John Kelman

“ The saints and heroes of Israel, claimed also by Mohammedans and Christians, have achieved a kind of funereal immortality which makes the whole land seem one vast graveyard. Every prospect is dotted with tombs. The tomb of Jonas shines white from its hill-top north of Hebron, that of Samuel north of Jerusalem, while Joseph’s tomb commands the view where the Vale of Shechem opens on the wider valley of Makhnah. None of them, however, is at all so impressive as the tomb of Rachel, where a modern house and dome cover a rough block of stone worn smooth with the kisses of centuries of Jewish women. ”

“ Into the East, again, the Crusades brought much from the West. From north to south of Palestine one meets with the remains and memorials of that invasion. Theirs are the footprints most visible throughout the land. Everything in Syria has felt the touch of them and retained its mark. At every turn one finds something recognisable and homely to Western ears and eyes—the name of a castle, the chiselling of a stone, the moulding of metal—they are strangely familiar as they are met so far away from home. Yet they survive as wreckage, and as wreckage only. ”

“ In London, or even in Rome, the new world jostles the old; in Palestine the old is so supreme as to seem hardly conscious of the new.
All this reaches its keenest point in connection with men’s worship; and what a long succession of worshippers have left their traces here! The primitive rock-hewn altar, the Jewish synagogue, the Greek temple, the Christian church, the Mohammedan mosque—all have stood in their turn on the same site. His must be a dull soul surely who can feel no sympathy with the Moslem, or even with the heathen worship. ”

“ Nature is not always severe, nor the spirit of man melancholy, in the East. Both nature and man are sometimes found in lighter vein here as elsewhere. Stevenson’s most charming good word for the world he always defended so gallantly, is specially applicable to the Syrian part of it.—“It is a shaggy world, and yet studded with gardens; where the salt and tumbling sea receives rivers running from among reeds and lilies.” Syria has always known the value of her gardens, and felt the sweet enchantment of her reeds and lilies. ”

“ They are of every colour. There are scarlet poppies and crimson anemones, blue dwarf cornflowers, yellow marigolds, white narcissus (said to be the Rose of Sharon) ; but here they seldom grow in patches of strong hue. Each flower blooms apart, and the sheen of them is delicate and suggestive rather than gorgeous. They seem to share the reticence and shyness of the land, and tinge rather than paint it. Even the animal life conforms to this dainty rule; lizards are everywhere, but their colouring is that of their environment, now stone-grey, now wine-red, now straw-coloured. ”

“ Jerusalem is a waterless city, whose famous pools are tanks for rain-water. Its one spring is that strange intermittent one which overflows from the Well of the Virgin through Hezekiah’s aqueduct to the Pool of Siloam. Yet there are legends that beneath the sacred rock which the mosque of Omar covers there is a subterranean torrent; and that the rushing of hidden waters has been heard at times below the massive stones of the Damascus Gate of the city.
These underground waters have given to Palestine a still more interesting feature at the points where her greatest rivers rise. ”

“ That honour is reserved for Hermon, the range and summit which Antilebanon thrusts south from it into Galilee, just opposite Damascus. It is happily named “the sheikh.” Go where you will in Palestine, Hermon seems to lie at the end of some vista or other. For many miles around it, Hermon commands everything. Its mass tilts the plain and sends out innumerable spurs of rich and fertile land; its snow shines far and gives character to the view; its eastern waters redeem the wilderness through many a mile of Hauran; and from its western roots spring all the fountains of the Jordan. ”

“ Early tradition has pictured the angel Gabriel meeting with Mary at the village spring of Nazareth; nor is that the only Syrian fountain by which the footsteps of angels have been traced. All the more trying is the reality. Hideously tattooed women squat by the sweetest springs, fling filthy garments into them, and beat them with stones till the stream flows brown below them; or they toil wearily a mile or two away from their villages to fill the heavy water-pots, beasts of burden rather than mothers in Israel. Of cleanliness the natives have not the remotest idea. ”

“ Many a sweet vista is seen in Palestine framed in trellised vines or in passion-flower swinging over a roofed fountain or a garden house. The mountains were often bare and unhomely, for at no time can any but a minor part of them have been cultivated; yet even the wind-swept heights were inhabited by health and hope and gladness, and when a shepherd passed by, or the reapers shouted in the harvest-fields, the heart of the men of Israel sang aloud. ”

“ The gorges themselves are part and parcel of the city, and they stand for the overflow of her sad and desolate spirit. Their sides are banks of rubbish—the wreckage and débris of a score of sieges, the accumulation of three thousand years. You look from the lower pool of Siloam in the valley of Hinnom, up a long dreary slope of dark grey rubbish, down which a horrible black stream of liquid filth trickles, tainting the air with its stench. Far off above you stands the wall, which in old days enclosed the pool. ”

“ The martyr monuments of Syria are wonderfully full of peace, hope, and assurance. Like Marius the Epicurean you feel, when first you come upon them, that for the first time you are seeing the wonderful spectacle of those who believe. You understand his impression of every form of human sorrow assuaged—desire, and the fulfilment of desire working on the very faces of the aged, and the young men obviously persons who had faced life and were glad. And the same wistful sense of a sure word of revelation comes upon the beholder as that which appealed to him. ”

“ The Sea of Galilee, even so far as natural appearance goes, must be judged by itself.
Journeying to it from Tabor, you ride across a rather characterless tract of country. A jackal, a stray Circassian horseman, a low black tent of the Bedawin, are the only signs of life. Suddenly the track, sweeping up over the farther side of a shallow and rudely cultivated valley, lands you on an unexpected edge, from which the ground falls sheer away before you into the basin of the lake. This is not scenery; it is tinted sculpture, it is jewel-work on a gigantic scale. ”

“ The impression made by Christian missions, however, must have a word of record before we close these notes of travel. We have already described at considerable length the sadness of Palestine. As you journey from place to place the impression deepens. Sores, exposed and fly-blown, intrude themselves into the memory of many a wayside and city street. The dirt and stench of the houses make the sunshine terrible. After weeks of travel the feeling of a sick land has deepened upon you until it has become an oppression weighing daily upon your heart. ”

“ At any rate, to understand anything more than the colour of a land—indeed even to understand that, as we shall see—it is necessary to begin outside it and know something of its surroundings. For Palestine, environment means sea and desert—sea along a straight line for the most part unbroken by any crease or wrinkle of coast-edge which might serve for a harbour, and desert thrown round all the rest, except the mountainous north. Palestine is a great oasis—a fertile resting-place for travellers making the grand journey from Egypt to Mesopotamia ”

“ Rising from springs at the western roots of Hermon, high above sea level, it sinks by rapid stages till at the Dead Sea it reaches bottom nearly 1300 feet below the Mediterranean. Down its extraordinary gully flows the one great river of Palestine. There are other perennial streams, but none to compare with Jordan either for volume or for associations. It is this mass of flowing water which stands as the heart and soul of the Syrian oasis. Its mighty stream has overcome the desert, and claimed the western land for greenness and for life. ”

“ Everybody official—the railway guard, the escort, even the mourner at a funeral—is immensely conscious of his dignity; and on him descends the spirit of Solomon in all his glory. The man you hire to guide you for a walk of half a dozen miles will disappear into his house and emerge in gorgeous array. One of our guides decked himself in flowing yellow robes and marched before us ostentatiously carrying in front of him a weapon which appeared to be a cross between a carving-knife and a reaping-hook, through a land peaceful as an infant school. ”

“ The work of Greece is far beyond the furthest reach of Roman work—the glad spring, the grace of conscious strength that is beautiful as well as strong, the restfulness withal of perfect harmony that is thinking of more than merely utilitarian values; of these Rome knows not the secret. Beside the flight of Greek art she is pedestrian; to the Greek artist she plays at best but the part of Roman artisan. Forceful, massive, successful up to its highest desire, the Roman work is finished and perfect. ”

“ Its jungle is uncompromisingly distinct throughout the entire course, and its colour is living green, with a white flash of broken water or a quiet flow of brown bursting here and there through the verdure. Other streams are similarly marked, with luxurious undergrowth of reeds, varied by clumps of hollyhock or edged with winding ribbons of magenta oleander. But the most striking oases of this kind are the valley of Shechem and the city of Damascus. There is a hill seldom visited by tourists, but well worth climbing, set in the broad vale of Makhna, right opposite Jacob’s Well. ”

“ But the sun is the magician of Syria, who bleaches her and then throws up against his handiwork the boldest contrasts of strong light and shade. No one{15} who has seen the crimson flush of sunset on the olives, or the sudden change of a grey Judean hill-side to rich orange, or the whole eastern cliffs of the Sea of Galilee turned to the likeness of flesh-coloured marble, will be likely to forget the picture. Loti’s wonderful description of desert sunsets—“incandescent violet, and the red of burning coals”—is not overdrawn. Shadows will transform the poorest into the richest colouring. ”

“ Nothing in the land has a more bare and savage grandeur than the square-chiselled mountain blocks of Quarantana, seen from below at Jericho in black angular silhouette against the sunset. South of Jerusalem the Kidron gorge, cleaving the intruding desert, exaggerates the wildness of the north, but as you climb past Bethlehem to Hebron you are in a region liker to Samaria, with its deeper and more rounded valleys and its richer pasture and cultivation. South of Hebron the range spreads fanwise and gradually sinks to the desert. ”

“ Where was that note learned if not in black tents pitched in the boundless waste, where man’s littleness, in contrast with the great powers of Nature, oppressed him into prone fatalism, or revealed to him the infinite refuge and comfort of the Everlasting Arms? He whose fathers have sung such songs will not satisfy his soul with the bustle of towns. He will need the desert for retreat, that his confused mind may calm itself down to order and find new revelations of truth. And when the Syrian retreats to the desert he seems rather to be going home than abroad. ”

“ These irregular, three-tiered clusters of variously sized and shaped arches, carrying the stone or concrete channel across a gorge, have a real beauty of their own; and the long stretches of single or double tiers that take up the channel where it emerges from a mountain-tunnel, lead it high and secure across the treacherous ooze of a marsh, throw their level line on high bridges over ravines, and at last end in the tumbled ruins of a city whose pools and fountains they filled long ago—these have an indisputable beauty of workmanship and design, as well as an infinite pathos of sentiment. ”

“ These are the spots of brightness in a very grey landscape, little centres of life in a land where so much is morbid. The visiting of sacred places would be the most selfish of religious sentimentalities if it were done without a painful sense of helplessness against the misery that surrounds them. The only thing that turns pity into hope in Palestine is the mission-work that is being done there. No one can see that work without being filled with an altogether new enthusiasm for missions. Across the sea, one believes in them as a part of Christian duty and custom. ”

“ To perform his devotions the Syrian goes to a fountain, when that is possible, as it is part of the ritual to wash the hands before praying; but the Arab, spreading his carpet in the shade of his camel, far away upon the desert, where no water is to be had but the precious drops in his leathern bottle, is permitted to wash his hands and lips with sand instead. That which impresses every spectator is the extraordinary faculty for abstraction which is manifested. The Moslem seems to have at command the power of annihilating the world around him, and entering the unseen. ”

“ After the magic of that light, with its blended purple and amber and ruby, the finest Western work seems harsh. It is hardly light; it is illuminated shadow. The rugs and carpets, with their intricate colouring, are more familiar and need not be described. The finest of them are of silk, and their delicacy of shade is marvellous. The patterns constantly elude the eye, promising and just almost reaching some recognisable figure, only to lose themselves in a bright maze. ”

“ The spell of the fountains remains in spite of all, and no traveller wonders that the ancient men revered them as sacred places. Israel exulted in the forcefulness of her larger rivers, but hardly knew their kindlier resources. Her affection was kept for those wells and streamlets which flowed past her doors and made glad her cities. It is a land of dried-up torrent-beds, and no river made glad any City of God except at the seasons when God had filled it with His rain. In such a land a wayside well like Jacob’s counts for more than our Western imagination can realise. ”

“ The immense variety of its buildings, with their domes, flat terraces, minarets, and sloping roofs, distinguishes it at once from the rectangular masses of the villages. As if on purpose to emphasise the contrast, one of these villages has set itself right opposite the city across a narrow valley. Looking from the southern wall of the Haram enclosure, this village of Siloam is seen sprawling along the opposite hillside, a mere drift of square hovels seen across some fields of artichokes. Nothing could appear more miserable; inferiority is confessed in every line of it. ”

“ No one who has stood upon that hill of Golgotha and thought of the wondrous past can have failed to perceive a mystical and dark connection between the crime which has rendered Jerusalem so famous, and all that deathly and spectral fate which has befallen{238} the spirit of Syria. As we stand amid the deepening shadows of sunset on the spot where Christ was crucified, a change seems to come, as the blood-red sky crimsons the minarets and domes. It is no longer Christ that hangs upon the Cross, but Palestine. ”

“ The marsh in which the Abana loses itself shares with the Serbonian Bog its grim distinction, chiefly on account of its deep black wells, which the natives take to be man-devouring whirlpools.
In her grander and more impressive features, Nature is in Syria constantly suggestive of the play of occult powers. Earthquake has left its mark in many a split{212} rampart and broken tower, and that of itself is enough to give a peculiarly ghostly tinge to the spirit of any land. The unspeakable loneliness of the desert has its own magic—a melancholy spell which has no parallel in other lands. ”

“ But as you approach, all is disillusionment. The trees seem to detach themselves and stand apart in the untidy paths. The cactus hedge is repulsive, with its spiked pulpy masses and its bare and straggling roots. The brown walls seem to decay before your eyes, and the village{68} seen from within its own street changes to a succession of ruinous heaps of débris, with excavations into the mud of the hillside. If, as at Nain, there be a white-walled church or mosque in the place, it seems to stand alone in a long moraine of ruins. ”

“ Nothing proves and exemplifies all this more strikingly than the apparently unreasonable view of the fertility, beauty, and general perfection of Palestine which its inhabitants have always cherished. Visitors from the West are often disappointed, and as they move from place to place their wonder grows as they recall the Biblical descriptions of the land flowing with milk and honey. Allowing for the many centuries of misrule and deterioration, it still remains obvious that Palestine never can have been that dreamland of natural delight which piety has imagined. ”

“ We have seen how to the dwellers west of Jordan it was at once an abiding enemy and an ancient home. Shut out from it by the huge trench of the Jordan valley and the barricade of the eastern mountains, the Syrian still feels enough of the desert’s fiery touch to fear it as an enemy. Its wind blasts his crops and its heat drives him from his valleys to the hill country for the breath of life. Every traveller speaks of the “positive weight” of heat that makes men bend low in their saddles. ”

“ To all creeds alike the essential element in religion seems to be ritual performance, and the ideal life is accordingly not one of ethical character but of formal correctness. And yet in the midst of all this self-righteous complacency, any one can see that every part of the land is being judged and is bearing the punishment of sin. Jericho, squatting sordidly amid the ruins of its ancient Hellenism, looked down upon by the severe and barren mountain where Jesus hungered, is a monument of the reality of ethical distinctions as hard and practical facts. ”