Letters from Palestine / Written during a residence there in the years 1836, 7 and 8

by J. D. Paxton

We left Jerusalem by the gate of St. Stephen, passing between the chapel of the Virgin Mary and the garden of Gethsemane. We crossed Mount Olivet a little to the south of the church of the Ascension, where there is a slight depression in the mount; the part south of this is called the Mount of Corruption. On it Solomon built places for his heathen wives, to practise the heathen rites. They point out a place where they say he had a large establishment for these "strange women." The Mount of Corruption! very well named, when put to such uses; a very corrupt business it was—bad enough at any place, but still worse at the holy city, and by the ruler of the chosen people! Solomon was, no doubt, a very wise man in some things, but he did not show it in his relation to females. In that respect he behaved very foolishly. It is the dictate of wisdom for a man to have one wife, it was thus intended by his Maker; and he will be the happier and even the better man, all other things being equal, for being thus connected. If he uses a little wisdom in making his choice, and a little more in treating and taking care of his wife, as every good man ought to do, he will find, nine times out of ten, that his wife will be a great comfort and help to him, and do him good all the days of his life. But what is to be expected of the man who is so very foolish as to gather them about him by the score, yea, the hundred? And then, what a selection from all the idolatrous nations within his reach! I doubt not they were a bad set, a very bad set of women; but what right had he to expect a better from the quarter whence he obtained them? Had he gone to some good old pious father of his own people, and married his well-raised, virtuous, and pious daughter, and confined himself to one wife as a wise man ought to do, and a good man would do, he might have been happy in the married life. But behaving as he did, there is no wonder that he was unhappy. It is not at all courteous and gallant in him, in these circumstances, to show his spite in making hard speeches about the ladies, as if there was no fault on his own side.

Mount Olivet, where we crossed it, had a few trees on it, and a portion was laid out in gardens and vineyards, but a great deal of it evinced neglect. It has a wide, flat top, over which we passed for some time, before we began our descent. We had a pretty good view of the northern end of the Dead Sea, the valley of the Jordan, and the mountains of Moab, which run north and south, not far east of the Jordan and the Dead Sea. These mountains do not appear to be very high; I should judge them to be about the height of the hills to the west of Jerusalem. My attention was arrested by the apparent straightness of the range, and the uniform height of the ridge. The top of it, from the south to the north, as far as it could be seen with distinctness, appeared almost perfectly level. It forms a most beautiful eastern horizon to a person on the high grounds about Jerusalem.

On the eastern side of Olivet, a little on the descent, is Bethany, where Lazarus and his sisters lived. It is a low, miserable village, containing only a few families, and most of these live in the lower rooms and cellars of old buildings. Not one good house did I see in the village. It is little else than a mass of ruins. An old ruin is pointed out as the house of Martha. We were shown the grave of Lazarus; it is an excavation in the rock, narrow at the mouth, barely allowing a person to enter; we descended eight or ten steps, and there found a small room, in which was a place that served for an altar, on which service is at times performed. In one side of this room is a small hollow place, rude enough certainly, in which we were told the body of Lazarus was deposited. The whole concern is certainly a very poor one, much less like a place of interment than many we had seen, but may have been intended for that purpose.

Our course was now nearly due east. We had a very steep descent to make on the eastern side of Olivet. We found some cultivated ground, and a few olive and fig trees. Among the limestone on the surface we saw many masses of silex, much of it of a variegated and fine kind, which had the appearance of the coarser kinds of agate. We passed from the Mount of Olives into a deep hollow, which runs east towards the valley of the Jordan. Near the head of this hollow is a spring of water, with a ruin in the vicinity, which appears to be a great stopping-place for those who are passing to and from Jerusalem and Jericho. We found there a company of Arabs and muleteers. Our road led us down the valley. The hills on both sides were steep, and the valley narrow. From this place there is a change in the character of the rock, and a corresponding one in the character of the soil and the aspect of the country. The rock becomes a friable limestone of the softest kind. This continues most of the way to the valley of the Jordan. It is easily disintegrated, and of course but little of it appears on the surface. A fine-looking soil covers the face of the country, the hills are rounded over, and but few rocks are seen projecting out. Those veins of silex, which I have mentioned, form an exception; and there are several of them, one above another, at a greater or less distance. They vary from two or three to twelve or eighteen inches in thickness; and, in some places, form a kind of cord-like appearance round the hills. While, however, the land looks more favourable for tillage, it does not show the evidences of it—far otherwise—we saw less and less of its surface under the care and cultivation of man, and fewer traces of a resident population; no villages, no houses, no vineyards nor olive trees, and but occasionally a spot that had been made to yield grain. About half-way from Mount Olivet to the plain of Jordan, we passed a district that exhibited rather a singular aspect. The rock on both sides of the narrow valley down which we were passing, was thrown much out of the horizontal position, which is the general state of the rock in this district, and forced up in the middle, a rod or two it may be, and made to have much the appearance of a regularly-formed arch. It was manifest especially in the siliceous stratum before-mentioned. In some places you might count many of these arches along the side of the hill, on both sides of the valley, and in part corresponding with each other. They had all the appearance of having been formed by the action of some great force from below, acting partially on small locations. I noticed the same, but on a more extended scale, on the road by which I returned from the Dead Sea, which lay considerably to the south of this. It was, however, as far as I could judge, about the same distance from the valley of the Jordan. It is, indeed, the same district, and may possibly exhibit a similar appearance both north and south to a much greater extent. It deserves an examination from some one who has leisure and the desire to gain a perfect knowledge of the geology of Palestine.

The west side of the valley of the Jordan is bounded by a very high hill; it might well be called a mountain. It cannot be less than from 500 to 800 feet high. The rock of these hills is limestone, so very soft and white that I hesitated whether it did not more properly belong to the chalk formation. As the valleys approach this abrupt border of the plain, they cut deep into the earth, and some of them form most tremendous chasms. They reminded me much of the mouths of the streams in some parts of Kentucky, and on the Kanhawa. They are all destitute of trees, and hardly a bush is to be seen that would shade a goat. This nakedness of the banks and precipices gives them a wild appearance. On the sides of these deep chasms you occasionally see ledges of rock jutting out, and caves, either natural or artificial, entering under them—a noble place for thieves and robbers. The descent from the hills to the plain of Jordan is abrupt and steep. To our left was a most tremendous gorge, with a small flow of water in it. The face of the hill towards the plain, was almost entirely destitute of vegetation, and deeply furrowed, from the washing of its soft and yielding soil. Directly before us, and a short distance from the foot of the hill, we saw some ruins, and the remains of a wall which enclosed a considerable district. Whether this was the remains of some old village or city, we could not tell, as our road turned north of it, towards Jericho, and we had not time to visit it and examine it more minutely. We crossed the rivulet flowing out of the deep gorge to our left, as we descended the hills; on its banks were some old ruins, and, to our right, was a large and very high mound, which, from its regularity, had the appearance of being artificial, and was much like some of those large mounds that are seen in the valley of the Mississippi.

A few small trees adorned the banks of the rivulet within the gorge, and marked its course through the plain. This noble, wide-spread plain lay almost as much at waste, especially toward the hills, as if there was no man to till the ground. It had the appearance of having been fertile, and not wholly deprived of its fertility, but as worn a good deal with former usage. There was, as is usual with plains near water, a scattering of water-worn pebbles over it, but not so many as to be at all in the way of tillage. As we entered more on the plain, we passed some spots that bore marks of having yielded grain not long since.

After travelling about three miles, we reached the village which is called Jericho. Just before entering it, we crossed a small brook which flows from the north-west, and has its rise in the fountain pointed out as that which Elisha healed. 2 Kings, ii. 21. About this brook, and spreading out over the plain, were a number of bushes, mostly of the thorn kind, and not unlike what I have heard called the white thorn in some parts of the United States. The largest of them were about as high as a peach tree, but were rather a clump of branches growing out of one root, than branches from the same stem. They have many very sharp thorns on them. Some of them bore an apple, of a whitish colour, larger than a grape. There was also another bush with prickles on it, which grew from four to five feet high. It bore a yellow fruit, about as large as the apricot, that looked very rich and pretty, enticing the appetite, but the taste was unpleasant and indescribably nauseous. When cut, they were soft and watery.

The village called Jericho, may stand about mid-way from the hills to the Jordan. It is one of the most miserable villages that I ever saw. The houses are low, dirty, miserable places, hardly deserving the name. Piles of rubbish, ashes, and filth, lie all about. There is one building now occupied by the soldiers stationed there, that has high and strong stone walls, but is much out of repair. The village has, however, some gardens about it, and a number of fig and other fruit trees. Of the many palms which may once have decorated this city, but one remains. We encamped near the house used as a fort by the troops, under some fine spreading fig trees. There were some cattle in the village, but we were not able to procure any milk that was fit to drink; a small vessel which they sent to us, being so bad that we would not have it, but sent it back to the owner. We have usually found it difficult to procure milk.

We set out in the morning to visit the fountain of Elisha before we went down to the Jordan. It lies about three miles north-west of Jericho. As our guide did not know the way, we tried to engage a person from the village, and on inquiring for a boy, they told us they had no boys; all their boys and young men were taken for soldiers. They are all Mohammedans in this village; and it is only Mohammedans, or Druses and Ansairi, who are next-door neighbours to them, that the Pasha honours with a forcible incorporation into his army—a happy deliverance for the Christian. After some inquiry, a woman engaged to be our guide so far as to put us in the right road. The spring is a fine large one, near a small hill, half a mile in the plain. There were some appearances of ruins in the piles of stone that lay about its head. The water is clear, but not cold; there is a considerable spreading of the waters by means of small channels, and also from the level character of the ground. This district is for some extent covered with the thorn-bush I have mentioned, together with some intermixture of other growth.

Mount Quarantania, which is one of the highest and roughest parts of that range of hills that border on the plain, has a peculiarly desolate appearance, and is full of holes and caves. This is the mountain into which, as the monks tell us, our Lord was led, after his baptism, to be tempted of the devil. Between its base and the fountain are a number of old walls and buildings, which indicate that a place of some consequence may once have been situate there.