This is especially true of Palestine. Nothing about it is more distinctive than its colour-scheme; and nothing is perhaps less familiar to those who have not actually seen it. Syria may be treated as if it were Italy, or even Egypt—in hard intense colouring; or it may be treated as if it were England, in strong tones but with a certain homely softening of edge. Neither of these modes is true to Syria. Its edge-lines are sharp, but they are traced in such faint shades as to produce an effect very difficult either to reproduce or to describe, and yet impossible to forget.
The colours are manifold, and they vary considerably with the seasons of the year. Yet the bare hill-sides (which form the greater masses of colour in most landscapes), the desert, and the distant mountain ranges, are ever the same. Most travellers make their first acquaintance with Palestine in Judea, entering it from Jaffa. When the plains are behind you, and you are in among the valleys up which the road climbs to Jerusalem, you at once recognise the fact that a new and surprising world of colour has been entered. In the valley-bottom there may be but a dry watercourse, or perhaps a rusty strip of cultivated land; but above you there is sure to be the outcrop of white and grey limestone. In some places it appears in characterless and irregular blotches whose grotesque intrusion seems to confuse and caricature the mountain side. This is, however, only occasional, and the usual and characteristic appearance is that of long and flowing lines of striation which generally follow pretty closely the curve of the sky-line. The colours of these strata are many. You have rich brown bands, dark red, purple, yellow, and black ones; but these are toned down by the dominant grey of the broader bands, and the general effect is an indistinct grey with a bluish tinge, to which the coloured bands give a curiously artificial and decorative appearance. As a work of Art Judea is most interesting; as part of Nature it is almost incredible.
In the northern district, near Bethel, everything yields to stone, and the brighter colours disappear. The mountain slopes shew great naked ribs and bars—the gigantic stairs of Jacob’s dream. On the heights your horse slips and picks his way over long stretches of
THE MOUNT OF TEMPTATION, FROM JERICHO.
The Mount of Temptation is one of the spurs of the mountains which overlook the deep valley of the Jordan on its western side. The central peak is the traditional site of the Temptation of Christ.
smooth white rock; in the valleys the soil is buried under innumerable boulders and fragments of broken rock.
The whole land is stony, but Judea shews this at its worst. It is an immense stone wedge thrust into Palestine from east to west. South of it lie the fertile valleys of Hebron, with their wealth of orchard and plantation. North of it open the “fat valleys” of Samaria, winding among rounded hills planted to the top with olives, or terraced for vines. Over these, here and there, a red cliff may hang, or the irrigation ditches may furrow and interline a vale of dove-coloured clay. But while the green of Judea is for the most part but the thinnest veil of sombre olive-green, a mere setting for the rocks, Samaria is a really green land, variegated by stone.
In the north of Samaria the land sinks gradually upon the Plain of Esdraelon. As we saw it first it was covered by a yellow mist through which nothing could be seen distinctly. But afterwards, viewed in its whole expanse from the top of Tabor in clear sunlight, the great battlefield of the Eastern world appeared in characteristic garb—“red in its apparel,” with the very colour of the blood which has so often drenched it.