IV. European emigrants, on landing in Syria, would find themselves in an unhealthy climate. The whole of the first batch of German settlers, and a very large number of the American emigrants who preceded them, fell victims to the fevers of the country. Captain Conder, referring to the difficulties of the German colonists, says:—
"There are other reasons which militate against the idea of the final success of the Colony. The Syrian climate is not adapted to Europeans, and year by year it must infallibly tell on the Germans, exposed as they are to sun and miasma. It is true that Haifa is, perhaps, the healthiest place in Palestine, yet even here they suffer from fever and dysentery, and if they should attempt to spread inland, they will find their difficulties from climate increase tenfold."[66]
The privations and discomforts of Syrian peasant life would be intolerable to European emigrants. The men would work by day under a blistering sun, and sleep at night the centre of attraction for sand-flies and mosquitoes, and all the other nameless tormentors that leap and bite. Mr. Oliphant speaks feelingly of a night spent at Kefr Assad:—
"No sooner had the sounds of day died away, and the family and our servants gone to roost, than a pack of jackals set up that plaintive and mournful wail by which they seem to announce to the world that they are in a starving condition. They came so close to the village that all the dogs in it set up a furious barking. This woke the baby, of whose vocal powers we had been till then unaware. Fleas and mosquitoes innumerable seemed to take advantage of the disturbed state of things generally to make a combined onslaught. Vainly did I thrust my hands into my socks, tie handkerchiefs round my face and neck, and so arrange the rest of my night attire as to leave no opening by which they could crawl in. Our necks and wrists especially seemed circled with rings of fire. Anything like the number and voracity of the fleas of that 'happy village' I have never, during a long and varied intimacy with the insect, experienced."[67]
These experiences were made near the troglodyte village es-Sal; and as Mr. Oliphant peeped into the subterranean dwellings and dark caves, with a view to his colonization company, he exclaimed,
"Indeed, there is probably no country in the world where an immigrant population would find such excellent shelter all ready prepared for them, or where they could step into the identical abodes which had been vacated by their occupants at least 1,500 years ago, and use the same doors and windows."[68]
It is just possible, however, that emigrants might not care to have their necks and wrists circled with rings of fire, and their bodies covered with swarms of loathsome insects, for the romantic delights of living in underground dens that had not been occupied for 1,500 years.
Mr. Oliphant's scheme only contemplates Jewish emigrants, to whom such conditions would not be altogether novel.
"I should not," he says, "expect men to come from England or France, but from European and Asiatic Turkey itself, as well as from Russia, Galicia, Roumania, Servia, and the Slav countries."
He has, however, his eye on the whole Jewish race throughout the world when he says:—