BOSTON
TO
M. R. H.
THE UNDERSTANDING COMPANION
OF THE PILGRIMAGE
A WORD ABOUT THE NEW PATHS
From our earliest childhood when at Christmas time we gazed with intense interest at the Wise-men on their gaily caparisoned camels, those great awkward ships of the desert have been associated in our minds with Palestine. The Child held close in Mary’s arms as she sat upon the donkey while Joseph urged it on through the day and the night in the hurried flight into Egypt has made that faithful little beast a part of Palestine.
We saw both the donkeys with loaded panniers driven along by wandering Arabs and the strings of camels, soft-footed, heads held proudly high, moving off over the yellow sands up to the hills. But we sat in a modern train, with comfortable leather seats, and a madly puffing engine dragged us over the wind-blown sands up through the hills of Judea to the little modern station just without the walls of Jerusalem. Once when we stopped at old Lydda we heard a rushing, whirring sound over our heads. It grew louder and, as we searched the sky, a plane swept out from the soft clouds into the clear blue, came down nearer, nearer to earth, rose again, and passed out of sight. It had come from the City of Zion: it would go into Egypt.
The Wilderness, the Dead Sea and the forty long years of wandering, the victories over the Philistines, the waters of Jordan parted for the passing of the hosts of Jehovah, the tumbling walls of Jericho, the spots where “the arm of the Lord prevailed”: with these we had long been familiar. They were associated in our minds with tents, with much cattle, with slow beasts of burden, with men, women, and children who moved leisurely in times of peace and fled in wild confusion in times of war.
The Wilderness, the Dead Sea, the Jordan, and Jericho we saw. A motor car driven by the son of an Arab chief took us over and past them all in less than a day!