The Innocents Abroad

M >> Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) >> The Innocents Abroad


Daylight came, soon after we got under way, and in the course of an hour
or two we reached the Dead Sea. Nothing grows in the flat, burning
desert around it but weeds and the Dead Sea apple the poets say is
beautiful to the eye, but crumbles to ashes and dust when you break it.
Such as we found were not handsome, but they were bitter to the taste.
They yielded no dust. It was because they were not ripe, perhaps.

The desert and the barren hills gleam painfully in the sun, around the
Dead Sea, and there is no pleasant thing or living creature upon it or
about its borders to cheer the eye. It is a scorching, arid, repulsive
solitude. A silence broods over the scene that is depressing to the
spirits. It makes one think of funerals and death.

The Dead Sea is small. Its waters are very clear, and it has a pebbly
bottom and is shallow for some distance out from the shores. It yields
quantities of asphaltum; fragments of it lie all about its banks; this
stuff gives the place something of an unpleasant smell.

All our reading had taught us to expect that the first plunge into the
Dead Sea would be attended with distressing results--our bodies would
feel as if they were suddenly pierced by millions of red-hot needles; the
dreadful smarting would continue for hours; we might even look to be
blistered from head to foot, and suffer miserably for many days. We were
disappointed. Our eight sprang in at the same time that another party of
pilgrims did, and nobody screamed once. None of them ever did complain
of any thing more than a slight pricking sensation in places where their
skin was abraded, and then only for a short time. My face smarted for a
couple of hours, but it was partly because I got it badly sun-burned
while I was bathing, and staid in so long that it became plastered over
with salt.

No, the water did not blister us; it did not cover us with a slimy ooze
and confer upon us an atrocious fragrance; it was not very slimy; and I
could not discover that we smelt really any worse than we have always
smelt since we have been in Palestine. It was only a different kind of
smell, but not conspicuous on that account, because we have a great deal
of variety in that respect. We didn't smell, there on the Jordan, the
same as we do in Jerusalem; and we don't smell in Jerusalem just as we
did in Nazareth, or Tiberias, or Cesarea Philippi, or any of those other
ruinous ancient towns in Galilee. No, we change all the time, and
generally for the worse. We do our own washing.

It was a funny bath. We could not sink. One could stretch himself at
full length on his back, with his arms on his breast, and all of his body
above a line drawn from the corner of his jaw past the middle of his
side, the middle of his leg and through his ancle bone, would remain out
of water. He could lift his head clear out, if he chose. No position
can be retained long; you lose your balance and whirl over, first on your
back and then on your face, and so on. You can lie comfortably, on your
back, with your head out, and your legs out from your knees down, by
steadying yourself with your hands. You can sit, with your knees drawn
up to your chin and your arms clasped around them, but you are bound to
turn over presently, because you are top-heavy in that position. You can
stand up straight in water that is over your head, and from the middle of
your breast upward you will not be wet. But you can not remain so. The
water will soon float your feet to the surface. You can not swim on your
back and make any progress of any consequence, because your feet stick
away above the surface, and there is nothing to propel yourself with but
your heels. If you swim on your face, you kick up the water like a
stern-wheel boat. You make no headway. A horse is so top-heavy that he
can neither swim nor stand up in the Dead Sea. He turns over on his side
at once. Some of us bathed for more than an hour, and then came out
coated with salt till we shone like icicles. We scrubbed it off with a
coarse towel and rode off with a splendid brand-new smell, though it was
one which was not any more disagreeable than those we have been for
several weeks enjoying. It was the variegated villainy and novelty of it
that charmed us. Salt crystals glitter in the sun about the shores of
the lake. In places they coat the ground like a brilliant crust of ice.

When I was a boy I somehow got the impression that the river Jordan was
four thousand miles long and thirty-five miles wide. It is only ninety
miles long, and so crooked that a man does not know which side of it he
is on half the time. In going ninety miles it does not get over more
than fifty miles of ground. It is not any wider than Broadway in New
York.

There is the Sea of Galilee and this Dead Sea--neither of them twenty
miles long or thirteen wide. And yet when I was in Sunday School I
thought they were sixty thousand miles in diameter.

Travel and experience mar the grandest pictures and rob us of the most
cherished traditions of our boyhood. Well, let them go. I have already
seen the Empire of King Solomon diminish to the size of the State of
Pennsylvania; I suppose I can bear the reduction of the seas and the
river.

We looked every where, as we passed along, but never saw grain or crystal
of Lot's wife. It was a great disappointment. For many and many a year
we had known her sad story, and taken that interest in her which
misfortune always inspires. But she was gone. Her picturesque form no
longer looms above the desert of the Dead Sea to remind the tourist of
the doom that fell upon the lost cities.

I can not describe the hideous afternoon's ride from the Dead Sea to Mars
Saba. It oppresses me yet, to think of it. The sun so pelted us that
the tears ran down our cheeks once or twice. The ghastly, treeless,
grassless, breathless canons smothered us as if we had been in an oven.
The sun had positive weight to it, I think. Not a man could sit erect
under it. All drooped low in the saddles. John preached in this
"Wilderness!" It must have been exhausting work. What a very heaven the
messy towers and ramparts of vast Mars Saba looked to us when we caught a
first glimpse of them!

We staid at this great convent all night, guests of the hospitable
priests. Mars Saba, perched upon a crag, a human nest stock high up
against a perpendicular mountain wall, is a world of grand masonry that
rises, terrace upon terrace away above your head, like the terraced and
retreating colonnades one sees in fanciful pictures of Belshazzar's Feast
and the palaces of the ancient Pharaohs. No other human dwelling is
near. It was founded many ages ago by a holy recluse who lived at first
in a cave in the rock--a cave which is inclosed in the convent walls,
now, and was reverently shown to us by the priests. This recluse, by his
rigorous torturing of his flesh, his diet of bread and water, his utter
withdrawal from all society and from the vanities of the world, and his
constant prayer and saintly contemplation of a skull, inspired an
emulation that brought about him many disciples. The precipice on the
opposite side of the canyon is well perforated with the small holes they
dug in the rock to live in. The present occupants of Mars Saba, about
seventy in number, are all hermits. They wear a coarse robe, an ugly,
brimless stove-pipe of a hat, and go without shoes. They eat nothing
whatever but bread and salt; they drink nothing but water. As long as
they live they can never go outside the walls, or look upon a woman--for
no woman is permitted to enter Mars Saba, upon any pretext whatsoever.

Some of those men have been shut up there for thirty years. In all that
dreary time they have not heard the laughter of a child or the blessed
voice of a woman; they have seen no human tears, no human smiles; they
have known no human joys, no wholesome human sorrows. In their hearts
are no memories of the past, in their brains no dreams of the future.
All that is lovable, beautiful, worthy, they have put far away from them;
against all things that are pleasant to look upon, and all sounds that
are music to the ear, they have barred their massive doors and reared
their relentless walls of stone forever. They have banished the tender
grace of life and left only the sapped and skinny mockery. Their lips
are lips that never kiss and never sing; their hearts are hearts that
never hate and never love; their breasts are breasts that never swell
with the sentiment, "I have a country and a flag." They are dead men who
walk.

I set down these first thoughts because they are natural--not because
they are just or because it is right to set them down. It is easy for
book-makers to say "I thought so and so as I looked upon such and such a
scene"--when the truth is, they thought all those fine things afterwards.
One's first thought is not likely to be strictly accurate, yet it is no
crime to think it and none to write it down, subject to modification by
later experience. These hermits are dead men, in several respects, but
not in all; and it is not proper, that, thinking ill of them at first, I
should go on doing so, or, speaking ill of them I should reiterate the
words and stick to them. No, they treated us too kindly for that. There
is something human about them somewhere. They knew we were foreigners
and Protestants, and not likely to feel admiration or much friendliness
toward them. But their large charity was above considering such things.
They simply saw in us men who were hungry, and thirsty, and tired, and
that was sufficient. They opened their doors and gave us welcome. They
asked no questions, and they made no self-righteous display of their
hospitality. They fished for no compliments. They moved quietly about,
setting the table for us, making the beds, and bringing water to wash in,
and paid no heed when we said it was wrong for them to do that when we
had men whose business it was to perform such offices. We fared most
comfortably, and sat late at dinner. We walked all over the building
with the hermits afterward, and then sat on the lofty battlements and
smoked while we enjoyed the cool air, the wild scenery and the sunset.
One or two chose cosy bed-rooms to sleep in, but the nomadic instinct
prompted the rest to sleep on the broad divan that extended around the
great hall, because it seemed like sleeping out of doors, and so was more
cheery and inviting. It was a royal rest we had.

When we got up to breakfast in the morning, we were new men. For all
this hospitality no strict charge was made. We could give something if
we chose; we need give nothing, if we were poor or if we were stingy.
The pauper and the miser are as free as any in the Catholic Convents of
Palestine. I have been educated to enmity toward every thing that is
Catholic, and sometimes, in consequence of this, I find it much easier to
discover Catholic faults than Catholic merits. But there is one thing I
feel no disposition to overlook, and no disposition to forget: and that
is, the honest gratitude I and all pilgrims owe, to the Convent Fathers
in Palestine. Their doors are always open, and there is always a welcome
for any worthy man who comes, whether he comes in rags or clad in purple.
The Catholic Convents are a priceless blessing to the poor. A pilgrim
without money, whether he be a Protestant or a Catholic, can travel the
length and breadth of Palestine, and in the midst of her desert wastes
find wholesome food and a clean bed every night, in these buildings.
Pilgrims in better circumstances are often stricken down by the sun and
the fevers of the country, and then their saving refuge is the Convent.
Without these hospitable retreats, travel in Palestine would be a
pleasure which none but the strongest men could dare to undertake. Our
party, pilgrims and all, will always be ready and always willing, to
touch glasses and drink health, prosperity and long life to the Convent
Fathers of Palestine.

So, rested and refreshed, we fell into line and filed away over the
barren mountains of Judea, and along rocky ridges and through sterile
gorges, where eternal silence and solitude reigned. Even the scattering
groups of armed shepherds we met the afternoon before, tending their
flocks of long-haired goats, were wanting here. We saw but two living
creatures. They were gazelles, of "soft-eyed" notoriety. They looked
like very young kids, but they annihilated distance like an express
train. I have not seen animals that moved faster, unless I might say it
of the antelopes of our own great plains.

At nine or ten in the morning we reached the Plain of the Shepherds, and
stood in a walled garden of olives where the shepherds were watching
their flocks by night, eighteen centuries ago, when the multitude of
angels brought them the tidings that the Saviour was born. A quarter of
a mile away was Bethlehem of Judea, and the pilgrims took some of the
stone wall and hurried on.

The Plain of the Shepherds is a desert, paved with loose stones, void of
vegetation, glaring in the fierce sun. Only the music of the angels it
knew once could charm its shrubs and flowers to life again and restore
its vanished beauty. No less potent enchantment could avail to work this
miracle.

In the huge Church of the Nativity, in Bethlehem, built fifteen hundred
years ago by the inveterate St. Helena, they took us below ground, and
into a grotto cut in the living rock. This was the "manger" where Christ
was born. A silver star set in the floor bears a Latin inscription to
that effect. It is polished with the kisses of many generations of
worshiping pilgrims. The grotto was tricked out in the usual tasteless
style observable in all the holy places of Palestine. As in the Church
of the Holy Sepulchre, envy and uncharitableness were apparent here. The
priests and the members of the Greek and Latin churches can not come by
the same corridor to kneel in the sacred birthplace of the Redeemer, but
are compelled to approach and retire by different avenues, lest they
quarrel and fight on this holiest ground on earth.

I have no "meditations," suggested by this spot where the very first
"Merry Christmas!" was uttered in all the world, and from whence the
friend of my childhood, Santa Claus, departed on his first journey, to
gladden and continue to gladden roaring firesides on wintry mornings in
many a distant land forever and forever. I touch, with reverent finger,
the actual spot where the infant Jesus lay, but I think--nothing.

You can not think in this place any more than you can in any other in
Palestine that would be likely to inspire reflection. Beggars, cripples
and monks compass you about, and make you think only of bucksheesh when
you would rather think of something more in keeping with the character of
the spot.

I was glad to get away, and glad when we had walked through the grottoes
where Eusebius wrote, and Jerome fasted, and Joseph prepared for the
flight into Egypt, and the dozen other distinguished grottoes, and knew
we were done. The Church of the Nativity is almost as well packed with
exceeding holy places as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre itself. They
even have in it a grotto wherein twenty thousand children were
slaughtered by Herod when he was seeking the life of the infant Saviour.

We went to the Milk Grotto, of course--a cavern where Mary hid herself
for a while before the flight into Egypt. Its walls were black before
she entered, but in suckling the Child, a drop of her milk fell upon the
floor and instantly changed the darkness of the walls to its own snowy
hue. We took many little fragments of stone from here, because it is
well known in all the East that a barren woman hath need only to touch
her lips to one of these and her failing will depart from her. We took
many specimens, to the end that we might confer happiness upon certain
households that we wot of.

We got away from Bethlehem and its troops of beggars and relic-peddlers
in the afternoon, and after spending some little time at Rachel's tomb,
hurried to Jerusalem as fast as possible. I never was so glad to get
home again before. I never have enjoyed rest as I have enjoyed it during
these last few hours. The journey to the Dead Sea, the Jordan and
Bethlehem was short, but it was an exhausting one. Such roasting heat,
such oppressive solitude, and such dismal desolation can not surely exist
elsewhere on earth. And such fatigue!

The commonest sagacity warns me that I ought to tell the customary
pleasant lie, and say I tore myself reluctantly away from every noted
place in Palestine. Every body tells that, but with as little
ostentation as I may, I doubt the word of every he who tells it. I could
take a dreadful oath that I have never heard any one of our forty
pilgrims say any thing of the sort, and they are as worthy and as
sincerely devout as any that come here. They will say it when they get
home, fast enough, but why should they not? They do not wish to array
themselves against all the Lamartines and Grimeses in the world. It does
not stand to reason that men are reluctant to leave places where the very
life is almost badgered out of them by importunate swarms of beggars and
peddlers who hang in strings to one's sleeves and coat-tails and shriek
and shout in his ears and horrify his vision with the ghastly sores and
malformations they exhibit. One is glad to get away. I have heard
shameless people say they were glad to get away from Ladies' Festivals
where they were importuned to buy by bevies of lovely young ladies.
Transform those houris into dusky hags and ragged savages, and replace
their rounded forms with shrunken and knotted distortions, their soft
hands with scarred and hideous deformities, and the persuasive music of
their voices with the discordant din of a hated language, and then see
how much lingering reluctance to leave could be mustered. No, it is the
neat thing to say you were reluctant, and then append the profound
thoughts that "struggled for utterance," in your brain; but it is the
true thing to say you were not reluctant, and found it impossible to
think at all--though in good sooth it is not respectable to say it, and
not poetical, either.

We do not think, in the holy places; we think in bed, afterwards, when
the glare, and the noise, and the confusion are gone, and in fancy we
revisit alone, the solemn monuments of the past, and summon the phantom
pageants of an age that has passed away.




CHAPTER LVI.

We visited all the holy places about Jerusalem which we had left
unvisited when we journeyed to the Jordan and then, about three o'clock
one afternoon, we fell into procession and marched out at the stately
Damascus gate, and the walls of Jerusalem shut us out forever. We paused
on the summit of a distant hill and took a final look and made a final
farewell to the venerable city which had been such a good home to us.

For about four hours we traveled down hill constantly. We followed a
narrow bridle-path which traversed the beds of the mountain gorges, and
when we could we got out of the way of the long trains of laden camels
and asses, and when we could not we suffered the misery of being mashed
up against perpendicular walls of rock and having our legs bruised by the
passing freight. Jack was caught two or three times, and Dan and Moult
as often. One horse had a heavy fall on the slippery rocks, and the
others had narrow escapes. However, this was as good a road as we had
found in Palestine, and possibly even the best, and so there was not much
grumbling.

Sometimes, in the glens, we came upon luxuriant orchards of figs,
apricots, pomegranates, and such things, but oftener the scenery was
rugged, mountainous, verdureless and forbidding. Here and there, towers
were perched high up on acclivities which seemed almost inaccessible.
This fashion is as old as Palestine itself and was adopted in ancient
times for security against enemies.

We crossed the brook which furnished David the stone that killed Goliah,
and no doubt we looked upon the very ground whereon that noted battle was
fought. We passed by a picturesque old gothic ruin whose stone pavements
had rung to the armed heels of many a valorous Crusader, and we rode
through a piece of country which we were told once knew Samson as a
citizen.

We staid all night with the good monks at the convent of Ramleh, and in
the morning got up and galloped the horses a good part of the distance
from there to Jaffa, or Joppa, for the plain was as level as a floor and
free from stones, and besides this was our last march in Holy Land.
These two or three hours finished, we and the tired horses could have
rest and sleep as long as we wanted it. This was the plain of which
Joshua spoke when he said, "Sun, stand thou still on Gibeon, and thou
moon in the valley of Ajalon." As we drew near to Jaffa, the boys
spurred up the horses and indulged in the excitement of an actual race
--an experience we had hardly had since we raced on donkeys in the Azores
islands.

We came finally to the noble grove of orange-trees in which the Oriental
city of Jaffa lies buried; we passed through the walls, and rode again
down narrow streets and among swarms of animated rags, and saw other
sights and had other experiences we had long been familiar with. We
dismounted, for the last time, and out in the offing, riding at anchor,
we saw the ship! I put an exclamation point there because we felt one
when we saw the vessel. The long pilgrimage was ended, and somehow we
seemed to feel glad of it.

[For description of Jaffa, see Universal Gazetteer.] Simon the Tanner
formerly lived here. We went to his house. All the pilgrims visit Simon
the Tanner's house. Peter saw the vision of the beasts let down in a
sheet when he lay upon the roof of Simon the Tanner's house. It was from
Jaffa that Jonah sailed when he was told to go and prophesy against
Nineveh, and no doubt it was not far from the town that the whale threw
him up when he discovered that he had no ticket. Jonah was disobedient,
and of a fault-finding, complaining disposition, and deserves to be
lightly spoken of, almost. The timbers used in the construction of
Solomon's Temple were floated to Jaffa in rafts, and the narrow opening
in the reef through which they passed to the shore is not an inch wider
or a shade less dangerous to navigate than it was then. Such is the
sleepy nature of the population Palestine's only good seaport has now and
always had. Jaffa has a history and a stirring one. It will not be
discovered any where in this book. If the reader will call at the
circulating library and mention my name, he will be furnished with books
which will afford him the fullest information concerning Jaffa.

So ends the pilgrimage. We ought to be glad that we did not make it for
the purpose of feasting our eyes upon fascinating aspects of nature, for
we should have been disappointed--at least at this season of the year. A
writer in "Life in the Holy Land" observes:

"Monotonous and uninviting as much of the Holy Land will appear to
persons accustomed to the almost constant verdure of flowers, ample
streams and varied surface of our own country, we must remember that
its aspect to the Israelites after the weary march of forty years
through the desert must have been very different."

Which all of us will freely grant. But it truly is "monotonous and
uninviting," and there is no sufficient reason for describing it as being
otherwise.

Of all the lands there are for dismal scenery, I think Palestine must be
the prince. The hills are barren, they are dull of color, they are
unpicturesque in shape. The valleys are unsightly deserts fringed with a
feeble vegetation that has an expression about it of being sorrowful and
despondent. The Dead Sea and the Sea of Galilee sleep in the midst of a
vast stretch of hill and plain wherein the eye rests upon no pleasant
tint, no striking object, no soft picture dreaming in a purple haze or
mottled with the shadows of the clouds. Every outline is harsh, every
feature is distinct, there is no perspective--distance works no
enchantment here. It is a hopeless, dreary, heart-broken land.

Small shreds and patches of it must be very beautiful in the full flush
of spring, however, and all the more beautiful by contrast with the
far-reaching desolation that surrounds them on every side. I would like
much to see the fringes of the Jordan in spring-time, and Shechem,
Esdraelon, Ajalon and the borders of Galilee--but even then these spots
would seem mere toy gardens set at wide intervals in the waste of a
limitless desolation.

Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes. Over it broods the spell of a
curse that has withered its fields and fettered its energies. Where
Sodom and Gomorrah reared their domes and towers, that solemn sea now
floods the plain, in whose bitter waters no living thing exists--over
whose waveless surface the blistering air hangs motionless and dead
--about whose borders nothing grows but weeds, and scattering tufts of
cane, and that treacherous fruit that promises refreshment to parching
lips, but turns to ashes at the touch. Nazareth is forlorn; about that
ford of Jordan where the hosts of Israel entered the Promised Land with
songs of rejoicing, one finds only a squalid camp of fantastic Bedouins
of the desert; Jericho the accursed, lies a moldering ruin, to-day, even
as Joshua's miracle left it more than three thousand years ago; Bethlehem
and Bethany, in their poverty and their humiliation, have nothing about
them now to remind one that they once knew the high honor of the
Saviour's presence; the hallowed spot where the shepherds watched their
flocks by night, and where the angels sang Peace on earth, good will to
men, is untenanted by any living creature, and unblessed by any feature
that is pleasant to the eye. Renowned Jerusalem itself, the stateliest
name in history, has lost all its ancient grandeur, and is become a
pauper village; the riches of Solomon are no longer there to compel the
admiration of visiting Oriental queens; the wonderful temple which was
the pride and the glory of Israel, is gone, and the Ottoman crescent is
lifted above the spot where, on that most memorable day in the annals of
the world, they reared the Holy Cross. The noted Sea of Galilee, where
Roman fleets once rode at anchor and the disciples of the Saviour sailed
in their ships, was long ago deserted by the devotees of war and
commerce, and its borders are a silent wilderness; Capernaum is a
shapeless ruin; Magdala is the home of beggared Arabs; Bethsaida and
Chorazin have vanished from the earth, and the "desert places" round
about them where thousands of men once listened to the Saviour's voice
and ate the miraculous bread, sleep in the hush of a solitude that is
inhabited only by birds of prey and skulking foxes.