the shadow of death is always haunted. a strong and pure faith peoples it with angels, and is accompanied through its darkness by that good shepherd whose rod and staff comfort the soul. when the faith is neither strong nor pure, and when those who sit in darkness have been disloyal to their faith, it is haunted by spectres, and its darkness becomes poisonous. the fascination of the marvellous passes into “what french writers call the macabre—that species of almost insane preoccupation with our mouldering flesh, that luxury of disgust in gazing on corruption.”[47] this unclean spectral element is a very real part of the spirit of syria.
the spell of the east is proverbial, and it is a more literal fact than is sometimes realised. even such a commonsense englishman as the captain of the rob roy confesses to a nameless fear that came upon him in the solitudes of the upper jordan.[48] there is a well-known passage in eothen, where kinglake describes the{206} calculating merchant, the inquisitive traveller, the wakeful post-captain all coming under the spell of asia.[49] the warmth and strangeness of the land may have something to do with it; but the associations and the prevalent tone of thought have more. every one feels it whose imagination and heart are in the least measure open to spiritual impressions.
to analyse it or to specify the causes which have produced it were an impossible task. three things have to do with it very specially. there is the habit of the eastern mind in dealing with matters of fact. truth is not to the oriental the primary moral necessity which it is to the west. vividness and forcefulness of presentation count for at least as much. the arab story-teller is said to close his enumeration of various legends with the sacramental formula, “god knows best where the truth lies,”—the truth being a matter of god’s responsibility, while to man is committed only responsibility for being interesting. again, in the east, terror is a recognised force between man and man; and the great forces of nature and the more occult forces of magic are recognised and taken as part of the natural order. religion also has had her share in the “great asian mystery.” this land is, to most devout persons, altogether isolated and apart, as the place of a divine revelation such as no other part of earth has known. there is a passage in pseudo-aristeas where, describing his supposed embassy to jerusalem, he gazes at the constant waving of the veil{207} in the temple, which screened from his view the holiest things of israel. as it rippled and swung in the wind it seemed to tantalise the gazer with the never-fulfilled promise of a glimpse into the secret place.[50] the wistful sense of mystery in that letter gives a hint which is of extraordinary significance on this subject.
the geographical formation of the land and its strange colouring lend themselves to the spectral and the uncanny. the dead sea presents the most sinister landscape in the world. the opening paragraphs of scott’s talisman, founded upon the description of josephus, are certainly overdrawn, yet in truth everything conspires to produce a sense of ghostliness by these unearthly shores. a ring of “scalded hills” encircles them, and a perpetual haze lies upon their waters. their soil is nitrous and their springs sulphurous. blocks of asphalt lie among their shingle; and fish, dead and salted, are cast up by the waves. there is little life visible about them, whether of man or beast or bird. here and there the tempting apple of sodom grows, to appearance the most luscious of fruits, but so dry that its core is combustible and is used as tinder by the arabs. a few feet above the summer level of the sea runs an unbroken line of drift-wood washed down by winter floods and left white and sparkling with crusted salt.
yet it was not the dead sea that seemed to us most unearthly, but that more famous lake of which one thinks so differently. it would be a curious and instructive{208} task to collect the various impressions which the sea of galilee has made upon travellers. romance and piety conspire to furnish many of its visitors with a predisposition to find it surpassingly beautiful; and not a little could be quoted which owes most of its touches to the imagination of the writer. a natural rebellion against this has led to no less exaggerated expressions of disappointment, and to accusations of ugliness which are simply untrue. the fact is that ordinary canons of description are of no avail here. the sea of galilee, even so far as natural appearance goes, must be judged by itself.
journeying to it from tabor, you ride across a rather characterless tract of country. a jackal, a stray circassian horseman, a low black tent of the bedawin, are the only signs of life. suddenly the track, sweeping up over the farther side of a shallow and rudely cultivated valley, lands you on an unexpected edge, from which the ground falls sheer away before you into the basin of the lake. this is not scenery; it is tinted sculpture, it is jewel-work on a gigantic scale. the rosy flush of sunset was on it when we caught the first glimpse. at our feet lay a great flesh-coloured cup full of blue liquor; or rather the whole seemed some lapidary’s quaint fancy in pink marble and blue-stone. there was no translucency, but an aggressive opaqueness, in sea and shore alike. the dry atmosphere showed everything in sharpest outline, clear-cut and broken-edged. there was no shading or variety of colour, but a strong and unsoftened contrast. to be{209}
[image unavailable.]
the tomb of rachel.
on the road from jerusalem to hebron. it is stated in the 35th chapter of genesis that rachel died and was buried in the way to hebron (ephrath).
quite accurate, there was one break—a splash of white, with the green suggestion of trees and grass, lying on the water’s edge directly beneath us—tiberias.
when, next day, we sailed upon the lake, coasting along the western shore from north to south, we found ourselves again as far removed from anything we had seen or experienced before. a casual glance showed utter and abject desolation, and a silence that might be heard oppressed the spirit. as the eye grew more accustomed, villages were discerned. but what villages! with the same exception of tiberias, they were brown slabs of flat-roofed cubical hovels—let into the slope of the shore or the foot-hills. and as we skirted closer along the beach, we descried everywhere traces of ruined architecture. it appeared to form a continuous ring of towers; columns broken and tumbled, but showing elaborately carved capitals; aqueducts and retaining walls; fragments of all sorts, and apparently of widely different styles of architecture. foliage is scanty, save for the thorn-trees and bamboo canes in which the carved stones are often half buried. here and there a plantation of orchard trees hides a trim little german garden. at tiberias a few palm trees lend their graceful suggestion of the far east.
all this impresses one in a quite unique way. you try to reconstruct the past—rebuild the castles and synagogues and palaces, and imagine the life that sent forth its fleets upon the lake in the days of jesus. or you more daringly attempt the future landscape, and imagine these hillsides as scientific cultivation and the{210} withdrawal of oppressive government may yet make them. but from it all you are driven back upon the extraordinary present—petrified, uncanny, spectral—a part of the earth on which some spell has fallen, and over which some ghostly influence broods, silencing the daylight, and whispering in the darkness. if, however, this sense of the ghostly be intenser here than elsewhere, it is but an exaggeration of the spirit of the whole land.
nature in syria seems always to have something of the supernatural about her. not only in the petrifactions of the lejja and the silent stone cities east of jordan is this the case. the whole country offers you stones when you ask for trees, and that mere fact of its stoniness is enough to lend it the air of another world. as an indirect consequence trees, when they are found, assume a factitious importance, and a supernatural significance either for good or evil. some of the fairest plants of syria are treacherous as they are fair. one of our company, in gathering sprays of a peculiarly lovely creeper, somewhat resembling a white passion-flower, had his hand wounded with invisible but virulent needles which caused it to swell and gave great pain. the green spots, where grass and trees abound, tempt the unwary to drink and rest in them. but they are the most dangerous places in the land, and some of them are deadly from malaria. on the other hand, a tree in a treeless country is an object of preciousness inconceivable by any who have not come upon it from the wilderness. in the distance it beckons the{211} traveller with the promise of shade and water. arrived beneath its branches, life takes on a new aspect; kindly voices are heard in the rustle of its leaves, and gracious gifts seen in its shadow and its fruit. it is said that our fleur-de-lis pattern, often supposed to represent the flower of the lily or the iris, is really an eastern symbol. the central stem is the sacred date-palm, while the side-lines and the horizontal band stand for ox-horns tied to the stem to avert the evil eye. it is no wonder if by the ancient semites trees were regarded as demoniac beings, or as growing from the body of a buried god.[51] such traditions are no longer to be found in their ancient forms, but they linger in a vague sense of the holiness of conspicuous trees, which may be seen covered with rags of clothing hung on them by natives. a like play of imagination has from time immemorial haunted the pools—especially those whose dark waters made them seem bottomless—with holy or unholy mystery. still more terrible is the superstitious dread with which the natives regard undrained morasses. the serbonian bog on the south coast has from of old been regarded with special fear, owing to its treacherous appearance of sound earth. the marsh in which the abana loses itself shares with the serbonian bog its grim distinction, chiefly on account of its deep black wells, which the natives take to be man-devouring whirlpools.
in her grander and more impressive features, nature is in syria constantly suggestive of the play of occult powers. earthquake has left its mark in many a split{212} rampart and broken tower, and that of itself is enough to give a peculiarly ghostly tinge to the spirit of any land. the unspeakable loneliness of the desert has its own magic—a melancholy spell which has no parallel in other lands. in the desert, too, the sky conspires with the earth in its bewitchment. the mirage has power to arrest and overawe the spirit with something of the same sense of helplessness as that felt in earthquake. in the one case earth, in the other heaven, are turning ordinary procedure upside down, and the bewildered mortal knows not what is to come next upon him. the writer has had experience of both, though with an interval of several years between them. the mirage he saw to the east of the great haj road in hauran. for some time the rocky hills of the lejja had been the horizon, shimmering dimly through the heat-haze. suddenly, on looking up, he was amazed to find that the hills had disappeared, and in their place had come a long string of camels on the sky-line, with an island, a lake, and a grove of palm-trees floating in the air above them. the sudden apparition recalled on the instant a day in the antipodes when he felt, though at a great distance, the tremble of the new zealand earthquakes. either experience is unearthly enough to explain many superstitions.
in most lands the sea would have yielded a larger crop of unearthly imaginations than has been the case in palestine. for reasons which have been already stated, israel kept out of touch with the ocean. yet, all the more on that account, it is the case that almost{213} every thought she has of the sea is fearsome. its immensity bewilders her with the unhomely distances of the world, and the four winds strive savagely upon it. the roar and surge of the shore are all she needs to remember in order to impress herself with its terror. now and then she thinks of the great deep, and of its horrible inhabitants—leviathan unwieldily sporting there, and other nameless monsters bred of the slime and ooze, and the dead men who are waiting to float up from their places to the great judgment, when their time shall come.
mention of the great deep reminds us of yet another prolific source of the spectral element in syrian thought. it was but natural that the sound of underground rivers and their explanation by the theory of a world founded on bottomless floods (the “waters underneath the earth”), should have given to the whole land an air of possession by ghostly powers. it may have been that same phenomenon which drew down the imagination of syria to the subterranean regions, or it may also have been to some extent the hereditary greed of buried treasure, which every nation whose buildings have been often overturned is likely to acquire. whatever be its explanation, the fact is certain that the underground element is one which counts for much in the spirit of syria. alike in christian and in pre-christian times there seems to have been a most unwholesome dread of fresh air blowing about holy things. sacred caves and pits were among the most characteristic properties of ancient{214} semitic religion.[52] as for christian tradition, it seems positively to dread the open air. the nativity in bethlehem and the agony in gethsemane have each their cave assigned to them, and many another site has a cave either discovered or actually constructed for its commemoration. nature and history have combined to encourage the underground tendency. palestine is remarkable for the number and size of its natural caverns, and it is not slow to add its imaginative touch to the length of them, connecting distant towns with supposed subterranean passages. these caves have been used as dwelling-places from very ancient times. the strange cities of edom and of bashan are well known to all as wonders. and not in these places only, but in many other parts of the land, men have dwelt beneath the ground. in times of invasion, for the solitude of hermit life, and in the terrors of persecution, caves have offered natural places of refuge and of hiding, which have in many cases been greatly enlarged by excavation. besides those caverns whose interest lies in the memory of ancient inhabitants, there are some of an interest whose terror is not yet departed. these are the cave-dwellings of lunatics, who in former times often chose the dead for company and inhabited tombs. now, in some places they are chained in black recesses of mountain caverns, where their life must be horrible indeed. there are also one or two caves in syria which end in sudden perpendicular shafts of great depth, where adulteresses are said to meet their fate. such{215} modern instances may have reinforced the natural fascination of the occult which subterranean places offer. but there is something congenial to it in the spirit of syria quite apart from these.
if the natural features of syria thus tempt men towards the ghastly side of things, her history suggests plenty of material for superstition to work upon. if the legend were true that no dew nor rain would moisten the spot where a man had been murdered, syria would be no longer an oasis, but the driest of deserts. in a spiritual sense the legend is truer than it seems. when, in his laughing mill, julian hawthorne works out the idea of a mystic sympathy in nature with crimes that have been done by man, he is reminding us of something which every one of sensitive spirit has more or less clearly felt. in nathaniel hawthorne’s subtler tales the same idea is worked out in a fashion still more convincing. there are times and places when it is difficult to resist the conviction that the material world, in its dumb, unconscious way, is yet burdened with the weight of man’s evil deeds. in syria one can almost hear “the groaning and travailing of the whole creation.” it seems to be a land waiting the hour of its release, and meanwhile shrouded in deeper mystery than any other land. something has happened here, you feel, which never happened elsewhere; something is going to happen here again, when the time shall come.
nothing could better attest this fact than the extraordinary wealth of legend in syria. fragments of{216} bible story, changed and often distorted by those who have retold them, are met with every day. sometimes a story has passed from jews to christians and from christians to mohammedans, increasing steadily in marvellousness and decreasing in verisimilitude as it passed. samson, goliath, and the prophet jonah are notable cases in point. a mohammedan weli marks the spot where the latter was thrown ashore; but the inventors of this legend have been inconsiderate. the weli stands at the bend of a shallow sandy beach, where the whale must either have itself come ashore to deposit the prophet, or have projected him a distance of at least a hundred yards. a very curious instance of a similar kind is that of the fall of jericho as narrated in joshua vi. conder gives two legends, both of which are obviously elaborated forms of that account. one of these is a samaritan story of iron walls, and the other a mohammedan one of a city of brass whose walls fell after aly, the son-in-law of mohammed, had ridden seven times round them.[53] still more curious is a legend related by the same author, which looks like a mohammedan version of the wandering jew. it tells how, at abila, cain was allowed to lay down the corpse of his brother abel after carrying it for a hundred years. the whole story of the herods has infested the region of their crimes with the ghosts of their victims. in samaria the murdered mariamne still seems to dwell in her honey, and herod and his servants to call her by name and force the pretence that{217}
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the valley of hinnom with the hill of offence
the upper portion of the picture to the left is the hill of offence, with the village of siloam on its lower slopes.
she is yet alive. the land is sick with ancient crimes whose blood “crieth from the ground.”
the religions of the land seem to be in league with the powers of darkness for the propagation of magic lore. it is an extraordinary fact that syria has sent forth to the ends of the earth a religion that is the eternal word of god to mankind, and yet herself has reverted to the religious conceptions of ancient semitic paganism. one of the most fundamental of these conceptions was that of a religion whose essential element is not belief but ritual.[54] while in the west the free play of reason has tested and interpreted israel’s faith, and discovered in it the unique revelation of the living god to man, the worshippers in the holy land itself seem to treat that same faith wholly as a department of magic lore. certain rites have to be performed, no matter how unintelligently, and that is all. all creeds alike share the blame of this. druse and samaritan, jew, christian, and mohammedan vie with one another to-day in the poor ambition of making the religion of jehovah contemptible in the eyes of thinking men who investigate it as it is practised on its native soil.
much of the magic of the east is decadent or decayed religion. on rare occasions a marriage superstition may be met with, such as the foretelling of marriage destinies by tying green twigs with one hand,[55] which appears to be the creation of pure romance.{218} but the great majority of those superstitions which hold the eastern mind in bondage are evidently relics of pagan thought incorporated now in jewish, christian, or moslem creeds, and absorbing all the interest of those who believe in them. if a mohammedan saint’s bones flew through the air from damascus to mount ebal, the christians can match the miracle and more, for was not the very house of the virgin carried off by angels from nazareth to loreto lest the moslems should desecrate it? magic dominates the mind of the east and explains everything there to this day. every inscribed stone runs the chance either of being honoured by a place in the wall of a dwelling or of being heated with fire and split with water, according to the sort of magic it is supposed to represent. it is difficult to realise that the men you converse with are actually living in the world of tasso’s gerusalemme liberata, where a dealer in black art, by his incantation,
unbinds the demons of the deep to do
deeds without name, or chains them in his cell,
and makes e’en pluto pale upon the throne of hell.
yet such is undoubtedly the case. even the saddle-bags you buy at jerusalem—those gorgeous labyrinths of shells and tassels—have a blue bead concealed somewhere in them to return the stare of any evil eye that may look upon your horse. to avert the same danger you will see little boys dressed in girls’ clothes, and specially pretty children kept dirty and untidy. lest the dreaded eye should blight the fortunes of a newborn babe the jewish rabbis sometimes hang up the{219} 121st psalm on the wall over mother and child. magic is as useful a substitute for science as it is for religion. it explains any phenomenon and clears up any mystery without the trouble of investigation. all great buildings must have been built by enchantment, so what is the use of speculating as to their architecture? western civilisation is, no doubt, a remarkable affair, but it never occurs to an unsophisticated syrian that it is a matter for energetic emulation. the frank has only been lucky enough to learn the proper spell. it is easy to see how syria, with such views as these, is doomed at once to moral and intellectual stagnation.
the vivid mind of the east is fertile in poetic imagination. restless and quick itself, it cannot conceive the universe otherwise than as living around it. everything is alive and aware. all inanimate things are personified; or, to speak more accurately, they are inhabited by spiritual beings. natural phenomena express the purposes of minds hidden behind them. every dangerous or adverse experience is regarded as the work of malice. human life is beset with ambushed spiritual enemies. the advantage which their invisibility gives to these over the human combatants would be enough to put fighting out of the question, were it not that so many of the spirits are of feeble intelligence and may be hoodwinked; while all of them have other spirits for their enemies who may be enlisted on man’s side against them. these spirits are of many kinds, but they may be classed in two groups, according to their connection with natural phenomena or with death.{220}
chief of the former group are the angels, good and bad; and the jinn, or genii, whom islam took over from the ancient paganism of arabia. the angels are god’s attendants, and have some functions entirely independent of natural phenomena. thus the two stones which mark a moslem’s grave show the stations of the angels who are to examine him; and the tuft of hair on his shaven head is (like the jewish sidelocks) to enable the angel gabriel to bear the man to heaven. yet the angels are in many instances personified parts of nature, guardians of the land, spirits of wind or fire or water, who are obviously the descendants and the heirs of the ancient local gods.[56] thus the wicked angels are supposed to have descended on mount hermon, and to have sworn their oaths there—a belief which adds considerably to the importance of the great mountain in syrian estimation. the jinn are the demons of the desert, lordly and terrible to all who have not the charm which masters them, obedient as little children to those who have it. they are the inhabitants of those whirling sandstorms which sweep across the waste. some superstitions of this kind may be connected with the former dangers from wild beasts, which used to haunt the jungles of lower jordan and swarm up to the inland territories after an invasion had depopulated them. even now there may be seen in{221} palestine an occasional wolf or leopard, to say nothing of the jackals which every traveller is sure to see. some of the fauna of palestine are in themselves so strange as to suggest unearthly affinities. the jerboa, for instance, the jumping mouse of the desert, merits browning’s description of him, when in saul he says, “there are none such as he for a wonder, half bird and half mouse.” the lizards, too, seem anything but ordinary respectable law-abiding animals as they twinkle to and fro among the ruins of old buildings. it is said that mohammed refused to eat lizards, considering that they were the metamorphosed spirits of israelites.
the spirits that haunt sepulchres are either ghosts of the dead or ghouls that prey upon their flesh. it is this class of apparition which appears to have the strongest fascination for the syrian mind; and its graveyard lore is the natural sequel to the morbid interest in death which formed the subject of our preceding chapter. conder, whose book gives much interesting information on this whole subject, found it difficult to keep any arabs about him at fusail, a few miles north of jericho, because of their fear of a ghoul in the ruins, who might chance to desire a change of food were he to see them there. the dead appear to have undergone a change for the worse in dying. the utmost caution and politeness are required to prevent their ghosts from doing harm to the visitors at their tombs, even in the case of men who, while in the body, were hospitable and friendly persons. some localities are regarded as peculiarly dangerous, among{222} which is the reputed site of the stoning of stephen and (according to gordon) of calvary, near jerusalem. an arab writer of the middle ages advises the traveller not to pass that haunted spot at night.[57]
if, under ordinary conditions, life in syria is overshadowed and haunted, the dread becomes far greater when disease has come. the explanation of disease is the same easy one as that which has deadened science and distorted religion—magic again. even when the true cause of illness has been guessed, it has to be explained in ghostly language. when plague has broken out in a locality the jewish rabbis make the neighbours of the stricken house empty all jars and vessels, saying that “the angel of death wipes his sword in liquids.” the malaria of swamps is set down to the same cause, and it is probable that many of that mixed multitude who are to be seen sitting chin deep in the hot sulphur-springs of gadara or tiberias regard their cure as due to some local spirit who happens to be benevolently inclined. in the neighbourhood of the tomb of a mohammedan saint, every accident or ailment is regarded as the work of the dead man. indeed the main idea of syrian medical science is that all or most sickness is possession by demons, and a common cure is to bore or burn holes in the patient’s flesh, by which the evil spirit may escape. the treatment of lunacy is perhaps the saddest case in point. until mr. waldmeyer built his asylum at beyrout, there was but one mode of treatment.{223} at certain monasteries there are caves in which the insane are chained below huge stones, with hardly space for movement, and are kept there for days in hunger and filth, in order to drive out the devil. the test for devil-possession is somewhat crude. the patient is shewn a cross. if he turns from it and refuses to look he is possessed; if he shews no aversion to it he is only unwell and is allowed to go. in the beyrout asylum we were told that no case of lunacy had been discovered which in any way differed from the european types of the same disease. the record of cures there, under the same treatment as that which is practised in the west, is a most encouraging and hopeful one.
it is true that the bright spirit of the east with its rapid changes and its unquenchable sparkle of gaiety, has mitigated the horror and oppressiveness of the spectral there. there are times when one would almost fancy that the whole of their superstition was a pretence which was never meant to be taken seriously. in damascus, and probably elsewhere, you may buy little rag-dolls supposed to resemble camels. they are made of bones, covered with patches of many-coloured cloth, and tricked out with tinsel and strings of beads. we bought two of these from a young girl in “the street called straight” for half a franc, and bore them through the city with a crowd of idlers following us. we learned afterwards that these were cunning devices to cheat the ghosts. when you are very sick or in danger you vow a camel to your saint or friendly spirit—this{224} is how you pay your vow. poking fun at hades in this fashion might seem a dangerous game, and one hardly to be recommended while any lingering belief in the reality of ghosts remained. yet such is syrian character. this sort of thing persists along with a deep horror of the other world. the words of job are not in the least out of date in palestine to-day: “fear came upon me, and trembling, which made all my bones to shake. then a spirit passed before my face; the hair of my flesh stood up. it stood still, but i could not discern the form thereof; an image was before mine eyes: there was silence, and i heard a voice.”[58] the horror is all the deeper because it appears to be seldom brought to clear statement. the spectral world is undefined, and it has, therefore, all the added power of the unknown, whose play upon the imagination is so much more strong and subtle than that of any clear conception, however ghastly.
in this chapter no attempt has been made to distinguish between the superstitions of jews, christians, and mohammedans in palestine. as a matter of fact, there is little to choose between them, and they have much in common. it is true that every nation has some outlook or other upon the world of spirits. but each has its own way of regarding the apparitions; and the kind of spectre which a land believes in is no bad indication of the tone of the land’s thought and character. about the fairy-lore of teutonic nations there is a child-like simplicity and purity which make{225}
[image unavailable.]
the valley of hinnom, with the hill of offence.
the upper portion of the picture to the left is the hill of offence, with the village of siloam on its lower slopes.
that lore wholly refreshing and precious. the nymphs and pan, whose ancient monuments we have seen in ancient palestine, were graceful. but the spectral element in modern palestine appears to be almost wholly morbid and unclean,—the further decadence of a land that has made its covenant with death. the life a syrian peasant leads to-day is haunted by ghostly terrors; it is a life led by leave of the dead, or by a systematic cunning which plays off one malign spirit against another, or succeeds in winning a point or two against the grave for the player. it is a view of life than which surely none can be at once more impudent and more melancholy.
