Crusader’s Coast

With
Illustrations from Sketches
by
C. E. HUGHES

Dedication

Mount Scopus

While the sun, amid blood-red skies, on the Prophet’s Height
        Sank from our sight,
Or on Moab Hills the moon rose globed and large,
        Like a giant’s targe—
Where the Roman camped, when the darkening heavens grew loud
        With the rushing crowd
Of the vulture host that flocked, foul, hard, without pity,
        Round the dying city;
Where now grew the fruited vines, and Olivet’s spurs,
        With a young wood of firs
Green-fledged, low-murmured as with sough of the sea
        And, with rosemary
Sweet-coppiced, scented the evening air as with spice
        Out of Paradise;
How have we two, in the fragrant, wonderful hour
        When Night, like a flower,
Opened about us, watched the fireflies flitting
        Around us sitting,
And laughed at Athene’s owl, all staring-eyed
        And ruffled in pride,
As he leaned from his perch in the almond-bush, each horn
        As sharp as a thorn!

Preface

I justify this book to myself by saying that it shows what will not be seen again, the Holy Land as it was when the War ended, before progress had laid hands on it. But I know this is not my underlying thought in attempting to give cohesion to what were scattered enthusiasms. That thought is the desire, before too late, to remind any who will read me that Palestine has other than economic values, and that more than one race has rights in it. We hear a great deal of “the poetry of machinery.” Unlike other poetry, this is a kind that man can create at any time and in any quantity. Reading books exultant over the prospect of Gennesareth artificially deepened by many feet and the Dead Sea yielding a hundred tons of nitrates daily, I feel these improvements poor compensation for the loss of the world’s most astounding gulf of fire, the very desolation of savagery. If there can be an Oxford Preservation Trust, whose views are willingly considered by business men proud of their great industrial town, why should there not be a Palestine Preservation Trust, in which even the most fervid Zionist might see a friend and not a foe to his people’s advancement?

Four chapters tell of 1927, not of the War period. I include the story of the Dog River caves after hesitation, hoping that the story may even yet be continued, in which case subsequent explorers’ chance of success will lie in husbanding every ounce of effort and avoiding our mistakes. So here is the record of the men who have tried hitherto.

When this book was in Messrs. Benn’s office it was read by one of the directors, Mr. C. E. Hughes. Mr. Hughes showed me his notebooks filled with sketches he had made during a tour in December, 1918, as Intelligence Officer of the East Indies and Egypt Sea Plane Squadron stationed at Port Said. It would be in every sense of the word an impertinence for me to praise these sketches, which his generosity has allowed me to include. But I cannot forbear expressing my admiration for the way in which he has set down both the haunting desolation of the Palestine desert scene and its ruined towns and the vivid and variegated life of that brief period when so many nations commingled in the streets and bazaars of Damascus and Beirut. It is a great loss to me that Mr. Hughes’ experience did not take him over the whole of my ground, but I have accepted with both hands all he could provide, though I knew that the unillustrated tracts of my book must suffer by contrast.

Part of the book’s material has appeared in The Times, Spectator, Sphere, Manchester Guardian, and other papers. Essays on the Jordan Valley and Gilead I have not included.

Oxford, 1929.

I. War Memories

Kantara

They are gathering round
Out of the twilight; over the grey-blue sand,
Shoals of low-jargoning men drift inward to the sound—
The jangle and throb of a piano . . . tum-ti-tum . . .
Drawn by a lamp, they come
Out of the glimmering lines of their tents, over the shuffling sand.

O sing us the songs, the songs of our own land,
You warbling ladies in white.
Dimness conceals the hunger in our faces,
This wall of faces risen out of the night,
These eyes that keep their memories of the places
So long beyond their sight.

Jaded and gay, the ladies sing; and the chap in brown
Tilts his grey hat; jaunty and lean and pale,
He rattles the keys . . . some actor-bloke from town. . . .
God send you home; and then A long, long trail; I hear you calling me; and Dixieland . . .
Sing slowly . . . now the chorus . . . one by one
We hear them, drink them; till the concert’s done.
Silent, I watch the shadowy mass of soldiers stand.
Silent, they drift away, over the glimmering sand.

The picture is Siegfried Sassoon’s; and of Kantara in April, 1918. The singers and actors were Lena Ashwell’s Party; to whom we owed a great deal in those dead days.

Kantara had an evil reputation. Like the other bases of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force, it was reported to harbour a crowd of embusqués. But most of its population was a shifting one, in which every gradation of wretchedness could be studied. Men waited, eternally waited; waited to go up the line, waited for leave or demobilisation. Around were the spreading sands, on whose face this city of tents had arisen. A handful of Olympians lived aloof, the administrative staff who flung orders at us from a distance, while we miserable ones were pitchforked together into huge, amorphous messes. Food was execrable, and was consumed with savage haste, for another horde was waiting; amusements were not, save such an occasional gaff as Sassoon’s verses describe.

At Kantara you caught the faint reverberations of the storm intermittently raging amid Judaean hills, and changed for up the line. You arrived, from England or Salonika or Mespot; you descended at the station, where lorries pounced on your kit and then raced along the dark road with it, scattering their loads at dumps. If you were swift and watchful, and the desert gods had a favour to you, you saw your kit again. Otherwise, you might spend the night, as I did, tramping that stretch of half a dozen miles, not once but repeatedly, raking each dump over piecemeal.

What did they do at Kantara in the Great War? A few played tennis; as a rule, these were residents. For the others, in this unnatural city of the wilderness, life dragged by somehow. New “thinning-out parades” were ever being arranged, and their presence might be called for up the line. Some cultivated castor-oil plants, a congruous garden; except for this useful but unexhilarating shrub, the camp had no green. We cursed the innumerable flies, scrummaged for meals, slept.

Once a group debated those pathetic lines:

The roses round the door
Make me love Mother more.

Why did the poet ascribe this quality to the roses? And one, having been a teacher, quoted Blake’s not less mysterious couplet:

The caterpillar on the leaf
Reminds thee of thy Mother’s grief.

Here, too, was a close connection between human emotion and a vegetable environment; we were referred to an old jest, “What is worse than finding a caterpillar on your plate? Answer: Finding half a caterpillar.” This experience had befallen the mother of the person Blake addressed, and ever after a caterpillar on a lettuce recalled a time of domestic upheaval. Might not this line of approach solve the problem of why the door-clustering roses intensified filial love? But we had a very learned man, who thought otherwise, referring Blake’s “musical and sphinx-like couplet”¹ back to old superstition, citing an Anglo-Saxon author who relates how a demon, asked why he had entered a woman, replied with a voice of grievance: “I was sitting on a lettuce, when she bit me.” It was no fault of his; he was but sunning himself on a leaf when his victim swallowed him. At this point heat and boredom closed down the discussion.

After the Armistice Kantara became increasingly a pot of simmering, seething rebellion. Finally it boiled over. In the late spring of 1919 the impossible happened: the British soldier reached the point of mutiny. Meetings took place, where (so people said) the chief orators were not those whose wrong was greatest. Officers were sympathetic, but aloof. Allenby himself had to come and promise that we should be got away more speedily.

I saw Kantara a year later, on my way to India. (I have often seen it since.) This place I had hated more than any I had known. It had changed. Miles of stores, hay, wire, beams, tools still littered the canal banks and the desert. But all that forest of tents had shrunk to scattered groves, and even these were falling before some invisible axe. There had been conflagration, there was waste. Of all that crowded human ant-hill, restless, angry, discontented, only a handful of Indian soldiers remained. Kantara was, Kantara is not. This city in the sands, glaring, unshaded, had played its brief part and belonged to history. The novelist may recreate its unhappy life, but those who wasted dreary days and sleepless nights there will forget it.

In the reed-beds opposite the ruins fires had broken out, now glowing, withdrawn into deep, sullen heart, now towering savagely aloft. Destruction was weaving a dance of death on this body of desolation; Kali, flame-tongued and zoned with darting serpents, as her worshippers picture her in dreadful revel on the prostrate form of Siva, was exulting over man’s departure from her realm.

Crusader’s Coast

We had come from Mesopotamia; three days in Canal sand, at Ismailia, had followed. Then, on the last day of March, 1918, we steamed through fragrant leagues of orange groves and into Ludd Station.

Even without the foil of Mesopotamian memory, initiation into our new campaign had been delightful. The roads were olive-shaded, ditches crammed with English flowers were below the prickly-pear hedges. Though sand, our ancient and hated foe, was not far away and covered the station approaches, its hillocks were planted with figs and black mulberries. We had begun with a long Canal march, wretched with blinding wind and stinging sand. Entrained at last, we noted at dawn a beginning of flowers—yellow broomrape, mats of dwarf stock, tiny white marguerites. And my mind retains a sleepy glimpse of breakers in moonlight at El Arish.

This drowsy, glamorous entry, and the fresh, rain-sprinkled, emerald setting which we reached at Ludd suited the War. The struggles for Gaza and the inchmeal wresting of pass and mountain from the Turk had finished. We were conscious of a slackening of strain, even at the Base. When Maude struck at Kut there was such a tense secrecy over operations that you listened to rumours from the other side of Tigris almost as if afraid of being detected in conspiracy, and you discussed operations little. Here every one spoke freely, as citizen soldiers of Athens might have done. We steamed into Ludd, to find “Fritz” hovering above to inspect us on arrival; but it was a peaceful Fritz, who neither bombed nor spotted for his artillery, but presently sheered off, like a kestrel who has passed a hillside as empty of mice. At the Front we were to find (instead of trenches, with all their apparatus of bays, sap-heads, communication lines) isolated strong points. On some parts of it, if the enemy were unsporting enough to shell us as we lay at ease on our flowery blanket, we dived into ancient tombs.

Every one in the 52nd Division, from whom we took over, impressed upon us, with the air of men anxious to pass on a vital discovery, that the best “Guide” to the country was the Bible, “especially the Old Testament. The whole army is reading it.” “Where does this road lead?” I asked a subaltern on a knoll by the Aujeh. He looked down benevolently and said: “To Jiljilieh. The biblical Gilgal. From the top you can just see Nebi Samwil. The biblical Mizpeh.”

Three days we camped on the Ludd hills, which were still beautiful with the spring flowers. Anemone was finished, tulip was fading. But there were lupins, blue, white, and yellow, a small pink stock, birdsfoot trefoil, mignonettes, mauve vetches, borage, ragged robin and other campions, red clover, cranesbills, germander speedwell, grape-hyacinth, blue iris, aliums of many kinds, Bethlehem stars, marguerites, marigolds, pink bindweed, toadflax, poppies, yellow scabious, sun-rose, an occasional cistus. In dry ditches and open places a tall, many-branched asphodel was common. The Moslem cemetery beside the tower at Ramleh—clustered about with so many crusading memories—was crowded with white spikes of lesser asphodel, the flower of immortality. The ruins of the tower were covered with henbane, whose yellow flowers muffled the arrow-slits and swarmed over the crumbling mortar. The alien cactus made a home for gnarled, grotesque lizards, and a shelter for buttercups, fumitory, campions and campanulas. Bryony sprawled over bush and quarry, broom was ablaze. Of the still richer—far richer—abundance of the hills by Arsuf, a Leicestershire later observed to me: “Here you have every flower that grows in a poor man’s garden at home.” There were other home reminders than the flowers. Larks were singing hard. In the trenches of the fighting just over martins were nesting. The skies were English skies that spluttered with rain. Guns thundered steadily to northward, but we put all thought of them from us till our time came.

That came on April 3rd, when we tramped to Sarona, three miles the other side of Jaffa. This was all artificial country; the roads went between hedges and were bordered with ash, cypress, sycamore, eucalyptus. It stirred no enthusiasm, though it was good to see the groves of lemon and orange and to breathe so fragrant an air. Bethlehem stars grew in myriads, and at a halt the wayside was gold-flecked with a tall sorrel (oxalis cernua). The day was one of tense discomfort, greater than need have been in my case, because of the fact that during the disorder of departure women who had entered our Ludd camp on pretence of selling oranges had salvaged my water-bottle and haversack, the latter containing things of no value to them, but of much to me. Next day I had to retrace my steps as far as Jaffa to purchase substitutes, at Jaffa prices. The villagers round Ludd never paused from marauding, for which later came the terrible but by no means unprovoked punishment of Surafend. As I hope the reader does not know why the Jaffa Surafend became notorious in Palestine, I do not propose to tell him.

To the world Palestine is the land of the Hebrews, but this Sharon coast, except at Jaffa, is a country where they failed to get footing. Its memories are almost all of Phoenician, Greek and Roman, of Crusader and Briton. We were forbidden to call ourselves Crusaders, but many of us were haunted by an older age, and a phantom human tide seemed to be beating southward over these gracious downs. Not ten miles beyond Jaffa is the Nahr el-Aujeh, which may almost be called the Crusader’s River. The tiny scale of Palestine things appears in this fact, that the Jaffa Aujeh, next to Jordan the largest stream in the land, is hardly sixteen miles long. The other chief river of the coast, the Kishon, is twenty-three. The Aujeh is the Old Testament Waters of Raqquon, Geoffrey de Vinsauf’s River of Arsur. After Richard’s defeat of Saladin by Arsuf (Arsur), the Saracens tried to hold the crossing. The story was repeated seven centuries later, with this change, that it was the northern bank that was carried. Where tide and stream have heaped sand and made a ford at the mouth, a stone column even in my time recorded how the Lowland Division (the 52nd) crossed under fire on a dark December night in 1917. Fighting continued till the dominating height of Sheikh Muannis was taken. There was much heroic work preceding the crossing, of swimmers reconnoitring in darkness for fords. Old shell-cases, sunken in lush grass, littered our rugger pitch. I have reason to remember them. After the colonel was sent into hospital I had to supply his place at full back in the match “Officers versus N.C.O.’s.”

We held the line at Arsuf, about three miles north of the Aujeh. The river flows through lovely pastoral country, meadows of campanulas, pink and blue flax, gladiolus, larkspur, lavatera, and scabious. It is a deep stream, with yellow lilies (nymphaea lutea) and, especially at its source, clumps of Syrian papyrus. The only genuinely wild pines in Palestine dot the higher banks of its upper course. Mills and farms of prosperous German pre-War settlements further tamed this wealthy stream, which resembles a larger Cuckmere; just as the Danish dragons could swim with the tide up that Sussex ditch, so here sailing vessels can make their way some miles inland. We were forbidden to bathe in it, for it was reputed to be a haunt of “Bill Harris” (the bilharziosis worm). But we had the sea.

My own brigade spent much time on the Aujeh, as our share of the big push in contemplation was to “seize the fords” of the next river, the Nahr el-Falik. I saw these fords exactly a year later; they averaged 6 inches in depth, and were spanned by a regular service of stepping-stones. The “road” forded the Falik where it had hardly begun to flow; its source was in a thicket of flags, whose drier edges disappeared into massed wildness of brambles, loosestrife, and willowherb. But the sight of our solemn, bearded Sikhs being towed across the Aujeh, sixteen to a raft, and of solitary voyageurs with immense gravity paddling coracles made on the Tigris model is one that I am glad I did not miss.

On April 8th we held our last ford-seizing parade. The push began on the 9th, in the Battle of Tireh. Standing on knolls, we watched the hills which end the Shephelah smoke and thunder and thrust our own preparations on. But the Germans also had a push on in Flanders. So ours, which had gone none too well, was wound up. Troops were drafted rapidly to Europe, the army was “Indianised,” and we settled down to gentlemanly warfare for the summer, with our lines 1,500 yards apart. It will seem strange, but the very casualness of this strife had its trials, and there was truth in a Seaforth’s complaint, that there were “not enough shells to get used to them.” The cliffs were crowned by sand-blown links,² where men toiled in ones and twos, since they were under observation. Unexploded bombs littered the top of the cliffs, and a superstitious Stokes mortar private, who used to pick them up and throw them over his left shoulder (“for luck”), heedless of whether other men were following him on the ladder-precipitous path from the beach, became unpopular. Inland were glorious stretches of meadow. There was a well, muffled with fig and cactus, which always seemed to hold out offer of a haven—till the guns started. Edmund Candler used to tell of the hatred of war which seized him in Mesopotamia, at the Jebel Hamrin disaster, when he saw men dying, not on the foul, blotched dust, but—for once—among lilies and young green grass. At Arsuf the Seaforths’ colonel spoke to me of the silliness of having to go through “so fair a land in this pagan fashion.” The Arsuf hills—the finish of those Shephelah uplands which are the buttress of Samaria—the first, bright beginnings of Sharon—were clothed with thyme, a perpetual incense in the warm sun, with burnet and cistus, thymelasa, and a thousand flowers. With dusk swift, silent nightjars flushed at your coming, and quails settling for sleep. Brilliant lizards wound through the scrub, snakes were in great number, chameleons and tortoises crawled. The cliffs were narcissus-sprinkled (it was not in flower), and their crest was golden with the profuse blossoms of the recumbent evening primrose (anothera drummondii). Wide patches shone with yellow cup (onosma), and were sweet with a dwarf mignonette, whose chocolate-brown flowers, unlike those of other wild mignonettes, were deliciously fragrant. The campions and clovers were thickened and made succulent by the salt air. Even at the very edge, grass-roots generally fastened the sand together and made a pasture.

Arsuf is one of several places where pagan imagination placed the exposure of Andromeda; M. Clermont-Ganneau derives Arsuf from Reseph, the Phoenician deity whom he identifies with Perseus. The myth travelled to Lydda (Ludd), where Perseus became St. George; and from Ludd, mainly by the Lionheart’s influence, Perseus and his dragon walked on to English coins. Marble columns cumbered the pebbles of Arsuf’s ruined harbour, that had been Phoenician first, and glimmered under clear, green water. A curve of the lofty coast sheltered bathers from all but a preternaturally lucky hit. Nevertheless, the enemy gunners used to try to catch our bathing parties—a shabby trick, since we could not retaliate against troops who did not bathe. But the long perfect beaches and the sun would have tempted us successfully had the danger been many times greater. In earlier days authority had occasionally held out the menace of sharks. There was a time when the Worcestershire Yeomanry, expectant of relief after weeks of warfare before Gaza, heard the mess-tent telephone bell, and the officers rushed up in a body to be in at the news. It was this: “It is reported that sharks have been seen off the coast. The greatest care will be exercised by all units when bathing.” The reply was indignant and extempore: “It is reported that rhinoceroses have been seen in the long grass of the Wadi Ghuzzeh. The greatest care will be exercised by all units when going to draw rations.” Nevertheless, though I have been anchored for days off Muscat and know well the seas between Rangoon and Suez, the only living shark I have ever seen was basking on the surface just outside Alexandria Harbour.

Four hundred yards back from Arsuf Harbour was a small hamlet, Haram Ali, which the Turk plastered regularly. It owns a patron saint, in his lifetime remarkable for skill in catching cannonballs. His ghost had opportunity for plenty of practice now. Another point greatly vexed by our enemies was Bedouin’s Knoll, beyond Arsuf. At first this was scrapped for nightly, since it gave observation during the day. (The enemy captured our best three-quarter in one of these little tussles.) Then it passed into our permanent possession. These points of divided occupation were a feature of the Holy Land war. Before Gaza there were “post offices,” ours by day, the Turk’s by night. Here we left newspapers and especially photographs of Turkish prisoners selected for their fatness and posed behind tables loaded with food. Our leaders attached great importance to these photographs as a means of winning the War; men had to crawl up to the enemy wire to leave them there.

There was many a bloody scuffle in the marguerites and poppies before both sides settled down for the summer. Two savage little affairs in June secured Brown Ridge and the Sisters, undulations which gave us all the ground observation and (an essential and carefully thought-out part of the scheme) pushed the Turk into the malaria belt of the Falik swamps. The earlier battle was made picturesque by little mobs of Turks rushing without direction through the nullahs, shouting “Allah!” This was understood to be a counter-attack, but it came somewhat late.

Our assault was so complete a surprise that the enemy signallers in their forward dug-outs pretended to be asleep. “Shall I stick them?” asked a Leicestershire private of his second-lieutenant. The answer was a nod. Prisoners’ bread was analysed by the Leicestershires’ doctor, who reported that the rolls were made of straw, with mud as the binding material. One prisoner was so absurdly like a renowned company commander that he was kept back after his fellows had been sent down to the Base, that all his double’s friends might have a chance of seeing him.

The habit of raiding grew on our troops, and the Sikhs were particularly adept at it. When in the autumn Allenby broke through, the enemy had become very wretched. One terrible mishap marred the triumphant race north, when the Seaforths were thrown, without artillery support, at Beit Lidd, a steep slope crowned with a cactus-ringed village and set in terraces. As this was the end of the War, no less than six M.C.’s came to the battalion, one—contrary to the M.C. rule—a posthumous one. The first fortnight of October saw the Leicestershires swinging through Beirut, just as they had marched through Baghdad, nearly a twelvemonth before, when leaving Mesopotamia. While the populace showered garlands on them and cheered madly what most supposed was the British National Anthem, the short, stocky figures chanted the lovely chorus:

Roly-poly, treacle duff!
Roly-poly, that’s the stuff
Oh, when I think abaht it it makes my tummy ache!
Oh, lor lumme, I want my mummy, the pudden she useter make!

Arsuf, after its brief and partial emergence into the upper light of history, has sunk back to its pastoral obscurity. Yet tourist and archeologist, wandering through even this land, so wealthy in sites, cannot altogether neglect a place where sea and shore hold so many relics, from so many times and peoples. There is the tiny harbour, used by Tyrian and Briton so diversely. The masonry is studded with arsurines, green and blue stones, and great quantities of coloured glass, melted in some conflagration or abandoned from what was perhaps an ancient glass factory. Recumbent pillars are set in the steps which lead up the cliff. Pottery in abundance strews the earth, some of it glazed, and much of it very old. At the cliff top are ruins—the castle which repulsed Raymond of Toulouse and Godfrey himself in the First Crusade, and later was a bulwark against the Moslem surge, when Christian lords held this coast and Islam was wresting the last strongholds one by one back. Vaults and masonry, that served us for makeshift trenches, are overgrown with datura and scrub; when I last went over them, in 1919, a wild cat leapt out. Will the archaeologist of later ages, examining pillars and tumbled castle, think of us who burrowed in rock-tombs and hid in caves at the cliff root while the 5.9’s rapped on the flowery pastures overhead? Or see, in his rekindled vision of the past, not only Phoenician trader and Roman galley and Frankish war-sloop seeking this mimic haven, but our vanished sojourn also? See the colonel and second-in-command of a famous regiment whiling away afternoons of little employment by gathering against each other cowries, dug out of the sands? Figures walking over the breakwater, stunning fish with rifle-shots? Stealthy patrols scattering in the dusk? Jubilant crowds exultant in the surf and laughing when a chance shell screamed far out to sea, bouncing up a column of spray? For this, too, is now history and will one day be ancient.

Yellow Sorrel

When we marched out of Jaffa, the way
Was bordered with sorrel
(Tall, long-stalked, beautiful, gold-flowered sorrel),
Which made the land gay.
But we raised no Te Deum,
Because of the day,
Which was hot, as we trudged
And dustily drudged,
While the weight of our packs
Sent the sweat down our backs.

Two miles out of town,
At the halt, we flung down,
And oranges sucked
And listlessly chucked
The peel at the view;
Then went on through the sorrel,
The marvellous sorrel.

The colonel described
That patch at our side;
He liked flowers, and knew
Quite a little about them,
But the glance that he threw
Said, “I’ll manage without them.”
And Irishman Mac
Held, unseeing, the track
Past fields that would stock
The whole world with shamrock.
And Keely displayed
No great joy, I’m afraid.
And I dare bet G. A.
Didn’t know what was there.
And Mason and Thorp
Gave never a stare.
On our brows the beads glistened,
As we lifelessly listened
To the guns that we neared;
So we washed out the sorrel.
For Jacko, we feared
(With whom we’d a quarrel),
Cared nix for the sorrel,
Just nix for the sorrel,
The gold-flowered, beautiful, tall, drooping sorrel.

Jerusalem: War Memories

For me Jerusalem has such a spell that, though I head this essay with its name, I hesitate to begin on the theme, but wander round its walls, and would stand where the hills have a less august story and memories less austere. There are its approaches, the defiles of Samson’s country, through which you pass from Ramleh to the Holy City; stony heights, shagged with coarse grass and scrub and, above all, with thymes and thistles. No land has a greater abundance and variety of thistles and thymes and mints than Palestine, and their tribes flower all the year round. The deep Judaean wadis, no less than Carmel and Tabor, are coppiced with oak, carob, terebinth, lentisk, arbutus, bay, styrax, hawthorn, broom, cistus, salvia. Honeysuckle grows in the ravines round Nebi Samwil. But the summits and slopes are bare.

Partridges bring off large broods in the dry bottoms. Till recent days the hunting leopard laired in some of the limestone caves. Hares, gazelles, hyenas, foxes, wolves—all find shelter amid the rocks and screes. Porcupines have their holes in the hillside. They were sufficiently common, a little farther south, in the time of our warfare before Gaza, for some to find them a pleasant change of diet. A friend³ had an adventure with one near Ludd, when Authority, learning that his life had been spent in digging (he was an archaeologist), put him in charge of road-making. Surface material being bad, he entered a rock-tomb to see if there were better stone beneath. Crawling out through the narrow opening he heard his Greek foreman shout, then laugh loudly; the light was blocked, and a body dashed into him. This newcomer, failing to get past, tried to reverse, hurting horribly; failing in this also, it rushed forward again, and by its rival’s accommodation got through, and ran over a pile of rubble into a hole at the back of the tomb. Engelbach came out and found his shoulder bleeding, full of quills.

Overlooking Jerusalem is Nebi Samwil, Mizpeh, the Crusaders’ Mont-Joie, from which they first saw Jerusalem. From this peak our own men, whom, by special and often-repeated routine orders, it was forbidden to call Crusaders, saw the Holy City through terrific days when shells hurtled to and fro from Mizpeh and Olivet. Jerusalem herself, so often sacked and ruined, escaped the ravage of battle, “her warfare accomplished” at last. But her incomings and outgoings suffered. The Ophthalmic Hospital and the pine woods of the German colony, on the road from Bethlehem to the Jaffa Gate, bore marks of shell and bullet. On Nebi Samwil the hostile lines were in places not 40 yards apart, and there was bitter clashing. The mosque of Samuel’s tomb was shattered, and behind stone walls and sangars swiftly hurled together remained signs of those hard days, tins and rotting clothing.

Bittir, Bethel, Ai, Gibeon, and a host more—of these let the commentators speak. We of the Expeditionary Force were there as pilgrims and sojourners in the land, expecting till the autumn push came. We dwelt in camps and billets, or in the two hotels, one of which, the Fast, found fame in the pages of Punch by the legend after its name, “Visitors must bring their own rations.” We made our multitude of roads for military traffic, with side-tracks bearing where they diverged from the main way the tactfully-worded notice: “Horses, mules, camels, donkeys, civilians.” Corps occupied the German hospice on Olivet, famed for its singular mural and roof decorations, the Kaiser as King David and that other of the Kaiserin receiving from her lord a model of the building—“Here’s a Noah’s Ark for Little Willie.” We had our cricket on Olivet, matting on a good true pitch, but an execrable outfield, a chaos of boulders and thistles. Here many world-renowned players performed. Afterwards Corps would entertain the teams, and there would be a “gaff” to follow.

Bethlehem, to those who care to see, gives a notion of what even this stony land has been. The hillsides are wooded with olive and pomegranate, a pleasant front of verdure. Looking down on the Shepherds’ Fields, and across to the mountains of Moab, you feel the fascination of the contours of these gaunt highlands. The land is naked and old, but not yet haggard.⁴ When the moonlight floods them, the hills are lovelier than an angel’s dream. David’s Well is fern-fringed. Wherever there is a crack which rigidly excludes the sun’s rays, maidenhair grows; alike at the lip of David’s Well, and in the Kedron tomb-caves and on shelves in the limestone beside the way from Gethsemane to the Damascus Gate.

Further afield is Hebron, noted yet for its grapes; noted, too, for the fanaticism of its Moslem inhabitants, in this particular second only to those of Nablus. The mosque over the Patriarchs’ tombs, in pre-War days opened to only a handful of exalted Christians, during the War was entered by a fair number, under permit from the Military Governor. But Jews were not permitted even to the door. They could go to a certain step, where there is a crack in the wall, through which his despised descendants precipitated letters to Father Abraham, in whose honour his children’s enemies kept this shrine.

At Hebron is the pool where David hanged the murderers of Ishbosheth, a brown, sinister tank. At Hebron, also, is the noble oak named of Mamre. The Hebron country has other fine oaks, and an abundance of shrubs that, if goats could be kept off them, would soon change the face of the district. On the Judaean hills, even round Jerusalem, wild roses grow; but it would be hard to prove that they ever flower. They are like the Epping Forest lilies of the valley. But near Hebron I found, in early April, 1919, a bank which was one riot of wild roses.

Where tradition puts the Baptist’s home is Ain-Karim, four miles out from Jerusalem, in a delightful vale, fed by a spring of plentiful water. I remember an amusing half-hour here, on an evening of quiet, clear sunlight, when I watched a fox fooling a village dog. The hillside was stone-terraced for vines. The fox would wait till his clumsy pursuer, barking and jumping heavily along, almost reached him, then he would slide down the wall into the next field. The dog would go round noisily to the lower allotment, not being able to slip down the wall. The fox would behave as before. This game went on for a considerable time, till the dog gave it up and trotted away, the fox looking after him.

Evening and the throng round Ain-Karim fountain, the good temper and the flashing, musical waters, the sunlight and gentle green of the pennywort springing from the stone walls, the fringe of colour trailed alone the hedgerows, of poppies and fumitory, mallows, cranesbills, henbane, ranunculus, wild garlics—“ver’ ordinar’ flowers,” as a Syrian observed to me on Carmel, weeds of no great note, but such as the good God scatters everywhere on the waste ground; all this was a sight calculated to make a man love his kind. And above were the hills, so stony and with so many bare patches, yet with such an appealing loveliness when the mind has dwelt with them—a heath of aromatic scrub, shot with radiance in spring, and even in the heats of summer keeping gold of flax and thistles and the varied purples and reds of the wild mints. In October, the heart of the mountains blossoms. Who could have guessed what tenderness had slept the summer through, folded deep under parched soil and hidden in clefts of rock? With the first gentle rains blue squills appear, and saffron crocus; cyclamens thrust up their leaves, whose underside is so lovely in its veined purple that we can well wait for the flowers. The true crocuses follow, blue and white. Then in a great wave spring overspreads the hills, even these hills of Judaea. By May the tide has ebbed, and of the lilies only yellow asphodeline remains. But mints and thymes and thistles continue. In July, Mr. Dinsmore, of the American Colony, took me to a hillside just outside Jerusalem, and showed me a little enclave made by the moor-gods, a fairy corrie where grew rosa canina, though so dwarf and trailing as to be overlooked except by careful search, styrax, wild olive, oak, terebinth, and a dozen thymes in flower.

The hillsides, to complete their picture, need this addition, that, scattered widely, a shrub or tree rises; carob as big as an apple tree, struggling oak no taller than a privet, or hawthorn cowering close to the wind-swept slope like a humpbacked dwarf.

I suppose one should speak of Bethany. But that huddle of houses beside the dust-tormented road interested me most because I found the words of Karshish true:

Blue-flowering borage, the Aleppo sort,
Aboundeth, very nitrous.

Borage is no rarity. It carpets Olivet; and the stones of the Temple courtyard are one tangle of it in many places, especially under the great olives.

After Allenby’s entry Jerusalem was at peace. The city was too sacred for hostile aeroplanes even to appear over it. But the War was at her borders, and the guns could still be heard. The fields to the north, on the Nablus road, were strewn with relics of conflict. At Ramallah a boy was brought before the Military Governor, charged with bomb-throwing. His defence was that he found lots of these round things, and once, when his sheep were loitering, he threw one at them, with splendid result. It made a big noise, and they hustled home. Since then, he had searched diligently for these crackers, and whenever his sheep were laggard encouraged them with a grenade. This pleasing yarn suggests a rewriting of Southey’s “Battle of Blenheim,” with Peterkin bringing duds to the appalled veteran:

He came to ask what he had found That was so large, and smooth, and round.

The City

The many bad books on Jerusalem have confused men’s minds with weariness of a place which its praisers have nowise helped others to see. I need not say that I do not write thus of Sir George Adam Smith’s two noble volumes, my daily companions as I searched the walls and streets, the pools above and the “waters that are under the earth”—a large part, these last, of the city’s life and story. There is always something fresh to see in Jerusalem. Yet, as the place sinks deep into imagination and grips the heart, it becomes ever harder to speak or write convincingly concerning it.

Of the Holy Sepulchre every traveller’s book speaks. But it is only with residence that you learn how varied an appeal lies in each yard of its neglected environs. There can be no other place where you so feel what Father Tyrrell rejoiced to know, the welling up of the sap in your veins from the hidden roots of the tree of humanity. For example, take a spot within 100 yards of the Sepulchre, visible from shops in Christian Street—“Hezekiah’s Pool,” the Κολνμβήφρα Ἀμυγδαλόν, the “Bathing-Place of the Almond Trees”⁵ of Josephus. From this shrunken puddle came light on an experience in Egypt. At Assuan, my dragoman always spoke of the ruined Roman baths in the Nile as “Queen Kolubetra’s Baths.” Kolubetra seemed obviously Cleopatra. But when I wished to find out if perchance the native pronunciation of the name of the “serpent of old Nile” had been Kolubetra (since the Arab makes our “p” into “b”),⁶ all he would say was, as before, they were Kolubetra’s Baths, always had been. Other names he pronounced as the books had taught him—in the main. In Jerusalem, the puzzle cleared itself, as I was looking out from the tailor’s shop on the “ Bath of the Almond Trees.” Kolubetra was Κολνμβήφρα and “Queen Kolubetra’s Baths” were really “Queen Bath’s Baths.” So here to-day in Upper Egypt a Greek term had survived the centuries, helped by sound-confusion with Cleopatra, and was extant in the patter of a dragoman.

Jerusalem’s countless visitors carried away the pleasantest impressions, as a rule, not from the Sepulchre but from the Haram and the Church of the Ecce Homo. The latter, a recent church, scarcely half a century old, had everything in exquisite simplicity. The Sisters of Zion, who have the charge of it, are unwearied in their courtesy to the never-ceasing parties of visitors. Their church, in addition to the side-arch about which it is built, contains a tribunal, and part of the scarp of Bezetha, the New Town, here cut down for the moat of the castle of Antonia. In the same buildings are another tribunal; and one of the most moving sights in Jerusalem, the old pavement. Here are squares and circles, scratched by Roman soldiers for their games of chance, while tedious business was proceeding within the Prastorium—trial of a prisoner or the handling of an excited deputation. In the same darkened vault and on the same pavement are stones roughened for passage of horses, and pious hands have placed a Figure staggering under a cross.

The War gave these Sisters an opportunity to attempt what has been done so often, to deflect the stream of tradition. The first Station of the Cross had been in the Turkish barracks opposite. As these were closed, the Sisters insisted that the first Station should be here. Their attempt was made in good faith and with more show of reason than most such attempts have had. But they had formidable competitors in the Greek hospice next door. Here are great underground dungeons, rock-hewn chambers, indescribably miserable, a nightmare to enter even as free men. The chambers have peepholes for the sentries, and some have stocks cut in the stone. Imagination is oppressed as it visualises the deeds done here, and one “hopes there is a Hell.” It may have been here that Barabbas sat, with expectation of no other escape than to the death of the cross. Within are pits crammed with human bones.⁷

The Haram brings the mind closer to our Lord’s life than any other site in Jerusalem. Not least, it lies open to the free wind and sun, and you can understand how it was that He was able to look up into a cloudless heaven and the face of a Father. All is friendly here, from the circling pigeons to the grass which knits the flags. In the lower courtyard are the kindly grey trees, old olives with their arms crowded with mistletoe. No tree, not even the apple, carries more mistletoe than the olive—the groves in the Kedron valley are prolific of it. Here, in the Temple court-yard, the olives have their feet tangled in grass and thistles and borage. So it must have been in Christ’s time, and the flowers and wealthy bushes spake of His Father’s business and His, to bring life abundantly, while men destroyed. That flower of Jerusalem walls, the snapdragon, is rooted here in the battlements. I never saw it without remembering Newman’s walls at Oriel. And there is the caperbush, the “hyssop that springeth out of the wall,” brightening the stones with its white, spraying blossoms. And there are the tall cypresses. And, opposite, the tombs and spaces of Olivet. Here He walked when Galilee was a memory, resolutely flung behind Him, and storms were gathering for the finish. Under the olives and among the thronging crowds He found His Father, and left what we should call the Temple to formalist and bigot.

The Aksa mosque, where two of the murderers of Thomas à Becket are buried, has a place where the guides and Moslem guardians tell you that Zacharias, the father of the Baptist, “prayed”— or, rather, “brayed.” See the genuine tradition here of another Zacharias, “the son of Barachias,” whom they “slew between the temple (walls) and the altar.” To this place Christ pointed, and emphasised His warning of destruction at hand.

The Haram area is a museum of architectural styles. In the Dome of the Rock are things beyond all praise, such as the glorious roof and the ironwork left by the Crusaders. At this place through millenniums worship has been made, history has been enacted. Primitive animism, Araunah’s threshing floor, Solomon’s glory, centuries of bloody sacrifice, sacrilege of Antiochus and Pompey, patronage of Herod, the terror and horror of the Roman siege, the agony of the Crusaders’ storm, ritual of pagan and Jew and Christian and Moslem—these are but a few of the associations of this bare rock, assuredly a hallowed place, if human passion and devotion can hallow any place. Yet, for all that, for those who follow “the Lord of all good life,” the deepest sanctity of the Temple area is away from the rock, in the courts outside. “Without the city wall” are spots more sacred still. Somewhere on these limestone hills He died; in that stony torrent-bed He passed nights darkened and in solitude of spirit, but assuredly, if one may so lift a pagan’s gay egoism to loftier purport, non sine dis.

This is how to secure the most wonderful and interest-crammed hour the whole world can give you. From the Jaffa Gate, where the early markets and shop-booths are, pass down the Hebron road. Above you are the massive buttresses, surnamed of David, supposed of Herod—his tower of Phasaelus. Swifts are flying in the afternoon brightness, the crowding life of the desert is entering in through the gate. Forget all later memories—the Turkish gallowstree, the Prussian warlord’s pomp, our own troops and their leader. You are to plunge into the far past. As you descend, Zion, the false Zion of tradition, rises high on your left. Here the earliest Church had its home, here the Virgin Mother died. Where the first descent has finished, and the road levels ere it rises, is the pool called the Birket es-Sultan. Yes, there was always an embankment there. Remember how clearly George Adam Smith brings out Jerusalem’s persistent efforts to draw all waters within herself, and to slay her foes with drought. You turn to the left, down the Wadi er-Rababi, the Valley of Hinnom. At its beginning notice the well-grown hawthorn. Below you are others. Spring by spring they flower, but their beauty is grimed and dim, for there is always a dust cloud dancing on that busy road which you have just left. A short ravine, dark with olives and the shadow of steep hills, brings you to where the valleys of Hinnom and Jehosaphat meet. About this region cluster the sinister memories of Jerusalem. Here were children passed through the fire to Moloch, here King Ahaz, shrinking before the menace of Assyria, sacrificed his son. By that ruined well, Job’s Well to-day (En-Rogel of the Old Testament), Isaiah, within sight of the place of that dreadful immolation, met the faintheart king with the great Messianic prophecy. To En-Rogel Joab brought Adonijah for coronation. Down on En-Rogel Aceldama looks. Beyond En-Rogel, Hinnom and Jehosaphat continue in the Wadi en-Nar, the Valley of Fire, a burnt ravine running down to the Dead Sea. In Moslem legend, the Valley of Fire is the home of Asrael, Angel of Death.

At Hinnom’s end, you turn sharply to the left. You pass upward by a very gradual ascent. Opposite is the Hill of Offence, traditionally the scene of Solomon’s idolatries. On its lower slopes are the houses of Siloam, whose inhabitants are troglodytes, with their homes built against caves and rock-tombs. Below are the King’s Gardens, the gardens of Siloam, fed by “the waters of Shiloah that go softly,”

Siloa’s brook, that flowed
Fast by the oracle of God.

From your left the Tyropoean Valley enters, almost filled up with rubbish. In its mouth grows an old black mulberry, the traditional site of Isaiah’s martyrdom. Fifty yards up the Tyropoean is the Pool of Siloam, a minaret above it. The Pool has been narrowly circumscribed by Herod’s and later masonry, and is a shallow, leech-infested water. Into it Hezekiah’s conduit, a dark gallery cut through the shoulder of the hill, brings a racing stream when the Virgin’s Spring flushes.

Continue up the Valley of Jehosaphat, climbing over the rubbish of ages. Flocks of goldfinches rise, as you push through the thistles; a gnarled, thorn-hued chameleon crawls away. The tombs begin. Presently, both sides of the valley are one vast burial ground. From the tombs, and indeed everywhere, till the hillside is one bulbous outgrowth, spring the lilies that lift the tall white spikes, urginea maritima. Josephus, describing the agony of the siege of Jerusalem, tells us how ravenous mobs in the dead of night crept into this valley to gather roots. The Romans set ambushes for them, and crucified those they caught. If some returned safely, often the city guards robbed them of their wretched food. These lilies, I think, were the roots they sought.

Here is the Virgin’s Spring, Gihon of the Old Testament. Steps lead down to it. The water floods from a siphon-spring in the rock into this channel. Once the overflow went into the valley, but Hezekiah “stopped the brook that ran through the midst of the land, saying, Why should the kings of Assyria come, and find much water?” On the tongue of rock above stood the primitive hamlet of the Jebusites, with a shaft sunk through to this channel (whose beginning is older than the rest). This was where David was mocked by the too confident defenders, till Joab stormed it, by way of “the gutter” (whatever that was). On this ridge probably stood the Akra, whose alien garrison so long defied the Maccabees. They had access to the one perennial spring of Jerusalem, and below them were the rich gardens of Siloam, inhabited by a population unfriendly to the Jews. To this eyrie food could be smuggled from the valley; and from this vantage they could harass the Temple worshippers. There, above you, is the Temple area, with the jutting point from which tradition says James the Just was hurled. From this ravine, polluted through all ages, where once the loathsome worm that died not crawled on the festering remains of criminals, and where the smouldering fires in never-consumed garbage were not quenched, Dives in the Parable looked up at Lazarus in Abraham’s Bosom. There is hardly any herbage here; only the thistles and the lily of desolation and the squirting cucumber, whose useless fruit bursts in the hand. You cross the valley to the opposite ascent. The path passes beneath rock-tombs, almost certainly here in Christ’s time. That queer building, with a great hole in it and a heap of pebbles round its base, is known as Absalom’s Tomb, at which Jews cast their stones. The path climbs between stone walls, where tall mulleins stand up like many-branched golden candlesticks; and you are on the Jericho road. A short distance brings you to the Virgin’s Tomb—also grave of the scandalous Queen Millicent. Beside this fine Crusader church, which is now far below the level of the ground, is the Grotto of the Agony, a cave whose simplicity is welcome. The Franciscans’ Gethsemane is 100 yards to your right, where you may see the old olives and be given a handful of flowers and sprigs of rosemary, “for remembrance.” Rosemary abounds on Olivet.

The road turns sharply to the left, crosses the dry Kedron, and turns right again by the shelter erected in honour of St. Stephen. Here a steep climb begins. But first, notice these rough relics of steps cut in the limestone. For a marvel, no Church has appropriated them or defaced them with a shrine. Yet it is hardly doubtful that by these steps Jesus descended from the Temple to the olive-groves.⁸ Here are large zizyphs, the tree from which tradition makes the Crown of Thorns. These yawning cracks by the wayside are lined with luxuriant maidenhair. Near the top of the slope a short path between banks of rubbish and cactus hedges leads to St. Stephen’s Gate. Inside is the old Crusader Church of St. Anne, which Saladin made a Moslem theological school and which covers the supposed Pool of Bethesda, now being excavated. You will find a Roman pillar there, with a floriated capital, and a notice “Piscine Probatique.”⁹ But return to the main road. It turns to left again, and runs directly beneath the noble walls. Nowhere do the walls show to more impressive advantage. In five minutes you reach Herod’s Gate. It was near this spot that Godfrey of Boulogne mounted his ladder, and first of the Crusaders entered the city. These banks, which only half cover the remains of Herod’s wall, are a great place for glow-worms. In this part of the city took place that memorable streaming-away, when from sunrise to sunset the poor escaped through the postern of St. Lazarus, permitted by Saladin, after the fall of Jerusalem, to depart without ransom.

A short distance further, and you pass the huge grottoes named Jeremiah’s, and the eyeless sockets in the limestone hillock which Conder and General Gordon thought was “the Place of a Skull.” Certainly here tradition sets the common place of execution, and the earliest tradition puts the death of Stephen near by. Almost opposite are the far-stretching caves beneath the city, called Solomon’s Quarries. A little further, and you are at the Damascus Gate, where you may see the arch of Herod Agrippa’s second wall. Here the street El-Wad runs into the heart of the city, over the course of the Tyropoean Valley. This, if followed, will bring you to the Via Dolorosa, and the old Cotton Merchants’ Market, ten years ago a deserted vaulted bazaar. The economic centre of Jerusalem had moved to the Jaffa Gate and the west. The British occupation so cleansed the city’s foulness that few would believe how unspeakable this once crowded mart had become. Streets entering El-Wad lead in a few minutes to the Haram, the Praetorium sites, or the Holy Sepulchre. How widely we have travelled in an hour!

Her visitors are conscious enough of how bigotry and cynicism have soiled the noblest city of the world; and her sordid greed is open to view. But I would forget all this, and would remember, as I close, only her gracious story, and the hills which girdle her, the lights of heaven which make her glorious. I would see again the wonderful contours of the bare heights, or look down from Olivet on Jordan, the perpetual haze of heat and damp in which our soldiers endured days never borne before. Who that has seen can forget the fascination of that view? The battlemented crags beyond, the seething trench, the darker green of Jordan’s rankness—“the Pride” or “Swelling of Jordan,”—the black tongues of the river’s delta, the steel-blue of that sunken sea? I remember the groves of fig and olive in Kedron’s upper cleft, where Athene’s owls sat in glaring sunlight or flitted into shadow of the rock-tombs. There lies Olivet, with its dense growth of thistles, the golden and the larger purple, its yellow flax and restharrow, its borage, and in autumn its grace of tender lilies. Midway to the pinewoods and vineyards of Scopus lies the cemetery made for our valiant dead, whom shell and bullet or fever or the serpents by Jordan slew. Yellow flax made this patch its home, and spread “a light of laughing flowers” over the like a benediction. I remember evening, and a crescent moon set in a sky green with the afterglow of summer sunset. Then there was the first coming of the rains, the first autumnal eve. First, the red shadow of sunset on Olivet’s upper slopes, and vast cloud-crags in heaven. Following, a sky of silver-grey blue dimness, over grey olives, grey boulders, grey tombstones. Last of all, a most magical moon, full and glowing, the deepest orange. It is with night that Jerusalem wakes to her full loveliness, and remembers how kings desired her and the thoughts of all nations have turned to her. Nights have I known of moonlight flooding the walls and the long valley of Siloam, when I have wandered round the glorious city, and looked far down the ravine. Surely nowhere else is such an impression of distance given by so short a space! When our camps were tense with knowledge of the war awakening, and of Allenby’s forward move at hand, I have watched the Australians on their tired horses filing up the last stages of the terrible trek from Jericho, man after man in that ghostly quiet, past Gethsemane, past the shadows of hill and olives. I have looked with an awful pity flooding the mind, with thought of their ordeal at hand, and the gallant hearts that a sword would pierce. From Olivet I have seen the city, a veritable New Jerusalem, with a power and appeal unknown by day. No words can describe a “sight so touching in its majesty.” Neither can words convey—no, not even dimly or afar off—the effect of the full, burning moon rising from the desert, over the hills of Moab. And there were hours of darkness, in the olive groves of Kedron, the fireflies glancing, the glow-worms lighting the stones. And memory casting its effulgent cloud about the spirit. “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning!”

Bush and Bird

As down the Kedron Valley I was riding,
Where olives veil the rock-cut tombs I saw
An owl, who neither for myself had awe
Nor of that glaring hour had thought save scorn,
But ruffed his wings and perked each feathered horn,
In anger that I came; but I was glad.
For why? You ask, as chiding
A mind so lightly stirred.
Know then, this joy I had
For sunlight on gray leaf and ragged stone;
But most to see, vouchsafed to me alone,
There, on Athene’s bush, Athene’s bird.

Sharon: Wreckage of Coast and Shore

It was a good thing that the completeness of Allenby’s victory gave us a clear run to Haifa, for from Caesarea northward a rocky rib projects, in antiquity a defence against the military peoples of the plain with their chariots and cavalry. Scarcely ever 50 feet high, it cuts off from observation of those travelling up Sharon the beach and a tiny strip of hinterland adjacent—a territory where you find Roman pillars rolled against the flint-man’s cave (still in use). The ridge is a thicket of lentisk, carob, genista, wild olive, which once covered the foreshore also. The Third Crusade from Haifa southward

“moved forward with more than wonted caution, impeded by the covert and tall and luxuriant herbage, which struck them about the face, especially the foot-soldiers. In these maritime parts were also numbers of wild beasts, which leapt from between their feet from the long grass and dense copse; many were caught, not by design but coming in their way by chance,”¹⁰

like the miscellaneous prey—jackals, a wild cat, partridges—with which the beaters at an Indian shoot emerge at the machans. A perfect trap of commingled rock and thorn, the ridge helped the Crusaders in their despairing limpet-clinging to the last strip of dominion, and made amends for the earlier suffering it caused them. It is fortunate that the Turkish machine-gunners never had their nests in it. A Crusader castle crowns the rough Carmel-facing slope at Kefr Lam, three corners intact. Petra Incisa, the road hewn through the rock rampart, is in front of Athlit, and above the precipice, commanding this narrow slit whose gates perished long ago, are traces of Détroits, the outer defences of Château Pèlerin (Athlit). In 1291, after even Acre had fallen, Athlit was the last fort to be wrested from the Christians. Its banqueting hall stands in part, with two human faces, one a bearded countenance in excellent clearness. Its moat is a red, rotting water, evil-looking, evil-smelling; a wide marsh abuts upon it, swampy fields where sandpipers race and herons fish. The defences on both sides run into the sea.

A tribe of earlier sea lords gripped this ridge, the handle to Palestine. Phoenician havens, tiny harbours of the Arsuf kind, dot the coast. “While the cruelty of many another wild coast is known by the wrecks of ships, the Syrian coast south of Carmel is strewn with the fiercer wreckage of harbours.”¹¹ For example, at Tantura (Phoenician Dor) are rock-shelves for beaching galleys, and remains of a pier. Roman masonry, rubble piles, broken pottery, winejars, Samian ware, porphyry, lie everywhere. The cliff-top has remains of a Crusader tower, with winding staircase.

Over Caesarea, shadow of a great name, sands have drifted, forming dunes where only rushes and lentisk will grow, with, on the firmer ground, thymelsea, a few carobs and fewer oaks. From here to Zummorin the country is the loveliest for wooded verdure left in Palestine. Sharon means “Forest”; it was “the Forest” for Strabo and Josephus, was Tasso’s “Enchanted Forest” and Napoleon’s “Forest of Miski.” When war broke out groves straggled south from the still extensive woods north of Caesarea, the ragged fringes of a tattered robe. But there was wreckage here also; the Turk left behind his battle-line a trail of stumps. They are planting trees in Palestine again, especially in Galilee. But to those who have seen the native woodland plantations of fir and eucalyptus, even Balfour Forest, can bring small comfort.

At all hours of the day and most of the night cars fly over the sickle-curve of hard sands between Haifa and Acre. Two famous rivers cross it—Kishon, a noble stream flowing through a region of sand mounds and tamarisks, Kishon destined to provide boating, fishing and shooting; and Belus, which has its niche in history because the Phoenicians are said to have learnt how to make glass by the accident of lighting a fire on its sands. Both end amid palm groves, an unusual Palestine sight. Acre fort, which saw almost the last fighting of the Crusades, and has been through so many struggles, has become the home of countless lesser kestrels, which fly unrestingly round its walls.

Carmel

Sharon can be fair enough, but Carmel is the real beginning of that luxuriance which makes so striking a distinction between Judaea and Galilee. We jested about the place of our campaigning being “a land of milk and honey.” Yet, when the tide of success carried men out of the miserable desert-plains, they began to see with wonder how many features of beauty remained; and few can have reached Galilee or Lebanon without finding they had learned to love a country so richly and variously attractive. “Gad, but this is pretty country, this is,” said a brigadier as we came in sight of the approaches to Haifa. “I’d like to go over it with a gun.”

Sir George Adam Smith writes of riding over the ridges of Gilead, “where the oak branches rustled and their shadows swung to and fro over the cool paths.” He did what no living man will do again. Coppice remains in Gilead, but hardly a tree; the woods went to feed the Maan Railway. The hills which run up into the country’s heart, through Samaria and by Nablus, when the War finished had the appearance of a shaven sheep’s back, so cleanly had the trees been cut away almost to the crest. Lebanon was stripped, and Anti-Lebanon, and it was only in some of the western valleys that thickets of ilex and myrtle reminded that it was here that the young world’s imagination wandered, that Adonis died and Kypris ran wailing. Syrian coppice is perhaps the loveliest on earth. But the Syrian makes a sheer sweep of it, that he may then terrace up the hillside for vineyards.

But Tabor remained, and Carmel. Turkish axes had been busy on both, yet both remained, lovelier than description can convey. I went into the heart of Carmel early in April, 1919. I had seen it a month earlier, in its burst of wild lilies, when the Austrian Hospice had bowls filled with great velvet, all-but-black irises, and the slopes were lit with yellow asphodeline. It was glorious in Esdraelon then, at Carmel’s foot, with anemones, white, blue, and scarlet, and with the small gold iris. But in April the spring had ripened. For a dozen miles I went on till I reached the traditional scene of Elijah’s contest with the priests of Baal, when he strove with a people “halting on the threshold.” Carmel’s long summit, a plateau with rugged edges, glens dipping down to sea or Kisnon and wooded still, was one face of flowers.

The Mediterranean front had been ruined before the War by the German colony of Haifa; for the native woodland they had planted eucalyptus and pines. Among these pines were our G.H.Q. huts. We were making a second Kantara here, cutting down the pines, to make way for long wooden sheds. When the work of devastation had gone moderately far, plans were changed, and it was decided to make Carmel the summer home, not of G.H.Q., but of Corps. It mattered little. The Muses were unrepresented on either, and the wood-gods got short shrift from both. Corps or G.H.Q.—they recognised that it was “ pretty country,” good to go over with a gun.

So I struck inland. The copse had been slashed and broken up, but the flowery carpet remained. There were miles of cistus, both white and pink, a shrubbery in themselves, rough, dwarf bushes, covered with multitudes of daintiest blossoms. From the clefts hollyhocks sprang, and cyclamen, not yet finished flowering. Where cornfields had usurped the forest’s place, yellow marigold and gladiolus grew. Both of these are “of the cornfields” (chrysanthemum segetum and gladiolus segetum). Under the rock-roses crept their tiny kinsflower, the sun-rose (helianthemum); blue cornflowers were everywhere. Lilies were over, except for gladiolus, garlics, and omithogalum; but red ranunculus was out, following on the heels of red anemone, which had reigned during March. Marguerites, and those most ubiquitous of Palestine wild flowers, pink flax and cream-coloured scabious, were in their prime. Other flowers that I noticed were bur-marigold, pink campion, campanulas of several sorts, including one tall enough and with bells enough to be a wand for Silenus, the silvan deities’ jester; buplevrum, negella, knapweeds, thyme—carpets of thyme—thistles, pink bindweed, poppy, adonis (“tears of Christ”), yellow saxifrage, white clover, dwarf yellow trefoil. But the copse was Carmel’s greatest glory. A stray pine had seeded itself here and there, from those abominable Teuton groves. Yet, where the axe of war had spared it, the woodland kept its fresh, native sweetness. Styrax, a very showy plant, was in flower, hung with white tassels; arbutus, wild bay (laurus nobilis), and holm-oak (quercus pseudo-coccifera) were all blossoming. These, with hawthorn, no longer in flower, butcher’s broom, terebinth, and carob, made up the thicket—a thicket, as I have said, lovelier to my mind than great forests of magnificent trees. Cistus filled up the interstices and made a purfled fringe; red-berried burnet and coarse, pungent lentisk added a rough jungle of their own. Two sorts of broom were flowering, genista sphacelata and calycotome villosa. Blue salvia is almost a shrub, and was abundant; thymelaea (which looks somewhat like young box) is certainly one, but this was rare. By El-Moukraqa, the place of Elijah’s sacrifice, the wildest part of all this lovely region, I found a cephalanthera in the arbutus thicket—tall, waxen spikes of virginal whiteness.

From Carmel the pilgrim looks down to Homer’s wine-dark sea, and on the story of uncounted centuries. The old high place remains, muffled in with ilex and knee-holly. Vespasian, marching to stamp out Jewry, halted to consult the oracle of this god Carmel. To north that ancient river, the river Kishon, runs past the mound where tradition says the priests of Baal died. Beyond Kishon is Acre; north-east of Acre, Hermon stands, heaven-exalted, looking towards the Patmos sunsets. Southward you see Athlit, Castella peregrinorum, sea-engirdled on its promontory. You look on Sharon, and here, to the southeast, is Esdraelon, where Sisera fled and good Josiah died. Above Esdraelon is the sickle-sweep of Gilboa, where Saul and Jonathan perished. Against Gilboa is Tabor. Nazareth is in the hills. Never was such a background for man’s prosperity as this mountain doomed to become a fashionable residential quarter, a second Malabar Hill to the Bombay which will be built at Haifa.

Esdraelon and the Pagan Marches

The railway to Damascus skirts the edge of Carmel. To north are wooded hills, in front Esdraelon opens. You cross the Kishon, whose flowery swamps keep you company for some miles. These swamps attain their richest beauty in March, when the anemones rule. Red is arriving, purple is going, white is in its fulness. There are orchises and acres of golden asphodeline and a small gold iris, poppies and massed charlock colour the drier tussocks. Tamarisks stand like giant heaths, hung with pink racemes. But yellow is the prevailing tint. An occasional mimosa, dwarfed by the dampness, scents the air with its pale yellow buttons, spurge and saxifrage pour in their contribution to the general flush of golden bloom. All these flowers, in varying abundance, accompany you to the edge of Jordan Valley.

Far aloft, in pinnacled isolation, towers the Place of Sacrifice. Then you have finished with Carmel, and are in the plain of so many battles. In winter the levels are marshy, and through them trickle the water-streaks which swell the Kishon. In his last sandy miles Kishon has woven about him a many-moated defence of swamps, a refuge to wild swine and gazelles. When Gilboa and Tabor have thrown in their tribute of winter rains, he floods far, into pools long unvisited by any river-god, and Esdraelon is a quag. But through the summer it is dry prairie, formerly given over to thistles and broom-rapes and wild carrot. Plenty of water still lurks in hollows, tufted over with willow-herb or the darker green of rushes. But the terrain looks itself, a vast battle-ground, where through four millenniums of recorded history peoples clashed—Israel with Canaan and Midian and Philistia; Egyptian, Roman, Crusader, Saracen, Frenchman, Briton, Australian, Indian, Turk.

Round the red-roofed houses, Zionist settlements, grow mimosas and castor-oil shrubs in abundance, and a few gum trees. Tabor and Gilboa face each other, a contrast, the former dark with woods, the latter bare from its former luxuriance, as though the curse had been fulfilled, “Ye mountains of Gilboa, let there be no dew, neither rain upon you!” In a cleft to the south is Jenin, where the great surrenders were made in Allenby’s break through. Here, close to the railway, to north of you, is Little Hermon, which hides both Nain and Endor, scenes of two such diverse callings back of the dead.

From Beisan (Bethsan, where the bodies of Saul and Jonathan were exposed, after their death on Gilboa) you look down on the Jordan Valley. You enter territory whose associations are Greek and Roman, rather than Hebrew. Beisan was Scythopolis, a city hostile to the Jews, the most prosperous town of the Decapolis and, as its excavators are now reminding us, a centre of pagan culture.

The railway turns north, and seems to run on an edge, athwart a slope. Overhead are deserted bluffs, which look as if they should be robber-holds. Below is the amazing valley, ever new cause for wonder, though a man should see it a thousand times. The Jordan’s passage is marked by rank green, the beginnings of the Zor. The seasons are already changing, as you dip towards it—from a temperate climate you are moving slowly to a tropical one. The first sign of this, or ever the descent has well begun, is that white anemone, though in its prime on the plain, has almost finished and red is abundant (this is in March). Poppies, marigolds, blue iris, polygonums, flowers which can flourish in any heat, are the characteristic flowers. A fitful and despairing wind, wandering apparently without purpose, ruffles the parched grass in handfuls, as if it were some recumbent faun’s hair. It blows as it lists,

“Curling with unconfirmed intent
Along the mountain-side.”

Still you descend, till the valley is almost at your feet, and those iron heights beyond seem at hand. And now, till you reach the Lake of Galilee, the track is bordered with faded stalks of that lily of desolation, urginea maritima. The line turns half-right, you cross a thin trickle, an arm of Jordan, and presently are over the main river. It has just fallen in heavy cascades, and foams beneath, through black volcanic rocks, into a swirling race. Bushes of oleanders are swaying in the spray- cooled air. The train climbs slightly, running north again. The lake appears, the train swerves into a mimosa avenue, there are red-roofed houses. You have reached Es-Semakh, the scene of the bloodiest little fight in Allenby’s drive.

At the time, the story was of a white flag thrust from an upper window of one of these red-roofed houses, that first one. An Australian officer went upstairs to receive the surrender and was shot dead. A fight without quarter followed. The officer killed was well known, and his name was passed freely through the Force. But I am satisfied, as were most of the men who fought there, that there was no treachery. The 11th Australian Light Horse stumbled on the station and its workshops in the early darkness, when a white flag would not have been seen. What is certain is that the affair was a death-grapple between the Australians and the German artisans, which cost the 11th Light Horse dear.

Sernakh lies on a bare tableland, the beginning of the Jordan trench. A mile to the west, Jordan leaves the Lake, a stripling brook flowing between reeds and oleanders and agnus-castus. Lofty hills rise to east and west. The blue water glimmers in front, also shut with hills, Hermon’s huge mass lifting above all. Before they took in hand its damming, to provide power and lighting, the Lake was very shallow. One October evening, I had waded far out, when a black, suffocating khamsin swooped down on the shining mirror, darkening the tormented waves, blotting out the desolate plateau, maddening man and beast.

Eastward the Yarmuk valley offers a way into the Hauran, and to Damascus. The train leaves the dry plateau, its zizyphs and dead lilies and jaded grass. You enter the Muses’ canyon, a haunt of Baals and silvan deities, fauns and satyrs. Galilee is forgotten in this pagan world. Ever, as you climb towards the Hauran, you are entranced by the sight of shooting waters, of a foam-crowned brook dividing round verdurous islets, of giant ravines. Sprinkled at vast intervals are tiny settlements. I have been fascinated at night here by the glow of one fire, set deep in the solitary hillside, savage with scrub and thorn-tangles. Above was a black sky, with Hesperus lonely, winking over a mighty fell. The valley was in utter darkness, filled with the river’s continuous roar.

Yarmuk seems in perpetual spate. At the valley’s upper end, where the Hauran’s crest is cloven, are lofty waterfalls, and throughout its length the stream is never long without cascades. The slopes are clothed with white broom (Elijah’s “juniper,” retama raetam); far up are small clumps of ilex and carob. Marigolds are the characteristic flower, and sheet the valley from end to end—a golden forest. There is a tropical heat where the river enters the Jordan valley, and palms, plantains and castor-oil plants are cultivated. There is much black, oil-bearing shale.

I have said that this is pagan ground. On its northern hills the Christian armies were routed by the Moslems, A.D. 634, by which battle the Holy Land passed into paynim keeping. But this valley had never been really Christian or Jewish. Not three miles out of Es-Semakh is El-Hamme, the baths, a spa of Roman times and earlier. Gadara was on the hill behind El-Hamme, where its amphitheatre may be seen. The patron-name of the valley is a poet’s, Meleager, the flower-lover who gathered those incomparable blossoms, the Anthology. Amid these rocks he learnt what a light the evening sun casts on lilies, the “laughing lilies” of his verse. Here is iris, here are squills and hyacinths. A short journey will bring you to the Hautan, where “narcissus that loves the rain,” φίλομβρος νάρκισόος—surely never poet gave loveliness a more caressing name!—blows in its thousands.

At El-Hamme the air is sulphur-tainted, and a steam rises from the jungle, as from the primeval world. There is a circular basin, 5 feet deep—glassy-clear, with bubbles rising continually. There are the hot sulphur springs, the Baths of Callirrhoe. The heat is far too severe for a plunge; however cold the day, you lower your body with many gasps. In 1919 the place was never without Indians, some of whom seemed to spend the day sitting in the baths. Not 5 yards away, a chill, fresh spring rises, and the two waters join immediately in a smoking marsh, overgrown with dense, enormous reeds. All around is beautiful jungle. There are large-fruited zizyphs, of extraordinary height and luxuriance in this hothouse air, brambles, willow-herb, pink restharrow, loosestrife, aromatic mints of many sorts. A shallow brook drains the marsh, and almost at once harbours abundant fish. It makes its way rapidly to the larger river close by. Yarmuk is jubilant, a brimming, racing flood, fringed with a forest of brambles and oleanders—especially oleanders, a riot of red blossoms.

First Days in Damascus, 1918

In the first fortnight of October, 1918, when we were sharing a condominium with the chieftain our soldiers called “ Weasel, King of the Hedgehogs,” Damascus was a lively place. Rumour alleged that the residents in the Victoria Hotel each morning looked out on corpses lying in the streets, from the promiscuous slaughter of the night. The facts, though short of this, were sufficiently interesting.

On our way to Damascus my unit passed Deraa, that links the Hauran and Yarmuk, Og’s capital, with its underground, ancient city; it owned a more recent fame, because Turk and Arab had grappled here for the junction of the Hejaz and Palestine railways. From here Lawrence had flown in person to ask for help, and here two of crusader’s coast our ’planes had sent five enemy ones crashing to earth. The station had been bombed to a shell.

After Deraa we seemed to come upon the United Arab Nation on holiday. Over the black-lava-boulder-strewn Hauran mobs of Hejaz troops galloped frantically, sometimes as if they meant to charge the crawling train, more often nowhere in particular. Men in villages beside the track took pot-shots at the train, generally hitting it, for it was a long one and moved slowly. Its carriage-roofs were crowded with Feisal’s picturesquely-clad followers. Every one was happy, and every one seemed to have a rifle and more ammunition than he knew what to do with.

For hours, as we travelled, Hermon shut the western horizon, a vast, far-stretching mass, clouded but without snow. We had expected to see it snow-capped, and its brown bareness disappointed. We crossed Pharpar, beautiful with poplars and flowering blue brooklime, and were in the hollow where Damascus lies, a paradise of flowing streams and verdure. It was evening when we reached it. I climbed on to a station balcony to get my first view of the famous city. An Indian sentry below was showing his revolver to the excited crowd whom he was supposed to overawe. It went off in the hands of a white-bearded gentleman, luckily without hitting any one. The Indian in alarm reclaimed his toy, and scolded the crowd.

Later, as I stood outside the Victoria Hotel, a friend in the American Red Cross, descending in the blackness from a lorry, almost literally fell on me. He was full of excitement. The previous day he had seen two Hejaz officers looking at an old cinema advertisement, and had addressed them in such simple, broken English as they might be able to understand. “Cinema mafeesh?” (“Is not?”) “Feenesh? Charrleee Chaplong no any more?” Whereupon one of them replied very politely: “Pardon me, sir, but the cinema is not running at present. We hope to have it in operation in the course of the next few weeks.” Then, seeing his “U.S.,” they praised God for America, the friend of small nations, and for President Wilson’s Fourteen Points. Both were Christians, old students of the Syrian Protestant College, Beirut. They were fanatical for Feisal, and one, whose English halted, said: “I Christian, Prince Mohammadan. If Prince say, I Prophet, new religion, I leave Christianity, follow Prince.” They carried my friend off to immediate interview with the Emir, who proved very anxious that he should interpret the Arab aims to the American people. He lunched and dined with Feisal, and his new acquaintances put him wise to their plans. There was to be an Arab federation of four states: Syria, with capital at Damascus and ports at Alexandretta, Beirut and Tripoli; Palestine, down to Gaza; Akaba; and the Hejaz. Egypt was to come in later. There was to be no distinction of race or religion.

Whilst the 7th Indian Division waited before Beirut for French representatives to make the official entry, Hejaz cavalry had raced across Anti-Lebanon and Lebanon, and run up their flag in the town. The Seaforths had to haul it down on behalf of the French. These Hejaz officers were sore. “Before we love French much. But now”—and they put their hands on their hearts—“it is not sweet.”

Emir Feisal asked my friend’s acceptance of a sheikh’s sword, and some time after an Arab posse called at the American Red Cross in Beirut, and left a superb sword for Second-Lieutenant Allan Hunter. Duty discharged, they proceeded to pleasure. They gathered a mob in the town square, and announced that Beirut was to belong neither to France nor Britain, but to the Sultan of Egypt. Then the French authorities descended and quelled the tumult.

We had, and lost, a great chance during our dual control of Damascus. The Hejaz officials were extremely anxious to get on good terms with us. Once I broke into their cadet school, where, as I stood bewildered, an owl in sudden glare, the commandant swiftly blocked escape, and asked me to review his cadets. I did so, and expressed my satisfaction with their soldierly bearing. Then he handed them over to a junior officer, and took me to a room upstairs, where five of us drank coffee and talked bad French for a long while. A Christian teacher, who said he had been taken prisoner before Kut by Maude, interpreted occasional sentences into English. Preliminary compliments were never quite disposed of. “It is all one uniform,” said they, magnanimously associating my travel-worn garb and their own dainty wear. Conversation sagged, with long silences, which were always broken by all four of my colloquists clapping their hands simultaneously and smiling encouragingly as they shouted “Well Come!”—with tremendous unction on the “Come.”

The Arabs were like schoolboys just liberated for the holidays. Singly, or in mobs, they galloped madly through the streets on excited little ponies. Many a British soldier had to skip out of their way, knowing that neither his rank nor uniform would save him from being ridden down in the mud. They were continually shooting off rifles, for sheer joy in a world where such excellent firearms could be had; and, especially at night, bullets sang over our tents. There has probably never been anywhere such an interest in what are technically termed “weapons of precision.” This story was told me by an Australian padre, so I know it is true. In the first days after Damascus fell, a Hejaz trooper stopped an Australian sergeant, to whom a German automatic pistol had accrued during the advance. The Arab made signs that he wished to see it. He was shown it. Then he asked to handle it, which was allowed. Finally he inquired if it was loaded. The sergeant nodded; whereupon he turned and shot an unoffending passer-by dead, returning the weapon with an approving “Queiis” (“Good”). But the Hedgehogs might have retorted with the tale over which I heard a Claims officer chuckling at breakfast in the Victoria. A local farmer, from whom Australians in the advance had commandeered two sheep, handed in a payment voucher signed “Blue Gum Bill of Blue Gum Creek,” which, in more soldierly language than I can reproduce here, requested the Claims officer to kick the claimant.

Every one who was in Damascus in these first days will remember the Victoria Hotel. It reigned as having no rival, although its proprietor never seemed able to provide anything, and always refused to make tea except at exactly five o’clock in the evening. His establishment, in former days honoured by many visitors of distinction, was dusty and desolate. It was decorated with many pictures of the late Emperor Francis Joseph, and of a cycle of deeds by some Persian hero. Sometimes the hero, who was always on horseback and had very lack-lustre and uninterested eyes, pushed an absurdly short sword through a kindly-faced, kneeling demon, who was armed with a massive club of such length that he could have ground his adversary to powder without coming within sword-thrust. A horrible-looking lady was standing by, rope-bound to a tree. In other pictures, the hero and another girl, this one distinctly pleasing, rode side by side on stately black horses. These scenes must have pleased the proprietor greatly, he had so many copies of them.

Our name had always stood well in Damascus, and events scarcely over had raised it. If you crossed to Beirut, eighty miles away, in the French administration, not all the official decrees in the world could make the people take Egyptian money—our money— at cent. per cent. You dropped heavily on all transactions. But in Damascus our pound note was accepted unquestioned as a pound. It was otherwise with the five-pound note, which was freely offered at far less than its face value. The Germans had issued quantities of counterfeit five-pound notes, so the buyer took a risk. Nevertheless, I knew men who made big profits by careful purchase. And Turkish money was at a ridiculous figure. I once watched an urchin, almost a baby in any other land, holding an officer’s horse; he was evidently the Napoleon of finance of his small world, for boy after boy came up to him, offering paper money for sale. Some he scorned, others he took.

In the Damascus bazaars “Kelmi Inglese”—Kilmet Inglese,” By the Word of an Englishman”—used to be taken to represent final probity. If for this there was a superlative, a gilding of the refined gold of absolute honesty, it was “Kelmi Blacki,” “By the Word of Black,” a Paisley banker of aforetime. The late Dr. MacKinnon, whose name was known everywhere and the record of his work and influence over the Arabs, told me of a suspicious merchant who declined to accept an oath “By the Head of Allah,” but capitulated at once to an assurance “By the Word of Black.”

The glory of these days was the lights of evening behind Hermon. On November 14th, after a bitter night, the first snow appeared on the mountain, which stood up magnificently white. From then onward, till April came, snowy Hermon dominated all vision. I have seen snowy Alps and snowy Himalayas, seen Kanchenjunga and Nandadevi, but Hermon can hold place with these, for his height, a mere 9,000 feet though it is, rises superbly from flat plain 7,000 feet below. I have seen him from the Jericho depression, his austere aloofness almost maddening by contrast with that dust-tormented desert; seen him from the Lake of Galilee, a faint cloud far aloft; seen him from out at sea, or as a dazzling shoulder lifted over Acre’s hilly background. I was to see him for many months from Damascus. But for full grandeur he must be seen from Coele-Syria, or, better still, from the nearer slopes of Lebanon, by Zahleh. Wonderful at dusk and sunset, Hermon is beyond words wonderful at dawn—a shining giant shutting the vale, and towering into the clear heaven.

The shadow of death was on these days. Allenby’s push had called for super-A men, yet the most of those available, at the end of four years’ campaigning, were C class. The need for ceaseless action and the excitement of pursuit kept gallant hearts alive till the completion of victory. Then came relapse. Such units as the Worcestershire Yeomanry had come wasted from a summer in the Jordan Valley, where civilised men had never spent a summer before; their strength was drained, their systems malaria-clogged. Other battalions were in like case. The Australian field hospital was crammed with miserable men, who lay where they could find room. Sanitary conditions were indescribable. An open cart, dropping to pieces, crawled round Damascus collecting dead, British and Indian, who were then left in a deserted mud hut, from which a padre took them for burial whenever he could get a working party of Turkish prisoners. These prisoners also died fast.

Beirut and Lebanon were in the grip of famine. Even in Damascus was a background of moaning rags; little children huddled up in the streets, starving and festering, while the gay Hejaz troopers dashed by. Close to my unit, in the lovely gorge which leads out of Damascus and towards Beirut, were the relics of the slaughter which had followed our entry into Damascus. The Australians, leading their horses over impossible, stony ways, had come out on the ridge commanding this deep ravine, through which a raving horde of fugitives was trying to escape. The mob, refusing to surrender, opened fire on the storm-seamed rocks with one machine-gun, which lay in the road for many a week after their ruin. The result was a wreckage and slaughter which blocked the road. As late as November 2nd I found a Turkish soldier dying of fever and starvation. For nearly a month he had kept alive in a tumbledown shed beside the Abana, feeding by night on wild mustard and watercress. Ten yards away was a house whose occupants merely observed: “He was a stranger. We didn’t know him.” Two months later the brooks were flooded, Damascus was under water, with great splashing of horses and camels and exultant play of children; and I rejoiced because the highest stream of the many-canalised Barada (Abana) broke its banks, and made a sheer waterfall from roof to floor of their house.

These sorrows passed and the spring came. From the soil which had seemed so barren blue crocuses rose; the white followed, and hyacinths. Especially on the hills, the blue crocuses made fairy rings round the mighty boulders. Beside Abana, after the rich harvest of the brambles had finished, English daisies opened, and in January came celandines. Pink colchicums flowered, grape hyacinths and blue irises lit the grass of the orchards. March brought ixiolirions, and on the hilltops red ranunculus, and in the fields gladiolus, great scarlet and purple poppies, hellebores, vetches of many hues, stars of Bethlehem. The orchards, the crown and ornament of Damascus, blossomed—pear, peach, apricot, plum, almond, apple. The brooks now ran through snowy woods, where jays flashed from thicket to thicket and hoopoes showed off their plumage in the brightness. Last of all, the hawthorns burst into abounding loveliness, and the warm breezes swept drifts of shining petals over the scarred land, obliterating the tracks of war and famine.

The Road Into Syria

Damascus lies at the door of the desert. From twin mountains guarding the road into Anti-Lebanon you look over a sea of greenness, and beyond, to the haze of the swamps where Abana perishes. On the skyline are the naked rocks of the Jebel ed-Druz. And beyond again? The desert, “Tadmor in the wilderness,” the wastes before Euphrates.

Of the parallel ranges, Lebanon, as the higher and nearer to the coast, takes most of the rain. Anti-Lebanon, defrauded thus, stretches parched and stony. Except for the grace of the subterranean Baalim, who have tossed up Abana, a full-grown stream, and cleft for it a passage eastward, Damascus would have been starved. Abana flows, swift and cold, nourishing orchards and poplar groves innumerable; and man, its master, takes the flood and canalises it in banks high up the ravine side as well as in its natural bed. Where the gorge joins the plain, the waters are thrown abroad in seven brooks. Yet, because there are four main and conspicuous streams, which murmur and rush beneath a park of planes and walnuts and apricots, it has always seemed to me that it is in this city, the oldest in the world, that the primitive story should be placed. “And a river went out of Eden, to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads.” So it is that Damascus is an oasis where grows every sort of fruit-bearing tree; where in spring the land is a glory of delicate petals and lush meadow, and at all times is music of whispering leaves and singing waters.

Spring comes later to Damascus than to Lebanon. Hawthorn is flowering on the Mediterranean slopes before the first week of March has ended, but in Damascus not till a fortnight later. Many of the commonest flowers of the field hardly reach Damascus. The anemones do not come so far, except red anemone, which reaches Anti-Lebanon, but not in its abundance of elsewhere. For compensation Damascus has azure troops of ixiolirion.

Damascus holds double keys, guarding the gateways of Lebanon and Syria no less than of the desert. The deep gorge of Abana leads right into Anti-Lebanon. It is tremendous to look down from the precipitous heights on this green knife-thrust into Syria’s heart. Kestrels are hovering far below you, brooks are hurrying, traffic flows along the ancient road. It must have been a pity-stirring sight when the Australians looked down on the foolish, fleeing mob of their enemies, caught in the narrow pass. When I first went this way Anti-Lebanon was littered with dead ponies, with here and there a Turkish soldier. The few who escaped from the slaughter of the gorge fled, with such wings as madness gives, into Coele-Syria, where the brigands, of whom the central plain has always nourished a considerable number, butchered them at Rayak.

Over the steep sides of Abana gorge the woods have flung a green arras; this valley gives you the most English scenery you will find in Syria. It might be some West Country ravine. Holm-oak, styrax, lentisk and the rest are absent; of all their tribe only an occasional carob or terebinth remains. Instead, you have poplars and willows and tall walnuts roofing the streams; ashes, planes and sumachs; hawthorn, bearing a larger fruit than ours, but with the same profusion of lace-white blossoms. Where the gorge begins is a small swamp overgrown with yellow flag. Thickets of St. John’s wort, willowherb and bramble keep the brooks in constant shade. Where cascades flash from one canal to another below it, maidenhair grows luxuriantly, with fronds attaining to 2 feet. Beside Abana’s main river are daisies, mustard, wood sorrel, and great beds of watercress.

The road climbs slowly, the orchards keeping you company. The racing stream swirls round willow-roots, and storms through forests of osier and poplar. This is a delightful way at all times, whether in autumn and winter, when the landscape is shot with variegated colour by the abundant rose-hips and the yellow poplar leaves and the snow-powdered heights, or in spring, when the banks are carpeted with celandine and dandelion and the fruit gardens are one flush of delicately-tinted blossom, or in summer, when the ways are emerald. It is England, not Syria, but an infinitely better England than most of us have the fortune to live in.

The passes through Anti-Lebanon are very easy. The railway takes you through more attractive country than the road, for it skirts Abana, and you are never without orchards. Mistletoe makes dark masses in the apples and walnuts. Celandines continue; there are white hyacinths and a few red anemones. All the way are rose bushes, crammed with redness of flower or fruit. Olives, which can cling to the barest soil and gather on the most niggard ledge a green carpet about their feet, plumage the crags. After orchards end, there are snow-fed pools and marshes of osiers; but Anti-Lebanon carries only the meagrest scrub, mostly juniper.

If you take the road, you pass over stony wastes relieved by a field of red tulips or such a prairie as that of Sahra ed-Dimas, where ixiolirions, ramsons, irises, campanulas, and many sorts of wild pink variegate the coarse grass. You travel between steep walls of rock, patched with white arabis or lit with the cleft-candles of the asphodeline. If Hermon disappears behind a peak, it is to stand up in renewal of majesty when the road turns again. At Bludan there is an oak grove, sacred in all ages, visible afar. It holds a Moslem shrine, whose guardian worships looking not towards Mecca, but towards Hermon. Questioned, the man replies that so his father did before him. Thus Baal-Hermon has his honour to-day.

From Anti-Lebanon you drop to the Bika’a, Coele-Syria. There is no barrenness here, but leagues of rolling flowery meadow, which Litani waters, spreading into frequent marshland. The way across to Lebanon is bordered with poplars, brambles, roses, and masses of periwinkle (vinca libanotica). The fly-catching arum, a foul plant which does good service, is very common. In spring, iris and anemone are as abundant as the grass in which they grow.

From Baalbek, the temple of Baal of the Bika’a, you view both Lebanons; therefore come in winter. Unless there has been a heavy recent fall, there will be only streaks to eastward, but westward is a chain of whiteness, unbroken and dazzling on Makmal, Lebanon’s culminant crest, continuing solid through Sarmin till it fissures on Kenisiyeh and merely powders Baruk, which cedars blacken. Then to south the snow lifts magnificently in Hermon, and the pagan soul within you worships towards that hill, as the dwellers in this valley did in the morning of time.

Zahleh, queen of Lebanon towns, nestles in a valley under Sannin. Its brook was wooded before the War; now only lines of poplar remain. But flowers are valueless as fuel, so the hills have kept their red ranunculuses, their pansies, and that ubiquitous tenant of the higher mountains, cerasus prostrata. You have reached the rhododendron country. Over the secluded crest of Lebanon there are copses of it; it fledges the rock-face of the mountain, beyond Neba Sarmin; it appears amid the wastes of Lebanon heather and Aleppo pine.

Lebanon lifts abruptly, as the road leaves Hollow Syria. The winding road keeps Hermon in sight. You are lucky if your climb is in winter, when beside you colchicums and crocuses are spraying out in clusters, and the valley is shut with that snowy vastness. Hollow Syria, marked with squares of cultivation, looks like a chessboard; part of the same geological fault, its deep trench is only less impressive than the Jordan one. As for Anti-Lebanon, the afternoon and sunset colours of its naked rocks have to be seen to be believed.

However you travel, you will travel in greater comfort than we did in the times of the War. Railway carriages had all their windows broken, and icy winds blew through them. Once a band of Australians, temporarily marooned on Kenisiyeh, stopped a train filled with convalescents and sick cases, for a snow battle. Sometimes the rains of Zeus descended, or his flying snowflakes silted through roof and sides. I remember a soldier awaking from cold in the dawn just in time to see a figure glide off into shadow with his boots, unlaced from his feet while he slept. The pillaged one acted with promptness. He could not catch the thief, but he took off the Syrian stationmaster’s boots, which were of one of our own standard Army makes, and left their late occupier standing bootlessly (in more senses than one) complaining on his own platform. No, I did not interfere. The Army code of discipline would have admitted no explanation for the loss of boots except that they had been sold to obtain drink or some more disreputable commodity. And the soldier’s reasoning seemed to me sound. If the boots had not been stolen by a friend or near relation of the stationmaster’s, at any rate they had been stolen on his platform. He had had excellent opportunities of seeing who was on the platform. And he was staying behind, so could prosecute inquiries better than the man who had to go on.

If you crawled across Syria by lorry, you were almost colder than in the railway carriages. You had a halt in the little village on the Mediterranean side of Kenisiyeh’s crest, where every shop seemed to sell the same half-dozen things—oranges, locust-pods, onions, pine-kernels, and the poisonous liqueur which our drivers sipped round the log fires. It is close on 6,000 feet above the sea where you cross Kenisiyeh. Presently you will see the blue Mediterranean, and be able to shout “Θάλασα.”

Phoenician Lebanon

The Syrian levels and the lower slopes of Lebanon would be grey if it were not for the plentifully intermixed sharper green of lemon and orange groves; below Beirut, on the Sidon road, is an olive garden reputed the second largest in the world. At Sidon orange rules over olive. The people assert that their oranges are the true Jaffa oranges which first won reputation, sweet and thin-skinned, whereas at Jaffa they now cultivate thick-skinned sorts that can bear travel.

It is hard to think such a land can suffer famine. From the earliest times it has sent out food to other lands. But during the War Turkish rule to its other infamies added yet this, the use of famine as a weapon of political massacre. When we entered Beirut the streets were full of people dying with a docility and despairing acceptance of misery which are impossible of belief, unless you saw. Gaunt crowds dragged themselves past well-stocked food shops, so drilled into submission that they never thought of looting. They eagerly gathered the bacon-salt we flung away; they picked the undigested grains out of dung on the streets; there were queues outside our men’s billets. A woman could be bought for a tin of bully beef. Even in the Hauran the wash of the famine was sufficient for men to be seen walking beside our troop trains, collecting the orange peel and melon rinds our feasting Indians threw down. In the Lebanon villages were blotted out, even to the dogs. American ladies visited a large village to give the people employment, and found themselves in a solitude of empty huts. The people had not emigrated; they had died.

The Phoenician plain begins at Beirut; north of it the mountains step to the sea, almost overhanging it. The rivers there are noisy brooks; those of the Phoenician plain purl over sands, are rock-dimpled and gently wild. At the foot of Kenisiyeh you come into an air as sub-tropical as that by the Lake of Galilee, into palms and plantains and towering grasses lining the road. But presently the Mediterranean softens this air.

As is fitting, the characteristic flower of Phoenicia is the Hunter’s, the purple anemone. December sows it thickly through the olive groves. Often the Mediterranean almost washes over your road, sip-sopping in the fretted rocks; it stretches, a tranquil blue, a foil to snow-powdered Baruk with its black cedars. A confused tumble of rocks neighbours the way to Sidon, sprinkled with windflowers and clumps of the most fragrant narcissus (narcissus tazetta), with here and there a glossy carob tree. The wildness is ordered with such perfect alternation of hues, such starry surprises amid the black rocks, that it seems as if the wood-gods must have busied themselves with careful disposal of flower and leaf as sea and sunlight suggested. A month later, narcissus and Hunter’s blood have gone, but in their stead are carpets of red anemone, closer to the earth than its blue luxuriant brother, and snowy iris (iris histrio-alba), shortest of its kind. And, because the guardians of this wave-washed shore consider, very justly, that gold is a superb admixture with white and scarlet, the boulders are ablaze with broom. If you have deserved it, as you leave Beirut you may see, as I once saw, a sun-bird sucking nectar from a hibiscus flower—so that I knew I carried still my old safe conduct from the Queen of Faery.

By March the spring begins to retreat, and you will do well to follow her to the hills. Then, in the needle-strewn turf of the Lebanon pinewoods, orchises are blooming, the dwarf bee-orchis and the green man most abundantly. The dwarf is not the perfect mimic that the larger bee-orchis is, but the green man is an excellent piece of roguery. Pink colchicums, which even in the heats of August begin to appear on the loftier heights of Lebanon, though the plain will not see them for weeks yet, are nestling in mossy corners. Myrtle, which flowers more or less most of the year round, and broom make stretches of fragrant wilderness. There still survive patches of Syrian copse, oak and ash and carob, though it is being rapidly swept away, as by a scythe, for the hideous terraced vineyards. Soon only the gardens of American missionaries and the isolated huge single oaks, hung with dangling rags, will remain to witness ubi silva fuit. Scrub will survive, burnet, cistus, knee-holly brushing round the cliff bases.

I have mourned the disappearing forest, the shattered copse; vainly, in an age which is satiated with elegiacs. As surely as the snows of Sannin the woods will vanish; unlike the snows, they will not return. But there are things no axe can destroy, no builder blot out. There is Sannin itself, and the lights of morning over Lebanon, the full moon rising over the snows and dappling the hillsides. There is the view over leagues of sea to Cyprus. There are the dipping glens, and the ancient brooks making their way, the red sand stretches by Beirut, the multitude of olives far below. For posterity this generation might have left how much more! But at least we cannot help but leave all this.

Across Galilee

I. The Lake

In April of 1919 our unit was ordered down from Damascus to the Base for demobilisation. Years of warfare had brought wisdom. Realising that a spell of residence at Kantara lay before us, Father Butler and I escaped from the train at Es-Semakh, and crossed by the ferry to Tiberias. We meant to make our way across Galilee on foot, and thence, at some leisure, to the Canal. After all, there are more ways than one of reaching your destination.

Tiberias is a dirty village, notable only for its few palms. It has no interest in itself, an alien in the richest region that memory knows. Chorazin, Capernaum, Bethsaida are dead, while Tiberias lives, the one considerable village on this lake which was once crowded with sails and ringed with houses. Yet though it lives, it lives a life-in-death, while men wander and dream in deserted fields.

Next day we spent on the lake, fortunate exceedingly in having with us as guide and companion the Rev. William Christie, whose life had been largely spent in Galilee. We saw with his eyes, and realised afresh that what Christian readers need is a commentary whose aim is not theological, is neither edification nor exegesis; but simply to make the Life and the words clear.

This was Gennesareth. On these shining waters the fishers had plied their boats and cast their nets. As the mind learns, so it teaches. From these earthly years come the colours of our heavenly kingdom. St. John took the sacred Saga of the Beginning, and rewrote the story. “In the beginning God created . . .”; “In the beginning was the Word. . . . All things were made through Him, and without Him was not anything made which hath been made.” “God said, Let there be light”; “In Him was light, and the light was the life of men.” The rewriting was enriched with a brightness that had been on sea and land, and the pictures of eternity were stained with hues that had come from wave and cloud and glowing meadow. “The Lord God planted a garden eastward, in Eden.” John, seeing that garden not as a dead thing in the vanished fields of time, but as living in the presence of God, transplanted more than trees. There is a river flowing through his Eternal City, as there is a river dividing the countries here, even Jordan. Those sunsets which flamed on the Mediterranean, seen by the exile in Patmos, built up the heavenly Jerusalem with flashing gem and lucent pearl, flooding its streets with gold of evenings that once set on an inland sea. Which things are a parable, and answer some at least of the heartache which comes when we think how surely must vanish all the wonder and glory our minds have gathered. They must colour our vision of any world we inhabit hereafter.

So Christie, pointing to Hermon’s fast-fading snow, on this first day of April a cloud at anchor far up, said, “John’s Great White Throne.” I remember how vivid John the Baptiser’s question to the “generation of vipers”—“Who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come?”— had become by a casual remark in Glover. I had seen the hateful little desert vipers scuttering before a fired copse of dry thorns and reeds. There is no book that is more of the earth, earthy, than the Bible.

Pushing out from Tiberias we escaped from its foul bays, and sailed north on the sweet, limpid water. Nearly ten miles away, two separate groups of palms, telescoped together as two single trees, marked the place where Jordan entered. Westward, low bushes of oleanders lipped the wave, Keble’s well-known “blossoms red and bright,” wrongly explained by him as rhododendrons. Christ’s country lay ahead of us. He never visited Tiberias or the shore to south of it. Tiberias was the city of “that fox,” that jackal Herod. It is generally assumed that John the Baptist was beheaded in Machaerus, an opinion almost certainly wrong. Behind Tiberias rises the hill on which was Herod’s castle, which is locally still called Tell Bint-el-melik, the Hill of the King’s Daughter. What a poignancy in Christ’s words when it is realised that it was on this mount of abomination that the brave life was taken! Herod’s symbol on his coins was a papyrus, the reed which still plentifully fringes the lake. So John’s cousin, facing that robber-hold, where cowardly folk passed idle, useless days, asked the multitude: “What went ye out for to see? A papyrus rocked with the wind? Behold, those are in king’s palaces, pliant reeds and no men.” One can hear again the scornful laugh, as each member of the crowd caught the allusion.

Christ, journeying on these inland waters, left Herod, the pomp and glory of this world, on one side;

“Left in God’s contempt apart,
With ghastly, smooth life, dead at heart.”

His life was with the common people.

Behind Tiberias are the ruins of Tancred’s castle and the white tombs of famous rabbis, among them Maimonides, that second framer of the Law, and the brave Akiba, who perished by torture for his people’s sake. But the pilgrim to the lake can see only one Figure, walking its waves, beckoning from its shore. Here is the Bay of Mejdel, and, as it came in sight, Christie told how when he landed there recently, after an absence of many years, a little maid ran out. He asked her her name. It was Miriam. And the village? Why, Mejdel, of course. She was Miriam of Mejdel, Mary of Magdala.

That ravine leading inland is the Wadi Hamam, the Valley of Doves. There lived the robbers whom Herod, the successful robber, slew, reaching their caves by ropes. Still blue pigeons tenant its holes and clefts. In our Lord’s time there was a regular trade in these with the Temple. Galileans snared them for sacrifice. And one day a prophet from Galilee, entering the Temple courts, found men keeping an unholy bazaar there, and cleansed its purlieus. Many among the offenders were His own kindred, from the same province, and knew Him well. Perhaps He knew them also. They were ashamed to face Him, being found so.

Over there is Safed, a sacred town to the Jews and the traditional “city set on a hill.” High up it lies, far-shining:

“Sown in a wrinkle of the monstrous hill,
The city sparkles like a grain of salt.”

So on all sides the parables lived anew. Life was altogether good again, even to us who had come through so much ruin. In that clear air, under that clear sky, floating on those fresh, cool waters, where everything helped and cleansed, from the green shores and those blessed oleanders to snowy Hermon, one knew again how far astray Christendom has gone. Hymns recurred to memory— hymns which misrepresented that joyous Life of flawless health and happiness:

“Thy couch was the sod,
O Thou Son of God.
In the deserts of Galilee.”

Deserts of Galilee? Not so! The Lord God’s paradise of lilies. This Life, the Light of men, was lived that men might never fear the world again, but rejoice in its free, open spaces, knowing and trusting God. For consider. Not only did the Word become Flesh, but “all things were made through Him, and apart from Him was not made any one thing that has been made.” He is green in the leaves, blue in the sky, flowing in the water. Or else the prologue to St. John’s Gospel is meaningless. And, loving the things which He had made, He lived among them. Lived after what fashion? Again:

“Long years were spent for me
In weariness and woe. . . .
Thy Father’s home of light
Thy rainbow-circled throne,
Were left for earthly night
And wanderings sad and lone.”

Never in Galilee! Here the stones of the field were in league with Him, the wild lilies in their myriads laughed to scorn Herod’s cruel and worthless grandeur; His friends were staunch, if stupid, and many faces met His with kindness as He went His daily ways. When will men read their Bibles again, and in their churches sing the truth, rejoicing that it is so much better and higher than their sentimental imaginings?

We passed by the Plain of Gennesareth, where clear across the lake you see Gamala, Camel-Hump-Town, which Alexander Jannaeus and Vespasian stormed, and see, north of Gamala, a space always green, possibly Luke’s “place of much grass.” But tradition has its own site on this more accessible western shore, the green slope known as Mensa Christi. We passed this, and disembarked at Tell Hum, Capernaum. Christie had friends here, German monks who were bringing to light our Lord’s own synagogue, the one the centurion built, “for he loveth our people.” We wandered over the ruins. Here was the very street and cobbles over which He had walked; the stone benches within, the limestone walls and marble columns, stamped with David’s seal, the egg and arrows. The whole was luxuriantly overgrown with blue, sickly-sweet broomrape, large white scabious, and mallows. But wild mustard filled the greatest space, in this warm air towering to the height of a small tree.

Thousands of crabs scuttled over the stones into the lake, which had deep water at the very edge, a natural harbour in shade of eucalyptus trees. Butler and I had a long swim, then in the afternoon returned in leisurely fashion along the shore, having sent the boat on. Many warm brooks ran into the lake, there were big patches of tepid marsh, haunts of snakes and clouds of mosquitoes. Oleanders made banks of colour against the masses of swaying papyrus. We tramped through the swamps, and had our reward. We smashed through thickets of marigolds, lavatera, white broomrape, vetches; tore a road through dense jungles of gorgeous thistles, zizyphs and cow parsley. In the evening we explored the Hill of the King’s Daughter, passing the old baths—from which, at sight of our coming, the bathers were hastily ejected by the proprietor. But one glimpse at the uninviting water determined us to forego a plunge. We clambered over Herod’s defences instead. A tangle of flowers snared the feet—borage, mallows, several species of scabious—the yellow palaestina, the large blue and the white, and a dwarf, small-flowered blue which I found only here and on the lower slopes of the hills leading from the lake into Galilee. The golden marigolds grew breast-high. The air along the hillside was sharp with mint scents.

II. The Road to Nazareth

As we climbed from Tiberias next morning the grass of the field seemed to be all flowers. We waded through surf of pink flax and yellow scabious; both the restharrows, the pink and the golden, were at their best. Tangles of red-berried burnet made a dwarf copse, some 12 inches high. Lilies were over, except for stars of Bethlehem and theasphodeline’s shining golden tapers in their rocky niches. But though our Version says “Consider the lilies,” we know that Christ considered not the lilies only, but pointed to scabious and cyclamen, to flax and scarlet windflower. Walking this road, His path between Nazareth and Galilee, He saw cranesbills and lupins, marigolds, marguerites, gentians, broomrapes white and blue.

We passed the Karn Hattin, a hill-face like a bull’s lowering front. A grove studs its northern end, where Saladin received his captives and slew Reginald of Kerak for truce-breaking. Near Cana rock cropped out, boulders bright with campanula and cyclamen. A large owl skipped in a patch of sunlight. These Palestine owls care as little for glare as the tiny owls of Huntingdonshire roads do. A snake whipped across the path; acting on the habit which years in India had given I struck it. Butler cried out in protest, so I let it go by. A Galilean peasant behind us leapt on its head and crushed it to death with his heel.

Cana is a dusty hamlet, amid pomegranates, olives and cactus. The fountain runs freely as of old, flowing into the stone sarcophagus. Sarcophagi are the usual water-troughs in Palestine. After Cana, the road took us by two famous battlefields. There was the spring where the Knights Templars perished—“and in the month of May, when the people of Nazareth were wont to gather roses,” instead of the rose-harvest the dead were gathered for burial. And there was the place of Junot’s sensational victory, a jungle of that newcomer, cactus, then, as now. Beit Lidd, where the Seaforths were flung at cactussed terraces, was just such another hill. We reached Nazareth by noon.

I wanted to see the flowers which Christ had known in his boyhood. So we went out from Nazareth, with evening, and climbed the Hill of Precipitation. Whether it was from here that His townsfolk tried to throw him down, or not, I am sure He often came here. Here you looked out on the world, on the great highways of splendid Roman power and of traffic. Herod’s palace at Tiberias was shut away in the Jordan rift, with no outlook except what the gaps of the mountains gave. But here, at the gates of Nazareth, “the flower village,” the boy could look down on the Esdraelon plain, where so many armies had perished or fled. Fronting were Gilboa and Carmel. Bethsan was just round the sweep of Little Hermon. Here He must have lain and watched. One remembers Hugh Miller, after his father’s death at sea, lying out on the cliff, as his autobiography describes and as James Smetham has shown him, in the most wistful of his etchings, looking far outward, as he dreamed.

What flowers, then, did the boy see when He visited these hills? In their tiny valleys He would find all the flowers of which I have written, with gladiolus and bladder campion in the plots of wheat. Among the boulders were knapweeds, crusader’s coast marguerites, marigolds, poppies, wild pinks. Where the mountain-mass has surged up before it drops abruptly are rocks jagged and cruel, so that, even with boots, it was a sharp pain to clamber over them. Their interstices are crammed with scrub, with lentisk, burnet, carob, ilex. Bee-orchis grew freely, not the dwarf bee-orchis so common throughout Lebanon, but the large flower of our English downs. I cannot forget my own wonder, as a boy, when I climbed over a wall in the Cotswolds and found myself in a field where bee-orchises grew in their hundreds. No boy, certainly not the boy who lived in Nazareth, could see this whimsical, exquisite flower and forget it. I found it nowhere else in Palestine or Syria. But it was at home in these rocks, where strange plants seemed to have been clustered, as if of set purpose. Here, in its season, the boy who wondered at the bee-orchis and the kindly fantasy of its Artificer, could find the flowers of butcher’s broom, green-white stars with central purple spikes, quaintly pinned on the undersides of the leaves. Here grew quaking-grass, with larger seeds than our English kind. Cyclamens, daintiest of rock-flowers, sprang from their variegated leaves. These the Syrians of Lebanon call “Lady Mary’s Incense” and “Pitchers of the Mountains.” But, with their flaming, brushed-up petals, like tresses, they seemed to me, especially the scarlet ones, like pierrettes or columbines. Red anemones are here, but these had finished when I came, though their place was not vacant, since red ranunculus had filled it, a flower not easily distinguished till you come up to it. Negella ciliaris, which is not unlike a double yellow ranunculus; the red helichrysum sanguineum; geropogon glabrum, like a grass which had decided to put out pink flowers; umbilicus pendulinus, the common pennywort of houses and hills—all these are in the crags where Nazareth breaks down to the central plain. But it is not by the flowers alone that a boy might wonder as he “thought God’s thoughts after Him.” For in the butcher’s broom I found a large green mantis, with body and wings perfect in mimicry of stick and leaf. And the place is lonely, a crag at the end of a boy’s world.

III. Storming Tabor

From Nazareth in the early morning we climbed again to the uplands. Then came a long stretch over downs carpeted with flowers. All the April loveliness was here in a prairie of wind-ruffled colour. The wild pastures were in places rock-ribbed like any Central Indian jungle; but this merely meant shelves where cyclamen and scarlet ranunculus supplanted iris and grape-hyacinth. This is the month when a man may stride through “lilies,” from Lake to Sea. Then came trees as the path dropped from the heights; styrax, gay with racemes of delicate white blossoms, terebinth, tinged with red of new leaves, rhamnus and oak—especially oak, not the common holm-oak only, or chiefly, but the rarer species, the Valonia oak (quercus aegilops), a shrubbery dotted over the hillside where the Crusaders found a forest. If the Palestine administration is wise, our grandsons may see the Nazareth oakwoods again. But for us, the Turk, against whom are recorded so many darker wrongs, has killed the forests also.

A long dip followed, down a glen fledged with scattered copse. Across a dwarf valley towered the wooded mass of Tabor. Here was a sudden abundance of gladiolus and hollyhocks. The former, as their name (gladiolus segetum) signifies, are flowers of cultivation, fighting the cornfields and pastures which man’s hand has already shorn of the loftier luxuriance of thorn and shrub. But the latter are mountain flowers, the glory of savage ravines in Moab and Gilead, abundant on Carmel, and springing from the clefts of the Yarmuk gorge. The loveliest hollyhocks in the world, and those with the largest blooms, grow in Gethsemane. All the way up Tabor hollyhocks flowered from the rocks—not red ones alone, but an even greater abundance of white ones, only seen in odd plants elsewhere.

The guidebooks say much of Tabor’s silvan loveliness. I was prepared to discount this as the efflorescence of pious imagination, seeing in this solitary tower the site of the Transfiguration. But those misleaders for once fell short of fact.

Neither my comrade nor I were prepared for such an upward battle as we endured, through overgrown, exquisite copse. We missed the path, so fought our way straight to the summit. It was an exhausting experience. Our unit had gone on from Damascus by train for demobilisation, so we carried our necessaries—a sufficient burden when a way has to be torn up 1,500 feet of almost sheer precipice, for so it seemed. Tabor’s height is not 2,000 feet, but its isolation and abrupt lift from the level make it an impressive mountain, especially when seen from the Esdraelon plain. And we carried an accumulation of woes. I left Damascus in the only footwear—after three years of Asiatic war—which could outlast even a day’s tramp, tall field-boots. They hurt execrably, so to-day I tried the experiment of toiling over twenty miles sockless, with a stiff climb thrown in. My feet were flayed in consequence. My companion was weighed down with a quite unnecessary revolver and ammunition. Thus we stormed Tabor, over boulders whose austerity cyclamen softened, through stiff, hanging thickets of oak and styrax, breaking a way into terebinth and hawthorn. So gained the flat summit, coming out suddenly on the hospice, to be surrounded by shouting savage dogs. Butler, in peace-time a Franciscan friar, led to the buildings, where we found rest and had simple refreshment thrust upon us, though we protested that we had food with us.

The harshest Protestant must be constrained to admit the blessing of hospices in wild spots such as this. These gracious fathers saved our water-bottles by the tea they gave us. They told us of the mountain’s recent story, of how the Turks had thinned the glorious coverts, driving away the roe-deer and gazelles from here as from Carmel. The leopards had gone also. The previous year, they said, four leopards had been killed on Tabor—hunting leopards, no doubt, for the leopard proper is no longer found west of Jordan. There used to be hyenas and wolves. A huge hyena stood in a case on the wall, killed in these woods in 1897.

We went over the extensive ruins covering this plateau, the friars guiding us, and remembered how much of secular history this lofty hill had witnessed, camp and defence of Jew and Roman, of Crusader and Turk. Our eyes feasted on the noble view, far over hills mottled with all that remains of the beautiful, fairy woods of Palestine. Then the fathers awarded us medals for our pilgrimage to “Thabor,” and sped us on our way with great kindness. We began our winding descent to Esdraelon, through holm-oaks hung with emerald tassels of flowers and white-blossoming styrax, and over a heath of pink and white cistus, the Divine Glory seeming to blossom from the soil in the shining flower faces. On the top of Tabor clematis cirrhosa sprawled over the bushes. Out of old masonry and rock-holes pennywort grew. A list of plants, made casually as we went along, shows all those already mentioned in this essay, and many besides—rue (ruta balepensis), asparagus acutifolius var. aphyllus, rhamnus palaestina, phillyrea media, tragopon longirostre, fumana arabica (the yellow rock-rose), omithogalum narbonense, briza minor (quaking-grass), rhus coriorium, matrimony vine (lycium europoeum), ranunculus asiaticus and the ranunculus-like negella ciliaris, the grass-like, pink-flowered geropogon glabrum, and red helichrysum sanguineum. We descended slowly for very gladness, pausing in wonder at so much friendly loveliness and for joy of the spreading richness of Esdraelon below us. Once on the level, away from those green, shady copses, we had to quicken our wearied steps, to be in time for the only train to Haifa. We pushed through the luxuriant pampas of thistles and wild carrot, stepping over the infant Kishon, alarming large, black snakes. The plain is treeless, except for two or three widely-separated oaks, such as we should consider reasonably well-grown in England, but here preserved for their size as sacred. We passed in sight of Endor. Father Butler raced ahead, determined to see Nain, a village hedged with cactus, on the slope of Little Hermon. He turned back, shouting to draw my attention to a gazelle bounding away from him. In my turn I showed him a hare. He vanished from my sight for a while. Then I met a string of camels, whose drivers made extraordinary pantomime, laughing like maniacs and tossing oranges in the air, throwing two to me with shouts of “Queiis. Very good,” and pointing over their shoulders. As I guessed, a short distance ahead I came on Father Butler triumphant by a pile of oranges, which he had bought from the caravan. In some manner or other, he had made them understand that they would find another weary wight, dragging through the dust and heat, to whom they were to fling a couple.

So, as the shadows lengthened on Gilboa and sunset gathered magnificently over Carmel, we rounded Little Hermon, and, racing on crippled feet, caught the only train to Haifa.

Shechem and Sychar

When the tide rushes up Severn, though it is that white foam at the edges which catches the eye, the heaving central water marks the shock and battle. So, when Allenby’s cavalry poured through the Sharon gate, and up the Es-Salt road, there had been bitter fighting in the middle, against the mountain-mass of Ephraim. The Cape Corps came out shattered. I remember one coloured hero, who had lost an arm, repeating happily, as he lay in bed: “We boys stood the test well.” Many an Englishman must have wondered how his race could prove worthy of such loyalty.

It was fortunate that the sweep came with such impetus. Otherwise there would have been many a bloody assault, in a country sown with hills castellated by villages rising, as if one with the slope’s formation, out of the cactus-cirques at the tops. But Mount Ephraim, after the initial grapple, fell quickly into our possession, and within six months was experiencing an administration possibly too efficient to be altogether comfortable. The Turk farmed the taxes, and in the Tulkeram district £80 reached his treasury from the cattle tax during 1918. Before May of 1919 had finished, our O.E.T.A.,¹² which did not employ publicans, had collected £819 from this particular source, with £60 still to come in. But this is by the way.

The main pass from north to south through Mount Ephraim runs between Ebal and Gerizim, and is dominated by Nablus, the ancient Shechem. Nablus was the goal of our efforts through many months. It seemed to be threatened in April of 1918, when its walls were placarded with the warning : “Any one speaking of the English, and saying that they are good and just and merciful, will be hanged.” But our initial assaults cost 2,000 casualties—half of the total cost of Allenby’s successful break through five months later—and got us no further. The German victories in Flanders, which caused the temporary quiescence of the Palestine war, saved useless bloodshed here.

Nablus is given over to Moslems, except for about 100 Samaritans. This latter sect have found American sympathisers, by whose munificence they have printed their various religious books, one of which I bought—“The Book of Enlightenment for the Instruction of the Enquirer.” Its contents suggest that there is worthier literature elsewhere for the wealthy of Illinois to encourage. Even more enlightenment as to the teaching of Samaritanism was given by the naïve and eager talk of the Samaritans themselves, as they showed us old scriptures. They lived in harmony with their Moslem neighbours, sharing with them the bond of a perfect bigotry. It was their boast and childlike pride that no Jew could come to Nablus. “If Juif come here, we kill him.” And eyes gleamed with the joy of religious hatred. When our occupation began, two Jews entered Nablus at dead of night. As our administration does not permit murder, the rabble hesitated. The story which reached me at the time was that the Jews were expelled by strategy. They asked for twelve eggs, which the hotel keeper gave, but then charged at £12. This procedure sent them hurrying northward, ruined by one day’s prodigal expenditure. Alas, for the historian! Fain would I let this picturesque tale stand. But—it is not true. The Jews were sent out, with a machine-gun and escort, with instructions—“Never to come back no more.”

The Jewish settlement of Zummorin talked of retaliation on the Haifa road. The East is a bad place.

Let those who feel inclined to foster the Samaritan sect, as an interesting relic from the past, consider whether the world has not been sufficiently plagued by savage bigotry.

Outside Nablus is Sychar. Before is a wide valley, and the road to the Holy City. In front is Nablus, between the twin mountains that rise bare and gloomy. Here was a well, thirty years ago left in ruin, amid its fig-trees; now with one more church, a Greek one, desecrating it. Forget the building, forget the ceremonial. Remember only a day of early summer, when a Teacher sat here wearied. His disciples, friends and servants said, “Master, the people are troublesome here, and there is no need foryou to go into the bazaar. Sit while we go to buy food.” So He sat, where the cool bream of the well came up, and talked with a prostitute who came to draw water. When she spoke of worship in Gerizim and in Jerusalem, probing with an idle woman’s willingness to pass for intelligent, He told her that the Spirit Who made all things and continually sought men, that they might worship Him in friendship and candour, eager and trustful from the roots of their being, needed not a shrine in this mountain nor yet in Jerusalem. His disciples, bringing their brown rolls and olives and onions, came, and marvelled that He talked with a woman. Yet no man said to the woman sharply, “What seekest thou?” or to the Teacher, “Why talkest thou with her?”

But the well is buried in a building; Shechem is a hornet’s nest of bloodthirsty fanaticism; almost within a stone’s throw of where Christ gave the world its charter of spiritual liberty, the narrowest-minded folk on earth reverently keep the tomb of Joseph, who, centuries before the Sermon on the Mount, showed how greatly a man can forgive.

Picture on a Wall in Gilead

In 1919, O.E.T.A. at Es-Salt (Rabbath Ammon) lodged where a handful of German soldiers had been quartered. These had left on the walls a lifesize drawing of their daily life—men carrying wood and pails of water, preparing and taking meals—a truly remarkable portraiture. In two places were verses:

Ruhe und Gemuselichkeit
Soil dieses Hein dir schaffen;
Gruss Gott Kamerad, tritt fröhlichein,
Und lege ab den Uffen.

Repose and cheerful comfort
This friendly home shall find thee.
Comrade, praise God, pass joyful in,
But leave the ape behind thee.

Euch, die Hir kampft ams heilige Land,
Euch, die Ihr wacht an Jordansstrand,
Hier winkt, nach harten Tagen,
In brütender Gonne am Fluss
Erquickung und Behagen,
Und deutsche Schwester Gruss.

You who have fought for Holy Land,
You who have watched by Jordan’s strand,
Here after toil await you
Comfort, refreshment, where you dream
In brooding rapture by the stream,
And German sisters greet you.

I print the German as I found it. Mr. W. O. Williams, who made the English versions, suggested other readings: Gemüllichkeit for Gemuselichkeit, Heim for Hein, Affen for Uffen, kampft for kampft, Wonne for Gonne. The people of Es-salt alleged that the “German sisters” were prostitutes; that does not strike me as likely, though it is what Arabs were bound to think.

I wonder what has happened to this “historical document.” Our official definition of an “antiquity “ was, anything that man made before A.D. 1500; that date was a concession, in a land where every hilltop had its old “high place.” It was fixed for us by men who knew where Abraham was buried, and had seen pyramids and ziggurats that were ancient when he was born. But, since an age will surely come to which we ourselves shall be antiquity, I should like to think that this sketch of our enemies’ hour to hour existence, in the days when armies confronted each other across the ditch of Jordan, has been scheduled as a monument deserving of preservation.

II. The Palestine Crocodile

During 1918, the Egyptian Expeditionary Force was amused by the weekly appearance in the Palestine News, its organ, of an advertisement offering “any price within reason” for a pair of Palestine crocodiles, alive and in good condition. The advertisement was taken to be a jest. Yet Palestine has two rivers with claims to be considered “crocodiliferous,” and a third has some tenuous right of addition to them. All three flow into the Mediterranean, in the short strip of seaboard, hardly more than fifty miles from north to south, between Haifa and Jaffa.

Putting aside Old Testament references to “leviathan,” and taking account of profane writers only, we find strong evidence of crocodiles in the Nahr ez-Zerka during 2,000 years of recent history. The Nahr ez-Zerka, or “Blue River,” gathers a thin stream out of the marshes of Samaria, and reaches the Mediterranean three miles north of Caesarea and twenty miles south of Haifa. Throughout its course it is a swamp, with a trickle of water pushing through. Guidebooks remark that the scenery at its mouth reminds one of the Nile. Egypt has a river and the Caesarea seaboard has a river, and there are crocodiles in both; therefore, to the Fluellens who put together our guidebooks the scenery of Egypt and that of the Caesarea seaboard are similar.

The Zerka strains through a jungle of reeds; its course is through wide pastures furrowed with rushy ditches; by its mouth, the sandy wastes behind old Caesarea are pitted with marshland and lentisk-thickets. Three miles from its mouth stood Strabo’s “City of Crocodiles,” “midway between Acre and Straton’s Tower”,¹³ (Caesarea). Half a century later, Pliny writes: “fuit oppidum Crocodeilon, est flumen.”¹⁴ The late Dr. Buchanan Gray¹⁵ cites a Persian traveller, Nasir-i-Khusrau (A.D. 1047):

“Leaving Haifa we proceeded on to a village called Kanisah, and beyond this the road leaves the seashore and enters the hills, going eastward through a stony desert place, which is known under the name of the Tamasih”¹⁶ (i.e., wadi of crocodiles).

From this date the evidence of pilgrims and modern travellers forms a chain. Arabs call the Zerka by a second name, Nahr et-Timsah, “River of Crocodiles,” and the Crusaders, knowing nothing of Strabo or Pliny, gave it the same name, for the most satisfactory of reasons, because men who bathed in it were taken by crocodiles. Much of the evidence, as Dr. Buchanan Gray emphasised, is hearsay; as thus:

“In the river of Caesarea are crocodiles, horrible serpents.”—Fetellus, twelfth century.¹⁷

“In which marsh are many cocatrices, which a lord of Caesarea put there, having had them brought from Egypt.”—Author of “The City of Jerusalem,” c. 1220.¹⁸

“The River of Crocodiles, because the crocodiles once devoured two soldiers while bathing therein.”—“Itinerary of Richard,” IV., 14.

“More crocodiles are found in the Nile than in any other river . . . they live also in the River of Caesarea, in Palestine.”—Jacques de Vitry, thirteenth century.

“Caesarea . . . is bounded on the west by the Mediterranean Sea, and on the east by a deep freshwater marsh, where is a multitude of crocodiles.”—Burchardt, c. 1283.¹⁹

“We afterwards passed the river Zerka, about three miles north of Caesarea; this, I suppose, is the river Crocodilon of Pliny. . . . When I returned to Acre, they told me that there were crocodiles in the river Zerka, which I should not have believed if it had not been confirmed by very good authorities, and that some of them had been brought to Acre, which I found attested by all the Europeans there. . . . They say the crocodiles are small, not exceeding five or six feet in length; but, however, that they have taken some cattle that were standing in the river.”—R. Pococke, eighteenth century.²⁰

Dr. Gray cites the Swedish naturalist, Seetzen,²¹ to similar effect, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and Gudrin, who

“records that on four occasions in the years 1854, 1863 and 1870, he crossed the Nahr ez-Zerka, and was assured on each occasion, by different guides, of the existence of crocodiles, and of the caution necessary in bathing. The story of the Egyptian origin of the Palestinian crocodiles, as reported by him, speaks of two couples imported from Egypt,²² one placed in the Zerka, the other in a river to the south of Caesarea. More than one writer reports the claim of the millers on the Zerka to have seen crocodiles in the river.”²³

See also Thomson’s “Land and the Book,” passim, and such authorities as the “Survey of Western Palestine” and Baedeker.

To come to our own times, Schumacher says the German colonists of Haifa killed a Zerka crocodile in the spring of 1878, and that he himself saw one in the freshwater marsh that has appeared more than once in our citations.

“We finally arrived at a small lake of about 150 by 80 yards of clear, good water, the shores overgrown by high jungles of cane, the so-called Birket Timsah, or ‘Crocodile Pool.’ This Birket was pointed out to be the regular hiding-place of the beasts, and, in fact, we remarked certain flat pieces of ground on the shore on which the cane was trodden down, with traces of such animals.”²⁴

This, their guides told the party, was where the crocodiles basked, but the explorers watched for hours in vain. They threw into the pool half a goat, on a strong hook and fastened to an iron chain secured ashore. Next morning the bait was gone, but nothing was caught. But

“at our second arrival at the pool a crocodile was seen for a moment near the shore, but disappeared immediately, and never was discovered again. . . . We proceeded to several pools, crawling on our hands and feet in the mud below the tamarisk jungles in order to discover a crocodile.”

Next morning, in similar arduous fashion, they searched adjoining bogs assiduously

“without result; all we came across were ditches, swamps, and jungles of tamarisks. I therefore hesitate to believe, as generally said, that these creatures are numerous in the marshes of the Zerka; and, although their existence cannot be denied, their number must have been reduced to a couple or so.”

My discussion of the question in the Spectator (February 14th, 1920) met the notice of Professor A. H. Sayce, who wrote to the editor:

“In the spring of 1881 I spent a night near the mouth of the Nahr-ez-Zerka, in a mill which stood there at the time. The miller informed me that there were crocodiles in the river, and showed me an egg which, however, he refused to part with, as it brought him good luck. My Beyrout dragoman undertook to get one or two for me, but died shortly afterwards, and I heard no more about them.”

Forty years ago, eggs sometimes found their way into Jerusalem shops.

We have seen that the German colonists of Haifa killed a crocodile in the Zerka in 1878. According to Baedeker, they killed another, apparently the last, in 1902. Between these dates, two others are known to have been killed. Tristram’s evidence clinches a case where evidence is surely abundant, despite the firm disbelief of many, including most of the writers in biblical and other encyclopaedias. He tells us, in his “Fauna and Flora of the Holy Land,” how he offered a reward, and a crocodile, 11½ feet long, was brought to him in Nazareth. He had previously found many crocodile’s foot-prints in the marshes of Samaria that are the Zerka’s head-waters. The skull was before him when he wrote:

“When I look at my crocodile’s head, brought home by myself, and read the long disquisitions written in various languages as to the possibility of the crocodiles inhabiting Palestine, I feel that an ounce of fact is worth a ton of theory.”

Arab goatherds told him the crocodiles were well known to them, and often carried off kids. He adds that doubtless the Zerka crocodiles were very few and on the verge of extinction.

The other crocodile known to have been killed between the dates cited is the one whose skin is in the Museum of the Palestine Exploration Fund. “The length up to the point at which the artificial head, with which it is now provided, begins is 6 feet 11 inches.”²⁵ It was killed in 1893,

“at a place called Mastankia el-Timsah, the pool of the crocodile, on the Nahr ez-Zerka. The animal seems to have been 8 or 9 feet long.”²⁶

But as late as 1919 I found that Father Kahndler, of Haifa, an excellent authority, was convinced that crocodiles still lingered in the swamps of Northern Sharon, which feed the Zerka.

I turn to the Kishon, the Nahr el-Mouqatta, a far more considerable stream. It reaches the sea just north of Haifa, after traversing a desolate hinterland of sand and marshy jungle, full of reed-clogged pools that in the wet months throw out connecting arms to the river. Dr. Ewing, in his article “Kishon” (Hastings’ “Dictionary of the Bible”), speaks of the “deep, muddy trench” of this last part of its course, and adds that, according to rumour, it is infested with crocodiles, though the only observer in recent times who claimed to have seen one was McGregor, author of “The Rob Roy on the Jordan.” Dr. Ewing told me he did not believe in the existence of either the Kishon or Zerka crocodiles. This was logical; it is hard to see how the Zerka could have crocodiles without the Kishon having them also. But I came upon a witness to the Kishon crocodiles. McGregor’s account is well known, but, though he supplements it with the statement that he searched the banks carefully, after the incident of the crocodile thrusting its head out of the water beside his canoe, and found innumerable footprints, his discovery has never been supported in print, and his evidence has usually been considered doubtful. When I mentioned this uncertainty in 1919 to the Rev. William Christie, who had spent most of a lifetime in the Holy Land, he answered:

“I saw a crocodile in the Kishon. It was in 1894. I was riding from Acre to Haifa, and, as I came to the Kishon’s mouth, a reptile about 8 or 9 feet rose up from the sand and rushed into the sea. I was going to see Schumacher, and I told him that I had seen what I should have been sure was a crocodile if I had not known that this was impossible. He said: ‘It’s not impossible. I have no doubt that what you saw was a crocodile. The natives all say they are found in the Kishon.’”

There need be only the briefest reference to a third river, the Jaffa Aujeh, next to the Jordan the finest watercourse in Palestine. It must be the river intended by Guerin, and in 1919 the people living on its banks asserted that crocodiles had been seen in it. This seems to be all the evidence of crocodiles in the Aujeh.

In May, 1919, I spent a day on the Zerka and at Caesarea. Both sides of Miamas (Crocodilopolis) the country is the best wooded in Palestine, with fine oaks and carobs, styrax, thymelaea, lentisk. Here one can get a glimpse of what the land has been. I caught sight of nothing more formidable than a large mongoose, though from the Arabs I got assurance that the crocodiles were still there, but nearer the sea. No one had seen them, but every one had heard of them, and some knew people who had seen them. This was very unsatisfactory, and I think the Palestine crocodile is at last extinct. Yet it is proverbially hard to prove a universal negative, and, unless one waded or swam every yard of these tangled last three miles of Zerka (no boat could get through them) and, further, splashed through every ditch and piece of rushy ground, there would remain the doubt that still some patriarchal monster was lurking in the papyrus. To conduct a search of this exhaustive kind would require an enthusiast such as hardly lives in these degenerate days.

It is interesting that Mr. Christie’s Kishon crocodile should have rushed into the sea. Swimming off the Malay Peninsula is said to be dangerous, not so much because of sharks as because of crocodiles, which swim round from estuary to estuary. A crocodile is on record as having emerged, Venus-fashion, on to the shore of a Pacific island, nearly a century ago, after a saltwater swim of some hundreds of miles. A Spectator reader wrote, after my article appeared, that an alligator came ashore at Barbados in 1886, supposedly from Trinidad, 150 miles away, the nearest haunt. The Estuarine crocodile (crocodilus porosus), which ranges over South-Eastern Asia, to Queensland and the Solomon and Fiji Islands, is frequently seen floating in the sea. I believe the Palestine crocodiles lived and bred in the Zerka, but, finding their marsh home inadequate for a food supply, since goats had attendants and wild pig were wary, did their hunting in the sea at night. They could do this even now, though we have bridled Zerka with a railway bridge. Fishing in the sea, they made their way to the Kishon, and may have even appeared in the Aujeh. Thus the African crocodile managed to keep its one Asiatic habitat till into the present century. Its extermination was not the work of man, but of mongoose and monitor, both of which creatures abound in its former haunt.

III. A Note on Fauna

Palestine still had cheetahs when the War ended; they had been reported recently from almost every district, especially Carmel, Tabor, the Nazareth hills, Galilee generally, and wadis between Jerusalem and Jaffa. One was killed at Enab (Kirjath-Jearim, the “forest town,” a summit still clad with olive groves) as recently as 1915. In the Druse villages of Carmel were skins procured during the war; the Tabor monks had seen them; Dr. Christie, of Tiberias, told me he had met them in the highlands west of the lake. In 1919 one pair existed even in Samaria, near Gerizim. But the leopard had only one certain locality, apart from the Jordan thickets—the hills by Ain-Jiddi. To-day I should be surprised to hear that either cheetah or leopard exists in the Holy Land, unless in the Jordan Valley.

From Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon both went earlier. The cheetah was always rare in Western Syria; but fifty years ago the leopard was common. It is remembered as haunting the Bhowara pine-grove, near the fastness Colonel Churchill built seventy years ago, steep ravine before and cliff and scree behind; and the ilex and myrtle jungle round the ruined Druse khalweh above Aleih. Till recently it laired by the Damur River, near Sidon. Not far from Schweir, a summer resort under Jebel Sannin (8,600 feet, highest of the Southern Lebanon), a myrtle-choked cave is pointed out as formerly a leopard’s den. The American University has a skin from the foothills where Lebanon breaks into Galilee. But, except that they are believed to linger along the rocky course of the Litani (Leontes), the Syrian leopards must be sought farther north, beyond Lebanon.

What of the bears, that sub-species named Isabelline? My interest in them was a jest in Beirut in 1919, where my American friends were sceptical as to their survival. Did not their museum contain the last of the race, shot by a professor alleged to exist from summer to summer solely in the dream of shooting another? Nevertheless, Lebanon still has bears, though not Anti-Lebanon or Hermon. Sir Valentine Chirol told me of an experience, fifty years ago, with a bear that savaged his clothes at Bludan, in Anti-Lebanon. Bludan, as late as 1908, was a great place for bears. Not only were several shot by the American family that has done so well in extirpating the Syrian fauna; Scotland lent a hand, Dr. MacKinnon, of Damascus, secured pelts. The last Anti-Lebanon bear-tracks were seen in 1919. No one knows when Hermon lost its bears. When I climbed it in 1927, spending the night in lee of Pan’s fallen temple on the summit, it was a mountain desolate of bird and beast.

But bears are still on Sannin’s vast craggy top, though another year or two will see their extermination. In 1919 I heard that mounted Australians chased one down in Coele-Syria, close to Sarmin. One was killed that year above Zahleh, and its skin sold to a sergeant in the motor transport. The Zahleh people complained of ravaged vineyards, and a man told me he had taken a German officer up the mountain, where he had shot four bears. Such a bag amused the sceptics; it was suggested that I had misheard my informant. “What he said was, a German officer came to his village and shot his forbears.” But in 1927 no one disbelieved in the Sannin bears. At Neba Sannin, a widow living in an isolated orchard high up had stories enough of their depredations. She saw them every summer, and had the skin of one her husband had shot. Elsewhere, on the circuit of Sannin, I met men who had seen or shot them. They have become very shy and wild, and have retreated to the caves and rocks behind the mountain’s brow. But they are there.

I am less satisfied that bears linger round Jebel Makmal, the culminating massif of Lebanon, and above the precipitous amphitheatre that half closes in the source of the River Adonis. But I am inclined to accept the latter locality, at any rate.

Beirut still has its family of seals. In 1926 an otter was killed in the Dog River, which unreasonably astonished the naturalists of the American University. It has long been known that there were otters in the Lake of Galilee and in Jordan; and they must be found in such rivers as the Litani and Aujeh, are no doubt found in every considerable brook. Hyenas are common. Wolves occur sporadically, especially round Homs and Sannin and on Sannin’s top. The last place is a home of hares, of which they told us at Neba Sannin a story that might have come out of Herodotus. The village is deserted in winter, when snow-drifts bury the orchards. The hares come down and eat the bark, scraping away the snow. This is not good for the trees. Bludan keeps a few martens, and many foxes. Badgers are found throughout the hill country of both Palestine and Syria. The hyrax (“coney”) still exists near Petra and the southern borders of the Dead Sea. During the War the Germans found a wild cat in the Wadi Kelt, that was thought new to science. Probably it was our old friend the Indian jungle-cat, which I saw one day in 1919, when I was going over the marble columns of Roman Apollonia (Arsuf). And Mr. Henriques notes: “The humble rabbit, which can be seen any morning or evening in and out of the young eucalyptus woods to the north of the Aujeh.” This must be a recent importation. If it confines its skipping to blue gum and castor-oil groves it will be no great matter. But in the native copse it will be out of place.

Esdraelon is becoming a vale of thriving Zionist colonies, an improvement on its old wasteful savannahs of wild lilies.

For there as wont to walken was an elf,
There walketh now the limitour himself.

But it is good to know that as yet the limitour has not thought it necessary to extirpate all other pleasant spectacles of the plain. Mr. C. A. Henriques, writing in The Times,²⁷ says:

“In 1926 and 1927 there were several survey parties working under me round Nahalal, and I hardly remember walking through the wadis to the east of that village without putting up one or more gazelles. As the fields of the Jewish colonists are mostly fenced there is not the same hostility to them in that neighbourhood as there is round the open Arab villages. I have also seen gazelle on the direct cross-country route between Nablus and Beisan, on the lower slopes of Gilboa.”

And, in justice to the Zionist colonists, one must admit that until they grow more numerous they are less likely to bother wild life than the Arabs; they are not so addicted to firearms. In 1919 gazelles abounded not only in Esdraelon, but elsewhere. I flushed one from the bosky fringe of a brackish Dead Sea pond. The Palestine terrain precludes the swift methods of modern sport; even Esdraelon is unlikely ever to provide such a sight as Corps Headquarters staff in Mesopotamia gave us one morning in 1917, when a car came back from a desert run near Samara with six dead gazelles hanging over its side. For this we must go to the uplands of Transjordan, where there are still ostriches. Did not the first party to motor from Jordan to Baghdad tell us recently how they chased a small flock of five or six and left one dead on the sands?

IV. Syria, 1927

The Dog River and Its Caves

A feature of Lebanon, as of Anti-Lebanon, is the rivers that spring full-breasted from its caverns. The most interesting is the Nahr el Kelb (Dog River), Pliny’s Lycus. The Nahr Ibrahim, the river where Adonis died and Kypris fled lamenting, has wilder scenery, deeper forests, and stormier clouds of legend. But the Dog River has at its mouth those unparalleled inscriptions, rock-faces where Egyptian, Assyrian, Roman, Greek, Turk, French, British and Australian have cut the records of their conquests; and its source, so far as it has been traced, is in a noble stream navigable far underground. For fifty years, though with considerable intervals until within the last three years—when successive parties of French or American explorers have pushed their way painfully through its stalagmite-studded and stalactite-hung corridors and clambered perilously across its precipices—men have crept a little further in, but have not yet discovered the river’s absolute beginnings.

The road up the coast, the Via Victorum from earliest times, a highway infinitely old, crosses the stream. The conquerors have made the lily-sprinkled rocks their Visitors’ Book. At least ten Egyptian and Assyrian inscriptions remain, panelled on the hillside. Time has dealt hardly with these, yet even now some of the cuneiform script keeps clear outlines. Rameses II. passed by, warring against the Hittites of Kadesh, in that campaign of which the Royal scribe Pentaur wrote, in the poem still extant on temple walls at Luxor. Tiglath-Pileser IV. cut his record here, when he came to hunt elephants and lions in Lebanon. Assur-nasir-pal, Shalmaneser II., Adadnirari, Sennacherib have set their graven boast. Other inscriptions have faded, washed out by rain and frost; and some have yielded to envy of later rivals. After the French expedition of 1860, an Egyptian panel was usurped by Napoleon III.; the Turks excised this during the War; the French have restored it. There are Greek inscriptions, one of which informs us that “the wine of Helbon is good.” Was this cut by a picnic-party, such as those that scribbled Greek verses on Memnon’s statue at Thebes, 2,000 years ago? Marcus Aurelius, who made a new road here, has his panel, a massive one and easy to find. Sultan Selim I., the Turkish conqueror of Syria (1517), has an inscription. And . . . the latest of the conquerors have made their panels. Here, in Allenby’s sweep northward, my own old division, the 7th Meerut, came,

“Late in the centuries, last up the Conquerors’ Road.”

Accordingly, a glaring white—terribly, overwhelmingly white—tablet tells that the 21st Corps, together with a French detachment, occupied Beirut and Tripoli in October, 1918. Political considerations looked over history’s shoulder when she wrote this information, and jogged her elbow a trifle askew. Consequently, the inscription had to grow older before it found a friend. In my time, rumour had it that those bold, bad men, the Australians, vowed to dynamite the tablet. However, the Aussies instead set to work to deface a cliff-wall for themselves. Then, after their defeat of Feisal, the French added a characteristically blatant record. In our own inscriptions some thought that, in conformity with old custom on this Conquerors’ Way, the King’s name should have been included. Still, our record is there, and no passer-by can shirk knowledge of it.

But even Egyptian and Assyrian were parvenus when they came to this ancient high road of the nations. Old paths, half buried now, high up in the crocuses and yellow asphodeline, pierce into Lebanon’s heart. Tide after tide of invasion has swept up Lycus, a human Eager more impetuous than that of the Norse Sea-God flooding inland up Trent. Climb the rocks, push past the cyclamen lighting the boulder crevices, the branching candlesticks of the pink-tipped asphodel, and you reach a small plateau. Here must have been a mart of the cavemen. Come after heavy rain, and see what the runnels have washed up. This forgotten city, which has left no inscriptions or roads, as yielded arrowheads by the hundred, stone scythes, adzes, spearheads. I have seen an ass’s jawbone conjecturally fitted with the sharp flint teeth that are found so freely here. A nasty weapon it must have been.

When you grow dizzy with antiquity, with thought of the far-off generations who lived and struggled here, the valley has another and gentler charm. Leave the coast, the dead tribes and kings, and seek the heart of the hills. All the way, in winter and spring, the cliffs are aflower; cyclamens, both white and pink, aliums, the dwarf bee-orchis, asphodel and asphodeline, crocuses. There are towering brambles, and rose bushes dense with hips—the thorns which clutched at the fair, desolate Goddess, “gathering the ruddy blossom of her blood,” as she fled through these tangled uplands, wailing for slaughtered Adonis. There are tall, thick clumps of feather-grass, set in the river sand, a haunt where the caitiff boar might have lurked. And the wonder deepens, the copse grows denser and lovelier. A wilderness of myrtle flows round you, starry with fragrant, innocent-eyed flowers and shining, waxen berries. Intermixed with the myrtle is terebinth, known by lighter green amid the holm-oak and glossy carob, and by the redness of its new leaves. Broom and heather make a scrub.

The Dog River’s lower course is taken off in canals, for irrigation and to supply Beirut with water. In summer little of it reaches the Mediterranean. But its higher course is full at all seasons.

The Stream of the Caves

The stream of the caves finds its way out in three places into a valley of exquisite loveliness. The southern side is fledged with dense woods of pine and ilex, broken at the river-side by neglected vines and olive orchards; the northern bank has a more scattered growth, is precipitous in places, and has many caves with abundant relics of prehistoric man, flints and calcined bone-fragments. From the river’s highest source the valley continues upward in a rift dry except when flooded with the melting snows; it is beautiful with fern-hung ledges and with coppice of sweet bay and with noble carobs. Wild blackberries cover great tracts. From this valley a side-rift leads to a cave hard to find, its mouth is so high up and shadowed by rocks and grape-vines—a cave first entered in 1836 by Thomson (author of “The Land and the Book”). The cave brings you by steep descents to the stream, which flows out in rapids to the north-west, into a natural conduit.

In 1873 the river was lower than it had been for many years, owing to an exceptionally dry winter. W. J. Maxwell and W. G. Huxley, British engineers examining the scheme for bringing Dog River water to Beirut, launched rafts from Thomson’s Cavern. Presently, they and R. W. Brigstocke, a retired British naval surgeon, and Daniel Bliss, founder of what is now the American University of Beirut, “bound themselves in a solemn league that they would either explore some of the mysteries mentioned by Dr. Thomson, or show that no other man could.”²⁸ On September 23rd, accordingly, they set out on their first expedition, navigating planks on inflated goat skins.

Two hundred metres from the cave’s entrance the river is completely blocked by a huge boulder, 15 feet high. It has natural capstans on both sides, to which rafts can be moored, but its surface is so slippery that there is considerable risk, as well as immense labour, involved in the task of pulling a raft over; exploration parties have preferred to make separate rafts for the upper river, which can be pulled over once, and then left there. This boulder the 1873 explorers named the Screen; on the other side they found a deep channel, about 40 feet wide, with a roof always lofty, and often so much so, that it is undiscoverable by the strongest lights that any expedition has carried. The stalactites and stalagmites far surpass, both in size and beauty, those of the cavern, which excited Thomson’s admiration. Maxwell clambered into a high gallery, reappearing suddenly some 65 yards away, behind a dazzling white wall, with a light in each hand. The place was immediately named the Pulpit, and the whole magnificent corridor became the Cathedral. He fixed his candles and got out his compasses, then he ignited a magnesium wire and illuminated the “heart of darkness,” the deep mysterious stream pacing under its inaccessible roof and between its pillars and stone canopies.

On September 30th a second expedition, “more fully equipped,” set out. A second raft and a boat capable of carrying two persons “were with no little labour dragged over the rocky barrier.” Four hundred and sixty-six yards from the Screen was found the grandest of all the many galleries, behind what has since borne the name of Maxwell’s Pillar. “A shoal at the base of the column offered a convenient resting-place for luncheon, and the leader of the party was compelled, amid ringing cheers, to allow his name to be given to the central attraction of this cavern.” The Pillar is 55 feet in circumference, and continuous to the roof; it is beautifully fluted. Climbing, so slippery as to be dangerous, brings you to a lofty side-chamber, crowded with glorious stalagmites. Its floor is split by a chasm that goes right down to the water.

It is hard to speak with moderation of the river beyond Maxwell’s Pillar. On both sides the walls are ornamented with stalactites that have taken a thousand shapes, and are all colours between glossy black and snowy white. Often they thrust down in an elephant’s head or mastodon’s, with trunk snapped short above the water, or they are flowers—a common form being whorls that reminded me of the Indian champak. At Willow Point the deposits have overflowered in a forest of tracery. Then, at the Curtains, they almost touch the water in vast, fluted bells; you paddle for all you are worth, for the current is tremendous, and you push between an island and a rock, where there is not an inch to spare for your raft. This is Bliss’s Straits, 630 yards from the Screen. Now comes the Pantheon, another lofty hall, with marble figures of gods in its galleries. In it is an island, which rises to a peak, icy in pallor and in slipperiness, on whose summit is the bottle containing the names of the first explorers, placed there more than fifty years ago. It stands in an incessant rain, and is now a solid part of the rock; we could not shake it in the least. From the Pantheon you proceed by a hole, lying flat on your raft and pulling this way and that till you have found the angle at which you can get through. Even so, you will be soused, for the current is again accelerated. This tiny hole, whose sides grind against both flanks of your raft, is the only passage; exploration parties have sometimes never found it, but have supposed that the Pantheon was closed. Beyond the Pantheon is Styx, dark, winding chambers with the roof low—a short journey to Chaos, where navigation temporarily ends, 1,130 yards from the Screen.

The first explorers found Chaos “so slippery that a landing could scarcely be effected.” They returned, and “were not a little astonished to find that it was eight o’clock in the evening when they emerged, having been underground about 10 hours.” A third trip, on October 10th, was a difficult, scrambling business. They were “frequently from accident or necessity in the water altogether”; crossing Chaos was “a work of great labour and no little danger. The mountain over which they clambered seemed to be formed of fallen débris from the roof, for nothing could be seen but a dark rift overhead, and the fallen mass was so coated over and cemented together by new stalagmite formation that progress was slow and scarcely a loose fragment could be found to throw into the chasm below.”

Chaos involves a portage—of loose materials, not of rafts (which would be impossible)—over every variety of rocky unpleasantness. Sometimes your feet are cut by saws and pikes; sometimes you stride across water glimmering far below; sometimes you climb a sheer rock-face, your next companion lighting your hand-hold with his flash. Then you come to open water again, the Rapids; the stream tears and throws itself along in a narrow channel. You lower yourself from ledge to ledge, to a place where you can stretch one foot to a split rock in mid-water, an inch or two below the surface. The upper side of the split is firm; the lower is loose and is better not stepped on. From this rock you spring across, and then climb, though never so high again.

The early explorers were busied from 1873 to 1875 and were both thorough and slow (as was inevitable). Midway in Chaos they were held up, until Bliss found Bliss’s Chimney or Funnel—which remained the highway until his grandson, in 1927, found a better way. In 1874 they were stopped in the Rapids by a boulder jutting out concavely; and they cut their names, still as clearly legible as ever. Next year they found a way over, and carved the statement: “1875, another hundred feet.” This other 100 feet brought them to what in their ignorance they termed smooth water—it is smooth only because no rocks shatter it, otherwise it is a current far fiercer than any that they encountered, for behind it is the momentum of the Riffle. They never saw the Riffle; a narrow block of fretted rock was their halting place, and they were well satisfied, as they had reason to be. “The explorers had unusual facilities for their work, and it is probable that their spirited undertaking will not soon be imitated or surpassed.”

This confidence proved justified. Until 1926 no succeeding expedition equalled their achievement. Collapsible boats had been found unsuitable at the very beginning; goat-skins were then inflated. But the twentieth century brought the petrol tin, and the Dog River Inland Navigation Companies now use a vessel surely unique. You solder up your tins, and lash them together, in sixteens, with boards. These rafts will support two men, or at a crusader’s coast pinch (if they do not mind being drenched) three. Sixteen tins have a certain balance, which eight tins alone have not, and will just scrape through the narrow places. Since Beirut is not a place where you can buy paddles, you cut these from pine planks.

In 1926 a French party entered the cave, intending to work all night. But what they took for gas fumes drove them out. A French doctor tried repeatedly with collapsible boats, and succeeded in getting as far as the early explorers. The American University took up the pastime, almost as a summer game. Young men who from their earliest days had heard of the subterranean river and its secret tried to push in, but only two—whose achievement must, I think, be considered the greatest feat in the whole story—surpassed what had already been done. They were cousins, Forrest Crawford and William West; Americans, men of very exceptional hardihood and skill both on water and land. As a friend put it, “they were running about shooting bears” (that is, the Syrian bears, now almost exterminated) “when they were two years old.” Their party—for it must be clearly understood that no considerable progress is possible without days of preliminary preparation and effort—had given up after reaching the Rapids, and gone on; West and Crawford, starting at dawn, raced up the Rapids, discovered and circumvented “the Riffle,” and navigated the treacherous stretch above until they reached another block, then through a narrow passage climbed to where they glimpsed an inland water. This they named Lake Dorothy, for reasons appreciated by their friends; hurrying back to save time, they shot the Riffle—to me, who have seen the Riffle, the riskiest thing I ever knew done—and by two in the afternoon they had climbed the steep mountain wall of the valley and caught up their friends.

In September, 1927, a long-meditated expedition took place, led by Dr. E. St. John Ward. Competition for places was keen, and I counted myself lucky to be included. The other members were Ward’s son, Philip, and three members of the staff of the American University—Hall, Ireland and Huntingdon Bliss—the last a grandson of one of the first explorers. We collected 120 petrol tins for seven rafts, with a margin over, bought stores and pine planks, captured a smith in Beirut and took him along to the tins, which he soldered, a job that engaged him for nearly two days. Every tin was tested under water, then taken by truck and car to Bint el Hamra (the village of “the Scarlet Woman”). For years the Bint el Hamrans have regarded the tins of expeditions as their perquisites. They have the same terror of the interior of the cave as primitive man must have had; but West and Crawford found them waiting on the beach facing the Screen, to break up the rafts. They had lit a fire, and were singing to keep up their spirits. Nevertheless, although during the next fortnight they were to haunt our camp, to seize every possible tin the first moment they could, they blocked us in our attempt to get debbis (beasts to carry the materials), When we succeeded, after hours of wrangling, we had to make our way down through the forest in darkness.

The camp was against a wall, and in shade of a mighty carob; below ran the river, clean and delightful—the bathing in darkness at the end of each day was not the least enjoyable part of the trip. The 17th was occupied with heavy carrying fatigues, first to a stony beach beside wild pear-trees, then up the steep hillside to the cave. Inside the cave you stoop—it was some time before I learnt to evade a very painful stalactite—and then slide down natural “shutes” over a floor blackened with bat-guano. When two rafts had been made, the Wards, Ireland and Bliss went on, to ferry planks and tins to Chaos; Hall and I made more rafts. I waited afterwards to fetch the voyageurs from the Screen (they would leave their own rafts moored above it). It was very late before a glow gathered in the blackness, gradually waxing to a ghostly brightness on the rock. Those giant figures on the Screen sang: first the Amherst College Song, then—in response to my assurance, “I’m coming”—Poor Black Joe. I sang back—and no cathedral could have made a grander rolling noise than ours in that vast natural hall, where the lanterns flickered against black wall and sleekly hurrying waters:

“Though my raft is bending low,
I hear the angel voices calling, Poor Black Joe.”

Next day the Wards stayed out and we others went forward, marvelling at the sights we saw—picking out the place where Maxwell had appeared in a blaze of light, and admiring his Pillar and the steep pinnacle where those first voyageurs’ bottle stood, encrusted with icy glitter. At Chaos we saw, as elsewhere, planks of West and Crawford’s trip wedged high and dry, where the winter rains had washed them, and found a store of half-used pickles and sardines, with a note left by the French doctor: “Épicier, Rue de Chaos. After lunch we began our portages. I had not visualised myself as taking an armful of planks or a rattling backfill of tins across such alpine territory; as we reached the Two Sisters, stalagmites of marble whiteness that overlook Chaos, I said to Huntingdon Bliss, “Rather rough going.” “This,” he replied, “is Fifth Avenue compared to what’s coming.” We skimmed a short tract of mud, a slope that outslid from under our feet, exchanged this for a stony scree that moved as fast as we touched it; came to the perfect semblance of a fossil armadillo or turtle, a horny rim with head hidden; crossed crevasses and a branch of the stream, and scaled a rock-face; wormed up natural chimneys, and crossed the stream again; then swung ourselves up, up, and then again down to the Rapids. We had not yet learnt the best methods of portage. Bliss and I thought we could tow our planks, all tied together, by a long rope—but the current whirled them into a crevice. Then Bliss sat despairing on a rock, that was one smooth precipitation towards disaster, and tugged; with one hand in a hole, I hung over the stream, kicking at the planks. In the end we had to take the others off their own jobs, to rescue the wood. Thereafter we halted at distances two men could stretch, and passed things across, which the more forward worker in his turn thrust into some niche as far on as he could reach. Our party had accidents, losses of rope-coils and lights, sudden escape and clatter of a plank far below—luckily, to wedge somewhere. But we did well, and were thrifty of our flashes, using candle-lanterns except for momentary searching illumination. I marvel at the memory of men walking where we went laden with lanterns carried by strings in our teeth. Bliss observed, “It’s a good thing we’re doing this in darkness. We’d never dare, if we saw what we’re doing.” From the Rapids onward we could not hear each other, except close to, for the roar of the water dashing along its narrow funnel. The air was sweet, and the temperature such that we stayed wet throughout without feeling cold.

Returning, we landed at Maxwell’s Pillar, and in its lofty clerestory gathered a few trophies from the countless stalagmites, which were of all sorts, from the semblance of an iguanodon’s thigh to a 6-foot slim marble candlestick. Two of us jumped the chasm to select these; for the return, when the jump was to a higher place and a landing like glass, the other two, one arm round the waist of a strong stalagmite, gripped the leapers.

On the 19th all six of us were busy completing the carrying, till at half-past three Philip and I had a first shot at defeating the “smooth water” above the Rapids. Since I was thirty years older than Philip, our raft was balanced absurdly, both in weight and paddling strength. And the current was such as one might expect to find in one of the rivers of Hell; we could never make more than 10 yards before it swept us into a bay from which no labour could stir us. At last I got out on a brief shelf and towed. When I stepped back, before I could pick up my paddle the race slewed us round; I never knew anything more instantaneous. Acetylene lamp and candle-lantern both went over and out; I grabbed the scalding things just in time to save them. We returned at the speed of a motor boat, Hall pushing a plank across the narrow entrance to the Rapids to stop us.

Philip and I then went, he to the camp, I to wait and ferry. Sitting on the Screen from five to nine, at last I realised that I was wet and cold. Round my head hundreds of bats were flying. Meanwhile, beyond the Rapids, Bliss and Ireland reached the foot of the Riffle, and towed Hall and Ward up to them. The Riffle, seeing its prey about to escape into the nook where you tie your raft and climb, swung Ward into the water. He saved himself by seizing the raft and at the cost of a belt-lamp; Hall caught the rock, and held the tumultuous raft while he scrambled back. They returned and waited at the beach during two hours, while Bliss and Ireland made their way alone to Lake Dorothy.

Next day Ireland and newcomers to the camp took photographs in the Cathedral. Then the original six went back to Beirut. But a new four stayed on to use our rafts; two succeeded in reaching Lake Dorothy, and making a nominal gain on the record, pushing a bottle which contained the names of all who had been concerned in this attempt, from first to last, into a cleft a few yards further than the place where West and Crawford had left their bottle.

The 1927 expedition had apparently ended—defeated; and the Bint el Hamrans had salvaged the tins below the Screen. But on the 23rd I got a note from Ireland, saying that he, Hall and du Bois—another “Staffite” (short term service member of the staff of the American University)—wished to have one more shot at the river, before the autumn rains broke. Bliss, whose courage, strength and deftness had been so conspicuous, had gone to Tripoli; du Bois, who was to take his place, had been one of the two who had notched West and Crawford’s record.

Next day, Sunday, we went through to the camp, with tins for another two rafts. On Monday, the 25th, we started at 8.10, left the Screen at 9, racing through to Chaos in fifty minutes. We were not too fresh, since raft-making had kept us in the cave till midnight; we took Chaos unhurriedly, and did not launch from the beach above the Rapids until 11.10. Ireland and Du Bois went first and reached the foot of the Riffle; they were to tow Hall and me. We made the mistake of paying out too much rope, and the current swept it under a stone on the bottom. Hall and I could therefore row as far as this stone, but no further, and we could not afford to lose the rope. From sheer stupidity we had not a knife, so when all efforts to dislodge the rope had failed we tried to cut it against the wall with a stone. It was useless—the rope was thick, the stone blunt, the current raging. But we did ultimately, beyond all our hopes, get the rope free, and reached the Riffle.

Riffle, I am told, is an American word, signifying a swift stretch of water whose surface is of a muscular, unbroken smoothness. The Riffle was 40 feet of river, of about a yard’s depth, sweeping powerfully along, and then making a sudden swerve to the right and shooting down 10 feet; the after-momentum of this drop was the current that we had fought, with our rope gripped on the bottom. There was a lee under a tall rock, which sheltered half a raft’s length from the downrush that had capsized Ward. To this rock we tied our rafts, then climbed up it to where it had a crack by which you could crawl. After crawling you turned a corner, to decent foot-space, and presently could wade up the Riffle’s edge and then across it, despite its speed, to a rocky beach opposite. Now came the hardest task of the whole affair. My companions throughout made things easier for me than for themselves; at first I had nothing more to do than to hang over the drop with two strong lights while they pulled the rafts up to the Riffle. They would get a raft a certain way; then it would stick, or the back-eddy at the foot of the drop would swirl it to the side again. Phil Ireland at last, holding on to nothing at all but the smooth, slippery bulge of the rock, kicked and thrust with a pole at the raft in the seethe; he was so excited and tense that he never dreamed of the position he was in. And the gods brought him through, though to me it is a nightmare to remember what he did. We got the rafts both up.

The reader will now understand why above the Rapids it was the matter of hours to make a hundred metres. We towed the rafts up the main sweep of the Riffle. The going was slippery, and we had painful falls; once Ireland was in danger of having his foot sawn off; it was caught beneath the raft that Hall and I were tugging, and, though he was only a few yards away, in the roar of the waters we could hear nothing, and only guessed that we must stop from the agony in his face. We crossed the Riffle back again, where it emerged from deep water. Its sweep was over a plateau, but here the deep water thrust in tongues, and you had to stride, first to a narrow peak a foot beneath the surface, and then to the main submerged plateau beyond. The race of the water was so fierce that you struck well upstream, for the current washed your foot down—only so could you hope not to miss the peak, which was but a point in ten feet of water with jagged sunken shores. It was here that one of the last party (those who had gone just beyond “West Point”) had been forced to stop, for his legs were too short to reach the peak. After this we had to circumvent water too fast for paddling and too deep for wading. So du Bois sat on a raft, surrounded by precious lights and ropes, and the rest of us, well under water, walked on the shelving bank. It struck down steeply, and how I managed to walk with a light in each hand—that I must not lose—I cannot say. Except that I knew I must manage it; if I lost my subaqueous foothold I should slide into deep, racing water—and lose our lights! So we reached Crawford’s Passage, where again the water is blocked; a narrow ravine of not more than 100 yards brings you to West Point and the shores of Lake Dorothy. By one lifting the rafts to the others on a boulder above, we surmounted the passage. It did not take more than twenty minutes a raft.

We now removed our party’s previously placed bottle to take on, and launched on Lake Dorothy at 3,

“the first that ever burst
Into that silent sea.”

Though, indeed, the “Lake” was a disappointment. It was merely a thickening of the stream about to be sucked under the fallen rock-wall; and a little ahead of us the river cranked abruptly to the left. In this seemingly placid loch we had a strong current to fight, which, when we turned the corner, became invincible. Ireland and du Bois managed to land, but Hall and I were caught, and, rowing hard, could not do more than just keep our position. Once we seemed within touch of shore, and I reached out to a rock, but in the moment when I ceased to paddle we were swept far back. By desperation we landed at last.

All scrambled over a rocky beach till a shallow allowed us to wade to a stretch of sand opposite. We had plainly reached the home of the devil, the first creatures since the world’s beginning to find it; it was pitted with hoof-marks! These were from heavy water-droppings, for we had come to a diminution of the stream. The early explorers remark on the fact that, so far as they had gone, there was no lessening of volume. But here were considerable seepings from above, and tiny tributaries trickling in. We waded again, on to rocks—low, with another sandy break in their middle. Though low, they were fretted with spikes that pierced our feet and made our hands one pattern of cuts, from our frequent all-fours progress. We named this Purgatory. Since we were in the mood for naming, when we held our breath in delight at a snowy pillar, rising 40 feet from a base 30 feet above the stream, Ireland called out, “I propose we call this Thompson’s Pillar.” “Carried by acclamation,” he announced, after my generous comrades’ agreement. “No,” said du Bois, a few yards further on. “Obelisk is a better word.”

Deserting the stream, we clambered as swiftly as we could over rocks that rose on one another’s shoulders, till Ireland paused on a lofty isolation. “We must all get to the same place,” he cried. It was a shelf with standing space for two, and 30 feet of abyss at the sides. We stood, two of us with one foot precariously dangling, and took our final bearings. We were in a vast hall, whose roof was far away. It seemed to be closed all round; but, looking away over the craggy wilderness below us, we saw—with such light as our dimming flashes gave—the river coming in by cascades from the north-east. This explained the roar that we had heard for some time, which we had spoken of as “the Fall,” for every explorer has expected sooner or later to come upon the river entering precipitously from the flank of Lebanon, where at least one large stream disappears.

We turned back because of weariness—of which in our excitement we were hardly conscious yet—because of failing and diminished lights (the river, as well as time, had taken large toll of these), because the others had to race through the night to Beirut, because friends were arriving outside and would be anxious. But we paced carefully the distance we had added to knowledge of the cave—91 metres to the Obelisk, another 530 to the moored rafts, and an estimated 70 to the beginning of Lake Dorothy (West Point). We took off a quarter for imperfect measurement, so claim to have added 370 metres to the record. Aware that we were at the degree of tiredness where accidents are likely, we went watchfully, and emerged to light of stars at 9.30, having been thirteen and a half hours in the cave. We found a large party from the American University at our camp, and it was late before Hall, Ireland, and du Bois got away. They undertook too much in doing this, and were still in hospital when I left Syria nearly three weeks later. Hall was dangerously ill for a long time, and was saved by blood transfusions. The expedition achieved nothing of scientific interest—we knew already that there was no living thing in the caves or the water, except the bats of the lower reaches. But it had traced the river underground to a distance of not less than 1,900 metres, and had made it certain that cave-work would continue to be the summer pastime of the French and American younger male communities, until the river gave up its secret. Yet, saying this, I have forgotten political amenities. After my articles appeared in The Times and Sphere, the “concession” to the caves was given to a Frenchman, wherefore there have been, and will be, no more expeditions. Never were more jealous guardians of all “rights” of archaeological discovery or exploration than the mandatory power of Syria. It is rumoured that the Screen is to be dynamited, and a cave service of motor-boats established, with a good hotel in the valley. If the Screen goes, the river will go with it, so far as navigation is concerned.

Ruined Belfort

During its ninety years of existence the Frank kingdom of Jerusalem lay within and behind a wide front of Christian principalities and fortresses that were its outworks. Syria and Northern Palestine are strewn with ruined castles, massive eyries above ravines that seem to fissure to their roots the mighty hills; others fringe the coast with forgotten menace and defiance. After Saladin in 1187 had broken the Christian power at the Horns of Hattin, for another century the Franks struggled to keep some footing in the land, and clutched at their hill-crowning castles to steady themselves. They rarely recovered a fortress once lost; but a victory would find them feeling out towards their old strongholds and a Crusaders’ army besieging the ramparts that had been their own a few years before.

While the Christian kingdom lasted three castles kept the northern marches of the Holy Land. They lay on points of a triangle. Magnificently correspondent and interlinked, they represent a strategic conception that discovered itself by the slow process of its own excellence emerging from the confusion of mountain and forest. Subeibeh, perched on crags above Banias (Caesarea Philippi), watched the wide fan of waters that become the Jordan, the rich green fields that roll up to the blue marshes of Merom; Belfort peered far into the innumerable clefts of Southern Lebanon and up the ravines that all but sever Lebanon from Hermon; Tibnin easily surveyed the sea, and glanced over the beginnings of Galilee.

Of these three key-castles perhaps Belfort has the sternest record of battle. Like its sisters, it must have been fortified ages before the Crusaders came; but it outlasted them as a Christian stronghold, and it was not until 1190 that Saladin, after a whole year of siege, starved it into surrender. The Templars purchased it back in 1240, and kept it till it was stormed in 1280; as recently as the wars between Turk and Egyptian, a century ago, it was the prize of hard fighting. To-day its battlements, though broken and dismantled, are a clear monument over scores of miles; its passages, that burrow deep into the crag, have been blocked, but you can descend three tiers of stairs into the heart of the mountain. The huge moat hewn at its western and southern sides is intact; beyond this southern moat are the crypts which once held stores and arms, running beneath an unfortified plateau that by a short saddle thrusts up to another crag, also crowned with towers and completing the whole. Its deep cisterns are filled with water and save the place from utter desolation; for the water, though possessing an abundant and varied fauna, is renowned for its excellence, and from the first hint of dawn until long after sunset donkeys carrying kerosene tins are loading up with it, to take it to villages far below.

The traveller who thinks some minor discomfort repaid by the shadow of the past and by views glorious beyond description should pass a night on Belfort. There is no danger—as the sheikh of the village below the ruins assured the present writer, “None at all, except wild beasts”; and in the year of grace 1927 even the wild beasts of Syria were only an occasional hyena and a still more occasional wolf. The only daring thing about our visit was that we took two children, aged seven and three, to sleep unsheltered on the mountain; and the one poignant moment was when the drivers who had brought our water up the long, stiff climb to the castle, with mistaken kindness set our kerosene tins before the donkeys, instead of raising water from the cistern. I was in time to save one tin, but we were very short of drinking water that night and next morning.

I have spoken of the partial moat—all that the steep scarp would permit. But the real moat is the Litani, 1,500 feet below, a torrent of green, lovely water foaming and flinging itself along, an arm about the two unmoated sides of the castle.

To its tree-plumaged edges the descent is precipitous, an awe-inspiring plunge; the murmur of its stream floated upward, and accompanied the hours of the night. Beyond Litani the road wound and returned upon itself, striving away to Hermon. From the river was a long slope culminating in a ridge that was out-topped by a higher ridge over which stood a third ridge, very lofty; then came the enormous mass of Hermon, making pigmies of them all.

Now, in August, the kingly mountain carried only streaks of snow, but he did not need winter to enhance a magnificence already enrapturing. Suddenly the sun grew golden-faced, hastening to his setting on the Mediterranean; and the mountain, not to be outdone, changed to a dim red, while the sky behind him softened with green. The horizon became all colours; to the north, Lebanon, lying between the rival splendours of sea and Hermon, was deep purple beneath a yellow heaven. Hermon reddened altogether, the sun sank, the clouds along the sea burst into an incredible conflagration, a fury of red and gold. A tarn in a fold of the western plateau beneath us became a burnished mirror of steel. A pair of hawks, lamenting our intrusion on their home, sailed below the Evening Star—a silver point in the night’s blue splendour—and cried. Then nothing remained of day but a long red line on the Mediterranean. The moon, at full, was shining on the ruins and fighting up the distant cleft where Litani was flowing.

I thought of the castle’s defenders seven and a half centuries ago—wondered what they thought of Hermon, whose changing grandeur confronted them at dawn and sunset, rugged or snowclad, through year following year—wondered what they did against mosquitoes—imagined the life of this crag when the Crusaders’ trumpets sounded from it, or the armies of Saladin camped below it, and the night was awake with peering eyes and listening ears. Then I tied a towel all over my face and went to sleep, my last conscious thought a speculation on the chances that the castle’s lairs somewhere housed a hyena, whose form I might see later, ghostly in the moonlight. But it was in a grey dawn that I awoke, with a thick fleece of cloud sweeping over me. The greyness passed quickly into a clear radiance that gave to Hermon an amazing height and majesty; the clouds gathered themselves into a dense bank resting between the last two ridges at his foot, and into a lofty insubstantial snow-mountain above Litani to the south. The mists vanished from the battlements and the castle’s drapery emerged; red snapdragon and purple-spoked flower of caperbush showed again; and the human tenants of a night prepared to follow the other mists, and to leave the ruins to their loneliness.

Fountains of Pan

Jordan has a multitude of sources; the wide, stony plain that terminates in Lake Huleh abounds in hurrying brooks that have gathered their waters from Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon alike (for Hermon is Anti-Lebanon). The August afternoon was tolerable, so we decided to race down as far as the Hasbani—the most remote of all Jordan’s headwaters, coming from far up Hermon’s flank. Hasbani, a wide, shallow stream amid rocks and lines of stepping-stones, lay in the green of maize-fields, now ripening. From here to Banias (Caesarea Philippi) the “road,” we had heard, was an abomination of badness, but the Arabs who were unloading their camels for the new bridge that was building spoke tolerantly, even enthusiastically, for it. We had a carload of happy English and American children, our Syrian driver was curious about country new to him, the sunlight on chattering brook and nodding stalks was an invitation and an assurance against disaster. We went on, and the car splashed through the river.

The road quickly proved itself as bad as we had heard. Almost immediately the car stuck in deep mud, and a deal of the precious daylight that remained was lost before it was got out. We tried to pay the peasant who helped us free, but he refused, explaining, “I am a Christian.” This was a refusal I had expected, for once you get away from the big towns, such as Beirut, you find a people who abound in courtesy and helpful kindness; it is hard to take service from men whose daily earnings you know are trivial, but you have to do it, for it is rarely that they will accept anything but thankful words in return.

After the maizefields we came to no second slough, though often the car drove across a rivulet, or even for too yards or so used the bed of one for its road. For most of the way we went jolted over cobbles and rocks. The main roads of Lebanon have become the world’s noisiest, with cars hooting in a hundred discordant notes as they drive—with incredible recklessness—from Beirut to Damascus or between the coast towns and the summer resorts in the hills. But the road that crosses Jordan’s headwaters—long may it remain unmended!—was desecrated by no one but ourselves; its other travellers were horsemen or riders on camels or donkeys.

Agnuscastus—the pilgrims’ flower so plentiful beside lower Jordan and towards the Dead Sea—was flowering by the brooks, in which storks were fishing; dragonflies flashed from one blue head of blossom to another, and stood poised there. The waters of the “Little Jordan” came tumbling down, in a series of full cascades, from the hill where once Dan existed and Palestine began; then we came to ground that rose slightly and was altogether uncultivated, overgrown with fine oaks and bushes of styrax—whose racemes of white, lemon-scented flowers are so lovely an adornment of the Syrian spring. A dark-brown squirrel crossed the road and leapt away into the oak-copse. Then Banias, in its park of poplars, with the Crusaders’ castle towering behind, grew distinct. The car rattled across a waterless, pebble-strewn river-bed, and came to streams that ran through thickets of oleander and agnuscastus. We had reached Caesarea Philippi.

Here you are in Palestine, yet apart from it. All around you is the murmur of that glorious river that was the life of that land, and has attained to a spiritual existence in the thoughts and dreams of men. Every yard of its course is beautiful, but it is nowhere more delightful than in its amazingly sweet and fresh beginnings, by the old grotto where Pan and the nymphs were worshipped. Some day soon, no doubt, these cool, tumbling waters will be made a summer resort; an hotelkeeper will buy a concession here, will wall them in, and build terraces where gramophones will play in the evening. But for this year, at least, they remain unfettered. Next year—or, if not next year, then the year after—the change will come:

The lonely mountains o’er,
And the resounding shore,
A voice of weeping heard, and loud lament;
From haunted spring, and dale
Edged with poplar pale,
The parting Genius is with sighing sent,
With flower-inwoven tresses torn,
The Nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets mourn.

Here, as I have said, you are apart from Palestine, yet—in all ancient reckoning, though not by the latest political division—of it. Galilee, out of sight, is almost within hail; these singing rivers are hurrying to its lake. You have hardly got too yards to go to see its hills. By the peace of these border brooks, and in shelter of great Hermon, the mind might ask of others and of itself many questions, with good hope of finding answer. “Whom do men say that I the Son of Man am?” For over there, by the busy lake and on the high road between Damascus and the other Caesarea, there was a wrangle of voices, some crying “John the Baptist; some Elias; and others, Jeremias, or one of the prophets.” But here they were blending into a message calmer yet the most arresting that time had heard, and the frowning crag which kept these coasts—there was a castle high above Philip’s Caesarea, whose ruins underlie the fortress that the Crusaders have left—supplied its imagery of assurance. This was the crag that kept guard upon the land and locked its gates towards the desert and Assyria beyond, and unloosened the abundant waters in the cave which Hermon secretly fed.

“Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church.”

Leaving our car, we walked to Jordan’s source and the shrine of Pan and the nymphs. The river raced through a park of poplars, and the path beside it was overshadowed with fig-trees; the evening was drenched with the sweetness of the ripening fruit, an air cool and fragrant by the bounty of stream and tree. When we came to the rock-face the children clambered, wild with delight, searching out each votive niche. From most of the niches all inscriptions had gone, though the carven shells were clear in outline still, but at others the Greek memorials remained and called witness to the fountain’s dedication to the forest king and his friends the nymphs.

I suppose the culture that was here 2,000 years ago was such as a man from Athens would despise, holding it for half-barbarian, with more of Baal-Hermon than the very Pan in it—perhaps an imitation of Hellenism such as the imitation of Parisian thought and ways which the more pretentious Syrians have now affected for many decades. But it was this borrowed love that gave Greek poetry its last genuine flowering. Meleager of Gadara to the true Hellene probably seemed a provincial, slightly pitiful, and absurd figure, daring to talk of the great poets of Athens in accents that had more of the desert than of Attica. But his verses have lilies and falling waters in them, light and fresh airs, and wild music. And not even in his beloved Arcadia could Pan have found waters clearer or more abounding in delightfulness, or figs that carried a richer freight of sweetness and fragrance.

At the Shrine of Venus

Beyond bare mention of Afka’s ruined temple at its source, Baedeker ignores the river where Adonis died. The valley is less visited than formerly; cars cannot go to Afka, and the lower reaches are forest with mule-tracks. Therefore, since the Syrian world is car-crazy, the Hunter’s Stream is forsaken.

At the end of August, 1927, my wife, Professor Seelye of the American University, and I set out from Schweir. Three days of steady tramp brought us to where the valley of the Nahr Ibrahim, the River Adonis, begins in a vast amphitheatre, under enormous cliffs. Towards the cave where the river is born thousands of cypresses march over a soil starved and crumbling—a queerly purposeful and seemingly conscious army, as of endless hooded mourners. They cling even to the sides of the precipitous bluffs. You move through their midst for a mile before you reach the stream.

The cave is set in the cliff, like an eye-socket. There are two main sources (as well as subsidiary minor runnels), one pushing under the rubble of the 1911 landslide (which has filled the cave’s actual floor), the other flooding out from a side-door, bramble-trellised. Both brooks quickly unite in a waterfall beneath a bridge that is fringed with fern and blackberry vine and gold-flowered tutsan. A few scattered trees remain, from a famous walnut park which the landslide swept away. That park (I speak of days before every Syrian became a sportsman) was once the haunt of brown squirrels. They are at Afka no longer.

The whole valley is full of the lovers, not only here but throughout its length. Confronting the falls are the ruins of the Temple of Venus, which Constantine dismantled, as the scene of licentious rites. He cut down her cypress groves, but they have returned. A tiny valley severs cave and ruins; it has a rivulet of its own, with beautiful pools draped with brambles and bellflowers. Silver fern, hart’s-tongue, maidenhair, all grow lushly, as also in the temple’s wall. The hart’s-tongue, which you will not find in Palestine (I know of only one locality, a cave on Mount Gerizim), is not uncommon in Syria. The wall has a tunnel, perhaps a yard in diameter; in it was a cheap coloured print of Virgin and Child, and our muleteers refused to let us camp on the ruins, saying they were a shrine of Mar Yusuf, St. Joseph the husband of Mary. Wild figs and terebinth grow out of the dishonoured walls; the biggest fig was hung with rags, votive gifts of women who wished Venus to prosper them. Venus? asks the reader, and would remind me that this was 1927 and that I have just spoken of a shrine to the Virgin. But the shrine is an affair of yesterday, the work of some private enthusiast, who set up the print and left a bottle opposite it. In 1894 there was no sort of shrine; yet the tree was hung with cloths, as now, and a friend of mine, asking in whose honour it was decorated, received the reply, “Sitt el matrah”—“the Lady of the Place.” That Lady was, and is, Kypris, haunting her old valley and persisting here, centuries after Constantine drove her and her worshippers hence.

Until you know the Syrian hillside, so fretted with rock and spiked with myriads of thorns, you cannot visualise the old legend of the goddess:

Drowned in grief, dishevelled, unsandalled . . .
Briars stab at her feet, and gather her blood.

Thymes and thistles, these—as the botanist knows—carpet a Syrian slope and make of it one fragrant sharpness. Had the goddess fled through an English wilderness, her limbs would have been drenched, but they would not have been flayed, as in this bony and thorn-set soil. The myth is Syrian, plainly enough in all its features bearing the stamp of the land. I have seen these valleys in spring, when the purple windflowers that rose from the Hunter’s blood bloom in their thousands. And when dark fell, above the shattered temple the sacred fig loomed against the sky in the very recognisable likeness of a mighty boar, as though Kypris had chained the felon beast to her shrine. Tusks and snout were plain, and the stiff hairy ridge of the back. The moon was at crescent; and, watching the way it rose above the tremendous eastern precipice and wandered slowly over our valley, looking deeply into the cavern and throwing as it were a lantern’s rays on its inmost crevices, to disappear over the western crags just when the rout of stars stormed the sky, it was easy to understand why the horned Astarte was thought of as the deity who ruled these springs. For there was a peculiar intimacy in the way she sauntered—yes, that was it—above the cliffs and across the heaven, gazing with listless brilliance down, neglecting the rest of the world. The moon at full would have been high above the valley before the daylight had gone; but the crescent moon seemed to walk its sides. Further, Syrians, like Indians, are great connoisseurs of water—this water is sweet, that water exhilarates, and so on; probably this river early acquired a fame for supposed aphrodisiac qualities. “It is very special water,” we were told; “some people came up from Beirut and examined it, and found it had electricity in it. It is very rarely that you find water with electricity in it.” When the scheme is put through by which the Falls of Venus light Beirut the peasant will ask, “Why, if you are so foolish as to maintain that this is ordinary water, was this, and no other, selected to supply Beirut with electricity?” So the river will gain new honour; and the store of votive kerchiefs continue to wave to “the Lady of the Place,” who was once Astarte Syriaca, and then Aphrodite and Venus, and is now the Mother of Christ.

Afka has a bad name with Europeans and Americans who have camped there. Sleeping in the shadow or vicinity of Venus’ shrine your vitality and spirits are lowered. Mists from the river, say some; others, vengeful Aphrodite stalking by the beds of those who slumber where her groves grew, yet acknowledge her not. But we experienced no discomfort, and after two perfect nights, spent between shrine and tumbling water, made our way seawards.

Our journey now took us through the finest forest left in Syria, a wilderness of juniper, terebinth, pine, and oak. We begin with a long detour over a wooded shoulder, then broke a path down to the river again, a broad stream shaded with plane and tamarisk. To keep to the levels and escape another climb we waded it, skirting a mighty lull that had set its foot athwart the river and deflected it. Wading back, we rested by a tiny chapel between two glorious oaks.

In the afternoon our road wound as boulders determined. Densely wooded hills towered either side; the river plunged through rock and jungle. Its course was dotted with boulders, usually fir-crowned—the country seemed to be pine and boulder planted alternately and cheek by jowl. We crossed by a bridge; and from the occasional peasant we began to hear much of Afrat, our next camping place. Seelye and I, trudging tired, asked at every opportunity, “Is there good water at Afrat?” “So good,” we were assured, “that you will never wish to taste any other, after tasting the water of Afrat.” At Afrat it fell to my lot to draw water after night had fallen; as I turned my flash on the pool where the spring emerged, a pariah dog shuffled off, a score of frogs splashed in. The pool swarmed with creatures, and from every stone and coign of vantage brilliant eyes met mine. A monstrous crab patrolled the bottom. We had already tasted the Afrat water, a sour, stinking liquid, when we entered the village; so my companions—who had never been reduced to unqualified Tigris water, as I have—listened to my report, and then, without thanking me, poured away the tinful I had brought, an ungrudged libation.

We had not done with Adonis. A friendly person told us that on this very hill above us “King Adonis and his wife” had once a summer palace, and had put on the rocks “pictures” of themselves and their family. He gave him a bad character as ruler, for he added that we could see the place where “he and his wife” used to hang their subjects. Later, I found that Renan visited this palace of Melek Adonis; but we had only Baedeker, who knows nothing of this valley except that it exists. It seemed worth going out of our way to see. So next day we toiled up the hillside to El Meshnakah, “the Gallows,” a summer seat of the old kings of Byblus. The path, at last escaping from the oak forest, went between two lofty natural monoliths, on which were bas-reliefs dimmed into vagueness. On the right was a standing man; a seated woman confronted him; seated figures were on the flanks of the monolith to our right and on other rocks near. There were sarcophagi cut out of the living rock—“Melek Adonis’ bed,” an old man told us. The two monoliths were grooved across the top—that was where the bar of the gallows ran.

At hand, stone pillars and fine gateways led into the ancient city. But this, outside the walls, was the place of ceremonial sacrifice or of execution; tradition, which invents so much, remembers much as well. The past seems the one thing in Syria that you cannot kill. Here men remembered the cruelty of kings whose very name history has not recorded; in the valley we were now leaving, Aphrodite, whom an Emperor had driven out, persisted through the centuries and still claimed her votive cloths and made folk afraid to sleep beneath her crescent or against her shrine. I remembered how at Amman, in 1919, Engelbach and I had spent the best part of a day going into cave after cave that was piled up with embalmed bodies; the people were Moslems, but they preserved their dead with bitumen, as they had done ages before Mohammad was born, and then thrust them, now secure from hyenas, into open holes where all the generations slept together. I thought of “Kolubetra’s Baths,” and of the solitary grove at Bludan, where they pray towards Hermon; and of how in the loneliest places you will suddenly come upon a tree fluttering with rags. Man’s agony was stamped deep on the forsaken rocks, man’s imagination had filled this valley with passion; the record had been kept by a handful of folk, whose own sorrows had faded out with each generation, while they had handed on these symbols mightier than their own realities.

Olive Groves: Ludd, Palestine, 1927

What berries on your glimmering boughs ye bear,
Grey Olives, like a flock in moonlight seen,
Blanching the field and casting on the air
A haze of dimness! reverie and dream—
Of Athens and the City-Guarding Queen
(The olive-tree’s inventress)—of the glow
That lit the dusk within an old man’s brain
(Remembering how through noon the nightingale
Deep in the dark of your close-plumaged boughs
Sang to Colonus’ million-crocused vale)—
Of men (my friends) who from the lagging train
(Their eyes not cleansed of the deceptive gleam
That dances over Iraq’s desert waste)
In an April morn, with sullen clouds hung low,
Emerging marched to where with muffled roar
The guns were waves bursting on battle’s shore—
Of Kedron midnights when your leaves were roof
Above a blackness pierced and interspaced
Only with glow-worms’ lamps of glassy green.

Grey Olives, ’tis the man ye knew! for proof,
Look in my eyes, and see what memories rouse
At glimpse of your soft leaves and silken sheen.
No alien this—whose spirit understands
Each scent and sound of these beloved lands!

The End