LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE W^- THE SPHINX AND THE PYRAMID LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE BY MALTBIE DAVENPORT BABCOCK ILLUSTRATED NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1902 Copyright, 1902, by CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS Published, March, 1902 mow DIRECTORY PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY NEW YORK " He went to see the Holy Land ; He has gone to the Land of Holiness itself." When Dr. Babcock sailed from New York, in February, 1901, on a trip to the Holy Land, the hope was expressed to him that he might find time to send letters to be read at the meetings of the Men's As- sociation of Brick Church, to be held during his absence. To this wish he most cor- dially responded, and the letters in this volume are the result. With his usual generosity, and careless of the labor it imposed upon him, Dr. Bab- cock did not content himself with brief, kindly, letters of remembrance, as was ex- pected, but sent a record of the entire journey. The party of which he was a member travelled rapidly, and it was only under most difficult circumstances, and as chance offered, that there was any opportunity for writing. Naturally, therefore, the letters took the direct and simple form of a journal. The record closes abruptly, for even then the fatal fever was stealing upon him and he could add no more. The letters are given just as written, with the omission, especially in the first, of a few personal allusions. Dr. Riggs, of Auburn Seminary, the leader of the party, has kindly verified the historical and geo- graphical references. So full of interest are these letters that there has been a generally expressed wish for them in a permanent form. In response to this they are published by arrangement with Mrs. Babcock. These letters were greatly prized by the members of the Men's Association, to vi whom every line was a personal message from their beloved pastor, and they are now put forth in the assurance that they will reach a wider circle, which also sadly misses the loving and helpful hand that sent them. Hexry L. Smith, President Men's Association, Brick Presbyterian Chm*ch. New York, February, 1902. LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS The Sphinx and the Pyra:mid Frontispiece From a photograph hy M. D. Babcock. Facing page Entrance to the Tomb of Seti I. Thebes-Necropolis .... 22 From a photograph by M. D. Babcock. The Ramesseum 34 From a photograph by M. D. Babcock. The First Camp between Joppa AND Jerusalem 50 From a photograph by M. D. Babcock. The Oak of Mamrk — Abraham's Oak 58 From a photograph by M. D. Babcock. The Dead Sea and the Wilderness of Jud.ea 68 From a photograph by D. L. Elmendorf. ix LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Facing page The Damascus Road out of Jerusa- lem, NEAR Bethel .... 92 From, a photograph hy M. D. Babcock. Ruins over Jacob''s Well, near She- CHEM 94 From a photograph by M. D. Babcock. A Goatherd, near Nazareth . .102 From a photograph hy M. D. Babcock. First View of the Sea of Galilee . 108 From a photograph by M. D. Babcock. Grotto of Pan — one of the Sour- ces OF THE Jordan . . . .114 From a photograph by M. D. Babcock. A Family Carryall, near Dothan . 120 From a photograph by M. D. Babcock. President Bliss and the Protestant Syrian College at Beirut . .126 From a photograph by M. D. Babcock. LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Facing page The Temple of the Sun, Baalbec . 136 From a photograph hy D. L. Elmendorf. Bull's Head Bath, or Fouxtaix, Ephesus 142 From a photograph hy M. D. Babcock. Constantinople from the Steamer . 146 From a photograph by D. L. Elmendorf. S. S. WERRA, February 24, 1901. I am afraid I could get no message to you and my brothers of the Men's Associ- ation from Gibraltar in time for the next meeting, and so send this greeting from the steamer from the not distant point of Sandy Hook, " thar or tharabouts." It seems something of a paradox, but nothing has made mo feel so much at home in New York as going away. So many people have writ- ten me notes or spoken to me — telling me of this or that, of some sermon or letter or little "confab" that had meant something to them — that I have suddenly felt that I really be- longed to you, and found my heart quicken- ing at the thought of coming back home. I wish I could peep into the room at the meet- LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE ing and see what is going on. I have deeper roots there than you think — for no organi- zation in the church has meant so much to me in the way of friendship, nor made me so hopefully aware of power — patent and latent. . . . To divide burdens and yet centralize responsibility is the art and secret of accomplishment. . . . Noth- ing is so important as to awaken and strengthen the sense of Brotherhood, and what will more surely do it than for a man to find work for another man ? There may be better preaching of the Gospel of the Kingdom than this, but I doubt it. I hope, too, that in our Monday evenings together we may remember that sometimes new friends are more important than old ones. To digest one who is a stranger is way ahead of enjoying one who is familiar- May I suggest, too, that no one of your Sunday preachers is going to be depressed LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE by your speaking to him, or sending him a message, if you tell him he has been a help to you. With all hearty and happy greetings Faithfully and affectionately yours, (Signed) Maltbie D. Babcock. S. S "\VERIIA, March 4, 1901. Still on the water, and to-day very still, so that the sick are looking up, and the lame leap like a hart. Last Thursday we had a southwest gale that drove every- one down below who did not have oil-skins. Life lines were s-tretched, and everything battened down. Mr. Frank Hastings and I were on the bridge with the Cap- tain when a tremendous sea struck our weather rail and went clean over every- thing, sending the spray over the smoke- stacks, and smashing one of the davits, and sending the third life-boat dangling help- lessly by the ship's side, but mighty dan- gerously. The Captain sang out his orders and was by the tangle in a minute slashing 4 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE away with his knife at lashings, fearing in the pounding seas that a port-hole glass might be stove in, or even the side of the ship. He and the men working with him were deluged by sea after sea, but the boat was cut clean away and no harm done. It happened opposite our state-room, and would have put us in a pretty salt pickle, ruining everything we had, if our dead- light had been broken. Two days after the Azores swung into sight with occa- sional swirls of mist that gave us the most beautiful rainbows against the fields and mountains, making thoughts of Patmos and the delectable country come to our minds. To-morrow we expect to reach Gibraltar, and get our foot on terra firma again — less teiTor and much firmer. I shall not send this letter now, but later from Naples or Cairo. Our ship company is a delight- ful one, with not an uncongenial spirit 5 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE discovered. Yesterday we had morning and evening service. The httle organ that we brought along was perfectly in tune with the piano, and we had a fine tutti effect. I preached in the morning, and the Rev. Father Collins (R. C.) spoke of his work in Dakota, and Mr. Elsing of his work in New York in the evening. A more broad-minded, brotherly, and utterly Christian man than Father Collins I never heard, and his account of the way he works with the Protestants in movements like our Federation of Churches w-as highly encour- aging. How interesting Mr. Elsing was you all know. Our Commander, Captain Polack, is an ideal ship-master, six feet two, broad and brawny, genial, without a touch of officiousness, vigilant, every inch a sailor and every ounce a gentleman. No trav- eller among us that does not say he is 6 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE by and large the finest Captain he ever met. I have worked pretty steadily at the Ge- ogi'aphy and History of the Holy Land and Egypt, and am now beginning to al- low myself more diverting leeway in read- ing. Every day we have some four-part male singing from the old Arions. Mr. Hastings and I are the bassos, Dr. Wilton Merle Smith second tenor, and Mrs. Bab- cock first tenor. Dr. Smith and I played ball several days with a big indoor base- ball mitil — alas ! it ricochetted overboard. I have a regular base-ball, and a catcher's mit, but these I do not care to imperil, pre- ferring to save them for the shadow of the Pyramids and the rocks of Engedi. March 7. Tuesday two Continents slowly loomed up — Europe and Africa. It stirs one deeply 7 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE after the long loneliness of the sea, to catch a glimpse of the low-lying land, and see it slowly rising from the ocean as though in the old Miocene day. Over the submerged Atlantis, into the Straits of Gibraltar, past the noble Atlas Mountains of North Africa in an Alpine glow at sunset, into the glory of the night as the full moon rose over the crags on the African side, up to the Pillars of Hercules, and under the great sleeping lion of Gibraltar — to drop anchor and be still for the first moment since leaving home ! The huge rock was sparkling with lights like glowworms. We all piled into a little steamer that fussily puffed us to shore, where we scrambled through the half- Moorish, half-English town for an hour. Fresh violets and jonquils everywhere for sale, and dates and figs. Heliotrope blos- somed on the walls and strayed over into the streets asking to be plucked. The LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE Turks or Moors in their booths or strolhng the streets, hke big bags in the wind blown around on slim legs and big feet, were picturesque and queer enough, especially by the side of slim Tommy Atkins with his tight red jacket, and his pill-box on one ear. It was little more than a scamper, for we were late and the Captain grudged us time, and Ave had our anchor up and were off by 10.30 p. M. A good part of the next day we ran fairly close to Spain with the rocks all colors in the sunlight, and the high ridge of the snow-capped Sierra Ne- vadas bitten sharply against the blue sky. One of the famous landmarks is a triangular cliff of white marble the shape of a sail, and called " Vela Blanca." It is included in tlie sailing directions of five hundred years ago, and was one of Columbus\s guides. Every evening at five Professor Riggs gives us an informal talk on Palestine, its geology, the 9 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE identification of historic places, the Macca- bean period, ancient and modern Jerusalem, and the like. To-night the Captain's din- ner, and the concert. Mr. Ferris is to pre- side at the concert, and I am to take several parts in solos, duets, quartets, and what- nots, and the air is much disturbed with re- hearsals. We sighted Sardinia this after- noon. It was blowing such a gale when we reached Naples — the smoke of Vesuvius being driven down its slopes — that it was thought best to spend the night on board. The landing had to be made in a tender, and the waves were smashing over the quay too boisterously for comfort. Mrs. Bab- cock and I spent Saturday riding and rum- maging about the fantastic, fascinating city, mixture of old and new, high and low, no- ble and debased Italy. What pirates the cabmen are, with their mad little ponies and diminutive victorias — slashing along the LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE stony streets, and cracking their whips hke pistol-shots ! A bargain in advance is the only safety. Most of our friends went to Pompeii, but we had been before and chose the matchless Aquarium again — where fairy plants of the sea-bottom blossom into liv- ing creatures before your eyes and fore- shorten the slow moving cycles. A cousin of mine owns the Villa Floridiana in Vo- mero — the height above Naples — and there we spent part of the day. Sunday there was a strange eruption of Vesuvius, filling the air with a saffron impalpable powder — like a yellow smoke — that made the most weird effects and frightened the common Neapolitans as though it were an ominous prelude. Such a phenomenon had not been known for a generation. At sunset there was no sign of the sun, but the world was enveloped for us in a sea of orange radiance, blotting out any distant object. Then came LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE a shower that washed the air clean and brought out the stars. AVherever the rain fell on a hat, or coat, or umbrella, it left a spot of yellow sulphurous mud. The vol- cano theory I learned afterward is wrong. It was yellow dust from the African desert, blown to Europe by Sirocco, but a most un- usual phenomenon called " mud-rain " and " blood-rain " from color. At ten P.M. we were off on this noble steamer Ortona of the Orient Line, bound from London to Australia. Yesterday we sailed between Italy and Sicily in the nar- row strait the classic navigator affected so to dread between Scylla and Charybdis. It did not seem so awesome to us on this big boat, but I can easily imagine what a skit- tish time their square-rigged craft or lum- bering triremes could have here when old ocean let some of his testy gales out of the bag. This afternoon we expect, like Paul, LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE to "sail close to Crete," but have no special hankering for Euroclydon. LtJXOR, March 17-20. We first suspected the nearness of Egypt by the changed yellowish color of the sea, due to waters of the Nile. Then sails and steamers, then the small lateen rigged craft and light-house and low sandy land line. Then the breakwater of the Suez Canal, and noble bronze figure of De Lesseps. Port Said is a port only of transition — a bazaar of trinkets, of official registry, cus- toms, clearings, coaling, and rascality and wickedness generally. The coaling was a noisy operation, hundreds of Arabs lifting the huge beams from lighters to ship, up which they were to walk with baskets of coal, singing as they together strained at the immense timbers. I fancied it might have been to such music the slaves worked 13 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE at the buildings whose colossal ruins we are looking at to-day in Upper and Lower Egypt. After lunch at Port Said, and a rather easy and superficial Customs experi- ence, we took train for Cairo. It is a huge melange — an ecumenical potpourri — a huddle of the ends of the earth, and the first and last of civilization. A bicycle and an automobile go whizzing by a moth-eaten old camel under its rock- ing rider who might be Adoni-bezek or Ishmael. Hundreds of camels file through the street under loads of grass, vegetables, or earth, and little asses patter along quite invisible under their burden of rushes or sugar-cane. The sight of a sheikh or other big-body in flowing robes — sitting far back on a little donkey and quite submerging him — is funny enough. It looks like a full-blown old lady on a hobby-horse. It feels good to be in a high-ceiled room and 14 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE old-fashioned beds after two weeks of state- rooms, " cribbed, cabined, and confined."" Our first day was a fourteen-mile donkey ride (after the steamer ride on the Nile) to old Memphis and Sakkhara, the Nekropolis or City of the Dead. It was my first don- key ride and was most entertaining. "Ver' good donkey — Ver"* good shantleman — Good shantleman gif good backsheesh ! Donkey he name Mackkinley ! Good backsheesh ! " Mackkinley stumbled with me three times, but I took no cropper, though two ladies and three men had pretty serious tumbles. The two granite figures of Rameses II., thirty-two and forty-five feet or more tall, were our first sight of the old Egyptian co- lossal sculpture. They are on the edge of what was once the Lake of the Dead, across which the dead were ferried to their " de- voted city " on the rocky plateau high above the highest reach of the Nile. Then for a 15 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE couple of miles more we bumped our don- key way, all the time on dykes or through narrow foot-paths, to the Tombs in the desert. The Egyptian villages through which we passed were pathetic affairs, looking like a collection of different sized gray mud blocks. They are made of sun-dried mud bricks. The houses have mud floors, and practically no windows. They swarm with flies and fleas, and every other skin game. Dogs and goats and kids roam in and out. The little children's eyes are black with flies crawling on the edges of their lids. They say that eyes too bright and clean would attract the bad spell of the Evil Eye. Though it is also due, doubtless, to " Kismet," flies and eyes fatally rhyme. Again and again I saw blind eyes, and few of the grown-up children open their eyes fairly. The women work like slaves. They carry the huge stone jar full i6 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE of water on their heads, or the baby on their shoulder, and walk with their load while their husbands ride the donkey. Wife beat- ing is the unwi'itten law of Egj'pt. Life is the closest struggle, with no alleviation of books, pictures, education, society, music, science, religion in any true sense. It is practical stagnation on the lowest levels, with no uplift or outlook offered by Ma- hommedanism. The United Presbyterian Mission is doing a heroic and successful work, having over 6,500 church members, and 14,800 children in religious schools. This offers a little horizon. Some of the missionaries have called on us, and Dr. Wil- ton Merle Smith and I are to speak at a gathering of their forces next Friday even- ing in Cairo. The Nekropolis, on the road to which I saw the villages that started the last train of thought, is a stretch of high and dry 17 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE rock and sand, perhaps fifteen miles long, and one to four miles broad. From Mem- phis and beyond it stretches to Gizeh and Cairo on the west bank of the Nile, and con- tains every kind of tomb, from the rocky niche or loosely stoned graves of the peasant to the gigantic Pyramid of Cheops. No nation of antiquity has had so strong and definite and even detailed a conviction and conception of the future life as the Egyp- tians. The Indian of our land buried hatchet and bow and aiTow, blanket and pipe, and even horse, with their dead broth- er's body to equip his spirit for his new " adventures, brave and free." But this is rudimentary, or rather vestigial, compared with the Egyptians, for not only were all sorts of life's tools buried with his age-last- ing mummy, but his mausoleum or " Mas- taba" was a large chambered house, with every scene of his life's activities sculptured i8 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE on the walls. Every chapter of life from boyhood to manhood is depicted, and, by a subtle magic, a spiritual alchemy furnishes him with all he needs for the happy absorp- tions of the next life. I believe we could most profitably add some of their pictures to our setting of death. Very little of the healthy, happy virility of their ideas is ex- plicitly embodied in our literature, our poetry, hymnology, and conventional con- versation about the next life. Apocalyptic visions of peace and painlessness ought to ba too negative to satisfy our full orbed, red-blooded human hopes. The immense vitality of the teachings of Jesus, His con- stantly comparing the Kingdom of Heaven to those engrossments of our daily life which are its chief stress and daily strain, are a fine vindication of the old Egyptian's forecasts, and splendidly authenticate our energetic hopes. ig LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE So far I have seen no picture of their building operations, no sign of the ropes, wedges, rafts, and sweating thousands by which these colossal shrines and temples were made. There are plenty of reliefs which show servants butchering, and carving, and cooking, ploughing, planting and reap- ing, rowing galleys and fighting, shaping timbers and building ships^ but, so far, no trace of the quarrying and transporting and erecting of these incredible monoliths. Did they want it to be a secret or was it too common-place ? There may be signs I shall yet see. I am curious. Four thousand five hundi'ed years ago, cen- turies before Moses, a most complex and highly variegated civilization existed, pict- ured before us now to the last item, and yet we have been told that Moses could not write. One thing is quite clear to my mind about LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE the enormous stones that are in the Nekrop- olis, and that is that they were floated on rafts from the quarries in the high rock ridge on the east of the Nile valley to this plateau of the Nekropolis on the west bank. The whole valley was then inundated from bar- rier to barrier, and for three or four months the tillers of the soil had nothing to do. These, with the slaves (there were 4,000,000 slaves where we are now at Thebes), could do any amount of rowing and hauling. It is thought, too, that the monoliths were raised by a system of locks in artificial canals, floated up to one level after another, and then stood at last on end by slow prying and building imder of embankment or pile of earth and small stone. But " they say " and "it is thought " do not tell the story, and I would give good backsheesh to know how in the tombs of the Sacred Bulls, those monster sarcophagi for the mummied sacred 21 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE beasts were moved and placed in their chambers, sarcophagi of black or red granite, thirteen feet long, seven feet wide, and eleven feet high. Owing to some strange chance these sub- terranean chambers were unknown to the civilized world since they were closed 3,750 years ago. Mariette, Avho visited them in 1851, to whom we owe a great Egyptian debt, found one tomb in its original condi- tion, where the embalmed bulls had lain for thirty-seven centuries, even to a footprint in the sand, and the finger-marks of the Egyp- tian who had put the last stone in the wall to conceal the doorway. The temperature in these chambers is seventy -nine degrees the year around. The steep pyramid of Sakkhara, near by, is a series of these mastabas, built on the top of each other like a pyramid of blocks. It is impossible to realize how old all this is. ■:v.;^^^ ENTRANCE TO THE TOMB OF SKTI I., THEBES-NECROPOLIS LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE The mind flags as it tries to think back and get these old builders and fighters, sailors and shepherds, lovers and haters again in " the warm precincts of the cheerful day." And yet to-day there is a little animal, an Ascidian, in the mud of Chesapeake Bay, that antedates them all, and was alive and flourishing before even the mountains were reared from which old Rameses and Seti quarried their monuments. One thought occurs to me that I must not forget, that, whatever the lives of the old Egyptians may have been, there is a noble austerity, a dignity and purity about their wall-pictures and statues that should put the Roman and the Greek to the blush. It was sunset over the Libyan Desert as we sailed home on the Nile, the great rock barriers on the east between the Nile Val- ley and the Arabian Desert gleaming in rose and violet and old gold, and on the 23 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE horizon line to the west on the edge of the Libyan Desert the pyramids sharply out- lined against the glowing sky. At the edge of the river boats were moored with lateen sails snugly furled on the slender yards. Buffaloes and sheep were drinking, men and women and children knee deep in the water washing themselves, and filling their water- jars and goat-skins. The sakkieh is still working, a clumsy wheel with its chain of ropes and water jars worked by a blindfold bullock in his monotonous round. A chain that reaches do^vn to the river carries the water to the top of the bank, pouring it into a tank from which it runs through its ap- pointed channels to irrigate the soil. The shadoof is a series of tanks six or eight feet above each other, each filled by a man with a little well-sweep and bucket that dips the water from the river or the tank below him to fill the tank into which the man above 24 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE him dips. Thousands of bronzed figures with only a waist-cloth work in this way — lifting a bucket at a time to keep the fields above and the garden patches from being burned up by the fierce sun. Wherever the river comes everything lives. Where it does not come is death. No one who has been in Egypt can fail to appreciate the old marble Nilus in the Vatican with its swarm- ing life. There are mightier rivers, but none that has so been identified with a na- tion's life, the very source and spring of its characteristic being. It was the Nile that by its tremendous inundations made the Egyptians a nation of civil engineers; that by the necessity of knowing the time from year to year of its rise forced them to tell time by the stars and become a nation of as- tronomers ; that by its annual sweeping away of all boundaries turned the people into geometers and surveyors, and that by 25 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE the inevitable differences concerning land- marks and records compelled the existence of a body of lawyers and the erection of a capable and authoritative judiciary. Its life-giving power has been immensely aug- mented by the dams and barriers and stor- age reservou's which the Anglo-Egyptian Government has built. Still greater plans are in hand, and I understand that Philae will soon be submerged and as an end for an archaeological pilgrimage, quite disquali- fied by the great lake in which it will find itself. It looked odd as we were sailing home to see men on little bars or mud islands in the river digging holes and planting seeds ; but they knew what they were about. The river is already getting lower, and in six or eight weeks there will be. a crop of water- melons for them. What legal right to that exact spot of river bottom and Nile deposit 26 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE those particular men had deponent sayeth not. The next morning bright and early we were galloping over the bridge, past the endless line of camels and donkeys and bur- den-bearers coming into the city with their green stuff and wares, past the Gizeh Mu- seum and along the high-road straight as an arrow and in the shade of double roA\s of acacia-trees for eight miles to the great Pyramids and the Sphinx. The north wind was as cool as though it were a " sea turn'" in New England, though in the sun and out of the breeze it was scorchingly hot. Greater and greater the pyramids grew, and on the last bit of level gi'een be- fore you climb the rocky plateau on which the graves of the mighty dead had won such distinction, a golf-course has been laid out and its direction flags were flying, and a black caddie dawdling along with a bag of 27 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE clubs. It was too much, and we resolutely forgot it, and pushed the hands of the clock back. The bargaining with the Arabs to lend their helping hands for the climb was soon over, and up we went. Go up-stairs at home four steps at a time, and you will get fair preliminary practice. A third Arab, after we had gone up twenty or thirty steps, appeared from nowhere and began to push me. It was an insult to my spirit, and an assault upon my purse, and I dis- missed him with some difficulty, but at last with definiteness. He attached himself soon to someone else. My men soon began to puff and wheeze, though they had not pulled me twenty pounds weight of pull. I scorned to sit down. They were theatrical and bulling the market. I promptly started up alone, and they were at once with me. Twice more they begged me to sit down and twice I started off alone. Either they 28 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE are great artificial puffers and blowers or else preaching is better for the lungs than climbing the pyramids. One of them told me he was Mark Twain's friend, and would like to nm down the pyramid we were on and up the next and back again in ten min- utes. I looked at him with horror, saying it would be murder for a man with such lungs as his, who wanted to rest three times coming up, to attempt such a mad feat, and so I strangled him with his own turban. The Arabs are really a great nuisance. When we wanted to be still, and abandon ourselves to the pleasures of sight and re- flection in a spot so unique, in suiTOund- ings so unparalleled, we could barely get a moment free from their importunities con- cerning scarabs, and necklaces, and sungods, and pieces of mummies, and little Rameses in stone, and a dozen other impertinences. You can get rid of them by certain reso- 29 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE luteness, and also by certain phrases, but it costs a good deal of effort and takes a good deal of time, and alas, it is often no more final than brushing away flies — the other great modern Egyptian plague. From the Pyramid how plainly you see what Egypt is — a shining stream of water flanked by two broad, yet how nar- row, bands of green, and then the desert waste stretching interminably east and west. It is a vast garment of yellow-brown with a stripe of green running through it, and down the stripe of green a silver thread. How well the old Egyptians knew it you see a thousand times in their picture-writing which puts the symbols of the Nile and life and happiness constantly together. How slight the stream, how vast the desert, how short the day, how endless the night, how brief is life, how silent and inexorable and certain is death ! Is this not the voiceless 30 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE meaning of the Sphinx, of all the creations of Egyptian thought the most mysterious and fascinating as it lies at the portal of the gi'eat Pyramid, guarding the dead, with its steadfast eyes fixed on the slender strip of green where the river runs, and men live out their little lives ? The sun sets behind it over the tawny rocks where sleep the countless dead, but it looks ever eastward whence new light and life are rising. Its silence is not of despair, for in the tombs it guards men are proving their dauntless courage and picturing their deathless hopes. There they have written their books, not of memory but of prophecy — not alone the Books of the Dead, but of the Living. Books of the Portals into the other life — of the doings and goings of the other world. One could spend a life-time over the walls of the tomb of Seti I., and ever glory, not in the beauty and delicacy of the craftsman''s 31 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE art, the exquisiteness of high and low rehef, the endlessness of historic recordings and recountings, the freshness of the age-old coloring, but, despite all allowance for superb pride and thoughtless cruelty of im- perial power, in the nobility of the soul's march with the Sun God into the worlds beyond — through death and darkness — with the symbols of truth and happiness and life. This morning has seemed like a dream, so much has flashed and flamed into the mind from the gray old past. We breakfasted at 5,30 and walked through our garden in Luxor, under palms, and Pride of India, and tamarisks, to the boat-landing. The mountains on the west bank of the river were in the sunlight while we were in the cool shade. A few moments and we had crossed the river, in a babel of noises, as the donkey drivers waded out to meet us and 32 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE carried us ashore on their shoulders, and set us down each on his own beast. The ride was dehghtful for a half hour in the cool morning to the Temple of Seti I. Then up the desolate valley we rode for an hour, winding through the very home of death — with never a bush or a tree or a bird in sight ; now in the glare of a pitiless sun, and now turning into the grateful shadow, till we reached the Tombs of the Kings. Into three of them we went — the tombs of Rameses IV., and Rameses VI., and Seti I. We saw the tomb of Amenophis, discovered last year, in which everything is as it was when it was sealed when the vast retinue of the dead turned again home through the winding valley we had been threading. Next year anyone can see the sarcophagus and the royal mummy, and the sacrificial tables, and the gold and jewels, but not now. We tried every way to induce the 33 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE Dragoman, El-Hashim — and a fine old man he is — to find a way for us to get in, but he said there was no way, and the inducements were such that the sincerity of his refusal was not to be doubted. The tombs of but 110 out of 334 kings have been discovered. What discoveries are yet to be made ! Then came the steepest chmb on foot, in hot, dusty desolation, over the highest part of the mountain, a ride along its height, and a shuffle and scramble down on foot over broken pottery, stones, bricks, flints, till with another ride we reached the Temple of Queen Hatshepsu, rising terrace after ter- race until the last courts and sanctuaries were in the mountain itself. This and all the other temples have been used by the Christians in early times. Then we rode to the Ramesseum, where everything colossal that the mind can conceive was done by the mighty Rameses II. to perpetuate his mem- 34 THE RAMESSEUM LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE ory. The impressions of these stupendous ruins cannot be recorded. His statue, prone and broken, is the hugest thing of the kind in the world. It is of highly polished red granite. The ear is three and a half feet long, the face six and three-quarters feet wide, the breast, from shoulder to shoulder, twenty -three and a third feet, the height fifty-seven feet, and the weight over 2,000,000 pounds. The Greek and Roman travellers wondered just as we do, and the rows of caryatids, in the form of Horus, but with the head and cartouche (or monogram) of Rameses were described by Diodorus. Then we went to the Pavilion and Temple of Rameses III. ; noble beyond words, add- ed to, and in some places rebuilt, by the Romans, with a distinct portion long used by the Christians. Ten minutes away are the Colossi of Memnon, visible from every 35 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE direction, rising out of a field of wheat. It is hard to reahze that they were once a part of the distant group of temples, but this was " hundred-gated Thebes,"" on both banks of the river, built on three islands beside, famous through all the world, for centuries the chosen city of the Pharaohs, into which the countless treasures of their plunder and tribute flowed, the city of Ammon. The northern of these Colossi is the musical statue of Memnon. There can be little doubt that some sound was given as the warm rays of the sun touched the hard resonant stone chilled from the cold night. In Sinai and Assuan and the Pyrenees the same phenomenon has been observed. Strabo and Juvenal and many another writer has commented upon it. Since Septimius Sev- erus attempted to repair it with five courses of sandstone blocks no sound has been heard. The statues are of seated figures of 36 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE Amenhotep III., that with the original crowns were sixty-nine feet high, now about sixty-four feet, and weight 1,175 tons each. Such a day seems too much for the mind, and would be so if conscientiousness concerning detail were binding, but the picture is con- tinuous, and is ever to be recalled, " flashing upon the inwai-d eye, which is the bliss of solitude." Karxak, March 19. I can never hear the word again without a strange mixture of feeling — resulting from the debased and depressing surroundings, the dust and dirt and heat, the squalor and clamor and confusion that touch and even enter the most vast and stupendous of human temples. Under the mud houses of the present-day Egyptians, deep in ashes, broken pots, bones and rubbish, what homes of the gods may yet be in darkness ? Through the bare yards and goat pens of 37 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE the villagers runs one of the long lines of colossal rams that marked the royal road connecting the Temple of Karnak with the mile-distant Luxor. One of the stone figures is at the corner of where two mud walls meet. From the west side of the Temple of Ammon ran the avenue across the present Nile — which then ran east of Karnak — five miles westward to meet the temples that lay at the foot of the moun- tains where were the royal tombs, an avenue five miles long, enclosed by two rows of colossal rams and sphinxes. North and east, as well, stretched those monumental avenues, from the huge Pylons or triumphal arches that were like outer guards or wards of the temple. The ruins at Baal-bec may be more stupendous, though I can hardly conceive it, but no other building in the world compares with the Temple of Ammon in extent. It grew for ages, each successor to the throne 38 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE of Egypt adding his best endeavor to rival and sui'pass in greatness and glory the additions of his predecessors, until the " Throne of the world," which it came to be called, was not grandiloquent. From the IVIiddle Empire, 2200 b. c, to the time of the Ptolomies, two thousand years later, nearly every Pharaoh dreamed his wider, loftier dream of beauty, and embodied it. Pylons, courts — courts so vast that several whole temples are included in them — chapels, sanctuaries, colonnaded halls, obelisks, rows of giant kings, the great Hypostyle Hall, sacred lakes, avenues of sphinxes, succeed each other in every direction. The great Hypostyle Hall is beyond words. Vaster than Notre Dame, it is a forest of stone pillars, pillars as large in diameter as the Column Vendome in Paris; a hundred and thirty-four of them there are, arranged in sixteen rows, and supporting the stone roof, 39 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE all of them the clustered papyrus column, some with papyrus bead capital, and some the calyx or flowering capital. The central rows are thirty feet higher than the others — making a clerestory with side windows, filling the whole vast building with light, a distinct cathedral effect thousands of years before the builders of Europe made a charcoal sketch. And this stupendous temple is but one of a score of others, great and small, grouped closely, with walls separated only by courts filled with colossal figures and obelisks, or linked by avenues flanked by sphinxes and rams in countless succession. Everywhere on temple walls, pylons and pillars, are the figures in high and low relief of the gods and the kings and their trains, chronicles of their prayers, their victories, their offerings, records of intellectual imag- ination, unwearying energy and titanic accomplishment. Karnak and Luxor are 40 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE really one, and the mind is fiiint as it seeks to comprehend the power in the hand of those Old World kings, those mightiest of builders. Cairo is tinsel and tawdriness after the majesty of Thebes, and her most endm'ing works seem like the painted flies and paste- board perspective of a passing show. How are the mighty fallen ! I could not help thinking as I saw the stone and stucco pedestals under the lions on the great iron bridge over the Nile, with what scorn under their solenm fillets the old Egyptian kings would have regarded them. Old Cairo is a bazaar, its narrow lanes overhung with cor- nices that almost touch, with awnings of rugs, its balconies, its grated windows through which secluded eyes peep, its booths, like mere vestibules with no windows or doors, their owners sitting Turk-fashion, smoking, haggling, finally demanding your 41 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE "last price," and often following you far along the way ; camels, donkeys, dogs, water-sellers with clanging brass cups, ven- ders of everything, with cries to match, whips cracking like torpedoes; Nubians, Abyssinians, Greeks, Copts, Arabs, veiled women in black silk balloons and high- heeled slippers, fellahin women with no veils but wdth skins tattooed, and babies on their backs ; rug-men and scarab sellers, jewellers and brass workers dragging you into their dens ; beggars, cripples, children crying, " Backsheesh '"* — O, the streets of Cairo ! The Mouski Bazaar no one who has seen can ever forget. The hotels are unsurpassed, but I shall be glad to be off for the Holy Land, and its tent life in the open. The heavens at night are glorious, and I am again a star- worshipper. We are to see the Dervishes to-mon-ow, but I will send this to-night 42 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE and begin my next epistle dancing and howling. Greetings to you all from the President to Quartus. Faithfully yours, (Signed) Maltbie D. Babcock. 43 JoppA, March 25, 1901. I sent off my letter just as we were going to see the Dervishes. It was a pathetic af- fair. The setting was fine — a court with a raised stone platform 20 x 30 feet square, and a foot high, covered with matting and rugs, and all under a roof of grape-vines in the first green leaf; a flute with a seven- note scale kept wailing in doleful minor and oddest Arabic intervals. A singer beside him seemed to please the native listeners, but it was anything but agreeable to us, and the man's expression belonged to a sharp tooth-ache, getting steadily worse un- til the song ended. Then the old Sheikh and a dozen men came on the platform and proceeded to vex the air with guttm'als and 44 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE groans, waving their bodies side-ways and back and forth, faster and faster, so long and wearily to us that before they reached the stage of fits which they evidently cov- eted and often accomplished, we packed off. It was an exhibition of lost force, or wasted energy. A little boy sat through it all beside the leader, with forty flies crawling over his face, and eyes, and nose, and mouth, and no one would lift a finger to drive them away, or seek to counteract the contagion that spreads its blight of blindness on every side. I cannot discover the element of progress in Mohammedanism, without which no religion can eventually survive. On the Island of Rhoda, where they showed us the place where the baby Moses was found in his little boat in the rushes, we saw a Nilometer used by the early Chris- tians and the Kopts, and now by the 45 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE Tui'ks. It is a deep stone chamber into which the river flows, the annual rise of water being measured by a graduated stone column. Then through the narrow streets, in which we were far more objects of curi- osity than the natives, we rode to the old Koptic Church, in which Christian men have worshipped for a thousand years. Its pict- ures seemed most homelike, the first Chris- tian emblems we have seen for a long time — pictures of the Holy Family and Apostles that were plainly earlier than Cimabue and Giotto, Early the next morning we took the train to Alexandria, always happy in our travelling because of the special cars we have, which free us from anxiety, and keep us together for lunches, and singing, and visiting generally. Pompey"'s pillar, the site where the old Pharos stood, and the base of the Cleopatra needles that Avent to London and New York, were about all that 46 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE was interesting in this comparatively mod- ern-looking city. The sea view was a con- stant delight. The steamer we took be- longed to the Khedivial Mail Line, and had been planned for the P. & O. Line, but was bought on the stocks by the Khedive for his private yacht, and finally sold to the present company. The Mediterranean was smooth as a mill-pond for us. We reached Port Said nine o'clock Sunday morning, and spent the day on board, waiting for the mail by railroad from Cairo and the East, leaving at sundown. We had church ser- vice at eleven o''clock, the after-deck being draped on every side with flags, the pulpit covered with the American and English flags, and the piano moved out. Our male quartet sang, and the Rev. George Curtis of Bloomfield preached. The captain, chief engineer, and other officers, were enthusias- tic over everything, and could not have 47 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE enough of the singing, which went on through parts of the afternoon and evening. At Joppa we had the most conspicuous blessing of our trip in a smooth sea that made our landing swift and easy. There is no harbor at all except for small boats back of a broken-tooth ledge of rocks, with an opening through which, in fair weather, passengers are taken in good-sized yawls. In rough water the risk is great, and often no passengers are landed at all, but carried on to Beyrout. In Joppa, after lunch, we picked out our horses, bought our saddle-bags, and re-ar- ranged our baggage. We tried our new mounts by riding to the house of Simon the Tanner, and the house and tomb of Tabi- tha. They may be fairly well identified, and they may not be. I try to be porous and only reasonably susceptible, shunning the extremes of credulity and scepticism. 48 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE At any rate, Simon's reputed house is by the seaside, and I saw a man sound asleep on an elevated portico platform, and was well aware of a tannery in the neighbor- hood. At 7.30 we were off on the road to Jerusalem. Our camp equipment had gone hours earlier. Out of Joppa we rode across the Plains of Philistia, the southern end of the Plain of Sharon. It was a gar- den, green with wheat fields and orchards of oranges, lemons, apricots, and olives. Across the plains the foot-hills grew into the Shephelah, or the Hill Country, and back of that rose the purple ridge of the Judean Mountains. South of us was the country of the Philistines, with their cities of Gath, Ekron, Ashdod, Gaza, and Aske- lon. East were Beth-dagon, but only tradi- tional, and Lydda, well authenticated, where Peter was enabled to get the palsied ^neas on his feet. One of the finest views we had 49 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE was when we came to the Valley of Ajalon. We had lunch, and had a siesta in the ruins where one white tower stood, and winding for an hour or so, suddenly came upon the vale pouring out like a fan from the Pass of Beth-Horon. Here Joshua routed the Philistines, and the same sun and moon were in evidence for us, — the moon over our head. Here Judas Maccabaeus, and the Roman, and the Crusaders fought back and forth. A steady climb until half-past four, and our camp flashed in sight with its tents and flags, and five oVlock tea! We could not keep from cheering, it looked so fine, a cir- cle of fifteen tents surrounding a court of green, with a hundred mules and horses picketed outside. Tables were spread with tea and cakes, which vanished like mist. How good it all tasted to our dry throats and hungry stomachs. Then an hour and a half went into cleaning up, writing, and a 50 ^'^\fi^ THE FIRST CAMP BETWEEN JOPPA AND JERUSALEM LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE game of baseball. The Arabs were much amused by the game — for we ran bases, and shouted like Bashi-Bazouks. Mr. Dwight Elmendorf umpired. The completeness of the camp is past praising. Dr. Wilton Merle- Smith, Rev. George L. Curtis, and I, old friends, share the same tent. It is a white wall tent, circular, twenty feet in diameter, with an extra roof or fly. The inside is in Persian figures of red, white, yellow and blue. Three cot beds with comfortable mattresses, a good sized table, with mirror and candles and hand basins, rugs on the ground, and hooks on tent-pole rig us out completely. To-night we found our camp waiting for us at Solomon"'s Pools, our bags in our tents, the evening cup of tea brew- ing. The dinner at night is an event ; six courses, well cooked, and promptly served, and six miles from a hotel. Soup, roast, bird, salad, sweets, and dessert with coffee, 51 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE make you feel that the windows of heaven have been opened in Samaritan famine time. After dinner we have prayers and a good sing, a bit of letter- writing, and a tumble into bed. At 5.30 this morning, a din of drums and bells, and Arab shouts distressed the air, and we were up for a six ©""clock breakfast, and off by 6.45. Three and a half to four homV riding, and the bivouac for two or three hours for lunch, and the same in the afternoon. Our camp was torn to pieces over our heads, and swept off the face of the earth at Latron, the reputed home of the penitent thief (Latro, a rob- ber). After a two hours' climb the view back across the Philistine plains and out to the Mediterranean was as full of color as a rainbow. Rocks and ridges, stone terraces., dry river-beds were everywhere, with little corners and bottoms, wherever ingenuity and labor could triumph, set out with Avheat, LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE and olives, and figs. The Carob tree (the Prodigal's husks) was occasionally seen. Mizpah towered above us where Samuel lived and gathered the people ; where he met Saul and anointed him King of Israel, first prophet and first king, forever asso- ciated with this airy spot, the highest point in Judea. There was doubt about the identification of Kirjath-Jearim by which we passed. The place where the Ark rested is probably in the next southern valley. The Crusader''s tradition is strong that Ain Karim, which we saw, was the birth-place of John the Baptist. We lunched in an orchard of Emmaus, and knew we were not far from Jerusalem. Higher and higher we climbed, wondering why the Jews could not have left the Egyp- tian and Assyrian quarrels alone, for if they had, it is hard to see what could have in- duced a foreign amiy to leave its march 53 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE along the maritime plain to chase up these terrible defiles, and over such barren, track- less rocks. "Their strength was to stand still."" " In quietness and confidence shall be your strength." We did not enter Jerusalem, but skirted under its walls, and past the Jaffa Gate, and past Bethlehem, to the camp at Solomon''s Pools, on our way to Hebron to-morrow. Oaks of Mamre, Hebron, March 28, 190L A four hour ride in the sweetest, coolest morning air, gradually warming to hot noon, brought us to Hebron. Some of us left the main road for an horn* and threaded om* way across the battle-field of Beth- Zacharias, where Antiochus Eupator, with his huge Syrian Army and fearsome squad of elephants, defeated Judas Maccabaeus. The plain answered perfectly to the de- 54 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE mands of the historic situation, and gave Professor Riggs and me the greatest pleas- ure in working over the ground with the maps. We travelled in the narrowest of bridle-paths, with skylarks over our heads, and wild flowers on every hand. Poppies and anemones, yellow gorse and orchids, red and blue lilies, blue lobelia and chicory, and dozens of other flowers bloomed wher- ever half a chance was given them. We passed a dozen flocks with their shepherds, men were working the fields ploughing with bent sticks, and most unscripturally, for they often had an ass and a bullock un- equally yoked together. I had an interest- ing talk with our dragoman, George. It began by my asking him about the people guarding their vineyards and fields in har- vest time. It led to my speaking of a feel- ing of safety in our camp, and he said : " O, of course. We are brothers, for we are 55 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE Christians. Every servant in our camp is a Christian. I could not be happy or safe if they were Mohammedans. Mohammedans would not think it wrong to take anything they dared from infidels, but we are broth- ers. You come as strangers from America to us, but it is one caste, and we treat you as ourselves." The head dragoman is a con- vert of the Church Missionary Society of England, and the second is a Baptist con- vert. Soon we came to the vale of Eshcol, and sure enough every field was filled with grape- vines, some of them as big as trees. Figs, and olives, cherries, pears, pomegranates, and quinces, grow in abundance, and it was no wonder it seemed a very Paradise to the men who had been wandering for so many years in the desert. Hebron is most interesting. It is a thou- sand feet higher tlian Jerusalem, and was the 56 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE mountain which hardy old Caleb chose, who well remembered the place he so hope- fully spied out as a young man. Here is Abraham's oak, and there is an old tree which is now fenced in, immense enough and old enough to have been here a thou- sand years anyway. Here Abraham lived, and entertained the heavenly strangers un- der the oak. Here began that strange but sure line of revelation through patriarch, prophet, priest, chosen people, till those days came when God spake to us through His Son (in whose birth-town we are to- day). Here the giants lived. Here began the separated people. Here were those springs, the upper and lower, where so love- ly a touch of romance came out, and the daughter planned to get the lower springs from her father for the man she was to wed. Here fi'om Gaza Samson brought the gates for a joke. Here David reigned for seven 57 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE and a half years, and over the pool (still here) hung the heads of the men who thought they would please him by the mur- der of Saul's son, Ishbosheth. Here Absa- lom began his pathetic rebellion that ended in such divine grief in the room over the gate, " O, Absalom, my son ! Would God I had died for thee, Absalom, mv son, ray son ! " From the tower on the hill back of the old oak the view swept from the Mediterranean to the Dead Sea. I do not wonder that the angels came here, the shade of the oak, the balm of the pines, the Avater from the spring, the view across the valley, all making it a heavenly spot. Back from Hebron to our camp at Solomon's Pools we came, and this morning, after a short hour's ride, we were in Bethlehem, — the flock tower of David, the House of Bread, the little town of Bethlehem. My keenest feeling, my deepest emotion came to me as we en- 58 the oak of mamre Abraham's oak LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE tered the village, coming along the road be- tween the fields and vineyards. AVriting in the traditional field of the Shepherds, where long before Ruth had gleaned, the thought awakens and thrills again that God has a human heart. He knows what I mean. In some way I must know Him. Every man who in the dim past or in his glimmer of light to-day worships his idol, who seeks to bring divinity in some way within his reach, is yearning, longing, striv- ing for the God he comprehends not, is hungering and thirsting for the Incarnation. " O, that I knew where I might find Him." O for "a daysman between us,"" that he might " lay His hand upon us both,"^ — ■ upon us both. Is there no one to stand as Mediator between God and me, with one hand in God's and the other in mine, and tell me what I long to know about God, what God thinks of me, and what 1 am to 59 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE think of Him ? Does He care for me ? Will He forgive me, and help me to be good ? Are we related to each other ? Have I any child's right to speak of " us both ? " Blessed forever be the answer that came in this little town of Bethlehem. " Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will to men." Here " in the fulness of time God sent forth His Son, made of a woman, made under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons,"" through Him who belongs to " us both." The Church of the Nativity must be very old. Its simplicity and dignity point to an ancient date. The pillars may well have been brought from Jerusalem by the Em- press Helena, and the sombre old Basilica is free fi-om offence. The door of entrance is so low that even a child must bow to enter. This is not to compel reverence, but to keep the Mohammedans from driving in on their 60 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE horses. The Church is used by Greeks and Romans and the Armenian Church, the rooms and time being divided among them, each having its own altar, and taking its turn in the sacred crypt below. It cannot but mortify and pain anyone who loves the Saviour, and who remembers His prayer " that they all may be one," to see Turkish soldiers standing guard night and day in the place that marks His birth, stationed there to keep the peace among the followers of the Prince of Peace. There was blood — ■ shed there but two years ago. The Cri- mean War began in a quarrel about the re- placing of a golden star in the Shrine of the Nativity. Russia sided with the Greek monks, and France with the Romans. I did not concern myself long with thoughts of the division, for deeper than the things that divide lay the profound, the unspeak- ably dear, and some day victoriously unify- 6i LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE incT truth of the Incarnation. All who wor- ship here confess the Father Almighty, and Jesus Christ His only Son, our Lord, who for us men and our salvation, came down from heaven, who was made man. I was glad I could not read the words on the sil- ver star without getting on my knees. " Hie de virgine Maria Jesus Christus natus est." Fifteen lamps are burning always here, six belonging to the Greeks, five to the Armenians, and four to the Latins. This shrine and the Chapel of the Manger near by, are overlaid with decoration and are far enough from the simplicity that is in Christ Jesus, but He does not misunder- stand. It is the best these men knew how to do in honoring Him. I was glad to have a quiet half hour in the Roman Catholic Church above the crypt, with a chance not so much to think as to feel, to be still. A most interesting visit was made by a 62 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE few of us to the pastor of the German Church of Bethlehem, to whom I had a letter. He took us in his school-room where a hundi'ed boys sang in Arabic " My faith looks up to Thee," sung to the tune "America." In his house, in the same building, he gave us some lemonade that it takes a desert wind to make one appreciate. On the wall was the friendly face of our Dr. Dennis. One of the preacher''s daughters put on the native bridal costume, and looked as pretty as a picture in it, being straightly photographed, to our mutual pleasure. The church is the finest new building in Bethlehem, full of good memorial windows with such texts never so soul-stirring as now, — " "We have seen His star in the east [Morgenlande] and have come to worship," — " Glory to God in the highest," — " This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased." The organist played chorals for us, and we rested and 63 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE were thankful. The church Bible was the gift of the present Empress, whose name is written in the front. We lunched in the P'ield of the Shepherds under some olive-trees. This is the country of Boaz, and the tradi- tion is that this very field was the one in which Ruth gleaned. "Why not.'' It had to be somewhere in this small valley — for the boundless walls of surrounding rock never grew anything more than precarious grazing for sheep and goats. I was sur- prised to find Bethlehem but six miles fi'om Jerusalem, and built on a high rocky spot, as high, I should say, as Jerusalem. Then to the east we rode for four hours through the Wilderness of Judea, full of memories of John the Baptist, till we came to the Monastery of Marsaba. A more desolate place cannot be imagined. It is part of the wall of a terrible ravine built in the rock. It grew from the cave of the hermit Saba, 64 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE and was added to on one side and another, above and below, till now sixty or eighty men live like swallows in a cliff. The rock is a sheer pitch of six hundred feet to the bottom of the gully. I led prayers in the evening after dinner. We sat in a circle in the moonlight, and gave ourselves long to happy thoughts, and songs of Bethlehem. We were roused at half-past four the next morning by the camp alarum, most difficult to get accustomed to, an alarum of cow-bells, and dinner-bells, and tin pans. Breakfast at five and the camp vanished — for we had over six hours in the saddle before we reached our lunching-place on the Jordan. For the first two hours the sun was somewhat hidden by clouds, giving us a good start, and we needed it, for a hotter ride than we had that morn- ing may I never take! The breeze seemed to have blown from the top of a kitchen stove on Tuesday. We had perpetual di- 65 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE vei-sion. The Mountains of Judea or the Wilderness of Judea between Jeioisalem and the Jordan, through which we rode, is a succession of bari'en mountains, on which, in the rainy season, there mu-t be some pas- turage, for as far as one can see they are marked with paths Hke interlacing lines made by the goats, for who shall say how many centmnes ? Through the ^"alley of the Kedron we journeved, now climbing up the way so steep that we were cHnging to our horses" necks, and now going down a pitch that standing up seemed K'ing down. Many a time the way was too full of smooth rocks and loose stones to ride, and we led our horses. More than once the path was on the edge of a gulf a thousand feet deep, where a goat would be pardoned for being a little giddv, and a single mis-step meant the end of the chapter. One of the pack -mules stumbled yestei-day, and, with his load, went 66 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE to tlie bottom of the defile, where it was impossible even to see whcit had been left of him. After three hours the barometer indicated that ^ve had reached sea-leveL \\'e ^vere in tropical heat, and in a country suffering from drought. A dog trotting along with u^ crept panting into every shadow he could find, even keeping beside the horses to be in their shadow. Om* first view of the Dead Sea from the mountain- ridge made us shout "* Thalatta,** and ex- claim over its beauty, a dark blue gem in a setting of violet, and amber, and dull reds, far awav and beli.i\'.'. When at last we reached its shoivs. 1.300 feet below sea- level, the thermometer was 13'2 . and our mouths dry as cotton. Part of the cav- alcade went on to the lunching-place, an hour and a half farther over the stifling plains, and the rest of us stnpped and were in the water in a minute. It was a delicious 67 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE joke ; a joke because we were so much out of water, feet refusing to stay under, and bodies wobbling like a high boat without ballast, such was the great density of the water ; but delicious — for it was wet and cool. It tasted so salty that it seemed peppery, biting the tongue with its mixture of chlorides of sodium, calcium, and mag- nesium. It looked like a beautiful Central New York lake, with its shingly beach and rippling waves. I saw more birds within a half mile of the Dead Sea than I had seen for hours before. Storks, and ravens, quail, and even snipe, with a nest in drift-wood on the beach. The mother fluttered around her nest in anxious self- consciousness, like a partridge playing ""possum in close quarters. From the Sea to the camp was the most trying ordeal so far, for we breakfasted at five o'clock, and after our swim at ten o'clock, we had nothing to eat up for nearly two 68 THE DEAD SEA AND THE WILDERNESS OF JUDEA LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE hours but the pathetically light southern breeze that went along with us. Jordan at last, and never was river more welcome. Everybody absorbed a quart of Apollinaris,or St. Galmier, at one standing, and although I had been taught in temperate climes that one should not bathe within three hours after eating, I felt that it must be radically differ- ent here, and that there must be some qual- ity of mercy in the Jordan, especially when the mercury was at 100° in the shade, and so I went in the river at two o'clock with a glad company of men, who seemed to have for- gotten everything about history and experi- ence and sacred associations, in the pure and absorbing joy of being boys in swimming. Six of us swam across a strong current and sat in a bower of shade on the other side of Jordan with not a conscious want, supremely happy. Mr. Elmendorf photographed our shining faces as we approached the shore LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE swimming back, and told us he would call it " Russian Pilgrims at the Jordan," for this is the place where thousands of them come to bathe after Easter. It was jxot far from here that the Children of Israel crossed over against Jericho. When we had dried off and warmed up again we went back into the river with re-awakened joy, and stayed there till we felt cool, for the first time in no one knows how long. Horses at foiu* o''clock, and such a ride to Jericho ! We had noticed strange columns of dusty smoke over the mountains, and soon the Dead Sea was invisible, and we rode to Jericho in the teeth of a dust and sand storm. It turned us gray in a jiffy, and gave us a staggering, choking hour. How welcome was our camp under the shadow of the Mountain of Temp- tation, pitched at Elisha's fountain. Such a fountain as it is, — just a well of water springing up and singing and laughing, cool 70 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE and clear, with plenty to drink, pools to bathe, raceway for a mill, brooks running everywhere for gardens, and with the sting of the Dead Sea and the dust of the desert still in our mouths ! Jericho has fulfilled every prophecy in its degeneracy and degra- dation, being only a collection of hovels and Bedouin tents, and only a sign or two left that ever a city stood here. At our Sunday service the Rev. Mr. Persons, of Cazenovia, N. Y., preached, and our male quartet — Stone, of Auburn Seminary, Dr. Merle Smith, Brewer Eddy, of Auburn Seminary, and I — sang. It was a scorching day, 130° in the tent open court, and 95° in our tents, though nmch tempered by the breeze. It is hard to believe that at three o'clock in the afternoon the thermometer stood 130° before our tent, and that five hours later the mercury had fallen sixty- three degrees. The change gave us all a 71 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE most comfortable night. We took time by the forelock again, and were up at 4.20 this morning, and on the southern road from Jericho to Jerusalem, the road our Saviour took after He had healed the blind Bartimaeus. Again and again our thoughts tm'ned to Him who went before His dis- ciples along this way, and " they were amazed, and as they followed they were afraid."" His decision had been made, and as far as that choice was concerned the be- trayal and crucifixion were already accom- plished. He had chosen irrevocably, say- ing : " Behold, we go up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man shall be delivered unto the Chief Priests and unto the Scribes, and they shall condemn Him to death." Luke records the beginning of this closing chapter of our Lord's life with the words : " And it came to pass, when the time came that He should be received up, that He stedfastly set His 72 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE face to go to Jerusalem." We read some of the Psalms of Ascent : " I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills,"" " I was glad when they said unto me: let us go into the house of the Lord," and thought of the countless pilgrims who had come this way to the Holy City, journeying with joy and glad- ness. How different His last journey, when at last the cry broke from the heart of Christ : " O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, which killest the prophets, and stonest them that are sent unto thee ; how often would I have gathered thy children together, as a hen doth gather her brood under her wings, and ye would not ! " We have fol- lowed our Lord's footsteps with strange emotions, stopping at the Khan, named for the Good Samaritan whom Jesus used to show all men how to love ; steadily climb- ing the steep road to Jerusalem ; resting at Bethany, of all spots the nearest a home of 73 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE Jesus, thinking of Simon the leper, and Mary, and Martha, and Lazarus, and re- calling Tennyson's Avonderful verse from "In Memoriam"—" Behold a man raised up by Chi-ist," and " Her eyes are homes of silent prayer." And then, by the way He must so often have gone, we came in sight of the city, flooded in sunlight. Forget it, who can ! It may be a different looking city, but yet it is the same, Jerusalem, " beauti- ful for situation, the joy of the whole earth,*" self-centred and self-righteous, yet more than Rome, — more than Greece, — the centre of light for the whole earth, the scene of its own deep shame, and the world's sure hope and salvation. Back from its present degradation, the outward sight of the city, still how beautiful, carries our thoughts to her ancient glory, and onward to the " New Jerusalem coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride 74 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE adorned for her husband." From Geth- semane we came again to the brow of the Mount of Olives, and for two hours let our eyes and thoughts roam back and forth over the city. The centuries of its history passed in review, from the time when to Mount Moriah Abraham first linked imperishable human interest, to the days of the strong- hold of the Jebusites, and the City of David, in the era of Solomon and his glory, and the Captivity and Restoration, the gallant vic- tories of the Maccabees, the Pharisaic bondage, and Roman subjection, the days of Christ and the Apostles, the destruction of the city, the pitiful attempt at national revival, the Moslem domination, the flaming period of the Crusades, and the steady de- cline under the Turk. Out of the blue two clear and contrasting places stand out, strangely separated, yet no less strangely united — the rock of Moriah, under the 75 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE Mosque of Omar, and the hill outside the city wall where the Cross of Jesus stood. All who honor Abraham, the Father of the Faithful, Jew, Christian, and Mohammedan, look on that strange rock, bare and rugged, where Abraham's devotion to God was so nobly vindicated, where David, long after, bought the high winnowing rock of Araunah, the Jebusite, and where for how many cen- turies stood the first, and the second, and the third temples, and what a succession of Christian and Moslem shrines since. There is the trough and hole through which the sacrificial blood of millions of bulls and goats has flowed. All that is past. That rock under the mosque belongs to a dead past. The hope of the future is bound to the hill where Christ was once offered, the " Lamb of God who taketh away the sins of the world," bound to Him whose perfect offering fulfilled and finished all sacrifice, 76 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE bound to Him who by His uplifting -will yet draw all men unto Himself. We saw the sun rise over Mount Nebo and set over Jei-usalem, bounding a full and happy day. How cold it was last night ! At Jericho the day before, it was 130' in the sun, and 100° in the shade, and on the Mount of Olives, at nine o'clock last night, 42°. It took all the clothes we could muster to keep warm. I slept comfortably, however, tucking mv rubber blanket over and under the bedding, and sliding in as into an um- brella-case. After breakfast we climbed the noble tower of the Russian Church on the Mount of Olives, with Jerusalem spread before us, Bethphage and Bethany, and Bethlehem and Mizpah, in plain sight, and the width of the land fi-om the MediteiTa- nean to the Dead Sea silver bright in the morning sunlight. Then to the Temple en- closure, where we spent most of the morn- 77 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE ing. It hurts to see it all in Moslem hands, and to be obliged to take off our shoes and shuffle in the mis-matched slippers. It was easy to see what a glorious place it had been, for even the degenerate present is full of majesty and beauty. Nothing is surer in Jerusalem than that great expanse of bare rock, on which the great Altar of Sacrifice must have stood, where Abraham saw Christ's day and was glad. No Mosque except Sophia, at Constantinople, is more beautiful than this of Omar guarding the rock. This and the Mosque El-Aksa, a chiu'ch going back to Justinian, were both filled with beautiful rugs by the Sultan, in honor of the visit of the German Emperor. I have never enjoyed the thought of that visit. It seemed bad business, on the heels of the Armenian atrocities, for the Kaiser to be kissing hands with the unspeakable and unrepentant Turk. It was not far 78 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE from what school-boys would have called boot-licking. Under the Temple enclosm'e are the wonderful sub-structures, some of them dating back to Herod's times. They are called Solomon''s Stables, and it is plain to see where horses were tied and fed, but I suspect it was the horses of the Crusaders. From the walls we could look deep down into the valley of the Kidron, though it has filled up over eighty feet, and its bottom is thirty-five feet east of its old bed. In the open courts of the Temple some boys were playing " hop-scotch," and thoughts flew to Him who had watched the children play- ing their games. How often He was here ! Here the boy asked the Doctors of the Law questions that astonished them. Here He was at the Feast of Dedication. Here, on the great day of the Feast He cried, " I am the Light of the World." Here how often He came with the disciples teaching daily. 79 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE Here He discomfited His malicious ques- tioners. Here in glowing indignation He freed His Father's House from the shame of heartless trading, and here was gladdened by the hosannas of the children. What if the old buildings are gone ! what if the gorges are filled up with the wreck of cen- tiu'ies ! — here He walked ; the outline of these changeless hills He saw ; on this holy hill He lifted his eyes to heaven. Nearer still to Him we felt ourselves when we walked through the Via Dolorosa, and un- der the church of the Sisters of Zion saw the old pavement deep below the present road ; saw the foundation of the Pretorium that ran to the rock level of the Tower of Antonia. Close to this spot, it may be on this very pavement, " Pilate brought Jesus forth in a place that is called The Pavement." On one of the stones are cut the lines of a kind of chess-board where Ro- 80 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE man soldiers had whiled away the time. I must believe that close to this spot was the derision, when the soldiers clothed Him with purple and crowned Him with thorns. The dearest little church in Jerusalem is this church of the Sisters of Zion. We worshipped there with joy and sorrow, and deep gratitude for the purity and simplicity of the conception that incorporated the foundation there discovered into the altar, and placed over it no figure of Mary, or Joseph, or saint, but only a white marble Christ, thorn-crowned, and with the robe and reed of the soldiers' mockery — but, thank God, of their unwitting prophecy — and on each side of the Saviour a kneeling angel. In the new German Church, whose dedication brought the Emperor here two years ago, we heard the organ and sang " Ein feste burg ist unser Gott." But a lit- tle way is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. 8i LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE We roamed from shrine to shrine and altar to altar. One marked the centre of the world ; another the spot where Adam was created ; one the spot where Christ was imprisoned ; and another where He was mocked. Through a brass aperture a reed is thrust to touch the rock on which He was scourged, and then the reed is kissed by the worshippers. A\^here His garments were parted ; where He was nailed to the Cross ; where the Cross was raised ; where He was taken down ; where the penitent thief died ; where the true Cross was found ; where Queen Helena sat while the Cross was being soufjht, and I know not how many other spots, are marked by chapels where candles are given you and gifts expected. Latins and Greeks, Kopts, Abyssinians, Ai'menians, all have their special sanctuaries, and divide among them the most important places. It becomes intolerable after a while. I gave 82 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE up following our guide, preferring to watch the pilgrims as they came into the main en- trance of the church, and saw the long mar- ble called the Stone of Anointing or Wash- ing, on which they believe the body of Jesus was placed before His burial. Look- ing up, they cross themselves, bow, fall on their knees, kiss the stone that frames the marble, rise and cross themselves again, and most reverently bow, and kneeling kiss the stone itself They measure the stone, too, so that their winding-sheet may be the same length. The sincerity, the devotion and the joy of these pilgi'ims was beautiful. Thousands of them have come from Russia alone, the great majority of them being men and women sixty years of age and more. For a lifetime they have looked forward to their reaching the shrine of all most sacred. With staves and bundles and tea- pots they have journeyed, old women wrin- gs LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE kled like the old portraits Franz Hals painted, old men in top boots, wearing belted blouses like little boys, but bearded and bronzed, and looking for all the world like Tolstoi, out of Russia with return ticket compulsorily bought at Odessa, herded like cattle on the steamer to Joppa, trudging the blinding, blistering roads of Palestine to Bethlehem and Jerusalem and the Jordan, Avhere at last they bathe with the solemnity of a baptism, it is all the crown of a lifetime, and a real "Nunc di- mittis." Bethel, April 6, 190L How glad we were in the evening to for- get the church full of rival sects, the Moslem guards smoking and gossiping in its en- trance, the scores of pedlars in its front court selling palms to the Greek pilgrims, whose Easter is a week later, selling every- thing to eat and di'ink, and filling the place 84 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE with their cries. At eight o'clock we all went into the city through the Damascus gate and threaded our way through the vaulted passage-ways that pass for streets in this city (this city, " which is compact to- gether " ), till we entered a low door, and went up a flight of stone steps to an open court and into a large upper room, furnished, where the Lord's Passover had been made ready for us. We sang "Just as I am," " There is a green hill far away," " Rock of Ages," " My faith looks up to Thee." Dr. Thurber, of the American Chapel in Paris, led the service. We read the account of the supper the Lord ate this same evening, in this same city, " before He suffered " ; we pi-ayed, and took the bread and cup in memory of Him. A twelve-year-old boy who was in our company, was quite over- come when the bread was given him, and unconsciously helped us all, who were full to 85 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE overflowing with emotion. After we had " sung an hymn " we, too, went out to the Mount of Olives, and in Gethsemane with Christians ah'eady gathered there, wor- shipped our Saviour and Lord. It was the time of the full moon, which had risen over the Mount of Olives. Clouds passed by and made alternating lights and shadows. Once a band of people, with lanterns, came around a corner of the street- wall, and the illusion was startling, for the words were in our ears, " Rise, let us be going, behold he is at hand that doth betray me." The thought that possessed me in Gethsemane was the perfect purpose of Jesus to do the Father's will. His body was weakening under the strain of His soul's determination. His human sensibilities shrinking from the load of the world's iniquities that were laid upon His sacrificial sympathy and redeeming love, but past them all He must go in His obe- 86 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE dience. Strength He must have lest He break down before the cross is reached, and power was given Him. His strong crying was heard, His tears were effectual, and He was strengthened to " despise the shame, to endure the cross," and in expiring to cry with a loud voice. The next day was Good Friday, and while some of our company were tracing the line of the second wall, with our Consul, Dr. Merrill, showing that the site of the present Church of the Holy Sepulchre was inside the city at the time of Christ, a few of us w^ent with our Bibles to Calvary, outside the Damascus gate, near the road that led into the country, on which Simon, the Cyrenian, was journeying, and, sitting down, we read aloud the account of that night of shame and outrage and the day that followed. It is something to be forever thankful for, to have had such an opportunity where the 87 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE place and the day, the words of the Gospel, and our own sorrowful, trusting, thankful hearts, united to bring home to us the over- whelming reality of the Divine Sacrifice. And the garden beside the hill, how beauti- ful it is ! English Christians own it. It is full of signs of loving care, bright and fi-agrant with flowers that bloom to the very edge of the solid rock, in which, a few years ago, a large unfinished tomb was found. Was it here that the body of Jesus rested ? Was it here Death was vanquished, and our dearest hopes confirmed ? Was it this garden in which the loving woman stood, begging the gardener to tell her where they had taken the body of Jesus, and heard Jesus utter the word that thrills us all to-day, " Mary ? " Who can say ? Paul sounded the note of changeless truth, and well may we all accept it as the true resolu- tion, — " \\'Tierefore henceforth know we no LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE man after the flesh ; yea, though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now hence- forth know we Him no more." The true cross we may find in supreme loyalty of will to God. The real Easter is the power of Christ's resurrection that raises our spirits to heavenly places, and fills our lives on earth with the joy and peace, the victory and love of the spirit of the risen Christ. In the evening, in moonlight that seemed as bright as day, we had prayers on the sa- cred hill, glad to know it was to be our last impression of Jerusalem. We could not bear to spend Easter in the Moslem city ; and left Jerusalem early this morning plan- ning on green hills, under blue skies, to celebrate the day of joy and gladness. Poor Jerusalem ! It was its great week — the Jews having Passover, the Christians Easter, and the Moslems their day of great sacrifice when Mecca pilgrimage ends, and 89 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE their Neby Musa begins, a Jerusalem cele- bration and parade planned to counteract or counter-irritate the Christian Easter. They go with banners, and drums, and dervishes to the tomb of Moses, on this side of Jordan. The intelligent know it is not authentic, but the mob believe it. As one said, " Moses lived in several different houses when he was alive, why shouldn't he have more than one grave .'* " Despite all the excitement this week had, Jerusalem is so far from being the joy of the whole earth that it seems the bottom of degi'adation and hope- lessness. The Jews wailing by the old A\all on Fridays would be most stirring for its fitness, if it were not so histrionic with eyes of the wailers looking this way and that. Trodden down of the Gentiles, and such Gentiles ! Bitter fate for the city that be- fore all is the " Mother of us all,"" and after all gives its name to the New Jerusalem of go LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE oui" heavenly faith, hope, and love. \N'^ho shall say, however, what future this City of the Great King may yet have in store for it, — City of Melchisedek, — City of David, — City of our Saviour"'s love, and tears, and death, and resurrection ? What a ride it was as we left in the cool, brilliant morning ! What a view as we looked back upon the city " on the sides of the north" from Scopus, the hill on which Titus began his siege. There was no attack- ing it from the other sides, where the deep gorges of Kidron, and Hinnom, and Tyro- poean valley gave more than moated protec- tion. We pitched our lunch-tent at noon at Bethel, and read its wonderful history in Genesis, especially Jacob's story in the twenty-eighth chapter, so wonderfully treat- ed in the hymn " Nearer, My God, to Thee ;" its subsequent history in Joshua, Judges, Sanuiel, and Kings. The ride from Bethel 91 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE to Sinjil was in charming air, a westerly breeze from the sea, but over the worst road I ever dreamt of. No mountain-stream I ever waded had so steep a pitch, or was so full of loose stones and smooth pitches as this dry wady. We could not ride our horses a tenth of the way, but led them, stumbling, slithering, hirpling along as best we could. A little more and we shall all be wearing our Sunday shoes for every-day. Jacob's Well. At Sinjil from our camp we looked across a fertile valley to Shiloh, full of memories of the lots cast for the tribes' possessions, of the daughters of Shiloh carried off for wives by the sons of Benjamin, of Eli, and the Ark. How long it has been in ruins ! Jeremiah said of Jerusalem : " The Lord will make it like Shiloh." We had a good day of rest on the hill above Sinjil, and an 92 --•^' THE DAMASCUS ROAD OUT OF JERUSALEM NEAR BETHEL LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE Easter service in the big tent, with the table covered with flowers. A walk in the village in the afternoon gave me an intimate knowl- edge of their home life, for we went into the home of a rich man, and of a poor man. Tlie former made a fire, roasted some coffee and gave it to us, beginning with the old- est. His wife was grinding wheat as we came in. His three children, and fifteen others, sat aromid in a silence we could not credit, for it was the first time in Palestine the din of Baksheesh ! Baksheesh ! had not been ringing in our ears. Some of the party came across a case of small-pox in their wanderings, and scuttled backwards like crabs. Two of our company went back this morning to Jerusalem because of illness that made this hard riding out of the ques- tion. Four hours riding this Monday morn- ing along the high-road from Jerusalem to Samaria, high and low, rough and rocky, 93 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE making us scramble and shuffle among the loose stones, brought us to this spot most beautiful, with the fertile plain before us, Mount Ebal and Mount Gerizim back of us, but a little away from Sychar on the north and Shechem on the west. This is the parcel of ground which Jacob gave to his son Jo- seph, where Jacob's well is, and Jesus sat by the well, being wearied with the journey.- Of no one spot in this Holy Land can we be more sure than this. It is now enclosed by a wall, and in a garden of apricot-trees. The ruins of a church built around it in the fourth century are plainly visible. A little shrine encloses it, reached by ten or twelve stone steps. The Avell has been partly filled up by stones dropped down to test its depth. I drew some water from it with a rope seventy-five feet long, and we drank it, and it was cool and sweet. How the divinity and the humanity of the Saviour 94 RUINS OVER Jacob's well NEAR SHECHEM LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE are linked in this wonderful fourth chapter of John ! How marvellous that the high- est, clearest declaration of spiritual religion should have been made here, and to a poor, sinful Samaritan woman. But the world knows it, knows it from Him, and knows it is of God. I can never forget the scene — the long road that wearied us, that wearied Him ; Sychar at the foot of Ebal ; the broad fields on which He told the disciples to look, comparing their ripeness and the readiness of the men of Samaria. The music of the beautiful " Song of the Well," in Bennett's " Woman of Samaria," with the water springing up, has been singing itself to me all day long. Nabulus. After lunch we climbed Mount Gerizim, where the ruins of the Samaritan Temple are, and the altar which they use now, kill- ing seven lambs, according to the ancient 95 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE rites. Heaps of brushwood are by the altar, ready for the celebration three days from to-day. It is the sole survival of the Mosaic ritual, the narrow thread of that great stream of sacrifice which came down through the old dispensation. The Samari- tans number but a hundred or so. In their synagogue Nabulus (Shechem), the oldest in the world, they worship, a few tatters of the Samaritan nation. We saw their new Pen- tateuch, which dates from the Maccabees more than a century b. c, and a still older one, no one knows how old. We had to have good protection through the streets of this city, for it is thoroughly Moslem and fanatical, and as it was we had curses hurled at us, and occasional stones. The filth and degradation of their streets passes belief, but never gets past the senses. The face of the Samaritan High Priest was beautiful, thoughtful, and refined, and sent my thoughts 96 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE swiftly to the Good Samaritan. I wish Tis- sot could have had this face in his pictures of the Saviour. The priest's name was Jacob Aaron. He is of the lineage of the Tribe of Levi, and lives on the tithes of his people. He trains the few Samaritan chil- dren in his care in the Law of Moses. Speaking of the law reminds me of the blood I saw on the walls and door-frames of Mos- lem houses, sprinkled or daubed there as one of their religious rites, derived, doubtless, from the Jewish Passover. We were thankful yesterday that Dr. Wright, of the English Church Missionary Society, was but fifteen miles away, for he was a friend in need to two of our travellers who were sick enough to need medical at- tendance. He stayed over night with us, and caught such a cold in camp that we found him to-day in his home sick a-bcd. The hospital here is a model one. If people 97 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE at home could realize what an oasis in the desert, what a centre of light, what seed of future harvests, what an advance guard of Christian civilization, such a Christian church, and school, and hospital are, they would glory in the love that conceived them, and sustain them with enthusiasm. Over one hundred and fifty a day of these fanatical, ignorant, dirty human beings pass through its gate into perfect clean- ness, order, intelligence, and kindness. Not a few of them become Christians, but not one of them escapes the inoculation of new ideas. All through these lands Christian missions are making molecular and structural changes that do not appear in reports, nor show themselves to the passing tourist, but that yet are profound and prophetic, and surely preparing the way of the Lord. This is a place where such a work is not only desperately needed, but a place whose 98 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE history naturally calls for it, since it was to Shechem that Abraham first came, whom God blessed, that he might be a blessing, and it was Shechem that Moses appointed as one of the cities of refuge. This would have been the inevitable capital of a United Israel if it could have been fortified, for it is the centre of the land, and accessible from every direction. Its interest, however, pales before Samaria. It was the head and front of to-day (April 9th). Up its ascent we rode and viewed the site of the city. " The head of the fat valley " is a literal descrip- tion of it. It is a hill with a continuous valley encircling it, girded by splendid mountains. Every way you look a rich vale of wheat, or olives, or figs, is before you, and back of the vale the climbing mountain. In an olive orchard thirty pil- lars of Herod's palace stand to-day. Two amphitheatres are clearly outlined. Pillars 99 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE and capitals, and pieces of cornice, and architrave are everywhere — and the gate where the doubter was trampled upon, where the famine was ended by the Syrian flight. The glory of old Samaria was ended 722 B.C., when Sargon earned captive the ten tribes. Herod more than restored its glory when he made it most royal, and named it Sebaste, in honor of Augustus (Sebaste in Greek). The Church of St. John the Bap- tist, built by the Crusaders, largely survives in a mosque to-day. Samaria must have stood out temple crowned, like the Acrop- olis, in the days of its wicked splendor, visible from every side. From Samaria we rode through the plain of Dothan, where Joseph sought his broth- ers. I saw an empty grain-pit which would perfectly have answered their fraternal pur- pose for the young dreamer. LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE Nazareth, April 10, 1901. To-day we have crossed the most famous battle-ground of the world — the plain of Megiddo — the plain of Jezi'eel, or the plain of Esdraelon, highway of the nations. The paths across it were red, and thev might \\e\\ be for the blood that here has been shed. Egyptian, Assyrian, Philistine, He- brew, Greek, IMaccabean, Jew, Persian, Ro- man, Crusader, Turk, Frenchmen, here have fought. To the east are the mountains of Gilboa, on which David prayed that there might be no dew, as he lamented Saul and Jonathan dead. There eastward, too, are the ruins of Beth-shan, where Saul's body was hung up. Up the hill of Jezreel we climbed, where Ahab and Jezebel set up their abominations, where poor Naboth was done to death that Jezebel might have his vineyard, and where the painted Queen her- self was thrown from the palace window — lOI LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE gone to the dogs at last. The view to the north, over the wonderful plain, was start- ling in its beauty. What places those old builders chose, Hebron, Jerusalem, Samaria, and Jezreel ! Past the remnants of Nain we rode, and Shunem, and Endor, past Gideon"'s fountains, where the soldiers were tested, past the source of the Brook Kishon, and on for hours over the plain of Esdraelon — endless, compared with the little patches of level land we had seen before, and a para- dise of fertility compared to rocky Judea. I never dreamed Nazareth was on such a mountain. It was an hour's climb to the town that is built in a hollow a few hundred feet below the top of the range. It might well have been from that high point just above His home that Jesus saw the king- doms of the world in a moment of time, for from the Jordan valley on the east the eye can sweep to the very surf of the Mediter- A GOAT HERD NEAR NAZARETH LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE ranean, and from the mountains of Samaina across the plain southward, to the glory of snow-crowned Hermon on the north. Cir- cling the town wind the caravan routes fi'om Damascus and the Far East to the Great Sea and Egypt. Let no one think that the boyhood and young manhood of Jesus were spent in a corner. Josephus says there were 204 cities of over 15,000 inhabitants in Galilee. This was The Galilee literally. The circle of the nations in which Nazareth found itself. Before the eyes of Jesus there passed all the greatness of the world, the endless pageant of travel, and trade, and war, of the Decapolis and Syria, Phoenicia and Greece, and Rome. It flashes a new light on the words : " He knew what was in man," when we think that there was no type of faith or fashion, no school of men, no warlike arms that did not cross and re- cross this pathway between North and South, 103 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE between East and West. We were shown the spot in one of the churches where Mary was told the tidings of Israel's hopes and the de- sire of nations ; the carpenter shop of Joseph ; and the synagogue where Jesus stood up " and the eyes of all were fixed upon Him." It matters not to us — the sacred spots where these monuments of an uncritical faith are built ; it matters not that men show the wine-jar at Cana that made the wedding glad, and the stone on which the Angel of Annunciation sat ; here certainly in Naz- areth Jesus played as a little boy, surely in this very maricet-place where our tents were pitched ; here He learned both of His Father'^s books by heart, and here He made ploughs and yokes. The Hill of Precipita- tion, from which the people would have cast Him, did not satisfy us at all, as it was one and a half miles from the town. The Vir- gin's fountain was delightful, with its two 104 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE streams of water gushing into a stone basin and then filling a large stone enclosed pool. As this is the only water in Nazareth, we cannot doubt that the Mother and Child were often here, like the mothers and chil- dren we have seen. Some of the women''s faces were strong and fine, but we saw no such children's faces as there were at Beth- lehem. It was quite as it should be that one of the best orphanages in Palestine has been placed here by the Church Missionary Society. Over seventy girls are living here in cleanliness, instead of filth, with educa- tion, and order, and hope, and love in their lives, instead of ignorance, and neglect, and hopelessness. To go into these clean, sweet rooms, and into the Scotch Medical Mission, under Dr. \'artan, famous through the whole countryside, is to feel a thrill of jov that the love of God is being shed abroad in these hearts, and the people that sit in LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE darkness are seeing a great light. To-day, in Tiberias, three of us breakfasted with Dr. Torrance (who attended the Ecumenical Council in New York City), who has the only centre of health and hope in Tiberias, in fact, in this whole district. Every morn- ing at his door the blind, and maimed, and diseased come, as they did in the time of Jesus, and in the spirit of Jesus he and his helpers do what they can for their bodies and minds. He performed more than one thou- sand operations last year, and has a hundred consultations a day. To come to such a Christian Mission, if only a Greek or Roman Catholic, but how much more a Protestant one, is to know what it is to find an oasis in a desert. Whatever else I may miss I will not miss seeing the missions of any Christian church, for the sake of the encouragement I can get and give. The last forty-eight hours were memorably spent at the Sea of Galilee. io6 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE It was far more beautiful than I had imagined. The lake is " blue Galilee" indeed, the shape of a harp, encircled with mountains, receiv- ing the muddy Jordan at one end, and sending it out clean and clear thirteen miles away at the other. Our camp was at the hot spring below Tiberias, and as we looked out this morning it seemed as though we must be at one of the Italian lakes, so sharp were the mountain lines, so clear the air, so blue and flashing the waves. Yesterday we went by row-boat to the southern end of the lake, and this morning to the northern end, seeing where the Jordan made its entrance and its exit. I tried my fishing tackle, but in vain. I, too, caught nothing. I fancy the fish have never been trained to be caught by anything but a net. As we rowed liome at sunset a light like Alpen-glow came over the mountains with the rosy light fading last from Mount Hermon, and we talked of 107 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE what this lake must have been with Beth- saida, Capernaum, Magdala, Tiberias, Cho- razin, Dahnanutha, Gadara, and Hippos flourishing as they did in the days of Jesus. Here He called and trained the disciples, and taught the multitude and fed them. Land and Sea are full of memories of Him, for here He spent most of His public life. Whole chapters of the Gospels describe the events of His Galilean ministry. It was easy enough to see how the disciples could have been caught in a sudden storm, and could have toiled all but helplessly against a contrary wind, for when we were rowed by our Arab oarsmen to the southern end of the lake six miles away from our camp, the last mile went swiftly because of a breeze that sprang up. But when we turned to come back we were in the teeth of half a gale and the oarsmen kept as close in the lea as they could, and got us home an hour and loS FIRST VIEW OF THE SEA OF t;AI.II.El- LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE a half later than we expected. The borders of the lake are glorious with pink oleanders, some of them like little trees, and all in full tilt of blossom. At Tel Hum the Francis- cans have a little monastery with a paradise of a garden full of figs, grapes, apricots, and vegetables, where all the birds of the coun- try seem to have made a home. Some high- ly ornamented stones are here thought to be the relics of the White Synagogue of Caper- naum, which some scholars identify with Tel Hum. The verdure and fertility of such a spot show what the land must have been when hundreds of thousands of busy people lived here. The mountains and low ridges are such naked bare bones of desolation to- day that it is hard to believe such a popula- tion could ever have been here, but the cut- ting down of the trees, and neglect of the terraces let the slopes soon be washed bare. ^^^lere we camped last night near the Wa- 109 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE ters of Merom there is a colony of Russian and Roumanian Jews, founded by one of the Rothschilds, It has been in existence about sixteen years, and the place looked like a clean, thriving German or Swiss village. From the high mountains back of the vil- lage a water-supply is piped that runs into a stone cistern outside every house. Or- chards of almond-trees and vineyards of Malaga grapes are everywhere, and thou- sands of mulberry-trees support a good silk- worm industry. We went into one man's house and saw the shelves in a room where the silk-worms were feeding on the mulberry leaves. In a month they will have attained their growth, will not eat more, and will find each a place where he can hang himself up and spin his cocoon. The children of the community have learned how to handle the cocoons, and they will not be sent as before to France. It is hard, though, with all their no LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE industry, to get ahead, for the Turkish Gov- ernment exacts a tax of thirty-thi'ee and one-third per cent, on everything they raise. There is no immediate prospect of more colonies or individual Jews coming into Palestine, since the Turks have passed a law giving no passport to a Jew entering the country that does not bind him to leave in three months. This, of course, stops the Zionist movement effectually for the pres- ent. A^^lat the future has in store for them who can sav ? It does not seem as though anything but bitterest Anti-Semite perse- cution could drive Jews from Germany and England and America to this land, dear as it must be to them, to exchange all that Christian civilization offers them for the barrenness and narrowness and intolerance awaiting them here, if the doors should be again opened. I am writing now under an oak — just such LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE an one as Absalom was entangled in. Across the plain through which the Jordan flows, hidden in rushes and irises and papyrus reeds, rises Mount Hermon with its clefts filled with snow, with the Hill of Dan at its foot and Caesarea Philippi, and the sources of the Jordan well up its side. There we are to go to-moiTow. The Sources of the Jordan, April 15. Yesterday, Sunday, was a real day of rest. Breakfast at 7.30 instead of 4.30 and 5 and 5.30 as we ordinarily have it. Dr. Newman Smyth preached under a great oak in the morning, and I in the evening in the tent after dinner. This morning I saw the August stars overhead, and the old moon silver decrescent over the mountains to the eastward. At four o'clock the deadly alarum of mule-bells, dinner-bell, and tin- pans went ringing through the camp, and 112 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE in a little over an hour we were off for Caesarea Philippi, and the Castle of Banias. Half an hour after we started we saw the sun's edge over the mountain-ridge we were heading for. A three-hour ride brought us to this old Roman town built by Herod, and greatly adorned by Philip his son, and named after Caesar. The name Cassarea Philippi was given it to distinguish it from C^sarea on the sea-coast. It is a poor jum- ble of a village to-day, but everywhere are remnants of Roman roads, bridges, pillars, and nobly carved cornices. Such water we have not seen in Palestine. We crossed a dozen streams of the young Jordan, two of them quite large, and lunched at the main som'ce, where the living water bursts from the rock below the cave of Pan. Here Hittites and Bedawi of the desert ; here Hebrew, Greek, and Roman have felt the in- stinct and impulse of worship. There are 113 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE three perfect niches in the rock with inscrip- tions to the God Pan. No one who has not toiled over the hot dry wastes of this thirsty land can appreciate what it is to be by a spring or stream of living water, in the music of its rushing and the shadow of the figs and olives, the willows and the poplars, that are glad as we to be near it. How often have we spoken to each other of what " the shadow of a great rock " had come to mean to us, and the longing of the Psalm- ist's heart when he cried : " As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after Thee, O God. My soul thirst- eth for God, for the living God." How we drank the cool water, and bathed our faces and hands and wrists in the running stream. Five of us had climbed the steep jagged mountain 1,500 feet above Caesarea Phi- lippi, over rocks as sharp as the thorns that grow about them, and we shall never forget 114 GROTTO OF PAN, ONE OF THE SOURCES OF THE JORDAN LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE what the Jordan''s Spring meant to us. Our chmb was up to the old Crusader Castle of Banias, the most splendid fortification — massive, extensive, aspiring, impregnable — I have seen in the East. And yet it was not impregnable, for the Moslems won it from the Crusaders. The titanic enclosure of towers and bulwarks is 1,450 feet from east to west, and 350 from north to south, con- forming itself to the mountain-top as though it had grown there. Caesarea Phi- lippi is the farthest point north that our Lord reached in His ministry, and here one of the supreme joys of His life came to Him when asking the disciples whom the people, and whom they themselves, thought Him to be, found in Peter a man who had begun to understand Him, found a man wlio had seen the Divine heart, the Divine purpose. With what gladness He hailed it, declaring the safety of His Church which should be 115 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE founded not on fallible men, nor book, nor creed, nor ritual, but on men of His spirit, who had found God and goodness, salvation and the spring of service through Him. That Peter''s idea of Christ's work was im- perfect was clearly enough shown by his protest when the Lord announced plainly the sufferings and death that awaited Him in Jerusalem ; but Peter came to see it all, and became a living foundation-stone in the Church whose law of self-sacrificing love Jesus enunciated here at Caesarea Philippi ; here where fi'om this rock, doubtless in sight of Jesus when He spoke, flows the living water of the Jordan. " Here dies another day,"" I thought as I saw the sun dip behind the high hills of Naphtali, dies, but only to live in vital, happy memories. Our days average in this way. We are called at four or five oHock, according to the length of the day's trip. Breakfast in a ii6 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE half hour. Our bags must have been packed before breakfast, for by the time we are through our tents are down and being packed by the muleteers. Our horses are waiting, champing, and biting each other and squealing. On go our saddle-bags, in which we caiTv our rubber clothes, Bae- dekers, cameras, field-glasses, and odds and ends like surgeon's kit, and water-bottle and lemons. I always carry some dry bread and crackers and chocolate and nuts in my pockets, and about nine o'clock munch away in a lunch about half a mile long. By ten or eleven o'clock we have our noon halt, al- ways in some spot planned in advance, with two tents open on one side, or under some trees. Lunch is spread on a white cloth with i-ugs around it. Afterwards we read or write, and sleep, or talk and sing for two or three hours. Then as many moi-e hours on horseback laboriously picking our way over 117 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE endless bowlders, often dismounting and leading the horses in unusually bad bits of road ; but often, too, when we find an open place, having a good canter. This after- noon, as we came to camp, four of us had the maddest kind of a race, as fast as our horses could run. It is genuine gladness that invades our hearts when we see the camp gleaming in the distance. Tea waits us on boxes with camp-stools around them in the square court of the camp. Then a general washing up and rest, sometimes a swim, though too rarely. Dinner lasts over an hour, and is a really remarkable affair. The kitchen tent has two or three little char- coal fires with grates and ovens, and yet a dinner fit for a king is always ready on time. Soup and roast and vegetables, and birds or chicken, salad, pastry or pudding, with des- sert of nuts, figs, raisins, and coffee. Then announcement of programme for next day, ii8 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE and a general cheer or groan according to the hour of rising. Then prayers with a hymn before and after. We take turns in leading. A few will write afterwards for awhile in the big tents, but all are in bed generally by nine o'clock. Days when we are to visit special places of interest the travelling is arranged so as to allow plenty of time. We have a palanquin with us all the while, but it has rarely been in use. A funny kind of palanquin passed us the other day. A Moslem rode on the humps of his camel with his two wives each in a private box on the right and left. Their goods were strapped in one way and another all over the camel. The master bowed every second with the big beasfs swing, and the women listed heavily to port or starboard as the ship of the desert rolled along its way. I have the crated family safely tucked away in my camera F. O. B. 119 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE April 15. Westward all day, up and down the deep- est declivities and defiles, once for a while on the old Roman road which ran from Caesarea Philippi to Tyre, most of the time single file along the caravan route among loose stones, in beds of brooks, winding around the edges of gullies with no more than the narrowest footing for the horses. Occasionally there will be a double path so that we can ride side by side, but all in a string is the rule. Zigzagging up a hill sometimes brings us all in sight above and below each other like the levels of a Swiss railroad. My horse went down on his knees and bit the road so suddenly this afternoon that I had nothing to do but to turn a somersault over his head, but as I came down squarely on both feet it was only a little extra thrown in or thrown off for a change. As this is the third time my faithful steed 1 20 A FAMILY' CARRVALI, NEAR DOTH AN LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE has broken faith with me, and ahnost bones too, I have decided to change him for an- other. We camped this evening below one of the old Crusaders' castles, a wonderful old eyrie, crowning a hill, almost a moun- tain, and guarding the pass we go through to-morrow on our way to Tyre. I do not see how anything but starvation could reduce such fortresses. The ruins of the Crusaders"" strongholds are among the first of the monuments of this land in extent and fascination. What did the great Cru- sading Ages accomplish ? Little here, but who can estimate what their enthusiasm did for a formal Christianity that was swept and shaken by their excitement, and that in its subsequent defeat and in the fall of Con- stantinople was inestimably enriched by the treasures long forgotten of the Classic East, receiving an intellectual re-birth or renais- 121 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE sauce which was itself re-born morally in the Reformation. April 17. We had a midnight excitement more amusing than alarming. A mule that broke his tether got tangled in the ropes of two tents, and half demolished them both before he could be corralled. The shouting failed to arouse the distant muleteers, and a pistol was fired that brought the camp up stand- ing. The mule and the rest of us finally quieted down. Down, down, we steadily rode this morning until the Mediterranean and Tyre were before us. How are the mighty fallen ! The splendor of Tyre is a pathetic memory. Huddles of columns are on the beach and, on the line of the outside breakers, send the foam flying up in the air. Pieces of mosaic pavement were found by several in the sand. The line of the splen- did mole, so large that, like the Ponte 122 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE Vecchio at Florence, it was covered with shops, is marked by shoals and white-crested waves to-day. Ezekiel, in his 26th, 27th, and 28th chapters, uttered his forebodings, all too well substantiated. Two English- women have the only lighthouse here, and do their best in the dark. We spent a half hour in their school with their native help- ers and eighty or ninety girls and boys. SiDON, April 18. A day of wonderful beauty and all hearts happy. The Mediterranean is like a sap- phire shading out of the sky. My first de- light in a skylark has come back to me again and again ; when at Stonehenge I looked everyway, like Wordsworth after the cuckoo, till I saw him far overhead. Tenny- son sang of him : " 'Till drowned in yonder living blue The lark becomes a sightless song." 123 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE Mr. Hoskins, of our mission in Beyrout, met us here like Paul's friends who came down to greet him at Appii Forum, and brought a bundle of accumulated letters. Here at Sidon, Paul himself once stopped to cheer the Christians. What a place it must have been in its prime ! Not a hill or val- ley, not a mountain-side or wadj near it that does not bear signs of her life. This im- mense plain is filled with sarcophagi. Dr. Torrey, of the Palestine Exploration Fund, whom we met in Jerusalem, dug up some treasures a little while ago of greatest in- terest and value, but swiftly buried them again, for the government is a good deal of a dog in a manger ; and, although it does not value these antiquities, will not lose them. Our mission gave us a reception in the afternoon with some stirring speeches, and tea, and unspeakably good cakes. It was in their main room, which is an old 124 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE Crusaders"' arched hall with walls five feet thick. Two of the teachers are sisters of a young man who attends Brick Church, and of the pastor of the German Church in Bethlehem. These teachers' faces — faces of young Christian men and women — seem of a different nationality ; almost of another order of being from those about them. Here is the kindling hope of the future, a selected seed for new sowing. They show in a pro- phetic way that warms the heart what the Gospel of Christ can do in transforming and transfiguring life, and are the first-fruits of the harvest that is bound to come. In the evening the hall was filled, and five of us made short speeches, Dr. Ford interpreting. It was hard work. We would speak a sen- tence or two and then, while it was being interpreted, wish we had said something else. It was a kind of compound fracture of an idea, with mortification instantly setting in. 125 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE On this Sidon field one could rest the case for Foreign Missions, so fine is the organiza- tion, so thorough the equipment, so sensible and practical the management, and so en- couraging the results. Part of the education is industrial, and the quality of the work in masonry, carpentry, cabinet work, tailoring, shoemaking astonished us all. It is like the word, " And beholding the man which was healed standing with them they could say nothing against it." It is educating the whole man by a full-orbed Gospel, and show- ing the Oriental world an integral human development it has known nothing about. Sidon, like Zahlah, is really preparatory to the college at Beyrout, which crowns the Christian work of our Presbyterian missions in Syria, and commands the admiration of friend and foe. The buildings thrilled me not alone because I belong to the Presbyte- rian Church but because I belong to Brick 126 ^% M ?S[1-. . " iwr PRESIDENT BLISS OF THE SYRIAN PROTESTANT COLLEGE, BEIRUT LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE Church, for these noble moulds and matrixes of a new civilization are made of the blood of men I know and love, and are here to-day because of the past gifts and the present care of Dr. Stuart Dodge and Mr. W. K and Madame Dodge, and Mr. J&sup and Mr. Maitland, and Dr. Dennis, and other devoted men. The undimmed eye of Dr. Bliss, the president, flashes as he tells of stiiiggles and successes and hopes yet to be realized. In the fine chapel I preached to the students Sunday morning, and my heart was excited with hope as I thought of the part these men from Egypt, Algeria, and Greece, from Arabia and Asia Minor and Persia, and who can say where else, are to play in the years to come. No one can see the kind of work they are doing, the new bodies physical ex- ercise is giving them, the new standards, the mental training they are getting, and wide horizons, and Christian motives, and doubt 127 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE for a moment that they are to be the leaders of their day and generation. From the Ht- tle handful of a dozen beginners in some rented room the College, in less than forty years, has grown to its noble proportions. No one can forecast its future, for it is grow- ing not merely in numbers but in percentage of increase, and in ever-widening fame and deepening respect. No college I know of offers a more encouraging outlook for in- vestment of money for the Kingdom than this one. Its buildings are fairly abreast of its needs, but it is crying for a larger en- dowment, that the teaching force may be in- creased. The best work of a professor for his students cannot be done when he has classes of sixty and seventy-five. The maxi- mum efficiency for mental training, and es- pecially for personal influence, is reached when a man has classes of about thirty. The need and the promise of the Beyrout College 128 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE are far and away beyond those of any of our well-known home colleges to-day, for from this beacon and from Robert College this Eastern world must find its way out of dark- ness. The editor of the chief Greek news- paper has just written an article summon- ing all Greeks to awake to the meaning and value of the Syrian Protestant College, and support it in every way. The Medical Col- lege gives men an unparalleled opportunity — not only because of the distinction of the faculty, but because the students practically become interns two years earlier than in America, working in the hospital, and being junior assistants in all kinds of operations. A dozen of them were with Dr. Post yester- day morning, when he literally dissected a young woman's forearm, removing a colloid tumor that was woven among tlie muscles and tendons, and had eaten into the bone. I do not believe there is a man living who i2g LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE from first to last could have operated more swiftly and skilfully than Dr. Post. A lit- tle longer and it would have been necessary to amputate the arm, and that would have meant celibacy and poverty and obscurity for the poor girl. Then I saw Dr. Webster remove a cataract from a blind man''s eye. When the doctot moved his fingers after- wards before the man"'s face and he said he could see, the thought came instantly, " Lord, that I might receive my sight." Is not such Christian work, multiplied all over the world, work of minds and hearts and hands that owe their impulse and skill to the life and love of Jesus Christ, the fulfil- ment of our Lord's words, " And greater works than these shall ye do *" ? Only from Christian roots are such fruits growing. Men sometimes think, when they see the vast temples of the elder days and the Cathedrals of the Middle Ages, that religion must have 130 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE lost much power because she builds so few shrines to-day that can compare with them. But let them learn what the word means, " I will have mercy and not sacrifice," and add to the buildings to-day where men wor- ship, those equally sacred structures where the sick are healed, the orphans are trained, the blind and deaf and dumb, the aged and insane and recreant are ministered unto, and they will see how intrusive and extrusive has been the growth of intelligent Christian devotion, how close to the ways of Christ His people have been coming, and this I say with the wonders of Baalbec still fresh in my mind. After being two days in Beyi'out we made an excursion to Damascus. It was planned to spend five days there and at Baalbec, but I cut a day off Damascus to have at Beyrout, preferring more of the roots of the future and less of the ruins of the past. 131 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE The ride over the Lebanon mountains and up the Coele-Syrian valley is magnificent, fairly " its own excuse for being." The best of Damascus to me was its distant view as we came to it embowered in the orchards that spring fi'om Abana and Pharpar. No wonder Naaman could not see how one could compare with them the low muddy Jordan flowing through its fruitless land to the Dead Sea. From the hill on the west we had a view of the city in the sunset light never to be forgotten. Its buildings were white with pink and blue tones gleaming in the evening glow. It looked like warm- tinted marble set in malachite, or, to use an every-day summer figure, like a tennis racket lying on the grass, for it is really that shape, quite round, with the long street called Straight corresponding to a projecting handle. But near by — what a disillusion ! — dirty stone houses, mud walls, stucco and 132 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE cheapness, dogs and swirls of dust, and evil smells. Its bazaars are countless in the arch- covered streets with their arched roofs. But the very variety at last is monotonous. Da- mascus is the oldest city in the world, but you would not dream it. Its advantages have preserved it through every change of dynasty. All its characteristic Orientalism can be matched on a smaller but far more animated scale at Cairo. Wa did our duty for several hot hours, seeing the great Mosque, the Tomb of Saladin and Fatima, the House of Ananias, and the place where Paul was let down from the wall in a basket. I refused to look at the rope itself, having a few wisps of unfrayed self-respect left. " The street called Straight " is without doubt a genuine antique, for where is there another in the East ? Four hours by train and four by carriage, and one of the prime events of the journey, not to say of a life- 133 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE time, came in Baalbec. I had expected some great ruins, some tumble of pillars, some huge stones, an uncouth and vaster Stonehenge. I found a conception of un- paralleled grandeur and beauty, blending the stupendous with the exquisite in undreamed ways. Who can say how far back it goes, in what twilight of the world those earliest stones were laid! No wonder the Arabs say it was begun in the days of Cain and is older than the Tower of Babel, and that slants were the first builders and the belie- moths were their beasts of burden. Think of a stone still in the quarry fourteen feet high, fourteen feet broad, and seventy-four feet long. It makes one feel like Cassius peeping about under the huge legs of Caesar and wondering what order of men these were, whose ruined work leaves us quite breathless for amazement. The deposits of history read like a geological cross section, 134 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE but the development of the Akropohs, or rather the shrine, the temple, seems the work of inspiration, such is the unity of its age-long growth. See the hill sloping north and south 3,800 feet above the sea, flanked east and west across the luxuriant valley by the Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon ranges. Look south up the gradual marble stairway approaching the portico through the colon- nade of marble pillars, through the great central door into the hexagon, with its glorious pool and fountain reached by four descending steps of marble. Still look on across the water and up the steps through another arched and pillared doorway into the vast pantheon with its twelve shrines for the twelve gods alternately semicircular and rectangular growing out of the central court, with the altar of sacrifice and in the middle a glorious fountain, one of whose huge marble basins hud been unearthed by 135 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE the German Exploration Society only two days before we were there — basins with balustrades of marble enriched with heads of griffins and fauns and cupids with flower- wreaths. Look still southward and upward beyond this great Court of the Gods, up the sweeping marble ways to the crowning temple of the sun, Helio-polis Baalbec, whose glory it was to have no room, no chamber hidden from the sun, whose walls were pillars between which the mountains and skies were framed, whose bases even towered above the worshippers' heads, and w^hose capitals blossomed against the blue of the heavens, and where all day long the sun sought his seeking worshippers and all night long the stars sent down their light. Add to the cyclopean vastness of this gran- ite and marble every conceivable delicacy in relief of acanthus and lotus, of geometric pattern and interlacing vines and wreaths ; 136 THE TEMPLE OF THE SUN, BAALBEC LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE people the niches with the figures of the gods and goddesses ; gild the capitals again with the gold of votive gifts ; fill the air with incense and the courts with worshippers, and an incomparable and indisputable testi- mony is here for the hunger of the human heart for God and of its incompleteness and restlessness. If in ignorance, if in cruelty, if in ways superstitious and unworthy, and in symbols impossible to us God was adored. He was yet adored. He was yet worshipped, and can we think that anyone who sought his God in sincerity and truth, true to the light that lightened him, worshipped in vain or departed unblessed ? We saw the sun set on the ruins, lighting them with fires of copper and amber, while the mountains beyond glowed in violet and gold. Swiftly the chill of the night fell when the daylight was gone and moonlight and mystery were on the ruins, and " our noisy years seomed 137 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE moments in the being of the Eternal silence." It is not at Rome that one feels what that imperial power must have been that ruled the world, but in such remote places as this Syrian valley across the Lebanon and far away in the Land of Bashan. Straight to Great Britain she thrust out her roads and far south and east, and the hoof- beats of her horses in these far-off lands rang like the pulse-throbs that told the strength of her iron heart. One h"undred and fifty miles a dav her chariots and horsemen could make on her roads when the message demanded it — so Gibbon says — and it must be true, though travellers to-day can hardly believe it. Far north in the Hauran are whole cities she built, with temples, market-places, amphitheatres, and artificial lakes for naval combats. Was ever such power concentrated that radiated so far, with such unwasting force ! Yet to-day Roman ruins lie here 138 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE between Phoenician and Saracenic, for the pure-blooded Northmen were too much for her degenerate sons. Two more days at Beyrout went into the details of College and Hospital work. An Arab dinner was given to some of us, which was a new experience, and proved to be a terrible test which not all could abide. One dish called " Kibby," made of meat and grain and onions, and I dare not say what else, pounded for hours in a mortar and baked with oil in a flat tin-dish, looked like chocolate caramels cut into squares, but it did not taste like it. They tell me it is to this dish the wise man alluded when he said that if a fool were mixed with wheat and brayed in a mortar yet would not the flavor of his foolishness depart from him. The faculty of the College gave us all a reception the evening before we sailed, which came to a glowing point of connnon 139 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE happiness when one of our men presented to the mission a new printing-press as a gift from our company and the churches repre- sented. We had learned that work had been shpping back, scores of thousands of Bibles being unprinted and orders unfilled through the hopeless breaking down of one of the older presses, and that a man was to be sent to America to raise money for a new one. We told them to order the kind they needed, and save the time and money the messenger would have cost. Everyone who has any stock in the new press may rejoice in the pure light it will be throwing through this dark land long after the giver''s hand is cold. Past Cyprus, westward on the Great Sea, we steamed past Rhoda and Patmos, and made our first stop at Samos, where some of the earliest of the serious nautical experi- ments were made that resulted in sending colonies to Crete and Thrace and Greece 140 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE and Italy. I hear that Pythagoras was born there, and that Cleopatra spent some idle days there, and that little has happened since. The bay was beautiful, and the little town clean and bright. The Mediterranean has been in its mildest May mood, roaring as gently as any sucking-dove. We saw but little of Smyrna as we took train an hour after arrival for the village nearest to Ephe- sus. I expected little, but found much. And first of all the storks ! What fun it was to see them sitting on their nests or standing on one foot, on the tops of old chimnevs or ruined minarets, looking ex- actly like their pictures, and probably think- ing of Strasburg or Holland, like restless people. They were tame enough, and flew over our heads almost in clubbing distance. Then the multitude of broken marbles, hands and heads, acanthus leaves from cap- itals, bits of mosaic pavement, and frag- 141 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE ments of cornices. They lay along the road- side, in the fields, were collected in piles in the ruins, and were built into the walls of the houses as though there never had been a museum or a rabid collector. The lowest of all falls has been Diana's. Her ruins are most pathetic. Where other spots have been pushed up in geologic changes her temple site has been depressed, and a poor, marshy, grassy, frog-croaking hollow, with not a sign of distinction, not a standing column even, is all that is left to mark the spot where once was such magnificence and men made the air ring with " Great is Diana of the Ephesians." Not far from this spot are the ruins of the Custom-house of Ephesus, with the long quays once alive with her com- merce and arms and fashion, now knowing not a ripple but that of the waving wheat, for the sea is a mile and a half away. The gymnasium and market-place are but a short 142 BULL S HEAD BATH, OR FOUNTAIN AT KPHESUS LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE distance from this spot, once the port of the city, and must have been places of incred- ible beauty. Such colonnades of white mar- ble, such wreathed bulls and torsos of lions and wrecks of human figures, and fountain- basins and water-ways and Greek inscrip- tions, all a dazzle of glistening light in the brilliant noon-day. A little away is the street that led from the Amphitheatre to the sea, a noble and exciting ruin to-day, as one looks along its white length, paved with smooth stones in the middle between rows of marble pillars, many of whose bases are in place, flanked by arcades with mosaic floors for foot- passengers. Then up broad marble ap- proaches through courts and shrines to the Amphitheatre hollowed in the mountain- side and facing the sea. It must have seat- ed sixty thousand people. The stone col- umns supporting the arena are yet standing 143 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE like a little Avhite forest. The 19th and 20th chapters of Acts are full of memories of Ephesus, and thoughts of St. John and of Mary the Mother of Jesus and of Timothy come swiftly. Here Paul wrote his first let- ter to the Corinthians and to these Ephe- sians, that most majestic and heavenly of all the Epistles. But her light grew dim. " Unto the Angel of the Church of Ephe- sus."" How strangely the words sound here. Alas for the words that came true and the candlestick departed. The Church of Smyrna is the only one of the seven whose light still burns, with two-thirds of its in- habitants Christians to-day. At 4.30 this morning we were rung up to undergo at the Dardanelles a medical ex- amination, lest some foreign germs should be brought to the Sick Man of the East. If he did but know on Avhich side the fears really were ! The Sea of Marmora has been 144 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE all day long a sea of glass and the air quite as the first of May in a happier clime. It might have been called The Marble Sea from its polished surface instead of from the quarries that surround it. The approach up the Bosphorus to Constantine's city gives the traveller the impression of all the choic- est and, after all other impressions, the one to be cherished. Everywhere the city seems to be climbing from the water, where its walls and towers are reflected, up to a sky- line broken by palaces and mosques, pierced by the slender minarets of the living and the cypress spear-points of the dead. The city grows vaster and vaster as you approach. Far as the eye can see it reaches out over the hills and along the shores. The Golden Horn, which pierces the city like a flashing scimitar, is alive with steamers and ships, ferry-boats and caiques (are caiques here and kayaks in Greenland etymological rela- ys LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE tives ? ). Though most of the houses are wooden, the impression is of a city of stone and marble. The water is beautifully clear and the sky as blue as at Naples. There is no fairer sight East or West. The Mediter- ranean has run through the Dardanelles into its miniature self — the Sea of Marmora ; and the Sea of Marmora has been drawn into the narrow ribbon of the Bosphorus that links it with the old Euxine, the new Black Sea, and here, where from the Bos- phorus the Golden Horn is pushed deep into the land, the ancient Byzantium was built, old as Rome. What a place for a city, with ^larmora on the South, the Bosphorus on the east, and the Golden Horn on the north ! No wonder it withstood twentv-one out of twentv-three times when it was be- sieged. No wonder Persians, Macedonians, Spai-tans, Athenians, Romans, Arabs, Turks, and Christians have fought for it, and Rus- 146 1 T i^Lj BHr ' ' 4- ^9 Hpi. -■- ^!jf 3 I^^^Hti '^ I- 1 1 ] LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE sia hankers and hopes to-day. Demos- thenes's great oration was to persuade the Athenians to help it against Phihp. Con- stantine made it the capital of the Roman Empire, and called it New Rome, the name surviving in Roumelia. Constantine de- clared for Christianity, but evidently was a good while in reaching a conclusion. " In hoc s'lgno " must have been a later revela- tion, for like the Vicar of Bray he had an open mind as he faced his official future, calling his three great churches Sophia, Irene, and Anastasis, which were equally fitted to be the names of shrines of Chris- tian or pagan worship. San Sophia looks less of a mosque on the outside than some of the others in Constantinople, — but inside — it is incomparable. Its dome seems loftier and vaster than St. Peter's. It is as though it were floated on air, so far away it is from earth, so independent, so unsupported. The 147 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE straight flat effects of Egyptian temples, the low triangles of the Greek, the pointed arch of the Gothic cathedrals have their own peculiar power over the mind, but here it is the dome of the sky that has filled the builder's thought, filling the beholder's eye, and thrilling his heart as though hemisphere after hemisphere were piled on each other to hold up the circle of the heavens. Through the gilt in many a place are seen the out- lines of Christian Saints and deep in many a stone is sunk the cross, carrying the heavy heart back to the time when the Crescent had no place here, but carrying it on too in hope that the words, " Thy Kingdom, O Christ, is an everlasting kingdom, and Thy truth endureth for all generations,"" words still standing on the walls of the great mosque of Damascus, shall there and here find certain fulfilment. Few of us dreamed of the treasures awaiting us in the Royal 148 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE Museum, which the Sultan has of late years been befriending to glorious advantage. The art treasures of the past that are yet undiscovered are almost all in lands under his red flag. If what he has collected here is any fair first-fruits of the harvest yet to be reaped after deep ploughing, the Mu- seums of Europe will have a formidable rival. Here is the first Jewish inscription ever discovered. It is called the Siloam Stone, and records the meeting of the work- men who approached each other in the con- struction of the tunnel that brought the water into the Pool of Siloam. Here is the Soreg, a stone forbidding all but Jews to go beyond the Court of the Gentiles, letters Jesus must often have seen. Here is a Hit- tite monument with inscriptions that schol- ars have not been able to translate. It was better than we had bargained for to find Professor Hilprecht upstairs in the Museum 149 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE at work unpacking, reading, and classifying four hundred cases of cylinder tablets and seals from Babylonia. For a half hour he held us spellbound as he read records that have come down from forty centuries before Christ, writings of Sennacherib and Ne- buchadnezzar, lists of Jewish names that ap- pear for the first time in Babylon in the times of Ezra and Nehemiah, locating their exile home and identifying the river where they sang their homesick songs. He made us all feel that Old Testament critics, who had been wearing Mercury's wings on their sandals, would be safer in the long run with- out them. I shall never forget the flash of this scholar\s eye, his enthusiasm wearing his weight of learning lightly as a flower. The Alexander Sarcophagus seems to me the very head and front of Greek Art, bearing the frieze of the Parthenon in miniature. It is a colossal tomb of marble designed in ar- 150 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE chitectural perfection, with battle-scenes on four sides in high rehef The faces are cut like cameos. The muscles of men's legs and arms, the cords of their necks, the terror of a horse's eye, the spring of a hound, the relaxation of dead bodies, all are past won- der. We saw the place at Si don where it was unearthed, and cannot but wonder what else is to come to light. Much we know is forever lost. The Fourth Crusade is respon- sible for the destruction of the greatest col- lection of treasures of art the world has ever seen. Bv Constantine, Justinian, Theo- dosius, and the whole line of Emperors, the earth had been ransacked for marbles and bronzes to adorn the imperial city. The Hippodrome, now an open square where the bronze tripod of Delphi and an obelisk of Heliopolis stand, a building that seated eighty thousand people, was lined with works of art. No hammer of Goth or Van- 151 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE dal was ever more ruthless than the battle- axe of the Latin Crusaders who spared the horses now at St. Mark"'s in Venice only be- cause they thought the bronze too poor to melt. In 1453 the last shred of the Chris- tian Empire of the East was lost when the Turks captured Constantinople, 80,000 of them against 9,000 defenders. (" The Cap- tain of the Janizaries," " Paul PatofF," and the " Prince of India " give good descrip- tions of the city.) At Robert College on the Bosphorus are the old towers and walls of Mahommed II. When one thinks that they were built in two months and have stood nearly five hundred years, one does not wonder that such brains and energy as his swept everything before him. When Dr. Hamlin built the College he had the mortar of Mahommed's towers analyzed, " for," he said, " our work must last as long as his." It will last longer, for 152 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE it is filling the East with light. It has fur- nished more Prime Ministers proportionate- ly than any university of Europe. So says an English consul. And the Sultan said it was Robert College that took away Bul- garia from him. When we went through the College gate we were for the first time free from the surveillance of spies, for this is American property, with the Stars and Stripes flowing over it, and no Turk can enter without permission. The history of the years when Dr. Hamlin was trying to buy it reads like a fairy tale. " My Life and Times,"" by Cyrus Hamlin, is a notable book apart from any Oriental interest. Dr. Washburn and his staff gave us a reception, inviting Americans from far and near. Miss Patrick of the Women's College, and Dr. Barnum and Professor Hilprecht. There is no other site near Constantinople that can compare with the spot, with the hills of 153 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE Roumelia back of it and the Bosphorus in fi'ont and below, looking up toward the Black Sea and down toward the city\s min- arets, and across to the Sweet Waters of Asia and the defile through which Darius marched his army. From three to six spies followed us all the while. We were delayed hours both coming and going in the exam- ination of our passports. The visit to Robert College caused much excitement, and more than one in our company who knew the Turk's tongue heard men ask what this thing meant. They say the spy system costs the government four pounds for every foreigner who enters Constantinople, but I call that a fairy tale. Their suspicions are past belief. Some New Testaments were held by the censor because of the word Galatians. " Who is this Paul and what is he writing to our people in Galata" (one of the divisions of the city) ? He was with 154 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE difficulty persuaded that Paul was dead, and that the letter was not part of a plot. A chemistry was refused admission because the eyes of the censor fell on the term H,0, which to his cryptic suspicions meant that Haniid II. amounted to nothing. But such things are child's play compared with what happened to a boy in Robert College. He had come into the city to see the pageant when the Sultan went to the Yildiz-Mosque, and was describing his pleasure to a group of boys on his return. Speaking of the good place he had he said, " I was near enough to the Sultan to shoot him." The unguarded expression was repeated by a student spy, and the boy was arrested and has never been seen since. No effort of his friends or the College authorities have resulted in finding a trace of the boy, who possibly is in prison for life, but more probably has been thrown into the Bosphorus. 155 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE Here word came to us that Greece had laid a quarantine on Constantinople be- cause of a reported case of the plague. We hoped it might be lifted after a day or two, but it was not to be, and our first delight in the outward beauty of the city, our thanks to it for saving Art and Literature and Civilization for centuries for the world, our pleasure in its mosques and bazaars and boats and bridges, struggled for existence against its narrow dirty streets, its countless evil- looking dogs that offended our eyes all day and our ears all night, and its crowning vvi-ong in adding to its own suspicions the suspicions of Greece, and compelling us to sail by her rocky shores under an unclean taboo. But it has been borne with cheerful equanimity. Some of the travellers hope to go back to Greece from Brindisi, but others of us who are committed by dates have to call it all " Yarrow unvisited." We who 156 LETTERS FROM EGYPT AND PALESTINE sail home from Naples are to recoup our loss and spend our extra time in Rome before we sail. The sail through the ^gean and the Adriatic Seas has been bewitching. Calm seas, blue skies, and every color of the changing daylight and the mystery of moon- lit nights were ours through the voyage from the Dardanelles past Tenedos, Samothracia, Eubora, Chios, Cythera, Corfu, and scores of other islands. 157 THE LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Santa Barbara THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE STAMPED BELOW. unwhbs sahta » '-r??^ DFEBl 93105 ho ^ illlilllllillllllllllllilliillil 3 1205 02033 8768 AA 000 9 IG 4/0