Paine Albert Bigelow
The Ship-Dwellers: A Story of a Happy Cruise

XXIX
DAMASCUS, THE GARDEN BEAUTIFUL

Later, we drove to the foot of Mohammed's Hill – the hill from which the Prophet looked down on the Pearl of the East and decided that as he could have only one paradise he would wait for the next. They have built a little tower to mark the spot where he rested, and we thought we would climb up there.

We didn't, however. The carriages could only go a little way beyond the city outskirts, and when we started to climb that blistering, barren hillside afoot we changed our minds rapidly. We had permission to go as high as we pleased, but it is of no value. Anybody could give it. Laura and I and a German newspaper man were the only ones who toiled up high enough to look down through the mystical haze on the vision Mohammed saw. Heavens! but it was hot up there! And this is March – early spring! How those Quaker City pilgrims stood it to travel across the Syrian desert in August I cannot imagine. In the Innocents I find this observation:

"The sun-flames shot down like shafts of fire that stream out of a blowpipe. The rays seemed to fall in a steady deluge on my head and pass downward like rain from a roof."

That is a white-hot description, but not too intense, I think, for Syrian summer-time.

Another thing we noticed up there: Damascus is growing – in that direction at least. Older than history, the place is actually having a boom. All the houses out that way are new – mud-walled, but some of them quite pretentious. They have pushed out far beyond the gardens, across the barren plain, and they are climbing the still more barren slope. They stand there in the baking sun, unshaded as yet by any living thing. One pities the women shut up behind those tiny barred windows. These places will have gardens about them some day. Already their owners are scratching the earth with their crooked sticks, and they will plant and water and make the desert bloom.

Being free in the afternoon, Laura and I engaged Habib and a carriage and went adventuring on our own account. We let Habib manage the excursion, and I shall always remember it as a sweet, restful experience.

We visited a Moslem burying-ground first, and the tomb of Fatima – the original Fatima – Mohammed's beautiful daughter, who married a rival prophet, Ali, yet sleeps to-day with honor in a little mosque-like tomb. We passed a tree said to have been planted by the Mohammedan conqueror of Damascus nearly thirteen hundred years ago – an enormous tree, ten feet through or more – on one side a hollow which would hold a dozen men, standing.

Then at last we came to the gardens of Damascus, and got out and walked among the olive-trees and the peach and almond and apricot – most of them in riotous bloom. Summer cultivation had only just begun, and few workmen were about. Later the gardens will swarm with them, and they will be digging and irrigating, and afterward gathering the fruit, preserving and drying it, and sending it to market. Habib showed us the primitive methods of doing these things.

How sweet and quiet and fragrant it was there among the flowering trees! In one place a little group of Syrian Christians were recreating (it being Sunday), playing some curious dulcimer instrument and singing a weird hymn.

We crossed the garden, and sat on the grass under the peach-bloom while Habib went for the carriage. Sitting there, we realized that the guide-book had been only fair to Damascus.

"For miles around it is a wilderness of gardens – gardens with roses among the tangled shrubberies, and with fruit on the branches overhead. Everywhere among the trees the murmur of unseen rivulets is heard."

That sounds like fairyland, but it is only Damascus – Damascus in June, when the fruit is ripening and the water-ways are full.

We drove out of Damascus altogether – far out across a fertile plain, to the slopes of the West Lebanon hills. Then turning, we watched the sun slip down the sky while Habib told us many things. Whatever there is to know, Habib knows, and to localities and landmarks he fitted stories and traditions which brought back all the old atmosphere and made this Damascus the Damascus of fable and dreams.

Habib pointed out landmarks near and far – minarets of the great mosque, the direction of Jerusalem, of Mecca; he showed us where the waters of Damascus rise and where they waste into the desert sands. To the westward was Mount Hermon; southward came the lands of Naphtali, and Bashan where the giant Og once reigned. All below us lay Palestine; Mount Hermon was the watch-tower, Damascus the capital of the North.

Damascus in the sunset, its domes and minarets lifting above the lacing green! There is no more beautiful picture in the world than that. We turned to it again and again when every other interest had waned – the jewel, the "pearl set in emeralds," on the desert's edge. Laura and I will always remember that Sunday evening vision of the old city, the things that Habib told us, and the drive home.

Next to the city itself I think the desert interested us. It begins just a little beyond Damascus, Habib said, and stretches the length of the Red Sea and to the Persian Gulf. A thousand miles down its length lies Mecca, to which pilgrims have journeyed for ages – a horde of them every year. There is a railway, now, as far as Tebook, but Mecca is still six hundred miles beyond. The great annual pilgrimages, made up of the faithful from all over Asia and portions of Europe and Africa, depart from Damascus, and those that survive it return after long months of wasting desert travel. Habib said that a great pilgrimage was returning now; the city was full of holy men.

Then he told us about the dromedary mail that crosses the desert from Damascus to Bagdad, like a through express. It is about five hundred miles across as the stork flies, but the dromedary is not disturbed by distance. He destroys it at the rate of fifteen miles an hour, and capers in fresh and smiling at the other end. Habib did not advise dromedary travel. It is very rough, he said. Nothing but an Arab trained to the business could stand it. Once an Englishman wanted to go through by the dromedary mail, and did go, though they implored him to travel in the regular way. He got through all right, but his liver and his heart had changed places, and it took three doctors seven days to rearrange his works.

A multitude was pouring out of the city when we reached the gates – dwellers in the lands about. We entered and turned aside into quiet streets, the twilight gathering about mysterious doorways and in dim shops and stalls, where were bowed, turbaned men who never seemed to sell anything, or to want to sell anything – who barely noticed us as we passed through the Grand Bazaar, where it was getting dark, and all the drowsy merchants of all the drowsy merchandise were like still shadows that only moved a little to let us pass. Out again into streets that were full of dusk, and dim flitting figures and subdued sounds.

All at once I caught sight of a black stone jar hanging at the door of a very small and dusky booth. It was such a jar as is used in Damascus to-day for water – was used there in the time of Abraham.

"Habib!"

I had wanted one of the pots from the first. The carriage stops instantly.

"Habib! That black water-jar – a small one!"

I had meant to bargain for it myself, but Habib is ahead of me. He scorns to bargain for such a trifle, and with such a merchant. He merely seizes the jar, says a guttural word or two in whatever tongue the man knows, flings him a paltry coin, and is back in the carriage, directing our course along the darkening, narrow way.

What a wonderful life the dark is bringing out! There, in front of that coffee-house, that row of men smoking nargileh – surely they are magicians, every one. "That silent group with shaven faces and snowy beards: who are they, Habib?"

"Mongolians," he says. "Pilgrims returning from Mecca. They live far over to the north of China, but still are followers of the Prophet." The scope of Islamism is wide – oh yes, very wide, and increasing. That group gathered at the fountain – their dress, their faces —

"Habib!"

The horses come up with a jerk.

"A copper water-jar, Habib! An old, old man is filling it – such a strange pattern" —

Habib is down instantly, and amid the crowd. Cautiously I follow. The old man is stooped, wrinkled, travel-worn. His robe and his turban are full of dust. He is listening to Habib and replying briefly.

Habib explains. The pilgrim is returning with it from Mecca; it is very old; he cannot part with it. My heart sinks; every word adds value to the treasure. Habib tries again, while I touch the ancient, curiously wrought jar lovingly. The pilgrim draws away. He will hardly allow me even this comfort.

We return to the carriage sadly. The driver starts. Some one comes running behind, calling. Again we stop; a boy calls something to Habib.

"He will sell," Habib laughs, "and why not? He demands a napoleon. Of course you will not give it!"

Oh, coward heart! I cannot, after that. I have the napoleon and the desire, but I cannot appear a fool before Habib.

"No, it is too much. Drive on."

We dash forward; the East closes behind us; the opportunity is forever lost.

If one could only be brave at the instant! All my days shall I recall the group at the fountain: that bent, travel-stained pilgrim; that strangely fashioned water-pot which perhaps came down to him from patriarchal days. How many journeys to Mecca had it made; how many times had it moistened the parching lips of some way-worn pilgrim dragging across the burning sand; how many times had it furnished water for absolution before the prayer in the desert! And all this could have been mine. For a paltry napoleon I could have had the talisman for my own – all the wonder of the East, its music, its mystery, its superstition; I could have fondled it and gazed on it and re-created each picture at a touch.

Oh, Habib, Habib, may the Prophet forgive you; for, alas, I never can!

At the station next morning a great horde of pilgrims were waiting for the train which would bear them to Beirut – Mongolians, many of them, who had been on the long, long, pilgrimage over land and sea. At Beirut, we were told, seven steamers were waiting to take them on the next stage of their homeward journey. What a weary way they had yet to travel!

They were all loaded down with baggage. They had their bundles, clothing, quilts, water-bottles: and I wandered about among them vainly hoping to find my pilgrim of the copper pot. Hopeless, indeed. There were pots in plenty, but they were all new or unsightly things.

All the pilgrims were old men, for the Moslem, like most of the rest of us, puts off his spiritual climax until he has acquired his material account. He has to, in fact; for, even going the poorest way and mainly afoot, a journey of ten or twelve thousand miles across mountain and desert, wilderness and wave cannot be made without substance.

We took a goodly number of them on our train. Freight-cars crowded with them were attached behind, and we crawled across the mountains with that cargo of holy men, who poured out at every other station and prostrated themselves, facing Mecca, to pray for our destruction. At least, I suppose they did that. I know they made a most imposing spectacle at their devotions, and the Moslem would hardly overlook an enemy in such easy praying distance.

However, we crossed the steeps, skirted the precipices safely enough, and by-and-by a blue harbor lay below, and in it, like a fair picture, the ship – home. We had been gone less than a week – it seemed a year.

XXX
WHERE PILGRIMS GATHER IN

At some time last night we crossed over the spot where the Lord stirred up a mighty tempest and a great fish to punish Jonah, and this morning at daybreak we were in the harbor of Jaffa, "the beautiful," from which port Jonah sailed on that remarkable cruise.

We were not the only ones there. Two other great excursion steamers lay at anchor, the Arabic and the Moltke, their decks filled with our fellow-countrymen, and I think the several parties of ship-dwellers took more interest in looking at one another, and in comparing the appearance of their respective vessels, than in the rare vision of Jaffa aglow with morning. Three ship-loads at once! It seemed like a good deal of an invasion to land on these sacred shores. But then we remembered how many invasions had landed at Jaffa – how Alexander and Titus had been there before us, besides all the crusades – so a modest scourge like ours would hardly matter. As for that military butcher, Napoleon, who a little more than a century ago murdered his way through this inoffending land, he shot four thousand Turkish prisoners here on the Jaffa sands, after accepting their surrender under guarantee of protection. We promised ourselves that we would do nothing like that. We might destroy a pedler now and then, or a baksheesh fiend; but four thousand, even of that breed, would be too heavy a contract.

The Patriarch knew all about Jaffa. It is one of his special landmarks, being the chief seaport of the Phœnicians, the one place they never really surrendered. A large share of the vast traffic that went in and out of Palestine in the old days went by Jaffa, and a great deal goes that way still. The cedarwood from Lebanon, used in Solomon's Temple, was brought by water to this port; the treasure and rich goods that went down to Jerusalem in the day of her ancient glory all came this way; her conquerors landed here. The blade and brand prepared for Jerusalem were tried experimentally on Jaffa. According to Josephus, eighty thousand of her inhabitants perished at one time. Yet Jaffa has survived. Her harbor, which is not really a harbor at all, but merely an anchorage, with a landing dangerous and uncertain, has still been sufficient to keep her the chief seaport of Judea.

There is another reason for Jaffa's survival. Beyond her hills lie the sacred cities of Jerusalem and Bethlehem. The fields that knew Ruth and Benjamin and a man named Jesus lie also there. From Jaffa in every direction stretch lands made memorable by stories and traditions in which the God and the prophets of at least three religions are intimately concerned. So during long centuries Jaffa has been a holy gateway, and through its portals the tide of pilgrimage has never ceased to flow.

Some of us who were to put in full time in Egypt would have only a few days in the Holy Land, and we were off the ship presently, being pulled through the turquoise water by boatmen who sang a barbaric chorus as they bent over their huge, clumsy oars. Then we were ashore and in carriages, and in another moment were "jumping through Jaffa," as one of the party expressed it, in a way that made events and landmarks flit together like the spokes of a wheel.

We visited the tomb of Dorcas, whom Peter raised from the dead, though for some reason we did not feel a positive conviction that it was the very tomb – perhaps because we did not have time to get up a conviction – and we called at the house of Simon the Tanner. It was with Simon, "whose house is by the seaside," that Peter lodged when he had his "vision of tolerance," in which it was made known to him that "God is no respecter of persons, but only of righteousness." It is truly by the seaside, and there is an ancient tanner's vat in the court-yard. But I hope the place was cleaner when Peter lodged there than it is now. One had to step carefully, and, though it did not smell of a tanyard, it did of several other things. Many travellers, including Dean Stanley, have accepted this as the veritable house where Simon dwelt and St. Peter lodged. Those people ought to get together and have it cleaned up. I could believe in it then myself.

Jaffa, as a whole, could stand the scrub-brush and the hose. It is not "the beautiful" from within. It is wretchedly unbeautiful, though just as we were getting ready to leave it we did have one genuine vision. From the enclosures of the Greek Church we looked across an interminable orange-grove, in which the trees seemed mere shrubs, but were literally massed with golden fruit – the whole blending away into tinted haze and towering palms. No blight, no vileness, no inodorous breath, but only the dreamlit mist and the laden trees – the Orient of our long ago.

One might reasonably suppose that, as often as parties like ours travel over the railway that potters along from Jaffa to Jerusalem, there would be no commotion, no controversy with the officials – that the guard would only need to come in and check up our tickets and let us go.

Nothing of the kind; every such departure as ours is a function, an occasion – an entirely new proposition, to be considered and threshed out in a separate and distinct fashion. Before we were fairly seated in the little coach provided, dark-skinned men came in one after another to look us over and get wildly excited – over our beauty, perhaps; I could discover nothing else unusual about us. They would wave their hands and carry on, first inside and then on the platform, where they would seem to settle it. When they had paid us several visits of this kind, they locked us in and went away, and we expected to start.

Not at all; they came back presently and did it all over again, only louder. Then our dragoman appeared, and bloodshed seemed imminent. When they went away again he said it was nothing – just the usual business of getting started.

By-and-by some of us discovered that our bags had not been put on the train, so we drifted out to look for them. We found them here and there, with from two to seven miscreants battling over each as to which should have the piastre or two of baksheesh collectible for handing our things from the carriage to the train. Such is the manner of graft in the Holy Land. It lacks organization and does not command respect.

The station was a hot, thirsty place. We loaded up with baskets of oranges, the great, sweet, juicy oranges of Jaffa – the finest oranges in the world, I am sure – then we forgot all our delays and troubles, for we were moving out through the groves and gardens of the suburbs, entering the Plains of Sharon – "a fold for flocks, a fertile land, blossoming as the rose."

That old phrase expresses it exactly. I have never seen a place that so completely conveyed the idea of fertility as those teeming, haze-haunted plains of Sharon. Level as a floor, the soil dark, loose, and loamy; here green with young wheat, there populous with labor – men and women, boys and girls, dressed in the old, old dress, tilling the fields in the old, old manner; flocks and herds tended by such shepherds as saw the Star rise over Bethlehem; girls carrying water-jars on their heads; camel trains swinging across the horizon – a complete picture of primal husbandry, it was – a vast allegory of increase. I have seen agricultural and pastoral life on a large scale in America, where we do all of the things with machinery and many of them with steam, and would find it hard to plough with a camel and a crooked stick; but I have somehow never felt such a sense of tillage and production – of communing with mother earth and drawing life and sustenance from her bosom – as came to me there crossing the Plains of Sharon, the garden of Syria.

It is a goodly tract for that country – about fifty miles long and from six to fifteen wide. The tribes of Dan and Manasseh owned it in the old days, and to look out of the car-window at their descendants is to see those first families that Joshua settled there, for they have never changed.

Our dragoman began to point out sites and landmarks. Here was the Plain of Joshua, where Samson made firebrands of three hundred foxes and destroyed the standing corn of the Philistines. The tower ahead is at Ramleh, and was built by the crusaders nearly a thousand years ago – Ramleh being the Arimathea where lived Joseph, who provided the Saviour with a sepulchre. Also, it is said to be the place where in the days when Samuel judged Israel the Jews besought him for a king, and acquired Saul and the line of David and Solomon as a result. To the eastward lies the Valley of Ajalon, where Joshua stopped the astronomical clock for the only time in a million ages, that he might slaughter some remaining Amorites before dark.

We are out of the Plains of Sharon by this time, running through a profitless-looking country, mostly rock and barren, hardly worth fighting over, it would seem. Yet there were plenty of people to be killed here in the old days, and as late as fifteen hundred years after Joshua the Roman Emperor Hadrian slaughtered so many Jews at Bittir (a place we shall pass presently) that the horses waded to their nostrils in blood, and a stone weighing several pounds was swept along by the ruby tide. The guide told us this, and said if we did not believe it he could produce the stone.

Landmarks fairly overlap one another. Here, at Hill Gezer, are the ruins of an ancient city presented to Solomon by one of his seven hundred fathers-in-law. Yonder at Ekron so much history has been made that a chapter would be required to record even a list of the events. Ekron was one of the important cities which Joshua did not capture, perhaps because he could not manage the solar system permanently. The whole route fairly bristles with Bible names, and we are variously affected. When we are shown the footprints of Joshua and Jacob and David and Solomon we are full of interest. When we recall that this is also the land of Phut and Cush and Buz and Jidlaph and Pildash we are moved almost to tears.

For those last must have been worthy men. The Bible records nothing against them, which is more than can be said of the others named. Take Jacob, for instance. I have searched carefully, and I fail to find anything to his credit beyond the fact that he procreated the Lord's chosen people. I do find that he deceived his father, defrauded his brother, outmanœuvred his rascally father-in-law, and was a craven at last before Esau, who had been rewarded for his manhood and forgiveness and wrongs by being classed with the Ishmaelites, a name that carries with it a reproach to this day.

Then there is Solomon. We need not go into the matter of his thousand wives and pretty favorites. Long ago we condoned that trifling irregularity as incident to the period – related in some occult but perfectly reasonable way to great wisdom. No, the wives are all right – also the near-wives, we have swallowed those, too; but then there comes in his heresy, his idolatry – all those temples built to heathen gods when he had become magnificent and mighty and full of years. There was that altar which he set up to Moloch on the hill outside of Jerusalem (called to this day the Hill of Offence), an altar for the sacrifice of children by fire. Even Tiberius Cæsar and Nero did not go as far as that. I'm sorry, and I shall be damned for it, no doubt, but I think, on the whole, in the language of the Diplomat, I shall have to "pass Solomon up." Never mind about the other two. Joshua's record is good enough if one cares for a slayer of women and children, and David was a poet – a supreme poet, a divine poet – which accounts for a good deal. Still, he did not need to put the captured Moabites under saws and harrows of iron and make them walk through brick-kilns, as described in II. Samuel xii: 31, to be picturesque. Neither did he need to kill Uriah the Hittite in order to take his wife away from him. Uriah would probably have parted with her on easier terms.

It is sad enough to reflect that the Bible, in its good, old, relentless way, found it necessary to record such things as these against our otherwise Sunday-school heroes and models. Nothing of the sort is set down against Buz and Cush and Phut and Pildash and Jidlaph. Very likely they were about perfect. I wish I knew where they sleep.

The nearer one approaches Jerusalem the more barren and unproductive becomes the country. There are olive-groves and there are cultivated fields, but there are more of flinty hillsides and rocky steeps. The habitations are no longer collected in villages, in the Syrian fashion, but are scattered here and there, with wide sterile places between. There would seem to be not enough good land in any one place to support a village.

I suppose this is the very home of baksheesh. I know at every station mendicants, crippled and blind – always blind – come swarming about, holding up piteous hands and repeating endlessly the plaintive wail, "Baksheesh! bak-sheesh!" One's heart grows sick and hard by turns. There are moments when you long for the wealth of a Rockefeller to give all these people a financial standing, and there are moments when you long for a Gatling-gun to turn loose in their direction. We are only weak and human. We may pity the hungry fly ever so much, but we destroy him.

I think, by-the-way, some of these beggars only cry baksheesh from habit, and never expect to get anything. I think so, because here and there groups of them stand along the railway between stations, and hold out their hands, and voice the eternal refrain as we sweep by. It is hardly likely that any one ever flings anything out of a car-window. Pity becomes too sluggish in the East to get action as promptly as that.

It was toward evening when we ran into a rather modern little railway station, and were told that we were "there." We got out of the train then, and found ourselves in such a howling mob of humanity as I never dreamed could gather in this drowsy land. We were about the last party of the season, it seems, and the porters and beggars and cabmen and general riffraff were going to make the most of us. We were seized and dragged and torn and lifted – our dragoman could keep us together about as well as one cowboy could handle a stampeded herd. I have no distinct recollection of how we managed to reach the carriages, but the first words I heard after regaining consciousness were:

"That pool down there is where Solomon was anointed king."

I began to take notice then. We were outside a range of lofty battlemented walls, approaching a wide gate flanked by an imposing tower that might belong to the Middle Ages. We looked down on the squalid pool of Gihon, and I tried to visualize the scene of Solomon's coronation there, which I confess I found difficult. Then we turned to the tower and the entrance to the Holy City.

We were entering Jerusalem by the Jaffa gate, and the tower was the Tower of David.