Outside of poetical romances, one does not find many examples of Oriental beauty. There are multitudes of pretty children, and the girls of twelve or fourteen have large, soft eyes, regular features and graceful figures; but early marriages and the subsequent drudgery, combined with a lack of proper dentistry, usually turn them into toothless, wrinkled hags at an age when they should be most attractive. There are exceptions among the richer classes and among girls who have been educated in schools connected with European or American missions; but on the whole there are very few fine-looking women over twenty-five years old to be found in Palestine.
We are therefore surprised to notice that many of these Bethlehem women are really handsome; not with the rich, voluptuous beauty which is usually associated with the East, but with a matronly dignity which appeals more strongly to our Western eyes. We enjoy watching that young mother who is carrying the baby upon her shoulder; she is such a straight, slender woman, with clean-cut features and honest eyes. We like the old woman beside her; an old woman who looks like a grandmother, not like a withered witch, and who carries herself with a dignity that wins our admiration.
It may be due to nothing more than good food and pure water, or to the great headdresses which make it necessary to stand so erect; but whatever the cause, it seems to us that not even in Nazareth have we seen so many self-respecting, motherly-looking women as in this town which once witnessed the apotheosis of motherhood.
As we stroll along the well-paved road, we pass one spot after another which is not only connected by tradition with the sacred history, but which has been noted by such a long succession of pious pilgrims that even the most trivial fables seem to bind us more closely with the innumerable throng which for nineteen centuries has been treading with reverent feet this ancient highway to the birthplace of our Lord.
Off to our right is the Wâdi el-Werd, “The Valley of Roses,” which recalls the quaint tale of Sir John Mandeville. At the left of the road is a well by which Mary is said to have rested on her way to Bethlehem, and in which a few days later the Wise Men found again the reflection of the guiding Star. Some distance further on, near the venerable monastery of St. Elijah, the “Field of Peas” is still strewn with its little, rounded stones. A sudden rise in the road broadens our horizon so that we can see, off to the left and very far below us, the dark blue waters of the Dead Sea. Six or seven miles to the southeast there rises the striking profile of the Frank Mountain, shaped like a truncated pyramid, upon whose platform lie the ruins of Herod’s famous castle. Glimpses of Bethlehem itself are caught now and then between the surrounding heights. We pass the tomb of beautiful, warm-hearted, impulsive Rachel, the sadness of whose lonely burial by the roadside has touched the hearts of passers-by for nearly forty centuries.
Here we leave the main road, which goes on southward to Hebron, and turn in to the left to Bethlehem. “David’s Well” has long been identified with a series of cisterns hewn in the rock some distance before we reach the modern city. Somewhere in the fields below us Ruth gleaned among the harvesters of Boaz. Somewhere among those same fields the youthful David tended his father’s sheep. Somewhere above them rang the glad music of the angelic Gloria. Somewhere on the long hilltop, now covered by the white, closely-built houses of the town, the Saviour of the world was born.
The heart must be dead to romance as well as to religion, which does not beat with a strange, solemn excitement upon entering the Christmas City.
THE HOUSE OF BREAD