New Paths through Old Palestine

by Margaret Slattery

There was little traffic passing after we turned onto the long hill—donkeys with panniers loaded with products to be exchanged in the markets of Jerusalem, a boy driving a few sheep slowly up the steep hill, a lone Arab on his horse. The air was still, crisp, and very clear. We were exceedingly thankful for the road built by the Turks in excellent fashion for the visit of the Kaiser twenty-three years before and carefully repaired by the British troops for military service. We passed the rest house built that William Hohenzollern might refresh himself before approaching the Holy City. Lower and lower into the valley we went. The road now had a thin covering of soft gray mud. Suddenly, turning to avoid a huge rock that had rolled down the hillside into the road, the car skidded. A second and the light machine had crashed into the retaining wall of rock and cement. The axle bent, the front wheels turned at an angle, we were thrown back and forth in our shaky seat. The car stopped. We heard the sickening thud of the rocks as they fell to the dry bed of the stream below. Then we climbed down carefully over the loosened mass of cement. “Thank God we are to live!” said the guide reverently. The driver was trying to turn the wheels back. He pushed the car into the road. The engine would still run but the axle looked hopeless. The guide spoke again—“As I have said, a carriage is better for Jericho.” After all our effort, we had failed to impress him with the fact that for us to give three days to the trip was impossible. “Of old,” he continued, “they fell here among the thieves. We have fallen among the rocks.” We could not help smiling at his look of dismay as he walked around the car again and again. He was so proud of his record of over thirty years as guide to whose care was due the fact that no serious mishaps had ever befallen any of his people. We were so grateful that we were not lying down there among the jagged rocks in the dry bed of the stream that our present difficulty seemed slight indeed. We were midway between Jerusalem and Jericho. If no help came we could walk in either direction twelve and a half miles though the prospect was not tempting. While we were discussing it we heard a rumbling, then a horn. It was a British hospital car taking an officer down to Jericho. It was pay day for the soldiers and he was late. The driver of his car felt sure that with a little help the axle might be repaired enough to enable our driver to crawl back to Jerusalem, but the steering gear had been damaged and it would be an uncertain venture. A lorrie was on its way to Jerusalem and was to wait at the Good Samaritan Inn to give a message to the officer. He would leave instructions for them to help our driver back to the city and he could get aid for us. The men in the lorrie which came along according to schedule looked the car over with the air of expert mechanics. They spent a half hour or more on it with the help of our driver and then the little Ford turned and climbed slowly and bravely up the hill, keeping with greatest difficulty close to the safe side of the road. The lorrie was out of sight in a few moments flying along to make up for lost time. It would take word of our trouble and send another car.

There lay the boat in which one might row across the Jordan to the land of Moab.

There was nothing to do but wait and nothing to see but bare hills. We climbed one great rocky mound only to see more hills with deeper valleys lying between as far as the eye could reach. They reminded us of the hills in the most desolate part of the Mormon trail in our own American desert. The sun rose higher and the heat became almost unbearable. We drew down our hats, put on our dark glasses and sat on the rocks in the dry bed of the stream. There was not a sound, not a bird note, no bleating of sheep. There were caves in the side of the hill. They looked dark, cool, and inviting, they had sheltered many people good and bad during the long centuries, but the guide warned us that they were full of vermin and unclean. There was a tiny boulder half-way up the hill which made on one side a narrow strip of shade and we made ourselves as small as possible and sat there.

Noon came and we ate our chicken and hard boiled eggs, French bread, figs, dates and oranges made ready by the hotel, and drank the water in our thermos bottles sparingly. A group of Arabs clattered past us over on the road. One sang a couplet in a clear, ringing voice and the others joined as in a chorus. They did not see us, or, if they did, made no sign. “When the Turks ruled Palestine,” said our guide, “we could not sit here so safe. There was much danger on this road and no man traveled over it at nightfall.” He told us tales of brigands in league with Turkish high officials with whom they shared their spoil that would have made excellent material for certain types of American motion pictures. Suddenly the simple story that Jesus told to the crowd in answer to the half-mocking question of the keen Jewish lawyer came vividly before us. It was in these hills, in the desperate loneliness of them, that the certain man, stripped of all his goods, beaten and half dead, lay helpless. He might wait for help for many an hour before out of this place of emptiness any would come! How could Priest and Levite pass him by on the other side and leave him in this forsaken spot that their own journey might be undisturbed? To them he was only a man robbed by the bandits. He would die as had many another. It was a common thing, and, inhuman as it seems, they went on to their task of holy worship and to the seat of judgment.

How keen was the mind of Christ! How quickly and unerringly He put his finger upon the very center of sin! It was easy to see, coming down the narrow camel path in the hills, the hated Samaritan with the spirit of justice, mercy, and brotherhood in his soul. He stopped—the man one would least expect to stop—and rescued with generous tenderness the suffering victim of thieves, while the servants of Jehovah and his law passed by on the other side, doing in that day even as, in all the days since, the followers of the letter and not of the spirit of the law have done.

There was only one answer to the question the lawyer had asked of Jesus and he was forced to give it—“He that showed mercy.” I doubt if any who had heard the question, “But who is my neighbor?” ever forgot the answer, or the command that followed it: “Go and do thou likewise.”

I was so lost in a new sense of the significance and sincerity of His wonderful teaching that I did not see our guide make his way toward the road. “A car comes,” he called, but we, lacking his desert-trained senses, heard nothing. Two or three minutes and we could see it coming rapidly along the white road on the farther hillside. The guide was overjoyed when he saw the new driver. “Ah!” he said, “this is the man I wanted. He drives anything that can go. Through the war he drove over hills with no road—always safe! He speaks English, too.” He examined the car. It had both windshield and horn. It had an extra tire and seats that were straight. Hope revived.

“We shall now get quickly back to Jerusalem,” said the guide. “Tomorrow, perhaps, we shall have the carriage.” “To Jerusalem!” we said. “It is only one o’clock. With such a driver we can surely get to the Dead Sea and the Jordan. If it is late we can stay tonight at the Inn near Elijah’s Spring and go back to Jerusalem in the morning. Our time is short and we cannot take another whole day.” Jamil looked at the driver. “They are Americans,” he said, “and when they will go, they will go!” After a moment he added, “The sun has been very hot. Perhaps for you it has dried the roads.”

So we climbed the steep grade, ran along a level strip, then a steeper grade to the Inn of the Good Samaritan where Arab traders and men of the caravans stop for coffee. There was a tank in the yard where one could buy gasoline!