In a Syrian Saddle

by A. Goodrich-Freer

The Sportsmen carried guns, the Doctor a notebook—though he was more than suspected of yearning for a rifle,—the revolver which he carried at his belt being better adapted for the murder of man than of beast—not that the murder of man, to judge from the experiences of earlier travellers, was a wholly improbable contingency. Our road led us along almost the entire length of the north and east wall of Jerusalem; we then crossed the bridge over the Kedron valley—the brook, if any exist, is now far below the surface; we passed the Garden of Gethsemane, skirted the southern slope of the Mount of Olives, hastened past the filthy hovels of the little village of Bethany, crowned by the so-called Castle of Lazarus, probably the remains of a pre-crusading Benedictine convent, and finally, about seven o'clock, pulled up at what is known as the Inn of the Apostles' Fountain, just such a building as a child might draw upon a slate. As this is the only well between Bethany and Jericho it may be safely assumed that the apostles, coming up to Jerusalem, would drink here, though it is to be hoped that it was less contaminated than at present; for even the careless natives strain the water through a sieve before allowing their animals to drink, though, nevertheless, they still acquire leeches, as the bleeding mouths of the camels and donkeys one meets along the road frequently betray. The spot has been marked by a succession of buildings; a little white dome over the well, and some hewn stones and the ruins of an aqueduct in the hill across the road, being all that now remains of its old dignity.

Passing the Khan of the Good Samaritan—a modern inn and curiosity shop, at which you can, at your leisure, renew "a certain man's" experiences—we paused at the top of the last hill before descending towards the Jordan valley. Here the entire neighbourhood was once commanded by a strong mediæval castle, intended, like many all over the country, for the defence of the district. The tribal marks of the Bedu to be found on its walls are of extreme interest. The hill upon which it stands is known as Tel'at ed-Dam, the hill of blood, probably from the red colour of the rock, though some have sought to identify it, by reason of the sound of the name, with the Adummim of Joshua xv. 7.

The view from this point is, in certain details, absolutely unique. You look down at the lowest spot upon the earth's surface—the hollow of the Dead Sea, blue as the sky in the morning sunshine, flecked with cloudlike wavelets, beautiful, gay and smiling, but bitter, treacherous, and the home only of mystery and death. The water contains about twenty-five per cent. of solid substances; no organism higher than such microbes as the bacilli of tetanus can live in it; even swimming is almost impossible; neither shells nor coral testify to any happier past. The water boils at 221 degrees Fahrenheit, but the presence of chloride of magnesium makes it incredibly nauseous, while the oily quality, which it derives from chloride of calcium, makes any accidental splash upon the garments very destructive. We gratefully take in long breaths of air which, hot and dry as it is, are, we are well aware, more fresh and sweet than any we are likely to obtain during the next twenty-four hours, for only personal experience of the stifling heat of that unrivalled hollow can make it possible to realise that six and a half million tons of water which fall into the Dead Sea—a basin about the size of the Lake of Geneva, but with no outlet—have to be daily evaporated. Far away southward is the great salt district, where the salt deposit, coated with chalky limestone and clay, takes many weird forms, among which the Arabs point out Bint Shech Luth—the woman of Shech Lot.

"Of whose wickedness, even to this day, the waste land that smoketh is a testimony, and plants bearing fruit that never come to ripeness, and a standing pillar of salt is a monument of an unbelieving soul" (Wisdom x. 7).

"The waste land that smoketh" is a touch of autopic description which one remembers when, towards sunset, great wreaths of white mist lie low in the mountain hollows, as nowhere else in Judæa. Eastward, the horizon is bounded by the long chain of the mountains of Moab, which, ever since our arrival in the country, have seemed a sort of mysterious dreamland, a limit of knowledge, the gate of fairyland, the nightly stage of the great pageant gilded and painted by the sunset. How often have we longed, like the youngest brother of the fairy tale, to ride across the wide plain, and to wander forth for a year and a day into that dim Unknown! We could hardly realise that at last the time had come and we were stepping eastward.

Below us, in the great plain, a meandering green track shows where the banks of the Jordan are offering shade and refreshment. In the nearer foreground the scanty hovels and many hotels of modern Jericho lie, embowered in tropical vegetation, and we remember with an added interest that, within even the next day or two, we shall pass through districts of three distinct flora and fauna, and, leaving behind the oaks and pines, the familiar sparrows and starlings of our Jerusalem environment, we shall rest to-night among palms and bananas, we shall hear the cry of the jackal, and smell the tracks of the hyæna, and again, in a couple of days, find ourselves in desert surroundings, the nursery of the camel and home of the gazelle, with the scanty herbage and stalkless flora of an Alpine world.

Looking down upon the Jericho plain we note various points of interest. We distinguish the sites of three Jerichos.

First we notice, to the south, the kraal-like village of to-day, on the site of a castle and church of the Crusaders, afterwards a flourishing Moslem town, plundered by Egyptian soldiers in 1840, and subsequently destroyed by fire in 1871. It seems unlikely that it will ever recover its former position; for, apart from apparent absence of all ability for initiation on the part of the Arabs, the climate seems to have a degenerating effect upon the inhabitants, Even German perseverance, which has made habitable spots in the low maritime plains of Judæa where all other colonists had failed, could not suffice to render life here endurable, and an agricultural settlement organised within the last few years has literally died out. The Latins—or, as we say in England, the Roman Catholics—have also failed to establish themselves, and the Russian and Greek settlements find existence possible only under conditions of frequent change, and the stimulus of the profits to be made out of the thousands of Russian pilgrims who come, every year, at Epiphany, for baptism in the Jordan. Last year, however, the Jordan was held to have acquired so large a proportion of cholera bacilli on its way from Tiberias, where there was a great outbreak of disease, that approach was justly forbidden by the authorities. To the west lie the remains of the Jericho of Bible history, of which, from earliest childhood, most of us have had a mental picture—the great town enclosed by walls enwreathed with vegetation, "that ancient city of palm-trees," few of which still remain, though they were abundant as late as the seventh century; and in Jewish amulets, and marriage or divorce documents, which are commonly decorated with allegorical pictures, Jericho is still represented by a group of palms. South of the Israelitish town, and west of modern Jericho, are the remains of the Roman Jericho, which, it is interesting to remember, was presented by Anthony to Cleopatra, who, characteristically, promptly sold it to Herod for a winter home. He made of it a beautiful city, adorned with palms and gardens, and scented with the balsams for which it was long famous as an article of commerce, but which are no longer to be found in Syria, and where, in the time of Christ, the roadsides were shaded with sycamores—not the pseudo-platanus with which we are familiar, and which is not a sycomore at all, but the ficus sycomorus, the mulberry fig, which, often attaining the proportions of a handsome forest tree, still yields its wholesome and refreshing fruit among the humbler surroundings of to-day. The remains of a pool, five hundred and sixty-four feet long, part of an immense system of conduits still visible, which was the immediate cause of the fertility and beauty of the Roman Jericho, is said to indicate the whereabouts of Herod's palace.

The Jericho of crusading times was, probably, supplied with water from what is now locally known as the Ain es-Sultan (the Sultan's Spring), although its more suggestive name of Elijah's Fountain is still in use among the Christian population. Pilgrims of the fourth and fifth centuries record the tradition that it was here that the prophet healed the bitter water with salt. Salt is still thrown into a pool or cistern which, toward the end of the dry season, is found to be impregnated with noxious matter, animal or vegetable. As, before the time of the Roman water system, there was no other means of supply it is almost certain that the ancient town must have stood near this, the only natural spring, and the site of the house of Rahab, still shown, may quite well have been in the neighbourhood indicated.

Rising almost perpendicularly a short distance beyond the Fountain of Elijah, is the Quarantana Mountain, first so called by the Crusaders, in memory of the forty days of the Temptation, although it seems to have been held sacred from a much earlier period, as there are remains of many hermitages, one of which is said to have been occupied by S. Chariton about 400 A.D.