Take a seat with me this morning in the railroad car which is just about leaving the seaport of Jaffa to go to Jerusalem. The distance by rail is only fifty-four miles, but it will take us more than four hours. Crossing the rich plains of Sharon, the road winds its way up the hills of Judea until it brings us to the Holy City, about twenty-five hundred feet above the sea.

The cars are comfortable, but we have had to fight with the tourists and pilgrims for our seats near the windows. A German and a Greek on the opposite side of the coach are still quarrelling for places, using language not that of brotherly love. The German has just called the Greek a swine, while the Greek has retaliated by simply calling the German a dog. But now they are quiet and we can enjoy the scenery as we go on.

Leaving Jaffa we ride for some miles through orchards. There are orange groves loaded with blossoms and fruit. There are orchards of olives, pomegranates, and figs, and many gardens surrounded by cactus hedges twice as high as our heads. Next we enter the rich plain where the Philistines lived. The soil is brown and so fat that you have only to tickle it with the plough and it laughs with the harvest. You do not wonder that the Philistines fought for this fertile land.

Here is a green field of wheat. The stalks stand as thick as grass, and rise and fall with the winds from the sea. There a native is ploughing with a bullock and donkey harnessed together. The plough is the rude implement of the Scriptures, and the dark-skinned farmer steadies it with one hand, while he carries a goad in the other. Farther on are camels dragging the ploughs. In places we see flocks of fat sheep, herded by boys, and now and then pass a village of flat, white-walled houses with thick roofs of thatch on which the grass grows. Nearly every house has a roof of sod about a foot deep, and as we near the hills, the towns on their sides rise up in green terraces.

Here some shepherds in sheep-skin coats, with the wool inside, are watching their flocks, and there, pulling up bunches of grass for her cattle, is a maiden who makes us think of Ruth gathering wheat in the harvest-fields of Boaz. Here and there throughout the plains of Sharon we see the watch-towers built for soldiers posted to ensure the Turkish Sultan’s share of the farmers’ crops.

The landscape here is far different from that of the United States. There are no houses or barns standing alone in the fields. There are no outbuildings of any description, and no haystacks or strawstacks. The people live in villages and go out to work in the fields. The only fences are cactus hedges, but most of the holdings are not fenced in at all.

The land is fertile clear to the mountains, a distance of perhaps twenty miles. In the foothills there are patches of green, while higher up fields are here and there cut out of the rocks, which are built up to hold in the earth. I have never seen a country more rocky. The rough lands of the Blue Ridge are Nile farms compared to the hills through which our train climbs up to Jerusalem. In many places there is nothing but rocks. The limestone strata are piled stone upon stone, looking like mighty monuments rising on the hills. In some places mountains rise in steps forming pyramids of white limestone, sparsely sprinkled with patches of grass and red poppies.

As we begin to ascend the hills of Judea, we come into the real land of the Israelites. Our railroad winds in and out among little mountains and we can see that in the past the whole country was terraced and that not a bit of land went to waste. What is now the grazing ground for sheep and cattle was once a garden.

Palestine reminds us of other parts of the world. The rich fruit of the orange groves of Jaffa makes us think of Florida. Were it not for the lack of fences and barns, the plains of Sharon might be a slice out of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, or the rich fields of the Scioto Valley in Ohio. These hills are very like Italy near Genoa, or south France about Nice and Monte Carlo. The terraces are planted with olive trees and we see gray-green olive orchards everywhere.

As we rise the air becomes purer and fresher. We pass the spot on which David is said to have killed Goliath, and see in the distance the town of Mizpah, where the Prophet anointed Saul king when the latter was out hunting his father’s asses. When we see an old bearded and turbaned Syrian riding along on his donkey, we wonder if he may not be a second Balaam, and we almost expect his donkey to open its mouth and speak to its master.

But let me tell you something about the railroad up to Jerusalem. The track is narrow gauge, and the coaches are much like street cars, with little racks for baggage along each side under the roof. Each carriage is divided into compartments the sides of which are walled with windows. The road has no tunnels, and it winds its way in and out as it climbs the hills. There are five stations between Jaffa and Jerusalem.

The total cost of the railroad was two million dollars, or a little less than forty thousand dollars per mile. The idea of the road was originated by an American, a civil engineer named Zimpel, who came to Palestine as a pedlar of a patent medicine which he called “Sunlight Pills.” He brought the scheme before the Sultan at Constantinople, but failed to get the concession to build it. After his death the matter was taken up by the French, who put the line through.

This was the first railroad built in Syria, and it is the father of a system which is now opening up a great part of the country. One section is the road building from Damascus toward Mecca, and connected with it are others which will eventually join the Holy Land to the valley of the Euphrates, as well as to Asia Minor and Turkey. The rates for both passengers and freight are much higher than in the United States.

As it goes up the mountains, the railway twists this way and that. It crawls along the sides of the hills with horseshoe curves here and there. The whole journey is over historic ground. We cross the plains where Samson fought with the Philistines, slaying a thousand of them with the jawbone of an ass. We see the place where he tied the firebrands to the tails of three hundred foxes and let them loose to burn up the harvest. A little farther on we enter the valley of Sorek, where the wicked Delilah cut off the hair of the strong man as he lay asleep in her lap, and away up on the side of the hill we can see the town of Zorah, where Samson was born. At the station of Deir Aban, where Samuel raised his Ebenezer, a crowd of children comes to the trains with bouquets of wild flowers. The boys whine for baksheesh. We wonder whether there may not be an infant Samson among them.

It was in Zorah that Samson was buried, and the guides will show you his tomb. Farther along the road we pass through a great gorge in the cliffs, on the north side of which, near the top, is a cave, where Samson lived, and I verily believe if we should offer the guides sufficient reward they would find us his bones or some pieces of brass from the gates of the city of Gaza, which, you remember, he carried away on his shoulders.

In our ride up to Jerusalem we go by the ancient city of Gezer. It is marked by a mound which has several buildings upon it, including the dome of a Mohammedan mosque. The ground about it has been dug over and over, and the ruins discovered have excited the religious and scientific world.

The excavations made by the Palestine Exploration Fund show it to be one of the oldest of cities. The scientists have gone down into the earth at this point, finding one city built upon the ruins of another, down to the seventh city, which seems to have been occupied by the cave dwellers of the Flint or Stone Age, a period before recorded history began. In these cave dwellings pottery and flint instruments were discovered. A burial place of that ancient race was opened up and remains were found which show that the cave dwellers practised cremation. In one of the six other cities, higher up, bronze tools were discovered, and higher still the relics of an ancient Egyptian civilization. In one of the caves were found large jars containing the skeletons of infants that had been sacrificed to some pagan idol, probably during the Canaanite period. In another was a cistern, the mouth of which was guarded by the skulls of two young girls, and inside which were fourteen skeletons, one that of a girl of sixteen who had been sawn asunder.

The King of Gezer was defeated by Joshua, and later the city was captured by a king of Egypt, who was one of Solomon’s three hundred-odd fathers-in-law. The story is that Pharaoh gave Gezer to Solomon as a dowry with his daughter, and that Solomon rebuilt the city. At the time of the Crusades Richard Cœur de Lion and Saladin fought over it, and it was an important fortress at the time of the Maccabees.

The archæologists of the Palestine Exploration Fund have discovered bronze pots, ivory tablets, statues, and jewels and other treasures of a half-dozen different periods of history. In one of the cities a complete olive press made of stone was unearthed, and in another an Egyptian statuette about four thousand years old. The figure was that of a man with a beard and a wig. Bronze tweezers were found as well as many articles of Greek and Roman times. One of the most interesting discoveries was a reservoir with a capacity of four million gallons. Another was a place supposed to belong to one of the Maccabees.

The Palestine Exploration Fund is not a religious body, but rather a scientific and historical society. It has spent about fourteen thousand dollars a year on such work, most of the sums being collected in amounts of five dollars or less from English and Americans all over the world. The Fund has made great discoveries in Jerusalem. It has surveyed and mapped a great part of Palestine and has added many Bible sites to those already known.