Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885

by Various

"Yes," he said, "you stay here all night, but go away early in the morning."

This was definite, if not hospitable; but we went in, and asked to see the monks.

"None here," said the Arab, with a chuckle: "all gone to Tiberias." We ordered dinner, and, after half an hour, the Arab brought a saucer holding two boiled eggs, put it on a chair, and said, "There's your dinner." We were indignant, but it did no good: this boy was the head of the house for the time, and neither promises nor threats were of any avail to add anything, besides a little salt and pepper, to the dinner he had prepared. We went to bed very hungry, but very tired, and in the morning, before breakfast, hunted out the house of an English missionary, who took pity on us and gave us to eat. But it is an unusual thing for any one to leave Nablous without having an experience of some sort more or less disagreeable to fasten the name of the place in his recollection. When the brilliant author of "Eothen" sojourned for a day or two in this "hot furnace of Mohammedanism," as he calls it, the whole Greek population chose him as an involuntary deliverer of a young Christian maiden who had been perverted by rich gifts to the faith of Islam, or at least to a belief that a rich Mohammedan was to be preferred as a husband to a poor Christian. They stare upon you now, as they did then, as you walk through the streets and bazaars, "with fixed, glassy look, which seemed to say, God is God, but how marvellous and inscrutable are his ways, that thus he permits the white-faced dog of a Christian to hunt through the paths of the faithful!"

We went, of course, to the little Samaritan synagogue, to see the famous copy of the Pentateuch, whose age no man knoweth. We rode up the steep slopes of Gerizim to the ruins of the temple where the woman of Samaria said her fathers had always worshipped, and then, in a pouring rain, we started for Jenin. Hassan sunk his head down in a huge Oriental cloak, undoubtedly manufactured in Birmingham or Manchester, and his horse, left to himself, lost his way, for a Palestine road may at any time, like a Western trail, turn into a squirrel's track and run up a tree. When we found ourselves again we were all wet and not in the best of humor, but in sight of the old city of Samaria on her high hills.

The magnificent capital of Ahab and Jezebel, we saw at a glance, is now only a ruined, dirty village, where a European could not hope for shelter for a night. The hills sank into a heavy plain that seemed interminable. The short twilight faded into untempered darkness. Hassan was again in the rear. He would have fled incontinently at the first sign of danger. Our only consolation was that his horse was tired and he couldn't get very far away from us under any circumstances. I had a letter to a Christian at Jenin that was thought to be good for supper and lodging. We filed through the muddy streets to the door of the Christian's house, sent in the letter by Hassan, and a man came out, saluted us, told us to follow and he would take us to "a most comfortable place." When we stopped, it was before the door of a little mud hut. An old woman opened it, but, before letting us in, fixed the price we were to pay. We entered a room that did service for the entire wants of our hostess. It was very small, but it could not have been made larger without knocking out the sidewalls of her house. The floor was of dry mud, and there was nothing to sit upon except our saddles. We supped from the bread and meat our good missionary friend had given us, and, rolling ourselves in our blankets, we slept; but not long. The mud beneath us was not that dull, inanimate, clog-like thing we trample thoughtlessly under our feet along our country roads: it was that sort of matter in which Tyndale thought he could discern "the form and potency of life." They were both there, and in the still darkness they made themselves felt. My friend, for some mysterious reason, was left untouched, but the regiments that should have quartered on him joined those that were banqueting on my too unsolid flesh. My sufferings were but slightly mitigated by the remembrance that probably the progenitors of these fierce feeders on human blood may have dined as sumptuously on prophets and apostles, and that, intense as my anguish was, the chances were against any fatal termination. I rose often and went to the door, hoping for the morning, but it came not. Each time on returning to my couch I found the number of my tormentors had been augmented: so I kept still, like an Indian at the stake, and only refrained for my friend's sake from singing a triumphant song as I found myself growing used to the pain and at last able to sleep a troubled sort of sleep, such as Damiens may have had on the rack. When I showed my arms in the morning to Hassan, he lifted his eyes to heaven and muttered a prayer to Allah, of which I thought I could divine the meaning.

Our ride that day was across the great plain of Esdraelon. We were charitable enough to believe that travellers who have raved over the exquisite beauty of this valley, who tell of "the green meadow-land flaming with masses of red anemones," of "myriads of nodding daisies," and of "sheets of burning azure in the sun," did actually look upon all these splendors in the early spring; but it was January now, and we seemed to be pushing our way through a sea of dull, dead brown. The ground was soft with the winter rains, and our horses' feet sank to the fetlocks and gathered huge balls of the thick adhesive earth, deposited every hundred yards or so to give place to others. We rode through the dirty little village of Nain, where once a widow's son, carried out to burial, heard the only voice that reaches the dead and rose from his bier; but all solemn and tender thoughts were frightened away by the crowd of maimed and blind and ragged and hungry men, women, and children that came pouring out of the huts, crying, begging, demanding backsheesh. "This," one of our American consuls said, "is the language of Canaan now;" and it is one of the least melodious of earth. We lunched on the dry grass in the sun in full sight of Tabor, on the remnants of what the good missionary at Nablous had given us, and, tightening our saddle-girths, we began the ascent of the mountain. We clambered up the rude bridle-path, covered with loose stones, and knocked timidly, with the remembrance of our Nablous experiences, at the door of a large and very sightly monastery. Almost immediately a monk of kindly face and soft black Italian eyes gave us a cordial greeting, and the unexpectedness of it nearly enticed us into throwing our arms around his neck and leaving an Oriental salutation upon his cheek. He led us into a large, clean refectory, and then into two clean rooms. I might use other epithets, but none other means so much in the East. After a very satisfying supper, the good monk—he was so good to us, we tried to think he was as clean within as the rooms of his monastery—took us out to the pinnacle of the mountain and enjoyed our enthusiasm over the magnificent view that was spread out before us. Almost the whole of Palestine was within sight beneath us. We looked southward, across the plain we had struggled over so laboriously, to the mountains behind Jerusalem. We could see the depression where the Dead Sea lay in its bowl, encircled by the hills of Moab. To the west we were looking upon Carmel, at whose base the blue waves of the Mediterranean sigh, and moan, and thunder. To the east, across the Jordan, from which the mists of evening were already rising, we could distinguish the wild, deep ravines of the land of the Bedawin; and in the north, grandest of all, stood Hermon, his great white head touched with the crimson of the setting sun, just plunging, like an old Moabite deity, into the mountains of Lebanon beyond. By almost common consent it is agreed among the Biblical scholars of our day that not here on Tabor where we stood, but northward, there on one of the peaks of Hermon, was the place where our Lord was transfigured; but the Christian imagination, like the Christian consciousness, is not always submissive to fact, and we shall continue, with the larger part of the Christian world, to think of Tabor as the Mount of Transfiguration, while we speak of Hermon as the true site.

We had an easy ride the next morning to Nazareth, and a kindly reception from the monks. The hospitality at all these convents is untrammelled by pecuniary conditions; but all travellers who have purses and hearts and consciences do, in fact, on their departure, present the Superior with a sum about equal to the charges for the same length of time at an Eastern hotel. I mention this in the interests of historic truth, and not with any desire to throw a garish light of self-interest upon the cordiality of these Latin "religious." We were in the heart of the little city where He whom millions of human beings call their Saviour and God lived for more than twenty years. Somewhere among these houses that fill the valley and cling to the hill-side was Joseph's home. Not a house, of course, is here now that was here then; all the sacred places they show you—the Virgin's home, the place of the Annunciation, the workshop of Joseph—must be unauthentic; but these hills are what they were. They shut out the great world He had come to redeem, but not the heavens above Him or the sinfulness and needs of the segment of humanity around Him. When we rode toward Tiberias in the early morning there were a dozen or more of the girls of Nazareth going out to Mary's spring, as the fountain at the entrance of the town is called; but their garments were ragged and uncleanly and their swarthy faces heavily tattooed, and, while we were ready to accept the season of the year as an excuse for any deficiency in the attractiveness of the landscape, we could not admit it in extenuation of the uncomeliness of the maidens of Palestine. Their beauty we believe to be almost entirely a fiction of the tourist's imagination.

On our way to the Sea of Galilee we passed through Cana, where they show you still some of the water-pots in which "the conscious water blushed" when it saw its Lord, and crossed the plain of Hattin, on one of whose round, horn-like acclivities the Sermon on the Mount is said to have been given. Here the Crusaders made their last stand against the victorious army of Saladin; and when at nightfall their bugles sounded the retreat, the Holy Land was given over to the unbeliever for centuries:—who is prophet enough to say for how many? As we first saw the lake that afternoon, with the sunlight on it, and the low Moabite hills rising lonely and sad against the blue sky, and Hermon, cold and regal, far away to the north, and yet standing out so prominently as to be the most striking feature in the scene, we felt that Gennesaret had been ruthlessly robbed of her rights by certain well-known critics who, professing to be her best friends, have denied her all claim to beauty except by association. Tiberias ranks with Jerusalem and Hebron and Safed as one of the four holy cities of the Jews, but its houses are filthy huts and its streets muddy lanes. Here we saw the Jew, down-trodden, oppressed, wretched, but still proud, the unhappiest creature, this Tiberian descendant of David, in all the Holy Land, with his long yellow cloak, his hair hanging upon his shoulders in corkscrew curls, and an expression on his wan, sallow face that would force tears from your eyes if you did not know that his life is ordinarily as contemptible as his condition is pitiable. We spent an hour or more in one of the two boats that to-day make up the entire fishing-fleet of Galilee, and then found hospitable shelter under the roof of the Latin monastery, the last that was to open its doors to us in Palestine; and when we rode away on Monday morning we made a vow in our hearts never to speak ill of that part of the Romish Church which presides over the convents of the Holy Land. As our muleteer confessed he was as ignorant as any dog of a European Christian of the route we wished to take from Tiberias to Banias and Deir Mimas, the monks advised us, to save time, and perhaps our purses, perhaps our lives, by taking a Turkish soldier as a combined guide and guard. We sent to the proper official, and two savage-looking fellows came to the monastery. They swore by the beard of Mohammed that our lives would be worth less than that of a Tiberian flea if we went alone, or even with one soldier; they talked our few remaining powers of resistance to death, and we took them at their own price, less one-half, which was conceded to be very liberal on our part. We felt we had a new lease of life, and spent the rest of the afternoon in sweet unconcern and content; but late that evening word was sent that one of the brave soldiers, in consideration of the great risk involved in the enterprise, had concluded to raise his price, and of course his companion, deeply as he regretted it, felt compelled to follow his example. We at once sent back word that our poverty would not permit us to accede to their most modest request, and threw ourselves on the Superior of the convent to extricate us from our dilemma. A guard had now become a necessity, for the poor muleteer was so badly frightened by all the terrible things he had heard, that if we had promised him his weight in gold to be delivered at Beirut he would not have stirred a step unprotected. A request was sent to the commandant of the city, and he was pleased to present us with a Kurdish cavalryman, who was to be our slave for the next four days, if on our part we would agree to pay him well and do as he said. We were now humble. We promised, and the Kurd came riding to the gates of the convent the next morning at the hour fixed for our departure. He was immensely long and lean. He looked hungry all over. Even his musket, longer by some inches than himself, had the appearance of existing on a very low diet of powder and ball. An awful doubt of its efficacy crept into my heart, but we gave him the matutinal greetings of the country, and our cavalcade followed at his heels.

We rode along the lake at a fairly rapid walk to the little mud village of Magdala, the home, it is supposed, of Mary Magdalene. We stopped to breathe our horses at Khan Minyeh, the site, some scholars assert, of the once beautiful city of Capernaum, and then rode along a rocky road to Tel Hun, at the end of the lake, chosen by the best judgment of the day as the actual spot where the city, exalted by her pride to heaven, rested lightly on the earth. We picked our way in and out among fluted marble columns, the very ruins, some insist, of the synagogue which the good centurion built for the city he loved. Here, then, may have been the home of our Lord during those earliest days of his public ministry, the happiest days of his earthly life, before baffled hate had begun to weave its net around him.

Our course now lay due north, away from the lake, across trackless fields covered with round basaltic stones. The Kurd's horse was a better one than ours, and it was all we could do to keep him in sight. The sun was hot. What would it have been on those hills in midsummer? We threw off our heavy coats, that had been more than comfortable in the early morning along the lake, and pushed doggedly on. To our left, higher even than the hill we climbed, was holy Safed, to which it is thought our Lord may have pointed when he spoke of a city set upon a hill, that cannot be hid; and straight before us, the object of our hopes and efforts, was snow-clad Hermon, as beautiful, we thought, as an Alp. We crossed the mountain at last, and, as our horses waded through a deep brook on the other side, the Kurd bent slightly in his saddle, and, reaching down, brought up great handfuls of water to stay his thirst, without stopping for an instant. There was a sly twinkle of pleasure in his eye when the muleteer told him we had admired his skill.