A steady rain was falling next morning and my host awoke me with the old saw—“To-morrow is just as good a day as to-day.” When I had convinced him that this was not an Occidental proverb, he set out to pilot me through the city. On the way he paused often to purchase food or tobacco, with which he stuffed my knapsack in spite of my protests, answering always: “It is far to Jerusalem, and some day I will come to America.” All in all, he did not spend twenty-five cents; but I was well nigh staggering under my load when I took leave of him at the southern gate of the city and struck off across the oblong plateau shielded by Mt. Ebal and Mt Gerizim. Since the day when it was called Shechem, a city of refuge, Nablous has carried on much traffic with Jerusalem, and in recent years the pusillanimous Turk has set himself to the task of building a connecting highway. The section beyond the southern gate promised well; but in this rainy season it was a river of mud which clung to my shoes in great cakes and made progress more difficult than in the trackless mountains to the north.
The highway ended abruptly at noonday, as I had been warned it would. “It is all complete,” Shukry had said, “except over the mountain, the highest mountain in Palestine, and over that it runs not.” The barrier must, indeed, have been a problem to the engineers, for it towered hundreds of feet above, as nearly perpendicular as nature is wont to construct her works. Diagonally up the face of the cliff a path was cut, but no spiral stairway, compressed within a slender tower, ever offered more difficult ascent. At the summit I came again upon the road, as wide, as finely ballasted, as well engineered, as the most exacting traveler could have demanded; yet, as it stood, utterly useless. It had been built that carriages might pass from Nablous to the Holy City; but no wheeled vehicle in existence could have been dragged up that wall-like hillside; and the sure-footed ass, who still carries on the traffic between the two cities, would make the journey exactly as well had the highway never been proposed. One could read in that road the character of the power that holds Palestine, and fancy its builders, like the highway, wandering irresolutely from east to west and west to east, and halting at the highest point to peer helplessly over the dizzy edge upon the section below.
Long after nightfall I stumbled upon an isolated shop, occupied by the keeper and an errant salesman of tobacco. The building was no more than a wooden frame covered over with sheet iron; and the rain, that began soon after I turned in with the drummer on one of the shelves that served as bunks, thundered on the roof through the night and made sleep as impossible as inside the bass drum at a Wagnerian performance. In the morning, a deluge more violent than I had ever known, held us prisoners; and, the weather being bitterly cold, I kept to my shelf and listened to the roaring of the tin shack through the longest day that ever rained and blew itself into the past tense.
The storm had abated somewhat when I set out again on the following day. One stone village broke the dreary prospect; the ancient Bethel, beyond the sharp hills of which the highway side-stepped to the eastward. The rain of the preceding days had, no doubt, left the peculiar atmosphere of Palestine unusually humid. In no other way can I account for the strange vision that appeared late in the morning. The hills ahead were somewhat indistinct, in the valleys lay a thick, gray mist, while overhead, the sky was dull and leaden. Before me, well above the horizon, hung a long dark cloud which, as I looked, took on gradually the faint shape of a distant line of buildings. It could have been no more than a mirage, for beneath it was a considerable strip of sky; yet it grew plainer and plainer until there rode in the heavens, like the army in that weird painting of the soldier’s dream, a dull, gray city, a long city, bounded at one end by a great tower, at the other shading off into nothing. Then suddenly it vanished. Black clouds, hurrying westward from across Jordan, wiped out the vision as one erases a lightly penciled line. Yet the image was Jerusalem. Miles beyond, the fog lifted and showed the city plainly, and it was that same long city bounded on the eastward by a great tower, but with solid footing now on a dull, drear hill that sloped to the west. The highway led downward across bleak fields, past the reputed Tombs of the Kings and Judges, to-day the refuges of shivering shepherd boys, and through the Damascus gate into the crowded bazaars of the Holy City.
The shopkeeper and the traveling salesman with whom I spent two nights and a day on the lonely road to Jerusalem. Arabs are very sensitive to cold, except on their feet and ankles
A high official of Mohammedanism. It being against the teachings of the Koran to have one’s picture taken, master and servant turn away their faces
A howling horde swept me away through markets infinitely dirtier and far less picturesque than those of Damascus, up and down slimy stone steps, jostling, pushing, trampling upon me at every turn, not maliciously, but from mere indifference to such familiar beings as faranchees. At the end of a reeking street I turned for refuge to an open doorway, through which I had caught a glimpse of a long greensward and a great mosque with superbly graceful dome. A shout rose from a rabble of men and boys at one side of the square. In Damascus, such demonstrations, bursting forth each time I entered a mosque enclosure, had soon subsided. So I marched on with an air of indifference. The shouts redoubled. Men and youths came down upon me from every direction, howling like demons, and discharging a volley of stones, some of which struck me in the legs, while others whistled ominously near my head. I beat a hasty retreat. Not until later in the day did I know the reason for my expulsion. I had trespassed on the sacred precincts of the mosque of Omar on the summit of Mt. Moriah, where no unbeliever may enter without an escort of bribed soldiers.
A second attempt to escape the throng led me down more slimy steps and along a narrow alley to a towering stone wall, where Hebrews, rich and poor, filthy and bediamonded, alternately kissed and beat with their fists the great beveled blocks of stone, shrieking and moaning, with tears streaming down their cheeks. It needed no inquiry to tell me that I had fallen upon the “Jews’ Wailing-Place.”