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territory is the Jordan valley. Rising from springs at the western roots of Hermon, high above sea level, it sinks by rapid stages till at the Dead Sea it reaches bottom nearly 1300 feet below the Mediterranean. Down its extraordinary gully flows the one great river of Palestine. There are other perennial streams, but none to compare with Jordan either for volume or for associations. It is this mass of flowing water which stands as the heart and soul of the Syrian oasis. Its mighty stream has overcome the desert, and claimed the western land for greenness and for life. It is this huge cleft that has isolated the Holy Land for the purposes of its God.

The only clear opening from the Jordan to the Mediterranean is the Plain of Esdraelon. Standing on Jordan's bank below Bethshan and looking westward, you see before you a valley whose farther end shows nothing but sky. Many streams cut their way down its slopes beside a green morass, and hold in their embrace the ruins of a strong city. You must follow them up westwards for some ten miles before you reach sea level, and soon after that you cross the watershed in a wide valley with mountains rising to north and south. Jezreel stands above you on a protruding tongue of high cultivated land to the south. At a level of about 200 feet above the sea, you suddenly emerge upon a great triangular plain, with Carmel at its apex, 15 miles to the west. This is the Plain of Esdraelon. The one really large level space in Syria, its rich soil, even surface, and plentiful water-supply make it a famous piece of cultivated ground. But it is also the natural battlefield of the East, and its chief associations are not with agriculture but with war.

Let us suppose ourselves to land at Beyrout and journey from north to south well inland. At first we climb eastwards among bold bare hills, in whose recesses mulberry gardens nestle and on whose heights innumerable villages perch. Cedars are conspicuous by their absence, but there are plenty of humbler trees. Soon we come to realise the large-scale meaning and contour of the district. We have been crossing Lebanon, whose highest peaks have revealed themselves now and then far to the north. Some twenty miles from the coast we find ourselves in the valley of the Litany . This whole region is easily understood. It consists of the magnificent ranges of Lebanon and Antilebanon and the spacious valley between them, running in ample curves parallel with the shore.

Mighty though these are, however, it is neither of them that has received the name of Jebel-es-Sheikh--"the patriarch of mountains." That honour is reserved for Hermon, the range and summit which Antilebanon thrusts south from it into Galilee, just opposite Damascus. It is happily named "the sheikh." Go where you will in Palestine, Hermon seems to lie at the end of some vista or other. For many miles around it, Hermon commands everything. Its mass tilts the plain and sends out innumerable spurs of rich and fertile land; its snow shines far and gives character to the view; its eastern waters redeem the wilderness through many a mile of Hauran; and from its western roots spring all the fountains of the Jordan. This is the king of Syria, by whose beneficent might the desert has become oasis.

While the southern continuation of Hermon holds up the high tableland of Bashan and runs it on into the mountains of Gilead and Moab east of Jordan, the thrust of Lebanon into Western Galilee ends curiously in a succession of hills divided by valleys running east and west, like great waves of mountain rolling south to break along the northern edge of the Plain of Esdraelon. There is a quiet regularity about these Galilean Highlands, which gives the impression of a region made to plan. The eastern end of Esdraelon is blocked by the group of Tabor and "Little Hermon," while the feature of the western end is the long lonely ridge of Carmel.

Crossing the plain we enter Samaria, whose deep rounded valleys, rich in corn, send their sweeping curves in all directions. Here there is neither the dominant north-and-south trend of Lebanon, nor the horizontal ripple of Galilee, but an intricate network of curving valleys, which leave the mountains everywhere more individual and distinct, and which frequently expand into wide meadows or fields. Yet the general rise of the region is from west, sloping up to east. The watershed is perhaps 10 to 15 miles from Jordan, while it is more than 30 miles from the sea. But Jordan here is well-nigh 1000 feet below sea-level, so that the eastern slope is immensely steeper than the western.

As we enter Judea, we find the land, as it were, gathering itself up on almost continuous heights. The lesser valleys are shallow, and the hilltops swell from the lofty plateau in colossal domes or cupolas. So high is the general level that when we come to Jerusalem we look in vain for the mountains we had understood to be round about her. No peaks cleave the sky--only smooth and gentle hills, which have never been in any way her defence, but have made excellent platforms for the siege-engines of her enemies, and have grown wood for the crosses of her inhabitants. The lateral gorges of Judea, both east and west, cut into her high tableland in angular zigzags, and as you descend these in either direction you realise what is really meant by "the mountains round about Jerusalem." She does not see them, lying secure upon the height to which they have exalted her. But he who approaches her must come by their gorges, where for many miles his sky will be but a strip seen between sheer heights of cliff and scaur. The rugged sharpness of outline reaches its climax on the eastern side, where the range, split in the wildest gorges, falls in fragmentary masses between their mouths down to the Jordan valley. Nothing in the land has a more bare and savage grandeur than the square-chiselled mountain blocks of Quarantana, seen from below at Jericho in black angular silhouette against the sunset. South of Jerusalem the Kidron gorge, cleaving the intruding desert, exaggerates the wildness of the north, but as you climb past Bethlehem to Hebron you are in a region liker to Samaria, with its deeper and more rounded valleys and its richer pasture and cultivation. South of Hebron the range spreads fanwise and gradually sinks to the desert.

The most impressive memories of the land, so far as its form and contour go, are two--the gorges cleft through the Judean mountain, and certain isolated conical hills thrown up from the Samaritan valleys. Judea is mountain, emphasised by gorge; Samaria is valley, diversified by hill. The gorges are uncompromising. When we read, for instance, the third verse of the seventh chapter of Joshua, we think of an ordinary march--"The men went up and viewed Ai. And they returned to Joshua, and said unto him, Let not all the people go up; but let about two or three thousand men go up and smite Ai; and make not all the people to labour thither." But he who has himself "gone up" from Jericho to Ai puts feeling into his reading of the words "to labour thither." That is the only way of going up. The recollection is of several hours of precipitous riding, with beasts stumbling and riders pitched ahead. When the climb is over you turn aside to the south, and view the gully of Michmash along whose northern edge you have scrambled inland. It looks not like a valley, but a crack in rocks, hundreds of feet deep. The valley of Achor, next to the south of Michmash, presents an almost more dramatic appearance as you view its entrance from the Jordan foot-hills. It gapes on the plain, like the open mouth of some petrified monster.

The isolated hills of the northern territory are in their way as memorable as the gorges of the south. In Judea you cannot see the mountains for "the mountain." The whole land is one great elevated range, and the noticeable features of the district are the gorges that cut across it. Samaria, on the other hand, is a place of valleys and of plains, and its mountains are seen as mountains. This fact finds its most striking instance in certain "Gilgals," or isolated cones standing free in the midst of plain, or cut off by circular valleys round their bases. The most perfect of these is that which bears the name of Gilgal, rising detached in the wide valley to the south-east of Jacob's Well. It is in shape an almost perfect cone, whose gradual curve renders it very easy of ascent. The Hill of Samaria itself is another such "Gilgal," the centre of a splendid circular panorama of hills. Sanur, in the country of Judith and Holophernes, is a third, on a smaller scale, but with even wider panorama. North of Esdraelon, again a long ripple of mountains sweeps round at least one such Gilgal, leaving Sepphoris isolated on the peak of it. And Tabor itself might plausibly be counted in this class--Tabor the irrelevant, whose cone seems always to be peeping over the shoulder of some lower ridge, unlike any other landmark, commanding all the views eastward from the heights of Nazareth. These curious cones are in Palestine to some extent what the Righi is in Switzerland. With the exception of Tabor, they are but lesser heights; yet they give the widest mountain views, and seem to shape the land into a succession of circles, of which their summits are the centre-points.

The mountains of Israel are the characteristic features of her history as of her geography. In every part of Syria they are the companions of the journey. Great

distant masses, or near crests of them, seem to accompany you as you move. And as you travel through the history of the land it is in the same companionship. The Jordan valley lies along the western side of the mountain range, a place of luxury and temptation. But Israel abides on the hills, sending down to it only the most degenerate of her children. It is a very striking fact that Jesus was tempted to sin for bread on the mountain almost within sight of Jericho, where the Herodians were sinning with surfeits of wine and rich meats. All that is truest to Israel and most characteristic of her at her best is on the hills. They are the places of her war and of her worship. The Gilgals have almost all stood siege. All, or at least the most of them, have been fortified. On some of them the rude remains of ancient sacred circles, or the decayed steps of altars cut in the rock, may still be traced. Her enemies found by bitter experience that "her gods are gods of the hills." Her ark had its abode on the tableland at Shiloh or on the hill of Zion. Its history on the low ground was but a story of calamity; it had to be sent up again to Kirjath-Jearim among the hills. Yet the heights of Israel stand for more than this blend of war and worship; they were her home. All her greater towns nestle among them somewhere; most of them stand on the summits, or just below them. It was a race of Highlanders that gave us our Bible--men whose home was on the heights.

Her wars, indeed, were everywhere, for it is a blood-drenched land. Many of her battles were fought at the edge of the mountain-land, on the kopjes that run along the southern border of Esdraelon, or among the foot-hills near the mouth of the western gorges. There, or on the great plain, she met her invaders. But the heights were the scenes of battles in the last resort, and the gorges are associated with the advance and retreat of armed hosts, the rush of the invader and the headlong retreat of armies that had been surprised and routed from above.

Meanwhile, in the middle spaces, she fought her continuous battle with the desert and the sun for her daily bread. It is said that in Malta, where every possible spot is cultivated, the earth has been all imported, and that the Knights of Malta allowed no vessel to enter the harbour without paying dues in soil. The denuded hill-sides of Palestine, with their ruined heaps of stones that once built up terraces for cultivation, tell a similar story. On some hillsides the remains of sixty or even eighty such terraces may still be traced. In many places the valleys are rich in an altogether superfluous depth of fertile soil. But this did not suffice the inhabitants, and they built up the terraces along the southward slopes, in many places quite to the walls of their mountain villages. On not a few of these slopes labour must have actually created land, and men's hearts grown strong within them as they changed the rocks into gardens and the slopes of shingle into harvest fields.

THE WATERS OF ISRAEL

There was a beautiful poetry of Hermon which from earliest times made it a sacrament of sweet thoughts to Israel. Perhaps the sweetest thought it gave her was that of dew. In every part of that land of clear skies, a heavy dew lies upon the ground at sunrise. Poetic feeling, undertaking the work of science, interpreted this dew as Hermon's gift, so that "the dew that descended on the mountains of Zion" was "the dew of Hermon" . The meteorology is faulty, but the larger idea is true. The cool and glistening snow-field, more than a hundred miles away from Zion, does indeed send out and receive again the waters that refresh the land in an endless round. "The Abana dies in the marsh of Ateibeh, yielding its spirit to the sun, as Jordan dies in the Dead Sea, and, rising into clouds again, both of them wafted to the snow-peaks where they were born, they pour down their old waters in a current ever new, in that circuit of life and death which God has ordained for all."

So conspicuous are these two rivers that we almost need to remind ourselves that they are not the only waters of Israel. There are several perennial streams in Syria, of which something will be said presently; but the list of these by no means exhausts the stores of water in the land. Great stretches of the country are apparently waterless, especially in the south, and yet water is almost everywhere, underground. In many parts the soil and surface-rock are soft, lying on a hard bed-rock at various depths below. Accordingly we find that one of the most mysterious and characteristic features of the south country is its underground waters. Springs and streamlets find their way through fissures or filter through porous stone to the harder rock below, and flow along subterranean channels there. Zangwill quotes an older authority for the somewhat startling statement that "the entire plain of Sharon seems to cover a vast subterranean river, and this inexhaustible source of wealth underlies the whole territory of the Philistines." Putting the ear to any crack in the sunburnt clay of the surface, in certain parts, one may hear the subdued growl and murmur of the waters underneath. Trees flourish in places where there is no water apparent, their roots bathing in unseen streams, and drawing life and freshness from them. One can well understand the feelings of awe with which primitive people regarded these mysterious nether springs. They did not connect them with the idea of rain from above, as modern science does, but believed that they had forced their way up from "the Great Deep," which was supposed to underlie the earth, and into which the roots of the mountains were thrust far down like gigantic anchors of the world. Some of the rivers of Damascus are also underground, "and may often be seen and heard through holes in the surface." Jerusalem is a waterless city, whose famous pools are tanks for rain-water. Its one spring is that strange intermittent one which overflows from the Well of the Virgin through Hezekiah's aqueduct to the Pool of Siloam. Yet there are legends that beneath the sacred rock which the mosque of Omar covers there is a subterranean torrent; and that the rushing of hidden waters has been heard at times below the massive stones of the Damascus Gate of the city.

These underground waters have given to Palestine a still more interesting feature at the points where her greatest rivers rise. This is the sudden emergence of full-bodied streams from the ground. These rivers have, so to speak, no infancy. Their springs are not little toy fountains with trickling rivulets. They bound into the world full-grown, with a rush and fury which is perhaps unparalleled in any other land. This inspiring and suggestive phenomenon has not been without its effect on the national thought and imagination. In the midst of one of the most gloriously forceful passages of Isaiah the vigour and impetuousness of the prophecy finds its climax in the sudden leap of waters which "break out" in the wilderness, and which are described in the same breath as the first glad leap of the restored lame man, leaping "as an hart." When Moses in his blessing of the tribes speaks of Dan "leaping from Bashan," he refers to that wonderful spot where Jordan, in the tribe of Dan, leaps up from below Hermon. Matthew Arnold, had he chanced to think of it, might have seen in his delight in full and rushing streams another link connecting him with the Hebrew race with which he so quaintly claims affinity.

The south country keeps its rivers for the most part below ground, though even there considerable streams suddenly break out. Conder describes deep blue pools of fresh water near Antipatris which "well up close beneath the hillock surrounded by tall canes and willows, rushes and grass." Yet the greatest outbursts are in the north. One traveller describes a river-source in Lebanon as an abyss of seething black waters, into which he rolled large stones, only to see them presently reappear, flung up like corks from the depths. At one of its sources the Abana bursts from the masonry of some ancient temples "a pure and copious river, rushing into light at once as if free."

Jordan is a river worth much study, interesting from

every point of view--geographical, historical, religious. Changing in colour, as the floods wash down their various soils to it, it tumbles and rushes south through a stretch of some 137 miles without a single cascade till it sweeps, with strong and level current, into the Dead Sea. At Banias its height above the Mediterranean is about 1000 feet, but the extraordinary valley is chiselled on a running slope down to the depths of the earth. Clouds have been seen sweeping above its bed 500 feet below the level of the ocean. The Dead Sea level is 1290 feet below the Mediterranean; its bottom, at the deepest part, is as deep again. Spanned by a few bridges, of which only one or two are now entire, the river's course is for the most part through solitudes without inhabitants, or tenanted but by a few half-savage people. The valley is alternately wide and narrow, swelling out in five broad expanses, of which the two northern are lakes, and the other three are plains. From Banias to the last confluence of the different head-streams is a distance of some seven miles through green land. Soon after that point the river loses itself in a vast forest of impenetrable papyrus canes growing in shallow water, from which it emerges in a little lake or clear space half a mile lower. Then it flows, a solemn and glassy stream, for some three miles and a half down a sharp-edged lane whose perpendicular banks are tall papyrus canes, till it glides silently out, a hundred feet in breadth, into Lake Huleh. From Huleh to the Sea of Galilee is ten miles, along the greater part of which the river tears through a narrow gorge. Emerging clear and broad from the Sea of Galilee it soon begins its innumerable windings. A few streams flow into it perennially from east and west, and countless torrents after rain. In the north it quickens a poisonous soil into rank vegetation, and spreads its superfluous waters on steaming swamps, full of malaria. Opposite Shechem its clay is good for moulding, and the mounds which break the level are for the most part apparently the remains of old brickfields or brass foundries. As it descends to the broadest of its plains at Jericho the valley falls into three distinct levels. From the hills a flat expanse of desolation spreads towards the river, till it falls in steep banks of 150 to 200 feet to the lower level of the "trench" down which the river flows in flood. Finally, in the centre of this lies the ordinary channel, at whose banks the trees and undergrowth seem to crouch and kneel over the sullen brown stream.

There are other perennial rivers in Syria, but their courses are short. The Litany rises between the Lebanons a short distance north of the highest springs of Jordan. For many miles the two flow in parallel courses, divided only by the little ridge of Jebel-es-Zoar. But before Jordan has passed its new springs at Banias, the Litany has swept to the west in a sharp right angle, to pour itself into the ocean north of Tyre. It is a fine stream, yellow with rich loam, but its bed is in the sharp angle of valleys whose sides remind one of the Screes of Wastwater. Its descent is so rapid that even if there were meadows in the bottoms of its gorges, it would hurry past them to pour its treasure of water and of soil alike into the thankless sea. The Abana, rising in the same region as the springs of the other two, has a course of only some fifty miles. Kishon, which waters the Plain of Esdraelon, is certainly the most generous in the matter of cultivated fields, but it is also the most treacherous. Its fords are never certain, for great masses of sand and mud are shifted to and fro in the most unaccountable manner. The rest of the perennial rivers are either tributaries of the Jordan, companions of the Abana in its eastern course, or streams from Carmel or the central mountain range, whose short course to the Mediterranean is of little account.

The fate of Jordan seems still more tragic. In the far north his waters are indeed utilised to some small extent for irrigation, but for the vastly longer part of his course he does nothing but flee through the wilderness to the bitter sea in the south. Dr. Ross has strikingly summed up Jordan's career in the words: "So, in a valley which is thirsting for water, the Jordan rushes along to an inglorious end." Yet that is only one aspect of the matter. Jordan gave Israel her last story of Elijah and her first of Christ's ministry. Neither association is of the kindly sort which a nation's sentiment usually gathers round its rivers. There is, as it were, the glitter of fire from the prophet's departure for ever lending to these brown waters a sort of unearthly grandeur. Those fiery horses which bathed their feet here take the place of the gentle memories of generations of lovers or little children. Yet that is true to the spirit of the river. To Israel it stood for a very forceful and practical fact. Their first crossing of Jordan began their national life in Palestine and cut them off from the desert. So, to the end, the Jordan stood for this to them, and that was much. Jordan created no great city as Abana created Damascus; but it streamed down the side of the east, flinging, as it were, a great arm round the land, claiming it from the desert, and proclaiming this to be oasis and the home of men. Disraeli characteristically writes: "All the great things have been done by the little nations. It is the Jordan and the Ilyssus that have civilised the modern races." And truly it is the Jordan that is in great part responsible for the Hebrew share in that civilisation--not by his material gifts, indeed, which were ever ungenerously given and carelessly gathered, but by his sentiment of isolation and aloofness from the rest of the Eastern world, to which we owe much that is best in our inheritance from Israel.

For the homelier uses and gentler thoughts of Israel's waters we must turn to the lesser fountains and streams. There is, it is true, much disillusionment for the sentimentalist even here. Remembering the sweet music in which they have been sung--the "Song of the Well" or the "gently flowing waters" of the 23rd Psalm--one expects the perfection of purity and freshness. Early tradition has pictured the angel Gabriel meeting with Mary at the village spring of Nazareth; nor is that the only Syrian fountain by which the footsteps of angels have been traced. All the more trying is the reality. Hideously tattooed women squat by the sweetest springs, fling filthy garments into them, and beat them with stones till the stream flows brown below them; or they toil wearily a mile or two away from their villages to fill the heavy water-pots, beasts of burden rather than mothers in Israel. Of cleanliness the natives have not the remotest idea. We used to see them filling their vessels from a stream where our horses were being washed down after their day's ride, and they seemed on principle to choose a spot just below that where the horse was standing. Often the water seemed calculated to assuage hunger rather than thirst. The natives drank it freely when it was mere mud in solution; and even when it was clear, the glass bottles on the table sometimes presented the appearance of lively and well-stocked aquariums. Our squeamishness was unintelligible even to our camp-servants, who drank in defiance large draughts of the water we refused. The landmarks of the hot journey are the pools where one may bathe, and the first sight of Elisha's Fountain and the Well of Harod is refreshing to remember still. But one touch of the bottom mud sufficed to bring to the surface a gas which sent us posthaste to our stores of quinine--and yet the deliciousness of the plunge was worth the risk!

The spell of the fountains remains in spite of all, and no traveller wonders that the ancient men revered them as sacred places. Israel exulted in the forcefulness of her larger rivers, but hardly knew their kindlier resources. Her affection was kept for those wells and streamlets which flowed past her doors and made glad her cities. It is a land of dried-up torrent-beds, and no river made glad any City of God except at the seasons when God had filled it with His rain. In such a land a wayside well like Jacob's counts for more than our Western imagination can realise. Property in water was an older institution than property in land. These wayside wells and "sealed fountains" refreshed men from time immemorial in the very presence of their enemies. They were the choicest riches of their owners. The journey from south to north leads one ever more frequently in among such springs, but many towns of the south are built at places where there is abundance of them. Hebron has twelve little fountains; Gaza fifteen. In Samaria they burst forth in every valley, and the vale of Nablus is a net-work of rivulets, springing, it is said, from no fewer than eighty sources. In Galilee they are still more abundant. At Khan Minyeh, supposed by many to be the site of the ancient Capernaum, the ruins are mostly those of aqueducts, and springs break forth and stream in little rivers everywhere.

The beauty and refreshing coolness of such fountains is very great. The dripping walls of the Khan Minyeh aqueducts are covered with magnificent bunches of maidenhair, whose fronds were the broadest we had ever seen. The Well of Harod, close by the stream where Gideon tested his soldiers, is one of the loveliest spots imaginable. There is a little cave, where the pebbles shine up blue through the shallow water; ferns grow in its crannies, and at the side a clear spring, two feet broad and five inches deep, splashes into the pool from a recess entirely hidden by hanging maidenhair. Nor is the natural beauty of these springs their only charm. When one remembers the days of old through which they flowed, and the men who stooped to drink of them so along ago, all that was most sacred and most heroic to one's childhood lives again, and speaks to the heart. Ay! and to the conscience too; for these were the springs that gave to Bible men their metaphors of a fountain opened for sin and for uncleanness; this is the land in which it sprang up and from which it has flowed forth with cleansing and refreshment for the whole earth.

BROWN VILLAGES, WHITE TOWNS, AND A GREY CITY

The changing history of the land has passed it through many phases, and no doubt there are far wider differences between the centuries in respect of men's dwellings than in respect of those natural features of the land which we have been studying in the preceding pages. This chapter will describe present conditions. And yet in spite of changes the aspect of things must be pretty much what it always was. Men gathered into cities on some strongly fortified hill for purposes of war, or around some holy place for worship, or in some fertile valley for safe agriculture; and the sites thus chosen are retained for the most part. With the exception of the wandering tents, which are occasionally seen throughout the land, there is hardly a solitary dwelling in Palestine which is not a ruin. And the want of good roads, together with the uncertain government, seems still to keep the village communities more apart than they are in most countries. Each village has a character and a reputation of its own, and cherishes views regarding its neighbours which it is not slow to impart either to them or to foreigners. The colour of these townships divides them into the three classes of our title. Damascus and Beyrout are beyond the scope of the present description--Damascus, the greyest city in the world so far as age is concerned; and Beyrout, the over-grown white town upon which the ends of the world are come, leaving it little individual character of its own. Keeping to the south of these, we have the clearly marked division, with little overlapping. A brown village may indeed have a white church or mosque gleaming from its bosom, and the walls of some towns besides Jerusalem are grey; yet in the main it is a land of brown villages, white towns, and one grey city.

The villages are very brown--"dust-coloured," as they have been happily called. Seen from a distance they generally look inviting, but it takes the traveller no long time to believe that a near approach will certainly disillusionise him. They have many sorts of charm in the distance. Some of them are set up on the edge of a hill, and these seen from below present all the appearance of fortification, their flat roofs and perpendicular sides giving them an angular and military aspect. Others are surrounded by neatly walled and cultivated olive-yards which give the promise of a well-conditioned village. In the rare instances where trees are planted among the dwellings, the flat brown roofs seem to nestle among the branches in delightful contentment and restfulness. Where trees are absent there is generally a high cactus hedge, serving as an enclosing wall, which sets the village in a pleasant green. Even those hamlets which have about them no green of any kind are not uninviting, especially if they are built on a hill-slope. There is a peculiar formality and neatness given by irregular piles of flat-roofed buildings overlapping each other at different levels. But as you approach, all is disillusionment. The trees seem to detach themselves and stand apart in the untidy paths. The cactus hedge is repulsive, with its spiked pulpy masses and its bare and straggling roots. The brown walls seem to decay before your eyes, and the village seen from within its own street changes to a succession of ruinous heaps of d?bris, with excavations into the mud of the hillside. If, as at Nain, there be a white-walled church or mosque in the place, it seems to stand alone in a long moraine of ruins. An acrid smell hangs upon the air, for the fuel is dried cakes of dung. These are plastered over the walls of low ovens into which the mud seems to swell in great blisters by the street-side. In some of these ovens crowds of filthy children and tattooed women are sitting, while the men loiter in idle rows along the house walls. When suddenly you say to yourself that this is Shunem, or this Nain, or Magdala, the disappointment is complete.

In some places the houses are built of stones gathered from the ancient ruins of the neighbourhood . Other houses consist simply of four walls of mud, with a roof of the same material laid upon branches set across. A small stone roller may be seen lying somewhere on the roof, for in heat the mud cracks and needs to be rolled now and then to keep the rain from leaking through. The sheikh, or headman of the village, has a better house--often the one respectable habitation in the place, but suggestive of a ruined tower at that. It is a two-storeyed building, whose great feature is the public hall, or reception-room, where local matters are discussed and strangers interviewed. There is no glass in the windows, and the strong sunlight deepens the gloom of the interiors to a rich brown darkness with points of high light and colour. The shade is precious in these sun-smitten places, and Conder narrates an incident which often recurs to mind in them. It was in the cave of the Holy House at Nazareth, the reputed home of Jesus in His boyhood. The visitor "observed to the monk that it was dark for a dwelling-house, but he answered very simply, 'The Lord had no need of much light.'" The rooms are almost bare of furniture, a bed and a few water-jars in a corner being sometimes the only objects visible. In some of them the floor space is divided into two levels, half the room being a platform two or three feet higher than the other half. On this platform the family lives, while the cattle occupy the lower part; and along the edge of the platform there are hollows in its floor, which serve as mangers for the beasts. No doubt it was in such a manger that Jesus was laid in Bethlehem.

As for their faults, no doubt they are many, but it is not for the passing stranger to attempt an estimate of their character. The most obvious lapses are sins of speech, and one always has the impression that the interpreter is toning down as he translates. One can see that property is insecure, and life by no means so sacred as in the West. One incident brought this home to us vividly. Some of our party had been detained on an exploring excursion till after dark. When we asked a group of natives what could have become of them, the answer was more significant than reassuring, for they pointed with their fingers vertically downwards! It was not so bad as that, however, for we soon heard revolver shots, and answered them. We fired into a field, aiming at a large stack of corn to prevent accidents. Conceive our horror when a silent figure in flowing robes rose from the centre of the stack! He was spending the night there to keep his property from thieves. For the rest, it is their laziness that strikes one most forcibly. Their agriculture is as leisurely as it is primitive. They sit while reaping, and thresh by standing upon boards studded with flints, which oxen draw over the threshing-floors. Their ploughs are but iron-shod sticks which scratch the surface of the field. In outlandish districts they are described as mere savages, but we saw little to justify such a criticism. They are uncompromisingly dirty everywhere, yet their food is simple, and they appear in the main to be healthy enough. At first one's impression of them is of universal gloom, sulky and contemptuous; but the mood soon changes if you stay among them for a little time, and the knit brows relax to a smiling childishness.

Of white towns, with a population between 3000 and 3500, there are about a dozen in Palestine, of which, excluding Damascus and Beyrout, the best known are Haifa and Acre, Tyre and Sidon, Tiberias, Jenin, Nablus, Bethlehem, Hebron, Gaza, Jaffa. They shine from far as you approach them. Some, like Jenin, gleam most picturesquely from among palm trees; others, like Nazareth seen from Jezreel, shew like stars of white in high mountain valleys; and yet others, like Bethshan, appear "like white islands in the mouth of an estuary." The nearer view of Nazareth, when the hill has been climbed and the town suddenly reveals itself, is one of rare beauty. You are looking down into an oval hollow full of clean and bright houses. Many cypress trees and spreading figs enrich the prospect, and the whole picture is most pleasing. Bethlehem, again, has a picturesqueness that is all its own. Approaching it from the south, the track turns sharply into a valley whose end is entirely blocked by a lofty hill, covered along its whole length with shining white masonry set far up against the sky. It looks trim and newly finished; and one hardly knows whether to be delighted or vexed that Bethlehem should be so workmanlike a place.

But it is the sea-coast towns which are the most characteristic of their class. Tyre is a surprisingly living and wide-awake place still, and the name recalls ever some vista of blue sea with ships seen through the white arches or rich foliage that decorate the town's western front. Jaffa is still more surprising. It is usual to embark at Port Said late in the evening, and when you wake in the morning and find the steamer at anchor, the first sight of Palestine that greets you is Jaffa, framed in the brass circle of the port-hole--a very perfect and brilliant little picture. The town is set well up, a conical

hill of sparkling colour, backed, as we first saw it, by cloudless Syrian sky, into which it ran its two minarets. It was larger than we had imagined, and much loftier, with a very bold and gaily tilted edge-line--a city set on its hill, and with a mighty consciousness of being so set, like Coventry Patmore's old English cottage. Dark-leaved trees, red roofs, and occasional jewel-like points of green, where copper cupolas have been weathered, light up the picture into one of the most ideal of its kind.

Within, the white towns shew a strange mixture of splendour and of sordidness. The streets are aggressively irregular, and the whole impresses one as at once ancient and unfinished. The wider spaces are full of colour and of noise, and the houses which surround them are a patchwork of all manner of buildings, with smaller structures leaning against their sides, and gaudy awnings of ragged edge protecting doorways from the sun. Where the street narrows, it is filled with crowds of men, women, and children, and laden donkeys pushing them aside as they pass along. There are lanes, also, in deep shadow, with buttresses and long archways converting them into high and narrow tunnels. The shopkeepers in these lanes sit behind their piles of merchandise and converse in shrill voices with neighbours on the other side, not six feet away. The whole appearance of the town is that of close-huddled dwellings, which have squeezed themselves into as little space as possible, and have been forced to expand upwards for want of lateral room.

These towns are the mingling-places of Syria--crucibles of its national life, in which new and composite races are being molten. One or two of them, like Nablus and Hebron, are inhabited chiefly by a fanatical Moslem population, and in these life stagnates. But the others are open to the world. In the past, long before the modern stream of travellers came, this process was going on. In very early times the towns were recruited by the neighbouring Canaanites and Arabs. They were, as they still are, so insanitary that if it were not for such additions their population would soon die out. In Christ's time the Greek and Roman world poured itself into them; then came the long train of Christian pilgrims; after that the Crusader hosts. Each of these, and many other incursions, have helped to mix the race of townsfolk. In Bethlehem and elsewhere there are many descendants of the Crusaders, whose fair hair and complexion tells its own tale. But the mingling of races has gone on with quite a new rapidity during the last few decades. Trade and travel have combined to force the West upon the East. Circassians, Kurds, Turks, Jews, Africans, Cypriotes have settled there. Travellers who have twice visited the land, with an interval of some years between their visits, are struck by the sudden and sweeping change. Even the passing visitor cannot fail to perceive it. The villagers remain apart, intermarrying within the village or with neighbouring Fellahin. The townspeople bring their brides from other towns, and sometimes from other nations. Many kinds of imported goods are exposed for sale in the bazaars. There are parts of Damascus where nothing is sold that was not made in Europe. The habits of the West are also invading towns. Intoxicating liquors are freely sold, and in Nazareth there are now no fewer than seventeen public-houses. "Paris fashions"--probably belated--are ousting the ancient customs. Tattooing is quite out of fashion among the women of the towns, and knives and forks have penetrated native houses even in Hebron. The traveller comes into contact with the townspeople far less fully than with the villagers. In the towns everybody is minding some business or other of his own, and the stranger meets with the residenter merely as buyer with seller. Once only did we see the interior of a town house, and that visit confirmed the impression of a new and composite life very remarkably. It was in Tyre. An agreeable native, who had brought some curiosities for sale, invited us to go home with him and inspect his stock. The house was in a narrow street, but the rooms were large. His wife sat near the window smoking a nargileh, her eyebrows painted black, and her face heavily powdered and rouged. The room was crowded with furniture. There were a sofa and two European beds with mosquito curtains; a new English wardrobe of carved walnut, with a large mirror; a kitchen dresser covered with dinner dishes of the customary European kind. Dry-goods boxes were drawn forth from under the beds and the sofa, and pasteboard boxes from drawers and shelves, all filled with the most indescribable medley of curiosities from rifled tombs. Bracelets, tear-bottles, ear-rings came to light in rapid succession. Finally, a square foot of lead-work appeared--part of a leaden winding-sheet which had recently been torn off an ancient corpse in a sarcophagus--a heavy shroud, finely ornamented with deep-moulded garlands and figures. Our hosts were good-humoured and pleasant people, who conducted the conversation in some five different languages, and appeared to combine in themselves and their properties several centuries of human life.

The grey city of Jerusalem stands unique among the towns of Palestine. With the brown villages it has nothing in common. The immense variety of its buildings, with their domes, flat terraces, minarets, and sloping roofs, distinguishes it at once from the rectangular masses of the villages. As if on purpose to emphasise the contrast, one of these villages has set itself right opposite the city across a narrow valley. Looking from the southern wall of the Haram enclosure, this village of Siloam is seen sprawling along the opposite hillside, a mere drift of square hovels seen across some fields of artichokes. Nothing could appear more miserable; inferiority is confessed in every line of it.

Yet in Jerusalem all this makes a different impression from that of other towns. The mingling of races here is but, as it were, the surface appearance of a far more wonderful fact. From the days of Solomon, Israel centralised her life in Jerusalem. On that hill the mountainland seems to gather itself as in a natural centre, typical and representative of the whole. There the nation centred its life also, in "the mountain throne, and the mountain sanctuary of God." Jeroboam's attempt to decentralise cost the nation dear; but in spite of that attempt the centralisation took effect, and made her the most composite of cities from the first. All ends of the earth meet here as in a focus. Laden camels of the Arameans from the far East are making for the city, and ships flying like a cloud of homing doves to their windows are bearing precious freights to her port. History and religion are compressed within the walls. On the spot no one can forget the ancient geography which regarded Jerusalem as the centre of the earth, with Hell vertically below, and the island of Purgatory its antipodes, and Heaven's centre overhead. In the Church of the Holy Sepulchre they shew a flattened ball in a little hollow place as the centre of the world. As in some other cases of faulty science, an imaginative mind may discover here a happy truth beneath the error. The composite life of Jerusalem without the walls is but of yesterday, that within the walls is hoary with age.

We have called it "a grey city," and even in respect of colour this is a true name. Not that there is any one colour of Jerusalem. In the varying lights of sunrise, noon, afternoon, and evening, its colour changes. At one time it hangs, airy and dreamlike, over the steep bank of the Valley of Jehoshaphat; at another time it seems to sit solid on its rock, every roof and battlement picked out in photographic clearness; again, in the twilight of evening, all is sombre with rich purple shadows. There are spots of colour, too, which break its monotonous dull hue. The Mosque of Omar, with its faint metallic greenish colour, stands in contrast to everything, and makes a background of the city for its isolated beauty. There is another dome, that of the Synagogue of the Ashkenazim, whose colour is a lustrous blue-green, shining over the city almost luminously. White minarets and spires are seen here and there, and a few red-tiled roofs have found place within the walls. Several spots are softened by the foliage of trees, and the pools, whose edges are formed of picturesque and irregular house-sides, catch and intensify the colours in their rich reflections. Yet, in spite of all that, Jerusalem is grey. The walls are grey with a touch of orange in it. The houses, massed and huddled close within, are grey with a touch of blue. They are built roughly, the stones divided by broad seams of mortar, and most of them in their humble way conform to the fashion set by the Mosque of Omar and the Holy Sepulchre, and are domed. But the domes of ordinary houses are far from shapely, and suggest the fancy that the scorching sun has blistered the flat roofs.

been caught by that great angle of wall just before it precipitated itself into the gorges.

To see the grey city rightly, and feel how grey it is, you must view it across these gorges. The more distant environs are detached from the city. They are cultivated in patches, and dotted with modern buildings of various degrees of irrelevance. But these are mere accidents, which the place seems to ignore. The gorges themselves are part and parcel of the city, and they stand for the overflow of her sad and desolate spirit. Their sides are banks of rubbish--the wreckage and d?bris of a score of sieges, the accumulation of three thousand years. You look from the lower pool of Siloam in the valley of Hinnom, up a long dreary slope of dark grey rubbish, down which a horrible black stream of liquid filth trickles, tainting the air with its stench. Far off above you stands the wall, which in old days enclosed the pool. Here the city seems to have shrunk northwards, as if in some horror of conscience. The Field of Blood and the Hill of Evil Counsel are just across the gorge to the south. The valleys are full of tombs, those on the city side for the most part Mohammedan, while the lower slopes of Olivet are paved with the flat tombstones of Jews.

What a stretch of history unrolls itself to the imagination of him who lingers on the sight of Jerusalem! The boundaries seem to dwindle, till that which stands there is the old grey battle-beaten fortress of the Jebusites, the last post held by her enemies against Israel. David conquers it, and the procession of priests and people bring up to its gate the ark, for the celebration of whose entrance tradition has claimed the 24th Psalm. A new city rises, and falls, and rises again, through more than twenty sieges and rebuildings. Assyrians, Babylonians, Romans, Moslems, Crusaders batter at its gates. The level of the streets rises through the centuries, till now the traveller walks on a pavement thirty or forty feet above the floor of the ancient city. To discover the old foundations, the explorers of our time have sunk shafts which at some parts of the wall touch bottom 120 feet below the present surface. Far below the slighter masonry of the present wall, with its battlemented Turkish work, lie the huge stones of early days, some of which bear still the marks of Phoenician masons.

The gates, of course, are modern, though in some of them there are immense stones of very ancient date, whose rustic work the Turkish builders have cut away, and scored the flat surface with imitation seams to make them match the small square stones of the building above. Yet the positions of the ancient gates are not difficult to fix, and modern ones do duty for some of them. Others are built up with solid masonry, notably the double-arched "Gate Beautiful," which was thus closed because of a tradition that Messiah would return and enter the city by it. It was from this gate that in olden times the man went forth with the scapegoat that was to bear the sins of the people to the wilderness. The interior is a rich and beautiful piece of architecture, with massive monolithic pillars supporting heavy arches, and an elaborately decorative entablature cornicing the walls. It is a dreary little place, with its litter of d?bris and its flights of bats; and its dead wall, pierced only with loophole windows, now affords neither entrance for Christ nor exit for sin. What memories crowd the mind of the beholder as he looks upon these gates! Here, seven centuries ago, went out the weeping company of the inhabitants, when Saladin took the city. There, eleven centuries earlier, the Jews set fire to the Roman siege-engine, the flames were blown back upon the fortifications, and the wall fell and made an entrance for the legions. That was near the Jaffa Gate. Here again, by the Damascus Gate, if Gordon's theory be the correct one, the Saviour passed to Calvary; and there may be stones there on which the cross struck, as Simon the Cyrenian staggered out under its weight.

It is indeed a strange city, a city of grey religion, in which three faiths cherish their most hallowed memories of days far past. But "far past" is written on every memory. That Beautiful Gate has indeed shut out Christ, and shut in all manner of sin unforgiven. The land, as has been already said, seems still inhabited by Christ, but He has forsaken Jerusalem; it is almost impossible to feel any sense of His presence there. This is a city of grey history, whose age and decrepitude force themselves upon every visitor. It has been well described as having still "the appearance of a gigantic fortress." But it is a weird fortress, with an air of petrified gallantry about it, and an infinite loneliness and desolation. No river flows near to soften the landscape. A fierce sun beats down in summer there upon "a city of stone in a land of iron with a sky of brass." But for the sound of bugles, whose calls seem always to shock one with their savage liveliness, it might be a fossil city. Built for eternity, setting the pattern for that "New Jerusalem" which has been the Utopia of so many devout souls, it seems a sarcasm on the great promise, a city "with a great future behind it." What has this relic to do with a blessed future for mankind--this rugged bareness of stone, this contempt for beauty, this pitiful sordidness of detail? History and religion seem to mourn together here, and one sees in every remembrance of it those two weeping figures, the most significant of all, for its secular and religious life--Titus, who "gazed upon Jerusalem from Scopus the day before its destruction, and wept for the sake of the beautiful city"; and Jesus Christ who, when things were ripening for Titus, foresaw the coming of the legions as He looked upon Jerusalem from Olivet, "and when He was come near He beheld the city and wept over it."

PART II

THE INVADERS

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 blas?-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. 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.

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. 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

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.

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