J. D. Paxton

“ From the terrace of the palace, which looks towards Beyroot, we had one of the most splendid views I have ever seen. We saw the sun set in the ocean behind Cyprus; could distinctly see the island in the full blaze of the setting sun. It lies so far to the west, that it is only in peculiar states of the air it can be seen. Corneil stands on a rocky knoll on the top of a ridge. At this place the limestone is thrown up, while both above and below on the ridge the sandstone prevails. It is surrounded with vines, mulberry, fig and other kinds of trees. But they stop here. ”

“ They are all destitute of trees, and hardly a bush is to be seen that would shade a goat. This nakedness of the banks and precipices gives them a wild appearance. On the sides of these deep chasms you occasionally see ledges of rock jutting out, and caves, either natural or artificial, entering under them—a noble place for thieves and robbers. The descent from the hills to the plain of Jordan is abrupt and steep. ”

“ The great quantity of rock on the surface, and the little earth that is at times to be seen, must at first strike the observer as a great objection to this country, and may lead to the inquiry, how could such a rocky land be called "the land flowing with milk and honey"—the glory of all lands? There are many districts that are sadly encumbered with rock, yet the soil among these rocks is of a very superior kind, and were the rock somewhat broken up, the large pieces piled and the small mixed with the soil, it might be made very productive. ”

“ Cairo is rather an assemblage of towns than one great and continuous city; its parts lie contiguous to each other, as chance and caprice may have decided. Close to the south-east side of it a range of hills rises, the first and almost the only hills that we saw in Egypt—those back of the pyramids of Gheza excepted—on a part of these hills the citadel is situate, which commands the city, and is a place of considerable strength.
Between the town and the river there lies a large open space—immense piles of rubbish disfigured some parts of it. ”

“ Jaffa is a place of interest, chiefly, as being the sea-port nearest Jerusalem, and the landing-place of a large number of pilgrims that annually resort, by thousands, to visit the holy places in and about Jerusalem. It has also, in the noble plain of Sharon, a most admirable back country. But what avails a country, however good, if there be not people to cultivate it, and if the government be so unwise and oppressive as to hold out no inducement for industry among the people? ”

“ The ridges of the mountain lower down gradually, and spreading out, form a general level, which merges insensibly into that of the plain. It is on this elevated level that the ruins stand; about a mile from them, on the side of a hill, is the quarry that has furnished the stone for these stupendous buildings. A little to the east arises the finest set of springs that I have seen in Syria. They boil up over a considerable surface, and send off a stream of water sufficient to set in operation various kinds of machinery, if applied to that purpose. ”

“ We passed a very high rock in the middle of the plain which had a wide, high, flat face to the south—in that face I counted the mouths of nearly thirty tombs. Most of them were from ten to twelve feet high. There was a house on the top, said to be a convent.
We also passed an old city, which must once have been a place of great strength. The walls are nearly perfect and very strong. There are but few people in the city. It stands there almost alone. Most of the houses within are gone, and cultivated spots occupy their place. ”

“ The Mohammedan ladies have their rights, as well as our own fair ones, and know how to stand up for them—and the female tongue is fully as powerful an instrument in the East as it is in the West. Judging from what I used to hear when a boy about the Mohammedans, I should have expected to have seen this fair one put in a sack and thrown in the river, or, as water is rather scarce here to be used for drowning scolds, I should at least have expected to have seen her head cut off, and her tongue nailed up in terror to others. But it was plain that the good lady was in no fear of such treatment ”

“ It is amusing to one not accustomed to the sight, to observe how partial the people are to a sitting posture. You may see the blacksmith sitting and hammering his iron; the carpenter sitting and hewing his wood, or planing his plank; the merchant sitting and selling his goods; and the women sitting and washing their clothes,—not sitting on chairs, or on benches, but á-la-turque, with their feet folded under them. ”

“ Learning that at the distance of a mile or two to the north-west, on the same plain, there was a remarkable set of sepulchres, called the Sepulchre of the Judges, we concluded to visit them also. There are extensive beds of rock in this part of the plain, and in many places its upper surface is six, eight, and ten feet above the level of the soil. The rock is softer than that at the sepulchre of the kings, being of that soft, friable limestone, which, from the ease with which it is worked, is so much used in building. ”

“ Sometime before I got out of quarantine, there was a death in the Emeer family of this village; and, as is the custom, the people are not allowed to wash their clothes for forty days—as they are not much given to cleanliness at any time, this was an order grievously out of place. About the time I came up the people were most fearfully dirty. The days of restriction are, however, past, and it is thought the people have been using water. It is a rare evil for people to get habituated to—a disregard of cleanliness—for it is hard to correct the evil. ”

“ A space, perhaps forty feet square, has been cut down fifteen or twenty feet, perhaps originally twenty-five or thirty feet, and the whole of the rock removed, leaving the sides regular and smooth, like the walls of a house. Parallel to the south side, and at the distance of eight or ten feet, a graduated road has been made fifteen or twenty feet wide, on a moderate descent, which brings it down near the south-east corner, to nearly the same level with the floor within. A noble archway is hewn through this wall, wide enough to admit three or four men abreast. ”

“ The excuse for its being in the city is, that the city does not now occupy the same ground that it did at that time—its walls were farther west and north—and the present walls take in what the old walls, when those transactions took place, left out. It appears to me very manifest, that the places now shown as the places of crucifixion and interment, must have always been within the city. A wall so run as to leave it out, would be located in a way that no wise builder would ever think of in running a wall to defend a city situated as Jerusalem is. ”

“ A few years ago, when Ibrahim Pasha's troops took Hebron, they committed great outrages on the Jews, by plundering them of all they could find. They broke into their synagogue, and opened all parts of it in which they thought anything could be found, mutilated and tore their roll of the law, and perpetrated many other enormities. Hebron is esteemed by the Jews as a sacred city; and they think it a great privilege to live here. They pretend that persons, when old, if they come and live at Hebron, can renew their age. They need not go far for materials to correct the opinion ”

“ While under the guidance of the man who showed us the house of Ananias, and the window through which Paul made his escape, we were taken to see several other things, especially some graves, which were not far from the gate. In one of the large vaults, which was in part open, we could see the skeletons of various persons—their winding-sheets in part rotted off—the flesh all gone, and the whole exhibiting a spectacle most humbling to human nature. In health man is the most beautiful of animals, and in corruption the most loathsome. But death will lose its victory through Christ, to the believer. ”

“ Still it is carrying the matter too far and beyond the truth, when it is said to be so heavy, or so dead, that it never rises in waves, but always lies smooth and unruffled, let the wind blow as it will. ”

“ The streets are narrow, crooked, and miserably dirty. But little effort is made to remove filth and produce cleanliness. In truth, throughout this whole eastern world, the people appear to have very low ideas of neatness and cleanliness. While the city abounds with water, and a fountain of it is seen in most of the good houses, you meet with filth everywhere, and are often most grievously annoyed with the stench of dead animals in the roads and streets. ”

“ The great heats of summer are now past, showers of rain have already fallen, and the driving up of clouds at one time from the north, and at another from the south, betoken the approach of those copious showers, which the earth, parched by a whole summer's sun, so much requires, and which man and beast need to refresh their exhausted system. ”

“ He had come the day before from Bethlehem to the Dead Sea, and from thence came up past Jericho to the fountain of Elisha, and was off this morning for Jerusalem before we arrived. It would seem that even to unbelievers this land has a most intense interest; and well it may, for what land ever witnessed such wonders as have taken place in Palestine?
We took a south-east direction across the plain, which differed but little from the district we had already passed over, in the sterility of its aspect. ”

“ Poor human nature! how low it can and will come down, where grace does not prevent.
There are, just outside the walls of Damascus, some mills, that looked better than any of the buildings of the sort I have seen in the East. They stand on the main channel of the river, and avail themselves of its waters to work their machinery. The bread of Damascus is, for the East, good. ”

“ To the south, we could see as far as Mount Hermon and the mountains about the sea of Tiberias. To the north, the plain ran out till it met the horizon. The whole plain of Celo-Syria appeared to be a dead level. The mountains rise from it as if they rose out of a sea. In this it reminded me of the plain of Ephesus, which stretches up almost to Smyrna. Baalbec can be seen from Sun-neen, but the state of the air was not favourable to a distant view on the plain. North of the point of Sun-neen, on which we stood, the main ridge of the Lebanon sinks a good deal, as it [25] does on the south. ”

“ It is with them a body without a soul—a form, and a greatly altered form, without the spirit and power which makes it a transforming principle among mankind. But the darkness is passing away—rays of light are breaking upon these regions—and we doubt not the day is not far remote when the religion of Christ will, in its enlightening and transforming power, revisit these regions, and make them revive and flourish like the garden of the Lord.
From Soor we made our next stage to Saida, the ancient Sidon, which is so often mentioned in connection with Tyre—"Tyre and Sidon." ”

“ Near Gibeon I saw some sandstone, singularly mixed up with the limestone. It lay about in large masses, but I saw no continuous rock of it. The ancient Gibeon is now a small-village, inhabited by a few Mohammedan families. It stands on the summit of a round hill, and from the steepness of its sides is capable of being made very strong. There are various old ruins and some arches of great size running into the sides of the hill, forming rooms, in which various labours are now carried on. ”

“ The stars are numerous, and the face of the heavens has a clearness in it, that makes the impression on the mind that we can see further into the deep and pathless abyss by which our little earth is surrounded than we can in other countries. It agrees in this with the Italian sky, but is, I think, still more clear. This clearness of the air is also manifest in looking at distant objects. They appear much nearer than they really are. I am almost perpetually struck with this in looking from Bru-ma-nah down to Beyroot, and the long line of coast which lies to the north and south. ”

“ The greater part of the most valuable land of Egypt lies between the rivers. This part is called the Delta from its likeness to the Greek letter of that name, which is of a triangular form. A district of land on both sides of the triangle was cultivated and productive as far as the waters of the Nile could be made to reach it; but beyond that, the long burning suns scorch up vegetation, and convert all into a waste of barren sand. At some distance in the interior, both to the east and west, water is found, and there vegetation exists, but these places are not in the valley of the Nile. ”

“ As to the pure service of the heart—faith that worketh by love—regeneration by the Spirit—a new moral nature, effected through the word of truth under the agencies of the Holy Spirit, with most if not all the other elements of real genuine piety, they are almost wholly ignorant. It is, indeed, astonishing that a people, who have the book of God in their hands, should so long remain in utter darkness and ignorance of that spirituality which beams forth from all parts of it. ”

“ The antiquities at Petra are most wonderful; a town hewn out in a sandstone rock, only one house of any size built above ground, and that a church. This building has been slightly injured by the late earthquake. There are most extensive excavations—a considerable town under ground; the tomb of Aaron on Mount Hor is an excavation. The mount is a round sugar-loaf hill, with a small level on the top.
We have had fearful accounts of the prevalence of cholera at Jerusalem, Aleppo, Malta, and some other places; much fear is felt that it will visit us; may the Lord preserve us from its ravages! ”

“ We have from Bru-ma-nah a fair view of the mountains, as they rise above us, and run far to the north-east and south-west: a long sea coast spreads out before us—the town of Beyroot—the shipping that lies off the town on the face of the smooth waters, all rise into view, and give a rich and beautiful variety to the prospect.
Nearly one-half of the village is composed of Greeks, and the other half about equally divided between the Druses and Maronites. They all speak the Arabic, which is indeed the vernacular language of this region. ”

“ The whole upper part of the Mount, from where we pitched our tents, which was near the sandstone formation, is limestone with its varieties. It lies horizontally, and is stratified with unusual regularity. This can be seen with great distinctness on the west side of the Mount, where the deep hollow, in which a branch of the river Beyroot heads, terminates against the cone, and makes a regular, steep, sloping descent of, I should think, from four to six thousand feet. Near the top, on the west side, I saw a small spot of fine white marble—much of the rock, indeed, approximates to marble. ”

“ The whole face of the hill, both on the Gihon and the Kedron side, is evidently much enlarged, and made to project into the valley, from the quantity of rubbish thrown over it. Once it must have been a high and almost, if not altogether, a perpendicular bank, but now the rubbish has almost wholly hidden the face of the rock, being visible only in one or two spots; thus forming a steep but sloping bank of rich, soft earth. Some parts of it are planted with trees, and portions are used for cultivating vegetables of various kinds. ”

“ Parts of the plain had been under tillage, and on some spots the stubble on the ground showed that a crop of grain had been gathered, but the greater part lay untilled. It no doubt serves, as much of the best lands of these regions do, for pasturage—a matter, in the estimation of the people of this country, equally, if not more important than land employed in tillage. This is not the season for flocks to be seen on the plains, as they are too much burned up ”