Leaving Jerusalem after a week with the same pleasant English and American companions, and with a due provision of guards and tents and baggage mules, I rode to Bethlehem and Hebron, visiting on the way Abraham’s oak at Mamre, which is a magnificent old terebinth, and the vineyard of Esh-kol, then in a very poor condition of culture. We stopped the first night close to Solomon’s Pools, and I was profane enough to bring my sponges at earliest dawn into Jacob’s Well at the head of the waters, and enjoy a delicious bath. Ere we turned in on the previous evening, a clergyman of our party read to us, sitting under the walls of the old Saracenic castle, the pages in Stanley’s Palestine which describe, with all his vivid truthfulness and historic sentiment, the scene which lay before us; the three great ponds, “built by Solomon, repaired by Pontius Pilate,” which have supplied Jerusalem with water for 3,000 years.
I am much surprised that the problem offered by the contents of the vault beneath the Mosque of Hebron has not long ago excited the intensest curiosity among both Jews and Christians. Here, within small and definite limits, must lie evidence of incalculable weight in favour of or against the veracity of the Mosaic record. If the account in Gen. L. be correct, the bones of Jacob were brought out of Egypt and deposited here by Joseph; embalmed in the finest and most durable manner. We are expressly told (Gen. L., 2 and 3) that Joseph ordered the physicians to embalm his father, that “forty days were fulfilled for him, for so are fulfilled the days of those which are embalmed;” and that Joseph went up to Canaan with “all the servants of Pharaoh and the elders of his house, and all the elders of the land of Egypt,” (a rather amazing exodus!) and “chariots and horsemen, a very great company.” They finally buried Jacob (v. 13) “in the Cave of the field of Machpelah which Abraham bought.” It was unquestionably, then, a first-class Mummy, covered with wrappers and inscriptions, and enclosed, of course, in a splendidly-painted Mummy-coffin, which was deposited in that unique cave; and the extraordinary sanctity which has attached to the spot as far as tradition reaches back, affords presumption amounting almost to guarantee that there, if anywhere, below the six cenotaphs in the upper chamber, in the vault under the small hole in the floor where the Prince of Wales and Dean Stanley were privileged to look down into the darkness,—lie the relics which would terminate more controversies, and throw more light on the origin of Judaism than can be done by all the Rabbis and Bishops of Europe and Asia together! Why do not the Rothschilds and Hirschs and Montefiores and Goldschmidts put together a modest little subscription of a million or two and buy up Hebron, and so settle once for all whether the Jewish Ulysses were a myth or a man; and whether there were really an Israel of whom they are the “Children?” I have talked to Dean Stanley on the subject, who (as he tells us in his delightful Jewish Church, I., 500) shared all my curiosity, but when I urged the query: “Did he think that the relics of the Patriarchs would be found, if we could examine the cave?” he put up his hands in a deprecating attitude, which all who knew and loved him will remember, and said, “Ah! that is the question, indeed!”
Is it possible that the millionaire Jews of Germany, France and England are, after all, like my poor friends the Nuns, who would not get up at sunrise on Trinity Sunday to see “toutes les trois personnes de la sainte Trinité,”—and that they prefer to believe that the bones of the three Patriarchs are where they ought to be, but would rather not put that confidence to the test?
One of the sights which affected me most in the course of our pilgrimage through Judæa was beheld after a night spent by the ladies of our party in our tent pitched among the sands (and centipedes!) of the desert of the Mar Saba. (Our gentlemen-friends were privileged to sleep in the vast old monastery whence they brought us next morning the most excellent raki.) As we rode out of the little valley of our encampment and down by the convent of Mar Saba, we obtained a complete view of the whole hermit burrow; for such it may properly be considered. Mar Saba is the very ideal of a desert. It lies amid the wilderness of hills, not grand enough to be sublime but only monotonous and hopelessly barren. So white are these hills that at first they appear to be of chalk, but further inspection shows them to be of whitish rock, with hardly a trace of vegetation growing anywhere over it. On the hills there is sometimes an inch of soil over the rock; in the valleys there are torrents of stones over the inch of soil. Between our mid-day halt at Derbinerbeit (the highest land in Judæa), and the evening rest at Mar Saba, our whole march had been in utter solitude; not a village, a tent, a caravan, a human being in sight. Not a tree or bush. Of living creatures hardly a bird to break the dead silence of the world, only a large and venomous snake crawling beside our track. Thus, far from human haunts, in the heart of the wilderness, lies Mar Saba. Fit approach to such a shrine! Through the arid, burning rocks a profound and sharply-cut chasm suddenly opens and winds, forming a hideous valley, such as may exist in the unpeopled moon, but which probably has not its equal in our world for rugged and blasted desolation. There is no brook or stream in the depths of the ravine. If a torrent may ever rush down it after the thunderstorms with which the country is often visited, no traces of water remain even in early spring. Barren, burning, glaring rocks alone are to be seen on every side. Far up on the cliff, like a fortress, stand the gloomy, windowless walls of the convent; but along the ravine in an almost inaccessible gorge of the hills, are caves and holes half-way down the precipice,—the dwellings of the hermits. Here, in a den fit for a fox or a hyæna, one poor soul had died just before my visit, after five-and-forty years of self-incarceration. Death had released him, but many more remained; and we could see some of them from the distant road as we passed, sitting at the mouth of their caverns, or walking on the little ledges of rock which they had smoothed for terraces. Their food (such as it is) is sent from the convent and let down from the cliffs at needful intervals. Otherwise they live absolutely alone,—alone in this hideous desolation of nature, with the lurid, blasted desert for their sole share in God’s beautiful universe. We are all, I suppose, accustomed to think of a hermit as our poets have painted him, dwelling serene in
“A lodge in some vast wilderness,
Some boundless continuity of shade,”
undisturbed by all the ugly and jarring sights and sounds of our grinding civilization; sleeping calmly on his bed of fern, feeding on his pulse and cresses, and drinking the water from the brook.
“He kneels at morn at noon and eve,
He hath a cushion plump,
It is the moss that wholly hides