nothing could better illustrate the completeness of the change through which israel passed when she exchanged a nomadic for a settled life than the great importance which the idea of the city has in the bible. kinglake describes the jordan as “a boundary between the people living under roofs and the tented tribes that wander on the farther side.” the very name of “city,” applied to these grotesque little hamlets, shews how seriously they took themselves, and compels an amused respect for so mighty a little self-importance, for a “king” of that time might be compared with a chairman of parish council to-day. the idea of the city became more and more part of the religion of israel as jerusalem rose to religious as well as civil importance. to them god was a city-dweller, and there is an eastern saying about lonely wanderers journeying homeless towards the sunset, that they are “going to god’s gate.”
the changing history of the land has passed it through many phases, and no doubt there are far wider{66} differences between the centuries in respect of men’s dwellings than in respect of those natural features of the land which we have been studying in the preceding pages. this chapter will describe present conditions. and yet in spite of changes the aspect of things must be pretty much what it always was. men gathered into cities on some strongly fortified hill for purposes of war, or around some holy place for worship, or in some fertile valley for safe agriculture; and the sites thus chosen are retained for the most part. with the exception of the wandering tents, which are occasionally seen throughout the land, there is hardly a solitary dwelling in palestine which is not a ruin. and the want of good roads, together with the uncertain government, seems still to keep the village communities more apart than they are in most countries. each village has a character and a reputation of its own, and cherishes views regarding its neighbours which it is not slow to impart either to them or to foreigners. the colour of these townships divides them into the three classes of our title. damascus and beyrout are beyond the scope of the present description—damascus, the greyest city in the world so far as age is concerned; and beyrout, the over-grown white town upon which the ends of the world are come, leaving it little individual character of its own. keeping to the south of these, we have the clearly marked division, with little overlapping. a brown village may indeed have a white church or mosque gleaming from its bosom, and the walls of some towns besides jerusalem are grey;{67} yet in the main it is a land of brown villages, white towns, and one grey city.
the villages are very brown—“dust-coloured,” as they have been happily called. seen from a distance they generally look inviting, but it takes the traveller no long time to believe that a near approach will certainly disillusionise him. they have many sorts of charm in the distance. some of them are set up on the edge of a hill, and these seen from below present all the appearance of fortification, their flat roofs and perpendicular sides giving them an angular and military aspect. others are surrounded by neatly walled and cultivated olive-yards which give the promise of a well-conditioned village. in the rare instances where trees are planted among the dwellings, the flat brown roofs seem to nestle among the branches in delightful contentment and restfulness. where trees are absent there is generally a high cactus hedge, serving as an enclosing wall, which sets the village in a pleasant green. even those hamlets which have about them no green of any kind are not uninviting, especially if they are built on a hill-slope. there is a peculiar formality and neatness given by irregular piles of flat-roofed buildings overlapping each other at different levels. but as you approach, all is disillusionment. the trees seem to detach themselves and stand apart in the untidy paths. the cactus hedge is repulsive, with its spiked pulpy masses and its bare and straggling roots. the brown walls seem to decay before your eyes, and the village{68} seen from within its own street changes to a succession of ruinous heaps of débris, with excavations into the mud of the hillside. if, as at nain, there be a white-walled church or mosque in the place, it seems to stand alone in a long moraine of ruins. an acrid smell hangs upon the air, for the fuel is dried cakes of dung. these are plastered over the walls of low ovens into which the mud seems to swell in great blisters by the street-side. in some of these ovens crowds of filthy children and tattooed women are sitting, while the men loiter in idle rows along the house walls. when suddenly you say to yourself that this is shunem, or this nain, or magdala, the disappointment is complete.
in some places the houses are built of stones gathered from the ancient ruins of the neighbourhood (colonel conder believes that in hardly any instance are the stones fresh quarried). other houses consist simply of four walls of mud, with a roof of the same material laid upon branches set across. a small stone roller may be seen lying somewhere on the roof, for in heat the mud cracks and needs to be rolled now and then to keep the rain from leaking through. the sheikh, or headman of the village, has a better house—often the one respectable habitation in the place, but suggestive of a ruined tower at that. it is a two-storeyed building, whose great feature is the public hall, or reception-room, where local matters are discussed and strangers interviewed. there is no glass in the windows, and the strong sunlight deepens the gloom of the interiors to a rich brown darkness with points of high{69} light and colour. the shade is precious in these sun-smitten places, and conder narrates an incident which often recurs to mind in them. it was in the cave of the holy house at nazareth, the reputed home of jesus in his boyhood. the visitor “observed to the monk that it was dark for a dwelling-house, but he answered very simply, ‘the lord had no need of much light.’” the rooms are almost bare of furniture, a bed and a few water-jars in a corner being sometimes the only objects visible. in some of them the floor space is divided into two levels, half the room being a platform two or three feet higher than the other half. on this platform the family lives, while the cattle occupy the lower part; and along the edge of the platform there are hollows in its floor, which serve as mangers for the beasts. no doubt it was in such a manger that jesus was laid in bethlehem.
the inhabitants of these villages are the fellahin, of whom conder has given so interesting a description.[13] he recognises in them a people of almost unmixed ancient stock. distinct from bedawin and from turks, they are the “modern canaanites,” probably descendants of the original inhabitants whom israel displaced. these were never quite exterminated; and although there have no doubt been many minor instances of the absorption of other breeds, yet in the main they remain very much as they were when they talked with jesus in aramaic, or even as they were in days much earlier than his. a slight enrichment{70} to their lives has been made by each of the invaders, and reminiscences of israel, rome, the early christians, the crusaders, may be found blended with their mohammedanism. but they are conservative to the last degree, and any radical change seems an impossibility among them. many things contribute to this conservatism, among which perhaps the chief is the tradition of intermarriage between the inhabitants of the same village. another factor is their extraordinary ignorance, combined with a pride no less remarkable. it would be difficult to find anywhere men so self-satisfied on such small capital of merit. a third cause of their immovableness is to be found in the usury and oppression by which they are held down; and even their local self-government—that imperium in imperio which prevails under the larger oppression of the turk—keeps up, so far as it is allowed, the ancestral ways and thoughts. in one respect this conservatism of theirs is a gain to the world: it has preserved among them those habits of speech and manner with which the bible has made us all so familiar; and it is to them, with all their faults, that we owe much of the “sacramental value” of palestine travel.
as for their faults, no doubt they are many, but it is not for the passing stranger to attempt an estimate of their character. the most obvious lapses are sins of speech, and one always has the impression that the interpreter is toning down as he translates. one can see that property is insecure, and life by no means so sacred as in the west. one incident brought this home to{71} us vividly. some of our party had been detained on an exploring excursion till after dark. when we asked a group of natives what could have become of them, the answer was more significant than reassuring, for they pointed with their fingers vertically downwards! it was not so bad as that, however, for we soon heard revolver shots, and answered them. we fired into a field, aiming at a large stack of corn to prevent accidents. conceive our horror when a silent figure in flowing robes rose from the centre of the stack! he was spending the night there to keep his property from thieves. for the rest, it is their laziness that strikes one most forcibly. their agriculture is as leisurely as it is primitive. they sit while reaping, and thresh by standing upon boards studded with flints, which oxen draw over the threshing-floors. their ploughs are but iron-shod sticks which scratch the surface of the field. in outlandish districts they are described as mere savages, but we saw little to justify such a criticism. they are uncompromisingly dirty everywhere, yet their food is simple, and they appear in the main to be healthy enough. at first one’s impression of them is of universal gloom, sulky and contemptuous; but the mood soon changes if you stay among them for a little time, and the knit brows relax to a smiling childishness.
of white towns, with a population between 3000 and 3500, there are about a dozen in palestine, of which, excluding damascus and beyrout, the best known are haifa and acre, tyre and sidon, tiberias, jenin,{72} nablus, bethlehem, hebron, gaza, jaffa. they shine from far as you approach them. some, like jenin, gleam most picturesquely from among palm trees; others, like nazareth seen from jezreel, shew like stars of white in high mountain valleys; and yet others, like bethshan, appear “like white islands in the mouth of an estuary.” the nearer view of nazareth, when the hill has been climbed and the town suddenly reveals itself, is one of rare beauty. you are looking down into an oval hollow full of clean and bright houses. many cypress trees and spreading figs enrich the prospect, and the whole picture is most pleasing. bethlehem, again, has a picturesqueness that is all its own. approaching it from the south, the track turns sharply into a valley whose end is entirely blocked by a lofty hill, covered along its whole length with shining white masonry set far up against the sky. it looks trim and newly finished; and one hardly knows whether to be delighted or vexed that bethlehem should be so workmanlike a place.
but it is the sea-coast towns which are the most characteristic of their class. tyre is a surprisingly living and wide-awake place still, and the name recalls ever some vista of blue sea with ships seen through the white arches or rich foliage that decorate the town’s western front. jaffa is still more surprising. it is usual to embark at port said late in the evening, and when you wake in the morning and find the steamer at anchor, the first sight of palestine that greets you is jaffa, framed in the brass circle of the port-hole—a very perfect and brilliant little picture. the town is set well up, a conical{73}
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the fountain of the virgin at nazareth.
hill of sparkling colour, backed, as we first saw it, by cloudless syrian sky, into which it ran its two minarets. it was larger than we had imagined, and much loftier, with a very bold and gaily tilted edge-line—a city set on its hill, and with a mighty consciousness of being so set, like coventry patmore’s old english cottage. dark-leaved trees, red roofs, and occasional jewel-like points of green, where copper cupolas have been weathered, light up the picture into one of the most ideal of its kind.
within, the white towns shew a strange mixture of splendour and of sordidness. the streets are aggressively irregular, and the whole impresses one as at once ancient and unfinished. the wider spaces are full of colour and of noise, and the houses which surround them are a patchwork of all manner of buildings, with smaller structures leaning against their sides, and gaudy awnings of ragged edge protecting doorways from the sun. where the street narrows, it is filled with crowds of men, women, and children, and laden donkeys pushing them aside as they pass along. there are lanes, also, in deep shadow, with buttresses and long archways converting them into high and narrow tunnels. the shopkeepers in these lanes sit behind their piles of merchandise and converse in shrill voices with neighbours on the other side, not six feet away. the whole appearance of the town is that of close-huddled dwellings, which have squeezed themselves into as little space as possible, and have been forced to expand upwards for want of lateral room.{74}
these towns are the mingling-places of syria—crucibles of its national life, in which new and composite races are being molten. one or two of them, like nablus and hebron, are inhabited chiefly by a fanatical moslem population, and in these life stagnates. but the others are open to the world. in the past, long before the modern stream of travellers came, this process was going on. in very early times the towns were recruited by the neighbouring canaanites and arabs. they were, as they still are, so insanitary that if it were not for such additions their population would soon die out. in christ’s time the greek and roman world poured itself into them; then came the long train of christian pilgrims; after that the crusader hosts. each of these, and many other incursions, have helped to mix the race of townsfolk. in bethlehem and elsewhere there are many descendants of the crusaders, whose fair hair and complexion tells its own tale. but the mingling of races has gone on with quite a new rapidity during the last few decades. trade and travel have combined to force the west upon the east. circassians, kurds, turks, jews, africans, cypriotes have settled there. travellers who have twice visited the land, with an interval of some years between their visits, are struck by the sudden and sweeping change. even the passing visitor cannot fail to perceive it. the villagers remain apart, intermarrying within the village or with neighbouring fellahin. the townspeople bring their brides from other towns, and sometimes from other nations. many kinds of imported goods are exposed for sale in the{75} bazaars. there are parts of damascus where nothing is sold that was not made in europe. the habits of the west are also invading towns. intoxicating liquors are freely sold, and in nazareth there are now no fewer than seventeen public-houses. “paris fashions”—probably belated—are ousting the ancient customs. tattooing is quite out of fashion among the women of the towns, and knives and forks have penetrated native houses even in hebron. the traveller comes into contact with the townspeople far less fully than with the villagers. in the towns everybody is minding some business or other of his own, and the stranger meets with the residenter merely as buyer with seller. once only did we see the interior of a town house, and that visit confirmed the impression of a new and composite life very remarkably. it was in tyre. an agreeable native, who had brought some curiosities for sale, invited us to go home with him and inspect his stock. the house was in a narrow street, but the rooms were large. his wife sat near the window smoking a nargileh, her eyebrows painted black, and her face heavily powdered and rouged. the room was crowded with furniture. there were a sofa and two european beds with mosquito curtains; a new english wardrobe of carved walnut, with a large mirror; a kitchen dresser covered with dinner dishes of the customary european kind. dry-goods boxes were drawn forth from under the beds and the sofa, and pasteboard boxes from drawers and shelves, all filled with the most indescribable medley of curiosities from rifled tombs. bracelets, tear-bottles,{76} ear-rings came to light in rapid succession. finally, a square foot of lead-work appeared—part of a leaden winding-sheet which had recently been torn off an ancient corpse in a sarcophagus—a heavy shroud, finely ornamented with deep-moulded garlands and figures. our hosts were good-humoured and pleasant people, who conducted the conversation in some five different languages, and appeared to combine in themselves and their properties several centuries of human life.
the grey city of jerusalem stands unique among the towns of palestine. with the brown villages it has nothing in common. the immense variety of its buildings, with their domes, flat terraces, minarets, and sloping roofs, distinguishes it at once from the rectangular masses of the villages. as if on purpose to emphasise the contrast, one of these villages has set itself right opposite the city across a narrow valley. looking from the southern wall of the haram enclosure, this village of siloam is seen sprawling along the opposite hillside, a mere drift of square hovels seen across some fields of artichokes. nothing could appear more miserable; inferiority is confessed in every line of it.
more might be said for the description of jerusalem as the largest of the white towns. it is, like them, a centre where races mingle; indeed it is the centre of such mingling. all roads lead to it from north, south, east, and west; and when one suddenly comes upon one of those old roman roads which{77} make for jerusalem with such purposeful and grim directness over the judean mountains, one realises that this has been the centre and mingling-place of nationalities for many centuries. yet on the spot an obvious distinction is felt at once. there are two jerusalems: the old one within the walls, and a new one spreading on the open ground to the west and north. this “new levantine city side by side with the old oriental city” is quite a modern place. when stanley wrote his sinai and palestine it was unsafe to inhabit houses outside the walls. now such houses are clustered together to the west in a city which is actually larger than the enclosed one, and whose rows of shops are hardly distinguishable from those of western europe. a strange medley its buildings are! the best sites are occupied by the great russian cathedral and hospice, white-walled and leaden-roofed. beyond these, embedded in jewish “colonies,” are the european consulates, with a syrian orphanage and an english agricultural settlement farther up the slope. the tombs of the kings lie to the north, in all their desolation, and the still more desolate mound of ashes which is supposed by some to be a relic of temple sacrifices; but these are next neighbours to the dominican monastery, the bishop’s house, and the house of that curious body of americans known as the “overcomers”; while on the hill, not a mile above them, is an english villa. all this and much else pours itself into the city and mingles in the streets with the very composite life already dwelling there.{78} just at the foot of the hill which gordon identified as calvary, while turkish bugles were blowing from the fort, we saw two syrians engaged in rough horseplay, a party of americans and english riding, some tonsured and cowled monks on foot, and a travelling showman with an ape clinging to him in terror of a tormenting crowd of jews and mohammedans; while poor women, unconscious of any part in so strange a tableau, were returning to the city with full waterpots on their heads.
yet in jerusalem all this makes a different impression from that of other towns. the mingling of races here is but, as it were, the surface appearance of a far more wonderful fact. from the days of solomon, israel centralised her life in jerusalem. on that hill the mountainland seems to gather itself as in a natural centre, typical and representative of the whole. there the nation centred its life also, in “the mountain throne, and the mountain sanctuary of god.” jeroboam’s attempt to decentralise cost the nation dear; but in spite of that attempt the centralisation took effect, and made her the most composite of cities from the first. all ends of the earth meet here as in a focus. laden camels of the arameans from the far east are making for the city, and ships flying like a cloud of homing doves to their windows are bearing precious freights to her port. history and religion are compressed within the walls. on the spot no one can forget the ancient geography which regarded jerusalem as the centre of the earth, with hell vertically below, and the island of{79} purgatory its antipodes, and heaven’s centre overhead. in the church of the holy sepulchre they shew a flattened ball in a little hollow place as the centre of the world. as in some other cases of faulty science, an imaginative mind may discover here a happy truth beneath the error. the composite life of jerusalem without the walls is but of yesterday, that within the walls is hoary with age.
we have called it “a grey city,” and even in respect of colour this is a true name. not that there is any one colour of jerusalem. in the varying lights of sunrise, noon, afternoon, and evening, its colour changes. at one time it hangs, airy and dreamlike, over the steep bank of the valley of jehoshaphat; at another time it seems to sit solid on its rock, every roof and battlement picked out in photographic clearness; again, in the twilight of evening, all is sombre with rich purple shadows. there are spots of colour, too, which break its monotonous dull hue. the mosque of omar, with its faint metallic greenish colour, stands in contrast to everything, and makes a background of the city for its isolated beauty. there is another dome, that of the synagogue of the ashkenazim, whose colour is a lustrous blue-green, shining over the city almost luminously. white minarets and spires are seen here and there, and a few red-tiled roofs have found place within the walls. several spots are softened by the foliage of trees, and the pools, whose edges are formed of picturesque and irregular house-sides, catch and intensify the colours in their rich reflections. yet, in spite of all that, jerusalem is grey.{80} the walls are grey with a touch of orange in it. the houses, massed and huddled close within, are grey with a touch of blue. they are built roughly, the stones divided by broad seams of mortar, and most of them in their humble way conform to the fashion set by the mosque of omar and the holy sepulchre, and are domed. but the domes of ordinary houses are far from shapely, and suggest the fancy that the scorching sun has blistered the flat roofs.
by far the best view of jerusalem is that which is seen from the mount of olives, as one approaches the city by the hill-road from bethany. her environs are of interest from many associations—there, on the mount of offence, solomon offered sacrifices to idols; yonder, on the hill of scopus, the main body of titus’ troops was posted; here, near where we stand, is the place of the agony in gethsemane. for many days one might go round about the city, every day gaining new knowledge of its story. but what the first eye-shot gives is this: a sharp angle formed by the two valleys of jehoshaphat and hinnom; steep banks rising from their bottoms to the walls, which they overlap in an irregular and wavy line; within the walls, glancing back from the angle which they form above the junction of the valleys, the eye runs up a gradually rising expanse of close-packed building, which is continued more sparsely in the long rolling slope beyond, to the ridge of scopus in the north, and to the distant sweep of long level mountain-line in the west. it is as if the whole city had slidden down and{81}
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joppa from the sea.
been caught by that great angle of wall just before it precipitated itself into the gorges.
to see the grey city rightly, and feel how grey it is, you must view it across these gorges. the more distant environs are detached from the city. they are cultivated in patches, and dotted with modern buildings of various degrees of irrelevance. but these are mere accidents, which the place seems to ignore. the gorges themselves are part and parcel of the city, and they stand for the overflow of her sad and desolate spirit. their sides are banks of rubbish—the wreckage and débris of a score of sieges, the accumulation of three thousand years. you look from the lower pool of siloam in the valley of hinnom, up a long dreary slope of dark grey rubbish, down which a horrible black stream of liquid filth trickles, tainting the air with its stench. far off above you stands the wall, which in old days enclosed the pool. here the city seems to have shrunk northwards, as if in some horror of conscience. the field of blood and the hill of evil counsel are just across the gorge to the south. the valleys are full of tombs, those on the city side for the most part mohammedan, while the lower slopes of olivet are paved with the flat tombstones of jews.
what a stretch of history unrolls itself to the imagination of him who lingers on the sight of jerusalem! the boundaries seem to dwindle, till that which stands there is the old grey battle-beaten fortress of the jebusites, the last post held by her enemies against israel. david conquers it, and the procession{82} of priests and people bring up to its gate the ark, for the celebration of whose entrance tradition has claimed the 24th psalm. a new city rises, and falls, and rises again, through more than twenty sieges and rebuildings. assyrians, babylonians, romans, moslems, crusaders batter at its gates. the level of the streets rises through the centuries, till now the traveller walks on a pavement thirty or forty feet above the floor of the ancient city. to discover the old foundations, the explorers of our time have sunk shafts which at some parts of the wall touch bottom 120 feet below the present surface. far below the slighter masonry of the present wall, with its battlemented turkish work, lie the huge stones of early days, some of which bear still the marks of ph?nician masons.[14]
the gates, of course, are modern, though in some of them there are immense stones of very ancient date, whose rustic work the turkish builders have cut away, and scored the flat surface with imitation seams to make them match the small square stones of the building above. yet the positions of the ancient gates are not difficult to fix, and modern ones do duty for some of them. others are built up with solid masonry,{83} notably the double-arched “gate beautiful,” which was thus closed because of a tradition that messiah would return and enter the city by it. it was from this gate that in olden times the man went forth with the scapegoat that was to bear the sins of the people to the wilderness. the interior (which, however, dates from the seventh century) is a rich and beautiful piece of architecture, with massive monolithic pillars supporting heavy arches, and an elaborately decorative entablature cornicing the walls. it is a dreary little place, with its litter of débris and its flights of bats; and its dead wall, pierced only with loophole windows, now affords neither entrance for christ nor exit for sin. what memories crowd the mind of the beholder as he looks upon these gates! here, seven centuries ago, went out the weeping company of the inhabitants, when saladin took the city. there, eleven centuries earlier, the jews set fire to the roman siege-engine, the flames were blown back upon the fortifications, and the wall fell and made an entrance for the legions. that was near the jaffa gate. here again, by the damascus gate, if gordon’s theory be the correct one, the saviour passed to calvary; and there may be stones there on which the cross struck, as simon the cyrenian staggered out under its weight.
it is indeed a strange city, a city of grey religion, in which three faiths cherish their most hallowed memories of days far past. but “far past” is written on every memory. that beautiful gate has indeed shut out christ, and shut in all manner of sin unforgiven. the land, as has been already said, seems still inhabited{84} by christ, but he has forsaken jerusalem; it is almost impossible to feel any sense of his presence there. this is a city of grey history, whose age and decrepitude force themselves upon every visitor. it has been well described as having still “the appearance of a gigantic fortress.” but it is a weird fortress, with an air of petrified gallantry about it, and an infinite loneliness and desolation. no river flows near to soften the landscape. a fierce sun beats down in summer there upon “a city of stone in a land of iron with a sky of brass.” but for the sound of bugles, whose calls seem always to shock one with their savage liveliness, it might be a fossil city. built for eternity, setting the pattern for that “new jerusalem” which has been the utopia of so many devout souls, it seems a sarcasm on the great promise, a city “with a great future behind it.” what has this relic to do with a blessed future for mankind—this rugged bareness of stone, this contempt for beauty, this pitiful sordidness of detail? history and religion seem to mourn together here, and one sees in every remembrance of it those two weeping figures, the most significant of all, for its secular and religious life—titus, who “gazed upon jerusalem from scopus the day before its destruction, and wept for the sake of the beautiful city”; and jesus christ who, when things were ripening for titus, foresaw the coming of the legions as he looked upon jerusalem from olivet, “and when he was come near he beheld the city and wept over it.”
