It seems almost sacrilegious to travel by rail over the highways of the Bible. The iron tracks are laid in the pathways of the prophets, and the ghosts of the saints may be roused by the shriek of the locomotives. The modern traveller can cover in a few hours by rail distances that were several days’ journey in the times of our Lord.

My first railroad trip in the Holy Land was from the port of Jaffa up the mountains of Judea to the city of Jerusalem. My second was on the Mecca road from the lower end of the Sea of Galilee through the great plains of the Hauran to Damascus over the mountains of Lebanon to Beirut on the Mediterranean Sea. During the latter trip I went from Rayak, in the Valley of Lebanon, between the two ranges of mountains, along the road which has been built northward through the Cœle-Syria to Aleppo.

All of these roads are comparatively new, and some are still building. The Mecca line now runs as far south as Medina, where Mohammed came after his flight from Mecca, and where his tomb is. That city has something like forty thousand people and is one of the most fanatical of the Moslem centres. It will be the chief stopping place on the way to Mecca.

Mecca lies about two hundred and fifty miles still farther south and the track is being laid toward that point. When the first surveys were made there were two Christian civil engineers in the surveying party, but the people were so intolerant that these men were kept hidden the greater part of the time and did their work inside the tents. They were not allowed to spy out the land, to see, or be seen.

The Bedouins are now causing the contractors considerable trouble. The road will take a large part of the pilgrimage traffic, which, it has been estimated, is worth to Arabia some ten million dollars a year. Much of the money goes to the owners of the camels and the leaders of the caravans, who are Bedouins. During the building of the road many of these have been employed in the construction and in supplying the other labourers with food. As the present work has neared its completion, many of the Bedouins have lost their jobs. They are objecting to the railway and have torn up the tracks in many places. The result is a great unrest which threatens to cause serious disturbance.

The traffic on the Constantinople-Damascus and Mecca railways will be made up largely of men on their way to worship at Mecca and Medina. Now, with nothing but camels to carry them, it is estimated that about four hundred thousand go there every year, and it is believed that the railway will increase the traffic from fifty to one hundred per cent. Christians and other unbelievers will not be carried to the holy cities, although they may make tours to Petra and other parts of Arabia.

This Mecca railway will have special accommodations for Mohammedans. Certain of the carriages will be fitted up as mosques, so that the travellers can perform their devotions during the journey. The praying carriages will be luxuriously furnished. The floors will be covered with Persian carpets, and around the sides will be painted verses from the Koran in letters of gold. A chart will indicate the direction of Mecca, so that the Faithful can always face the right way when praying, and there will also be a minaret on the top of the car six and a half feet high.

The Mecca road is a narrow-gauge with French rolling stock. The material has been imported from Europe, the ties being of iron to withstand the white ants, which eat anything wooden. One of the great difficulties of construction has been the lack of water. The road goes for long stretches through the desert, and many of the trains carry large tanks to keep the boilers full.

I travelled over a part of the Mecca road on my way from the Holy Land north to Damascus. Leaving Tiberias in the early morning, I was rowed by four lusty Syrians across the Sea of Galilee to Semakh, which is the station on the lower end of that sea and the place where a branch line runs off to Haifa. From there northward we skirted the east side of the Sea of Galilee, passing the hills upon which our Saviour preached. We rode up the valley of the Yarmuk, a stream almost as large as the Jordan, which loses itself in the Jordan farther south. We climbed the foothills of Lebanon, and at about three thousand feet above the surface of the Sea of Galilee reached the rich plain of Hauran, the great bread basket of the Bedouins. It grows wheat and other grain, and the land near the track was covered with poppies, golden daisies, and wild red hollyhocks.

We could see Bedouin camps everywhere. These nomads live in brown tents so low that the people have to stoop to get in. Outside each little group of tents was an inclosure for the stock, and on the lands near by cattle and camels were grazing. As we travelled we could see great flocks of black goats feeding on the sides of the Lebanon Mountains. They hung to the cliffs, looking much like flies on the wall. There were also droves of black cattle and many flocks of fat-tailed white sheep.

The cars were crowded with Turks, Syrians, and Bedouins, but on the advice of a friend I gave the conductor a dollar, and in return had a compartment all to myself. Baksheesh will do anything in Syria. As Shammas, my guide, puts it: “The franc is the wheel upon which the world goes round.”

This road to Damascus, beginning with the branch line to Haifa, skirts the edge of Mount Carmel, where Elijah lived in a cave and where he contended with the four hundred and fifty prophets of Baal and caused their destruction. It goes up the plain of Esdraelon, where the fair Jezebel lived and over which Jehu galloped to Jezreel on his race for the throne. It takes you in plain sight of Mount Tabor and under the hills of Nazareth where the Saviour’s boyhood and young manhood were spent. It crosses the spot where Jael was camping when Sisera came and she lulled him to sleep to drive the tent peg into his forehead. Then it goes on up to Damascus over a route which was probably travelled by Abraham, David, and Solomon, and by St. Paul when he was blinded by the great light.

The road to Jerusalem goes over the plains where the Israelites fought with the Philistines, through the country of Samson, which I have already described, and near the place where David with his little stone slew the great Goliath.

The railway from Damascus to Beirut shows you Mount Hermon, so famed in the Psalms, and passes numerous places, which, according to the Mohammedans, were the homes and tombs of the prophets. Take, for instance, Suk Wady Baroda, a little valley oasis on the way to Baalbek made up of flat-roofed mud houses surrounded by orchards and vineyards. It is mentioned by Josephus and is referred to in St. Luke as the home of the tetrarch Lysanias. The Mohammedans say that Adam lived in the mountain which looks down upon it, and that it was near the oasis itself that Cain became jealous of Abel and slew him. I have always thought that Abel was killed with a club, although I see now that the Bible does not mention the weapon used in the murder. The Moslem legend says it was a stone. The story is that Adam had divided the world into two sections and had given one of them to each of his boys. They had marked out their respective sections with stones, when a dispute arose concerning the boundary line. Cain claimed that Abel was inching on him, whereupon hot words passed, and Cain threw a rock and struck Abel in the temple and killed him.

According to the Moslem tradition, Cain was filled with remorse. He did not know what to do with his dead brother, so he took the body on his back and carried it with him over the world for five hundred years. At the end of that time he returned to this mountain, where he saw two birds fighting. At last one killed the other and then washed and buried the one slain. Cain did likewise with Abel, and straightway there sprang up seven oak trees, which are pointed out to this day.

According to the same authorities, Seth, Adam’s son, who took the place of Abel, lived on the western slope of the Lebanon range, and his tomb is still there. A mosque is built over it and the tomb may be seen through an iron grating. It is eighty feet long, but the people living in the village say that it was too short and that Seth’s legs had to be doubled up in order to fit. Not far away is the tomb of Noah, which is forty feet longer. It also has a mosque connected with it.

The distance from Damascus to Beirut is ninety-one miles. Travellers are advised not to take the third class, and women should always go first class. The third class has compartments eight feet wide running across the cars at right angles with the engine. Each compartment has two cushioned benches facing each other, its sides are walled with windows, and there is a door at each end. The conductor does not go through the cars, but collects the tickets from the outside, walking along a running board which extends the full length of the car and holding on to an iron rail fastened to the outside some distance above the step.

The road is picturesque and gives magnificent views of the Lebanon Mountains. The track winds its way up and down the hills, and the western side of the range is so steep that the cars are taken up on cogs after the same manner as on Pike’s Peak, Mount Washington, and the Rigi. There are twenty-five stations, mostly two-story buildings of stone.

The passengers are the conglomerate mixture of humanity found in this part of the Orient. There are scores of Syrians in long coats and trousers, some wearing red fezzes, and others having turbans or handkerchiefs wrapped around their heads. There are Turkish officers in uniform, with swords at their sides, fez-capped boys in silk gowns, and other Moslems in turbans and gowns. There are Mohammedan women clad all in black and wearing black veils. There are pretty Greek girls with bare faces, brown-skinned women from the mountains, and Bedouins, who have ropes tied about the kerchiefs which half shroud their fierce features. There are also Persians, Druses, and Christians of all sorts and conditions.

The trains go slowly in climbing the mountain. The average express makes less than sixteen miles an hour, while the mixed train takes twelve hours to make the ninety-one miles.

For many years the European powers have been scheming for the right to build railroads in this part of the world. One of the biggest and most talked-of projects is a line to open up the rich valley of the Euphrates where Babylon and Nineveh once flourished. It has some of the best lands on the face of the globe, and it has been suggested that it was the site of the Garden of Eden. The British are especially interested in the project because of their irrigation plans for Mesopotamia headed by Sir William Willcocks, the engineer for the Aswan Dam, which has redeemed about seven million acres in Egypt. The Germans won out in the scramble for the concession to build the road to Bagdad. The line was divided into sections and the Germans pushed on the work rapidly. Another concession to part of this line was granted by the Sultan to a group of Americans, but their plans fell through.

As to the resources to be developed by these new roads, they are beyond description enormous. They include rich deposits of coal, oil, and other minerals. Asia Minor is rich agriculturally. The plains of Mesopotamia will raise anything that can be grown in Egypt, and the new irrigation schemes will make them as productive as they were when Nebuchadnezzar was reigning at Babylon. In ancient times that country had a population of more than six million. It has not one fourth as many to-day. I am told that cotton will grow not only there but also throughout Asia Minor, and it may be that one of the chief competitors of our Southern plantations will eventually be found in this now almost waste but potentially rich part of the world.

The famous Berlin-to-Bagdad scheme is not the only evidence of the German Kaiser’s desire to gobble up as much of the Near East as possible. I use the word “gobble” advisedly. According to the Century Dictionary, it means “to swallow in large pieces, to swallow hastily, to seize upon with greed, and to appropriate graspingly.” And that aptly describes the German methods. I have seen German Kultur at work all during this trip.

In the richest parts of Palestine I saw their flourishing colonies. At Jerusalem I saw the great German church built under the very shadow of the Holy Sepulchre, their huge church on Mount Zion beyond the Tower of David, and the enormous limestone hospice erected in honour of Kaiserin Augusta on a commanding slope of the Mount of Olives. It is said that the money with which the site was bought and some of that used in the building was a silver wedding present to the Empress. It was known that she greatly loved Palestine, and her friends planned this memorial as a silver wedding gift. The hospice is several hundred feet above Jerusalem, and standing upon its roof on a bright day one can look across the hills of Judea and see the silvery thread of the Jordan and the shining Dead Sea with the blue mountains of Moab beyond.

The Kaiser was no respecter of persons, either living or dead. The site of his big church was purchased by him of Sultan Abdul Hamid when he visited him in Constantinople. He went there on his way to the Holy Land, and while hobnobbing with the Sultan got him to sell him this tract for twenty-four thousand dollars. The land, however, was not large enough, so the Germans by a clever trick purchased for sixteen thousand dollars the American cemetery which adjoined the original tract.

The Emperor of Germany when he made his trip through the Holy Land created as great a sensation as Theodore Roosevelt when he cavorted through Europe. Kaiser Wilhelm and his empress started in at Beirut and crossed the mountains of Lebanon to Baalbek and Damascus. They then returned to Beirut and took ship down the coast, past Tyre and Sidon, to the Bay of Acre. Here horses were waiting for them and they rode down around the slopes of Mount Carmel, over the plains of Sharon to Jaffa, and thence up the hills of Judea to Jerusalem. There were about a thousand in the party, and it required one thousand two hundred and fifty mules and horses to carry them and their baggage. The Emperor himself had a staff of one hundred and twenty, who ate at his own tables, and there were in addition one hundred and forty naval and military officers. The Empress also had her ladies-in-waiting with her. One hundred and seventy-five high Turks and officials were supplied by the Sultan as a special escort. The Emperor’s tour was so arranged that he had four camps. He slept in a different camp every night and had a new one for each meal.

Although the journey was made in October, the weather was hot, and the chief trouble was to supply the expedition with water. Some died of thirst, and between Haifa and Jaffa six horses dropped dead of sunstroke. It was so hot that the trip to the Dead Sea and the Jordan was not attempted, but the Emperor went to Bethlehem and other places near by. He remained seven days at Jerusalem, during which time he consummated his purchases of land.

In Palestine I encountered a German tourist agency, a competitor of Thomas Cook & Son. This tourist agency had its own hotels at Jaffa, Jerusalem, and Haifa, and its own guides, dragomans, horses, and carriages. Its men, who thoroughly understood the country, had established such relations with the Bedouin tribes that they could take parties anywhere. The agency’s road mending and other activities had opened up many hitherto inaccessible parts of the country. Indeed, the Germans started a new roads movement in the Holy Land. The first attempt was made when the Kaiser went from Jaffa to Jerusalem. The Sultan had the highway repaired, and when the Germans travelled over it, it was watered for the first time in its history, being sprinkled from skin-bags carried from the shoulders of women and girls, and filled at the springs, wells, and cisterns near by.