The Holy Land

by John Kelman

Galilee repeats the limestone outcrop of Judea, but in far gentler fashion, the undergrowth and trees softening almost every landscape, and the mountains leading the eye along bold sky-lines to rest on that form of beauty and of light which masters and watches over the whole land—the white Hermon. Hermon is always white. But sometimes when clouds are forming rapidly around its summit, it is a wonder of brightness. On no other mountain, surely, was it that “a bright cloud overshadowed” Jesus and his three friends. Even now, on many a summer day, Hermon is lost in a changing glory of frosted silver, when the sun strikes upon its cloudwork, and the long trails of snow in the corries stream towards the plain below.

The limestone runs on into Phœnicia, and seems to grow whiter there. Nothing could be finer than the valleys east of Tyre at harvest time, when the fields of ripe grain wave below cliffs white as marble, and the whole scene, with its foreground of brilliantly robed reapers, is a study in white and gold. But in the higher valleys of Phœnicia the rock breaks through a rich red soil, which in parts is gemmed with the curious and beautiful “Adonis stones”—little egg-shaped bits of sandstone, dyed to the heart of them with deep crimson, as if they had been steeped in newly shed blood. Little wonder if the women of old days “wept for Tammuz” at the sight of them.

The thing most characteristic of Syrian colour is its faintness and delicacy. Pierre Loti, who in this matter is a witness worthy of all regard, is constantly ending the colour adjectives in his Syrian books with -atre—“yellowish,” “bluish,” “greenish,” etc. The general impression is of dim and faded tints, put on, as it were, in thin washes. In the stoniest regions there seems to be no colour at all, as if the sun had bleached them. The curious colouring of the Judean valleys, which has been described, is never aggressive, and it takes some carefulness of observation to see anything in them more than a blue green in the sparsely-planted olive-groves fading into faint greenish grey above. The valleys of ripe sesame and vetch are washed into the picture in pale yellow or yellow ochre. Where tilled earth appears it is generally a variegated expanse of light brown, or pink, or terra-cotta. The eastern slopes of Hermon, below the snow, shew vertical stripes like those of the haircloth and jute garments of the peasants, washed out with rain and sun; or they are spread upon the roots of the mountain like some vast Indian shawl cunningly and minutely interwoven with red and green threads, but worn almost threadbare. As you approach a village in strong sunlight, you see it as a dark brown mass shaded angularly with black; but it seems to float above a mist of the airiest purple sheen, where the thinly-planted iris-flowers stand among the graves before the walls. The Sea of Galilee, as we saw it, was light blue; the Dead Sea was light green, with a haze of evaporation rendering it even fainter in the distance.

If this be true of the near, it is doubly so of the distant, landscape. In a country so mountainous and so sheer-cleft as Palestine, distant views are seen for the most part as vistas, the “land that is very far off” revealing itself at the end of some V-shaped gorge or towering over some intermediate mountain range. Of course distant views are faint in all lands, but in Palestine the clear air keeps them distinct with clean-cut edge, however faint they are. Thus there is perhaps nothing more delicate and spirituel in the world than those faint dreamlike mountains in the extreme distance of Syrian vistas—the hills east of Jordan grey, with a mere suspicion of blue in them, or the lilac and heliotrope mountains of the desert which form the magic background of Damascus looking eastward.

Reference has been made to the irises (the “lilies of the field”) near villages. These are but typical of the general sheen of that carpet of wild flowers which every spring-time spreads over the land. They are of every colour. There are scarlet poppies and crimson anemones, blue dwarf cornflowers, yellow marigolds, white narcissus (said to be the Rose of Sharon); but here they seldom grow in patches of strong hue. Each flower blooms apart, and the sheen of them is delicate and suggestive rather than gorgeous. They seem to share the reticence and shyness of the land, and tinge rather than paint it. Even the animal life conforms to this dainty rule; lizards are everywhere, but their colouring is that of their environment, now stone-grey, now wine-red, now straw-coloured. Chameleons are anything you please—green in growing corn, black among basalt rocks. Tortoises are blue at the sulphur springs, brown or slate in the muddy banks of streams.

This faintness is, however, but half the truth of the colour of Syria. Everywhere it is rendered emphatic by certain vivid splashes of the most daring brilliance. Wherever springs are found you have instances of this contrast, and Palestine is essentially the land of bright foregrounds thrown up against dim backgrounds.

The Jordan valley is the greatest example, running south along its whole length, “a green serpent” between the pale mountains of the east and the faint mosaic of the western land. Its jungle is uncompromisingly distinct throughout the entire course, and its colour is living green, with a white flash of broken water or a quiet flow of brown bursting here and there through the verdure. Other streams are similarly marked, with luxurious undergrowth of reeds, varied by clumps of hollyhock or edged with winding ribbons of magenta oleander. But the most striking oases of this kind are the valley of Shechem and the city of Damascus. There is a hill seldom visited by tourists, but well worth climbing, set in the broad vale of Makhna, right opposite Jacob’s Well. North and south past the foot of this hill runs the broad valley. It is edged on the western side by the continuous line of the central mountain range of Samaria—continuous except for one great gash, where, as if a giant’s sword had cleft the range, the valley of Shechem enters that of Makhna at right angles. The whole landscape is in dim colour except for that valley of Shechem. Ebal and Gerizim guard its eastern end, dull and rocky both. But the valley which they guard is fed by countless springs and intersected by rivulets, so that below the shingle of their slopes there spreads a fan-shaped expanse of intensely vivid green, like a carpet flung out from Nablus between the mountains. The lower edge of the green is broken by the white wall of the enclosure of Jacob’s Well, and the cupola of Joseph’s tomb. Damascus—surely the most bewitching of cities—owes its witchery to the same cause. The river Abana spends itself upon the city. As you approach it from the south it discloses itself as a mass of bold outline and high colour in the midst of a great field of verdure, flanked on the west by precipitous hills of sand and rock—sheer tilted desert. When you climb those hills you see the white city, jewelled with her minarets of many hues, resting on a cloth of dark green velvet whose edge is sharply defined. Immediately beyond that edge the sand begins, stretching into the farther desert through paler and paler shades of rose and yellow to the lilac hills in the eastern distance.

It is not only the water-springs, however, that provide the land with vivid foregrounds. Loti describes a little sand-hill in the desert “all bespangled with mica,” which “sets itself out, shining like a silver tumulus.” Such bold and detached features are by no means uncommon even on the west of the Jordan. The name of the cliff “Bozez” in Michmash means “shining,” and there are many shining rocks in these valleys—either masses of smooth limestone, or dark basalt rocks, from whose dripping surface the sun is reflected in blinding splendour after rain. Even without such reflection the sudden intrusion of black rock will often give character to an otherwise neutral landscape.

But the sun is the magician of Syria, who bleaches her and then throws up against his handiwork the boldest contrasts of strong light and shade. No one who has seen the crimson flush of sunset on the olives, or the sudden change of a grey Judean hill-side to rich orange, or the whole eastern cliffs of the Sea of Galilee turned to the likeness of flesh-coloured marble, will be likely to forget the picture. Loti’s wonderful description of desert sunsets—“incandescent violet, and the red of burning coals”—is not overdrawn. Shadows will transform the poorest into the richest colouring. The tawny desert changes to the luscious dark of lengthening indigo at the foot of a great rock; and the shadows of clouds float across Esdraelon, changing the red plain to deep wine-colour as they pass. Silhouettes are of daily occurrence in that crisp air. One scene in particular made an indelible impression. It was a village on terraced heights, thrown black against a gold and heliotrope sunset. The figures of Arabs standing or sitting statuesque upon the sky-line were magnified to the appearance of giant guardians of the walls, and the miserable little hamlet might have been an impregnable fortress.

The inhabitants have entered with full sympathy into the spirit of this play of foreground. They are spectacular if they are anything. Their religion forbids them all practice of the graphic arts, and most of the Western pictures which are to be seen in churches are execrable enough to reconcile them to the restriction. But they obey the law in small things only to break it by transforming themselves and their surroundings into one great picture. Their clothing, their buildings, and their handiwork are a brilliant foil to the dull background. From them Venice learned her bright colouring, and there are few English homes which have not borrowed something from them.