The only clear opening from the Jordan to the Mediterranean is the Plain of Esdraelon. Standing on Jordan’s bank below Bethshan and looking westward, you see before you a valley whose farther end shows nothing but sky. Many streams cut their way down its slopes beside a green morass, and hold in their embrace the ruins of a strong city. You must follow them up westwards for some ten miles before you reach sea level, and soon after that you cross the watershed in a wide valley with mountains rising to north and south. Jezreel stands above you on a protruding tongue of high cultivated land to the south. At a level of about 200 feet above the sea, you suddenly emerge upon a great triangular plain, with Carmel at its apex, 15 miles to the west. This is the Plain of Esdraelon. The one really large level space in Syria, its rich soil, even surface, and plentiful water-supply make it a famous piece of cultivated ground. But it is also the natural battlefield of the East, and its chief associations are not with agriculture but with war.
Esdraelon, however, is but an incident in the geographical fact of Syria, though an important and large incident. It is but the largest of those open spaces into which Syrian valleys swell out. There are three or four of them in the Jordan valley, and several of smaller size are scattered here and there throughout the country. The really essential feature of the land—that, indeed, which historically is the land—is the mountain range that sweeps from Lebanon to Hebron and beyond. It was on the mountains that Israel lived. The Plain of Esdraelon, being the ganglion of the natural main routes of traffic and of war, was but a doubtful possession, precariously held at best, and often changing owners. The strong city of Bethshan at the eastern mouth of its main valley was held by Israel’s enemies during almost the whole of her history; and, until a year or two ago, the Arabs made yearly raids upon the Plain. Again, the sea-coast was largely in the hands of enemies; while the Jordan valley, with its insupportable heat and malaria, was thinly peopled, and its population swiftly degenerated from national as well as from moral loyalties. Thus he who would know the Holy Land must, in every sense of the words, “lift up his eyes unto the hills.”
It was our good fortune to have this view at its very best for our first sight of Palestine. We should have landed at Jaffa, but a rather doubtful case of plague at Alexandria inflicted a two days’ quarantine on all ships coming out of Egypt. So we looked at Jaffa from under the yellow flag, and sailed off in the morning sunlight northward to Beyrout. All day long we lay on deck, with maps spread out before us. The quarantine had cost us the sight of the Greek Easter ceremony at Jerusalem, but it gave us in exchange the rare experience of a daylight sail along the Syrian coast. The day was marvellously clear, and every object on the shore was seen in photographic outline, while the various distances were preserved in fading colours, back to the thin transparency against the sky which stood for the furthest mountain ranges. The shore was barren: a low belt of tawny sand, broken by dark olive-green scrub, and very desolate. One solitary house was all we saw for the first two hours, and in another place a column of smoke, apparently rising from some invisible camp. Beyond this the foot-hills east of the plain were seen, lifting towards the great central ridge of the mountain range. Though broken here and there by an occasional point, or overlooked by a peak that rose very high beyond, the crest of the range was remarkably level, with wavy outline. Until we passed Carmel it shewed as a unity—“the mountain” of Ephraim and Judah. North from that there was a bolder sky-line, much nearer to the sea, which led on eventually to the magnificent heights of Lebanon, beautiful as they are mighty.
Let us suppose ourselves to land at Beyrout and journey from north to south well inland. At first we climb eastwards among bold bare hills, in whose recesses mulberry gardens nestle and on whose heights innumerable villages perch. Cedars are conspicuous by their absence, but there are plenty of humbler trees. Soon we come to realise the large-scale meaning and contour of the district. We have been crossing Lebanon, whose highest peaks have revealed themselves now and then far to the north. Some twenty miles from the coast we find ourselves in the valley of the Litany (Leontes). This whole region is easily understood. It consists of the magnificent ranges of Lebanon and Antilebanon and the spacious valley between them, running in ample curves parallel with the shore.
Mighty though these are, however, it is neither of them that has received the name of Jebel-es-Sheikh—“the patriarch of mountains.” That honour is reserved for Hermon, the range and summit which Antilebanon thrusts south from it into Galilee, just opposite Damascus. It is happily named “the sheikh.” Go where you will in Palestine, Hermon seems to lie at the end of some vista or other. For many miles around it, Hermon commands everything. Its mass tilts the plain and sends out innumerable spurs of rich and fertile land; its snow shines far and gives character to the view; its eastern waters redeem the wilderness through many a mile of Hauran; and from its western roots spring all the fountains of the Jordan. This is the king of Syria, by whose beneficent might the desert has become oasis.
While the southern continuation of Hermon holds up the high tableland of Bashan and runs it on into the mountains of Gilead and Moab east of Jordan, the thrust of Lebanon into Western Galilee ends curiously in a succession of hills divided by valleys running east and west, like great waves of mountain rolling south to break along the northern edge of the Plain of Esdraelon. There is a quiet regularity about these Galilean Highlands, which gives the impression of a region made to plan. The eastern end of Esdraelon is blocked by the group of Tabor and “Little Hermon,” while the feature of the western end is the long lonely ridge of Carmel.
Crossing the plain we enter Samaria, whose deep rounded valleys, rich in corn, send their sweeping curves in all directions. Here there is neither the dominant north-and-south trend of Lebanon, nor the horizontal ripple of Galilee, but an intricate network of curving valleys, which leave the mountains everywhere more individual and distinct, and which frequently expand into wide meadows or fields. Yet the general rise of the region is from west, sloping up to east. The watershed is perhaps 10 to 15 miles from Jordan, while it is more than 30 miles from the sea. But Jordan here is well-nigh 1000 feet below sea-level, so that the eastern slope is immensely steeper than the western.
As we enter Judea, we find the land, as it were, gathering itself up on almost continuous heights. The lesser valleys are shallow, and the hilltops swell from the lofty plateau in colossal domes or cupolas. So high is the general level that when we come to Jerusalem we look in vain for the mountains we had understood to be round about her. No peaks cleave the sky—only smooth and gentle hills, which have never been in any way her defence, but have made excellent platforms for the siege-engines of her enemies, and have grown wood for the crosses of her inhabitants. The lateral gorges of Judea, both east and west, cut into her high tableland in angular zigzags, and as you descend these in either direction you realise what is really meant by “the mountains round about Jerusalem.” She does not see them, lying secure upon the height to which they have exalted her. But he who approaches her must come by their gorges, where for many miles his sky will be but a strip seen between sheer heights of cliff and scaur.[6] The rugged sharpness of outline reaches its climax on the eastern side, where the range, split in the wildest gorges, falls in fragmentary masses between their mouths down to the Jordan valley. Nothing in the land has a more bare and savage grandeur than the square-chiselled mountain blocks of Quarantana, seen from below at Jericho in black angular silhouette against the sunset. South of Jerusalem the Kidron gorge, cleaving the intruding desert, exaggerates the wildness of the north, but as you climb past Bethlehem to Hebron you are in a region liker to Samaria, with its deeper and more rounded valleys and its richer pasture and cultivation. South of Hebron the range spreads fanwise and gradually sinks to the desert.
The most impressive memories of the land, so far as its form and contour go, are two—the gorges cleft through the Judean mountain, and certain isolated conical hills thrown up from the Samaritan valleys. Judea is mountain, emphasised by gorge; Samaria is valley, diversified by hill. The gorges are uncompromising. When we read, for instance, the third verse of the seventh chapter of Joshua, we think of an ordinary march—“The men went up and viewed Ai. And they returned to Joshua, and said unto him, Let not all the people go up; but let about two or three thousand men go up and smite Ai; and make not all the people to labour thither.” But he who has himself “gone up” from Jericho to Ai puts feeling into his reading of the words “to labour thither.” That is the only way of going up. The recollection is of several hours of precipitous riding, with beasts stumbling and riders pitched ahead. When the climb is over you turn aside to the south, and view the gully of Michmash along whose northern edge you have scrambled inland. It looks not like a valley, but a crack in rocks, hundreds of feet deep. The valley of Achor, next to the south of Michmash, presents an almost more dramatic appearance as you view its entrance from the Jordan foot-hills. It gapes on the plain, like the open mouth of some petrified monster.
The isolated hills of the northern territory are in their way as memorable as the gorges of the south. In Judea you cannot see the mountains for “the mountain.” The whole land is one great elevated range, and the noticeable features of the district are the gorges that cut across it. Samaria, on the other hand, is a place of valleys and of plains, and its mountains are seen as mountains. This fact finds its most striking instance in certain “Gilgals,” or isolated cones standing free in the midst of plain, or cut off by circular valleys round their bases. The most perfect of these is that which bears the name of Gilgal, rising detached in the wide valley to the south-east of Jacob’s Well.[7] It is in shape an almost perfect cone, whose gradual curve renders it very easy of ascent. The Hill of Samaria itself is another such “Gilgal,” the centre of a splendid circular panorama of hills. Sanur, in the country of Judith and Holophernes, is a third, on a smaller scale, but with even wider panorama. North of Esdraelon, again a long ripple of mountains sweeps round at least one such Gilgal, leaving Sepphoris isolated on the peak of it. And Tabor itself might plausibly be counted in this class—Tabor the irrelevant, whose cone seems always to be peeping over the shoulder of some lower ridge, unlike any other landmark, commanding all the views eastward from the heights of Nazareth. These curious cones are in Palestine to some extent what the Righi is in Switzerland. With the exception of Tabor, they are but lesser heights; yet they give the widest mountain views, and seem to shape the land into a succession of circles, of which their summits are the centre-points.