In the Levant / Twenty Fifth Impression

by Charles Dudley Warner

There is in Bethlehem another ancient cave which is almost as famous as that of the Nativity; it is called the Milk Grotto, and during all ages of the Church a most marvellous virtue has attached to it; fragments of the stone have been, and still continue to be, broken off and sent into all Christian countries; women also make pilgrimages to it in faith. The grotto is on the edge of the town overlooking the eastern ravines, and is arranged as a show-place. In our walk thither a stately Bedawee, as by accident, fell into our company, and acted as our cicerone. He was desirous that we should know that he also was a man of the world and of travel, and rated at its proper value this little corner of the earth. He had served in the French army and taken part in many battles, and had been in Paris and seen the tomb of the great emperor,—ah, there was a man! As to this grotto, they say that the Virgin used to send to it for milk,—many think so. As for him, he was a soldier, and did not much give his mind to such things.

This grotto is an excavation in the chalky rock, and might be a very good place to store milk, but for the popular prejudice in cities against chalk and water. We entered it through the court of a private house, and the damsel who admitted us also assured us that the Virgin procured milk from it. The tradition is that the Virgin and Child were concealed here for a time before the flight into Egypt; and ever since then its stone has the miraculous power of increasing the flow of the maternal breast. The early fathers encouraged this and the like superstitions in the docile minds of their fair converts, and themselves testified to the efficacy of this remarkable stone. These superstitions belong rather to the Orient than to any form of religion. There is a famous spring at Assiout in Egypt which was for centuries much resorted to by ladies who desired offspring; and the Arabs on the Upper Nile to-day, who wish for an heir male, resort to a plant which grows in the remote desert, rare and difficult to find, the leaves of which are “good for boys.” This grotto scarcely repays the visit, except for the view one obtains of the wild country below it. When we bade good by to the courtly Arab, we had too much delicacy to offer money to such a gentleman and a soldier of the empire; a delicacy not shared by him, however, for he let no false modesty hinder a request for a little backsheesh for tobacco.

On our return, and at some distance from the gate, we diverged into a lane, and sought, in a rocky field, the traditional well whose waters David longed for when he was in the Cave of Adullam,—“O that one would give me drink of the water of the well of Bethlehem, which is by the gate!” Howbeit, when the three mighty men had broken through the Philistine guards and procured him the water, David would not drink that which was brought at such a sacrifice. Two very comely Bethlehem girls hastened at our approach to draw water from the well and gave us to drink, with all the freedom of Oriental hospitality, in which there is always an expectation of backsheesh. The water is at any rate very good, and there is no reason why these pretty girls should not turn an honest penny upon the strength of David's thirst, whether this be the well whose water he desired or not. We were only too thankful that no miraculous property is attributed to its waters. As we returned, we had the evening light upon the gray walls and towers of the city, and were able to invest it with something of its historical dignity.

The next excursion that we made from Jerusalem was so different from the one to Bethlehem, that by way of contrast I put them together. It was to the convent of Mar Saba, which lies in the wilderness towards the Dead Sea, about two hours and a half from the city.

In those good old days, when piety was measured by frugality in the use of the bath, when the holy fathers praised most those hermits who washed least, when it might perhaps be the boast of more than one virgin, devoted to the ascetic life, that she had lived fifty-eight years during which water had touched neither her hands, her face, her feet, nor any part of her body, Palestine was, after Egypt, the favorite resort of the fanatical, the unfortunate, and the lazy, who, gathered into communities, or dwelling in solitary caves, offered to the barbarian world a spectacle of superstition and abasement under the name of Christianity. But of the swarm of hermits and monks who begged in the cities and burrowed in the caves of the Holy Land in the fifth century, no one may perhaps be spoken of with more respect than St. Sabas, who, besides a reputation for sanctity, has left that of manliness and a virile ability, which his self-mortifications did not extirpate. And of all the monasteries of that period, that of Mar Saba is the only one in Judæa which has preserved almost unbroken the type of that time. St. Sabas was a Cappadocian who came to Palestine in search of a permanent retreat, savage enough to satisfy his austere soul. He found it in a cave in one of the wildest gorges in this most desolate of lands, a ravine which opens into the mountains from the brook Kidron. The fame of his zeal and piety attracted thousands to his neighborhood, so that at one time there were almost as many hermits roosting about in the rocks near him as there are inhabitants in the city of Jerusalem now. He was once enabled to lead an army of monks to that city and chastise the Monophysite heretics. His cave in the steep side of a rocky precipice became the nucleus of his convent, which grew around it and attached itself to the face of the rock as best it could. For the convent of Mar Saba is not a building, nor a collection of buildings, so much as it is a group of nests attached to the side of a precipice.

It was a bright Saturday afternoon that a young divinity student and I, taking the volatile Demetrius with us for interpreter, rode out of St. Stephen's gate, into Jehoshaphat, past the gray field of Jewish graves, down through Tophet and the wild ravine of the Kidron.

It is unpleasant to interrupt the prosperous start of a pilgrimage by a trifling incident, but at our first descent and the slightest tension on the bridle-reins of my horse, they parted from the bit. This accident, which might be serious in other lands, is of the sort that is anticipated here, and I may say assured, by the forethought of the owners of saddle-horses. Upon dismounting with as much haste as dignity, I discovered that the reins had been fastened to the bit by a single rotten string of cotton. Luckily the horse I rode was not an animal to take advantage of the weakness of his toggery. He was a Syrian horse, a light sorrel, and had no one of the good points of a horse except the name and general shape. His walk was slow and reluctant, his trot a high and non-progressive jolt, his gallop a large up-and-down agitation. To his bridle of strings and shreds no martingale was attached; no horse in Syria is subject to that restraint. When I pull the bit he sticks up his nose; when I switch him he kicks. When I hold him in, he won't go; when I let him loose, he goes on his nose. I dismount and look at him with curiosity; I wonder all the journey what his forte is, but I never discover. I conclude that he is like the emperor Honorius, whom Gibbon stigmatizes as “without passions, and consequently without talents.”

Yet he was not so bad as the roads, and perhaps no horse would do much better on these stony and broken foot-paths. This horse is not a model (for anything but a clothes-horse), but from my observation I think that great injustice has been done to Syrian horses by travellers, who have only themselves to blame for accidents which bring the horses into disrepute. Travellers are thrown from these steeds; it is a daily occurrence; we heard continually that somebody had a fall from his horse on his way to the Jordan, or to Mar Saba, or to Nablous, and was laid up, and it was always in consequence of a vicious brute. The fact is that excellent ministers of the gospel and doctors of divinity and students of the same, who have never in their lives been on the back of a horse in any other land, seem to think when they come here that the holy air of Palestine will transform them into accomplished horsemen; or perhaps they are emulous of Elisha, that they may go to heaven by means of a fiery steed.

For a while we had the company of the singing brook Kidron, flowing clear over the stones; then we left the ravine and wound over rocky steeps, which afforded us fine views of broken hills and interlacing ridges, and when we again reached the valley the brook had disappeared in the thirsty ground. The road is strewn, not paved, with stones, and in many places hardly practicable for horses. Occasionally we encountered flocks of goats and of long-wooled sheep feeding on the scant grass of the hills, and tended by boys in the coarse brown and striped garments of the country, which give a state-prison aspect to most of the inhabitants,—but there was no other life, and no trees offer relief to the hard landscape. But the way was now and then bright with flowers, thickly carpeted with scarlet anemones, the Star of Bethlehem, and tiny dandelions. Two hours from the city we passed several camps of Bedaween, their brown low camel's-hair tents pitched among the rocks and scarcely distinguishable in the sombre landscape. About the tents were grouped camels and donkeys, and from them issued and pursued us begging boys and girls. A lazy Bedawee appeared here and there with a long gun, and we could imagine that this gloomy region might be unsafe after nightfall; but no danger ever seems possible in such bright sunshine and under a sky so blue and friendly.

When a half-hour from the convent, we turned to the right from the road to the Dead Sea, and ascending a steep hill found ourselves riding along the edge of a deep winding gorge; a brook flows at the bottom, and its sides are sheer precipices of rock, generally parallel, but occasionally widening into amphitheatres of the most fantastic rocky formation. It is on one side of this narrow ravine that the convent is built, partly excavated in the rock, partly resting on jutting ledges, and partly hung out in the form of balconies,—buildings clinging to the steep side like a comb of wild bees or wasps to a rock.