CHAPTER II
THE DESERT
Environment counts for much in national life. A country knows itself, and asserts itself, as in contrast with what is immediately over its border; or it retains connection with the neighbouring life, and is what it is partly because the region next it overflows into its life. At any rate, to understand anything more than the colour of a land—indeed even to understand that, as we shall see—it is necessary to begin outside it and know something of its surroundings. For Palestine, environment means sea and desert—sea along a straight line for the most part unbroken by any crease or wrinkle of coast-edge which might serve for a harbour, and desert thrown round all the rest, except the mountainous north. Palestine is a great oasis—a fertile resting-place for travellers making the grand journey from Egypt to Mesopotamia; between which kingdoms she was ever also the buffer state in war and politics. These nations were her visitors, her guests, her terrors, but they never were her neighbours. Her neighbours are the sea and the desert.
The sea she never took for a friend. With no harbour, nor any visible island to tempt her to adventure, and no sailor blood in her veins, she hated and feared the sea, and thought of it with ill-will. There is little of the wistfulness of romance in her thought of the dwellers in its uttermost parts; little of the sense of beauty in her poetry of the breaking waves. She views the Phœnician trader who does business on the ocean as a person to be astonished at rather than to be counted heroic. She exults in the fact that God has his path on the great waters, but has no wish to make any journey there herself. Her angels plant their feet upon the sea, and she looks forward almost triumphantly to the time when it will be dried up and disappear. Meanwhile its inaccessible huge depth is for her poets a sort of Gehenna—a fit place for throwing off evil things beyond the chance of their reappearing. Sins are to be cast into it, and offenders, with millstones at their necks.
The desert was Israel’s real neighbour. South-east from her it stretched for a thousand miles. From N.N.E. round through E. and S. to W. it hemmed her in. To a Briton, watching the departure of the Bagdad dromedary post from Damascus, the desert seems infinitely more appalling and unnatural than the sea. For ten days these uncanny beasts and men will travel, marching (it is said) twenty hours out of every twenty-four. The stretch of dreariness which opens to the Western imagination, as you watch the lessening specks in the tawny distance, is indescribable. To the Eastern it is not so, and it never was so. He knows its horrors, and yet he loves it. The modern Arab calls it Nefud (i.e. “exhausted,” “spent”), and, according to Palgrave, there are in the Arabian desert sands no less than 600 feet in depth. Yet with all its horrors it is after all his home.
The desert is not all consecrated to death. Besides the occasional oases which dot its barren expanse, there are many regions where grass and herbage may be had continually so long as the flocks keep wandering. Accordingly the long low black tent, with its obliquely pitched tent-ropes and skilfully driven pegs, takes the place of such substantial building as might create a city. It has been so for countless generations, until now the desert Arab fears walls and will not be persuaded to enter them. Kinglake gives a remarkable instance of this, telling of a journey to Gaza on which his Arabs actually abandoned their camels rather than accompany them within the gates.[1]
Colonel Conder insists that the Arabs are entirely distinct from the Fellahin of the Syrian villages; yet he and other writers call attention to the borderland east of Jordan where the boundaries of the rival races swing to and fro with the varying successes or failures of the years. In places where the land lies open, as at the Plain of Esdraelon, the east invades the west. No one who travels in Palestine can fail to be impressed—most will probably be surprised—by the frequency with which those black hair-cloth tents are seen, sprawling like the skin of some wild-cat pegged out along the ground. If the question be asked what becomes of them, the day’s journey will likely enough supply the answer. In the market-place of a town you may see their inhabitants trading their desert ware for city produce. But even such slight contact of city with desert evidently has its temptations. In the valley below, the tent is pitched on the edge of a field rudely cultivated. The nomad here has already yielded to the agriculturist. Descend to the Jordan valley, and you shall see the hair-cloth covering a hut whose sides are of woven reeds from the river, and a little farther on the covering itself will be exchanged for a roof of reeds. Finally, you may look from the road that runs between the two main sources of the Jordan, and see in the southern distance, shining out against the lush verdure of the Huleh morass, the red-tiled roof of a two-storey villa—the house of the Sheikh of the local tribe of Arabs![2] This immigration has gone on from time immemorial, and it was some such process by which Palestine received all her earlier inhabitants. Once fixed in cities and settled down to the cultivation of the fields, their character and way of life so changed that the desert and its folk became their enemies. Yet a deeper loyalty remained through all such alienation; and, in spite of dangers and even hostilities, the desert was still their former home.
It is not only by its neighbourhood, however, that the desert has influenced Palestine. Nature has done her best to shut it off from the land, from the eastern side at least, by the tremendous barrier of the Jordan valley. Not even the angel of the wilderness, one would think, might cross that defence. Yet even that barrier has been crossed, and a bird’s-eye view of Palestine shews a land bitten into by great tracts of real desert west of Jordan. In a modified degree, the whole of Judea—that great stone wedge to which reference was made in Chapter I.—exemplifies this. Half the Judean territory is wilderness, and the other half is only kept back from the desert by sheer force of industry. Even on the western side this is strikingly seen. As viewed from the ocean, the desolate sand and scrub of the coast seems to clutch at the land, stretching here and there far inland from the shore. But the desert of Judah, in the south-east of the country, is the great intrusion of the desert upon Palestine. The sea-board of Palestine is perhaps the smoothest and most unbroken of any country in the world. But if a coast-line of the desert were sketched in the same way as a sea-coast is shewn on maps, the edge would show an outline almost as broken as that of the Greek coast, with many a bay and creek. The desert is the sea of Syria, and its inthrust is like that of great fingers feeling their way through the pastures to the very gates of her cities, and at one place reaching a point within a mile or two of her capital. Disraeli describes graphically the transition from Canaan to
ON THE ROAD FROM JERUSALEM TO BETHANY.