Life of Frances Power Cobbe, as told by herself / with additions by the author, and introduction by Blanche Atkinson

by Frances Power Cobbe

The rotted old oak stump.”

But the hermits of Mar Saba, how different are they from him who assoiled the Ancient Mariner? No holy cloisters of the woods, and sound of chanting brooks, and hymns of morning birds; only this silent, burning waste, this “desolation deified.” It seemed as if some frightful aberration of the religious sentiment could alone lead men to choose for home, temple, prison, tomb, the one spot of earth where no flower springs to tell of God’s tenderness, no soft dew or sweet sound ever falls to preach faith and love.

There are many such hermits still in the Greek Church. I have seen their eyries perched where only vultures should have their nests, on the cliffs of Caramania, and among the caverns of the Cyclades. Anthony and Stylites have indeed left behind them a track of evil glory, along which many a poor wretch still “crawls to heaven along the devil’s trail.” Are not lives wasted like these to be put into the account when we come to estimate the Gesta Christi? Must we not, looking on these and on the ten thousand, thousand hearts broken in monasteries and nunneries all over Europe, admit that historical Christianity has not only done good work in the world, but bad work also: and that, diverging widely from the Spirit of Christ, it has been far from uniformly beneficent?

It was while riding some hours from Mar Saba through the low hills before coming out on the blighted flats of the Dead Sea, that one of those pictures passed before me which are ever after hung up in the mind’s gallery among the choicest of the spoils of Eastern travel. By some chance I was alone, riding a few hundred yards in front of the caravan, when, turning the corner of a hill, I met a man approaching me, the only one I had seen for several hours since we passed a few black tents eight or ten miles away. He was a noble-looking young shepherd, dressed in the camel’s-hair robe, and with the lithesome, powerful limbs and elastic step of the children of the desert. But the interest which attached to him was the errand on which he had manifestly been engaged on those Dead Sea plains from whence he was returning. Round his neck, and with its little limbs held gently by his hand, lay a lamb he had rescued and was doubtless carrying home. The little creature lay as if perfectly contented and happy, and the man looked pleased as he strode along lightly with his burden; and as I saluted him with the usual gesture of pointing to heart and head and the “salaam alik!”, (Peace be with you), he responded with a smile and a kindly glance at the lamb, to which he saw my eyes were directed. It was actually the beautiful parable of the gospel acted out before my sight. Every particular was true to the story; the shepherd had doubtless left his “ninety-and-nine in the wilderness,” round the black tents we had seen so far away, and had sought for the lost lamb “till he found it,” where it must quickly have perished without his help, among those blighted plains. Literally, too, “when he had found it, he laid it on his shoulders, rejoicing.”

After this beautiful sight which I have longed ever since for a painter’s power to place on canvas (a better subject a thousand-fold than the cruel “Scape-Goat”), we reached the Dead Sea, and I managed to dip into it, after wading out a very long way in the shallow, bitter, biting water which stung my lips and nostrils, and tasted like a horrible mixture of quinine and salt. From the shore, all strewed with the white skeletons of trees washed down by the river, we made our way (mostly galloping) in four hours to the Ford of Jordan; and there I had the privilege of another dip, or rather of seven dips, taken in commemoration of Naaman and to wash off the Dead Sea brine! It is the spot supposed to have witnessed the transit of Joshua and the baptisms of St. John. The following night our tents were pitched among the ruins of Jericho. The wonder is, not that the once flourishing city should be deserted and Herod’s great amphitheatre there a ruinous heap, but that a town was ever built in such an insanitary place. Closed in by the mountains on every side from whence a fresh breeze could blow upon it, and open only to the unwholesome flats of the Dead Sea, the situation is pestilential.

Next day we rode back to Jerusalem through the desolate mountains of the Quarantania, where tradition places the mystic Fast and Temptation of Christ; a dreary, lonely, burning desert. Here, also, is the supposed scene of the parable of the Good Samaritan, and the ruins of a great building, which may have been a Half-way House Inn beside the road, bear out the tradition. I have often reflected that orthodox divines miss half the point of that beautiful story when they omit to mark the fact that the Samaritans were, in Christ’s time, boycotted by the Jews as heretics; and that it was precisely one of these heretics who was made by Jesus the type for all time of genuine philanthropy,—in direct and purposeful contrast to the representatives of Judaic orthodoxy, the Priest and Levite.

The sun on my head during the latter hours of the ride became intolerable; not like English heat, however excessive, but roasting my very brains through all the folds of linen on my hat and of a damp handkerchief within. It was like sitting before a kitchen fire with one’s head in the position proper for a leg of mutton! I felt it was a matter of life and death to escape, and galloped on by myself in advance for many miles till suddenly I came, just under Bethany at the base of the Mount of Olives, to a magnificent ancient fountain, with the cool water gushing out, amid the massive old masonry. In a moment I leaped from my equally eager horse, threw off my hat and bared my neck and put my head under the blessed stream. Of course it was a perilous proceeding, but it saved me from a sunstroke.

That evening in Jerusalem I wished good-bye to my pleasant fellow-travellers, who were good enough to pass a vote of thanks to me for my “unvarying pluck and hilarity during the fatigues and dangers of the way!” I started next day for the two days’ ride to Jaffa, accompanied only by a good Italian named Abengo, and a muleteer. There was a small war going on between some of the tribes on the way, and a certain chief named Aboo-Goosh (beneath whose robber’s castle I had been pelted with stones on my way up to Jerusalem) was scouring the country. We passed, in the valley of Ajalon, some wounded men borne home from a battle, but otherwise encountered nothing alarming, and I obtained a great deal of curious information from Abengo, who knew Palestine intimately, and whose wife was a Christian woman of Nazareth. There is no use in repeating now records of a state of things which has been modified, no doubt, essentially in thirty years.

From Jaffa I sailed to Beyrout, and there, with kind help and advice from the Consul, I obtained the services of an old Turk as a Dragoman, and he and I and a muleteer laden with my bed and baggage started to cross Lebanon and make our way to Baalbec and, as I hoped, also to Damascus. The snows were still thick on the higher slopes of Lebanon, and after the excessive heat I had just undergone in Syria, the cold was trying. But the beauty and grandeur of those noble mountains, fringed below with fig and olive, and with their snowy summits rising height beyond height above, was compensation for all hardship. By a curious chance, Lebanon was the first mountain range worthy of the name, which I had ever crossed. It was an introduction, of course, to a whole world of impressions and experiences.

I had a good many escapes in the course of my ride; there being nothing to be called a road over much of the way, and such path as there was being covered with snow or melting torrents. My strong little Syrian horse walked and scrambled and stumbled up beds of streams running down in cataracts over the rocks and boulders; and on one occasion he had to bear me down a very steep descent, where we floundered forward, sometimes up to his girths in the snow, in dread of descending with irresistible impetus to the edge of a precipice which yawned at the bottom. We did reach the verge in rather a shaky condition; but the good beast struggled hard to save himself, and turned at the critical moment safe along the edge.