The power of the evil eye is also possessed by spirits who inhabit human beings. The people here believe in one class of spirits who live underground but who are fed by those on earth. They are said to come up and take the wheat from the threshing-floors and the bread from the ovens, and the only way to keep them from doing so is to utter a sentence from the Koran or Bible as you put the bread in to bake, or spread out the grain. These same spirits hover about the fire, and if you quench it without asking Mohammed to protect you the spirits are liable to beat you or perhaps lame you for life.
These underground spirits are known as the jinn. Their favourite place of residence is below the front doorsteps, for which reason women are not allowed to sit there. The jinn, or genii, are supposed to be an organized body, having a sultan, a court, and regular officials. They keep guard on the food stores and are on the whole fairly good fellows. They are said to be fond of human company. It is even whispered that they sometimes assume human shape and marry mortals. They are believed to be most common in Egypt. One may attract a jinn by whistling, and it is said that the girls here frequently whistle. Some of the men of Palestine are jealous of the jinn, thinking they have association with their wives, and some will not look at a real woman for fear the jinn girls, who they imagine are in love with them, will object.
One of the queer superstitions here in Jerusalem is the idea that a marriage in a cemetery will propitiate the Lord and cause Him to favour His people. This is believed by the native Jews, and several cemetery weddings have recently occurred on account of the drought. Palestine has had no rain for weeks and the crops are drying up. The people are wildly excited over the prospect. There is also an epidemic of infantile paralysis, which has been carrying off the children. The people think that God is angry with them, and perhaps wroth because the graveyard marriages have been too few. To pacify Him they have had weddings in the cemeteries, though a graveyard is considered a most unlucky place for starting upon the life matrimonial. Indeed, it so unlucky that brides and grooms have to be hired to get married there. At a marriage which took place this week the couple received two hundred dollars in gold, besides food for two years, as a present for having the ceremony in the cemetery. In this case the groom was a Jew from Yemen, Arabia, and the bride a Jewess from Aleppo, in Syria. The bride was late coming, and the three thousand worshippers who had assembled to see the ceremony had to wait for two hours. She was finally carried in under a canopy, and took her stand on one side of an open grave while the bridegroom stood on the other. Standing thus they exchanged marriage vows. Two more cemetery weddings are planned, but it is difficult to get willing couples, as such marriages are supposed to be disastrous. Nevertheless, the charm seems to be working. The wind has changed since the first ceremony took place, and it may rain by and by.
CHAPTER XII
EASTER IN JERUSALEM
At no time in the whole year is the Holy City so interesting as during Easter Week. Jerusalem seems always filled to overflowing, but during Holy Week it is crowded and jammed with people for days and nights on end to a degree that it is impossible to describe.
I had the good fortune to be here during the most remarkable Easter that Jerusalem ever had, when by a curious coincidence the calendars of the various sects fixed the holy feasts on the same days, and the Jewish Passover and the Mohammedan festival of Nebu Musa, or the pilgrimage from the Mosque of Omar to the tomb of Moses, came during Easter Week. These celebrations packed the narrow, vaulted, winding streets of Jerusalem with a jam of crushed and crushing humanity. They filled the monasteries which surround the walls with tens of thousands of pilgrims, and clothed the Holy City in a greater variety of colours than were in the coat which Jacob gave to his favourite son Joseph.
The walls of Jerusalem enclose an area of not more than three hundred acres of ground, made up of hill and hollow, all filled with the flat-roofed box-like houses. There is no regularity in the city. The streets wind in and out and up and down, now becoming narrow, murky tunnels, and now roofed with the blue sky of Palestine. They are so narrow that through most of them no wheeled vehicle can go, and standing in the middle of many of them you can touch the walls on both sides with your outstretched hands. It is in such streets that the thousands move to and fro at Easter.
Grandfather and grandson—and both are followers of the ancient profession of begging. Under Turkish taxation the Palestinians were reduced to such dire poverty that asking alms is considered no disgrace