THE FOUNTAIN OF THE VIRGIN AT NAZARETH.
hill of sparkling colour, backed, as we first saw it, by cloudless Syrian sky, into which it ran its two minarets. It was larger than we had imagined, and much loftier, with a very bold and gaily tilted edge-line—a city set on its hill, and with a mighty consciousness of being so set, like Coventry Patmore’s old English cottage. Dark-leaved trees, red roofs, and occasional jewel-like points of green, where copper cupolas have been weathered, light up the picture into one of the most ideal of its kind.
Within, the white towns shew a strange mixture of splendour and of sordidness. The streets are aggressively irregular, and the whole impresses one as at once ancient and unfinished. The wider spaces are full of colour and of noise, and the houses which surround them are a patchwork of all manner of buildings, with smaller structures leaning against their sides, and gaudy awnings of ragged edge protecting doorways from the sun. Where the street narrows, it is filled with crowds of men, women, and children, and laden donkeys pushing them aside as they pass along. There are lanes, also, in deep shadow, with buttresses and long archways converting them into high and narrow tunnels. The shopkeepers in these lanes sit behind their piles of merchandise and converse in shrill voices with neighbours on the other side, not six feet away. The whole appearance of the town is that of close-huddled dwellings, which have squeezed themselves into as little space as possible, and have been forced to expand upwards for want of lateral room.
These towns are the mingling-places of Syria—crucibles of its national life, in which new and composite races are being molten. One or two of them, like Nablus and Hebron, are inhabited chiefly by a fanatical Moslem population, and in these life stagnates. But the others are open to the world. In the past, long before the modern stream of travellers came, this process was going on. In very early times the towns were recruited by the neighbouring Canaanites and Arabs. They were, as they still are, so insanitary that if it were not for such additions their population would soon die out. In Christ’s time the Greek and Roman world poured itself into them; then came the long train of Christian pilgrims; after that the Crusader hosts. Each of these, and many other incursions, have helped to mix the race of townsfolk. In Bethlehem and elsewhere there are many descendants of the Crusaders, whose fair hair and complexion tells its own tale. But the mingling of races has gone on with quite a new rapidity during the last few decades. Trade and travel have combined to force the West upon the East. Circassians, Kurds, Turks, Jews, Africans, Cypriotes have settled there. Travellers who have twice visited the land, with an interval of some years between their visits, are struck by the sudden and sweeping change. Even the passing visitor cannot fail to perceive it. The villagers remain apart, intermarrying within the village or with neighbouring Fellahin. The townspeople bring their brides from other towns, and sometimes from other nations. Many kinds of imported goods are exposed for sale in the bazaars. There are parts of Damascus where nothing is sold that was not made in Europe. The habits of the West are also invading towns. Intoxicating liquors are freely sold, and in Nazareth there are now no fewer than seventeen public-houses. “Paris fashions”—probably belated—are ousting the ancient customs. Tattooing is quite out of fashion among the women of the towns, and knives and forks have penetrated native houses even in Hebron. The traveller comes into contact with the townspeople far less fully than with the villagers. In the towns everybody is minding some business or other of his own, and the stranger meets with the residenter merely as buyer with seller. Once only did we see the interior of a town house, and that visit confirmed the impression of a new and composite life very remarkably. It was in Tyre. An agreeable native, who had brought some curiosities for sale, invited us to go home with him and inspect his stock. The house was in a narrow street, but the rooms were large. His wife sat near the window smoking a nargileh, her eyebrows painted black, and her face heavily powdered and rouged. The room was crowded with furniture. There were a sofa and two European beds with mosquito curtains; a new English wardrobe of carved walnut, with a large mirror; a kitchen dresser covered with dinner dishes of the customary European kind. Dry-goods boxes were drawn forth from under the beds and the sofa, and pasteboard boxes from drawers and shelves, all filled with the most indescribable medley of curiosities from rifled tombs. Bracelets, tear-bottles, ear-rings came to light in rapid succession. Finally, a square foot of lead-work appeared—part of a leaden winding-sheet which had recently been torn off an ancient corpse in a sarcophagus—a heavy shroud, finely ornamented with deep-moulded garlands and figures. Our hosts were good-humoured and pleasant people, who conducted the conversation in some five different languages, and appeared to combine in themselves and their properties several centuries of human life.
The grey city of Jerusalem stands unique among the towns of Palestine. With the brown villages it has nothing in common. The immense variety of its buildings, with their domes, flat terraces, minarets, and sloping roofs, distinguishes it at once from the rectangular masses of the villages. As if on purpose to emphasise the contrast, one of these villages has set itself right opposite the city across a narrow valley. Looking from the southern wall of the Haram enclosure, this village of Siloam is seen sprawling along the opposite hillside, a mere drift of square hovels seen across some fields of artichokes. Nothing could appear more miserable; inferiority is confessed in every line of it.
More might be said for the description of Jerusalem as the largest of the white towns. It is, like them, a centre where races mingle; indeed it is the centre of such mingling. All roads lead to it from north, south, east, and west; and when one suddenly comes upon one of those old Roman roads which make for Jerusalem with such purposeful and grim directness over the Judean mountains, one realises that this has been the centre and mingling-place of nationalities for many centuries. Yet on the spot an obvious distinction is felt at once. There are two Jerusalems: the old one within the walls, and a new one spreading on the open ground to the west and north. This “new Levantine city side by side with the old Oriental city” is quite a modern place. When Stanley wrote his Sinai and Palestine it was unsafe to inhabit houses outside the walls. Now such houses are clustered together to the west in a city which is actually larger than the enclosed one, and whose rows of shops are hardly distinguishable from those of Western Europe. A strange medley its buildings are! The best sites are occupied by the great Russian Cathedral and Hospice, white-walled and leaden-roofed. Beyond these, embedded in Jewish “colonies,” are the European consulates, with a Syrian Orphanage and an English Agricultural Settlement farther up the slope. The Tombs of the Kings lie to the north, in all their desolation, and the still more desolate Mound of Ashes which is supposed by some to be a relic of Temple sacrifices; but these are next neighbours to the Dominican monastery, the Bishop’s house, and the house of that curious body of Americans known as the “Overcomers”; while on the hill, not a mile above them, is an English villa. All this and much else pours itself into the city and mingles in the streets with the very composite life already dwelling there. Just at the foot of the hill which Gordon identified as Calvary, while Turkish bugles were blowing from the fort, we saw two Syrians engaged in rough horseplay, a party of Americans and English riding, some tonsured and cowled monks on foot, and a travelling showman with an ape clinging to him in terror of a tormenting crowd of Jews and Mohammedans; while poor women, unconscious of any part in so strange a tableau, were returning to the city with full waterpots on their heads.
Yet in Jerusalem all this makes a different impression from that of other towns. The mingling of races here is but, as it were, the surface appearance of a far more wonderful fact. From the days of Solomon, Israel centralised her life in Jerusalem. On that hill the mountainland seems to gather itself as in a natural centre, typical and representative of the whole. There the nation centred its life also, in “the mountain throne, and the mountain sanctuary of God.” Jeroboam’s attempt to decentralise cost the nation dear; but in spite of that attempt the centralisation took effect, and made her the most composite of cities from the first. All ends of the earth meet here as in a focus. Laden camels of the Arameans from the far East are making for the city, and ships flying like a cloud of homing doves to their windows are bearing precious freights to her port. History and religion are compressed within the walls. On the spot no one can forget the ancient geography which regarded Jerusalem as the centre of the earth, with Hell vertically below, and the island of Purgatory its antipodes, and Heaven’s centre overhead. In the Church of the Holy Sepulchre they shew a flattened ball in a little hollow place as the centre of the world. As in some other cases of faulty science, an imaginative mind may discover here a happy truth beneath the error. The composite life of Jerusalem without the walls is but of yesterday, that within the walls is hoary with age.
We have called it “a grey city,” and even in respect of colour this is a true name. Not that there is any one colour of Jerusalem. In the varying lights of sunrise, noon, afternoon, and evening, its colour changes. At one time it hangs, airy and dreamlike, over the steep bank of the Valley of Jehoshaphat; at another time it seems to sit solid on its rock, every roof and battlement picked out in photographic clearness; again, in the twilight of evening, all is sombre with rich purple shadows. There are spots of colour, too, which break its monotonous dull hue. The Mosque of Omar, with its faint metallic greenish colour, stands in contrast to everything, and makes a background of the city for its isolated beauty. There is another dome, that of the Synagogue of the Ashkenazim, whose colour is a lustrous blue-green, shining over the city almost luminously. White minarets and spires are seen here and there, and a few red-tiled roofs have found place within the walls. Several spots are softened by the foliage of trees, and the pools, whose edges are formed of picturesque and irregular house-sides, catch and intensify the colours in their rich reflections. Yet, in spite of all that, Jerusalem is grey. The walls are grey with a touch of orange in it. The houses, massed and huddled close within, are grey with a touch of blue. They are built roughly, the stones divided by broad seams of mortar, and most of them in their humble way conform to the fashion set by the Mosque of Omar and the Holy Sepulchre, and are domed. But the domes of ordinary houses are far from shapely, and suggest the fancy that the scorching sun has blistered the flat roofs.