The Holy Land

CHAPTER I

THE LIGHTER SIDE OF THINGS

One easily forgets, among the many sorrows of the Holy Land, that there is any lighter side to the picture there. Yet such a side there is, and always has been. 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. Was not her first story told of a garden where four such rivers flowed, and her noblest sermon that whose text was “the lilies of the field” and “the birds of the air”? What pleasantness of open nature there is in these two latter expressions! What sense of field-breadth and sky-space, in which the Preacher had room for breathing and for delight! Every Israelite, sitting under his vine and fig tree, or going forth to meditate in the fields at evening, knew this charm. From of old the inhabitants have taken delight in exchanging roofs for bowers in their fields and gardens, or for booths, built with green branches on their house-roofs. 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. In the words of the 65th Psalm this exhilaration and childlike glee finds its most perfect expression; we quote them in that old Scottish rhymed version which has so singularly caught their spirit:—

Similarly the Jordan, usually thought of with a certain gloom, and rendered still more dismal by its persistent allegorical association with death, is by no means so melancholy as it is supposed to be. Its rise, indeed, was from a black cave, where ancient pagan worship erected its shrines, seeing life issue there from the abyss of death. Its course leads it far down, like the dark stream of classic fable, below the surface of the earth and ocean. Yet there is no sense of all that as one looks at it from any point in its course. The trees of Syria are generally disappointing. For the most part solitary, or undersized where there is a wood, many of them are decaying, and most of them are dull in colour. But the vegetation of the Jordan is a bright exception. Even at its lowest point, when it is hurrying over the last miles to the Dead Sea, it flows through that rich boscage known as the “Swellings” or the “Pride” of Jordan, where pilgrims cut their staves. It is to this part of its course that the words in Tancred apply most exactly, “The beauty and abundance of the Promised Land may still be found ... ever by the rushing waters of the bowery Jordan.” Warburton, describing the same scene in early morning, speaks of the awakening of birds and beasts there, and then the sunrise, adding, “I lingered long upon that mountain’s brow, and thought that, so far from deserving all the dismal epithets that had been bestowed upon it, I had not seen so cheerful or attractive a scene in Palestine.”

The scents of the East add to the delightfulness of Nature on her pleasant side. There are plenty of abominable smells there, but these are in the towns and villages. The open country is continually surprising and refreshing its travellers with new perfume. That this is fully appreciated by the natives, no reader of the Bible can forget. There we have the scent of spices and of wine; of the field, of water, and of Lebanon; of budding vines, mandrakes, apples; of ointment, of incense, and of raiment. In such references we see the East inhaling the fragrance of the land with an almost passionate delight. It is all there still. The scent of the desert after rain has been already referred to, but the same aromatic perfume may be enjoyed by climbing the hills above Beyrout, where every ground-plant seems to breathe forth spices. Again, there are the blossoming trees, the heavy perfume of orange-flower, and the simple fragrance of roses. Best of all, there is the clean smell of ripe grain in the cornfields, and the fresh, briny exhilaration of breezes from the sea.

Such is the lighter side of Nature; and man is not by any means so far out of touch with it as is often supposed. The severity of material conditions and of historical experience has not been able quite to suppress man’s gaiety. It is well that this has been so, for here certainly the words of the Scots song are true enough: “Werena my heart licht, I wad dee.” With so much of the darker powers of the universe pressing hard upon them, one trembles to imagine what the spirit of Syria would have been without those inexhaustible stores of gaiety that break forth sometimes like her great river from the very darkness of the abyss. Her laughter is not that of progressive lands looking to the future in the great joy of an intelligent hope. It is rather a part of her inalienable childhood, whose fresh sweetness and virginity have somehow been permitted to remain through all her sorrows. Renan describes the heroes of the Bible as “always young, healthy, and strong, scarcely at all superstitious, passionate, simple, and grand.” There is still some inheritance of such life, perpetually young and even childish, in the Holy Land.

The first appearance of an Eastern is grave and solemn, with an element of contempt in it rather trying to the would-be jester or too familiar stranger. But this is not wholly due to any weight of gloom pressing on his heart. It has, with singular ingenuity, been traced to quite minor and apparently insignificant causes, such as the wearing of flowing robes by the men and the burden-bearing of the women. There can be no doubt that both clothes and burdens exercise a powerful influence on character; and it may well be the case that the management of their garment has taught dignity to the men, while the carrying of heavy waterpots has helped to make the women graceful and erect. There is also the instinct of self-defence, and the constant remembrance of danger. Every Eastern, however prosperous, impresses one with the idea that his table is spread for him in the presence of his enemies. This leads him—especially if he be an Arab—to assume a show of superiority and a bullying swagger, which seem to the uninitiated quite impervious to any thought of fun. But the mask is easily laid aside, and the gravest and most contemptuous Syrian will suddenly collapse into harsh laughter or forget himself in childish interest.

It would be wonderful if it were otherwise. The East is full of provocatives to mirth—not merely such as seem ridiculous to a stranger because they are foreign, but things grotesque in themselves. Take the one instance of the camel. Much has been written about him from many points of view, but justice has never yet been done to the camel as a humorous person. Yet he is the most humorous of all the inhabitants of the East. Beside him, with his sardonic pleasantry, the monkey is a mountebank and the donkey but a solemn little ass. He has been described as “the tall, simple, smiling camel”; but on closer acquaintance he turns out to be hardly so simple as he might be taken for, and if he smiles, he is generally smiling at you. The camels you meet in Syria are carrying barley with the air of kings, and regarding their human companions with, at best, a sentiment of contemptuous tolerance. The lower lip of a camel is one of the most expressive features in the whole repertoire of natural history. The humours of this animal reached for us their climax at Sheikh Miskin, while we were waiting for the Damascus train. A camel had been persuaded to kneel in order to receive its load of long poles brought by the railway. It was roaring steadily, in a fiendish and yet conscientious manner. Ten men were loading it, of whom one stood upon its near fore-leg, two fastened the poles upon its back, and the remaining seven looked on and made remarks. The beast waited until the poles were all but fixed—ten of them or so. Then it indulged in a shake, which sent them rolling in all directions. Finally it was loaded, with two of the sticks on one side and one on the other, their ends projecting far out behind and in front. It rose, nearly ruining a well-dressed Arab who had somehow got in among it. Just then the train arrived and the camel fled incontinently, sidewise like a crab, spreading the fear of death in man and beast for many yards around, and dragging a terrified driver, who hung on to its head-rope, across towards the distant east. A loaded camel behaving in this fashion is a deadlier weapon than a loaded gun.

Now the native wit always appeared to us to have modelled itself on camel drollery of this sort. It is generally personal, and its essential function is to hit somebody. It lacks freshness, and has a certain suggestion of a clown with “crow’s feet” under his eyes. Sometimes indeed a Syrian indulges in jokes at his own expense, but more frequently his facetiousness is at the expense of others, and it is tolerably direct. The habit of nicknames lends itself to Oriental wit, the lean man being described familiarly as “Father of Bones,” and the stout man as “Full Moon of Religion.” Passing through a village some distance off the usual route of travellers, we were surrounded with villagers who asked the dragoman why we had come. “To take away your country!” was the answer, and it was met with peals of laughter. Another witticism which was immensely appreciated was the remark to some farmers who were suffering from drought that we in England had stolen their rain and it had made many people sick there. A boatman on the Sea of Galilee was being chaffed unmercifully upon the fact that he had once tried to commit suicide. He appealed, smiling, to one of the passengers as “My Father,” and pled that he had been mad when he did that. A fellow-boatman rebuked him for calling the gentleman “father of a lunatic,” and the whole crew was dissolved in laughter, the victim himself heartily joining in the chorus. In Damascus we found a time-worn Joe Miller in the shout of the nosegay-seller—a very musical cry, which the guide-book translates “Appease your mother-in-law,” i.e. by presenting her with a bouquet.

From of old pleasure has been apt to degenerate in the luxurious East, and the fun of Syrians shows abundant traces of such degeneration. Many unpleasant elements mingle with it. One of the recognised forces in Eastern life is humbug—barefaced bluff and transparent pretence, which is apparently seen through and yet retains its potency. The lengths to which this method may go are almost incredible, and cases are on record of interpreters who have volubly translated a long English address and afterwards confessed that they did not know a word of the English language. At times, also, high spirits leads to savagery. The men who were in charge of our animals were kind and even affectionate to them, but their moods changed unaccountably. Your donkey-driver, trotting behind his donkey, will sometimes encourage it with yelling which would fill any animal less philosophical with the fear of instant extermination, and he jocularly throws rocks at it until you stop him. Worst of all, the Syrian humour constantly tends towards indecency of the most bestial type. The song with which a musical donkey-boy relieves the monotony of the journey is sometimes quite untranslatable. The “body-dances,” which form the staple

entertainment provided by wandering Arabs, are often pantomimic, and their crude realism is unspeakably disgusting.

Yet there is a very innocent and cheerful vein in the human nature of Syria. At times it is irrelevant and trying. The camp guards, e.g. who are hired from the nearest village to watch the sleeping tents, are apt to beguile the hours of darkness in a manner hardly conducive to repose. In most of our camps they were silent figures, flitting about in an almost ghostly fashion, with perfectly noiseless footsteps. But MacGregor complains of having had to pay his Egyptian guards “for sleeping very loud to keep away the robbers.” Our difficulties were not exactly the same as his, but in some places the guards kept singing as they paced to and fro, and shouted cheerily to one another along the whole length of the encampment, or whistled incessantly, and occasionally fired guns to prove their vigilance. There is a sense of spontaneity and heartiness about the mirth of the East which throws into strong contrast its subtler and more gloomy characteristics. Irresponsible and gay, Syrians seem to be grown-up children, and they retain the ways of childhood. We rarely saw children playing games, but bands of full-grown men were seen at times playing schoolboys’ field games with much shouting. Everybody in the cities appears to be either selling or eating sweetmeats. Sport is rare, but men go forth with guns to shoot little birds like sparrows. One of the most curious sights of Damascus is that of shopkeepers and artisans who go about the streets followed by pet lambs instead of dogs, the wool of these strange little creatures being dyed in brilliant spots of blue or pink.

The kindliness of the East is as genuine and as pleasing as that of any land in the West. It is not in evidence indeed when there is nothing to call it forth. As you pass through the country, the villagers and townsfolk regard you with indifference if not with scorn. But one must remember the universal acting of the East—its devotion to appearances, and its very curious ideas as to which appearances are most becoming. With that in mind, the indifference and the scorn become less alarming. You may find the whole spirit of the situation suddenly change to one of the kindliest. A traveller who has fallen victim to one of the malarial fevers which are so common in Syria at certain periods, will never forget the tenderness with which his camp-servants come about his tent inquiring, “Ente mabsut?” (Are you happy, or well?). When he returns the inquiry the answer is, “Ente mabsut, ana mabsut” (If you are happy, I am happy). At Sidon we had just arrived and had the tents pitched in the open space next the burying-ground. It was Thursday, and the graves were crowded with visitors—Mohammedan women in black, white, or light-coloured robes. They did not seem very sad, even beside the most recent graves, but gossiped and enjoyed their half-holiday, disappearing before sunset silently, like a flock of pigeons to their dovecots. The spectacle was theatrical and almost unearthly. It was difficult to persuade oneself that these flitting figures were really women at all; they seemed rather to be animated bits of landscape. Just while we were watching this, and feeling all its dreamy remoteness from human life as we had ever known it, two new figures appeared. They were the gardener of a neighbouring garden and his young daughter Wurda (Rhoda, Rose). She was five years of age, a tiny vision of black eyes and hair, the hair being arranged in two pigtails down her back. She brought a little bunch of roses for each of us, and as she gave them kissed our hands with as sweet a shyness as any child anywhere could have done. The incident, like that on the hill of Samaria, lingers on the memory, and bears witness to a world of gentleness and kindliness such as we had little dreamed of. Altogether there are abundant signs that in ancient days there must have been much of that Syrian life described by one scholar as “gay and bright, festive and musical—the very home of songs and dances.” It is pleasant to know that although the fortunes of the land have saddened her so terribly, there still remains something at least of her former gaiety.

Even the religion of Syria has its lighter side. Every student of the Bible knows how much there was of rejoicing and fresh childlike revelling in the situation, in the worship of ancient Israel. It is peculiarly interesting to find that in the Semitic worship before and apart from the invasion of Israel, so kindly and friendly a relation subsisted between man and his gods. “The circle into which a man was born was not simply a group of kinsfolk and fellow-citizens, but embraced also certain divine beings, the gods of the family and of the state, which to the ancient mind were as much a part of the particular community with which they stood connected as the human members of the social circle.”[32] Accordingly it would appear that among these ancient Semites the conception of sacrifice was by no means so gloomy as it came to be later, when the moral tragedy of life was more clearly realised. The idea was that of “communion with the deity in a sacrificial meal of holy food.” They “go on eating and drinking and rejoicing before their god with the assurance that he and they are on the best of jovial good terms.... Ancient religion assumes that through the help of the gods life is so happy and satisfactory that ordinary acts of worship are all brightness and hilarity, expressing no other idea than that the worshippers are well content with themselves and with their divine sovereign.”[33]

Of course the severer truth and cleaner conscience which Israel’s revelation brought her gradually deepened the shadows on her religious life. She substituted duty for happiness, the beauty of holiness for the mere joie de vivre, and the tragic blessedness of forgiveness for the careless pleasures of life. Yet to the end she retained and insisted on the gladness of religion. The duty of joy was a command and not merely an epigram for Israel. Dante himself was not more explicit in his condemnation of perverse sullenness than was he who wrote, “Because thou servedst not the Lord thy God with joyfulness, and with gladness of heart, for the abundance of all things: therefore shalt thou serve thine enemies.”[34]

It is surely a very striking fact that the spots which all travellers select as those in which the gladness of the land dwells most freely still are Nazareth and Bethlehem. For beauty of feature and of dress, and for their general air of pleasant and light-hearted gaiety, these are the acknowledged centres. It was of Bethlehem that we felt this most true. Its name, signifying “House of Bread,” is significant of plenty and of comfort. Its associations, even apart from the song of angels there, are sweet and gracious. While approaching it, you look across a pleasant and lightsome landscape to the dim blue mountains of Moab, and remember how Ruth looked across these very fields, when the reapers of Boaz were working in them, to her distant home in those mountains. Here it was that King David in his boyhood played and tended the flocks of his father, and it was the water of that sweet well for which he longed in the days of his adversity. These and a hundred other memories prepare the traveller for a place of gracious and kindly sweetness.

CHAPTER II

THE SHADOW OF DEATH

We now turn sharply to the other side of things, and it must be apparent to every one that we are passing from the smaller to the vastly greater element in the spirit of Syria. The text in Deuteronomy which we quoted[35] shows us joy commanded at the sword’s point, as if the nation were unwilling and unlikely to obey easily the happy command. Even when Jesus Christ repeats the injunction in His great words, “Rejoice and be exceeding glad,” it is a defiant gladness He enjoins. The context shows that the rejoicing is that of persecuted and slandered men. A recent writer has bitterly described our march through life in the words: “We uphold our wayward steps with the promises and the commandments for crutches, but on either side of us trudge the shadow Death and the bacchanal Sex.”[36] The words sound profane to Western ears, but they are not untrue of the spirit of Syria. It is of “the shadow Death” that the present chapter treats.

As primitive religion decayed and men lost their sense of kinship and their easy and friendly relations with the old gods, they were left alone with death, which everywhere stared them in the face and claimed them for its own. Next to God, death is the most impressive fact in human experience, with sin for its sting. When old and defective views of God are passing away, two courses are open to men. As death closes in upon them, and they feel its grasp upon their unprotected souls, they may appeal from it to God, and find Him revealing Himself, with eternal life for them in the knowledge of Him. This was what the noblest of Israel’s thinkers did, and the growing revelation of the Bible was their reward. God showed Himself to them in ever-increasing clearness, until one and another and another of them found that the hand that grasped them was “not Death but Love.” But another course is open. They may enthrone death in place of the broken gods—“Death is king, and vivat rex!” They may “say to corruption, Thou art my father; to the worm, Thou art my mother, and my sister.” Then the emphasis of thought will fall on the grave, and all men’s imaginations will grow morbid.

The tombs of the Holy Land are of many patterns. In his Haifa, Laurence Oliphant describes several different kinds of them, from the cave-sepulchres, or the underground galleries, to the little wayside graves or narrow holes driven into rock which seem such tightly-fitting homes for the dead. There are, of course, the modern graves sacred to the wives and children of missionaries who have laid down their lives in the loving service of Christ and man. Buckle the historian sleeps in the Christian burying-ground at Damascus, and Henriette Renan was laid to rest in Byblus. These graves and others dear to the Western world are, as graves have been since Abraham’s day, symbols of the strangers’ inheritance and lot in the Holy Land. From these, back to the tombs of hoariest antiquity, the country is bound by an unbroken chain of death. Through all the centuries the dead have been thrust upon the notice of the living in a fashion so obtrusive as to make this the most obvious impression of the land. Most of the graves are those of persons now unknown and quite forgotten. Small and great, common men and heroes, are alike conspicuous in death. Each of the invaders has left his memorial, and the sites of ancient cities are traced by help of their burying-grounds.

Moslem tombs are everywhere. Most of them are oblong structures of rude but solid masonry erected over shallow graves. In some cases a painted tarbush (fez-cap) marks the head and a little upright stone the feet. A slight hollow is often cut in the flat top for birds to drink from. Tombs are clustered among their iris-flowers beside the walls of villages. They have crept up to the very summit of the hill which Gordon identifies as Calvary. They have encroached on the palace of Herod’s daughter at Samaria. They crowd the ground outside the built-up “Gate Beautiful” at Jerusalem. There is, to our feelings, a certain indecency in this promiscuous invasion of the grave: Mohammedans seem

to bury their dead anywhere. The Crusaders have left fewer memorials of themselves in the shape of tombs than one might have expected. Barbarossa’s tomb we have already visited. For the rest, their memorials are mostly those great buildings whose ruins stand to this day. Early Christianity, too, has left its tombs—catacombs and single graves, especially in the southern part of the coast, and eastwards in Hauran. People of importance have sometimes more than one tomb, like St. George, who is buried both in Lydda and Damascus. But the graves of humbler Christians are more precious than these, for their inscriptions remain, breathing forth the faith and peace with which Christ had blessed the world. Such memorials of victory over death are inextinguishable lamps hung in the sepulchres of Syria. And these lamps are kindled at the Great Light. Never was symbolism more appropriate than that of the Holy Fire in the Church of the Sepulchre. The very heart and soul of Syria is a tomb—the reputed grave of Jesus Christ. To this day the chief pilgrim song repeats with exultant reiteration the words, “This is the tomb of Christ.” It is a song which has never been silent in the land. In the Crusader camps a herald closed the day with the loud cry, “Lord, succour the Holy Sepulchre”; and the sentinels passed the word from post to post, “Remember the Holy Sepulchre.”

It is not, however, the victory over death that impresses one as the spirit of Syria. It is death itself, unconquered, mysterious, and dark. Its Christian tombs are few and far between compared with the countless multitude of sepulchres where there is no lamp alight. Most common and most impressive of these are the Roman and Greek graves. The sands of Tyre and Sidon are strewn with sarcophagi. Here a man’s magnificently carved stone coffin serves for a drinking-trough, there a little child’s stands alone and desolate near a river mouth. In Sidon the ancient cemetery is on a scale whose rifled grandeur speaks volumes concerning the vanity of earthly greatness. At Gadara, the eastward road is a miniature Appian Way: hollow to the tread of horses as they cross the excavated rock, and adorned with sarcophagi carved with crowns and garlands, but bearing inscriptions without hope in them. Farther north, on the eastern slopes of Hermon, we found a far older monument near one of the Druse villages. We were crossing a little brook, when we noticed that the bridge consisted of two huge monolithic slabs of limestone, which, on examination, appeared to be the lids of ancient sarcophagi. The carving on the ends was obviously intended to represent figures of cherubim or some such winged creatures. The heads were gone, but the plumage of the wings was very perfectly preserved. No one in the locality knew anything about their origin. Their general appearance seemed to connect them with the far East.

The Jewish tombs are those which impress the imagination most with the bitterness of death in Syria. They are so sad, with their antique solemnity—so severely simple and unadorned. Where there is carving it is almost always of Roman or Christian workmanship. A few stones with such symbols as the seven-branched candlestick engraved on them are the only unquestionable remains of ornamental Jewish work. Few of the Jewish sepulchres have escaped appropriation by Gentiles. The more famous of them have been appropriated by the Mohammedans, and early Christian tradition is responsible for many other indentifications. 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. The wailing, as we saw it there, is a memorable custom. The women were mostly elderly or aged, but they were weeping real tears and wailing bitterly as they kissed the stone. It is an old story that consecrates that rough stone, but how eternal is its human pathos: “And they journeyed from Bethel; and there was but a little way to come to Ephrath: and Rachel travailed, and she had hard labour.... And Rachel died, and was buried in the way to Ephrath, which is Bethlehem.”[37]

The earlier fashion of Jewish work seems to have been the “pigeon-hole,” in which the corpse was thrust into a little tunnel six feet long driven at right angles to the rock face. Later, troughs were excavated to fit the body along the line of the rock. In some instances these graves, especially the former kind, are found in detached groups in wayside rocks, whose perpendicular faces front the open air. For the most part they are grouped in larger numbers within natural caves or subterranean excavations, whose low doorway is blocked by a large circular stone running in a groove. A later example of such a cave is that which is shewn as the “new tomb” of Joseph of Arimathea, close to Gordon’s Calvary. A few specimens of another sort, built of masonry without cement, are to be found in Galilee.[38] Nothing could be gloomier than the constantly repeated ruins of ancient Jewish graves in Syria. No day’s journey is without them. They meet you casually, as it were, at every turning. They are not, indeed, quite dark like the pagan tombs; but the twilight, in which the hope of immortality just broke the darkness for ancient Israel, is grey and cheerless, and the contribution of Jewish graves to the spirit of Syria is a very sombre one.

The typical spot for this side of the spirit of Syria is the town of Hebron.

The lanes and the dark bazaar are filthy and foul-smelling. The mosque is an impressive building, suggestive of military rather than devotional ideas. The Tomb of Abraham, which it covers, is one of the sights which only a very few Christian eyes have seen. It is permitted to none but Mohammedans to approach nearer the entrance to it than the seventh step of the lane, or staircase, alongside its eastern wall. There is a hole in that wall which is supposed to communicate with the cave below. Jews write letters to Abraham, and place them in this hole, to tell him how badly they are being treated by the Moslems. But the Moslem boys are said to know that the hole has no great depth, and to collect these letters and burn them before Abraham has seen them. The tomb is the very heart and black centre of the Shadow of Death in Palestine.

There is no part of man’s faith in which it is more necessary to be thoroughgoing than in his thoughts about immortality. Egypt and Greece furnish examples of great significance here. Egypt held an elaborate doctrine of the future life, and it dominated all her thought concerning this life. Men built their tombs and kings their pyramids as the most important of their life’s achievements. The earthly house of the Egyptian was but an inn where he spent a little time in passing; his tomb was his eternal house and real home. Thus the tombs were glorified copies of the dwelling-houses, either of the present, or more often of a former generation.[39] Greece, on the other hand, did not believe in a life beyond the grave. Her funeral celebrations were full of lamentation, and her inscriptions sound sad enough to us. But it was a principle with Greece and Rome to decorate tombs exclusively with glad symbols such as sculptured flowers and even dances.[40] The point to be observed about these is that neither of them was morbid. Morbidness appears to avoid a robust faith or a frank scepticism,[41] and to cling about the thought which is neither sure of one thing nor another.

Israel’s position in regard to the belief in immortality is extremely difficult to define. It was obviously with her a thing of gradual development, as her revelation opened its broadening light upon life’s problems. He would be a bold critic who would sum up the situation of Isaiah’s time as Renan does in the statement, “not looking beyond the world for reward and punishment,” the Hebrew life “has a heroic tension, a sustained cry, an unceasing attention to the events of the world.” Everything goes to shew that long before the faith in immortality had grasped the imagination and the belief of the people in general it had been revealed to chosen spirits. As for the others, it had been working its way among them, occupying their minds in speculation, and leading them, as it were, among the shades of the nether world. There was something in the genius of the nation which rendered this interest in death quite inevitable. The natural bearing of the people has a strange solemnity about it, which finds constant expression in pose and gesture, and often strikes the stranger with sudden vividness. Women may be often seen, especially when clad in thin white garments on holidays, who might stand just as you see them as models for monumental sculpture. Along with all its activities, there is a distinct sympathy with death in the genius of Israel.

This phenomenon is, of course, due to very complex causes. It is a deep-rooted Semitic instinct, which seems to be not altogether unlike that of the Egyptian feeling to the tomb as the real home. Some parts of Arabia are very rich in sacred tombs and spots of holy ground, and pilgrimages are made to these both by Moslems and by Jews. Long strings of mules, laden with coffins, wend their way to such sacred places as Nejf, and thousands of corpses are sent thither even from India.[42] Old tombstones are held in peculiar veneration by the more devout Arabs. The well-known reverence with which the Syrian Jews regard the tombs of their ancestors may be in part explained on the ground of patriotic loyalty. Such scenes as those which may be witnessed at the tomb of Rachel, remind us that a sense of the pathos of human life and its mortality is also developed strongly and enters as a very real factor into the spirit of Syria.[43] Nor can there be any doubt that a certain moral or didactic use of death is also characteristic of the East, such as is expressed in the sententious rhymes of old graveyards in this country. The reader will recall the famous instance of this, which Sir Walter Scott has made familiar—the shroud which served for the banner of Saladin, with its inscription, “Saladin must die.”[44]

If, however, such elements have entered into earlier thoughts of death, it is to be feared that Palestine of the present day has little of them left. The great light of Christ illuminated the sepulchres of Christian Syria; but with the Mohammedan conquest darkness fell again, and all the morbid fascination of the grave reasserted itself. There is little reverence for the ordinary man’s place of burial now, whether it be of ancient or of recent date. Dr. Merrill tells how he has found Arabs actually stealing graves, i.e. clearing out old ones to make room for a newly-deceased body, on the plea that “the dead man who was buried there could not possibly want his grave any longer.”[45] On many a hillside the rock tombs are rent and split, like pictures from Dante’s Inferno, where they have been blasted open with gunpowder in the search for treasure; and sometimes parties of natives may be seen prowling about a hillside on that business. The find may consist of glass bracelets, which have to be taken from the bone of a baby’s arm, or gold earrings beside the skull whose face was once fair; but they excite no emotion except that of money values. Laurence Oliphant had difficulty in restraining the natives who searched with him from smashing the cinerary urns they found, on

the plea that “they are so very old that they are not worth anything.”

With the decay of reverence for the dead, however, there seems to have been a recrudescence of that morbid and charnel-house interest in death which marks the spirit of the land. At times one is shocked by the apparently total indifference displayed—houses being built close to the mouths of graves or even, it is said, upon the roofs of them. Yet any one who has seen a festival at a holy tomb, whether Jewish or Mohammedan, must have realised the strong attraction by which death and the grave draw men. A curious instance of this is that of the “Jews’ Burning” at Tiberias.

Tiberias has been a Jewish centre since the time of Vespasian. Before that time, Jews avoided the city, because in building it Herod had disturbed a burial-place. To-day, by a strange coincidence, it is a tomb that gives it its special popularity for the Jews—the grave of the famous Rabbi Meir. Conveniently near the tomb there are large baths, whose warm and sulphurous water is considered highly medicinal. At this tomb a curious spectacle may be seen on the second day of May each year. Jewish pilgrims from near and far assemble, bringing with them their oldest garments, which are immersed in a great cauldron of oil, and then piled up and burned. The honour of setting fire to the pile is sold to the highest bidder, and the sum paid reaches £15 or more.

The same fascination of death, seen as it were past a byplay of irreverence and grotesqueness, is felt in the burial customs as they are seen to-day. At the Moslem funerals we saw there was no appearance of mourning. The men were dressed in gay colours, and they trotted along behind the corpse talking and gesticulating with an apparent gusto. It may have been the unusual appearance of the thing which impressed strangers more powerfully than natives; but to us it seemed that the realism of death was here in more crude and aggressive consciousness than in Western funerals. The corpse lay on a board, shoulder-high, with a gorgeous crimson and purple pall covering his body and limbs instead of a coffin. The head, wrapped tight in a napkin, rested on a pillow, and the features of the face stood prominently out against the sky. The man seemed, in an altogether gruesome way, to be attending his own funeral, and to be thrusting the fact of his presence on the spectators.

This may be subjective criticism, and it is always unfair to judge the burial-customs of other peoples without intimate knowledge of their origin and inner meaning. In one respect, however, it is certain enough that the Shadow of Death rests upon the land of Syria. That is Fatalism. We have all heard of the fatalism of the East; and strange stones have become familiar, of soldiers selling cartridges to their enemies, of villagers refusing to drain the swamp that was decimating them by its malaria, or even to desist from poisoning their own springs with foul water. “It is Allah!” ends all questioning and checks all energy. Yet the constant recurrence of living instances of fatalism shocks the traveller, however well he was prepared for them. A traveller asked a Mohammedan in Damascus what they had done to the workman who upset his brazier and burned the great mosque. “Oh nothing,” said he, “what should we do?” “I should have thought you might have killed him.” “No,” he replied; “in the West you say when such things happen, ‘It is the devil’; in the East we say, ‘It is God!’” Still more impressive was a conversation with one of the camp-servants during a long ride near Jezreel. He had told the pathetic story of his life—how they had lived comfortably till the father died, leaving no money; then came work, begun too early and with no providence and little hope of success, until it had come to be “eat, drink, sleep, then again, eat, drink, sleep—then die and sleep, no more eat nor drink.” The Syrian character of the present day has been well expressed on its negative side in three traits. These are, want of concentration, want of will-power, and an absolute want of the sense of sin. Of sin they literally do not understand the meaning, the substitute for conscience being a dread of the opinion of friends and of the public. They do not think about the problem of evil as in any sense a practical problem. “The Lord said unto Ahriman, I know why I have made thee, but thou knowest not”—that is their philosophy of the moral mystery of things. Conder sums up the situation in striking words: “Christian villages thrive and grow, while the Moslem ones fall into decay; and this difference, though due perhaps in part to the foreign protection which the native Christians enjoy, is yet unmistakably connected with the listlessness of those who believe that no exertions of their own can make them richer or better, that an iron destiny decides all things, without reference to any personal quality higher than that of submission to fate, and that God will help those who have lost the will to help themselves.”[46]

The spirit of Syria is darkened by a shadow of death that has grown not only familiar but congenial, as darkness does to all who choose it rather than the light. Strange that Syria should thus have “made a covenant with death,” she from whom shone forth once the Light of the World. But that was long ago. These many centuries this has been one of that sad multitude of nations and of individuals who have sent forth a spirit that has inspired and moved the world, and who yet themselves sit desolate and listless.

CHAPTER III

THE SPECTRAL

THE shadow of death is always haunted. A strong and pure faith peoples it with angels, and is accompanied through its darkness by that Good Shepherd whose rod and staff comfort the soul. When the faith is neither strong nor pure, and when those who sit in darkness have been disloyal to their faith, it is haunted by spectres, and its darkness becomes poisonous. The fascination of the marvellous passes into “what French writers call the macabre—that species of almost insane preoccupation with our mouldering flesh, that luxury of disgust in gazing on corruption.”[47] This unclean spectral element is a very real part of the spirit of Syria.

The spell of the East is proverbial, and it is a more literal fact than is sometimes realised. Even such a commonsense Englishman as the captain of the Rob Roy confesses to a nameless fear that came upon him in the solitudes of the upper Jordan.[48] There is a well-known passage in Eothen, where Kinglake describes the calculating merchant, the inquisitive traveller, the wakeful post-captain all coming under the spell of Asia.[49] The warmth and strangeness of the land may have something to do with it; but the associations and the prevalent tone of thought have more. Every one feels it whose imagination and heart are in the least measure open to spiritual impressions.

To analyse it or to specify the causes which have produced it were an impossible task. Three things have to do with it very specially. There is the habit of the Eastern mind in dealing with matters of fact. Truth is not to the Oriental the primary moral necessity which it is to the West. Vividness and forcefulness of presentation count for at least as much. The Arab story-teller is said to close his enumeration of various legends with the sacramental formula, “God knows best where the truth lies,”—the truth being a matter of God’s responsibility, while to man is committed only responsibility for being interesting. Again, in the East, terror is a recognised force between man and man; and the great forces of nature and the more occult forces of magic are recognised and taken as part of the natural order. Religion also has had her share in the “Great Asian Mystery.” This land is, to most devout persons, altogether isolated and apart, as the place of a divine revelation such as no other part of earth has known. There is a passage in Pseudo-Aristeas where, describing his supposed embassy to Jerusalem, he gazes at the constant waving of the veil in the Temple, which screened from his view the holiest things of Israel. As it rippled and swung in the wind it seemed to tantalise the gazer with the never-fulfilled promise of a glimpse into the secret place.[50] The wistful sense of mystery in that letter gives a hint which is of extraordinary significance on this subject.

The geographical formation of the land and its strange colouring lend themselves to the spectral and the uncanny. The Dead Sea presents the most sinister landscape in the world. The opening paragraphs of Scott’s Talisman, founded upon the description of Josephus, are certainly overdrawn, yet in truth everything conspires to produce a sense of ghostliness by these unearthly shores. A ring of “scalded hills” encircles them, and a perpetual haze lies upon their waters. Their soil is nitrous and their springs sulphurous. Blocks of asphalt lie among their shingle; and fish, dead and salted, are cast up by the waves. There is little life visible about them, whether of man or beast or bird. Here and there the tempting Apple of Sodom grows, to appearance the most luscious of fruits, but so dry that its core is combustible and is used as tinder by the Arabs. A few feet above the summer level of the sea runs an unbroken line of drift-wood washed down by winter floods and left white and sparkling with crusted salt.

Yet it was not the Dead Sea that seemed to us most unearthly, but that more famous lake of which one thinks so differently. It would be a curious and instructive task to collect the various impressions which the Sea of Galilee has made upon travellers. Romance and piety conspire to furnish many of its visitors with a predisposition to find it surpassingly beautiful; and not a little could be quoted which owes most of its touches to the imagination of the writer. A natural rebellion against this has led to no less exaggerated expressions of disappointment, and to accusations of ugliness which are simply untrue. The fact is that ordinary canons of description are of no avail here. 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 rosy flush of sunset was on it when we caught the first glimpse. At our feet lay a great flesh-coloured cup full of blue liquor; or rather the whole seemed some lapidary’s quaint fancy in pink marble and blue-stone. There was no translucency, but an aggressive opaqueness, in sea and shore alike. The dry atmosphere showed everything in sharpest outline, clear-cut and broken-edged. There was no shading or variety of colour, but a strong and unsoftened contrast. To be