The Holy Land and Syria

by Frank G. Carpenter

“Poor fellow,” thought he, “I who am free have much more than I need, I will give him some of my grain while he sleeps, for he would never take it from me if he knew I was giving it.”

So he transferred a generous portion of wheat from his heap to his brother’s.

In the morning both were astonished to find their piles exactly the same size as they had been the night before. Then a prophet appeared to them and told them what had passed in the night. He said that God, who had seen and approved the evidences of their brotherly kindness, had decided to make this threshing-floor the place of prayer for the whole world.

Priests of the Greek Church bless the waters of the Jordan at Easter, when hundreds of pilgrims bathe in the river, many of them clad in their burial shrouds. Across the Jordan Joshua led his hosts dry-shod to the assault on Jericho

Sturdy character shows in the faces of these Russian women, who patiently trudge from shrine to shrine. The Russians are perhaps the most devout of all the thousands of pilgrims who come to the Land of Christ

Directly under the plateau on which Solomon’s Temple stood is a great catacomb, which once formed a part of one of the Jerusalems of the past. Let us first visit these underground caves before going into the mosque. Descending the steps, we come into a wilderness of vaults with roofs upheld by pillars and arches of stone. Some of the stone blocks are of enormous size. I have measured one which is eight feet wide and fifteen feet high. These stones are beautifully laid. They are closely joined and show mechanical ingenuity in their construction. The pillars are about four feet square, and some of them have holes bored through the corners. It is claimed that the vaults were constructed by Solomon for his stables, and that the holes in the columns were the tying places for the horses. In some of them are stone mangers, which the guides say were used long ago. Others claim that this stable story is a fiction, and that the excavations were made in erecting the Temple and the great columns put up to sustain its platform. However that may be, the architecture is wonderful for that time, or, indeed, for our own. There are altogether a hundred or more vaults, and the mighty stones which wall them are so heavy that it would be impossible to handle them nowadays without the use of machinery.

Since the site of Solomon’s Temple is now a Mohammedan shrine, and under their control, Christians cannot visit this place unless they first obtain an official permit. This I obtained through our American consul, who not only arranged for a soldier to escort us, but sent along his chief kavass, so that we have two guards with us as we walk about. The kavass is a sort of majordomo of the consul. He has two of them, tall, straight Syrians attired more gorgeously than Solomon in all his glory. They wear vests covered with bands of gold embroidery, with long, flowing sleeves like those of the ladies of the Middle Ages. They wear big, baggy trousers, each pair of which would make two full suits for a fat man. They have enormous scimitar-like swords at their sides and carry ebony staffs as thick as the handle of a baseball bat topped with great knobs of silver as big as your fist. The United States Government furnishes the outfits, except for the swords. Formerly, whenever our consul came out of the cavernous region of his hotel or walked down the narrow stone stairs of his office, these two gaudy officials preceded him, making the pavements ring with their staffs as they cleared his path. When he stepped across the way to church, though the streets were deserted and a baby might go about without danger, a kavass always went with him and waited outside the building until His Excellency was ready to return. Such extreme pomp as this has, however, begun to go out of style, though the consul still has his strikingly garbed kavasses to lend the dignity expected of Uncle Sam’s representatives.

The Mosque of Omar was supposed by the Crusaders to be Solomon’s Temple. This is not so, of course, as the original building was destroyed long before their time. It is now believed to have been built by a Moslem governor in the seventh century. But before that, and soon after Jerusalem was destroyed in the first century after Christ, the Roman Emperor Hadrian is known to have built on this site a temple to Jupiter. It is believed that some of the pillars in the present mosque came from a church erected on Mount Zion by the Christian Emperor Justinian. The mosque is one of the finest specimens of Byzantine architecture.