Tent Work in Palestine: A Record of Discovery and Adventure

by C. R. Conder

And now at length we arrived at the top of the ascent, and spurring along under the stony knoll on which the little village of Kŭstŭl—an ancient “castellum” of the Roman conquerors—stands, we fully expected to see Jerusalem. Instead of this we saw before us a huge valley over 1000 feet deep, and beyond it a straight line of hills more lofty and barren than those before passed. We could well picture the disappointment, so graphically described by the old chronicler, of the weary hosts of women and children who toiled footsore and thirsty in rear of the Crusading army, faintly asking, as each height was passed and a new view opened, “Is that Jerusalem?” If to us, well mounted and well fed, the journey was wearisome, what was it to the pilgrims harassed by Saracen skirmishers, and afraid to stop and bury those who fell, lest, as one writer says, a man might be found to be but digging his own grave.

A stony winding road led down to the bottom, a stony winding ascent led up on the other side. Around us were mountains of strikingly wild and barren character, with the dark iron-grey rocks tinged in parts with black and russet and capped by a softer white chalk. The long blue shadows, the large rounded outlines, the hardness and ruggedness of the slopes, combined to produce a scene of wild grandeur more striking than anything yet met except the dark thickets of the Sôba ridge.

The valley beneath is full of grey olive-groves; the white torrent bed is sinuous and winds gradually round west. In the hollow, south of its course, the village of ’Ain Kârim stands on an eminence, and close to it the white convent wall, with its dark cypresses, marks the traditional birthplace of John the Baptist.

The valley is a place famous in Jewish history. It commences north of Jerusalem, and leads down past Lifta (Eleph) to a little village called Kolônia which was on the road beneath us. Thence by ’Ain Kârim southwards to join the Bether valley, and by Kesla it runs down to Zoreah and Eshtaol and widens out into the great corn valley of Sorek, and so past Ekron and Jamnia to the sea. Thus it was one of those passes by which the Philistines were able to penetrate into the heart of the Jewish mountains. It was down this valley that Samuel drove the defeated host from Mizpeh, north of Jerusalem, to Ebenezer, a place probably at the entrance of the hills. In their flight they passed under Bethcar, which is not impossibly the present ’Ain Kârim. Along the stony bed of this great valley at our feet, we may picture to ourselves the nomadic hosts with their mail-clad champions flying before the followers of the prophet, while far away on the white hills the tabernacle would be seen high on the ridge of Mizpeh.

The valley was also once the scene of more peaceful events at the yearly festival of “tabernacles.” Kolônia has near it a ruin called Beit Mizzeh, the ancient Motza or “Spring-head,” a town of Benjamin. The Talmudic doctors tell us that Motza was a colonia or place free from taxes, whence the origin of the modern name, and beside the banks of the stream from the spring-head grew, and still grow, the willows used at the feast. By the restaurant and the ruins of a small monastery, the stream flows under a little bridge; and round its course shady orange-gardens and olive-yards, beneath the village perched on the hillside, often tempt the inhabitants of Jerusalem to come out for an afternoon siesta. It would seem also that on the Day of Atonement this place used to be the scene of a festival so peculiar and so unlike any other part of Jewish custom that we are tempted to believe that it was an innovation of the later Hellenising faction. The daughters of Jerusalem were encouraged to come out to meet the youths who were celebrating the newly-acquired purification from sin, with palms in their hands and songs and dances. Twice a year this festival of maidens took place, and the contrast to the stern precepts of the Talmudic doctors, who discountenanced any gaiety in which women took part, forbade a student to speak to or look at any woman but his wife, and even counselled that the less he talked to her the better, is certainly suggestive of foreign origin for the feast of Motza.

Passing by this little oasis in the hills, which has thus from time immemorial been the site of festal excursions from the capital, we began the long ascent which led, not, as we hoped, to Jerusalem, but to the edge of the plateau on the opposite side of which the city stands. The road, afterwards so familiar to me, seemed longer when the distance was unknown than when every way-mark was recognised as showing nearer approach to the end of the journey; and we did not halt to admire, as I often did afterwards, the fine view from the brow of the hill.

From that brow the great valley is seen winding southwards, and the high rounded ascent to Kŭstŭl bars out the view of the plain. Northwards the conical point of Neby Samwîl, crowned with its minaret, is a conspicuous object, and in the evening when the long shadows steal up the rugged hillsides, and the western slopes are ruddy in the setting sun, the breadth and grandeur of the colouring of the wild shapeless mountains is extremely striking, and grows upon one every time the scene opens before one’s eyes.

The first approach to Jerusalem from the west is decidedly disappointing. From the east, north, and south, the aged walls, the mosque, and Holy Sepulchre, come into view at some distance, and the scene is striking; but from the west the city is approached within less than a quarter of a mile before it is seen. The first object is the huge Russian cathedral outside the town, built in 1864. The white walls and heavy leaden roofs in the Neobyzantine style block out ancient Jerusalem. Standing on the approximate site of the old tower of Psephinus, the Russian Hospice commands the whole town, and is thought by many to be in a position designedly of military strength.

When, however, these ugly modern buildings are passed, together with the many white stone villas, country residences of Europeans or rich Jews, which form “New Jerusalem,” the traveller at length comes in view of a long grey battlemented wall, a tower, the dark trees of the Armenian convent garden, and behind all the pale blue line of the Moab hills. He enters between groups of tawny, groaning camels, and black donkeys loaded with firewood, under a dark archway, and forcing a path through a noisy bright-coloured crowd of peasantry, under the shadow of the great Tower of David he alights at a German hotel within the walls of Jerusalem.