Palestine

by C. R. Conder

The Judean desert I surveyed with a very small party in the early spring of 1875. The Jericho plains we unfortunately visited too soon in December 1873. The Shephelah and the plain of Philistia were completed in the spring of 1875 without any difficulty, save a small part near Beersheba, which was finished in 1877. Beersheba itself was visited in the autumn of 1874. These regions were all more or less wild, and inhabited by nomadic Arabs, so that the adventures of the party were more numerous than when our work lay near the civilised centres and among the settled villagers. The four regions above mentioned may be briefly mentioned in order.

The Judean desert is without exception the wildest and most desolate district in Syria. It seems hardly possible that man or beast can find a living in such a land. Yet, as David found pasture for those “few poor sheep in the wilderness,” so do the desert Arabs find food for their goats among the rocks. It is none the less a desert indeed, riven by narrow ravines leading to deep gorges, and rising between the stony gullies into narrow ridges of dark brown limestone, capped with gleaming white chalk, full of cone-like hillocks and fantastic peaks. Here sitting on the edge of the great cliffs, which drop down a sheer height of some two thousand feet to the rock-strewn shore, gazing on the shining waters of that salt blue lake, watching the ibex herds scudding silently over the plateau, the tawny partridges running in the valley, hearing the clear note of the black grackle as it soars among the rocks where the hyrax (or coney) is hiding, I have felt the sense of true solitude such as is rarely known elsewhere. There is no stirring of the grass by the breeze, no rustling of leaves, no murmur of water, no sound of life save the grackle’s note or the jackal’s cry, re-echoed from the rocks. The sun beats down from a cloudless sky; the white glare of the chalk, the smooth face of the sea, are broad stretches of colour unbroken by variety, save where the tamarisk with its feathery leaves makes a dark line among the boulders of the torrent course. Here really out of the world the solitary hermits sate in the rocky cells which were their tombs; here in the awful prison of the Marsaba monastery men are still buried, as it were, alive, without future, without hope, without employment, with no comradeship save that of equally embittered lives. The chance traveller alone connects them with the world. The grackles, to whom, on the wing, they toss the dried currants, the jackals, who gather beneath the precipice for the daily dole of bread, these are almost the only living things they see. Many are monks disgraced by crime, and what wonder, too, that some are maniacs or idiots? Few sadder scenes can be witnessed than that of a mass sung in the chapel of Marsaba, where John of Damascus (once the minister of a Moslem Khalif) sleeps in the odour of sanctity.

I think it is General Gordon who has somewhere said that for a man to understand the world he should for a time leave the life of busy cities and think out his thoughts alone in the wilderness. Often have I thought that could the critic leave his comfortable study and dwell for a time in this desert of Judah, under the starry sky at night and the hot glare of the sun by day, in a land which men once thought to have been burned by fire, cursed, and sown with salt, and in the great stillness of a world almost without life, he would be able better to understand what Hebrew poets, prophets, and historians have written, and we should perhaps not see Solomon in the garb of a German Grand Duke, or Isaiah in the robes of an University Don.

The north part of this desert is inhabited by scattered groups of the Taamireh tribe, the southern part by the Jahalin Arabs. The Taamireh, or “cultivators,” are not true Arabs, but villagers who have taken to desert life. They wear turbans, and resemble the villagers in type more closely than the Bedu. The Jahalin, whose name means “those ignorant of the Moslem faith,” are a wild and degraded tribe, the poorer being almost naked, while the chiefs have an evil name. I went into this desert without either guide or interpreter, and the party depended throughout on such knowledge of Arabic as I possessed in communicating with natives. I was not then aware how exact are the border divisions between nomadic tribes, and was surprised to find the Taamireh chief one day very unwilling to follow me. As we returned home the reason became evident. We had crossed the boundary valley into Jahalin country, and a number of wild half-clad figures sprang up from behind the rocks on the hillside armed with ancient matchlocks. The Sheikh’s influence was enough to prevent their robbing me, but they guarded us for some distance to the border valley, only asking how soon I was going to cover the land with vineyards. They believe that the Franks control the rain, and that they once grew vines in the desert. It is perhaps a dim memory of the days when the Crusaders had sugar-mills at Engedi, on the shores of the Dead Sea, as mentioned in the chronicles of the twelfth century, of which mills the ruins are still to be seen.

At Engedi the Taamireh left us, and a few days later I rode with my scribe to the camp of the Jahalin, where we sat down and made ourselves guests of the chief. The Arabs were at first surly, but soon came to see that money was to be earned, and finally asked us to recommend their country to tourists. To those who choose to venture into this wild corner, there is an attraction in the wonderful fortress of Masada, on the shores of the Dead Sea, one of the most remarkable places in Palestine, and one which has been little visited.

Masada (now called Sebbeh) was the stronghold built by Herod the Great which held out against the Romans after the terrible destruction of Jerusalem by Titus in 70 A.D. A people less determined than the Romans might well have been content to leave the surviving Jewish zealots in so remote and inaccessible a fortress. But not so the Romans. After the death of Bassus the procurator, his successor, Flavius Silva, in the spring of 74 A.D., gathered his forces against this last refuge of the fanatical robbers called Sicarii or Zealots, who were enemies alike of Jews and Romans. The difficulty of the task was immense. Water had to be brought by Jewish captives from a distance of eleven miles: the nearest supplies of corn were twenty miles away; and only in spring could an army have endured the great heats in the valleys, 1200 feet below sea-level. The fortress is a lozenge-shaped plateau, with precipices 1500 feet high all round; walls and towers, now in ruins, surrounded it on all sides; and while on the east a narrow path called the “Serpent” wound up the cliffs, the only vulnerable point was on the west, where a chalky undercliff 1000 feet high lies against the rocky walls. Opposite this undercliff Silva placed his camp on a low hill, and round the fortress he drew a wall like that which Titus had built round Jerusalem, with small posts at intervals, and a second larger camp on the east. The Romans then piled a great mound 300 feet high on the top of the undercliff, and built a wall on the mound, from the top of which they fought in a siege-tower plated with iron, and battered the fortress wall with a ram.

The besieged were not in want of food or water. There were rain-water tanks, and corn was grown on the plateau. It is even said that the stores of wine, oil, pulse, and dates laid in by Herod a hundred years before were still edible, because of the dryness of the desert air. Within the ramparts was Herod’s old palace, towards the north-west part of the plateau, and until the walls fell to the battering-ram the courage of the Zealots was unabated. Even then they made an inner stockade of beams and earth, and still continued their fierce fight for freedom when this was in flames.

But when the dawn of the Passover came, the Romans put on their armour and shot out their bridges from the siege-tower, yet met with no resistance, and heard no sound save that of the flames in the burning palace: “A terrible solitude,” says Josephus, “on every side, with a fire in the place as well as perfect silence.” In the night 960 persons had been slain; first the women and children by their own husbands and fathers, then the men each by his neighbour. Only one old woman with five children hidden in a cavern had escaped.

Such was the wonderful history of the fortress which we explored and planned. From the plateau one looks down on the Roman wall which crosses the plain and runs up the hills to south and north. One can see Silva’s camp and the guard-towers almost as he left them 1800 years ago. The Roman mound, the wall upon it, the ruins of Herod’s palace and of the fortress walls, the towers on the cliff-side to the north, the empty tanks, the narrow “serpent” path, all attest the truth of Josephus’ account (VII. Wars, viii., ix.), and remain as silent witnesses of one of the most desperate struggles perhaps ever carried to success by Roman determination, and of one of the most fanatical resistances in history. On the east is the gleaming Sea of Salt; the dark precipices of Moab rise beyond, and the strong towers of Crusading Kerak. On all sides are brown precipices and tawny slopes of marl, torrent beds strewn with boulders, and utterly barren shores. There has been nothing to efface the evidence of the tragedy, nor was Masada ever again held as a fortress. Yet even here the hermits found their way, and built a little chapel from the stones of Herod’s house; while in a cave—perhaps the one in which the poor Jewish matron hid—I discovered on the dark walls a single word, Kuriakos, flanked by crosses and written in mediæval letters—evidence of some peaceful anchorite’s last rest among the ghosts of the Zealots.

The survey of this wilderness was completed in ten days, and the party, having no food for beast or man, were forced to march to Hebron in one of the great spring storms. Sleet and hail, a biting wind, and a rocky road made this one of our most toilsome journeys, and when, half frozen, we reached the fanatical town, we were greeted only with curses, and owed shelter, food, clothing, and fire to the hospitality of a Jewish family in the despised suburb to the north of the Haram.