Take a seat with me this morning in the railroad car which is just about leaving the seaport of Jaffa to go to Jerusalem. The distance by rail is only fifty-four miles, but it will take us more than four hours. Crossing the rich plains of Sharon, the road winds its way up the hills of Judea until it brings us to the Holy City, about twenty-five hundred feet above the sea.
The cars are comfortable, but we have had to fight with the tourists and pilgrims for our seats near the windows. A German and a Greek on the opposite side of the coach are still quarrelling for places, using language not that of brotherly love. The German has just called the Greek a swine, while the Greek has retaliated by simply calling the German a dog. But now they are quiet and we can enjoy the scenery as we go on.
Leaving Jaffa we ride for some miles through orchards. There are orange groves loaded with blossoms and fruit. There are orchards of olives, pomegranates, and figs, and many gardens surrounded by cactus hedges twice as high as our heads. Next we enter the rich plain where the Philistines lived. The soil is brown and so fat that you have only to tickle it with the plough and it laughs with the harvest. You do not wonder that the Philistines fought for this fertile land.
Here is a green field of wheat. The stalks stand as thick as grass, and rise and fall with the winds from the sea. There a native is ploughing with a bullock and donkey harnessed together. The plough is the rude implement of the Scriptures, and the dark-skinned farmer steadies it with one hand, while he carries a goad in the other. Farther on are camels dragging the ploughs. In places we see flocks of fat sheep, herded by boys, and now and then pass a village of flat, white-walled houses with thick roofs of thatch on which the grass grows. Nearly every house has a roof of sod about a foot deep, and as we near the hills, the towns on their sides rise up in green terraces.
Here some shepherds in sheep-skin coats, with the wool inside, are watching their flocks, and there, pulling up bunches of grass for her cattle, is a maiden who makes us think of Ruth gathering wheat in the harvest-fields of Boaz. Here and there throughout the plains of Sharon we see the watch-towers built for soldiers posted to ensure the Turkish Sultan’s share of the farmers’ crops.
The landscape here is far different from that of the United States. There are no houses or barns standing alone in the fields. There are no outbuildings of any description, and no haystacks or strawstacks. The people live in villages and go out to work in the fields. The only fences are cactus hedges, but most of the holdings are not fenced in at all.
THE HOLY LAND
The land is fertile clear to the mountains, a distance of perhaps twenty miles. In the foothills there are patches of green, while higher up fields are here and there cut out of the rocks, which are built up to hold in the earth. I have never seen a country more rocky. The rough lands of the Blue Ridge are Nile farms compared to the hills through which our train climbs up to Jerusalem. In many places there is nothing but rocks. The limestone strata are piled stone upon stone, looking like mighty monuments rising on the hills. In some places mountains rise in steps forming pyramids of white limestone, sparsely sprinkled with patches of grass and red poppies.