“The wild gazelle on Judah’s hills
Exultingly would bound,”
and escape also, for I carried no gun with me.
Mounting still higher we came upon the Dahar-es-Salâhh, a mountain whence the prospect of all Philistia and the coast from almost Gaza to Carmel expands like a map—no, rather like a thing of still life before the eye, with the two seas, namely, the Mediterranean and the Dead Sea, visible at once, with likewise the mountains of
Samaria and Gerizim, besides the Moab country eastward, and Jerusalem and Bethlehem nearer home.
Close at hand upon the mountain on which we thus stand, are vestiges of a monastic house and chapel called “Khirbet el Kasees,” (the priest’s ruins,) and even more interesting objects still, the remains of older edifices, distinguished by ponderous rabbeted stones.
On the mountain top is a large oval space, which has been walled round, fragments of the enclosure are easily traceable, as also some broken columns, gray and weather-beaten. This has every appearance of having been one of the many sun-temples devoted to Baal by early Syrians.
By temple I here mean a succession of open-air courts, with a central altar for sacrifice; a mound actually exists on the highest spot of elevation, which may well have been the site of the altar.
What a vast prospect does this spot command, not only of landscape in every direction, but of sky from which the false worshipper might survey the sun’s entire daily course, from its rising out of the vague remote lands of “the children of the East,” and riding in meridian splendour over the land of Israel’s God, till, slowly descending and cloudless to the very last, it dips behind the blue waters of “the great sea!” Alas! to think that such a spot as this should ever have been desecrated by worship of the creature within actual
sight of that holy mountain where the divine glory appeared, more dazzling than the brightest effulgence of the created sun.
Sloping westwards from the Dahar-es-Salâhh were agreeable rides over a wilderness of green shrubs with occasional pine and karoobah trees, and rough rocks on the way to Nahhâleen or Bait Ezkâreh, from which we catch a view of the valley of Shocoh, the scene of David’s triumph over Goliath, and beyond that the hill of Santa Anna at Bait Jibreen. The region there is lonely and silent, with some petty half-depopulated villages in sight, but all far away; sometimes a couple or so of peasants may be met upon the road driving an ass loaded with charcoal or broken old roots of the evergreen oak. Evening excursions in that direction were not infrequent for the purpose of seeing the sun set into the sea, from which the breeze came up so refreshingly.