The Ship Dwellers Part 22

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 superst.i.tion; 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.

x.x.x

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 sh.o.r.es. But then we remembered how many invasions had landed at Jaffa--how Alexander and t.i.tus 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE PATRIARCH KNEW ALL ABOUT JAFFA]

The Patriarch knew all about Jaffa. It is one of his special landmarks, being the chief seaport of the Phoenicians, 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 G.o.d 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 ash.o.r.e 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 "G.o.d 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 ma.s.sed 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 Mana.s.seh 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 pa.s.s 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, outmanoeuvred 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 cla.s.sed 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 G.o.ds 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 Caesar and Nero did not go as far as that. I'm sorry, and I shall be d.a.m.ned for it, no doubt, but I think, on the whole, in the language of the Diplomat, I shall have to "pa.s.s 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 Hitt.i.te 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.