Nature in Syria seems always to have something of the supernatural about her. Not only in the petrifactions of the Lejja and the silent stone cities east of Jordan is this the case. The whole country offers you stones when you ask for trees, and that mere fact of its stoniness is enough to lend it the air of another world. As an indirect consequence trees, when they are found, assume a factitious importance, and a supernatural significance either for good or evil. Some of the fairest plants of Syria are treacherous as they are fair. One of our company, in gathering sprays of a peculiarly lovely creeper, somewhat resembling a white passion-flower, had his hand wounded with invisible but virulent needles which caused it to swell and gave great pain. The green spots, where grass and trees abound, tempt the unwary to drink and rest in them. But they are the most dangerous places in the land, and some of them are deadly from malaria. On the other hand, a tree in a treeless country is an object of preciousness inconceivable by any who have not come upon it from the wilderness. In the distance it beckons the traveller with the promise of shade and water. Arrived beneath its branches, life takes on a new aspect; kindly voices are heard in the rustle of its leaves, and gracious gifts seen in its shadow and its fruit. It is said that our fleur-de-lis pattern, often supposed to represent the flower of the lily or the iris, is really an Eastern symbol. The central stem is the sacred date-palm, while the side-lines and the horizontal band stand for ox-horns tied to the stem to avert the evil eye. It is no wonder if by the ancient Semites trees were regarded as demoniac beings, or as growing from the body of a buried god.[51] Such traditions are no longer to be found in their ancient forms, but they linger in a vague sense of the holiness of conspicuous trees, which may be seen covered with rags of clothing hung on them by natives. A like play of imagination has from time immemorial haunted the pools—especially those whose dark waters made them seem bottomless—with holy or unholy mystery. Still more terrible is the superstitious dread with which the natives regard undrained morasses. The Serbonian Bog on the south coast has from of old been regarded with special fear, owing to its treacherous appearance of sound earth. The marsh in which the Abana loses itself shares with the Serbonian Bog its grim distinction, chiefly on account of its deep black wells, which the natives take to be man-devouring whirlpools.
In her grander and more impressive features, Nature is in Syria constantly suggestive of the play of occult powers. Earthquake has left its mark in many a split rampart and broken tower, and that of itself is enough to give a peculiarly ghostly tinge to the spirit of any land. The unspeakable loneliness of the desert has its own magic—a melancholy spell which has no parallel in other lands. In the desert, too, the sky conspires with the earth in its bewitchment. The mirage has power to arrest and overawe the spirit with something of the same sense of helplessness as that felt in earthquake. In the one case earth, in the other heaven, are turning ordinary procedure upside down, and the bewildered mortal knows not what is to come next upon him. The writer has had experience of both, though with an interval of several years between them. The mirage he saw to the east of the Great Haj Road in Hauran. For some time the rocky hills of the Lejja had been the horizon, shimmering dimly through the heat-haze. Suddenly, on looking up, he was amazed to find that the hills had disappeared, and in their place had come a long string of camels on the sky-line, with an island, a lake, and a grove of palm-trees floating in the air above them. The sudden apparition recalled on the instant a day in the Antipodes when he felt, though at a great distance, the tremble of the New Zealand earthquakes. Either experience is unearthly enough to explain many superstitions.
In most lands the sea would have yielded a larger crop of unearthly imaginations than has been the case in Palestine. For reasons which have been already stated, Israel kept out of touch with the ocean. Yet, all the more on that account, it is the case that almost every thought she has of the sea is fearsome. Its immensity bewilders her with the unhomely distances of the world, and the four winds strive savagely upon it. The roar and surge of the shore are all she needs to remember in order to impress herself with its terror. Now and then she thinks of the Great Deep, and of its horrible inhabitants—leviathan unwieldily sporting there, and other nameless monsters bred of the slime and ooze, and the dead men who are waiting to float up from their places to the Great Judgment, when their time shall come.
Mention of the Great Deep reminds us of yet another prolific source of the spectral element in Syrian thought. It was but natural that the sound of underground rivers and their explanation by the theory of a world founded on bottomless floods (the “waters underneath the earth”), should have given to the whole land an air of possession by ghostly powers. It may have been that same phenomenon which drew down the imagination of Syria to the subterranean regions, or it may also have been to some extent the hereditary greed of buried treasure, which every nation whose buildings have been often overturned is likely to acquire. Whatever be its explanation, the fact is certain that the underground element is one which counts for much in the spirit of Syria. Alike in Christian and in pre-Christian times there seems to have been a most unwholesome dread of fresh air blowing about holy things. Sacred caves and pits were among the most characteristic properties of ancient Semitic religion.[52] As for Christian tradition, it seems positively to dread the open air. The Nativity in Bethlehem and the Agony in Gethsemane have each their cave assigned to them, and many another site has a cave either discovered or actually constructed for its commemoration. Nature and history have combined to encourage the underground tendency. Palestine is remarkable for the number and size of its natural caverns, and it is not slow to add its imaginative touch to the length of them, connecting distant towns with supposed subterranean passages. These caves have been used as dwelling-places from very ancient times. The strange cities of Edom and of Bashan are well known to all as wonders. And not in these places only, but in many other parts of the land, men have dwelt beneath the ground. In times of invasion, for the solitude of hermit life, and in the terrors of persecution, caves have offered natural places of refuge and of hiding, which have in many cases been greatly enlarged by excavation. Besides those caverns whose interest lies in the memory of ancient inhabitants, there are some of an interest whose terror is not yet departed. These are the cave-dwellings of lunatics, who in former times often chose the dead for company and inhabited tombs. Now, in some places they are chained in black recesses of mountain caverns, where their life must be horrible indeed. There are also one or two caves in Syria which end in sudden perpendicular shafts of great depth, where adulteresses are said to meet their fate. Such modern instances may have reinforced the natural fascination of the occult which subterranean places offer. But there is something congenial to it in the spirit of Syria quite apart from these.
If the natural features of Syria thus tempt men towards the ghastly side of things, her history suggests plenty of material for superstition to work upon. If the legend were true that no dew nor rain would moisten the spot where a man had been murdered, Syria would be no longer an oasis, but the driest of deserts. In a spiritual sense the legend is truer than it seems. When, in his Laughing Mill, Julian Hawthorne works out the idea of a mystic sympathy in Nature with crimes that have been done by man, he is reminding us of something which every one of sensitive spirit has more or less clearly felt. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s subtler tales the same idea is worked out in a fashion still more convincing. There are times and places when it is difficult to resist the conviction that the material world, in its dumb, unconscious way, is yet burdened with the weight of man’s evil deeds. In Syria one can almost hear “the groaning and travailing of the whole creation.” It seems to be a land waiting the hour of its release, and meanwhile shrouded in deeper mystery than any other land. Something has happened here, you feel, which never happened elsewhere; something is going to happen here again, when the time shall come.
Nothing could better attest this fact than the extraordinary wealth of legend in Syria. Fragments of Bible story, changed and often distorted by those who have retold them, are met with every day. Sometimes a story has passed from Jews to Christians and from Christians to Mohammedans, increasing steadily in marvellousness and decreasing in verisimilitude as it passed. Samson, Goliath, and the prophet Jonah are notable cases in point. A Mohammedan weli marks the spot where the latter was thrown ashore; but the inventors of this legend have been inconsiderate. The weli stands at the bend of a shallow sandy beach, where the whale must either have itself come ashore to deposit the prophet, or have projected him a distance of at least a hundred yards. A very curious instance of a similar kind is that of the fall of Jericho as narrated in Joshua vi. Conder gives two legends, both of which are obviously elaborated forms of that account. One of these is a Samaritan story of iron walls, and the other a Mohammedan one of a city of brass whose walls fell after Aly, the son-in-law of Mohammed, had ridden seven times round them.[53] Still more curious is a legend related by the same author, which looks like a Mohammedan version of the Wandering Jew. It tells how, at Abila, Cain was allowed to lay down the corpse of his brother Abel after carrying it for a hundred years. The whole story of the Herods has infested the region of their crimes with the ghosts of their victims. In Samaria the murdered Mariamne still seems to dwell in her honey, and Herod and his servants to call her by name and force the pretence that
THE VALLEY OF HINNOM WITH THE HILL OF OFFENCE
The upper portion of the picture to the left is the Hill of Offence, with the village of Siloam on its lower slopes.