: The Holy Land by Kelman John Fulleylove John Illustrator - Palestine Description and travel

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FACING PAGE

PART I

THE LAND

A journey through the Holy Land may reasonably be expected to be in some sort a sacramental event in a man's life. Spiritual things are always near us, and we feel that we have a heritage in them; yet they constantly elude us, and need help from the senses to make them real and commanding. Such sacramental help must surely be given by anything that brings vividly to our realisation those scenes and that life in the midst of which the Word was made flesh. The more clearly we can gain the impression of places and events in Syria, the more reasonable and convincing will Christian faith become.

Everything which revives the long past has power to quicken the imagination, and site-hunters and relic-hunters in any field have much to say for themselves. Now, apart altogether from the Christian story, Syria has the spell of a very ancient land. The mounds that break the level on the plain of Esdraelon represent six hundred years of buried history for every thirty feet of their height. Among the first objects pointed out to us in Palestine was a perforated stone which serves now as ventilator for a Christian meeting-house in Lebanon, but which was formerly a section of Zenobia's aqueduct. In Syria the realisation of the past is continual, and the centuries mingle in a solemn confusion. Its modern life seems of little account, and is in no way the rival of the ancient. In London, or even in Rome, the new world jostles the old; in Palestine the old is so supreme as to seem hardly conscious of the new.

All this reaches its keenest point in connection with men's worship; and what a long succession of worshippers have left their traces here! The primitive rock-hewn altar, the Jewish synagogue, the Greek temple, the Christian church, the Mohammedan mosque--all have stood in their turn on the same site. His must be a dull soul surely who can feel no sympathy with the Moslem, or even with the heathen worship. These religions too had human hearts beating in them, and wistful souls trying by their help to search eternity. To the wise these dead faiths are full of meaning. Through all their clashing voices there sounds the cry of man to his God--a cry more often heard and answered than we in our self-complacency are sometimes apt to think.

The belief in miracle is always difficult: nowhere is it so difficult as on the traditional site. The earth is just earth there as elsewhere; and the sky seems almost farther above it. The rock is solid rock; the water, air, trees, hills are uncompromising terrestrial realities. It is wiser to abandon the attempt at forcing the supernatural to reveal itself, and to turn to the human side of things as the surest way of ultimately arriving at the divine. When that has been deliberately done the reward is indeed magnificent. An unexpected and overwhelming sense of reality comes upon the sacred narrative. These places and the life that inhabited them are actualities, and not merely items in an ancient book or the poetic background of a religious experience. More particularly when you look upward to the hills, you find that your help still cometh from them. Their great sky-lines are unchanged, and the long vistas and clear-cut edges which you see are the same which filled the eyes of prophets and apostles, and of Jesus Christ Himself.

It is this, especially as it regards the Saviour of mankind, that is the most precious gain of Syrian travel. Now and again it comes on one with overpowering force. Sailing up the coast, this impression haunted the long hours. As we gazed on the mountains, and the image of them sank deeper and deeper, the thought grew clear in all its wonder that somewhere among these heights He had wandered with His disciples, and sat down by the sides of wells to rest. In camp at Jericho we were confronted by an uncouth, blunt-topped mountain mass, thrusting itself aggressively up on the Judean side, in itself a very rugged and memorable mountain-edge. Not till the light was fading, and the bold outline struck blacker and blacker against the sky, did the fact suddenly surprise us that this was Quarantana, the Mountain of Temptation. Then we understood that wilderness story in all its unprotected loneliness, and we almost saw the form of the Son of Man.

THE COLOUR OF THE LAND

Every land has a scheme of colour of its own, and while form and outline are the first, they are not the most permanent nor the deepest impressions which a region makes upon its travellers. It is the colour of the land which slowly and almost unconsciously sinks in upon the beholder day by day. We observe the outlines of a scene; we remember its colouring.

This is especially true of Palestine. Nothing about it is more distinctive than its colour-scheme; and nothing is perhaps less familiar to those who have not actually seen it. Syria may be treated as if it were Italy, or even Egypt--in hard intense colouring; or it may be treated as if it were England, in strong tones but with a certain homely softening of edge. Neither of these modes is true to Syria. Its edge-lines are sharp, but they are traced in such faint shades as to produce an effect very difficult either to reproduce or to describe, and yet impossible to forget.

The colours are manifold, and they vary considerably with the seasons of the year. Yet the bare hill-sides , the desert, and the distant mountain ranges, are ever the same. Most travellers make their first acquaintance with Palestine in Judea, entering it from Jaffa. When the plains are behind you, and you are in among the valleys up which the road climbs to Jerusalem, you at once recognise the fact that a new and surprising world of colour has been entered. In the valley-bottom there may be but a dry watercourse, or perhaps a rusty strip of cultivated land; but above you there is sure to be the outcrop of white and grey limestone. In some places it appears in characterless and irregular blotches whose grotesque intrusion seems to confuse and caricature the mountain side. This is, however, only occasional, and the usual and characteristic appearance is that of long and flowing lines of striation which generally follow pretty closely the curve of the sky-line. The colours of these strata are many. You have rich brown bands, dark red, purple, yellow, and black ones; but these are toned down by the dominant grey of the broader bands, and the general effect is an indistinct grey with a bluish tinge, to which the coloured bands give a curiously artificial and decorative appearance. As a work of Art Judea is most interesting; as part of Nature it is almost incredible.

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