Tent Work in Palestine: A Record of Discovery and Adventure

by C. R. Conder

The Scapegoat was led out on the Sabbath, and in order to evade the law of the Sabbath-day’s journey, a tabernacle was erected at every term of two thousand cubits, and became the domicile of the messenger, who, after eating bread and drinking water, was legally able to travel another stage. Ten such tabernacles were constructed between Sook and Jerusalem, and the distance was thus about six and a half English miles. The district was called Hidoodim, and the high mountain Sook. The first means “sharp,” the second “narrow,” both applying well to the knife-edged ridges of the desert. The distance brings us to the great hill of El Muntâr, and here, beside the ancient road from Jerusalem, is a well called Sûk, while in the name Hadeidûn, applied to part of the ridge, we recognise the Hebrew Hidoodim.

Here then, I think, we may fairly conclude is the Mountain of the Scapegoat. From this high ridge the unhappy victim was yearly rolled down into the narrow valley beneath, at the entrance of the great desert, which first unfolded itself before the eyes of the messenger as he gained the summit half a mile beyond the well of Sûk. Beside this well stood probably the tenth booth to which he returned after the deed, and where he sat until sundown, when he was permitted to return to Jerusalem.

From a very early period this horrible wilderness appears to have had an attraction for ascetics, who sought a retreat from the busy world of their fellow men, and who thought to please God by torturing the bodies which He had given them. Thus the Essenes, the Jewish sect whose habits and tenets resembled so closely those of the first Christians, retired into this wilderness and lived in caves. Christian hermits, from the earliest period, were also numerous in all the country between Jerusalem and Jericho, and the rocks are riddled with caves in inaccessible places where they lived. About 480 A.D., St. Saba and St. Euthymius followed the general custom, and established here, in the Fire Valley, the first nucleus of the present monastery.

The Mar Saba Laura clings to the side of a precipice some four hundred feet high, and is built against the cliff with huge flying buttresses to support the walls. The buildings are scarcely distinguishable in colour from the brown crags on which they stand. The deep crevice, which seems to have been rent in some great convulsion of nature, is bare and tawny like the rest of the country. The silence of the desert surrounds it, and only the shrill note of the golden grackle, or the howl of a jackal, breaks this solemn stillness. Not a tree or shrub is in sight, walls of white chalk and sharp ridges shut out the western breeze, and the sigh of the wind in the trees is a sound never heard in the solitude. The place seems dead. The convent and its valley have a fossilised appearance. Scarcely less dead and fossil are its wretched inmates, monks exiled for crimes or heresy, and placed in charge of a few poor lunatics.

Ladies are not admitted into the monastery, but we were provided with a letter to the Superior. A little iron door in a high yellow wall gives admission from the west, thence a long staircase leads down into a court before the chapel. The walls within are covered with frescoes, some old, some belonging to the time when the monastery was rebuilt, in 1840, by the Russian Government; Greek saints, hideous figures in black and grey dresses, with stoles on which the cross, and ladder and spear, are painted in white, stand out from gilded backgrounds. Against these ghosts of their predecessors the monks were ranged, in wooden stalls, or miserere benches with high arms, which supported their weary figures under the armpits. The old men stood, or rather drooped in their places, with pale sad faces, which spoke of ignorance and of hopelessness, and sometimes of vice and brutality; for the Greek monk is perhaps the most degraded representative of Christianity, and these were the worst of their kind. Robed in long sweeping gowns, with the cylindrical black felt cap on their heads, they looked more like dead bodies than living men, propped up against the quaint Byzantine background. One could fancy one’s self suddenly brought back to the dark ages of the fifth and sixth centuries, when art, and literature, and even human intellect seem to have sunk into a second childhood, and that these were the very men who had fought so obstinately for and against the Monophysite heresy, which St. Saba succeeded in putting down.

The floor of the church was unoccupied, and paved with marble; the transept was closed by the great screen, blazing with gold, and covered with dragons and arabesques, and gaudy pictures of saints and angels on wood. A smell of incense filled the church, and the nasal drawl of the officiating priest soon drove us away to the outer air. We next visited the dark cave covered with pictures, which, after the Greek fashion, were cased in silver, and gleamed in the darkness, and where, behind a grating, are the skulls of the martyrs of a former massacre. Next we went up and down, by winding stairs in the rock, on to the roof of the church to see the nawâkîs, or wooden beams, which are struck instead of bells, though bells are also hung in the belfry. The convent pets came about us, the beautiful black birds with orange wings, which live only in the Jordan Valley, and have been named “Tristram’s grackle,” after that well-known explorer. They have a beautifully clear note, the only pleasant sound ever heard in the solitude, and the monks have tamed them, so that they flock round them to catch raisins, which they pounce upon in mid air. In the valley below, the foxes and jackals also come for alms, the monks throwing down loaves for them.