The Entire Project Gutenberg Works of Mark Twain

M >> Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) >> The Entire Project Gutenberg Works of Mark Twain


This morning, during breakfast, the usual assemblage of squalid humanity
sat patiently without the charmed circle of the camp and waited for such
crumbs as pity might bestow upon their misery. There were old and young,
brown-skinned and yellow. Some of the men were tall and stalwart, (for
one hardly sees any where such splendid-looking men as here in the East,)
but all the women and children looked worn and sad, and distressed with
hunger. They reminded me much of Indians, did these people. They had
but little clothing, but such as they had was fanciful in character and
fantastic in its arrangement. Any little absurd gewgaw or gimcrack they
had they disposed in such a way as to make it attract attention most
readily. They sat in silence, and with tireless patience watched our
every motion with that vile, uncomplaining impoliteness which is so truly
Indian, and which makes a white man so nervous and uncomfortable and
savage that he wants to exterminate the whole tribe.

These people about us had other peculiarities, which I have noticed in
the noble red man, too: they were infested with vermin, and the dirt had
caked on them till it amounted to bark.

The little children were in a pitiable condition--they all had sore eyes,
and were otherwise afflicted in various ways. They say that hardly a
native child in all the East is free from sore eyes, and that thousands
of them go blind of one eye or both every year. I think this must be so,
for I see plenty of blind people every day, and I do not remember seeing
any children that hadn't sore eyes. And, would you suppose that an
American mother could sit for an hour, with her child in her arms, and
let a hundred flies roost upon its eyes all that time undisturbed? I see
that every day. It makes my flesh creep. Yesterday we met a woman
riding on a little jackass, and she had a little child in her arms
--honestly, I thought the child had goggles on as we approached, and I
wondered how its mother could afford so much style. But when we drew
near, we saw that the goggles were nothing but a camp meeting of flies
assembled around each of the child's eyes, and at the same time there was
a detachment prospecting its nose. The flies were happy, the child was
contented, and so the mother did not interfere.

As soon as the tribe found out that we had a doctor in our party, they
began to flock in from all quarters. Dr. B., in the charity of his
nature, had taken a child from a woman who sat near by, and put some sort
of a wash upon its diseased eyes. That woman went off and started the
whole nation, and it was a sight to see them swarm! The lame, the halt,
the blind, the leprous--all the distempers that are bred of indolence,
dirt, and iniquity--were represented in the Congress in ten minutes, and
still they came! Every woman that had a sick baby brought it along, and
every woman that hadn't, borrowed one. What reverent and what worshiping
looks they bent upon that dread, mysterious power, the Doctor! They
watched him take his phials out; they watched him measure the particles
of white powder; they watched him add drops of one precious liquid, and
drops of another; they lost not the slightest movement; their eyes were
riveted upon him with a fascination that nothing could distract.
I believe they thought he was gifted like a god. When each individual
got his portion of medicine, his eyes were radiant with joy
--notwithstanding by nature they are a thankless and impassive race--and
upon his face was written the unquestioning faith that nothing on earth
could prevent the patient from getting well now.

Christ knew how to preach to these simple, superstitious,
disease-tortured creatures: He healed the sick. They flocked to our
poor human doctor this morning when the fame of what he had done to the
sick child went abroad in the land, and they worshiped him with their
eyes while they did not know as yet whether there was virtue in his
simples or not. The ancestors of these--people precisely like them in
color, dress, manners, customs, simplicity--flocked in vast multitudes
after Christ, and when they saw Him make the afflicted whole with a
word, it is no wonder they worshiped Him. No wonder His deeds were the
talk of the nation. No wonder the multitude that followed Him was so
great that at one time--thirty miles from here--they had to let a sick
man down through the roof because no approach could be made to the door;
no wonder His audiences were so great at Galilee that He had to preach
from a ship removed a little distance from the shore; no wonder that
even in the desert places about Bethsaida, five thousand invaded His
solitude, and He had to feed them by a miracle or else see them suffer
for their confiding faith and devotion; no wonder when there was a great
commotion in a city in those days, one neighbor explained it to another
in words to this effect: "They say that Jesus of Nazareth is come!"

Well, as I was saying, the doctor distributed medicine as long as he had
any to distribute, and his reputation is mighty in Galilee this day.
Among his patients was the child of the Shiek's daughter--for even this
poor, ragged handful of sores and sin has its royal Shiek--a poor old
mummy that looked as if he would be more at home in a poor-house than in
the Chief Magistracy of this tribe of hopeless, shirtless savages. The
princess--I mean the Shiek's daughter--was only thirteen or fourteen
years old, and had a very sweet face and a pretty one. She was the only
Syrian female we have seen yet who was not so sinfully ugly that she
couldn't smile after ten o'clock Saturday night without breaking the
Sabbath. Her child was a hard specimen, though--there wasn't enough of
it to make a pie, and the poor little thing looked so pleadingly up at
all who came near it (as if it had an idea that now was its chance or
never,) that we were filled with compassion which was genuine and not put
on.

But this last new horse I have got is trying to break his neck over the
tent-ropes, and I shall have to go out and anchor him. Jericho and I
have parted company. The new horse is not much to boast of, I think.
One of his hind legs bends the wrong way, and the other one is as
straight and stiff as a tent-pole. Most of his teeth are gone, and he is
as blind as bat. His nose has been broken at some time or other, and is
arched like a culvert now. His under lip hangs down like a camel's, and
his ears are chopped off close to his head. I had some trouble at first
to find a name for him, but I finally concluded to call him Baalbec,
because he is such a magnificent ruin. I can not keep from talking about
my horses, because I have a very long and tedious journey before me, and
they naturally occupy my thoughts about as much as matters of apparently
much greater importance.

We satisfied our pilgrims by making those hard rides from Baalbec to
Damascus, but Dan's horse and Jack's were so crippled we had to leave
them behind and get fresh animals for them. The dragoman says Jack's
horse died. I swapped horses with Mohammed, the kingly-looking Egyptian
who is our Ferguson's lieutenant. By Ferguson I mean our dragoman
Abraham, of course. I did not take this horse on account of his personal
appearance, but because I have not seen his back. I do not wish to see
it. I have seen the backs of all the other horses, and found most of
them covered with dreadful saddle-boils which I know have not been washed
or doctored for years. The idea of riding all day long over such ghastly
inquisitions of torture is sickening. My horse must be like the others,
but I have at least the consolation of not knowing it to be so.

I hope that in future I may be spared any more sentimental praises of the
Arab's idolatry of his horse. In boyhood I longed to be an Arab of the
desert and have a beautiful mare, and call her Selim or Benjamin or
Mohammed, and feed her with my own hands, and let her come into the tent,
and teach her to caress me and look fondly upon me with her great tender
eyes; and I wished that a stranger might come at such a time and offer me
a hundred thousand dollars for her, so that I could do like the other
Arabs--hesitate, yearn for the money, but overcome by my love for my
mare, at last say, "Part with thee, my beautiful one! Never with my
life! Away, tempter, I scorn thy gold!" and then bound into the saddle
and speed over the desert like the wind!

But I recall those aspirations. If these Arabs be like the other Arabs,
their love for their beautiful mares is a fraud. These of my
acquaintance have no love for their horses, no sentiment of pity for
them, and no knowledge of how to treat them or care for them. The Syrian
saddle-blanket is a quilted mattress two or three inches thick. It is
never removed from the horse, day or night. It gets full of dirt and
hair, and becomes soaked with sweat. It is bound to breed sores. These
pirates never think of washing a horse's back. They do not shelter the
horses in the tents, either--they must stay out and take the weather as
it comes. Look at poor cropped and dilapidated "Baalbec," and weep for
the sentiment that has been wasted upon the Selims of romance!




CHAPTER XLVI.

About an hour's ride over a rough, rocky road, half flooded with water,
and through a forest of oaks of Bashan, brought us to Dan.

From a little mound here in the plain issues a broad stream of limpid
water and forms a large shallow pool, and then rushes furiously onward,
augmented in volume. This puddle is an important source of the Jordan.
Its banks, and those of the brook are respectably adorned with blooming
oleanders, but the unutterable beauty of the spot will not throw a
well-balanced man into convulsions, as the Syrian books of travel would
lead one to suppose.

From the spot I am speaking of, a cannon-ball would carry beyond the
confines of Holy Land and light upon profane ground three miles away.
We were only one little hour's travel within the borders of Holy Land--we
had hardly begun to appreciate yet that we were standing upon any
different sort of earth than that we had always been used to, and see how
the historic names began already to cluster! Dan--Bashan--Lake Huleh
--the Sources of Jordan--the Sea of Galilee. They were all in sight but
the last, and it was not far away. The little township of Bashan was
once the kingdom so famous in Scripture for its bulls and its oaks.
Lake Huleh is the Biblical "Waters of Merom." Dan was the northern and
Beersheba the southern limit of Palestine--hence the expression "from Dan
to Beersheba." It is equivalent to our phrases "from Maine to Texas"
--"from Baltimore to San Francisco." Our expression and that of the
Israelites both mean the same--great distance. With their slow camels
and asses, it was about a seven days' journey from Dan to Beersheba---say
a hundred and fifty or sixty miles--it was the entire length of their
country, and was not to be undertaken without great preparation and much
ceremony. When the Prodigal traveled to "a far country," it is not
likely that he went more than eighty or ninety miles. Palestine is only
from forty to sixty miles wide. The State of Missouri could be split
into three Palestines, and there would then be enough material left for
part of another--possibly a whole one. From Baltimore to San Francisco
is several thousand miles, but it will be only a seven days' journey in
the cars when I am two or three years older.--[The railroad has been
completed since the above was written.]--If I live I shall necessarily
have to go across the continent every now and then in those cars, but one
journey from Dan to Beersheba will be sufficient, no doubt. It must be
the most trying of the two. Therefore, if we chance to discover that
from Dan to Beersheba seemed a mighty stretch of country to the
Israelites, let us not be airy with them, but reflect that it was and is
a mighty stretch when one can not traverse it by rail.

The small mound I have mentioned a while ago was once occupied by the
Phenician city of Laish. A party of filibusters from Zorah and Eschol
captured the place, and lived there in a free and easy way, worshiping
gods of their own manufacture and stealing idols from their neighbors
whenever they wore their own out. Jeroboam set up a golden calf here to
fascinate his people and keep them from making dangerous trips to
Jerusalem to worship, which might result in a return to their rightful
allegiance. With all respect for those ancient Israelites, I can not
overlook the fact that they were not always virtuous enough to withstand
the seductions of a golden calf. Human nature has not changed much since
then.

Some forty centuries ago the city of Sodom was pillaged by the Arab
princes of Mesopotamia, and among other prisoners they seized upon the
patriarch Lot and brought him here on their way to their own possessions.
They brought him to Dan, and father Abraham, who was pursuing them, crept
softly in at dead of night, among the whispering oleanders and under the
shadows of the stately oaks, and fell upon the slumbering victors and
startled them from their dreams with the clash of steel. He recaptured
Lot and all the other plunder.

We moved on. We were now in a green valley, five or six miles wide and
fifteen long. The streams which are called the sources of the Jordan
flow through it to Lake Huleh, a shallow pond three miles in diameter,
and from the southern extremity of the Lake the concentrated Jordan flows
out. The Lake is surrounded by a broad marsh, grown with reeds. Between
the marsh and the mountains which wall the valley is a respectable strip
of fertile land; at the end of the valley, toward Dan, as much as half
the land is solid and fertile, and watered by Jordan's sources. There is
enough of it to make a farm. It almost warrants the enthusiasm of the
spies of that rabble of adventurers who captured Dan. They said: "We
have seen the land, and behold it is very good. * * * A place where
there is no want of any thing that is in the earth."

Their enthusiasm was at least warranted by the fact that they had never
seen a country as good as this. There was enough of it for the ample
support of their six hundred men and their families, too.

When we got fairly down on the level part of the Danite farm, we came to
places where we could actually run our horses. It was a notable
circumstance.

We had been painfully clambering over interminable hills and rocks for
days together, and when we suddenly came upon this astonishing piece of
rockless plain, every man drove the spurs into his horse and sped away
with a velocity he could surely enjoy to the utmost, but could never hope
to comprehend in Syria.

Here were evidences of cultivation--a rare sight in this country--an acre
or two of rich soil studded with last season's dead corn-stalks of the
thickness of your thumb and very wide apart. But in such a land it was a
thrilling spectacle. Close to it was a stream, and on its banks a great
herd of curious-looking Syrian goats and sheep were gratefully eating
gravel. I do not state this as a petrified fact--I only suppose they
were eating gravel, because there did not appear to be any thing else for
them to eat. The shepherds that tended them were the very pictures of
Joseph and his brethren I have no doubt in the world. They were tall,
muscular, and very dark-skinned Bedouins, with inky black beards. They
had firm lips, unquailing eyes, and a kingly stateliness of bearing.
They wore the parti-colored half bonnet, half hood, with fringed ends
falling upon their shoulders, and the full, flowing robe barred with
broad black stripes--the dress one sees in all pictures of the swarthy
sons of the desert. These chaps would sell their younger brothers if
they had a chance, I think. They have the manners, the customs, the
dress, the occupation and the loose principles of the ancient stock.
[They attacked our camp last night, and I bear them no good will.]
They had with them the pigmy jackasses one sees all over Syria and
remembers in all pictures of the "Flight into Egypt," where Mary and the
Young Child are riding and Joseph is walking alongside, towering high
above the little donkey's shoulders.

But really, here the man rides and carries the child, as a general thing,
and the woman walks. The customs have not changed since Joseph's time.
We would not have in our houses a picture representing Joseph riding and
Mary walking; we would see profanation in it, but a Syrian Christian
would not. I know that hereafter the picture I first spoke of will look
odd to me.

We could not stop to rest two or three hours out from our camp, of
course, albeit the brook was beside us. So we went on an hour longer.
We saw water, then, but nowhere in all the waste around was there a foot
of shade, and we were scorching to death. "Like unto the shadow of a
great rock in a weary land." Nothing in the Bible is more beautiful than
that, and surely there is no place we have wandered to that is able to
give it such touching expression as this blistering, naked, treeless
land.

Here you do not stop just when you please, but when you can. We found
water, but no shade. We traveled on and found a tree at last, but no
water. We rested and lunched, and came on to this place, Ain Mellahah
(the boys call it Baldwinsville.) It was a very short day's run, but the
dragoman does not want to go further, and has invented a plausible lie
about the country beyond this being infested by ferocious Arabs, who
would make sleeping in their midst a dangerous pastime. Well, they ought
to be dangerous. They carry a rusty old weather-beaten flint-lock gun,
with a barrel that is longer than themselves; it has no sights on it, it
will not carry farther than a brickbat, and is not half so certain. And
the great sash they wear in many a fold around their waists has two or
three absurd old horse-pistols in it that are rusty from eternal disuse
--weapons that would hang fire just about long enough for you to walk out
of range, and then burst and blow the Arab's head off. Exceedingly
dangerous these sons of the desert are.

It used to make my blood run cold to read Wm. C. Grimes' hairbreadth
escapes from Bedouins, but I think I could read them now without a
tremor. He never said he was attacked by Bedouins, I believe, or was
ever treated uncivilly, but then in about every other chapter he
discovered them approaching, any how, and he had a blood-curdling fashion
of working up the peril; and of wondering how his relations far away
would feel could they see their poor wandering boy, with his weary feet
and his dim eyes, in such fearful danger; and of thinking for the last
time of the old homestead, and the dear old church, and the cow, and
those things; and of finally straightening his form to its utmost height
in the saddle, drawing his trusty revolver, and then dashing the spurs
into "Mohammed" and sweeping down upon the ferocious enemy determined to
sell his life as dearly as possible. True the Bedouins never did any
thing to him when he arrived, and never had any intention of doing any
thing to him in the first place, and wondered what in the mischief he was
making all that to-do about; but still I could not divest myself of the
idea, somehow, that a frightful peril had been escaped through that man's
dare-devil bravery, and so I never could read about Wm. C. Grimes'
Bedouins and sleep comfortably afterward. But I believe the Bedouins to
be a fraud, now. I have seen the monster, and I can outrun him. I shall
never be afraid of his daring to stand behind his own gun and discharge
it.

About fifteen hundred years before Christ, this camp-ground of ours by
the Waters of Merom was the scene of one of Joshua's exterminating
battles. Jabin, King of Hazor, (up yonder above Dan,) called all the
sheiks about him together, with their hosts, to make ready for Israel's
terrible General who was approaching.

"And when all these Kings were met together, they came and pitched
together by the Waters of Merom, to fight against Israel. And they
went out, they and all their hosts with them, much people, even as
the sand that is upon the sea-shore for multitude," etc.

But Joshua fell upon them and utterly destroyed them, root and branch.
That was his usual policy in war. He never left any chance for newspaper
controversies about who won the battle. He made this valley, so quiet
now, a reeking slaughter-pen.

Somewhere in this part of the country--I do not know exactly where
--Israel fought another bloody battle a hundred years later. Deborah, the
prophetess, told Barak to take ten thousand men and sally forth against
another King Jabin who had been doing something. Barak came down from
Mount Tabor, twenty or twenty-five miles from here, and gave battle to
Jabin's forces, who were in command of Sisera. Barak won the fight, and
while he was making the victory complete by the usual method of
exterminating the remnant of the defeated host, Sisera fled away on foot,
and when he was nearly exhausted by fatigue and thirst, one Jael, a woman
he seems to have been acquainted with, invited him to come into her tent
and rest himself. The weary soldier acceded readily enough, and Jael put
him to bed. He said he was very thirsty, and asked his generous
preserver to get him a cup of water. She brought him some milk, and he
drank of it gratefully and lay down again, to forget in pleasant dreams
his lost battle and his humbled pride. Presently when he was asleep she
came softly in with a hammer and drove a hideous tent-pen down through
his brain!

"For he was fast asleep and weary. So he died." Such is the touching
language of the Bible. "The Song of Deborah and Barak" praises Jael for
the memorable service she had rendered, in an exultant strain:

"Blessed above women shall Jael the wife of Heber the Kenite be,
blessed shall she be above women in the tent.

"He asked for water, and she gave him milk; she brought forth butter
in a lordly dish.

"She put her hand to the nail, and her right hand to the workman's
hammer; and with the hammer she smote Sisera, she smote off his head
when she had pierced and stricken through his temples.

"At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down: at her feet he bowed,
he fell: where he bowed, there he fell down dead."

Stirring scenes like these occur in this valley no more. There is not a
solitary village throughout its whole extent--not for thirty miles in
either direction. There are two or three small clusters of Bedouin
tents, but not a single permanent habitation. One may ride ten miles,
hereabouts, and not see ten human beings.

To this region one of the prophecies is applied:

"I will bring the land into desolation; and your enemies which dwell
therein shall be astonished at it. And I will scatter you among the
heathen, and I will draw out a sword after you; and your land shall
be desolate and your cities waste."

No man can stand here by deserted Ain Mellahah and say the prophecy has
not been fulfilled.

In a verse from the Bible which I have quoted above, occurs the phrase
"all these kings." It attracted my attention in a moment, because it
carries to my mind such a vastly different significance from what it
always did at home. I can see easily enough that if I wish to profit by
this tour and come to a correct understanding of the matters of interest
connected with it, I must studiously and faithfully unlearn a great many
things I have somehow absorbed concerning Palestine. I must begin a
system of reduction. Like my grapes which the spies bore out of the
Promised Land, I have got every thing in Palestine on too large a scale.
Some of my ideas were wild enough. The word Palestine always brought to
my mind a vague suggestion of a country as large as the United States.
I do not know why, but such was the case. I suppose it was because I
could not conceive of a small country having so large a history. I think
I was a little surprised to find that the grand Sultan of Turkey was a
man of only ordinary size. I must try to reduce my ideas of Palestine to
a more reasonable shape. One gets large impressions in boyhood,
sometimes, which he has to fight against all his life. "All these
kings." When I used to read that in Sunday School, it suggested to me
the several kings of such countries as England, France, Spain, Germany,
Russia, etc., arrayed in splendid robes ablaze with jewels, marching in
grave procession, with sceptres of gold in their hands and flashing
crowns upon their heads. But here in Ain Mellahah, after coming through
Syria, and after giving serious study to the character and customs of the
country, the phrase "all these kings" loses its grandeur. It suggests
only a parcel of petty chiefs--ill-clad and ill-conditioned savages much
like our Indians, who lived in full sight of each other and whose
"kingdoms" were large when they were five miles square and contained two
thousand souls. The combined monarchies of the thirty "kings" destroyed
by Joshua on one of his famous campaigns, only covered an area about
equal to four of our counties of ordinary size. The poor old sheik we
saw at Cesarea Philippi with his ragged band of a hundred followers,
would have been called a "king" in those ancient times.