Our steamer was crowded with pilgrims from Russia, Egypt, and north Africa. There were many Americans, French, and Germans travelling first class, and hundreds of Syrians and Egyptians going steerage. The Russian pilgrims were particularly interesting to me. Old men and old women, with honest faces full of intelligence and goodness, they held their religious services all over the third-class portion of the ship, and I spent two hours watching them as one after another they turned their faces toward the Holy City and prayed, crossing themselves, and now and then getting down upon their knees and bumping their heads against the deck in their worship. They were curiously dressed and many of them wore long fur coats. Some had high fur hats and looked as if they had just stepped out of one of Tolstoi’s novels. I was especially impressed with the strength of character shown in their faces and with their magnificent physique. If all of Russia’s millions are of the same mould as those who make the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, they will some day prove to the world that there is in them as good stuff as ever made history or built up a civilization. The women, with their strong, motherly faces made heroic by toil and privation, were equally as striking as the men. They were better looking than any other peasant women I have ever seen, and the old saying of the Greeks came to me as I looked at them: “If strong be the frame of the mother, her sons shall make laws for the people.”
As the ship approached the Holy Land the people broke out into prayers, and in some cases into tears. It is a religious pilgrimage for them and they think, I doubt not, that in making it they are coming nearer to heaven.
We had our first view of the shores of Palestine at seven o’clock in the morning, after a night on the steamer. We had been awakened at six with the cry that we were nearing shore, but this was a ruse of the captain to get breakfast out of the way before landing.
When I came up on deck nothing but the sea was in sight. The sun was about two hours high and the sky, a light blue with long streaks of fleecy white drawn like a half-veil over it, curved down into the ocean at the eastern horizon. As I looked I saw two lines of hazy gray rise up out of the water, which rippled in sapphire wavelets, caught by the sun. The first line was the sandy beach that edges the rich plains of Sharon and the second the wall of smoky gray which marks the hills of Judea or the highlands of Palestine. As we came nearer, these lines increased in size, until the first turned to dazzling white sand, out of which a little later the wooded green strip marking the port of Jaffa came into view. Nearer still we could see the shipping in the harbour, and above and behind it the walls of this, one of the oldest towns of the world.
We get some idea of the age of Jaffa from the story of Jonah; for the Bible says that it was from here Jonah took passage upon the ship from which he was thrown into the sea into the mouth of the whale. He remained in the whale’s belly for three days, during which time he prayed to the Lord, and the Lord spake to the whale, whereupon he was vomited out upon dry land. Jonah was born about eight hundred and fifty years before Christ. He was a baby when, according to some authorities, Homer was telling the story of the Iliad, and a hundred years had yet to elapse before the founding of Rome. I am not sure as to the exact spot where Jonah was taken up by the sailors and thrown into the sea, but he is said to have been buried not far from Jerusalem, and there are dragomans who will show you his tomb. Ever since Jonah’s time sailors have been superstitious about having preachers along, thinking that such passengers bring bad luck to a ship.
These brickmakers work under a taskmaster to-day just as the Israelites toiled under the lash in this spot nearly four thousand years ago. Here was built Bubastis, the ancient Egyptian city sacred to the worship of the Cat
We go ashore in small boats at the city of Jonah, which rises almost straight out of the water—but we see no whales
