Since the days of the ancient Canaanites Palestine has been often invaded. The composite life of the towns we have already noted. The history of Palestine shows how composite the life of the whole land has become. Its central position among the nations is known to every one. To the south, shut off by but a strip of desert, are Egypt and Africa; to the east lie Arabia, Persia, and the farther Asiatic continent; easily accessible on the north are Asia Minor, Turkey, and Russia; while ships almost daily arrive which unite it on the west with Europe and America. Yet one day’s ride along any of its chief highways will do more to show the traveller what that central position practically means, than all his study of it in books and on maps. For in one day’s ride he may meet Kurds, Circassians, Arabs, Syrians, Turks, Cypriotes, Greeks, Russians, Egyptians, Nubians, Austrians, French, Germans, English, and Americans. In a mission school in Damascus were found some little dark-eyed Syrian children speaking English with an unmistakable Australian accent. They had been born and brought up in Queensland.

It is in Hauran that this mixture of races is most forcibly thrust upon one’s notice. In the villages south of Damascus, the crowd which gathers round the tents is sure to contain several smiling negroes, some of them branded on the cheeks; Circassians, with sickle-shaped nose and thin lips, sharp-featured and small-limbed men with an untamable expression on their bitter faces; Arabs, darker of complexion, and more languid of eye; and Turkish soldiers, thin and smallpox bitten. There are to be found the Jew, sneering complacently at the inferior world; the fanatical Moslem, who will break the water-bottle your lips have touched; the Druse, who objects to coffee and tobacco, and to whom you hesitate to say “Good morning,” lest he may have conscientious scruples about that; and the cross-bred ruffian, who has no scruples about anything. Everything helps to strengthen the impression. In Damascus it seems always to be Sunday with one or other portion of the population, and a different set of shutters are up each day for nearly half the week. The railway, it might be supposed, must have blended the life of the composite East, but it only serves to emphasise the compositeness. In one of the Hauran stations we had some hours to wait. We spread our rugs in the shadow of the station-house, with a Turkish officer, an Arab soldier, and a long line of camels to watch till lunch was ready. When the time came, the hall of the booking-office was cleared of passengers of a dozen different nationalities, and our lunch was spread on the floor, just in front of the ticket-window! The train came at last, an hour late, drawn by a rather blasÉ-looking engine. Then began that babel of tongues which shows how nations meet in the East. All the world seemed to have sent its representatives to that train—its wealth to the white-cushioned first-class; its middle-class to the bare boards of the second; its poverty to the cattle-trucks dignified by the name of third,—while behind the carriages came two waggons loaded with grain, their owner perched high on one, and a baby’s cradle on the other.

All this phantasmagoria of the present helps one to realise better the extraordinary history of the past. For thousands of years the flow of manifold human life through Syria has been continuous. At the mouth of the Dog River, whose valley has from time immemorial served as a main passage from the sea to the East for armies, there is, cut in smoothed faces of the solid rock, the most remarkable collection of inscriptions in the world. The Assyrian slab shows still the familiar bearded figure of the monarch with his air of strength untempered by compassion. The Egyptian slab records its invasion in hieroglyphics. The Greek, Roman, and French stones tell their similar tale. Throughout the land the same thing repeats itself. In Hauran we found a fine Egyptian hieroglyphic embedded in the mud-and-rubble interior wall of a private courtyard, an altar of the time of Titus lying exposed on a hillside, and many Graeco-Roman inscriptions built into the walls of houses.[15] The five names which we have selected from so great a number of invaders are those whose mark upon the land has been deepest and most permanent.

CHAPTER I
ISRAELITE

Every traveller is impressed by the very meagre remains of a material kind which Israel has left for curious eyes. In a museum at Jerusalem many of these have been gathered—fragments of pottery and glass, coins, and other relics,—but the total number of them is surprisingly small. There are, of course, those huge stones to which reference has been already made, cut in a style which experts used to regard as distinctive enough to enable them to identify it as Jewish work.[16] But inscriptions are extremely rare. Phoenicia and Israel seem to have purposely avoided the habit of Assyrian and Egyptian kings, who wrote upon everything they built. There is, of course, the Moabite stone, whose characters are closely allied to Hebrew writing. But with that exception there is hardly any certain Hebrew inscription extant except one. That is indeed a writing of romantic fame. There is a tunnel known as Hezekiah’s Aqueduct, connecting the Fountain of the Virgin with the Pool of Siloam at Jerusalem. Its length is rather more than the third of a mile; its

height varies from five or six feet to one foot four inches. Its course bends in a wide sweep which adds greatly to the distance, and is said to have been taken in order to avoid tombs. There are a number of culs de sac, where the workmen had evidently lost their way. The flow of water is intermittent, so that Sir Charles Warren and his friends took their lives in their hands when they first explored it. Their mouths were often under water, “and a breath of air could only be obtained by twisting their faces up. To keep a light burning, to take measurements, and make observations under these circumstances was a work of no little difficulty; and yet, after crawling through mud and water for four hours, the honour of finding the inscription was reserved for a naked urchin of the town, who, some years after, announced that he had seen writing on the wall, whereupon Professor Sayce, and Herr Schick, and Dr. Guthe plunge naked into the muddy tunnel with acid solutions, and blotting-paper, and everything necessary to make squeezes, and emerge shivering and triumphant with the most interesting Hebrew inscription that has ever been found in Palestine.”[17] The inscription describes the meeting of the two parties of miners, who, like the engineers of modern tunnels, began to bore simultaneously at opposite ends.

Failing any wealth of such material remains, we must seek for Israel in the human life of the land. Jews are there in abundance, gathered, for the most part, within their four holy cities of Jerusalem, Tiberias, Hebron, and Safed. In Hebron they are a persecuted minority; in Safed they form about half the population; in Jerusalem, where there are more than seventy synagogues, it was estimated in 1898 that out of the 60,000 inhabitants 41,000 were Jews, nearly six times the number of the Mohammedans; while in Tiberias also they form about two-thirds of the population. Besides the Jews resident in these cities there are others both in the older colonies and in the new settlements of the Zionist movement, which have been created by the generosity of Jewish millionaires. Reports differ as to the success of these interesting experiments, and the knowledge of them which can be obtained from a passing visit is a quite inadequate ground for forming any judgment. Mr. Zangwill eloquently pleads for the restoration of the land to its ancient people; Colonel Conder assures us that the Jew is incapable of becoming a thoroughly successful agriculturist, though as a shopkeeper, a money-changer, or, in some cases, as a craftsman, he prospers in his native land. Certain it is that Jews are gathering to it from Russia, Poland, Germany, Spain, Arabia, and many other countries, with what ultimate result the future alone can shew.

It would be unfair and misleading to take the present Jewish population of Syria as the representative of ancient Israel. It still perpetuates, indeed, the sects of Pharisees and Sadducees, and it still holds aloof from the surrounding population with that independence and tenacity which has marked Israel from of old. Crucified by Romans, butchered and tortured by Crusaders, oppressed and driven forth by Moslems, this marvellous people lives yet and will live on. In Europe the lot of the Jew has been and still is a bitter one. In Syria to-day the lowest and most insulting term of abuse among the Fellahin is to call each other Jews. Yet the spirit of the people is not broken by oppression, as is the spirit of the Fellahin. The Jew takes what comes and says little; but he believes in himself, his past and his future, with a faith indomitable as it is daring. Still it must be confessed that the Jew of Palestine is generally repulsive. Mark Twain’s description of them as he saw them at Tiberias is hardly overdrawn—“long-nosed, lanky, dyspeptic-looking ghouls with the indescribable hats on, and a long curl dangling down in front of each ear.” The hats are circular black felt plates, giving to their wearers a peculiar air of conscious rectitude and semi-clerical superiority; the curls are grown for the convenience of the archangel in the resurrection! The younger men and lads of Tiberias impress one as the most unpleasant-looking of all the inhabitants of the land. They are so neurotic and effeminate, and at the same time so monstrously supercilious. The Jewish quarters are famous for their excessive dirt. In the visitors’ book of the hotel at Tiberias, Captain MacGregor wrote “that the Rob Roy and myself had stopped there two nights, and that the canoe was not devoured.” This is not encouraging, and in part it is the result of mistaken methods. Many of these Jews are subsidised, and a subsidised religion is inevitably degrading. A man who receives an income for no other service to his kind than that he is a Jew is not likely to do credit to his ancestors.

In the Samaritans we have better representatives of the ancient days. No people in the land have a more pathetic quaintness about them than these few survivors of antiquity who are still met with in the streets of Nablus. They preserve the old type of features, for their blood has been unmixed for more than 2000 years. But they are fast dying out, and only a remnant of less than 200 individuals is now alive. Difficult of access, reserved, mysterious, they are the ghosts of ancient Israel, who seem to haunt rather than to enjoy their former heritage.

In the manners and customs of Syria a still more interesting memorial of Israel is found. Many of these were not peculiar to Israel, nor was she the first to cherish them. They are the forms of the general Semitic stock, of which she was but one people. But the words and ways of Israel are the only form of Semitic life with which the world is familiar, and every student of the Bible finds in these the greatest source both of devout and of scientific interest. In the towns and in Jerusalem there is still much to remind one of the life so matchlessly delineated in Scripture. Lean and mangy dogs still sniff around Lazarus at the very door of Dives. The windows of houses generally face the interior courts, and the outer walls are blank, so that every door opened after nightfall contrasts the vivid light of the interior with the “outer darkness” of the street. Still more in the country, among the Fellahin and the wandering Arabs, does one seem to live in Bible times. The gipsy-like Bedawin west of Jordan are certainly degraded by change of nomadic habits and by contact with the villagers; yet there is enough of their desert heredity in them to interpret many of the patriarchal stories. The Arab sitting at noon-day in the shaded edge of his tent, or walking at eventide in the fields where it is pitched, is the true son of Abraham and Isaac. When you know him better you will not improbably recognise Jacob also. Except for tobacco, gunpowder, and coffee, he lives much as Israel lived in those days of wandering to which her writings love to trace back her origin. Even these modern innovations hardly break the continuity. The Arab smokes with such enthusiasm that it is difficult to imagine his fathers without their chibouk; and his brass-bound gun might be the heirloom of countless generations. Of the Fellah and his descent, and his conservatism of the past, we have already written.

So it comes to pass that he who journeys intelligently through Palestine reads the history of Israel ever afterwards with a quite new interest. The Bible is incomparably the best guide-book to Syria; and you seem to journey through its chapters as you move from place to place. Here is the fig tree planted in the vineyard; there, the tower guarding the wine-press. Unmuzzled oxen are trampling the corn on the threshing-floor, from whence the wind drives the chaff in a glistening cloud. Women are still coming from the city to draw water, and grinding in couples at the mill. We saw the prodigal son, drinking and singing at Beyrout; and the owner of the waggonloads of corn we noted in Hauran had kept them from the last year on the chance of a drought, which would raise their prices in the market—he was the rich man of the prophets who was grinding the faces of the poor. Under the walls of Jezreel a curious coincidence brought back vividly to mind the tragic fate of Jezebel. It was there that we first saw people with painted eyes and faces; and there a horse lay dead with a pack of dogs at work upon the body. Next morning, as we parted, nothing was left but the skeleton and the hoofs. The people whom you meet are talking in Bible language. When they repeat the familiar words of Scripture they are not quoting texts, but transacting business in their ordinary way. We were told of a shepherd near Hebron who, when asked why the sheepfolds there had no doors, answered quite simply, “I am the door.” He meant that at night, when the sheep were gathered within the circular stone wall of the enclosure, he lay down in its open entrance to sleep, so that no sheep might stray from its shelter without wakening him, and no ravenous beast might enter but across his body. In the north, an American was endeavouring to persuade a stalwart Syrian lad to try his fortunes in Chicago. The boy evidently felt the temptation, but he turned smilingly towards the middle-aged man at his side, and, pointing to him, answered, “Suffer me first to bury my father.”

But of all our experiences there was one which recalled the ancient life most vividly, and on that account it may be related here. We had camped over night near the village of Tell-es-Shihab in Hauran. In the morning we mounted our horses amid a crowd of villagers, and started for the village. The men protested loudly, and when we told them we were going only to search for inscriptions, they assured us that there were none. In spite of their opposition we rode on, followed by a tumultuous chorus. A chance remark led finally to an invitation from the headman of the village to his menzil, or reception hall. It was the mention of the name of Dr. Torrance, of the Tiberias Medical Mission, who, on one of his journeys, had cured this sheikh of an illness. At the door our host met us, and most courteously invited us to enter, bowing and touching our palms with his. The hall was dark, with the great stone arch characteristic of Hauran architecture spanning its centre. Smoke had coloured the arch and the rafters a rich dark brown, from whose shadow swallows flitted continually out into the sunshine and back again. We were seated on mats, spread with little squares of rich carpet round three sides of a hollow place in the floor, where a fire of charcoal burned, surrounded by parrot-beaked coffeepots. This was the hearth of hospitality, whose fire is never suffered to go out; near it stood the great stone mortar, in which a black slave was crushing coffeebeans. The coffee, deliciously flavoured with some cunning herb or other, was passed round. But the conversation which followed was the memorable part of that entertainment. In the shadow at the back the young men who had been admitted sat in silence. The old men, elders of the village community, sat in a row on stone benches right and left of the door. The sheikh made many apologies for not having called upon us at the tents—he had thought we were merchantmen going to buy silk at Damascus. Then followed endless over-valuation of each other, and flattery concerning our respective parents and relations. “How long would we stay under his roof? surely at least till to-morrow or next day? No, one of us had to catch a steamer at Beyrout? But any steamer would wait for so great a general,” etc. Until finally our leader came to the delicate subject of inscriptions, and was made free of the town, and immediately guided to the Egyptian slab mentioned on p. 87. It was a perfect specimen of intercourse with Arabs, and it dazed us with its ancient spell. There is no possibility of hurry. You must despatch your business by way of a discussion of things in general. Compliments were as rife and as conventional as those of Abraham and the children of Heth at Kirjath-Arba, and they were received and given without any pretence of taking them seriously. The elders sat silently leaning upon their staves, except now and then, when one of them would slowly rise and expatiate upon something the sheikh had said—perhaps about camels or the grain crop—beginning his interruption almost literally in the words of Job’s friends:—“Hearken to me, I also will shew mine opinion. I will answer also on my part, I also will shew mine opinion.

For I am full of matter, the spirit within me constraineth me.” Altogether it was a scene of the unadulterated East—just such a scene as might have been witnessed any time these three thousand years.

The great memorial of Israel is her religion. To her it was given to know the Eternal God and to pass on that knowledge to all the nations of the world. Among the many impressions given by a journey through Palestine, none is so important and none so strong as this, that the land was eminently suited for that one purpose and for that alone. She tried many similar experiments, but they all failed utterly. The luxurious orientalism of Solomon, the democratic revolt of Jeroboam, the military ambitions of Baasha, and the attempt at commercial supremacy which Omri made—each of these was an imitation of one or other of the contemporary nations. For Israel they were alike impossible. Their successive failures proclaim her a peculiar people, set in a peculiar place for a peculiar purpose. For them, as Renan says, “to act like men”—i.e. like all the rest of the world—was a sort of degradation. All other experiments in greatness failed; their greatness lay solely in the knowledge of the Lord.

CHAPTER II
GRÆCO-ROMAN

Nothing strikes one more than the contrast in Palestine between the vanishing of Hebrew buildings and the permanence of Roman ones. You have come here to a land which you know to have been for many years under Roman government, but which still to your imagination is Oriental, with here and there a Roman touch. You find, among the very ancient buildings, hardly a remaining trace of anything that is not Roman; and of Roman work you find an amount which probably astonishes you. Before you have long left Jaffa, some part or other of one of the old Roman roads making for Jerusalem will be seen. Not long afterwards Bether comes in sight—that terrible little valley where the blood ran so deep when the siege ended and the Jews’ last hope was broken. So you move on from point to point of Roman story until, as you climb the steep ascent from the Jordan valley to Gadara, you realise that it was when encamped just here that Vespasian heard the news of Nero’s death and was proclaimed emperor by his legion.

The Roman work in Palestine seems to exaggerate its peculiar characteristics, so that here one notices these more distinctly than in any other land. A Roman tower in Switzerland, a Roman road in Scotland—certainly they are Roman, but they are not removed from all things Swiss or Scotch by so vast an interval as that which divides Roman from native work in Palestine. It is indeed an invasion of arms, this Roman life—an intrusion of what is, first and last, alien to the spirit of the place. The traveller to-day, to whom the very dust of this land is dear, inevitably feels about the Roman relics an air of obtrusive and uncomprehending indifference. They “cared for none of these things,” or, if they did care a little now and then and try to understand, they did it clumsily and unnaturally. Rome’s policy was that of wide toleration, but her spirit was absolutely unaccommodating. She might allow her provinces to govern themselves and to worship pretty much as they chose, but she herself, in her officials and their works, stood aloof from them and was Rome still. This is to be seen in Palestine in all its good and in all its bad aspects. In those solidly-constructed bridges and mighty aqueducts and imperishable causeways there is the very embodiment of the Roman virtus and gravitas, that output of manhood which never trifled nor spared itself, that solemn, business-like reality which is so full of purpose. In this hard reality of Rome there is not only purpose but pitilessness of force to accomplish what is planned. Every Roman road you chance upon seems to be feeling its way with an unerring instinct towards Jerusalem or some other goal, and you know that it will arrive. Just as impressive, on the other hand, is the sense of Rome’s limitations. Her works disclose her seeing a certain length, and you know beyond all doubt that she will get there. But there are very obvious and very clearly defined limits to the length she ever sees or will go. The work of Greece is far beyond the furthest reach of Roman work—the glad spring, the grace of conscious strength that is beautiful as well as strong, the restfulness withal of perfect harmony that is thinking of more than merely utilitarian values; of these Rome knows not the secret. Beside the flight of Greek art she is pedestrian; to the Greek artist she plays at best but the part of Roman artisan. Forceful, massive, successful up to its highest desire, the Roman work is finished and perfect. And it has attained finish and perfection on a lower level than that of any nation that ever yet dreamed dreams or “looked beyond the world for truth and beauty.”

Not that there are no other traces of Rome in Syria beyond the stones of Roman ruins. In many place-names Latin is discernible, and the country is full of inscriptions of all sorts. A still more permanent mark was left by that invasion of Roman spirit which, for a time, claimed Israel for Rome. Rome came to Syria next in succession to the invasion of Alexander the Great. After his death the Macedonian power remained in the East, and the seductive spirit of Greek humanism became the rival of the old Puritan Hebraism of the nation. It was this that led to the Wars of the Maccabees, who fought for the sterner against the more genial spirit. As in the days of English Cromwell, the Puritan was invincible while he remained true to his faith—that singularly effective blend of patriotism with religious belief which has made itself felt in so many national histories. The triumph of Hebraism lasted for about a century, and then came Pompey in 63 B.C. to Jerusalem. Hellenism regained its ascendency and the Greek cities of Palestine their freedom. About a quarter of a century later the figure of Herod the Great appears as a critical factor in the history of Palestine. An Idumean and a Sadducee, he had neither patriotism nor religion to check his ambition. The path of glory and of easy advancement, then, was by way of Rome, and there was much in Herod that found Rome congenial. As a young man he had made his name by clearing out a notorious band of robbers from the valley which led down the great road from the Mediterranean to the Sea of Galilee at Capernaum. This “Vale of Doves” is flanked by precipices pierced with many caves, in which the robbers lived. Josephus tells us how Herod fell upon the device of letting down cages with the bravest of his soldiers. These men, lowered by ropes from the edge of the cliff, sprang upon the robbers in their cave’s mouth, and when they retreated within, smoked them out with fires like vermin. The man who contrived and carried out that design was not unworthy of the title “Great” from the Roman point of view. He became the centre and the champion of the new Hellenism, which was really the worship of Rome, touched as Rome was with the Greek culture she had conquered and envied and sought in vain to acquire. Rome was clumsily Greek at this time, and Herod was clumsily Roman. Certainly he would have been a Roman if he could. He was prepared to go any length to serve his end. At the Banias springs of Jordan he built a temple to Augustus. Samaria and CÆsarea, his Roman cities, must have cost him a fabulous sum to build.

Of the actual architectural remains of Rome in Palestine, the smallest are perhaps the most impressive. Here and there, from south to north, you come upon tesserÆ, the remains of inlaid mosaic floors of the ancient houses. Sometimes it is single little cubes that turn up among the gravel of the sea-shore or shine from the newly-ploughed furrow. At other times broken fragments of a hand-breadth’s size may be found, with enough variety of colour to suggest the beginning of a pattern. But here and there you may find whole floors of elaborately designed mosaic, with concentric circles of various colour and size, with large-scale pictures, or, as in one case at least, with an ancient map—one of the most ancient in the world. On many a spot of Palestine you ride over ground whose stones are capitals of carved pillars, and whose layers of caked earth disclose fragments of ancient mosaic floors.

The Roman roads are still frequently met with in Palestine, and these, perhaps more than any other of their works, help the imagination to realise the old life in its magnificence of power. Whether the causeway lies bare to the weather across a mountain, or whether it cuts its track along the sheer cliff of a gorge, there is the same uncompromising purpose and capacity in it—the stride of the road, that seems to be aware of whither it is going and the reason for its going there. In the cities of the Decapolis and others there is generally one straight line of Roman causeway—the “Street called Straight,” which is by no means peculiar to Damascus. It was a Roman hobby, this of straightness, and one of the most characteristic of Roman hobbies. The roads went, so far as that was possible, up hill and down dale in a direct line from place to place; and in the cities at least one columned street did the same. The milestones which may still be found occasionally seem to heighten the human interest, though that is considerably damped when we realise that none of these roads date from the early Roman days in Syria. The paths our Saviour walked on were but tracks, not unlike those which modern travellers follow.

But the bridges are older, and in some places they are used for traffic to-day, spanning Jordan and Leontes. There is little causeway at the ends of them—their one business in these old days was to do the difficult and needful task of crossing water. Once across, the traveller might find his path or make it for himself. Parapets are not provided on the old bridges, and the surface is a flight of broad and shallow steps. If you walk unwarily and are drowned in the torrent below, that is no concern of these resolute but unluxurious bridge-builders. Their business is simply to span the stream. So effectively and conscientiously have they done this, that even when time and floods have broken the bridge, you may see the half of it still standing: the huge pier of stone and of mortar almost harder than stone stands at the side, and the actual arch is still flung across the water, wedged into an almost unbreakable strength by its keystone, while all the surface building above the arch has long been washed away. Such a ruin may be seen to-day on the coast some miles to the north of Tyre. It was in her fight with water, either for it in aqueducts or against it in quays and bridges, that Rome seems to have put out her utmost strength of masonry. Along the coasts both of the Mediterranean and of the Sea of Galilee, submerged stones and fragments of building may be seen, which bear testimony to this; and at TaricheÆ, where a large fish-curing trade had to be provided for, there are remains of a dam and quay where Jordan swept round in a circle, affording a great length of water-frontage. But perhaps the most noticeable monuments of Rome in this dry and thirsty land are the

aqueducts, sections of which still stand in many parts. In the neighbourhood of Jericho, Laurence Oliphant counted nine different aqueducts. At Khan Minyeh, believed by some to be the site of Capernaum, there is a bewildering mass of water-building of many sorts. A Wasserthurm still stands, whose walls are 12 feet in thickness, and in all directions water is carried at various levels in channels which run along the top of mighty banks of masonry. Great stone water-pipes, with rim and hollow for fitting to the next pipes tightly, lie scattered in all directions, peeping up through the long grass and ferns, or hiding among the roots of the thorn trees. Elsewhere are to be seen longer stretches of aqueduct, whose architects have been able to turn strength into beauty in a very wonderful fashion. Roman building at its best relies on the one principle of constructive truth. It never aims at being pretty; it never fails in being right for the purpose it is meant to serve. From the point of view of beauty this may often have produced harsh, material, and heavy work—and indeed that is part of what we have already referred to as the limitation of Roman achievement. But the highest beauty is, after all, a matter far more of truth than of ornament, and there are many remains of Roman work in which such high beauty has been unconsciously attained. They built to accomplish some definite practical purpose, and for that end they built thoroughly and well. The result is the beauty which comes like a crown upon honest work beyond the design of the workers—a beauty of wholeness, adequacy, truth, which is perhaps not so far removed from the Hebrew idea of the “beauty of holiness” as careless observers might be disposed to think. This is seen in many a fragment of the Roman aqueducts. These irregular, three-tiered clusters of variously sized and shaped arches, carrying the stone or concrete channel across a gorge, have a real beauty of their own; and the long stretches of single or double tiers that take up the channel where it emerges from a mountain-tunnel, lead it high and secure across the treacherous ooze of a marsh, throw their level line on high bridges over ravines, and at last end in the tumbled ruins of a city whose pools and fountains they filled long ago—these have an indisputable beauty of workmanship and design, as well as an infinite pathos of sentiment.

Next in impressiveness to these monuments are the remains of the Greek amphitheatres of the Roman period. Whether it be that the massiveness of the stones has been too much for the lazy builders who have constructed their modern dwellings out of stolen fragments of ruins; or whether, in its irony, history has attached to these monuments of Rome’s attempt to amuse the world some special sacredness, it would be difficult to say. Certain it is that these in many places remain, sunk in the natural hollow of a hill as in a socket, while all traces of the city which once surrounded them have disappeared. They have been often described, both as they are found in Syria and elsewhere; and the stage arrangements, the underground passages, and the whole design of them does not materially differ from those of other countries. One feature in the Syrian theatres appears with special distinctness. When the play was going on, an awning may be supposed to have been spread horizontally over the roof, to shade spectators and actors from the sun. Between the edge of this awning and the flat top rim of the stage buildings, there would be a blank space left, as it were, like a framed and draped picture. The sites were so chosen that this space was filled up with some commandingly beautiful vista—in the north generally a view of Hermon. Hauran boasts many such theatres in the cities of the Decapolis. In cities which were first Greek and then Roman, such as these, it may be difficult to determine the exact date of a particular building. If the Romans built these theatres, they closely imitated the older Grecian work. They certainly built the theatre and hippodrome of CÆsarea, in which latter the goal-post is still to be seen, an immense granite stone, which has seen life in its day.

The theatres have, as a rule, survived the fortresses and the temples. Rome undertook many things. She would worship, govern, educate, amuse. Is it not significant that her wreck looks so like a gigantic playground, as if in those degenerate days of her conquest the Empire was already finding in the motto “il faut s’amuser” her rule of life? After all, it is his chief interest that is the immortal thing about any man or nation. Yet this may be an unjust and fanciful estimate. Relics of Roman temples and fortresses also remain. A statue of Jupiter has had its resurrection from the sands of Gaza, and a monument in honour of Jupiter Serapis now bears a Roman inscription near the Zion Gate of Jerusalem. Near springs and the fountain-heads of rivers especially, the ruins of Roman shrines to the Genius of the fountain are found, as at Banias. Fortresses too, where Roman garrisons used to be located, can still be traced, in a ring or an oblong trail of loose stones. Such ruins crown the height of Tabor, the summit of Gerizim, and many another hill. But these shew little trace of their former meaning. Here and there the acropolis of a Greek or Roman town may retain its ancient embankment, built on the steep slope of the hill, as if shoring up the plateau above where the temple once stood. Elsewhere, some parts of the curtain wall of a crusader castle may be blocks of Roman fortification left in situ. But the greater part of the Roman building must be looked for in the walls of village houses, where the contrast between such fragments and their surroundings is as grotesque as it is pitiful. The Gadarenes have built into their walls whatever lay nearest them. Coffins and tombstones, capitals and columns, even altars themselves, are there, “stopping holes to keep the wind away”; it is exactly what “imperial CÆsar” has come to in Gadara.

When Roman power decayed, the signs of its decadence were manifest in the departure from old severity into an efflorescence of ornament and a magnificence of mere size out of all proportion to the constructive meaning of the work. In Baalbek, Rome has left us a monument of such decadence. The elaborated detail is foreign to the grand simplicity of the old Roman style, and the exaggerated size is but boastfulness. “The Romans had seen the huge Jewish stones at Jerusalem” (as Dr. Merrill explained the matter to us) “and began at Baalbek to work on a bigger scale, the Barnums of the ancient world, whose ambition was to run the biggest show on earth. By and by they got tired of that, and left it off; it was not their line, after all.” “The line” of Rome was a very straight and simple one. With immense power and a great and single purpose, she went straight forward, and did what she meant to do. Hers was a rough simplicity which never failed. Strange that, with so mighty a resource, she should have ever gone out of her line to attempt any other work than her own! When men or nations discover their limitations, and rashly make up their mind no longer to stay within them, their ambition has already begun to foreshadow their downfall.

The pathos of seeing anything which evidently was once so competent and so strong, now so absolutely dead as Rome is, is heightened almost to weeping, in those places where the little and everyday memorials of her former life are commonest. It is not the gigantic monoliths, but the little tesserÆ, not the fallen columns, but the broken jar-handles, that touch the heart most. Between Tyre and Sidon the rider passes over fields every stone of which is a fragment of some marble slab or curiously-carved piece of masonry. His horse is overturning the remains of Ornithopolis, “the city of the bird,” in these ploughed fields. But it is at Samaria that the emotion is most irresistible. Where the “fat valley” opens to the westward, a conical hill, slightly oval and with flattened top now clad with an orchard, nestles in and yet lies apart from the bend of the mountains of Ephraim. It was this hill that Omri bought from Shomer for the heavy price of two talents of silver. It was here that the city rose—the inferior houses (if we may reconstruct the probable past) of white brick, with rafters of sycamore; the grander ones of hewn stone and cedar—while the royal palace overtopped them all. A broad wall with terraced top encircled it, and the city lay there, “a vast luxurious couch, in which its nobles rested securely, ‘propped and cushioned up on both sides as in the cherished corner of a rich divan.’” It was Ahab’s capital too, and after the varying fortunes of centuries it was granted to Herod the Great by Augustus, who immediately called it by the Greek name of the emperor, Sebaste, and proceeded to rebuild it in a style of unheard-of magnificence. A hippodrome appeared in the hollow, a temple on the hill. Round the summit he ran a flat terrace with double colonnade of monolithic pillars about 16 feet in height, with palaces and massive gateways. From our camp on the threshing-floor, quite near the circuit of pillars—for many of them are still standing, and the bases of almost all may be seen in the ground—we crossed to within the ring of the colonnade. The ground was ploughed here even along the faces of the artificial terrace-banks, which still preserve their sheer angle, clean and steep as of old. The furrows were literally sown with fragments of broken pottery and tesserÆ. We crossed to a squared and heavy mass of fallen stones and carved pillars lying slantwise against walls still strong in ruin, which bears the name of Herod’s daughter’s palace; and then along the colonnade to the great piles of masonry which guard the gate that looks toward CÆsarea. Two massive towers are there, partly in ruins and soon to be wholly so, for the cactus hedge is busy with its roots among the stones, and is making its way through cracks to the very heart of the towers. We sat there watching the sun sink into the sea, and thought of all those faded splendours and crimes that make this spot so famous among the tragic places of the world. It was the home of Jezebel, it was the slaughter-house of Mariamne, both of whom must often have watched the sunset from that gate. The ambitions of the ancient kings, the pride and wealth and cruelty of Herod, the beauty and the misery of passionate women, dead these many centuries—all seemed to people the place with ghosts, as the twilight deepened. We turned to go back, and found ourselves accompanied by the man who farms the hill—a tall, friendly, and gracious man in long flowing robes. He held the hand of his little five-year-old girl, a dark-eyed, sweet-faced child, dressed in a red cloak crossed with blue and yellow stripes. Her hair was short, in clustering curls of glossy black, with a blue bead cunningly inwoven among them to keep off the evil eye. She had her free hand entwined by all its fingers in the wool of a pet lamb, which she steered along sideways vigorously. How dead the mighty Herod and all the Roman glory seemed in contrast with this simple picture of the eternal life of home!

It is not, however, merely with the chill of that which has been long dead that Rome affects us in Syria;

it is with the living interest which attaches to all that touched Christ, and entered in any way into Christianity. It is a far-reaching generalisation which reminds us that “the great civilisations have always risen in the meeting-places of ideas.”[19] Historically it is true that the times of greatest international struggle have been times of heightened vitality, when the mingling nations were ready to receive and to impart much, and to send forth a new spirit upon the world. Nothing could be more providentially apposite, from this point of view, than that Jesus should have been born “amid the fever of the establishment of the Roman power in Judea.” He kept aloof, indeed, from the Herodian people who lived delicately in kings’ houses, and from all the Greek and GrÆco-Roman life of his day. Yet, as Dr. Smith has shown us memorably, Jesus was no quiet rustic dreaming dreams and seeing visions far from the life of men. He lived and died in close touch with all that Rome, Greece, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Arabia had to show. Not for the first time, nor for the last, did He see, in His temptation, “the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them.” As this realisation becomes more and more distinct, a new force is added to the contention that His Gospel is the Gospel for the world. It was thought out and first preached amid the throng of commerce, and while the din of battle was as yet hardly silent.

This contact of Jesus Christ with Rome, which under Paul’s hand was to become the messenger and instrument of His kingdom, is vividly associated with two hill-tops in Palestine. One of them is that height near Nazareth, some ten minutes distant from the village well, the description of whose outlook closes the chapter on Galilee in the Historical Geography with the well-known passage about the boyhood of Jesus. There, while He faced seawards, lay on the left hand below Him the wine-coloured, battle-soaked plain of Jezreel, with squadrons of the Roman army marching east and west along it; while on the right hand the Sepphoris Road ran ribbon-like along the ranges, with its constant stream of merchandise. The other hill-top is that known as “Gordon’s Calvary” at Jerusalem—a low and rounded hillock just outside the Damascus Gate. If this be indeed the site of Calvary, Christ was crucified on a wedge of ground between a military and a commercial road; and “they that passed by wagging their heads” may have been soldiers from the Tower as well as merchants from the Northern Gate.

Certain it is, at least, that Rome was about His cradle and His grave. The earliest narratives of His earthly career bring Him to Bethlehem to a Roman taxation; the latest story delivers Him to a Roman judge, to Roman soldiers, and to a Roman cross.

CHAPTER III
CHRISTIAN

From the invasion of warlike Rome we turn to that “Peace and her huge invasion” which came to the Holy Land during the later days of the Roman Empire. Before the time of Constantine the Church in Syria had grown and spread with such startling vitality and promise of even more abundant life as to bring down upon her the cruelty of persecutions. In the north the Christian communities were mainly Gentile, in the south Jewish Christians. They must have been intellectually as well as spiritually vigorous, for the curious speculations and mystic dreams of the Gnostics had already, in the second century, gained footing in Syrian Christianity.

With Constantine (324-337) Roman persecution ceased for ever. The Jews were permitted to return to Jerusalem, and the construction of the written Talmud began its career of three centuries. Julian, the last emperor on the throne before the Empire divided into east and west, had apostatised from the Christian faith before his ascension, and in 361 he attempted the restoration of the temple in Jerusalem as a strength to Judaism against Christianity. But the Galilean had conquered, and it was the day of Christ. The recognition of Christianity as the religion of the State began a new era, which ran on for a thousand years in the Eastern Empire, until the siege of Constantinople changed the face of Europe in 1453. The words of Dante will often recur to the student of early Christian days in Palestine:—

The reference is to the legend of “The Donation of Constantine,” by which he transferred Rome and the states of the Church to the Papal See. Christianity in Syria has run a strange career.

Up to the time of Constantine the Church was at bay, fighting a desperate battle against the Pagan world. At CÆsarea especially, but in many another Roman town besides, native Syrians were forced underground into caves and catacombs, or brought to the death in the public games. Many records of this period survive. At Sidon, searching about among the tombs which Renan has recently explored, we came upon a broken marble slab—evidently the lintel of a church raised in memory of a local massacre of Christians—with the word MARTURION inscribed on it. The martyr monuments of Syria are wonderfully full of peace, hope, and assurance. Like Marius the Epicurean you feel, when first you come upon them, that for the first time you are seeing the wonderful spectacle of those who believe. You understand his impression of every form of human sorrow assuaged—desire, and the fulfilment of desire working on the very faces of the aged, and the young men obviously persons who had faced life and were glad. And the same wistful sense of a sure word of revelation comes upon the beholder as that which appealed to him. Surely here the earth was for once not forsaken of the higher powers, but visited and spoken to and loved!

After Constantine the pilgrim takes the place of foremost interest, which the martyr previously held. From 451, when an independent patriarchate was established at Jerusalem, pilgrimages became very frequent; and a century later there were hospices with 3000 beds in them within Jerusalem, while trade of many sorts flourished by their aid. In the oldest itineraries there are very curious accounts of these pilgrimages; but two, which Colonel Conder gives, are especially quaint and interesting. They refer to later pilgrimages, but are appropriate enough to earlier ones. The first one is from Saewulf, giving an account of his landing at Jaffa: “From his sins, or from the badness of the ship,” he was almost wrecked, and his companions were drowned before his eyes. The other is Sir John Maundeville’s—most fascinating, if most unscrupulous, of travellers: “Two miles from Jerusalem is Mount Joy, a very fair and delicious place. There Samuel the prophet lies in a fair tomb; and it is called Mount Joy because it gives joy to pilgrims’ hearts, for from that place men first see Jerusalem.”

From the first, pilgrimage seems to have had its moral disadvantages and special temptations. The Turkish proverb runs, “If your friend has made the pilgrimage once, distrust him—if he has made the pilgrimage twice, cut him dead.” And it would seem that the Christian pilgrim is not altogether in a position to throw stones at his Moslem brother. Apart from any sins to which the freedom of travel in a far land may be supposed to tempt poor human nature, there are some which are par excellence pilgrim sins. Thus we find in the seventeenth century the Armenian patriarch complaining that the seat in the Chapel of St. Helena in which he used to sit had been so hacked to pieces by relic-hunting pilgrims that he was “frequently obliged to renew it.” The case was all the harder because it was not from its association with the patriarch, but because St. Helena had sat in it, that it was so much in request! If Mark Twain be a true reporter, there are pilgrims who have inherited that particular kind of moral frailty with remarkable fidelity to the manners of their predecessors. Then again, the pilgrimages, which everywhere stimulated trade, created an amazing amount of fraud in the sale of false relics and other such traffic. Dr. Conan Doyle’s picture of the pilgrim in France, who takes a nail from the box of a blacksmith and sells it to unsuspecting soldiers as one of those which were driven into the wood of the true Cross, is drawn from the life. Even on the sacred spots themselves the simplicity of pilgrims has always been a temptation to custodians. A tale is told of some one who, only a year or two ago, dropped by accident a Bible down the dry shaft of Jacob’s Well. The Bible was reclaimed within a few days, but when brought up it was a mere mass of pulp. A large party of pilgrims had visited the place in the interval, and had professed a strong desire to drink water from the famous well. A small stream, conveniently diverted to the well mouth, had enabled the priest in charge to gratify their desire by draughts of water drawn from the depths before their eyes.

The pilgrim is still extant. For well-nigh two thousand years he has come and gone, a tourist who has always had an immense commercial value for the Holy Land. The levy made on pilgrims at the gate of Jerusalem was one of the principal causes of the Crusades, and it is hardly more than a hundred years since a heavy tax was imposed upon every pilgrim when he reached the gate of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The greater part of those who come now are Russians. Jaffa is full of them, but they are to be seen in long caravans of pedestrians, with a donkey or two bearing all their scanty luggage, as far north as Samaria and Galilee. The men are typical Russian peasants, in the blouses and caps that are so familiar. Their long hair may be fair or dark, but it is always matted and coarse. The women, with their good, weather-beaten faces, are uncommonly like old-fashioned peasant women from the northern Scottish countrysides. Their head-dress is a simple kerchief, and their hands grasp a rude pilgrim staff polished with much wear. The privations of such pilgrimages must be very great. They involve the expenditure of a lifetime’s savings, and a journey in many cases of at least six months. Most of this is done on foot, and largely by people who are growing old. There is no nation that could send forth such multitudes except “rough but believing Russia.” The belief is everything. They are very poor people, and very ignorant and simple. Yet many whose minds’ conflict seems only to grow sterner in this land of contradictions, may own without shame to a touch of something like envy as they see the exaltation of their childish faith. They encompass the walls of Jerusalem to the strains of Psalms, and march triumphantly to the sand south of Jaffa for shells to authenticate their travels, such as those which appear on the coats-of-arms of some European families, telling of former pilgrimages. Mere children in intellect, the gleam in their eyes tells that in their own pathetic way they have entered here into a veritable kingdom of heaven.

The objects of pilgrimage are somewhat gruesome in

their way. A favourite ambition used to be that of measuring the “stone of anointing” in the Holy Sepulchre, in order to have the pilgrim’s own winding-sheet made the same length. The great goal, however, is the Jordan, whose banks at the period after Constantine used to be paved with marble. In the old time a wooden cross was erected in mid-stream, and the waters were blessed by a priest, after which the pilgrims tumbled in with such haste that numbers of them were drowned. Here, too, the winding-sheet is in evidence. Besides the flask of Jordan water which they fill, they dip their own winding-sheets and those of friends at home who have been unable to come in person, but have sent these pale substitutes. It was not our good fortune to see the merry band of pilgrims at the Jordan, though we met scattered groups of Russians in many places. One other pilgrim we saw, and he accompanied us through several days’ march northward. He was a jet-black Abyssinian—a lonely and silent figure clad from head to foot in a loose robe of pure white sackcloth. He went with us to Nazareth, the destination of his pilgrimage. His only word in common with us was “Christianus,” and he always bowed and crossed himself when he said it. All day long he walked in silence in our company. He asked for nothing, but ate the meat he received in singleness of heart, and sat apart watching the loading and unloading of the baggage with the eyes of a great child.

While so many Christians paid a passing visit to Palestine in the early days, there were some who came to stay. It was the time of the rise of monastic institutions, which first appear in the beginning of the fourth century. Their history from the first is peculiarly associated with Syria, into which they spread almost immediately after their start in Egypt. Some of the most famous of the early recluses, including even St. Symeon Stylites himself, were of Syrian origin.[20] These ascetics were the natural successors of the martyrs. The first hints of them are given during the time of earlier martyrdoms, for it is recorded that Christians as early as the Decian persecutions fled to the wilderness and led a life there which was soon to become popular beyond all possibility of forecast.

It was not, however, until Constantine’s favour had secularised the Church, or at least had made easy that life which hitherto had been so dangerous, that the reaction set in which gave monasticism its great hold on the world. This is generally explained as a matter solely of protest against growing worldliness, or a development of that curious kind of “other-worldliness” which finds in asceticism the surest means of attaining earthly fame and heavenly reward. No doubt both these elements are true. In the early ascetics there was a self-denial prompted by the purest desire for escape from the defiling society of their time into the spiritual cleanness of the faith, and from its hard and coarse materialism into the delicate ideality and refinement of Christian thought and feeling. It was also, on the other hand, a refuge and an outlet for much of the inefficiency and moral worthlessness of the time, which found in its freedom from social restraint and its wide leisure things exactly to their own taste. But behind all this there is another fact which is really the most significant of all. Monasticism was “the compensation for martyrdom.” Readers of the letters of Ignatius are familiar with that mania for martyrdom which during persecuting times took possession of so many in the Church. In abnormal and extreme conditions such as these, certain minds grow hysterical and lose their perspective and sense of proportion altogether. In such minds a morbid and passionate delight in pain develops into a sort of lust—a religiosa cupiditas—for suffering torture, just as in the persecutors cruelty becomes a lust for inflicting it. So asceticism offered itself when martyrdom could no longer be had—“a voluntary martyrdom, a gradual self-destruction, a sort of religious suicide.”[21]

The new ideal passed through several successive phases. From an unorganised and individual way of life within the Church, it developed first into anchoretism about the beginning of the fourth century. In barren and solitary places, where life at best was precarious and physical enjoyment impossible, every cave and den had its tenant. On Mount Sinai one hermit is said to have lived for fifty years in absolute solitude, silence, and nakedness. As you ride down the terrific gorges from Mar Saba to the Dead Sea, you pass along precipitous hillsides and rock-faces which appear literally riddled with small caves and holes in the rock and sand. These, which now serve for a covert from the heat for passing shepherds, or for the lairs of jackals, were once populated by hermits. Saint Saba is said to have collected the bones of no fewer than 10,000 solitary dwellers in this district, who had fallen victims to the Carismians. And in many parts of Syria even now, a hillside which during the day has seemed barren of all human habitation, is unexpectedly illuminated with hermits’ lights—those “hands praying to God”—in the dark. The enthusiasm with which this dreary life has filled some of its devotees may be realised in the following lines from an epistle of St. Jerome:—“O desert, where the flowers of Christ are blooming! O solitude, where the stones for the new Jerusalem are prepared! O retreat, which rejoices in the friendship of God! What doest thou in the world, my brother, with thy soul greater than the world? How long wilt thou remain in the shadow of roofs, and in the smoky dungeon of cities? Believe me, I see here more of the light.”[22]

It was in cloister life, however—at first in smaller communities and then on the large scale of many cloisters gathered under a common rule—that early Christianity reached its full development. Besides the native establishments, there was, in the first centuries after Constantine, a cloud of religieux, flying like homing doves across the sea to alight and quietly settle down on holy soil. These establishments had many faults. They perpetuated little sectarian differences and exaggerated them into quite ridiculous importance. The very lamps that hang in the oldest churches are denominational, and are divided with a childish arithmetic among rival sects. The insistence of these on their respective rights is such that a guard of armed Moslem soldiers has to be kept perpetually on the spot to keep the peace. Yet there is a splendid dash of courage in this part of Church History, which cannot possibly have been all in vain. It must have been an exciting life in some of the outpost stations in these old days. “It is true,” says Warburton of one monastery, “the monks were occasionally massacred by the Saracens, Turks, and Carismians, but their martyrdom only gave fresh interest to the spot in the eyes of their successors.” No doubt these establishments drained the world of some of its best manhood, and diverted much greatly needed energy from family life and state loyalties; yet, on the other hand, these were the soldiers of the Cross who then fought the paganism of the world and conquered it.

Monastic establishments still remain, and supply much-needed inns to many thousands of poor travellers in Syria. They vary by very wide degrees of difference from one another. By far the worst place we saw in Palestine—one of the worst perhaps that could be seen anywhere—is the convent of Mar Saba near the Dead Sea. Coming out on the high ridge of the Judean mountain country, we caught a glimpse of two towers, which we have already described,[23] square and blind, and so pitilessly unsuggestive that they seemed, as it were, built into the desert, or part of its fantastic offspring. They were the most unhomely buildings we had ever seen, and they are the nearest point to which women are allowed to approach the monastery, lady travellers being accommodated with cells there if they have not tents. By and by we passed between them, down a road so steep as to be practically a stairway, on every step of which loathsomely dirty beggars sat plying their trade. In the courtyard to which this entrance led were two monks, fat and stupid-looking, who brought out strings of beads, rosaries, and crosses of their own manufacture for sale. Having, apparently, absolutely nothing to do, the making of these things may be taken for sign of enterprise and commercial genius, but as time is evidently valueless, they sell their work very cheap. To the right is a rock, hollowed out into a chamber or broad gallery, which is sacred as having been the shrine of Saint Saba’s devotions. The entrance is violently coloured in washes of blue and white paint, so crude and aggressive that it quite robs the pictures in the interior of their horror, and prepares you to look with unclouded eye upon the skulls which fill the grilled recesses. One of these skulls is set in front, to receive the kisses of devout pilgrims. It is deeply worn and polished. When it has actually been worn through to a hole it will be replaced, as others have been before it. Across the courtyard you follow narrow stairs and galleries that run irregularly along the edge of a precipice; for the monastery has affixed itself to the face of a cliff four hundred feet high. It clings there, supported by huge flying buttresses that spring from the depths below in a fashion which, as one writer says, remind you of pictures of Belshazzar’s feast. The cells of the monks, little disconnected “lean-to” sheds or caves, have the Greek cross upon their doors, and the often-repeated inscription, “O Christ, abide with us!” Here and there are a few plants in pots, or a feeble attempt at rearing vegetables in little garden patches which fill in any foot of level among the many-cornered buildings; while in one cranny grows the solitary date-palm which Saint Saba planted more than 1300 years ago. At every few yards you pause to look over a low balustrade into the gorge, which here is a sort of yellow-ochre gulf, with all the horror but none of the rich depth of colouring that belongs to frightful abysses. Over these walls the monks throw meat to the jackals which come and fight for it below. Occasionally, as we passed, a face was visible at a window, generally either wizened and dried up, or with a white, neurotic appearance that was almost more repulsive. Everywhere dirt reigned supreme—unspeakable filth in open drains and putrid litter. In one place, where the smell was sickening, a monk was lying asleep by the side of a broken drain, covered with flies in great black masses on his face and arms. In another place an abominable-looking dish of food, fly-blown and disgusting, was pushed with a spoon in it half through a hole broken in the bottom of a cell door. And everywhere throughout this palace of disgust was to be read the prayer, “O Christ, abide with us!”

That was the worst. Mar Saba is a sort of combination of prison and asylum, where lunatics are kept under the charge of monks condemned to this place for heresy or immorality. Other monasteries we saw, of a very different kind. Our tents precluded the necessity for our making any of these our home for the night, but in many cases it would have been very pleasant to do so. On the top of Tabor, at Tell Hum on the Sea of Galilee, and in other places, we were received and entertained with the most cordial and generous hospitality. The clean and spacious guest-chambers are open to all comers. They are adorned with photographs of various sorts, and often contain a cabinet of rare local curiosities. The brothers in charge of these establishments were fine genial men, courageously facing the risks of fever in deadly spots, or varying their hospitable labours on the heights by long seasons of study (for some of them are distinguished scholars); but always ready to meet a stranger as a friend, and to chat with him in French or German, over a pipe of Western tobacco, about the great world from which they had gone so far.

In all these ways the many-sided life of the old Christian days lingers and may still be seen. But it

lingers more impressively in the most ancient of the churches which date from this period. There is in Palestine an astonishing number of ruins of old Christian churches, many of them dating back, at least so far as their foundations go, to the Byzantine period. There are many modern churches, but they are not as a rule impressive. Even when, as in the Russian church at Gethsemane, the building is in itself rich and costly, it is so irrelevant as to rouse a feeling of rebellion.

Most of the ancient churches have utterly vanished, like that roofless basilica which Constantine built on the supposed scene of the Ascension on the Mount of Olives. In other cases they are mere heaps of ruin, like the remaining fragments of the Church of Jacob’s Well, which was built about the middle of the fourth century, and has been several times rebuilt since then. This church takes most travellers by surprise. They go expecting an out-door scene, with all the harvest breeze of the Scripture story on it. They find a newly built white wall, glaring in the sunshine. Through a gate in this wall they are admitted by certain broken-down-looking persons in the greenish-black garments of the Greek clergy. Within the gate, a few steps bring them to the edge of a sort of oblong pit full of masonry. It is the nave of the old church, and the splendidly carved pillars of its white stone show how beautiful it must have been. A door in the sunk side-wall opens upon a groined vault newly rebuilt. In the dim light you can discern in the centre a rough stone altar, with candles and lamps and a couple of execrable pictures of Christ and the woman of Sychar. On the ground before the altar is a flat stone perforated with a hole two feet in diameter. This is the cover of the well, and a second clerical person, badly marked with smallpox, lets down a twist of lighted candles by a long rope, while a little green lamp of silver hangs above, dripping oil steadily down the well. Surely this is the infatuation of reverence! If there is any memory of Jesus which is essentially of the open air, it is this incident of the Well of Samaria. Yet reverence must build its dark chamber, and proceed to illuminate with candles the spot where Jesus sat and saw the miles and miles of waving fields, white already to harvest. No doubt the church dates from the fourth century; but what right had even the ancients to build a church here, to keep men busy with their sectarianism on the very spot where they and all the world were told that the hour was come when neither in this mountain nor yet at Jerusalem would the Father be worshipped, but in spirit and in truth?

There are, however, two great churches of this ancient time which waken feelings very different from these; they have been for centuries the centres of Christian interest and devotion in the land, covering, as they are supposed to do, the sites of the birth and death of Jesus Christ. In some respects they are alike. The outsides of them are huddled and packed together, a heterogeneous mass of apparently unrelated buildings. The insides are not, like the houses, Rembrandt studies in intense light and shadow. By some skilful arrangement, the sunlight seems to be caught and diffused in a pale luminous twilight that sinks gradually to darkness in chapels and recesses, and blends with the light of many lamps and candles not unpleasingly. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is the gift of St. Helena, mother of Constantine, and was consecrated by her in A.D. 336. Tradition relates how, at the age of seventy-nine, she made her pilgrimage to Jerusalem, was baptized in Jordan, discovered the true Cross, and built the church upon the spot of its discovery. Our guide-book tells us of an ante-chamber “where Oriental Christians are in the habit of removing their shoes, though we need not follow their example.” Yet the Crusaders entered it barefooted, though with songs of praise, a thousand years ago; and the impulse of most Christians, however little they may be disposed to believe in the identity of the sacred sites within, will be to share the veneration of the Easterns. Not that what we see now is the original building. That was a rotunda and a basilica, the former quite other than the present rotunda, as we know from the fact that it formed the model for the Mosque of Omar. It has suffered many things from assault, from decay, from fire, and from rebuilding. In the twelfth century the whole group of detached shrines and monuments was included for the first time in one huge and complicated building. Probably no such patchwork in stone is to be seen elsewhere in the world. Yet each rebuilding found many of the older materials ready for its use, and incorporated them in the newer work. Thus the columns at the eastern door are supposed to have come from some ancient pagan temple, and the present foundations of the pillars belong to the old rotunda. The capitals of many pillars are Byzantine, while the pink limestone column which is embedded in the wall to the right of the eastern entrance is also very ancient.

It is a strange conglomeration of imaginary associations and real value of material. The atmosphere is at times dreadful enough within to justify that daring little touch of realism in the French bas-relief over the door, where some of the spectators at the raising of Lazarus are holding their noses with their hands! The chapel of the Empress adjoins the altar of the Penitent Thief; Adam and Abraham jostle each other for standing ground under the sacred roof; the stone of anointing has been “often changed” according to the guide-book, and the column of scourging “judging from the narratives of different pilgrims, must frequently have changed its colour and its size”—yet pilgrims poke a stick at it and kiss the part that has touched the stone to-day. Every incident of the world’s great tragedy is commemorated there, from the footprint of Jesus to the silver socket in the rock where His Cross was erected. Futile enough all this, and even wearisome. But the worship of fifteen hundred years is neither futile nor wearisome. And that worship seems to detach itself from the legends and find its embodiment in the marvels of precious stone that are gathered there. As one sees the slabs of costly stone with which the rock is overlaid—the ruddy yellow slab of the “anointing,” the red and white polished limestone of the central shrine, the green serpentine and the black basalt—one remembers the tomb which the Roman bishop ordered in St. Praxed’s, with its “peach-blossom marble,” its lump of lapis lazuli, “blue as a vein o’er the Madonna’s breast,” and its block of jasper, “pure green as a pistachio-nut.” But there is a difference. The stones of the Holy Sepulchre were given in love: they are the tribute of many souls whose adoration was the noblest feature of their times.

The Church of the Holy Nativity at Bethlehem is a simpler and, to many minds, a more impressive structure. It consists of a broad nave, entirely screened off from what lies beyond, with two rounded transepts and a rounded apse behind the screen—this trefoil-shaped inner building being the church proper. One of the transepts is the property of the Armenians; the other, together with the great altar in the apse, belongs to the Greeks. Below the great altar-rail (“in the breast of God,” in Dante’s language) is the cave of the Nativity, with steps leading down to it from either transept. A Mohammedan soldier stands at the bottom to keep the peace between Christians. The transepts and apse are ablaze with lamps and hangings. Below, the “manger” is overlaid with coloured marble, and the rock is entirely covered with yellow silk cloth, on which are stamped the insignia of the Franciscans—an arm of Christ crossed with an arm of St. Francis, both shewing the print of nails in the palms of their hands. All this, and the air of raree-show that exhibits so many spots where somebody or other stood, destroy any lingering credulity of which a man may still find himself capable; they make one rather ashamed, and glad to escape. But the nave is mighty in its simplicity, and no less mighty in its wealth of historical association. It is a great severe oblong basilica, with four rows of massive pillars giving double aisles. Old glass and old mosaics add their appropriate wealth of sombre beauty. The rafters, replacing Constantine’s beams of cedar from Lebanon, are the gift of Philip of Burgundy. Lead for the roof was sent by Edward IV. of England. Most impressive of all is the old plain font of polished stone, with its Greek inscription—not, like so many such inscriptions, a record of the donor’s name, but a prayer for God’s blessing upon those who gave it—“whose names are known to Thee only.” Opinions differ as to the plausibility of the claim to the site of our Lord’s nativity; but this church was built by Constantine, and the Vulgate was written in it by Jerome. And since that time the feet of countless millions of worshippers have trodden its stone pavement—a consecration in itself worth many traditional sanctities.

In this chapter we have sought to gather the most obvious survivals of that old Christian invasion of Palestine which followed next after the Roman. Almost inevitably we find ourselves quarrelling with the legendary lore that has stultified so many venerable buildings and associations. Yet in its legends too the early Church survives, and some of them embody eternal truths in forms of rare beauty. Take three of the legends of the Holy Sepulchre by way of example. They show the spot where the one-eyed soldier Longinus, who pierced the side of Christ, received back the lost eyesight at the touch of a drop of the blood. There, too, is the cleft in the rock through which blood flowed from the Cross down into the tomb of Adam, whose corpse came to life at once. And there, on Easter Eve, the sham miracle of the “Holy Fire” has been enacted annually for at least a thousand years. Who can miss the underlying truth beneath these legends? They are, for all but the ignorant and the gross, symbols of the eternal healing and quickening power that the love and sacrifice of Christ exert on humanity and even on His enemies. The torch-bearers, who kindle their fires at the blaze on Easter Eve, and speed thence to Bethlehem and other towns to light from it the candles waiting on many altars, tell their own exhilarating lesson. Two other legends may be mentioned, which the Western world owes to the Syrian Church—those of St. George and St. Christopher. St. George, who was a Roman soldier under Diocletian, was martyred in A.D. 303. His memory, mixed up with the Greek myth of Perseus and Andromeda, and with Crusader stories of Richard Coeur de Lion, stands for the victory of faith over paganism. St. Christopher would only follow the strongest, and finding that his master the devil was afraid of Christ, renounced his service and set out to seek Him who was strongest of all. The point of the story is that, after seeking Christ far and wide, he found Him while he was performing the humble task of carrying passengers across a river. It is characteristic of the pilgrim point of view that legend has fixed this scene not by some homely German stream but at the fords of Jordan, where he is said to have carried the infant Christ across upon his shoulder. Even of such legends no wise man will speak with scorn. They, too, are monuments of that conquest of Christ which gives its meaning and its glory to the Christian invasion.

CHAPTER IV
MOSLEM

Mohammedanism is the religion which is everywhere in evidence in the East to-day. From the smart Turkish officer who drops in to smoke a cigarette with you in the tent after dinner, and discusses European politics in excellent French, down to the beggar who beseeches you in the name of Allah for a pipeful of tobacco or the end of your cigar, your acquaintance in Syria is Moslem. From the consecration of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to the Moslem capture of Jerusalem was exactly three hundred years. When, in 637, Jerusalem fell, Damascus had already fallen, and Antioch was to follow next year—all within sixteen years of the beginning of the Mohammedan era. The conquest was inevitable. First Persia and then the scattered tribes of pagan Arabs had proved too much for the Byzantine empire in Syria. Then the man appeared who understood his opportunity. The Eastern world was in confusion. Heathens constituted the ruling race, the Jews were scattered in their dispersion, and the Christians torn into many fragmentary heretical sects. It was the moment for a great union of scattered forces. The Arabs were united by the new faith in God, for which they abandoned their paganism with a marvellous willingness. The bond of union with Christians and Jews was the common ancestry in Abraham by which Mohammed hoped to rally and unite the Syrian world. One sharp battle at the Yarmuk threw Syria open to his advance, and the crisis of the faith was past.

Mohammed has been declared an impostor, who from first to last won his way by cleverness without faith; he has been idealised as a hero and prince of heroes in the religious world. Dean Milman, perhaps, is wisest when he says, “To the question whether Mohammed was hero, sage, impostor, or fanatic ... the best reply is the reverential phrase of Islam: ‘God knows.’” One thing is certain, viz., that he founded a religion which proved itself capable of wakening response from the Semitic East with a swiftness and a completeness never elsewhere known. It would be a matter of rather serious consequences to affirm that such sweeping success is possible without any vestige of honest faith on the part of its own prophet.

Arabia found Islam a religion after her own heart. The conquest of the Arabian mind, and that sudden transference of religious and political loyalties which changed it from chaos into cosmos, is little short of miraculous. In the words of one of the severest critics of Islam: “In A.D. 570, Abdullah, the son of Abd el Muttalib, a Mecca merchant, went on a trading trip from Mecca to Medina and died there; the same year his wife, Amina, gave birth to a boy, named Mohammed, at Mecca. One hundred years later the name of this Arab lad, joined to that of the Almighty, was called out from ten thousand mosques five times daily, from Muscat to Morocco, and his new religion was sweeping everything before it in three continents.”[24] In many ways the new religion was congenial to Arabia. “Although it made a most vigorous effort to conquer the world, it is, after all, a religion of the desert, of the tent, and the caravan, and is confined to nomad and savage or half-civilised nations, chiefly Arabs, Persians, and Turks. It never made an impression on Europe except by brute force; it is only encamped, not really domesticated, in Constantinople, and when it must withdraw from Europe it will leave no trace behind.”[25] It gave the heathen Arabs, in exchange for their precarious dependence on incalculable and wayward gods, the sublime conception of “Islam,” the absolute surrender to the One God, whom it declared to be Almighty, All-Wise, and All-Merciful. For the rest, its secret was simplicity. It drove straight for its object, sacrificing art, appetite, the purity of home life, the spirituality of religious imagination, and some of the accepted moralities of conscience. What was left was a creed and standard, somewhat impoverished truly, but workable and uncompromising. A thousand difficult questions were avoided, and one of those forces set in play before whose rough simplicity finer and more delicate things are swept away.

Mohammedanism meets the traveller at every turn in Syria. Now and then a dervish is encountered—the extremest sort of Moslem. It would seem difficult to develop a mystic school within the pale of so clear-cut a faith as Mohammedanism; yet it has been done. But the Mohammedan dervishes escape from this despised material world by the vulgar process of hypnotising themselves by the repetition of the word “Allah” or “Hu,” or by whirling in circles until they are stupefied. This they call the ecstatic state, and when they have reached it they are said to perform many violent tricks, stabbing their flesh or eating broken glass, without appearing to feel pain. In Syria they are by no means impressive in appearance. Here and there you meet one, with hair crimped in long thin pointed wisps, and sticking out in a wiry fashion from his head in all directions. The dazed and rather weak look in the eyes is suggestive of a strayed reveller rather than a holy man, but the people hold them in great reverence.

Another occasional freak of Mohammedanism is the religious procession, which is conducted on the principle of a rival show to the Christian fÊtes. It starts on Good Friday from Jerusalem to visit the tomb of Moses—a late fiction, somewhat daring in its contradiction to the old belief that the tomb of Moses was known to no man. It is amusingly described by witnesses, but appears to be rather a poor affair on the whole.

These extravagances apart, one is never out of sight of Mohammedan religion for an hour of travel in Syria. The worship, like old idolatry, seems to have claimed every high hill and every green tree for its own. It has settled itself, in the very seat of old Judaism, on the sacred area of the temple. Almost every one of the prominent hills of Palestine is crowned with a little building, domed and whitewashed, opening in a porch in front, and containing a single empty chamber. This is the weli (i.e. monument, not necessarily tomb) of a Mohammedan saint. What the terms of canonisation may be, it is perhaps best not to inquire too minutely. Many of these departed saints are said to have been prophets, but the discoverer of coffee has his monument in Mocha, to which great processions come, and there is more than one weli in Palestine commemorative of a dead robber chief. Not the less sacred are they to the Mohammedans. In various parts of the country we were puzzled by little piles of stones, gathered and arranged in considerable numbers on the tops of long ascents or passes, and bearing a curious resemblance to the cairns which in certain districts of the west of Scotland mark the spots at which funeral processions have halted to change the coffin-bearers. The explanation of these little piles is very simple. When a Mohammedan comes to the hill-top, and looking around him sees a weli shining in the distance, he offers up a prayer, and drops a stone there, to call the attention of the next comer, that he also may look and pray. Very picturesque and quaint these little holy houses are; serving, like the hermit’s tower of old in Western lands, for landmarks as well as for shrines—the white light-houses of the inland.

It is not at the white tombs only that the Moslem prays. Five times a day, at the call from the mosque, he is summoned to his devotions. Often, indeed, it is inconvenient to worship at some of these hours, and it is permissible to say the prayer five times in succession in the evening, when there is most leisure. Sometimes he carries with him his rosary, to help his memory with the ninety-nine beautiful names of Allah, and in railway trains or steamers wealthy gentlemen are to be seen cherishing a string of amber beads which appear more like the property of young girls than of grown men. To perform his devotions the Syrian goes to a fountain, when that is possible, as it is part of the ritual to wash the hands before praying; but the Arab, spreading his carpet in the shade of his camel, far away upon the desert, where no water is to be had but the precious drops in his leathern bottle, is permitted to wash his hands and lips with sand instead. That which impresses every spectator is the extraordinary faculty for abstraction which is manifested. The Moslem seems to have at command the power of annihilating the world around him, and entering the unseen. His eyes are open, but you may pass within a yard of them and they will not seem to see you. They are fixed on the far distance, as if, over the Southern edge of the world, the man saw the Holy City towards which he bows, with its Kaaba and its black stone. He might be crystal-gazing, or watching the horizon for a sail at sea. People may be dancing and singing by his side, but he does not see them nor hear. Bathing once in the waters of Elisha’s fountain at Jericho we had a memorable instance of this. We found the pool empty and the walls undergoing repair. A lad who had charge of the place was persuaded in the usual fashion to let down the door of a sluice and so allow the pool to fill, greatly to the detriment of the newly mortared wall. When we had stripped, the owner of the place appeared, and we rose to the surface from a dive to hear a controversy going on, with violent gesture and apoplectic fury, which marks a high point in our register of vituperation. The water seemed on the whole to be the safest place, and we kept to it until suddenly we perceived that a great silence had fallen on the landscape. Looking anxiously to see what had happened, we found the owner on his knees, praying by his own spring. We dressed without delay, and had to pass in front of him to reach the tents, but he never seemed to know that we had passed.

The muezzin, or call to prayer from the minaret, is one of the most affecting of all Eastern sounds. Men are chosen for this office with singularly mellow and rich voices; they intone, with a very musical little cadence in a minor key, the first chapter of the Koran, and sometimes other prayers. At the great Mosque of Damascus, a solitary reciter calls from the slender minaret, and is answered from the balcony of the broader one across the court by twenty voices in unison. While the waves of rich sound float out over the city, and are caught and faintly echoed from scores of other minarets, one remembers how that voice has rolled forth already over innumerable villages from Bengal westwards, and men have paused from their labour to pray according to their lights.

Islam is usually supposed to have been the “Ishmaelite in church history,” with hand against every man from the first. Really, when it was Arabian, as it remained for four centuries, it was very tolerant, and the Christian pilgrims, priests, and monks were little disturbed. But in 1086 the Seljuk chiefs of wandering Turkish tribes came into possession, and the days of suspicion and that heavy cruelty which is characteristic of the stupid began. There were massacres of monks on Carmel and elsewhere then, and such a state of general tyranny and oppression that the cry reached the West, and the Crusades began. The Crusades, as they dragged their slow length along, did not tend to better understandings; and after Saladin’s conquest of Jerusalem, we read that the walls and pavement of the Mosque of Omar had to be purified with copious showers of water distilled from the fragrant roses of Damascus. The relations between Moslem and Christian in the land to-day are happier, and the intercourse of increasing trade and travel is breaking down old partitions here as elsewhere. Yet little love is lost between the professors of the rival faiths even now. Dr. Andrew Thomson relates how, in recent years, “it had been observed that at a particular period of the day the shadow of the great Mosque of Omar fell upon a certain Christian burying-ground. Even the honour of

THE TEMPLE AREA AND THE MOUNT OF OLIVES, FROM MOUNT ZION.