environment counts for much in national life. a country knows itself, and asserts itself, as in contrast with what is immediately over its border; or it retains connection with the neighbouring life, and is what it is partly because the region next it overflows into its life. at any rate, to understand anything more than the colour of a land—indeed even to understand that, as we shall see—it is necessary to begin outside it and know something of its surroundings. for palestine, environment means sea and desert—sea along a straight line for the most part unbroken by any crease or wrinkle of coast-edge which might serve for a harbour, and desert thrown round all the rest, except the mountainous north. palestine is a great oasis—a fertile resting-place for travellers making the grand journey from egypt to mesopotamia; between which kingdoms she was ever also the buffer state in war and politics. these nations were her visitors, her guests, her terrors, but they never were her neighbours. her neighbours are the sea and the desert.{21}
the sea she never took for a friend. with no harbour, nor any visible island to tempt her to adventure, and no sailor blood in her veins, she hated and feared the sea, and thought of it with ill-will. there is little of the wistfulness of romance in her thought of the dwellers in its uttermost parts; little of the sense of beauty in her poetry of the breaking waves. she views the ph?nician trader who does business on the ocean as a person to be astonished at rather than to be counted heroic. she exults in the fact that god has his path on the great waters, but has no wish to make any journey there herself. her angels plant their feet upon the sea, and she looks forward almost triumphantly to the time when it will be dried up and disappear. meanwhile its inaccessible huge depth is for her poets a sort of gehenna—a fit place for throwing off evil things beyond the chance of their reappearing. sins are to be cast into it, and offenders, with millstones at their necks.
the desert was israel’s real neighbour. south-east from her it stretched for a thousand miles. from n.n.e. round through e. and s. to w. it hemmed her in. to a briton, watching the departure of the bagdad dromedary post from damascus, the desert seems infinitely more appalling and unnatural than the sea. for ten days these uncanny beasts and men will travel, marching (it is said) twenty hours out of every twenty-four. the stretch of dreariness which opens to the western imagination, as you watch the lessening specks in the tawny distance, is indescribable. to the{22} eastern it is not so, and it never was so. he knows its horrors, and yet he loves it. the modern arab calls it nefud (i.e. “exhausted,” “spent”), and, according to palgrave, there are in the arabian desert sands no less than 600 feet in depth. yet with all its horrors it is after all his home.
the desert is not all consecrated to death. besides the occasional oases which dot its barren expanse, there are many regions where grass and herbage may be had continually so long as the flocks keep wandering. accordingly the long low black tent, with its obliquely pitched tent-ropes and skilfully driven pegs, takes the place of such substantial building as might create a city. it has been so for countless generations, until now the desert arab fears walls and will not be persuaded to enter them. kinglake gives a remarkable instance of this, telling of a journey to gaza on which his arabs actually abandoned their camels rather than accompany them within the gates.[1]
colonel conder insists that the arabs are entirely distinct from the fellahin of the syrian villages; yet he and other writers call attention to the borderland east of jordan where the boundaries of the rival races swing to and fro with the varying successes or failures of the years. in places where the land lies open, as at the plain of esdraelon, the east invades the west. no one who travels in palestine can fail to be impressed—most will probably be surprised—by the frequency with which those black hair-cloth tents are{23} seen, sprawling like the skin of some wild-cat pegged out along the ground. if the question be asked what becomes of them, the day’s journey will likely enough supply the answer. in the market-place of a town you may see their inhabitants trading their desert ware for city produce. but even such slight contact of city with desert evidently has its temptations. in the valley below, the tent is pitched on the edge of a field rudely cultivated. the nomad here has already yielded to the agriculturist. descend to the jordan valley, and you shall see the hair-cloth covering a hut whose sides are of woven reeds from the river, and a little farther on the covering itself will be exchanged for a roof of reeds. finally, you may look from the road that runs between the two main sources of the jordan, and see in the southern distance, shining out against the lush verdure of the huleh morass, the red-tiled roof of a two-storey villa—the house of the sheikh of the local tribe of arabs![2] this immigration has gone on from time immemorial, and it was some such process by which palestine received all her earlier inhabitants. once fixed in cities and settled down to the cultivation of the fields, their character and way of life so changed that the desert and its folk became their enemies. yet a deeper loyalty remained through all such alienation; and, in spite of dangers and even hostilities, the desert was still their former home.{24}
it is not only by its neighbourhood, however, that the desert has influenced palestine. nature has done her best to shut it off from the land, from the eastern side at least, by the tremendous barrier of the jordan valley. not even the angel of the wilderness, one would think, might cross that defence. yet even that barrier has been crossed, and a bird’s-eye view of palestine shews a land bitten into by great tracts of real desert west of jordan. in a modified degree, the whole of judea—that great stone wedge to which reference was made in chapter i.—exemplifies this. half the judean territory is wilderness, and the other half is only kept back from the desert by sheer force of industry. even on the western side this is strikingly seen. as viewed from the ocean, the desolate sand and scrub of the coast seems to clutch at the land, stretching here and there far inland from the shore. but the desert of judah, in the south-east of the country, is the great intrusion of the desert upon palestine. the sea-board of palestine is perhaps the smoothest and most unbroken of any country in the world. but if a coast-line of the desert were sketched in the same way as a sea-coast is shewn on maps, the edge would show an outline almost as broken as that of the greek coast, with many a bay and creek. the desert is the sea of syria, and its inthrust is like that of great fingers feeling their way through the pastures to the very gates of her cities, and at one place reaching a point within a mile or two of her capital. disraeli describes graphically the transition from canaan to{25}
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on the road from jerusalem to bethany.
stony arabia—the first sandy patches; the herbage gradually disappearing till all that is left of it is shrubs tufting the ridges of low undulating sand-hills; then the sand becoming stony, with no plant-life remaining but an occasional thorn, until plains of sand end in dull ranges of mountains covered with loose flints. in the journey from bethlehem to the dead sea the transition is even more abrupt. hardly have you left the “fields of the shepherds” when you perceive that the herbs, though still plentiful among the stones, are parched. in a mile or two there is nothing round you but wild greyish-yellow sand and rock. you thread your way precariously along the sides of gorges till you reach that sheer yellow cleft down which kidron is slicing its way with the air of a suicide to the sea. then you come up to a lofty ridge from which are seen the dreary towers of mar saba, like the “blind squat turret” of childe roland’s adventure, “with low grey rocks girt round, chin upon hand, to see the game at bay.” so you journey on, feeling at times that this is not scenery, it is being buried alive in great stone chambers beneath the surface; at other times welcoming the sight of a broom bush like that under which elijah lay down and prayed that he might die. the carcase of a horse or the skeleton of a camel are almost welcome, breaking the monotonous emptiness of this land of death.
the physical influence of the desert on the land is evident in many ways. greece and britain are not more truly children of the sea than is syria the desert’s{26} child. even those who have had no experience of the desert proper, but have only made the regulation tour in palestine, will have memories of what they saw recalled to them in every page of a book descriptive of the desert. the land throughout has ominously much in common with its desolate neighbour—so much so as to suggest a territory rescued from the desert and kept from reverting only by strenuous handling.
many things go to confirm this impression. the winds that blow from east or south have crossed the sand before they reach the mountains. when they are cool, they are pure and fresh, unbreathed before, “virgin air.” the evening breeze of syria is “the respiration of the desert” after its breathless heat of day. when the wind is hot, it is terrible as only wind can be that comes off burning sand. the shirky, or sirocco, interprets the desert in a fashion which the traveller is not likely to forget. we rode against it half the length of the plain of esdraelon, when the thermometer registered 104° in the shade, until the steel of our coloured eye-glasses became so hot that we were glad to remove them, and endure the glare by preference.
the plant-life of the desert has its counterpart in the land. loti describes it with his usual vividness. there is the furze dusted with fine sand; there are the strange sand-flowers of yellow or violet colours, the spikes shot out of the soil without leafage, the balls of thorn which wound the feet, the occasional palm-tree, the white edible manna plant. and there is the exquisite scent of these after rain, so strong that one might think a jar of perfume had been broken at the tent door—a{27} perfume in which one distinguishes the scents of resin, lemon, geranium, and myrrh. all this the palestine traveller seems to recognise; in that curious but familiar flora, and that pungent aromatic smell, we have the intrusion of the desert again.
the colour of the land has already been described, and here again we have the touch of the wilderness. the colouring is no doubt partly due to the quality of the air, dry and crisp as nothing but those miles of sand could make it. having absolutely no concerns of its own, as wooded or grassy lands have, the desert abandons itself to the sun. it takes and gives the sunlight wholly, making itself a mere reflector for the light and heat. “everything in this desert is of one colour—a tawny yellow. the rocks, the partridges, the camels, the foxes, the ibex, are all of this shade.”[3] yet this absolutely neutral region, just because of its neutrality, catches the sunrise and the sunset in a brilliance that is all its own, and deepens its shadows to liquid depths of indigo and violet. in this we see the extreme and untempered form of that interplay of faint background with intense foreground which is the characteristic feature of the colour-scheme of syria.
it is the same as regards form. the two towers of mar saba are among the most impressive of all the syrian spectacles. pitilessly unsuggestive, they are the most unhomely things one ever saw, like the mere skeletons of habitations. but part of this impression comes from the shape of the surrounding hills. ranged{28} in a wide semicircle, their fronts eaten out with land-slips and torrents, they are polished and smooth like gigantic sculptures. in some parts the regularity of their cones and tables suggests the work of purposeless but mighty builders. in other parts the rocks are twisted as if by tormentors, or tumbled in utter confusion. this too, as we shall see, has its modified counterpart in the land.
if the desert has thus produced a strong physical effect upon the land, its moral effects are even more apparent. we have seen how to the dwellers west of jordan it was at once an abiding enemy and an ancient home. shut out from it by the huge trench of the jordan valley and the barricade of the eastern mountains, the syrian still feels enough of the desert’s fiery touch to fear it as an enemy. its wind blasts his crops and its heat drives him from his valleys to the hill country for the breath of life. every traveller speaks of the “positive weight” of heat that makes men bend low in their saddles. others besides the persians are constrained, as kinglake puts it, to bow down before the sun, whose “fierce will” is most terribly felt in those tracts of the land which the desert has claimed for its own. in the desert there are the same conditions which are to be found in the land, only in extreme forms and without mitigation. it is the place of tempests, fires, and reptiles. these visit the land at times, but they abide in that weird country into whose distances the syrian may peer from most of his mountain tops. there, too, abide those dark and occult powers of{29} evil in which every eastern man believes. the magic of the desert—its treacherous mirage, its genii (by no means difficult to imagine in the forms of sandy whirlwinds whose march is strewn with corpses), and its infinite unexplored possibilities of terror—all this is very real to the native imagination. its inhabitants, too, are uncanny to think of. the true arabian, whom perhaps they may have met on a journey, with his jade-handled jewelled sword and his shrunken skin; the lunatics who have wandered to its congenial wildness; the anchorites and ascetics whom, like the scapegoat of ancient times, sin has driven forth to its unwalled prison-house,—all these fill in for syrians the ghastly picture, and its tales of wars and massacres add the last touch of horror.
nothing proves and exemplifies all this more strikingly than the apparently unreasonable view of the fertility, beauty, and general perfection of palestine which its inhabitants have always cherished. visitors from the west are often disappointed, and as they move from place to place their wonder grows as they recall the biblical descriptions of the land flowing with milk and honey. allowing for the many centuries of misrule and deterioration, it still remains obvious that palestine never can have been that dreamland of natural delight which piety has imagined. but the inhabitant views it, as dr. smith has pointed out, not in contrast with the west, but in contrast with the desert. we have to remember how “its eastern forests, its immense wheat-fields, its streams, the oases round its perennial{30} fountains, the pride of jordan, impress the immigrant nomad.” this contrast exaggerates all his blessings in a heat of appreciation. coming in from the desert, a man sees trees and fountains not as they are in themselves, but as they are in contrast with burning sand: he welcomes them as the gift of god’s grace. the sound of wind among the leaves or of flowing water is to him truly the speech of a god.[4] to many a wayfarer the poorest outskirts of the syrian land have meant salvation from imminent death, and so appreciation enlarges to optimism, and the very barrenness of the desert becomes a challenge to hope and faith. streams will break forth there, as in his happy experience they have already broken forth, until the whole barren waste shall blossom as the rose. it is by such hope and faith that the tribes of palestine have lived. there is a magnificent indomitableness in the spectacle of jews after two thousand years of exile still celebrating their vintage festival in the slums of great cities, or in the “squalid quarter of some bleak northern town where there is never a sun that can at any rate ripen grapes.” one seems to find the key to this in that tradition of the arabs that certain ruins near the dead sea are the remains of ancient vineyards. the syrian land can never be seen but as a miracle of life and beauty rescued from the desert, and that appreciation becomes the incentive for a larger hope.
yet it is not as an enemy, however wonderfully conquered or strenuously held at bay, that the desert{31} appeals most to the syrian. as he looks eastward to the hills of moab and dreams of what lies beyond them, there is perhaps more of wistfulness than of terror in his heart. the melancholy note of his music, heard by every camp-fire in the long evenings, is infinitely suggestive as well as pathetic. where was that note learned if not in black tents pitched in the boundless waste, where man’s littleness, in contrast with the great powers of nature, oppressed him into prone fatalism, or revealed to him the infinite refuge and comfort of the everlasting arms? he whose fathers have sung such songs will not satisfy his soul with the bustle of towns. he will need the desert for retreat, that his confused mind may calm itself down to order and find new revelations of truth. and when the syrian retreats to the desert he seems rather to be going home than abroad. david and elijah, paul and mohammed, for various reasons, but with the same urgency, betook themselves to the solitude. jesus christ himself was driven of the spirit into the wilderness. if temptation waited them there, and the sense of exile and desertion, it was there also that angels ministered to them; and ancient prophecies were fulfilled in those “streams of spiritual originality which broke forth in the deserts of moral routine” of their times. to their spirit, and to the spirit of all dwellers in the land, the desert is not enemy only, it is home.
this fact is abundantly borne out by many traits of character which are the survivals of a desert ancestry.{32} there is nothing in syria which can explain the fact that the most skilful dragoman cannot understand a map, nor guide you to your destination by geographical directions. on unknown ground a syrian is of little use as guide. on one occasion some of us set out on a journey of five or six miles in hauran under the guidance of an excellent lad who started with the air of a napoleon bonaparte. his directions were to go straight from muzerib to sheikh miskin—two stations on the railway south of damascus, between which the railway line runs in a wide curve. our route was the bow-string, while the line was the bent bow. for a little way he boldly marched forward, but soon began to edge towards the rails, and finally lost his head altogether, crossed the line, and set out on a route whose only apparent destination was persia! this was too much for us, and we mutinied and reversed the direction, arriving at sheikh miskin in less than an hour, with our guide under a cloud. there could not have been a better illustration of a syrian’s helplessness on ground without familiar landmarks. he finds his way partly by a nomad instinct, very difficult to account for; partly by the habit of noticing minute features of the road which entirely escape the ordinary observer. a story is told of a thief in a certain town in palestine who entered a house and stole nothing. he simply went out and claimed the house before the judge. when the case came to trial, the thief challenged the owner to tell how many steps were in the stair, how many panes of glass in the windows and a long catalogue of other such{33}
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the hills round nazareth, from the plain of esdraelon.
the village of nazareth shows out white in the dip between the hills.
details. this the owner could not do, and when the thief gave the numbers correctly, the house was at once given to him as its obvious possessor. the tale at once recalls the arab of our childhood who described the route of the strayed camel.
the syrian character is nothing if not complex, a mass of paradox whose contradictory elements it seems hopeless to attempt to reconcile. the politest and the most ruffianly of men, the most effusively frank and the most impenetrably wary, the most silent and the most voluble, the gayest in laughter and the most melancholy in song, is the syrian. he will bully you so long as he has the majority, and he will beg for the privilege of tying your shoe’s latchet if the majority is with you. he will row a boat or drive a donkey under a noonday sun with a violence which threatens apoplexy; he will suddenly subside into a repose which no surrounding bustle can disturb. the captain of the rob roy tells how in the huleh region a native boy running alongside pointed his long gun at him at least twenty times with the cry of bakhshish, so close that he once knocked the barrel aside with his paddle; and yet in the tent that evening this same youngster “was my greatest favourite from his lively laugh and eyes like diamonds, and his quick perception of all i explained.” in a note on page 39 an adventure of our own is told which illustrates sufficiently the rapidity of change in the mood of the native. he is a civilised barbarian, a scrupulous fraud, an aged little child. no doubt so complex a character is traceable to many causes, but{34} in the main it is the work of the desert. there the extreme conditions—the long hunger and the occasional surfeit, the great silence and the shrill speech in which that silence unburdens itself, the demand for desperate exertion and the long deep rest—these call forth the most opposite qualities, each in exaggerated degree.
perhaps the most important contributions of the desert to the syrian character have been two. there is a certain hardiness and strenuous carelessness of comfort, which produces a rather bleak impression on european travellers, but which nevertheless has counted for a great deal in national life. it has told in opposite ways. judea’s success has been undoubtedly due to the fact that it had to be fought for against such bitter odds. on the other hand, this same independence of fate has led the nation to settle down in a too easy contentment. defeat, and even oppression, sit more lightly on people who are indifferent to circumstances; and if the artificial demands for luxury have been the ruin of some nations, they have been the saving of others, keeping alive in them their vigour and whetting their ambition. the other contribution is the instinctive kindliness and hospitality which are well known as characteristic of the desert tribes. where life is so precarious, it inevitably comes to be regarded as an inviolable trust by the man on whose mercy it is cast. accordingly the wandering arab has but to draw in the sand a circle round his laden camel in order to secure every scrap of his possessions from robbery; and the bitterest enemies are sure of{35} safety so long as they abide in each other’s tents. a little incident which occurred to ourselves brought home to us vividly the real kindliness of the eastern sense of guest-right. it was in damascus, and after nightfall. some of us, wishing to see how the city amused itself, set out for a ramble through the streets. it was only nine o’clock, yet everything was shut up and the bazaars and thoroughfares silent and deserted. at last we found a little café still doing business at the end of the high black vault of a bazaar. seats were placed in the open air in front of it, while from within came the rattle of dice and the voices of one or two gamblers. sitting down on the outside bench, we asked for coffee, which was immediately brought. a stylishly dressed moslem, in an indescribable flow of robes, took his seat silently opposite us and sat smoking his nargileh. when we rose to go we found that he had paid for us all, and when we would have thanked him he would have none of it, satisfied with the consciousness of having shewn hospitality to strangers sojourning in his land. we could not help wondering how long our friend might have continued making the circuit of london restaurants before a similar experience would have fallen his way! there is a tale of a scoundrel who acts as guide to english travellers, and presents to each of them a certificate from a former victim, which invariably makes them laugh. the writing is, “i was a stranger and ye took me in.” it was pleasing to find that this testimony need not always be ironical.{36}
extract from journal
one of the horses had been stolen in the night. it was the last on the line, and beyond it harun was sleeping on the ground. at 11.30 all was right, but by 12.30 it had disappeared. by 1 a.m. the village had been roused, and the head men were coming in to the camp offering us one of their mares in compensation. the mares, which were wretched skeletons of beasts, were refused, and the horse demanded. nothing could persuade them to bring him back, or to acknowledge any cognisance of him whatever. they said that passing robbers had taken him, and begged us not to report the affair. our dragoman, however, took another view. he wrote a letter, long and circumstantial, describing us as “hawajas” (merchants, gentlemen), travelling for information under tescera from the sultan. the touch of genius in the letter was its insistence upon the seriousness of this affair on the ground that we were travelling under three flags, the union jack, the turkish flag, and the stars and stripes. this letter was sent, by one of our men on horseback, to the kaimakham, governor of the district, at a place some distance from where we were. the kaimakham passed him on to the mudir at another village, a person of terrible reputation, of whom everybody in the neighbourhood was afraid. the upshot of it all was that mohammed, the messenger, returned to camp accompanied by two soldiers, powerful and intelligent young fellows, but savage-looking and rather ragged. the taller of the two, named nimr (the leopard), was armed with bayonet, rifle, and revolver, while a double belt of cartridges added to the effect. his orders were to take the thirteen leading men of banias in irons, and march them off “shoulder-tight” to prison at mejdel. during the day a great meeting was held in the dragoman’s tent, the soldiers on one side, the “leading men” on the other. one of the latter protested that this was unfair—they had expected the dragoman to grow cooler, but although he had been hot at first, he was getting hotter instead of cooler. the reply was—(may it be forgiven!)—that he had meant to get cooler, but the hawajas were getting hotter steadily, owing to the three flags aforesaid. after a long parley it was arranged that they should send to another village for a horse worth ￡20, the value of the stolen one. they stoutly maintained that a stranger, and none of themselves, had committed the robbery, and that it was a bitter day when the hawajas had pitched their tents among them. nimr the soldier sat frowning and beating the ground savagely with a stick between his wide open legs. he repeated several times, with gusto, the aphorism, “better to touch fire and scorpions than the property of hawajas,” to which the rueful answer of the sheikh was that it would be better! all was gloom, and when at last a messenger was sent off to procure a horse worth ￡20, the grandees went to their houses with the air of men doomed. next morning the horse was brought, and was to be seen at the end of the line kicking and biting viciously. its worth was only ￡15, but the balance was condoned. we expected that this would draw forth gratitude and even some gladness; but instead it brought them all to tears, and drew from them many assurances of the miserable poverty of their condition, and the inevitable ruin that awaited them if we actually accepted this horse which they had brought. to these pleadings the dragoman was deaf, insisting that we must now at least let things take their course. when they saw that this was the final position of affairs, they ceased from wailing. within five minutes our own original horse was led into the camp, and their new one removed! their game had been played to its very last turn, and having failed was laid aside. during the rest of our sojourn there these same men lingered in the camp, manifesting neither regret nor shame, but smoking, chatting, and laughing with our company in the highest possible good-humour.
