"A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho"

Life is, in many respects, made very easy in the Holy Land. You can return home in the afternoon with no anxious forebodings as to how much waste of time is awaiting you in the shape of cards and notes on the hall table; you may wear clothes for covering, you may eat for nourishment; without taking thought for fashion in the one case, or of competition with your neighbour's cook or gardener in the other. But—according to our Occidental standards—you cannot consistently indulge any taste you may happen to have for being grand. Your attempts at a London, or shall we say a suburban, drawing-room, your "At Home" days, your Europeanised service, the dress of your {2} womankind—distantly reminiscent of the ladies' papers and of Answers to Correspondents—are certain to be complicated by some contretemps provocative only of mirth. The Oriental himself makes no attempt at being consistent. When you arrive at his house he spreads a priceless carpet, but omits to remove last week's dust from off the furniture; he gives you perfumed coffee, which is like a dream of Olympus, and his servant brings you a piece of bread in his fingers.

These reflections, and many more, were suggested during the waiting which accompanied our start in the early sunrise at half-past five on Saturday, 3rd October 1903. No one could have guessed how grand we really were, and there were moments then, and later, when the fact escaped even our own notice. We four, the Lady, the Doctor (of various forms of scholarship) and the two Sportsmen, were the chosen and proud companions of the Professor; and the Professor, besides being the greatest epigraphist in Europe, was the representative of a Royal Personage, and armed with all the permits and safe-conducts and special privileges useful in a land of cholera, quarantine, and backsheesh. Our eight horses {3} were innocent of grooming, and their equipment was fastened together mainly with tin tacks, pieces of rope, and bits of string; but it would have been difficult to find in England any animal to whom you could have proposed, still less with whom you could have carried through, one tithe of what our ragged regiment accomplished. Our two grooms, mukaris, appealed to certain senses as vaguely horsey, though they suggested nothing more distinguished than stable-helps; but their management of eight animals, under conditions which seemed especially designed for their destruction, when there was not a blade of grass, perhaps for a whole day not a drop of water; when they were ridden for ten, twelve, or even fourteen hours at a stretch with merely an hour's rest—without forage—at noon, would have done credit to any groom at Badminton or Berkeley. As we proposed to ourselves both pleasure and profit we took no servants—still less a dragoman. Our portable food had been very carefully selected, and was the best obtainable. Bread, eggs, chickens, grapes, and lemons we could count upon getting as we went along.

Each member of the party had clothing and a blanket in a pair of saddle-bags—mostly of {4} goats' hair or camels' hair, gaily decorated with coloured tassels—and these, with an extra pair for the baskets of food, spirit-lamps, plates, knives, and tin cups, were distributed among the three baggage animals, who also carried, in turn, the two mukaris, perched on the top of the pile, but capable of climbing up and down with incredibly rapid agility.

At length the cavalcade was ready, and we turned our faces towards Jericho. First came the Professor, on a tall, white Circassian horse, with a tail which almost swept the ground, and was dyed with henna for protection from the Evil One, who was further defied, by each of us, by means of a large blue bead hanging round the neck of every horse on a coloured worsted rope. The Professor himself exhibited five foot of humanity, mostly brains; a personality which consisted, to the eye, of a large scarlet and gold silk keffeeye (head covering) with a goats' hair akal (rope to keep it in place) and an elaborate silk fringe, below which emerged a pair of black leggings, into one of which a whip was jauntily stuck. He was mounted on a peaked, military saddle, and he alone of all the party refused to be separated from his saddle-bags, which contained an assortment of cigars, cigarettes, {5} tobacco, and the long wooden pipe, for use in the saddle, such as is in favour with the Bedu.

Next came the Lady, mounted on a long-legged Arab steed, several sizes too large for her, but selected for her use mainly because he could do the rahwan, the light canter special to the desert horses, and which reduces fatigue to a minimum. It was discovered, later in the day, that he was also capable, apparently, of running for the Derby, an incident which may as well be recorded at once, as it resulted in his banishment to the second class, and the society of the mukaris.

The road from Jerusalem to Jericho still retains the character recorded some two thousand years ago, but the thieves among whom you inevitably fall are now licensed by the Government. There is a whole village full of them, called Abu-dis, and they have the privilege of protecting travellers from Bethany to Jericho—that is, of enforcing payment for preventing anyone else from robbing you. It is but some few years ago that an Englishman, suspected of seeking to dispense with this advantage, had his donkey shot under him. At Bethany, accordingly, we were joined by our escort, but, as became our dignity, he was an officer, {6} picturesquely attired, and mounted, unfortunately, on a beautiful Arab mare. The misfortune lay in the fact that all our horses, with one exception, were stallions, most of whom became restless and uneasy, that of the Professor so unmanageable that our escort was compelled to leave us, and to take to bypaths from which he could, more or less, keep us in sight. Nevertheless, even the temporary companionship had somewhat excited the entire cavalcade. We were all in good spirits, and it must be confessed that there was a certain amount of what may be called "fooling"—-of what we would not for worlds describe as "showing off," but, rather, as trying the paces of our steeds—an amusement which the Professor saw reason, later, to forbid entirely.

The road to Jericho is a descent of over three thousand feet, but at a point nearly half way, a long and steep climb brings you from the transverse valley Sa'b-el-Meshak to the Khan of the Good Samaritan. At this point it occurred to the Lady's horse to have a private exhibition on his own account, and to set off at a truly breakneck gallop, with which no other animal in the party could possibly compete, even had it been wise to follow, except at a considerable distance. Her strength {7} was quite inadequate to check him, but in the length and steepness of the hill lay promise of safety, and it was with infinite relief that he was seen to pull up at last. He had no vice, but the occasion was not one for a steeplechase, and it was decided that, on the morrow, there should be a "general post" of horses, the mukari being made responsible for his Derby winner, and the Professor arranging, by exchange with one of the Sportsmen, to ride an animal which would admit of conversation with the officer, for such attainments as our leader's have not been achieved by sitting in a library, or by confinement to the professorial chair of his university, but rather by personal intercourse with the Arabs in the various dialects of their own clans, by life in the desert, and association with wandering tribes in the unexplored districts of the Per?a Hauran and of Central Arabia.

The Sportsmen carried guns, the Doctor a notebook—though he was more than suspected of yearning for a rifle,—the revolver which he carried at his belt being better adapted for the murder of man than of beast—not that the murder of man, to judge from the experiences of earlier travellers, was a wholly improbable contingency. Our road led us along almost the entire {8} length of the north and east wall of Jerusalem; we then crossed the bridge over the Kedron valley—the brook, if any exist, is now far below the surface; we passed the Garden of Gethsemane, skirted the southern slope of the Mount of Olives, hastened past the filthy hovels of the little village of Bethany, crowned by the so-called Castle of Lazarus, probably the remains of a pre-crusading Benedictine convent, and finally, about seven o'clock, pulled up at what is known as the Inn of the Apostles' Fountain, just such a building as a child might draw upon a slate. As this is the only well between Bethany and Jericho it may be safely assumed that the apostles, coming up to Jerusalem, would drink here, though it is to be hoped that it was less contaminated than at present; for even the careless natives strain the water through a sieve before allowing their animals to drink, though, nevertheless, they still acquire leeches, as the bleeding mouths of the camels and donkeys one meets along the road frequently betray. The spot has been marked by a succession of buildings; a little white dome over the well, and some hewn stones and the ruins of an aqueduct in the hill across the road, being all that now remains of its old dignity.

{9} Passing the Khan of the Good Samaritan—a modern inn and curiosity shop, at which you can, at your leisure, renew "a certain man's" experiences—we paused at the top of the last hill before descending towards the Jordan valley. Here the entire neighbourhood was once commanded by a strong medi?val castle, intended, like many all over the country, for the defence of the district. The tribal marks of the Bedu to be found on its walls are of extreme interest. The hill upon which it stands is known as Tel'at ed-Dam, the hill of blood, probably from the red colour of the rock, though some have sought to identify it, by reason of the sound of the name, with the Adummim of Joshua xv. 7.

The view from this point is, in certain details, absolutely unique. You look down at the lowest spot upon the earth's surface—the hollow of the Dead Sea, blue as the sky in the morning sunshine, flecked with cloudlike wavelets, beautiful, gay and smiling, but bitter, treacherous, and the home only of mystery and death. The water contains about twenty-five per cent. of solid substances; no organism higher than such microbes as the bacilli of tetanus can live in it; even swimming is almost impossible; neither shells nor coral testify to any happier past. The water boils {10} at 221 degrees Fahrenheit, but the presence of chloride of magnesium makes it incredibly nauseous, while the oily quality, which it derives from chloride of calcium, makes any accidental splash upon the garments very destructive. We gratefully take in long breaths of air which, hot and dry as it is, are, we are well aware, more fresh and sweet than any we are likely to obtain during the next twenty-four hours, for only personal experience of the stifling heat of that unrivalled hollow can make it possible to realise that six and a half million tons of water which fall into the Dead Sea—a basin about the size of the Lake of Geneva, but with no outlet—have to be daily evaporated. Far away southward is the great salt district, where the salt deposit, coated with chalky limestone and clay, takes many weird forms, among which the Arabs point out Bint Shech Luth—the woman of Shech Lot.

"Of whose wickedness, even to this day, the waste land that smoketh is a testimony, and plants bearing fruit that never come to ripeness, and a standing pillar of salt is a monument of an unbelieving soul" (Wisdom x. 7).

"The waste land that smoketh" is a touch of autopic description which one remembers when, {11} towards sunset, great wreaths of white mist lie low in the mountain hollows, as nowhere else in Jud?a. Eastward, the horizon is bounded by the long chain of the mountains of Moab, which, ever since our arrival in the country, have seemed a sort of mysterious dreamland, a limit of knowledge, the gate of fairyland, the nightly stage of the great pageant gilded and painted by the sunset. How often have we longed, like the youngest brother of the fairy tale, to ride across the wide plain, and to wander forth for a year and a day into that dim Unknown! We could hardly realise that at last the time had come and we were stepping eastward.

Below us, in the great plain, a meandering green track shows where the banks of the Jordan are offering shade and refreshment. In the nearer foreground the scanty hovels and many hotels of modern Jericho lie, embowered in tropical vegetation, and we remember with an added interest that, within even the next day or two, we shall pass through districts of three distinct flora and fauna, and, leaving behind the oaks and pines, the familiar sparrows and starlings of our Jerusalem environment, we shall rest to-night among palms and bananas, we shall hear the cry of the jackal, and smell the tracks {12} of the hy?na, and again, in a couple of days, find ourselves in desert surroundings, the nursery of the camel and home of the gazelle, with the scanty herbage and stalkless flora of an Alpine world.

Looking down upon the Jericho plain we note various points of interest. We distinguish the sites of three Jerichos.

First we notice, to the south, the kraal-like village of to-day, on the site of a castle and church of the Crusaders, afterwards a flourishing Moslem town, plundered by Egyptian soldiers in 1840, and subsequently destroyed by fire in 1871. It seems unlikely that it will ever recover its former position; for, apart from apparent absence of all ability for initiation on the part of the Arabs, the climate seems to have a degenerating effect upon the inhabitants, Even German perseverance, which has made habitable spots in the low maritime plains of Jud?a where all other colonists had failed, could not suffice to render life here endurable, and an agricultural settlement organised within the last few years has literally died out. The Latins—or, as we say in England, the Roman Catholics—have also failed to establish themselves, and the Russian and Greek settlements find existence possible only under conditions of frequent change, and {13} the stimulus of the profits to be made out of the thousands of Russian pilgrims who come, every year, at Epiphany, for baptism in the Jordan. Last year, however, the Jordan was held to have acquired so large a proportion of cholera bacilli on its way from Tiberias, where there was a great outbreak of disease, that approach was justly forbidden by the authorities. To the west lie the remains of the Jericho of Bible history, of which, from earliest childhood, most of us have had a mental picture—the great town enclosed by walls enwreathed with vegetation, "that ancient city of palm-trees," few of which still remain, though they were abundant as late as the seventh century; and in Jewish amulets, and marriage or divorce documents, which are commonly decorated with allegorical pictures, Jericho is still represented by a group of palms. South of the Israelitish town, and west of modern Jericho, are the remains of the Roman Jericho, which, it is interesting to remember, was presented by Anthony to Cleopatra, who, characteristically, promptly sold it to Herod for a winter home. He made of it a beautiful city, adorned with palms and gardens, and scented with the balsams for which it was long famous as an article of commerce, but which are no longer {14} to be found in Syria, and where, in the time of Christ, the roadsides were shaded with sycamores—not the pseudo-platanus with which we are familiar, and which is not a sycomore at all, but the ficus sycomorus, the mulberry fig, which, often attaining the proportions of a handsome forest tree, still yields its wholesome and refreshing fruit among the humbler surroundings of to-day. The remains of a pool, five hundred and sixty-four feet long, part of an immense system of conduits still visible, which was the immediate cause of the fertility and beauty of the Roman Jericho, is said to indicate the whereabouts of Herod's palace.

The Jericho of crusading times was, probably, supplied with water from what is now locally known as the Ain es-Sultan (the Sultan's Spring), although its more suggestive name of Elijah's Fountain is still in use among the Christian population. Pilgrims of the fourth and fifth centuries record the tradition that it was here that the prophet healed the bitter water with salt. Salt is still thrown into a pool or cistern which, toward the end of the dry season, is found to be impregnated with noxious matter, animal or vegetable. As, before the time of the Roman water system, there was no other means of supply {15} it is almost certain that the ancient town must have stood near this, the only natural spring, and the site of the house of Rahab, still shown, may quite well have been in the neighbourhood indicated.

Rising almost perpendicularly a short distance beyond the Fountain of Elijah, is the Quarantana Mountain, first so called by the Crusaders, in memory of the forty days of the Temptation, although it seems to have been held sacred from a much earlier period, as there are remains of many hermitages, one of which is said to have been occupied by S. Chariton about 400 A.D.

It is a panorama wonderful not only in extent but in the amount of detail, which, in the cloudless air of the East, we are enabled to distinguish, and we would willingly pause longer, but the sun is high in the heavens, we have been six hours in the saddle, and, leaving our horses to follow, we find a pleasant relief from the glare in descending an almost perpendicular path into the Wady Kelt, the deep gorge of the brook Cherith, where a monastery marks the site of the alleged hiding-place of the prophet Elijah. It is perched on a narrow shelf, high up on the perpendicular rock wall of the ravine, and can {16} only have acquired its present resemblance to domestic architecture by slow and painful labour. The lower storey, of rough massive stones, apparently designed for a fortress, is all that remains of an ancient monastery, founded in 535, possibly upon the site of an earlier habitation of the Essenes, an esoteric sect of Jews, whose life somewhat resembled that of the religious Orders among Christians. The cave, high up in the face of the rock, alleged to have been occupied by Elijah, is now an oratory for the Greek monks, who, in 1880, returned to an old foundation of Koziba, and built an upper storey, with projecting balconies, from which one has a wonderful view of the gorge below.

We left our horses upon a little bridge, which spans the bed of the brook—where they found welcome shelter, after their giddy descent, under a vine-covered pergola—and then, following a zigzag path, we made our way within the doors of one of the many hospitable monasteries which, all over the Holy Land, are ready to offer at least shade and water, the two great boons of a hot country, to the weary and thirsty traveller. No question was made as to creed, even as to that of our officer, a Moslem, and we were allowed to spread the meal we had with us, with {17} kindly additions of water for drink and ablution, coffee, liqueur, and fresh green lemons.

Ignoring all question as to whether the prophet were fed by Arabs or by orabs (ravens) it is at least a pleasing sight to watch the relations of the wild birds of the gorge with his modern representatives. The old superior of the convent, silent, calm, with an expression of infinite resignation to the poverty, in every sense, of his ascetic life, seemed to recover some faint and passing interest in the beautiful world about him as, bidding us be silent within the window, he stepped out on to the balcony, and produced from his pocket some dried figs. Scarcely raising his voice, he called gently, Idoo sudar! Idoo sudar!—or such his cry sounded—Russian, as we understood, for "Come along, sir!" The blue air was flecked with gold, a morsel of the fruit was seized as it was thrown into the air, there was another flash of golden wings, and on the head, shoulders, and the extended arms of the old man there perched the exquisite blackbirds of the district—the "Tristram's grakle" of the Dead Sea. The sheen of the deep purple wing, with its orange lining, was wonderfully rich, and the creatures themselves were, in every movement, graceful as swallows. {18} The dainties finished, there was an instant flutter, and not a sign remained in all the clear, blue heaven of our visitors of a moment ago; only a shimmer of silver on the opposite cliff showed where a cloud of rock pigeons had descended to inquire into the cause of excitement among their neighbours.

After a couple of hours' rest we went on our way, following the narrow path which crept along the precipice, and looking with equal wonderment at the rocky hermitages above our heads and at those beneath our feet; some which seemed to be accessible only to birds, while others were so deep down in the narrow gorge that the necessaries of life have to be lowered to them from a roughly-formed crane upon a narrow shelf of level ground above.

It was interesting to notice that, even among men of similar religious impulses, and identical occupations and opportunities, individual character nevertheless finds occasion for expression. While some dwelt in holes in the rock, accessible only by a ladder, sometimes of rope, and in one case, by a voluntary asceticism, only by a pole, others showed a tendency to make the best of the situation—two or three had constructed gardens, verandahs, or porticos; one {19} dwelling at least would have been described by an auctioneer as a cottage orné, and some had even shown an ?sthetic realisation of what was befitting the situation, and had sought after effects of colour and form as well as of convenience. Not a human being was to be seen, but we wondered how many pairs of eyes were watching our movements; whether it were possible that the sound of our cheery voices, and the sight of our enjoyment, may not have touched some heart to sense of loss, have sounded some chord of regret, or even of remorse, have recalled memories of other days, when friendship and anticipation and sympathy and glad companionship were theirs, and life was other than the awaiting of death, and the setting sun brought a sense of something added to the days that were gone as well as of something subtracted from such as might—in God's providence—remain.

Our horses followed slowly down the glen, and the afterglow was beautifying even the desolate village of Jericho as we finally remounted and rode in among the groves of orange and banana.