The reference, perhaps, is to the manner of conducting the water about from CHAPTER plant to plant, and from furrow to furrow, in irrigating a garden of herbs. I XXXIV. have often watched the gardener at this fatiguing and unhealthy work. When one place is sufficiently saturated, he pushes aside the sandy soil between it and the next furrow with his foot, and thus continues to do until all are watered. He is thus knee-deep in mud, and many are the diseases generated by this slavish work. Or the reference may be to certain kinds of hydraulic machines which were turned by the feet. I have seen small water-wheels, on the plain of Acre and elsewhere, which were thus worked; and it appeared to me to be very tedious and toilsome, and, if the whole country had to be irrigated by such a process, it would require a nation of slaves like the Hebrews, and taskmasters like the Egyptians, to make it succeed. Whatever may have been the meaning of Moses, the Hebrews, no doubt, had learned by bitter experience what it was to water with the foot; and this would add great force to the allusion, and render doubly precious the goodly land which drank of the rain of heaven, and required no such drudgery to make it fruitful. The fruits of Jaffa are the same as those of Sidon, but with certain varia- Fruits of tions in their character. Sidon has the best bananas, Jaffa furnishes the best Jaffa. pomegranates. The oranges of Sidon are more juicy and of a richer flavour than those of Jaffa; but the latter hang on the trees much later, and will bear to be shipped to distant regions. They are therefore more valuable to the producer. It is here only that you see in perfection fragrant blossoms encircling golden fruit. In March and April these Jaffa gardens are indeed enchanting. The air is overloaded with the mingled spicery of orange, iemon, apple, apricot, quince, plum, and china trees in blossom. The people then frequent the groves, sit on mats beneath their grateful shade, sip coffee, smoke the argela, sing, converse, or sleep, as best suits their individual idiosyncrasies, till evening, when they slowly return to their homes in the city. To us of the restless West, this way of making kaif soon wearies by its slumberous monotony, but it is Elysium to the Arabs. Are these orchards remunerative in a pecuniary point of view? I am informed that they yield ten per cent. on the capital invested, clear of Profit of all expense. Our friend Murad tells me that a biarah (the technical name of orchards, a watered garden) which costs 100,000 piastres will produce annually 15,000; but 5000 of this must be expended in irrigation, ploughing, planting, and manuring. This allows the proprietor 10,000 piastres, which is a very fair per-centage on capital invested in agricultural pursuits. Jaffa. I have been strolling along the streets, or rather street of Jaffa, for there Thorough seems to be but one, and a more crowded thoroughfare I never saw. I had to fare of force my way through the motley crowd of busy citizens, wild Arabs, foreign pilgrims, camels, mules, horses, and donkeys. Then what a strange rabble outside the gate, noisy, quarrelsome, ragged, and filthy! Many are blind, or at least have some painful defect about their eyes, and some are leprous. The PART III. Dorcas. Grave of peasants hereabout must be very poor, to judge by their rags and squalid appearance. I was reminded of Dorcas and the widows around Peter exhibiting the coats and garments which that benevolent lady had made, and I devoutly wished she might be raised again, at least in spirit, for there is need of a dozen Dorcas societies in Jaffa at the present time. Did you find her house? No! Well, our consul discovered her grave in one of his gardens, and gave it to the Armenian convent of Jerusalem. I examined the sarcophagus in its original bed, and there was this negative evidence in favour of Tabitha that there was no counter claim whatever. If not Tabitha's, whose tomb was it, pray? Though not so fortunate as you, I was taken to the house were Simon the tanner resided. It is certainly by the sea-side, and that is something, but then so is all Jaffa. A stout earthquake might shake half of it into the sea. If Simon lived near his business, his house was probably on the shore south Tanneries of the city, where the tanneries now are located, and most likely were in Peter's day. These manufacturing establishments are generally removed to a distance beyond the walls; and with good reason, for they are extremely offensive, as well as prejudicial to health. But there is no reason to suppose that Simon's dwelling-house was near his tannery, and it may have occupied the identical site now assigned to it. Pottery. Potter's wheel. I have been out on the shore again, examining a native manufactory of pottery, and was delighted to find the whole Biblical apparatus complete, and in full operation. There was the potter sitting at his "frame," and turning the "wheel" with his foot. He had a heap of the prepared clay near him, and a pan of water by his side. Taking a lump in his hand, he placed it on the top of the wheel (which revolves horizontally), and smoothed it into a low cone, like the upper end of a sugar-loaf; then thrusting his thumb into the top of it, he opened a hole down through the centre, and this he constantly widened by pressing the edges of the revolving cone between his hands. As it enlarged and became thinner, he gave it whatever shape he pleased with the utmost ease and expedition. This, I suppose, is the exact Scripture point of those Biblical comparisons between the human and the Divine Potter: "O house of Israel, cannot I do with you as this potter? saith the Lord. Behold, as the clay is in the potter's hand, so are ye in my hand, saith the Lord."1 And the same idea is found in many other passages. When Jeremiah was watching the potter, the vessel was marred in his hand, and "so he made it again another vessel, as seemed good to the potter to make it."2 I had to wait a long time for that, but it happened at last. From some defect in the clay, or because he had taken too little, the potter suddenly changed his mind, crushed his growing jar instantly into a shapeless mass of mud, and beginning anew, fashioned it into a totally different vessel. This idea Paul has ex allusions. pounded and employed, in the ninth chapter of the Romans, to soften some of CHAPTER those things which Peter says are hard to be understood: "Shall the thing XXXIV. formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus? Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour?" Certainly he has, and I saw him do it, but I did not see thereby much further into the great mystery which the apostle was illustrating. That, I fear, will ever remain among the "hard things" which the unlearned and unstable will wrest unto their own destruction. It is evident, from numerous expressions in the Bible, that the potter's Scripture vessel was the synonym of utter fragility; and to say that the wicked should allusions. be broken to pieces as a potter's vessel, was to threaten the most ruinous destruction. In this day of glass and other fragile fabrics, and of strong stone pottery, we should hardly have adopted this language. Perhaps not; but for this country it is still as appropriate and forcible as ever. Arab jars are so thin and frail that they are literally "dashed to Arab jars. shivers" by the slightest stroke. Water-jars are often broken by merely putting them down upon the floor, and nothing is more common than for the servant to return from the fountain empty handed, having had all his jars smashed to atoms by some irregular behaviour of his donkey. To what does Isaiah refer in the 14th verse of the 30th chapter, where he says, "He shall break it as the breaking of the potter's vessel that is broken in PART III. Potsherd. Fountain. "Void space" in the gate. Plain of Sharon and Philistia pieces; he shall not spare: so that there shall not be found in the bursting of it a sherd to take fire from the hearth, or to take water withal out of the pit ?" Your inquiry refers, I suppose, to the sherd to take fire from the hearth, or to take water out of the pit. This last you must have seen many times during our rambles. It is very common to find at the spring or "pit" pieces of broken jars, to be used as ladles either to drink from or fill with; and bits of fractured jars are preserved for this purpose. But the destruction mentioned by Isaiah was to be so complete that there would not be a piece left large enough for that. The other allusion in this passage you may not have noticed, but I have a hundred times and more. Take your stand near any of the public ovens in Sidon (or here in Jaffa, I presume,) in the evening, and you will see the children of the poor coming with "sherds" of pottery in their hands, into which the baker pours a small quantity of hot embers and a few coals with which to warm up their evening meal. Isaiah's vessels, however, were to be broken into such small bits that there would not be a sherd of sufficient size to carry away a few embers from the hearth. These comparisons are exceedingly expressive where the actions referred to are of constant occurrence, as they are in all our cities to this present day. The only building about Jaffa that has the slightest claim to even Saracenic beauty, is the fountain near the gate. This is really striking; and its surrounding courts furnish admirable specimens of Arab countenances and costumes for the pencil of the artist and the study of the phrenologist. I rarely pass out of the city without turning aside there to taste its cool water, and amuse myself with the ever-shifting scene. Did you not also notice the "void space" about Jaffa's only gate, and the crowds of people that always gather there in the afternoon? I have seen both the governor and the kady, with their suites, sitting there, decreeing and executing judgment precisely as such things are spoken of in the Bible. As the city is surrounded by a wall and ditch, and has but this one gate, all must go in and out through it, and hence the great crowd that chokes up the passage; and hence, too, it happens that there is scarcely an allusion in the Bible to matters transacted in "the gate," but what you may see enacted every day about this one of Jaffa. April 13th. I am quite satisfied with Jaffa, and it is a relief to get beyond this sea of green trees into open plain. How many hours' ride have we before us to-day? That depends upon the rate of travel. It is about three hours to the main source of the 'Aujeh at Er Ras, nearly the same distance back to Lydd, and three quarters of an hour further to Ramleh, where we are to find our tent. This is truly a magnificent plain, much larger than those of Tyre, Acre, or even Esdraelon. In its whole extent it certainly is the largest on the west side of the Jordan, SHARON-MIRAGE-THE PHILISTINES. 523 for it includes the entire territory of the Philistines. Far from being a flat, CHAPTER dead level, it is, like Esdraelon, agreeably varied by long swells, growing into XXXIV. sandy ridges, and even rocky tells and hills, which afford sightly positions for villages. Of these there are more than in other plains, more populous also, and surrounded often by olive and fruit orchards, which impart an air of cheerfulness not seen elsewhere in Palestine. Yonder, on the plain to the south-east of us, is a beautiful mirage. This optical illusion is often so per- Mirage. fect, that even the experienced traveller finds it difficult to believe that he is not approaching an actual lake of transparent water. Dr. Wilson tells us that the name for mirage in Sanscrit means "the thirst of the antelope;" and nothing could be more poetical. I once gave chase to a flock of gazelles on the plain of Tireh, south-east of Aleppo. The day was intensely hot, and the antelopes made direct towards a vast mirage, which covered the whole eastern horizon. To me they seemed to be literally leaping through the water, and I could see their figures below the surface, and reversed, with the utmost distinctness. No wonder they were deceived, for even their pursuers were utterly confounded. But the pursuit of the mirage is like chasing the rainbow, which retreats as you advance, and can never be overtaken. The Arab name is serab, and it is doubtless to this deceitful phenomenon that Isaiah refers,1 where the promise is that this serab shall become a real lake. Our translators have missed the exact meaning of this most emphatic figure. Serab is not " parched ground," but a simmering, tantalizing phantom of a lake. Sale, in his Koran, chapter xxiv., translates serab by vapour: "The works of unbelievers are like the vapour serab in a plain, which the thirsty thinketh to be water, until, when he cometh thereto, he findeth it nothing." Mohammed meant the mirage, and he gave the proper name for it. The peasants of Sharon differ strikingly from those in the north. All these Peasants around us appear to me to be of Egyptian origin. Do you suppose that there of Sharon is sufficient of the old Philistine blood in their veins to account for their peculiar physiognomy? the Philis There is enough of the Egypto-African about them to explain all peculiari- Supposed ties of colour, contour, and character. I hold that the Philistines came from origin of the neighbouring coast of Africa, perhaps from Lower Egypt, though Josephus tines. seems to place Caphtor, their ancient home, higher up the valley of the Nile. There is much plausibility in the theory which identifies the shepherd kings, who conquered Lower Egypt about the time of Abraham, with the Philistines. They may have been a great roving race of Bedawîn until the time of that conquest. By remaining masters of that highly enlightened people for so many generations, they acquired much of their civilization; and, when finally expelled, they came north into Palestine, drove the original inhabitants from the coast and the great plain of Sharon, and there built their cities, carried on agriculture and commerce, and became a powerful confeder 1 Isa. XXXV. 7. |