BETHLEHEM

A sparkling morning followed a showery night, and all the little red and white and yellow flowers were lifting glad faces to the sun as we took the highroad to Bethlehem. Leaving the Jaffa Gate on the left, we crossed the head of the deep Valley of Hinnom, below the dirty Pool of the Sultan, and rode up the hill on the opposite side of the vale.

There was much rubbish and filth around us, and the sight of the Ophthalmic Hospital of the English Knights of Saint John, standing in the beauty of cleanness and order beside the road, did our eyes good.

Blindness is one of the common afflictions of the people of Palestine.

Neglect and ignorance and dirt and the plague of crawling flies spread the germs of disease from eye to eye, and the people submit to it with pathetic and irritating fatalism. It is hard to persuade these poor souls that the will of Allah or Jehovah in this matter ought not to be accepted until after it has been questioned. But the light of true and humane religion is spreading a little. We rejoiced to see the reception-room of the hospital filled with all sorts and conditions of men, women and children waiting for the good physicians who save and restore sight in the name of Jesus.

To the right, a little below us, lay the ugly railway station; before us, rising gently southward, extended the elevated Plain of Repham where David smote the host of the Philistines after he had heard "the sound of a going in the tops of the mulberry-trees." The red soil was cultivated in little farms and gardens. The almond-trees were in leaf; the hawthorn in blossom; the fig-trees were putting forth their tender green.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A Street in Bethlehem.]

A slowly ascending road brought us to the hill of Mar Elyas, and the so-called Well of the Magi. Here the legend says the Wise Men halted after they had left Jerusalem, and the star reappeared to guide them on to Bethlehem. Certain it is that they must have taken this road; and certain it is that both Bethlehem and Jerusalem, hidden from each other by the rising ground, are clearly visible to one who stands in the saddle of this hill.

There were fine views down the valleys to the east, with blue glimpses of the Dead Sea at the end of them. The supposed tomb of Rachel, a dingy little building with a white dome, interested us less than the broad lake of olive-orchards around the distant village of Beit Jala, and the green fields, pastures and gardens encircling the double hill of Bethlehem, the ancient "House of Bread." There was an aspect of fertility and friendliness about the place that seemed in harmony with its name and its poetic memories.

In a walled kitchen-garden at the entrance of the town was David's Well.

We felt no a.s.surance, of course, as we looked down into it, that this was the veritable place. But at all events it served to bring back to us one of the prettiest bits of romance in the Old Testament. When the bold son of Jesse had become a chieftain of outlaws and was besieged by the Philistines in the stronghold of Adullam, his heart grew thirsty for a draught from his father's well, whose sweetness he had known as a boy.

And when his three mighty men went up secretly at the risk of their lives, and broke through the host of their enemies, and brought their captain a vessel of this water, "he would not drink thereof, but poured it out unto Jehovah."

There was a division of opinion in our party in regard to this act. "It was sheer foolishness," said the Patriarch, "to waste anything that had cost so much to get. What must the three mighty men have thought when they saw that for which they had risked their lives poured out upon the ground?" "Ah, no," said the Lady. "It was the highest grat.i.tude, because it was touched with poetry. It was the best compliment that David could have given to his friends. Some gifts are too precious to be received in any other way than this." And in my heart I knew that she was right.

Riding through the narrow streets of the town, which is inhabited almost entirely by Christians, we noted the tranquil good looks of the women, a distinct type, rather short of stature, round-faced, placid and kind of aspect. Not a few of them had blue eyes. They wore dark-blue skirts, dark-red jackets, and a white veil over their heads, but not over their faces. Under the veil the married women wore a peculiar cap of stiff, embroidered black cloth, about six inches high, and across the front of this cap was strung their dowry of gold or silver coins. Such a dress, no doubt, was worn by the Virgin Mary, and such tranquil, friendly looks, I think, were hers, but touched with a rarer light of beauty shining from a secret source within.

A crowd of little boys and girls just released from school for their recess shouted and laughed and chased one another, pausing for a moment in round-eyed wonder when I pointed my camera at them. Donkeys and camels and sheep made our pa.s.sage through the town slow, and gave us occasion to look to our horses' footing. At one corner a great white sow ran out of an alley-way, followed by a twinkling litter of pink pigs. In the market-place we left our horses in the shadow of the monastery wall and entered, by a low door, the lofty, bare Church of the Nativity.

The long rows of immense marble pillars had some faded remains of painting on them. There were a few battered fragments of mosaic in the clerestory, dimly glittering. But the general effect of the whitewashed walls, the ancient brown beams and rafters of the roof, the large, empty s.p.a.ce, was one of extreme simplicity.

When we came into the choir and apse we found ourselves in the midst of complexity. The ownership of the different altars with their gilt ornaments, of the swinging lamps, of the separate doorways of the Greeks and the Armenians and the Latins, was bewildering. Dark, winding steps, slippery with the drippings from many candles, led us down into the Grotto of the Nativity. It was a cavern perhaps forty feet long and ten feet wide, lit by thirty pendent lamps (Greek, Armenian and Latin): marble floor and walls hung with draperies; a silver star in the pavement before the altar to mark the spot where Christ was born; a marble manger in the corner to mark the cradle in which Christ was laid; a never-ceasing stream of poor pilgrims, who come kneeling, and kissing the star and the stones and the altar for Christ's sake.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Market-place, Bethlehem.]

We paused for a while, after we had come up, to ask ourselves whether what we had seen was in any way credible. Yes, credible, but not convincing. No doubt the ancient Khan of Bethlehem must have been somewhere near this spot, in the vicinity of the market-place of the town. No doubt it was the custom, when there were natural hollows or artificial grottos in the rock near such an inn, to use them as shelters and stalls for the cattle. It is quite possible, it is even probable, that this may have been one of the shallow caverns used for such a purpose. If so, there is no reason to deny that this may be the place of the wondrous birth, where, as the old French _Noel_ has it:

"_Dieu parmy les pastoreaux, Sous la creche des toreaux, Dans les champs a voulu naistre; Et non parmy les arroys Des grands princes et des roys,-- Lui des plus grands roys le maistre._"

But to the eye, at least, there is no reminder of the scene of the Nativity in this close and stifling chapel, hung with costly silks and embroideries, glittering with rich lamps, filled with the smoke of incense and waxen tapers. And to the heart there is little suggestion of the lonely night when Joseph found a humble refuge here for his young bride to wait in darkness, pain and hope for her hour to come.

In the church above, the Latins and Armenians and Greeks guard their privileges and prerogatives jealously. There have been fights here about the driving of a nail, the hanging of a picture, the sweeping of a bit of the floor. The Crimean War began in a quarrel between the Greeks and the Latins, and a mob-struggle in the Church of the Nativity. Underneath the floor, to the north of the Grotto of the Nativity, is the cave in which Saint Jerome lived peaceably for many years, translating the Bible into Latin. That was better than fighting.

II

ON THE ROAD TO HEBRON

We ate our lunch at Bethlehem in a curiosity-shop. The table was spread at the back of the room by the open window. All around us were hanging innumerable chaplets and rosaries of mother-of-pearl, of carnelian, of carved olive-stones, of gla.s.s beads; trinkets and souvenirs of all imaginable kinds, tiny sheep-bells and inlaid boxes and carved fans filled the cases and cabinets. Through the window came the noise of people busy at Bethlehem's chief industry, the cutting and polishing of mother-of-pearl for mementoes. The jingling bells of our pack-train, pa.s.sing the open door, reminded us that our camp was to be pitched miles away on the road to Hebron.

We called for the horses and rode on through the town. Very beautiful and peaceful was the view from the southern hill, looking down upon the pastures of Bethlehem where "shepherds watched their flocks by night,"

and the field of Boaz where Ruth followed the reapers among the corn.

Down dale and up hill we journeyed; bright green of almond-trees, dark green of carob-trees, snowy blossoms of apricot-trees, rosy blossoms of peach-trees, argent verdure of olive-trees, adorning the valleys. Then out over the wilder, rockier heights; and past the great empty Pools of Solomon, lying at the head of the Wadi Artas, watched by a square ruined castle; and up the winding road and along the lofty flower-sprinkled ridges; and at last we came to our tents, pitched in the wide, green Wadi el-'Arrub, beside the bridge.

Springs gushed out of the hillside here and ran down in a little laughing brook through lawns full of tiny pink and white daisies, and broad fields of tangled weeds and flowers, red anemones, blue iris, purple mallows, scarlet adonis, with here and there a strip of cultivated ground shimmering with silky leeks or dotted with young cuc.u.mbers. There was a broken aqueduct cut in the rock at the side of the valley, and the brook slipped by a large ruined reservoir.

"George," said I to the Bethlehemite, as he sat meditating on the edge of the dry pool, "what do you think of this valley?"

"I think," said George, "that if I had a few thousand dollars to buy the land, with all this runaway water I could make it blossom like a peach-tree."

The cold, green sunset behind the western hills darkened into night. The air grew chilly, dropping nearly to the point of frost. We missed the blazing camp-fire of the Canadian forests, and went to bed early, tucking in the hot-water bags at our feet and piling on the blankets and rugs. All through the night we could hear the pa.s.sers-by shouting and singing along the Hebron road. There was one unknown traveller whose high-pitched, quavering Arab song rose far away, and grew louder as he approached, and pa.s.sed us in a whirlwind of lugubrious music, and tapered slowly off into distance and silence--a chant a mile long.

The morning broke through flying clouds, with a bitter, wet, west wind rasping the bleak highlands. There were spiteful showers with intervals of mocking sunshine; it was a mischievous and prankish bit of weather, no day for riding. But the Lady was indomitable, so we left the Patriarch in his tent, wrapped ourselves in garments of mackintosh and took the road again.

The country, at first, was wild and barren, a wilderness of rocks and thorn bushes and stunted scrub oaks. Now and then a Greek partridge, in its beautiful plumage of fawn-gray, marked with red and black about the head, clucked like a hen on the stony hillside, or whirred away in low, straight flight over the bushes. Flocks of black and brown goats, with pendulous ears, skipped up and down the steep ridges, standing up on their hind legs to browse the foliage of the little oak shrubs, or showing themselves off in a b.u.t.ting-match on top of a big rock. Marching on the highroad they seemed sedate, despondent, pattering along soberly with flapping ears. In the midst of one flock I saw a fierce-looking tattered pastor tenderly carrying a little black kid in his bosom--as tenderly as if it were a lamb. It seemed like an ill.u.s.tration of a picture that I saw long ago in the Catacombs, in which the infant church of Christ silently expressed the richness of her love, the breadth of her hope:

"On those walls subterranean, where she hid Her head 'mid ignominy, death and tombs, She her Good Shepherd's hasty image drew-- And on His shoulders, not a lamb, a kid."

As we drew nearer to Hebron the region appeared more fertile, and the landscape smiled a little under the gleams of wintry sunshine. There were many vineyards; in most of them the vines trailed along the ground, but in some they were propped up on sticks, like old men leaning on crutches. Almond and apricot-trees flourished. The mulberries, the olives, the sycamores were abundant. Peasants were ploughing the fields with their crooked sticks shod with a long iron point. When a man puts his hand to such a plough he dares not look back, else it will surely go aside. It makes a scratch, not a furrow. (I saw a man in the hospital at Nazareth who had his thigh pierced clear through by one of these dagger-like iron plough points.)

Children were gathering roots and thorn branches for firewood. Women were carrying huge bundles on their heads. Donkey-boys were urging their heavy-laden animals along the road, and cameleers led their deliberate strings of ungainly beasts by a rope or a light chain reaching from one nodding head to another.

A camel's load never looks as large as a donkey's, but no doubt he often finds it heavy, and he always looks displeased with it. There is something about the droop of a camel's lower lip which seems to express unalterable disgust with the universe. But the rest of the world around Hebron appeared to be reasonably happy. In spite of weather and poverty and hard work the ploughmen sang in the fields, the children skipped and whistled at their tasks, the pa.s.sers-by on the road shouted greetings to the labourers in the gardens and vineyards. Somewhere round about here is supposed to lie the Valley of Eshcol from which the Hebrew spies brought back the monstrous bunch of grapes, a cl.u.s.ter that reached from the height of a man's shoulder to the ground.

III

THE TENTING-GROUND OF ABRAHAM

Hebron lies three thousand feet above the sea, and is one of the ancient market-places and shrines of the world. From time immemorial it has been a holy town, a busy town, and a turbulent town. The Hitt.i.tes and the Amorites dwelt here, and Abraham, a nomadic shepherd whose tents followed his flocks over the land of Canaan, bought here his only piece of real estate, the field and cave of Machpelah. He bought it for a tomb,--even a nomad wishes to rest quietly in death,--and here he and his wife Sarah, and his children Isaac and Rebekah, and his grandchildren Jacob and Leah were buried.

The modern town has about twenty thousand inhabitants, chiefly Mohammedans of a fanatical temper, and is incredibly dirty. We pa.s.sed the muddy pool by which King David, when he was reigning here, hanged the murderers of Ishbosheth. We climbed the crooked streets to the Mosque which covers the supposed site of the cave of Machpelah. But we did not see the tomb of Abraham, for no "infidel" is allowed to pa.s.s beyond the seventh step in the flight of stairs which leads up to the doorway.

As we went down through the narrow, dark, crowded Bazaar a violent storm of hail broke over the city, pelting into the little open shops and covering the streets half an inch deep with snowy sand and pebbles of ice. The tempest was a rude joke, which seemed to surprise the surly crowd into a good humour. We laughed with the Moslems as we took shelter together from our common misery under a stone archway.

After the storm had pa.s.sed we ate our midday meal on a housetop, which a friend of the dragoman put at our disposal, and rode out in the afternoon to the Oak of Abraham on the hill of Mamre. The tree is an immense, battered veteran, with a trunk ten feet in diameter, and wide-flung, knotted arms which still bear a few leaves and acorns. It has been inclosed with a railing, patched up with masonry, partially protected by a roof. The Russian monks who live near by have given it pious care, yet its inevitable end is surely near.

The death of a great sheltering tree has a kind of dumb pathos. It seems like the pa.s.sing away of something beneficent and helpless, something that was able to shield others but not itself.

On this hill, under the oaks of Mamre, Abraham's tents were pitched many a year, and here he entertained the three angels unawares, and Sarah made pancakes for them, and listened behind the tent-flap while they were talking with her husband, and laughed at what they said. This may not be the very tree that flung its shadow over the tent, but no doubt it is a son or a grandson of that tree, and the acorns that still fall from it may be the seeds of other oaks to shelter future generations of pilgrims; and so throughout the world, the ancient covenant of friendship is unbroken, and man remains a grateful lover of the big, kind trees.

We got home to our camp in the green meadow of the springs late in the afternoon, and on the third day we rode back to Jerusalem, and pitched the tents in a new place, on a hill opposite the Jaffa Gate, with a splendid view of the Valley of Hinnom, the Tower of David, and the western wall of the city.

_A PSALM OF FRIENDLY TREES_

_I will sing of the bounty of the big trees, They are the green tents of the Almighty, He hath set them up for comfort and for shelter._

_Their cords hath he knotted in the earth, He hath driven their stakes securely, Their roots take hold of the rocks like iron._

_He sendeth into their bodies the sap of life, They lift themselves lightly towards the heavens.