I see a race without disease of flesh or brain,—shapely and fair,—the married harmony of form and function,—and, as I look, life lengthens, joy deepens, love canopies the earth; and over all, in the great dome, shines the eternal star of human hope.
SUNSET NEAR JERUSALEM
From an article in the Century Magazine, June, 1906, with the
Permission of the Century Company and of the author.
BY CORWIN KNAPP LINSON
To our Northern eyes the intense brilliancy of the tropical and semi- tropical sky comes as a revelation. Sometimes at noon it is painfully dazzling; but the evening is a vision of prismatic light holding carnival in the air, wherein Milton's "twilight gray" has no part. Unless the sky is held in the relentless grip of a winter storm, the Orient holds no gray in its evening tones; these are translucent and glowing from the setting of the sun until the stars appear. In Greece we are dreamers in that subtle atmosphere, and in Egypt visionaries under the spell of an ethereal loveliness where the filigree patterning of white dome and minaret and interlacing palm and feathery pepper tree leaves little wonder in the mind that the ornamentation of their architecture is so ravishing in its tracery.
Outside the walls of Jerusalem on the north there is a point on a knoll which commands the venerable city that David took for his own. From here you can watch the variable glow of color spread over the whole breadth of country, from the ground at one's feet to the distant purple hilltops of Bethlehem. The fluid air seems to swim, as if laden with incense. The rocks underfoot are of all tones of lavender in shadow, and of tender, warm gleams in the light, casting vivid violet shadows athwart the mottled orange of the ground.
Down in the little valley just below us a tiny vineyard nestles in the half-light; the gray road trails outside; and beyond rise the walls, serene and stately, catching on their highest towers the last rays of the sun.
The pointed shaft of the German church lifts a gray-green finger tipped with rose into the ambient air. The sable dome of the Holy Sepulcher yields a little to the subtle influence, and shows a softer and more becoming purple.
All the unlovely traits and the squalor of the city are lost, so delicately tender is the mass of buildings painted against the background of distance.
It had been one of those days in March when the clouds of "the latter rains" had been blowing from the west. As the day drew near its close, the heavy mists assembled in great masses of ominous gray and blue, golden-edged against the turquoise sky. With such speed did they move that they seemed suddenly to leap from the horizon, and the vast dome of the heaven became filled with weird, flying monsters racing overhead. The violence of the wind tore the blue into fragments, so that what only a moment since was a colossal weight of cloud threatening to ingulf the universe, was now like a great host marshaled in splendid array, flying banners of crimson, whose ranks were ever changing, until they scattered in disordered flight across the face of the sky.