In The Levant 23

In The Levant 23

We passed, groping our way along in this religious cellar, through a

winding, narrow passage in the rock, some twenty-five feet long, and

came into the place of places, the very Chapel of the Nativity. In this

low vault, thirty-eight feet long and eleven feet wide, hewn in

the rock, is an altar at one end. Before this altar--and we can see

everything with distinctness, for sixteen silver lamps are burning about

it--there is a marble slab in the pavement into which is let a silver

star, with this sentence round it: _Hic de Virgine Maria Jesus Christus

natus est_. The guardian of this sacred spot was a Turkish soldier, who

stood there with his gun and fixed bayonet, an attitude which experience

has taught him is necessary to keep the peace among the Christians who

meet here. The altar is without furniture, and is draped by each sect

which uses it in turn. Near by is the chapel of the "manger," but the

manger in which Christ was laid is in the church of Santa Maria Maggiore

in Rome.

 

There is in Bethlehem another ancient cave which is almost as famous as

that of the Nativity; it is called the Milk Grotto, and during all ages

of the Church a most marvellous virtue has attached to it; fragments of

the stone have been, and still continue to be, broken off and sent into

all Christian countries; women also make pilgrimages to it in faith. The

grotto is on the edge of the town overlooking the eastern ravines, and

is arranged as a show-place. In our walk thither a stately Bedawee, as

by accident, fell into our company, and acted as our cicerone. He was

desirous that we should know that he also was a man of the world and of

travel, and rated at its proper value this little corner of the earth.

He had served in the French army and taken part in many battles, and had

been in Paris and seen the tomb of the great emperor,--ah, there was a

man! As to this grotto, they say that the Virgin used to send to it for

milk,--many think so. As for him, he was a soldier, and did not much

give his mind to such things.

 

This grotto is an excavation in the chalky rock, and might be a very

good place to store milk, but for the popular prejudice in cities

against chalk and water. We entered it through the court of a private

house, and the damsel who admitted us also assured us that the Virgin

procured milk from it. The tradition is that the Virgin and Child were

concealed here for a time before the flight into Egypt; and ever since

then its stone has the miraculous power of increasing the flow of

the maternal breast. The early fathers encouraged this and the like

superstitions in the docile minds of their fair converts, and themselves

testified to the efficacy of this remarkable stone. These superstitions

belong rather to the Orient than to any form of religion. There is a

famous spring at Assiout in Egypt which was for centuries much resorted

to by ladies who desired offspring; and the Arabs on the Upper Nile

to-day, who wish for an heir male, resort to a plant which grows in the

remote desert, rare and difficult to find, the leaves of which are "good

for boys." This grotto scarcely repays the visit, except for the view

one obtains of the wild country below it. When we bade good by to

the courtly Arab, we had too much delicacy to offer money to such a

gentleman and a soldier of the empire; a delicacy not shared by him,

however, for he let no false modesty hinder a request for a little

backsheesh for tobacco.

 

On our return, and at some distance from the gate, we diverged into a

lane, and sought, in a rocky field, the traditional well whose waters

David longed for when he was in the Cave of Adullam,--"O that one would

give me drink of the water of the well of Bethlehem, which is by

the gate!" Howbeit, when the three mighty men had broken through the

Philistine guards and procured him the water, David would not drink that

which was brought at such a sacrifice. Two very comely Bethlehem girls

hastened at our approach to draw water from the well and gave us to

drink, with all the freedom of Oriental hospitality, in which there is

always an expectation of backsheesh. The water is at any rate very good,

and there is no reason why these pretty girls should not turn an honest

penny upon the strength of David's thirst, whether this be the well

whose water he desired or not. We were only too thankful that no

miraculous property is attributed to its waters. As we returned, we had

the evening light upon the gray walls and towers of the city, and were

able to invest it with something of its historical dignity.

 

The next excursion that we made from Jerusalem was so different from the

one to Bethlehem, that by way of contrast I put them together. It was to

the convent of Mar Saba, which lies in the wilderness towards the Dead

Sea, about two hours and a half from the city.

 

In those good old days, when piety was measured by frugality in the use

of the bath, when the holy fathers praised most those hermits who washed

least, when it might perhaps be the boast of more than one virgin,

devoted to the ascetic life, that she had lived fifty-eight years during

which water had touched neither her hands, her face, her feet, nor any

part of her body, Palestine was, after Egypt, the favorite resort of

the fanatical, the unfortunate, and the lazy, who, gathered into

communities, or dwelling in solitary caves, offered to the barbarian

world a spectacle of superstition and abasement under the name of

Christianity. But of the swarm of hermits and monks who begged in the

cities and burrowed in the caves of the Holy Land in the fifth century,

no one may perhaps be spoken of with more respect than St. Sabas, who,

besides a reputation for sanctity, has left that of manliness and a

virile ability, which his self-mortifications did not extirpate. And of

all the monasteries of that period, that of Mar Saba is the only one

in Judæa which has preserved almost unbroken the type of that time. St.

Sabas was a Cappadocian who came to Palestine in search of a permanent

retreat, savage enough to satisfy his austere soul. He found it in a

cave in one of the wildest gorges in this most desolate of lands, a

ravine which opens into the mountains from the brook Kidron. The fame of

his zeal and piety attracted thousands to his neighborhood, so that at

one time there were almost as many hermits roosting about in the rocks

near him as there are inhabitants in the city of Jerusalem now. He was

once enabled to lead an army of monks to that city and chastise the

Monophysite heretics. His cave in the steep side of a rocky precipice

became the nucleus of his convent, which grew around it and attached

itself to the face of the rock as best it could. For the convent of Mar

Saba is not a building, nor a collection of buildings, so much as it is

a group of nests attached to the side of a precipice.

 

It was a bright Saturday afternoon that a young divinity student and I,

taking the volatile Demetrius with us for interpreter, rode out of St.

Stephen's gate, into Jehoshaphat, past the gray field of Jewish graves,

down through Tophet and the wild ravine of the Kidron.

 

It is unpleasant to interrupt the prosperous start of a pilgrimage by a

trifling incident, but at our first descent and the slightest tension on

the bridle-reins of my horse, they parted from the bit. This accident,

which might be serious in other lands, is of the sort that is

anticipated here, and I may say assured, by the forethought of the

owners of saddle-horses. Upon dismounting with as much haste as dignity,

I discovered that the reins had been fastened to the bit by a single

rotten string of cotton. Luckily the horse I rode was not an animal to

take advantage of the weakness of his toggery. He was a Syrian horse,

a light sorrel, and had no one of the good points of a horse except the

name and general shape. His walk was slow and reluctant, his trot a high

and non-progressive jolt, his gallop a large up-and-down agitation. To

his bridle of strings and shreds no martingale was attached; no horse in

Syria is subject to that restraint. When I pull the bit he sticks up his

nose; when I switch him he kicks. When I hold him in, he won't go; when

I let him loose, he goes on his nose. I dismount and look at him with

curiosity; I wonder all the journey what his _forte_ is, but I never

discover. I conclude that he is like the emperor Honorius, whom Gibbon

stigmatizes as "without passions, and consequently without talents."

 

Yet he was not so bad as the roads, and perhaps no horse would do much

better on these stony and broken foot-paths. This horse is not a model

(for anything but a clothes-horse), but from my observation I think that

great injustice has been done to Syrian horses by travellers, who have

only themselves to blame for accidents which bring the horses into

disrepute. Travellers are thrown from these steeds; it is a daily

occurrence; we heard continually that somebody had a fall from his horse

on his way to the Jordan, or to Mar Saba, or to Nablous, and was laid

up, and it was always in consequence of a vicious brute. The fact is

that excellent ministers of the gospel and doctors of divinity and

students of the same, who have never in their lives been on the back of

a horse in any other land, seem to think when they come here that the

holy air of Palestine will transform them into accomplished horsemen; or

perhaps they are emulous of Elisha, that they may go to heaven by means

of a fiery steed.

 

For a while we had the company of the singing brook Kidron, flowing

clear over the stones; then we left the ravine and wound over rocky

steeps, which afforded us fine views of broken hills and interlacing

ridges, and when we again reached the valley the brook had disappeared

in the thirsty ground. The road is strewn, not paved, with stones,

and in many places hardly practicable for horses. Occasionally we

encountered flocks of goats and of long-wooled sheep feeding on the

scant grass of the hills, and tended by boys in the coarse brown and

striped garments of the country, which give a state-prison aspect to

most of the inhabitants,--but there was no other life, and no trees

offer relief to the hard landscape. But the way was now and then bright

with flowers, thickly carpeted with scarlet anemones, the Star of

Bethlehem, and tiny dandelions. Two hours from the city we passed

several camps of Bedaween, their brown low camel's-hair tents pitched

among the rocks and scarcely distinguishable in the sombre landscape.

About the tents were grouped camels and donkeys, and from them issued

and pursued us begging boys and girls. A lazy Bedawee appeared here

and there with a long gun, and we could imagine that this gloomy region

might be unsafe after nightfall; but no danger ever seems possible in

such bright sunshine and under a sky so blue and friendly.

 

When a half-hour from the convent, we turned to the right from the road

to the Dead Sea, and ascending a steep hill found ourselves riding along

the edge of a deep winding gorge; a brook flows at the bottom, and its

sides are sheer precipices of rock, generally parallel, but occasionally

widening into amphitheatres of the most fantastic rocky formation. It

is on one side of this narrow ravine that the convent is built, partly

excavated in the rock, partly resting on jutting ledges, and partly hung

out in the form of balconies,--buildings clinging to the steep side like

a comb of wild bees or wasps to a rock.

 

Our first note of approach to it was the sight of a square tower and

of the roofs of buildings below us. Descending from the road by several

short turns, and finally by two steep paved inclines, we came to a lofty

wall in which is a small iron door. As we could go no farther without

aid from within, Demetrius shouted, and soon we had a response from a