Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land Part 7

Wherever the crucifixion took place, it was surely in the open air, beneath the wide sky, and the cross that stood on Golgotha has become the light at the centre of the world's night.

_A PSALM OF THE UNSEEN ALTAR_

_Man the maker of cities is also a builder of altars: Among his habitations he setteth tables for his G.o.d._

_He bringeth the beauty of the rocks to enrich them: Marble and alabaster, porphyry, jasper and jade._

_He cometh with costly gifts to offer an oblation: He would buy favour with the fairest of his flock._

_Around the many altars I hear strange music arising: Loud lamentations and shouting and singing and sighs._

_I perceive also the pain and terror of their sacrifices: I see the white marble wet with tears and with blood._

_Then I said, These are the altars of ignorance: Yet they are built by thy children, O G.o.d, who know thee not._

_Surely thou wilt have pity upon them and lead them: Hast thou not prepared for them a table of peace?_

_Then the Lord mercifully sent his angel forth to lead me: He led me through the temples, the holy place that is hidden._

_Lo, there are mult.i.tudes kneeling in the silence of the spirit: They are kneeling at the unseen altar of the lowly heart._

_Here is plentiful forgiveness for the souls that are forgiving: And the joy of life is given unto all who long to give._

_Here a Father's hand upholdeth all who bear each other's burdens: And the benediction falleth upon all who pray in love._

_Surely this is the altar where the penitent find pardon: And the priest who hath blessed it forever is the Holy One of G.o.d._

VII

JERICHO AND JORDAN

I

"GOING DOWN TO JERICHO"

In the memory of every visitor to Jerusalem the excursion to Jericho is a vivid point. For this is the one trip which everybody makes, and it is a convention of the route to regard it as a perilous and exciting adventure. Perhaps it is partly this flavour of a not-too-dangerous danger, this s.h.i.+vering charm of a hazard to be taken without too much risk, that attracts the average tourist, prudently romantic, to make the journey to the lowest inhabited town in the world.

Jericho has always had an ill name. Weak walls, weak hearts, weak morals were its early marks. Sweltering on the rich plain of the lower Jordan, eight hundred feet below the sea, at the entrance of the two chief pa.s.ses into the Judean highlands, it was too indolent or cowardly to maintain its own importance. Stanley called it "the key of Palestine"; but it was only a latch which any bold invader could lift. The people of Jericho were famous for light fingers and lively feet, great robbers and runners-away. Joshua blotted the city out with a curse; five centuries later Hiel the Bethelite rebuilt it with the b.l.o.o.d.y sacrifice of his two sons. Antony gave it to Cleopatra, and Herod bought it from her for a winter palace, where he died. Nothing fine or brave, so far as I can remember, is written of any of its inhabitants, except the good deed of Rahab, a harlot, and the honest conduct of Zacchaeus, a publican.

To this day, at the _tables d'hote_ of Jerusalem the name of Jericho stirs up a little whirlwind of bad stories and warnings.

Last night we were dining with friends at one of the hotels, and the usual topic came up for discussion. Imagine what followed.

"That Jericho road is positively frightful," says a British female tourist in lace cap, lilac ribbons and a maroon poplin dress, "the heat is most extr'ordinary!"

"No food fit to eat at the hotel," grumbles her husband, a rosy, bald-headed man in plaid knickerbockers, "no bottled beer; beastly little hole!"

"A voyage of the most fatiguing, of the most perilous, I a.s.sure you,"

says a little Frenchman with a forked beard. "But I rejoice myself of the adventure, of the romance accomplished."

"I want to know," piped a lady in a green s.h.i.+rt-waist from Andover, Ma.s.s., "is there really and truly any danger?"

"I guess not for us," answers the dominating voice of the conductor of her party. "There's always a bunch of robbers on that road, but I have hired the biggest man of the bunch to take care of us. Just wait till you see that dandy Sheikh in his best clothes; he looks like a museum of old weapons."

"Have you heard," interposed a lady-like clergyman on the other side of the table, with gold-rimmed spectacles gleaming above his high, black waistcoat, "what happened on the Jericho road, week before last? An English gentleman, of very good family, imprudently taking a short cut, became separated from his companions. The Bedouins fell upon him, beat him quite painfully, deprived him of his watch and several necessary garments, and left him prostrate upon the earth, in an embarra.s.singly denuded condition. Just fancy! Was it not perfectly shocking?" (The clergyman's voice was full of delicious horror.) "But, after all," he resumed with a beaming smile, "it was most scriptural, you know, quite like a Providential confirmation of Holy Writ!"

"Most unpleasant for the Englishman," growls the man in knickerbockers.

"But what can you expect under this rotten Turkish government?"

"I know a story about Jericho," begins a gentleman from Colorado, with a hay-coloured moustache and a droop in his left eyelid--and then follows a series of tales about that ill-reputed town and the road thither, which leave the lady in the lace cap gasping, and the man with the forked beard visibly swelling with pride at having made the journey, and the little woman in the green s.h.i.+rt-waist quivering with exquisite fears and mentally clinging with both arms to the personal conductor of her party, who looks becomingly virile, and exchanges a surrept.i.tious wink with the gentleman from Colorado.

Of course, I am not willing to make an affidavit to the correctness of every word in this conversation; but I can testify that it fairly represents the _Jericho-motif_ as you may hear it played almost any night in the Jerusalem hotels. It sounded to us partly like an echo of ancient legends kept alive by dragomans and officials for purposes of revenue, and partly like an outcrop of the hysterical habit in people who travel in flocks and do nothing without much palaver. In our quiet camp, George the Bethlehemite a.s.sured us that the sheikhs were "humbugs," and an escort of soldiers a nuisance. So we placidly made our preparations to ride on the morrow, with no other safeguards than our friendly dispositions and a couple of excellent American revolvers.

But it was no brief _Ausflug_ to Jericho and return that we had before us: it was the beginning of a long and steady ride, weeks in the saddle, from six to nine hours a day.

Imagine us then, morning after morning, mounting somewhere between six and eight o'clock, according to the weather and the length of the journey, and jingling out of camp, followed at a discreet distance by Youssouf on his white pony with the luncheon, and Paris on his tiny donkey, Tiddly-winks. About noon, sometimes a little earlier, sometimes a little later, the white pony catches up with us, and the tent and the rugs are spread for the midday meal and the _siesta_. It may be in our dreams, or while the Lady is reading from some pleasant book, or while the smoke of the afternoon pipe of peace is ascending, that we hear the musical bells of our long baggage-train go by us on the way to our night-quarters.

The evening ride is always shorter than the morning, sometimes only an hour or two in the saddle; and at the end of it there is the surprise of a new camp ground, the comfortable tents, the refres.h.i.+ng bath tub, the quiet dinner by sunset-glow or candle-light. Then a bit of friendly talk over the walnuts and the "Treasure of Zion"; a cup of fragrant Turkish coffee; and George enters the door of the tent to report on the condition of things in general, and to discuss the plan of the next day's journey.

II

THE GOOD SAMARITAN'S ROAD

It is strange how every day, no matter in what mood of merry jesting or practical modernity we set out, an hour of riding in the open air brings us back to the mystical charm of the Holy Land and beneath the spell of its memories and dreams. The wild hillsides, the flowers of the field, the s.h.i.+mmering olive-groves, the brown villages, the crumbling ruins, the deep-blue sky, subdue us to themselves and speak to us "rememberable things."

We pa.s.s down the Valley of the Brook Kidron, where no water ever flows; and through the crowd of beggars and loiterers and pilgrims at the crossroads; and up over the shoulder of the Mount of Olives, past the wide-spread Jewish burying-ground, where we take our last look at the towers and domes and minarets and walls of Jerusalem. The road descends gently, on the other side of the hill, to Bethany, a disconsolate group of hovels. The sweet home of Mary and Martha is gone. It is a waste of time to look at the uncertain ruins which are shown here as sacred sites. Look rather at the broad landscape eastward and southward, the luminous blue sky, the joyful little flowers on the rocky slopes,--these are unchanged.

Not far beyond Bethany, the road begins to drop, with great windings, into a deep, desolate valley, crowded with pilgrims afoot and on donkey-back and in ramshackle carriages,--Russians and Greeks returning from their sacred bath in the Jordan. Here and there, at first, we can see a shepherd with his flock upon the haggard hillside.

"As for the gra.s.s, it grew as scant as hair In leprosy."

Once the Patriarch and I, scrambling on foot down a short-cut, think we see a Bedouin waiting for us behind a rock, with his long gun over his shoulder; but it turns out to be only a brown little peasant girl, ragged and smiling, watching her score of lop-eared goats.

As the valley descends the landscape becomes more and more arid and stricken. The heat broods over it like a disease.

"I think I never saw Such starved, ign.o.ble nature; nothing throve; For flowers--as well expect a cedar grove!"

We might be on the way with Childe Roland to the Dark Tower. But instead we come, about noon, through a savage glen beset with blood-red rocks and honeycombed with black caves on the other side of the ravine, to the so-called "Inn of the Good Samaritan."

The local colour of the parable surrounds us. Here is a fitting scene for such a drama of lawless violence, cowardly piety, and unconventional mercy. In these caverns robbers could hide securely. On this wild road their victim might lie and bleed to death. By these paths across the glen the priest and the Levite could "pa.s.s by on the other side,"

discreetly turning their heads away from any interruption to their selfish duties. And in some such wayside khan as this, standing like a lonely fortress among the sun-baked hills, the friendly half-heathen from Samaria could safely leave the stranger whom he had rescued, provided he paid at least a part of his lodging in advance.

We eat our luncheon in one of the three big, disorderly rooms of the inn, and go on, in the cool of the afternoon, toward Jericho. The road still descends steeply, among ragged and wrinkled hills. On our left we look down into the Wadi el-Kelt, a gloomy gorge five or six hundred feet deep, with a stream of living water singing between its prison walls.