In The Levant 5

In The Levant 5

"That is where John Baptist was born."

 

The information is sudden and seems improbable, especially as there are

other places where he was born.

 

"How do you know?" we ask.

 

"O, I know _ganz wohl_; I been five years in dis land, and I ought to

know."

 

Descending into a deep ravine we cross a brook, which we are told is the

one that flows into the Valley of Elah, the valley of the "terebinth"

or button trees; and if so, it is the brook out of which David took the

stone that killed Goliath. It is a bright, dashing stream. I stood upon

the bridge, watching it dancing down the ravine, and should have none

but agreeable recollections of it, but that close to the bridge stood a

vile grog-shop, and in the doorway sat the most villanous-looking man

I ever saw in Judæa, rapacity and murder in his eyes. The present

generation have much more to fear from him and his drugged liquors than

the Israelite had from the giant of Gath.

 

While the wagon zigzags up the last long hill, I mount by a short path

and come upon a rocky plateau, across which runs a broad way, on the

bed rock, worn smooth by many centuries of travel: by the passing

of caravans and armies to Jerusalem, of innumerable generations of

peasants, of chariots, of horses, mules, and foot-soldiers; here went

the messengers of the king's pleasure, and here came the heralds and

legates of foreign nations; this great highway the kings and prophets

themselves must have trodden when they journeyed towards the sea; for Ï

cannot learn that the Jews ever had any decent roads, and perhaps

they never attained the civilization necessary to build them. We have

certainly seen no traces of anything like a practicable ancient highway

on this route.

 

Indeed, the greatest wonder to me in the whole East is that there has

not been a good road built from Jaffa to Jerusalem; that the city

sacred to more than half the world, to all the most powerful nations, to

Moslems, Jews, Greeks, Roman Catholics, Protestants, the desire of all

lands, and the object of pilgrimage with the delicate and the feeble as

well as the strong, should not have a highway to it over which one can

ride without being jarred and stunned and pounded to a jelly; that the

Jews should never have made a road to their seaport; that the Romans,

the road-builders, do not seem to have constructed one over this

important route. The Sultan began this one over which we have been

dragged, for the Empress Eugenie. But he did not finish it; most of the

way it is a mere rubble of stones. The track is well engineered, and

the road bed is well enough; soft stone is at hand to form an excellent

dressing, and it might be, in a short time, as good a highway as any in

Switzerland, if the Sultan would set some of his lazy subjects to work

out their taxes on it. Of course, it is now a great improvement over

the old path for mules; but as a carriage road it is atrocious. Imagine

thirty-six miles of cobble pavement, with every other stone gone and the

remainder sharpened!

 

Perhaps, however, it is best not to have a decent road to the Holy City

of the world. It would make going there easy, even for delicate ladies

and invalid clergymen; it would reduce the cost of the trip from Jaffa

by two thirds; it would take away employment from a lot of vagabonds

who harry the traveller over the route; it would make the pilgrimage

too much a luxury, in these days of pilgrimages by rail, and of little

faith, or rather of a sort of lacquer of faith which is only credulity.

 

Upon this plateau we begin to discern signs of the neighborhood of the

city, and we press forward with the utmost eagerness, disappointed at

every turn that a sight of it is not disclosed. Scattered settlements

extend for some distance out on the Jaffa road. We pass a school which

the Germans have established for Arab boys; an institution which does

not meet the approval of our restoration driver; the boys, when they

come out, he says, don't know what they are; they are neither Moslems

nor Christians. We go rapidly on over the swelling hill, but the city

will not reveal itself. We expect it any moment to rise up before us,

conspicuous on its ancient hills, its walls shining in the sun.

 

We pass a guard-house, some towers, and newly built private residences.

Our pulses are beating a hundred to the minute, but the city refuses to

"burst" upon us as it does upon other travellers. We have advanced far

enough to see that there is no elevation before us higher than that we

are on. The great sight of all our lives is only a moment separated

from us; in a few rods more our hearts will be satisfied by that

long-dreamed-of prospect. How many millions of pilgrims have hurried

along this road, lifting up their eyes in impatience for the vision!

But it does not come suddenly. We have already seen it, when the driver

stops, points with his whip, and cries,--

 

"Jerusalem!"

 

"What, _that?_"

 

We are above it and nearly upon it. What we see is chiefly this: the

domes and long buildings of the Russian Hospice, on higher ground than

the city and concealing a good part of it; a large number of new houses,

built of limestone prettily streaked with the red oxyde of iron; the

roofs of a few of the city houses, and a little portion of the wall that

overlooks the Valley of Hinnom. The remainder of the city of David is

visible to the imagination.

 

The suburb through which we pass cannot be called pleasing. Everything

outside the walls looks new and naked; the whitish glare of the stone is

relieved by little vegetation, and the effect is that of barrenness. As

we drive down along the wall of the Russian convent, we begin to meet

pilgrims and strangers, with whom the city overflows at this season;

many Russian peasants, unkempt, unsavory fellows, with long hair and

dirty apparel, but most of them wearing a pelisse trimmed with fur and a

huge fur hat. There are coffee-houses and all sorts of cheap booths

and shanty shops along the highway. The crowd is motley and far from

pleasant; it is sordid, grimy, hard, very different from the more

homogeneous, easy, flowing, graceful, and picturesque assemblage of

vagabonds at the gate of an Egyptian town. There are Russians, Cossacks,

Georgians, Jews, Armenians, Syrians. The northern dirt and squalor and

fanaticism do not come gracefully into the Orient. Besides, the rabble

is importunate and impudent.

 

We enter by the Jaffa and Hebron gate, a big square tower, with the

exterior entrance to the north and the interior to the east, and the

short turn is choked with camels and horses and a clamorous crowd.

Beside it stands the ruinous citadel of Saladin and the Tower of David,

a noble entrance to a mean street. Through the rush of footmen and

horsemen, beggars, venders of olive-wood, Moslems, Jews, and Greeks,

we make our way to the Mediterranean Hotel, a rambling new hostelry. In

passing to our rooms we pause a moment upon an open balcony to look down

into the green Pool of Hezekiah, and off over the roofs to the Mount of

Olives. Having secured our rooms, I hasten along narrow and abominably

cobbled streets, mere ditches of stone, lined with mean shops, to the

Centre of the Earth, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

 

 

 

 

II.--JERUSALEM.

 

|IT was in obedience to a natural but probably mistaken impulse, that I

went straight to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre during my first hour

in the city. Perhaps it was a mistake to go there at all; certainly I

should have waited until I had become more accustomed to holy places.

When a person enters this memorable church, as I did, expecting to see

only two sacred sites, and is brought immediately face to face with

_thirty-seven_, his mind is staggered, and his credulity becomes so

enfeebled that it is practically useless to him thereafter in any part

of the Holy City. And this is a pity, for it is so much easier and

sweeter to believe than to doubt.

 

It would have been better, also, to have visited Jerusalem many

years ago; then there were fewer sacred sites invented, and scholarly

investigation had not so sharply questioned the authenticity of the

few. But I thought of none of these things as I stumbled along the

narrow and filthy streets, which are stony channels of mud and water,

rather than foot-paths, and peeped into the dirty little shops that line

the way. I thought only that I was in Jerusalem; and it was impossible,

at first, for its near appearance to empty the name of its tremendous

associations, or to drive out the image of that holy city, "conjubilant

with song."

 

I had seen the dome of the church from the hotel balcony; the building

itself is so hemmed in by houses that only its south side, in which

is the sole entrance, can be seen from the street. In front of this

entrance is a small square; the descent to this square is by a flight

of steps down Palmer Street, a lane given up to the traffic in beads,

olive-wood, ivory-carving, and the thousand trinkets, most of them cheap

and inartistic, which absorb the industry of the Holy City. The little

square itself, surrounded by ancient buildings on three sides and by

the blackened walls of the church on the north, might be set down in a

mediæval Italian town without incongruity. And at the hour I first saw

it, you would have said that a market or fair was in progress there.

This, however, I found was its normal condition. It is always occupied

by a horde of more clamorous and impudent merchants than you will find

in any other place in the Orient.

 

It is with some difficulty that the pilgrim can get through the throng

and approach the portal. The pavement is covered with heaps of beads,

shells, and every species of holy fancy-work, by which are seated the

traders, men and women, in wait for customers. The moment I stopped to

look at the church, and it was discovered that I was a new-comer, a

rush was made at me from every part of the square, and I was at once the

centre of the most eager and hungry crowd. Sharp-faced Greeks, impudent

Jews, fair-faced women from Bethlehem, sleek Armenians, thrust strings

of rude olive beads and crosses into my face, forced upon my notice

trumpery carving in ivory, in nuts, in seeds, and screamed prices and

entreaties in chorus, bidding against each other and holding fast to me,

as if I were the last man, and this were the last opportunity they would

ever have of getting rid of their rubbish. Handfuls of beads rapidly

fell from five francs to half a franc, and the dealers insisted upon

my buying, with a threatening air; I remember one hard-featured and

rapacious wretch who danced about and clung to me, and looked into my

eyes with an __EXPRESSION__ that said plainly, "If you don't buy these beads

I 'll murder you." My recollection is that I bought, for I never can

resist a persuasion of this sort. Whenever I saw the fellow in the

square afterwards, I always fancied that he regarded me with a sort of

contempt, but he made no further attempt on my life.