In the Levant / Twenty Fifth Impression

by Charles Dudley Warner

The road is thronged with Jordan pilgrims. We overtake them, they pass us, we meet them in an almost continuous train. Most of them are peasants from Armenia, from the borders of the Black Sea, from the Caucasus, from Abyssinia. The great mass are on foot, trudging wearily along with their bedding and provisions, the thick-legged women carrying the heaviest loads; occasionally you see a pilgrim asleep by the roadside, his pillow a stone. But the travellers are by no means all poor or unable to hire means of conveyance,—you would say that Judæa had been exhausted of its beasts of burden of all descriptions for this pilgrimage, and that even the skeletons had been exhumed to assist in it. The pilgrims are mounted on sorry donkeys, on wrecks of horses, on mules, sometimes an entire family on one animal. Now and then we encounter a “swell” outfit, a wealthy Russian well mounted on a richly caparisoned horse and attended by his servants; some ride in palanquins, some in chairs. We overtake an English party, the central figure of which is an elderly lady, who rides in a sort of high cupboard slung on poles, and borne by a mule before and a mule behind; the awkward vehicle sways and tilts backwards and forwards, and the good woman looks out of the window of her coop as if she were sea-sick of the world. Some ladies, who are unaccustomed to horses, have arm-chairs strapped upon the horses' backs, in which they sit. Now and then two chairs are strapped upon one horse, and the riders sit back to back. Sometimes huge panniers slung on the sides of the horse are used instead of chairs, the passengers riding securely in them without any danger of falling out. It is rather a pretty sight when each basket happens to be full of children. There is, indeed, no end to the strange outfits and the odd costumes. Nearly all the women who are mounted at all are perched upon the top of all their household goods and furniture, astride of a bed on the summit. There approaches a horse which seems to have a sofa on its back, upon which four persons are seated in a row, as much at ease as if at home; it is not, however, a sofa; four baskets have been ingeniously fastened into a frame, so that four persons can ride in them abreast. This is an admirable contrivance for the riders, much better than riding in a row lengthwise on the horse, when the one in front hides the view from those behind.

Diverted by this changing spectacle, we descend from Bethany. At first there are wild-flowers by the wayside and in the fields, and there is a flush of verdure on the hills, all of which disappears later. The sky is deep blue and cloudless, the air is exhilarating; it is a day for enjoyment, and everything and everybody we encounter are in a joyous mood, and on good terms with the world. The only unamiable exception is the horse with which I have been favored. He is a stocky little stallion, of good shape, but ignoble breed, and the devil—which is, I suppose, in the horse what the old Adam is in man—has never been cast out of him. At first I am in love with his pleasant gait and mincing ways, but I soon find that he has eccentricities that require the closest attention on my part, and leave me not a moment for the scenery or for biblical reflections. The beast is neither content to go in front of the caravan nor in the rear he wants society, but the instant he gets into the crowd he lets his heels fly right and left. After a few performances of this sort, and when he has nearly broken the leg of the Syrian, my company is not desired any more by any one. No one is willing to ride within speaking distance of me. This sort of horse may please the giddy and thoughtless, but he is not the animal for me. By the time we reach the fountain 'Ain el-Huad, I have quite enough of him, and exchange steeds with the dragoman, much against the latter's fancy; he keeps the brute the remainder of the day cantering over stones and waste places along the road, and confesses at night that his bridle-hand is so swollen as to be useless.

We descend a steep hill to this fountain, which flows from a broken Saracenic arch, and waters a valley that is altogether stony and unfertile except in some patches of green. It is a general halting-place for travellers, and presents a most animated appearance when we arrive. Horses, mules, and men are struggling together about the fountain to slake their thirst; but there is no trough nor any pool, and the only mode to get the water is to catch it in the mouth as it drizzles from the hole in the arch. It is difficult for a horse to do this, and the poor things are beside themselves with thirst. Near by are some stone ruins in which a man and woman have set up a damp coffee-shop, sherbet-shop, and smoking station. From them I borrow a shallow dish, and succeed in getting water for my horse, an experiment which seems to surprise all nations. The shop is an open stone shed with a dirt floor, offering only stools to the customers; yet when the motley crowd are seated in and around it, sipping coffee and smoking the narghilehs (water-pipes) with an air of leisure as if to-day would last forever, you have a scene of Oriental luxury.

Our way lies down a winding ravine. The country is exceedingly rough, like the Wyoming hills, but without trees or verdure. The bed of the stream is a mass of rock in shelving ledges; all the rock in sight is a calcareous limestone. After an hour of this sort of secluded travel we ascend again and reach the Red Khan, and a scene still more desolate because more extensive. The khan takes its name from the color of the rocks; perched upon a high ledge are the ruins of this ancient caravansary, little more now than naked walls. We take shelter for lunch in a natural rock grotto opposite, exactly the shadow of a rock longed for in a weary land. Here we spread our gay rugs, the servants unpack the provision hampers, and we sit and enjoy the wide view of barrenness and the picturesque groups of pilgrims. The spot is famous for its excellent well of water. It is, besides, the locality usually chosen for the scene of the adventure of the man who went down to Jericho and fell among thieves, this being the khan at which he was entertained for twopence. We take our siesta here, reflecting upon the great advance in hotel prices, and endeavoring to re-create something of that past when this was the highway between great Jerusalem and the teeming plain of the Jordan. The Syro-Phoenician woman smoked a narghileh, and, looking neither into the past nor the future, seemed to enjoy the present.

From this elevation we see again the brown Jordan Valley and the Dead Sea. Our road is downward more precipitously than it has been before. The rocks are tossed about tumultuously, and the hills are rent, but there is no evidence of any volcanic action. Some of the rock strata are bent, as you see the granite in the White Mountains, but this peculiarity disappears as we approach nearer to the Jordan. The translator of M. François Lenormant's “Ancient History of the East” says that “the miracles which accompanied the entrance of the Israelites into Palestine seem such as might have been produced by volcanic agency.” No doubt they might have been; but this whole region is absolutely without any appearance of volcanic disturbance.

As we go on, we have on our left the most remarkable ravine in Palestine; it is in fact a canon in the rocks, some five hundred feet deep, the sides of which are nearly perpendicular. At the bottom of it flows the brook Cherith, finding its way out into the Jordan plain. We ride to the brink and look over into the abyss. It was about two thousand seven hundred and eighty-nine years ago, and probably about this time of the year (for the brook went dry shortly after), that Elijah, having incurred the hostility of Ahab, who held his luxurious court at Samaria, by prophesying against him, came over from Gilead and hid himself in this ravine.

“Down there,” explains Abd-el-Atti, “the prophet Elijah fed him the ravens forty days. Not have that kind of ravens now.”

Unattractive as this abyss is for any but a temporary summer residence, the example of Elijah recommended it to a great number of people in a succeeding age. In the wall of the precipice are cut grottos, some of them so high above the bed of the stream that they are apparently inaccessible, and not unlike the tombs in the high cliffs along the Nile. In the fourth and fifth centuries monks swarmed in all the desert places of Egypt and Syria like rabbits; these holes, near the scene of Elijah's miraculous support, were the abodes of Christian hermits, most of whom starved themselves down to mere skin and bones waiting for the advent of the crows. On the ledge above are the ruins of ancient chapels, which would seem to show that this was a place of some resort, and that the hermits had spectators of their self-denial. You might as well be a woodchuck and sit in a hole as a monk, unless somebody comes and looks at you.

As we advance, the Jordan valley opens more broadly upon our sight. At this point, which is the historical point, the scene of the passage of the Jordan and the first appearance of the Israelitish clans in the Promised Land, the valley is ten miles broad. It is by no means a level plain; from the west range of mountains it slopes to the river, and the surface is broken by hillocks, ravines, and water-courses. The breadth is equal to that between the Connecticut River at Hartford and the Talcott range of hills. To the north we have in view the valley almost to the Sea of Galilee, and can see the white and round summit of Hermon beyond; on the east and on the west the barren mountains stretch in level lines; and on the south the blue waters of the Dead Sea continue the valley between ranges of purple and poetic rocky cliffs.

The view is magnificent in extent, and plain and hills glow with color in this afternoon light. Yonder, near the foot of the eastern hills, we trace the winding course of the Jordan by a green belt of trees and bushes. The river we cannot see, for the “bottom” of the river, to use a Western phrase, from six hundred to fifteen hundred feet in breadth, is sunk below the valley a hundred feet and more. This bottom is periodically overflowed. The general aspect of the plain is that of a brown desert, the wild vegetation of which is crisped by the scorching sun. There are, however, threads of verdure in it, where the brook Cherith and the waters from the fountain 'Ain es-Sultan wander through the neglected plain, and these strips of green widen into the thickets about the little village of Rîha, the site of ancient Gilgal. This valley is naturally fertile; it may very likely have been a Paradise of fruit-trees and grass and sparkling water when the Jews looked down upon it from the mountains of Moab; it certainly bloomed in the Roman occupation; and the ruins of sugar-mills still existing show that the crusading Christians made the cultivation of the sugar-cane successful here; it needs now only the waters of the Jordan and the streams from the western foot-hills directed by irrigating ditches over its surface, moistening its ashy and nitrous soil, to become again a fair and smiling land.