The Holy Land

quite accurate, there was one break—a splash of white, with the green suggestion of trees and grass, lying on the water’s edge directly beneath us—Tiberias.

When, next day, we sailed upon the lake, coasting along the western shore from north to south, we found ourselves again as far removed from anything we had seen or experienced before. A casual glance showed utter and abject desolation, and a silence that might be heard oppressed the spirit. As the eye grew more accustomed, villages were discerned. But what villages! With the same exception of Tiberias, they were brown slabs of flat-roofed cubical hovels—let into the slope of the shore or the foot-hills. And as we skirted closer along the beach, we descried everywhere traces of ruined architecture. It appeared to form a continuous ring of towers; columns broken and tumbled, but showing elaborately carved capitals; aqueducts and retaining walls; fragments of all sorts, and apparently of widely different styles of architecture. Foliage is scanty, save for the thorn-trees and bamboo canes in which the carved stones are often half buried. Here and there a plantation of orchard trees hides a trim little German garden. At Tiberias a few palm trees lend their graceful suggestion of the Far East.

All this impresses one in a quite unique way. You try to reconstruct the past—rebuild the castles and synagogues and palaces, and imagine the life that sent forth its fleets upon the lake in the days of Jesus. Or you more daringly attempt the future landscape, and imagine these hillsides as scientific cultivation and the withdrawal of oppressive government may yet make them. But from it all you are driven back upon the extraordinary present—petrified, uncanny, spectral—a part of the earth on which some spell has fallen, and over which some ghostly influence broods, silencing the daylight, and whispering in the darkness. If, however, this sense of the ghostly be intenser here than elsewhere, it is but an exaggeration of the spirit of the whole land.

Nature in Syria seems always to have something of the supernatural about her. Not only in the petrifactions of the Lejja and the silent stone cities east of Jordan is this the case. The whole country offers you stones when you ask for trees, and that mere fact of its stoniness is enough to lend it the air of another world. As an indirect consequence trees, when they are found, assume a factitious importance, and a supernatural significance either for good or evil. Some of the fairest plants of Syria are treacherous as they are fair. One of our company, in gathering sprays of a peculiarly lovely creeper, somewhat resembling a white passion-flower, had his hand wounded with invisible but virulent needles which caused it to swell and gave great pain. The green spots, where grass and trees abound, tempt the unwary to drink and rest in them. But they are the most dangerous places in the land, and some of them are deadly from malaria. On the other hand, a tree in a treeless country is an object of preciousness inconceivable by any who have not come upon it from the wilderness. In the distance it beckons the traveller with the promise of shade and water. Arrived beneath its branches, life takes on a new aspect; kindly voices are heard in the rustle of its leaves, and gracious gifts seen in its shadow and its fruit. It is said that our fleur-de-lis pattern, often supposed to represent the flower of the lily or the iris, is really an Eastern symbol. The central stem is the sacred date-palm, while the side-lines and the horizontal band stand for ox-horns tied to the stem to avert the evil eye. It is no wonder if by the ancient Semites trees were regarded as demoniac beings, or as growing from the body of a buried god.[51] Such traditions are no longer to be found in their ancient forms, but they linger in a vague sense of the holiness of conspicuous trees, which may be seen covered with rags of clothing hung on them by natives. A like play of imagination has from time immemorial haunted the pools—especially those whose dark waters made them seem bottomless—with holy or unholy mystery. Still more terrible is the superstitious dread with which the natives regard undrained morasses. The Serbonian Bog on the south coast has from of old been regarded with special fear, owing to its treacherous appearance of sound earth. 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 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. In the desert, too, the sky conspires with the earth in its bewitchment. The mirage has power to arrest and overawe the spirit with something of the same sense of helplessness as that felt in earthquake. In the one case earth, in the other heaven, are turning ordinary procedure upside down, and the bewildered mortal knows not what is to come next upon him. The writer has had experience of both, though with an interval of several years between them. The mirage he saw to the east of the Great Haj Road in Hauran. For some time the rocky hills of the Lejja had been the horizon, shimmering dimly through the heat-haze. Suddenly, on looking up, he was amazed to find that the hills had disappeared, and in their place had come a long string of camels on the sky-line, with an island, a lake, and a grove of palm-trees floating in the air above them. The sudden apparition recalled on the instant a day in the Antipodes when he felt, though at a great distance, the tremble of the New Zealand earthquakes. Either experience is unearthly enough to explain many superstitions.

In most lands the sea would have yielded a larger crop of unearthly imaginations than has been the case in Palestine. For reasons which have been already stated, Israel kept out of touch with the ocean. Yet, all the more on that account, it is the case that almost every thought she has of the sea is fearsome. Its immensity bewilders her with the unhomely distances of the world, and the four winds strive savagely upon it. The roar and surge of the shore are all she needs to remember in order to impress herself with its terror. Now and then she thinks of the Great Deep, and of its horrible inhabitants—leviathan unwieldily sporting there, and other nameless monsters bred of the slime and ooze, and the dead men who are waiting to float up from their places to the Great Judgment, when their time shall come.

Mention of the Great Deep reminds us of yet another prolific source of the spectral element in Syrian thought. It was but natural that the sound of underground rivers and their explanation by the theory of a world founded on bottomless floods (the “waters underneath the earth”), should have given to the whole land an air of possession by ghostly powers. It may have been that same phenomenon which drew down the imagination of Syria to the subterranean regions, or it may also have been to some extent the hereditary greed of buried treasure, which every nation whose buildings have been often overturned is likely to acquire. Whatever be its explanation, the fact is certain that the underground element is one which counts for much in the spirit of Syria. Alike in Christian and in pre-Christian times there seems to have been a most unwholesome dread of fresh air blowing about holy things. Sacred caves and pits were among the most characteristic properties of ancient Semitic religion.[52] As for Christian tradition, it seems positively to dread the open air. The Nativity in Bethlehem and the Agony in Gethsemane have each their cave assigned to them, and many another site has a cave either discovered or actually constructed for its commemoration. Nature and history have combined to encourage the underground tendency. Palestine is remarkable for the number and size of its natural caverns, and it is not slow to add its imaginative touch to the length of them, connecting distant towns with supposed subterranean passages. These caves have been used as dwelling-places from very ancient times. The strange cities of Edom and of Bashan are well known to all as wonders. And not in these places only, but in many other parts of the land, men have dwelt beneath the ground. In times of invasion, for the solitude of hermit life, and in the terrors of persecution, caves have offered natural places of refuge and of hiding, which have in many cases been greatly enlarged by excavation. Besides those caverns whose interest lies in the memory of ancient inhabitants, there are some of an interest whose terror is not yet departed. These are the cave-dwellings of lunatics, who in former times often chose the dead for company and inhabited tombs. Now, in some places they are chained in black recesses of mountain caverns, where their life must be horrible indeed. There are also one or two caves in Syria which end in sudden perpendicular shafts of great depth, where adulteresses are said to meet their fate. Such modern instances may have reinforced the natural fascination of the occult which subterranean places offer. But there is something congenial to it in the spirit of Syria quite apart from these.

If the natural features of Syria thus tempt men towards the ghastly side of things, her history suggests plenty of material for superstition to work upon. If the legend were true that no dew nor rain would moisten the spot where a man had been murdered, Syria would be no longer an oasis, but the driest of deserts. In a spiritual sense the legend is truer than it seems. When, in his Laughing Mill, Julian Hawthorne works out the idea of a mystic sympathy in Nature with crimes that have been done by man, he is reminding us of something which every one of sensitive spirit has more or less clearly felt. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s subtler tales the same idea is worked out in a fashion still more convincing. There are times and places when it is difficult to resist the conviction that the material world, in its dumb, unconscious way, is yet burdened with the weight of man’s evil deeds. In Syria one can almost hear “the groaning and travailing of the whole creation.” It seems to be a land waiting the hour of its release, and meanwhile shrouded in deeper mystery than any other land. Something has happened here, you feel, which never happened elsewhere; something is going to happen here again, when the time shall come.

Nothing could better attest this fact than the extraordinary wealth of legend in Syria. Fragments of Bible story, changed and often distorted by those who have retold them, are met with every day. Sometimes a story has passed from Jews to Christians and from Christians to Mohammedans, increasing steadily in marvellousness and decreasing in verisimilitude as it passed. Samson, Goliath, and the prophet Jonah are notable cases in point. A Mohammedan weli marks the spot where the latter was thrown ashore; but the inventors of this legend have been inconsiderate. The weli stands at the bend of a shallow sandy beach, where the whale must either have itself come ashore to deposit the prophet, or have projected him a distance of at least a hundred yards. A very curious instance of a similar kind is that of the fall of Jericho as narrated in Joshua vi. Conder gives two legends, both of which are obviously elaborated forms of that account. One of these is a Samaritan story of iron walls, and the other a Mohammedan one of a city of brass whose walls fell after Aly, the son-in-law of Mohammed, had ridden seven times round them.[53] Still more curious is a legend related by the same author, which looks like a Mohammedan version of the Wandering Jew. It tells how, at Abila, Cain was allowed to lay down the corpse of his brother Abel after carrying it for a hundred years. The whole story of the Herods has infested the region of their crimes with the ghosts of their victims. In Samaria the murdered Mariamne still seems to dwell in her honey, and Herod and his servants to call her by name and force the pretence that

she is yet alive. The land is sick with ancient crimes whose blood “crieth from the ground.”

The religions of the land seem to be in league with the powers of darkness for the propagation of magic lore. It is an extraordinary fact that Syria has sent forth to the ends of the earth a religion that is the Eternal Word of God to mankind, and yet herself has reverted to the religious conceptions of ancient Semitic paganism. One of the most fundamental of these conceptions was that of a religion whose essential element is not belief but ritual.[54] While in the West the free play of reason has tested and interpreted Israel’s faith, and discovered in it the unique revelation of the living God to man, the worshippers in the Holy Land itself seem to treat that same faith wholly as a department of magic lore. Certain rites have to be performed, no matter how unintelligently, and that is all. All creeds alike share the blame of this. Druse and Samaritan, Jew, Christian, and Mohammedan vie with one another to-day in the poor ambition of making the religion of Jehovah contemptible in the eyes of thinking men who investigate it as it is practised on its native soil.

Much of the magic of the East is decadent or decayed religion. On rare occasions a marriage superstition may be met with, such as the foretelling of marriage destinies by tying green twigs with one hand,[55] which appears to be the creation of pure romance. But the great majority of those superstitions which hold the Eastern mind in bondage are evidently relics of pagan thought incorporated now in Jewish, Christian, or Moslem creeds, and absorbing all the interest of those who believe in them. If a Mohammedan saint’s bones flew through the air from Damascus to Mount Ebal, the Christians can match the miracle and more, for was not the very house of the Virgin carried off by angels from Nazareth to Loreto lest the Moslems should desecrate it? Magic dominates the mind of the East and explains everything there to this day. Every inscribed stone runs the chance either of being honoured by a place in the wall of a dwelling or of being heated with fire and split with water, according to the sort of magic it is supposed to represent. It is difficult to realise that the men you converse with are actually living in the world of Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, where a dealer in black art, by his incantation,

Yet such is undoubtedly the case. Even the saddle-bags you buy at Jerusalem—those gorgeous labyrinths of shells and tassels—have a blue bead concealed somewhere in them to return the stare of any evil eye that may look upon your horse. To avert the same danger you will see little boys dressed in girls’ clothes, and specially pretty children kept dirty and untidy. Lest the dreaded eye should blight the fortunes of a newborn babe the Jewish Rabbis sometimes hang up the 121st Psalm on the wall over mother and child. Magic is as useful a substitute for science as it is for religion. It explains any phenomenon and clears up any mystery without the trouble of investigation. All great buildings must have been built by enchantment, so what is the use of speculating as to their architecture? Western civilisation is, no doubt, a remarkable affair, but it never occurs to an unsophisticated Syrian that it is a matter for energetic emulation. The Frank has only been lucky enough to learn the proper spell. It is easy to see how Syria, with such views as these, is doomed at once to moral and intellectual stagnation.

The vivid mind of the East is fertile in poetic imagination. Restless and quick itself, it cannot conceive the Universe otherwise than as living around it. Everything is alive and aware. All inanimate things are personified; or, to speak more accurately, they are inhabited by spiritual beings. Natural phenomena express the purposes of minds hidden behind them. Every dangerous or adverse experience is regarded as the work of malice. Human life is beset with ambushed spiritual enemies. The advantage which their invisibility gives to these over the human combatants would be enough to put fighting out of the question, were it not that so many of the spirits are of feeble intelligence and may be hoodwinked; while all of them have other spirits for their enemies who may be enlisted on man’s side against them. These spirits are of many kinds, but they may be classed in two groups, according to their connection with natural phenomena or with death.

Chief of the former group are the angels, good and bad; and the jinn, or genii, whom Islam took over from the ancient paganism of Arabia. The angels are God’s attendants, and have some functions entirely independent of natural phenomena. Thus the two stones which mark a Moslem’s grave show the stations of the angels who are to examine him; and the tuft of hair on his shaven head is (like the Jewish sidelocks) to enable the Angel Gabriel to bear the man to heaven. Yet the angels are in many instances personified parts of nature, guardians of the land, spirits of wind or fire or water, who are obviously the descendants and the heirs of the ancient local gods.[56] Thus the wicked angels are supposed to have descended on Mount Hermon, and to have sworn their oaths there—a belief which adds considerably to the importance of the great mountain in Syrian estimation. The jinn are the demons of the desert, lordly and terrible to all who have not the charm which masters them, obedient as little children to those who have it. They are the inhabitants of those whirling sandstorms which sweep across the waste. Some superstitions of this kind may be connected with the former dangers from wild beasts, which used to haunt the jungles of lower Jordan and swarm up to the inland territories after an invasion had depopulated them. Even now there may be seen in Palestine an occasional wolf or leopard, to say nothing of the jackals which every traveller is sure to see. Some of the fauna of Palestine are in themselves so strange as to suggest unearthly affinities. The jerboa, for instance, the jumping mouse of the desert, merits Browning’s description of him, when in Saul he says, “there are none such as he for a wonder, half bird and half mouse.” The lizards, too, seem anything but ordinary respectable law-abiding animals as they twinkle to and fro among the ruins of old buildings. It is said that Mohammed refused to eat lizards, considering that they were the metamorphosed spirits of Israelites.

The spirits that haunt sepulchres are either ghosts of the dead or ghouls that prey upon their flesh. It is this class of apparition which appears to have the strongest fascination for the Syrian mind; and its graveyard lore is the natural sequel to the morbid interest in death which formed the subject of our preceding chapter. Conder, whose book gives much interesting information on this whole subject, found it difficult to keep any Arabs about him at Fusâil, a few miles north of Jericho, because of their fear of a ghoul in the ruins, who might chance to desire a change of food were he to see them there. The dead appear to have undergone a change for the worse in dying. The utmost caution and politeness are required to prevent their ghosts from doing harm to the visitors at their tombs, even in the case of men who, while in the body, were hospitable and friendly persons. Some localities are regarded as peculiarly dangerous, among which is the reputed site of the stoning of Stephen and (according to Gordon) of Calvary, near Jerusalem. An Arab writer of the Middle Ages advises the traveller not to pass that haunted spot at night.[57]

If, under ordinary conditions, life in Syria is overshadowed and haunted, the dread becomes far greater when disease has come. The explanation of disease is the same easy one as that which has deadened science and distorted religion—magic again. Even when the true cause of illness has been guessed, it has to be explained in ghostly language. When plague has broken out in a locality the Jewish Rabbis make the neighbours of the stricken house empty all jars and vessels, saying that “the angel of death wipes his sword in liquids.” The malaria of swamps is set down to the same cause, and it is probable that many of that mixed multitude who are to be seen sitting chin deep in the hot sulphur-springs of Gadara or Tiberias regard their cure as due to some local spirit who happens to be benevolently inclined. In the neighbourhood of the tomb of a Mohammedan saint, every accident or ailment is regarded as the work of the dead man. Indeed the main idea of Syrian medical science is that all or most sickness is possession by demons, and a common cure is to bore or burn holes in the patient’s flesh, by which the evil spirit may escape. The treatment of lunacy is perhaps the saddest case in point. Until Mr. Waldmeyer built his asylum at Beyrout, there was but one mode of treatment. At certain monasteries there are caves in which the insane are chained below huge stones, with hardly space for movement, and are kept there for days in hunger and filth, in order to drive out the devil. The test for devil-possession is somewhat crude. The patient is shewn a cross. If he turns from it and refuses to look he is possessed; if he shews no aversion to it he is only unwell and is allowed to go. In the Beyrout asylum we were told that no case of lunacy had been discovered which in any way differed from the European types of the same disease. The record of cures there, under the same treatment as that which is practised in the West, is a most encouraging and hopeful one.

It is true that the bright spirit of the East with its rapid changes and its unquenchable sparkle of gaiety, has mitigated the horror and oppressiveness of the spectral there. There are times when one would almost fancy that the whole of their superstition was a pretence which was never meant to be taken seriously. In Damascus, and probably elsewhere, you may buy little rag-dolls supposed to resemble camels. They are made of bones, covered with patches of many-coloured cloth, and tricked out with tinsel and strings of beads. We bought two of these from a young girl in “the street called Straight” for half a franc, and bore them through the city with a crowd of idlers following us. We learned afterwards that these were cunning devices to cheat the ghosts. When you are very sick or in danger you vow a camel to your saint or friendly spirit—this is how you pay your vow. Poking fun at Hades in this fashion might seem a dangerous game, and one hardly to be recommended while any lingering belief in the reality of ghosts remained. Yet such is Syrian character. This sort of thing persists along with a deep horror of the other world. The words of Job are not in the least out of date in Palestine to-day: “Fear came upon me, and trembling, which made all my bones to shake. Then a spirit passed before my face; the hair of my flesh stood up. It stood still, but I could not discern the form thereof; an image was before mine eyes: there was silence, and I heard a voice.”[58] The horror is all the deeper because it appears to be seldom brought to clear statement. The spectral world is undefined, and it has, therefore, all the added power of the unknown, whose play upon the imagination is so much more strong and subtle than that of any clear conception, however ghastly.

In this chapter no attempt has been made to distinguish between the superstitions of Jews, Christians, and Mohammedans in Palestine. As a matter of fact, there is little to choose between them, and they have much in common. It is true that every nation has some outlook or other upon the world of spirits. But each has its own way of regarding the apparitions; and the kind of spectre which a land believes in is no bad indication of the tone of the land’s thought and character. About the fairy-lore of Teutonic nations there is a child-like simplicity and purity which make

that lore wholly refreshing and precious. The nymphs and Pan, whose ancient monuments we have seen in ancient Palestine, were graceful. But the spectral element in modern Palestine appears to be almost wholly morbid and unclean,—the further decadence of a land that has made its covenant with death. The life a Syrian peasant leads to-day is haunted by ghostly terrors; it is a life led by leave of the dead, or by a systematic cunning which plays off one malign spirit against another, or succeeds in winning a point or two against the grave for the player. It is a view of life than which surely none can be at once more impudent and more melancholy.

CHAPTER IV

THE LAND OF THE CROSS

It is a sad view of the spirit of Syria which the last chapters have offered, yet it is but too true. We must linger yet a little longer listening to “the sob of the land” before we turn to that which is at once the explanation and the hope of relief for its long sorrow. Apart altogether from the ghostly elements in this land of ruins, the mere melancholy is persistent and depressing as one moves from place to place. The gloom is so ominous, as to be at times suggestive of a supernatural curse that broods upon everything with its depressing weight. The khans outside of villages are in ruins; so are the bridges over streams, and the castles on the hills. Amid such scenery it is natural to remember the defeats rather than the glories of the past, and the national history seems to be one long record of misfortune. In the modern conditions of life in Palestine the long story of tears and blood seems to be continued in the haggard desolation of its present.

Two things especially must send this impression home even to the most casual observer, viz. the heartlessness of toil and the prevalence of disease. In every country much must always depend on the spirit in which men labour. Where the walls of its cities rise to music, as the old glad legends told of Troy and Thebes, there is hope and promise; but here there is no song to help men’s toil. It is hard and joyless, with little promise and less hope. With the death of these self-respect also dies; and work, without incentives to anything which might tempt ambition, remains merely as a hard necessity and a curse.

Next to its heartless toil the uncured sickness of the land contributes to the deep sadness of its spirit. Disease seems to stare you everywhere in the face. Superstition and fatalism combined have blocked all progress in medical science. The people are naturally healthy; and their strong constitutions, kept firm by plain living, yield to medical treatment in a marvellous way. But when any serious accident has happened, or any dangerous disease infected them, they are utterly helpless, and things take their course. The medicinal springs form an exception to this rule, and seem to be the one real healing agency in the country. Their bluish waters bubble with sulphuretted hydrogen, and smell abominably, but they cure sicknesses of some kinds. For other diseases there is no native cure. Those which are most in evidence are ulcers and inflammatory diseases of the eyes. The natives appear to be immune so far as malaria is concerned; but a peculiar kind of decline is not uncommon, in which the emaciation is so great as to reduce the patient to the appearance of a skeleton, with great lustrous eyes. It need hardly be said that the characteristic disease of Syria is leprosy. The first object which attracts the eye after you arrive at the railway station of Jerusalem is an immense leper hospital. In a case which created some sensation lately in the south of England, it turned out that a fraudulent Syrian had been raising money for a non-existent hospital at Tirzah, which was to accommodate eleven thousand lepers. Of course the figure was a monstrous one, but the fact that it was invented shews how terrible a scourge this is. It is a curious circumstance that the inhabitants of towns do not contract leprosy. It appears in villages, and the sufferers are at once driven out, to wander to the larger towns, outside of which they settle in communities or beg by the wayside. The view of the north-east end of Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives shews a roadside which is always dotted with these pitiable folk. For many travellers this is the road of their first journey from the city, leading over Olivet to Bethany, and they are not likely to forget that ride. Lepers, in all stages of hideous decay, line the roadside; real or sham paralytics sprawl and shake in the middle of the path, so that the horses have actually to pick their way among the bodies of them. The epileptics appear to be frauds. Their faces are covered, but they see what is going on well enough to stop shaking when the horses have passed. The leprosy is all too real. Arms covered with putrid sores, hands from which the fingers have one after another fallen off, and husky voices begging from throats already half eaten out—these cannot be imitated.

As to the causes of Syrian disease, and leprosy in particular, there seems to be much obscurity. Perhaps the word that comes nearest to an explanation is uncleanness, and the promise of “a fountain opened for sin and for uncleanness” may have a physical as well as a spiritual significance. The land is incredibly contaminated with filth, as the following quotation shews: “Sir Charles Warren tells us that the soil in which he made some of his excavations was so saturated with disease germs that his workmen were often attacked with fever, especially if they had any sore or scratch on their hands.”[59] It would be hard to find words more significant than these.

For this state of matters, and for its continuance from generation to generation, many reasons may be given. The usual explanation of the whole is the government, with its soldiers and its taxation. The wild notes of Turkish bugle-calls answering each other across Jerusalem sound harsh, and as it were blasphemous, and further travel deepens the resentment rather than removes it. When, behind all the present evils, one remembers the past, with its massacres and all its other iniquities, one’s heart grows hot. One Syrian, after narrating a specially aggravated case of oppression, asked us if we knew “the story of the prophets Ananias and Sapphira.” We said we had heard it; and he added, “Ah, in those days God punished at once; now, God waits!” Dr. Thomson somewhere quotes a proverb to the effect that, “Wherever the hoof of a Turkish horse rests it leaves barrenness behind it”; and all that is seen in Syria tends to prove that saying but too true. Every possible experiment in misgovernment seems to have been made here. Frequent change of governors, underpayment of officials, conscription of the most ruinous sort, bribery, cruelty, fanaticism, laziness, sensuality, and stupidity—all are to be seen open and without pretence at concealment.

Yet in the interest of truth it ought to be remembered that there is another side to the story. The incident of the horse at Banias[60] made one understand how a Turk might answer his critics, with some show of reason, that this was the only sort of government these people could understand. Of course it might be again replied that it was oppression that had brought this about. Yet it is perfectly clear that Syrian character is very far from that of martyred innocence. From whatever causes it has come about, the fact is certain that in many respects the moral sense of Palestine is as depraved as that of her oppressors. Her worst enemy is her own wickedness.

Thus many elements enter into the desolation of the Holy Land, and make it a place of decaying body and of shiftless spirit, but of all these elements the ethical is supreme. The very look of the country suggests this. It is not merely stony; as has been cleverly said, it seems to have been stoned—stoned to death for its sins. The loose boulders of Judea, and the scattered ruins of old vineyard terraces and village walls, present all the appearance of flung missiles. This view of the case is acknowledged freely by the inhabitants themselves, in whose thoughts judgment has a prominent place. The buried cities of Sodom and Gomorrah are favourite subjects of reflection with disciples of all the creeds. A somewhat similar story is told of the Lake of Phiala, a volcanic mountain lake south of Hermon. Tradition tells of a village submerged below its waters “to punish the inhabitants for their inhospitable treatment of travellers,” and there are many other stories of judgment in the country. Yet the judgment always falls upon some one else than the narrator of the story, who would not insult your intelligence by supposing that you thought him in need of judgment. Even in the familiar quotations from the litany chanted by the Jews at their Wailing-Place, the confession of sin is conspicuous by its absence. There is sore mourning over the departed glories of the land, but the only sins confessed are those of priests and kings long dead. 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. They may be ignored, but they must be reckoned with in the end.

Of the ethical significance of the fate of Palestine there cannot be a moment’s doubt. It is here that the love and care of God have been met and foiled by the sin and carelessness of man. In regard to its whole moral and social life, there is one overmastering conviction which grows upon the traveller from day to day. That conviction is, that it is a land which requires and demands righteousness. Nature and man are in close touch, and each depends upon the other. It is not a desert, where no amount of labour can produce result; nor is it a luxuriant tropical country whose fruits fall ripe and untoiled for into man’s hand. It demands labour, but it answers to it. The least effort of man to be a man and do his human work meets with immediate and generous response. Neglected plains and valleys, once rich, are now a wilderness; the most unpromising hillsides, where terracing and irrigation

have kept the human side of the compact, are fertile. The labour would indeed require to be hard and unremitting. Many of the streams are so deep sunk in their channels that extraordinary enterprise would be needed to raise their waters for irrigation or to conduct them from higher levels in long conduits. Yet every remaining arch of an old aqueduct, and every watermill whose wheel thuds round in its heavy way, shew that such enterprise is possible. Each of those grooved and checkered valleys where men with their naked feet open and close the little gates of clay, and water the fat crops of onion and tomato, shews how sure is the reward of enterprise. Similarly the terracing reminds us that soil is as precious as water. Both must be laboured for and fought for. It is the desert that naturally claims the land and sets the normal point of view for its inhabitants. Syria is an oasis by the grace of God and the toil of man.

This alone would suffice to make Palestine an ideal training-ground for a nation to learn righteousness. The whole theory of Providence which dominates the earlier Old Testament, and lingers on in popular belief through the New, is apparent on every mile of these valleys. That theory was that even in the present life the sin of man will be immediately punished by adversity, and his righteousness rewarded by prosperity. It was a theory which had to be abandoned, and the whole marvellous story of Job shews us the process of the nation’s discarding it. To us it seems wonderful that it should have been able to survive at all in face of the inexplicable and at times apparently irrational facts of all human experience. But the fact that in Syria nature’s rewards and punishments are so certain and so immediate goes far to explain both its origin and its persistence.

Such thoughts as these regarding Syria inevitably lead towards one goal. There is but one symbol in the world which expresses all that depth of pain which we have found in the history of this sorely-tried land, and at the same time forces on even the most thoughtless its moral significance. That symbol is the Cross of Christ. It is still to be seen very frequently in Syria, generally in its Greek form . In this form it is more impressive than in the other. The oblique lower bar represents a board nailed across the shaft for the feet of the sufferer to rest on. The realistic effect of this is surprising, for it brings home to one’s imagination in a quite new way the terrible fact that men have actually been crucified.

The later history and legend of the cross in Palestine is one of singular and tragic interest. First of all there is the preposterous story of St. Helena’s dream—the miraculous discovery of the three crosses, and the miracle of healing which enabled her to distinguish the cross of Christ from those of the robbers. Since then the sacred wood has been tossed about from hand to hand, hunted for, bargained for sinned for, died for. Its presence in their army comforted the Crusaders in their misery; the sight of it in the hands of the Saracens filled them with despair. The restoration of it was among the chief demands conceded by Saladin when he surrendered Acre to Richard; and when he failed to deliver it, hostages to the number of 2700 were slaughtered in sight of the Saracen camp. All through the Crusades it was the badge of self-devotion to the holy wars, and a strange tale is told of an occasion on which Louis IX., presenting robes to his courtiers according to an ancient custom, had crosses secretly embroidered on them, so that the wearers found themselves committed unawares to the Crusade.

For 1500 years that symbol pointed to the site which the buildings of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre cover. Godfrey was buried there, and many a devout soul regarded it as the holiest of holy places. In the middle of the nineteenth century the question of its authenticity was raised; and General Gordon, who spent part of the last year before he went to Khartoum, in Jerusalem, championed the identification of the hill of Jeremiah’s Grotto, just outside the Damascus Gate, with Calvary. His point of view was a strange one. It was suggested by the words “place of a skull,” from which he developed the idea of the Holy City as the body of the bride of Christ, this hill being the head, Zion the pleura, and so on. The theory, so far as it regards Calvary, has appealed to many competent judges who were very far from adopting the mystical and emblematic views of Gordon. The hill is an old quarry, within which Jeremiah is supposed by tradition to have written his Lamentations. It is quite a little hill, whose short and scanty grass was burnt up with drought when we saw it, leaving a surface of loose sandy soil. A man crucified here would have the Mount of Olives in his eyes behind some roof-lines of the city. By a curious coincidence a rock-hewn tomb, with a groove running in front of the face of it for a great stone which would close its entrance, has been discovered close by. It is a grave with only one loculus in it, and it is temptingly like one’s idea of the Garden Tomb of Joseph; but it is said to be undoubtedly of later date than the death of Jesus. From one point in the road, somewhat nearer the Valley of Jehoshaphat, the hollows and caves of the hill, which here breaks along its length into a small precipice, bear a striking resemblance to a chapfallen skull. Not that the features can be examined in anything like accurate detail. But in the evening, while the sun sets over Jerusalem and the shadows slowly deepen, the resemblance is sufficient to strike one who had not heard that this was the place so named. Many arguments have been urged for this new site. Its proximity to an ancient Jewish cemetery is in favour of the probability that Joseph’s tomb was there. It was close to the public highway, as Calvary undoubtedly was. It is also significant that the gate now known as the Damascus Gate was formerly called St. Stephen’s Gate; and tradition affirmed that through it St. Stephen was led forth to his martyrdom. It is probable that the martyrdom took place on the public execution-ground, where, in the natural course of events, Jesus and the robbers would also have been crucified. Finally, and most important, recent explorations have discovered, in various parts of the city, huge Jewish stones which are believed by advocates of this theory to be those of the wall which stood there in the time of Christ. By completing the line of these stones a wall is reconstructed which encloses the traditional Church of the Holy Sepulchre, while it leaves Gordon’s site still outside. To get the Holy Sepulchre outside this wall, as we know the place of the crucifixion was, it would be necessary to imagine a sharp angular recess in the wall pointing inwards, with Calvary filling the space within the arms of the angle. It matters little where the spot was. Yet it would be interesting if the north side of the city should ultimately claim Him from the west—Nazareth, as it were, from Rome. The garden and the new grave belong to an English committee of trustees endowed in 1901. It would indeed be a striking thing if, after all the idolatry of sites which the vision of St. Helena started, the real hill and garden where the world’s great tragedy was enacted should prove to have gone past Roman and Greek worshippers both, and to have been committed to the hands of Protestants.[61]

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 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. No other land would have crucified Him. Had He come to Greece He might have been neglected or ridiculed, but certainly not crucified. For that it needed a religion as bitterly earnest, and at the same time as morally decayed, as Judaism was then. And that same moral and spiritual condition which set up the Cross for Jesus, has finished its course by crucifying the nation that murdered Him. Most literally this happened in the days when Titus used up all the trees near Jerusalem to make crosses for Jews. But in Sir John Mandeville’s time the legend had expanded to this, that at the Crucifixion all the trees in the world withered and died. Certainly a blight came upon the land of Palestine. It has sometimes been asserted that the nation which crucified Jesus Christ can never again rise to national prosperity or greatness. The forces at work in history are far too subtle and complex to allow any one to say with assurance what the future may or may not have in store for a race. But this at least is evident, that meanwhile the Cross has marked this region for its own; the land is everywhere on its Cross, and the obvious cause of this is the want of righteousness, both in oppressors and oppressed. It is a land that cries aloud for righteousness in its agony.

CHAPTER V

RESURRECTION

In regard to the future of Palestine the outlook of different writers varies perhaps as much as upon any similar question that could be named. Every one is familiar with the Utopian dreams which optimistic constructors of programmes cherish regarding it. On the other hand, grave and thoughtful writers have sometimes felt the misery of its present state so heavily as to abandon all hope for the future, and to acknowledge the most discouraging views as to the possibilities before the land. Apart from sentiment, or from some favourite method of interpreting prophecy, the reasons for such pessimism are mainly two. One is the change of climate, which appears from many indications to be an unquestionable fact. The other is the destruction of terraces, and the consequent washing away of soil from the higher regions of the country. These are serious considerations, which cannot be ignored. If this view be the correct one, the only permanent continuance of Syria will be as a symbol of judgment, a kind of Lot’s-wife pillar among the peoples, a sermon in stone upon the ethical principles which govern the fortunes of nations. The land will remain as a proverb, but will never again be a home.

Yet neither these nor any other such forebodings seem to the ordinary observer quite to be justified. If the climate has changed, may not that be due to causes that can be remedied? By proper drainage of swamps and planting of trees, it would seem perfectly possible to modify climatic conditions to an extent at least sufficient to allow the hope of prosperous agriculture and pleasant habitation. As to the terraces, if they have been constructed once they may be reconstructed with hope of result. There are tracts even in the desert itself where traces of former cultivation may still be seen. If the uncivilised or semi-barbarous tribes of the ancient time built up the land until handfuls of corn waved on the tops of mountains, surely it is not too much to expect that men armed with all the skill and appliance of modern engineering may yet repeat the process. The instance of Malta has been already cited; and, apart from that it is a very dusty world, and soil accumulates as if by magic where man provides for it a place to rest on.

It seems rash in one little qualified for the task to pronounce judgment of any sort on the future of Palestine, yet the conviction that all is not over with the land grows stronger, rather than weaker, with reflection. Renan speaks of “the little kingdom of Israel, which was in the highest degree creative, but did not know how to crown its edifice.” Put in another