a solitary pilgrim bathe. This was

a shock-headed Greek young man, who reluctantly ventured into the dirty

water up to his knees and stood there shivering, and whimpering over the

orders of the priest on the bank, who insisted upon his dipping. Perhaps

the boy lacked faith; perhaps it was his first experiment with water; at

any rate, he stood there until his spiritual father waded in and ducked

the blubbering and sputtering neophyte under. This was not a baptism,

but a meritorious bath. Some seedy fellahs from Gilgal sat on the bank

fishing. When I asked them if they had anything, they produced from the

corners of their gowns some Roman copper coins, picked up at Jericho,

and which they swore were dropped there by the Jews when they assaulted

the city with the rams'-horns. These idle fishermen caught now and

then a rather soft, light-colored perch, with large scales,--a

sickly-looking fish, which the Greeks, however, pronounced "tayeb."

 

We leave the river and ride for an hour and a half across a nearly level

plain, the earth of which shows salts here and there, dotted with a low,

fat-leaved plant, something like the American sage-bush. Wild-flowers

enliven the way, and although the country is not exactly cheerful, it

has no appearance of desolation except such as comes from lack of water.

 

The Dead Sea is the least dead of any sheet of water I know. When we

first arrived the waters were a lovely blue, which changed to green in

the shifting light, but they were always animated and sparkling. It has

a sloping sandy beach, strewn with pebbles, up which the waves come with

a pleasant murmur. The plain is hot; here we find à cool breeze. The

lovely plain of water stretches away to the south between blue and

purple ranges of mountains, which thrust occasionally bold promontories

into it, and add a charm to the perspective.

 

The sea is not inimical either to vegetable or animal life on its

borders. Before we reach it I hear bird-notes high in the air like the

song of a lark; birds are flitting about the shore and singing, and

gulls are wheeling over the water; a rabbit runs into his hole close by

the beach. Growing close to the shore is a high woody stonewort,

with abundance of fleshy leaves and thousands of blossoms, delicate

protruding stamens hanging over the waters of the sea itself. The plant

with the small yellow fruit, which we take to be that of the apples of

Sodom, also grows here. It is the _Solarium spinosa_, closely allied

to the potato, egg-plant, and tomato; it has a woody stem with sharp

recurved thorns, sometimes grows ten feet high, and is now covered with

round orange berries.