AXE AT ROOT OF THE TREE. 527 and summons his great army of locusts, and the caterpillar, and the palmer-worm to devour. Thus, too, even in our day, He rises at times to shake terribly the earth, and overwhelm the cities of the guilty. There is much more than a mere fortuitous conjunction of accidents in these and a hundred other items which might be mentioned. I can scarcely lift my eye without lighting upon something which repeats those lessons which God himself here taught to generations long since dead and gone. These poor women who are cutting up mallows by the bushes to mingle with their broth, are only doing that which want and famine, divinely sent, compelled the solitary to do in the days of Job.' And again, those men who have cleared away the earth, and are laying the axe at the very roots of that tree, in order to hew it down for firewood, are repeating the formula by which the Baptist teaches, That in the kingdom of heaven every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down and cast into the fire.2 Your fellaheen value trees only as they bear good fruit: all others are cut down as cumberers of the ground; and they cut them from the very root, as John had seen them in his day. And yet once more, this man, with his load of dry weeds and grass, is going to remind us, at his tannûr, of the day that shall burn as an oven, and all the proud, and all that do wickedly, shall be as stubble.3 And we should farther learn from this operation, That if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to-day is, and to-morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?1 This lad who is setting fire to these briers and thorns is doing the very act which typified to Paul the awful state of those apostates whom it was impossible to renew again unto repentance. Oh, may we not be like that ground which beareth thorns and briers-rejected and nigh unto cursing, whose end is to be burned.5 He finds it difficult to set the thorns on fire, for it is too late in the season. Before the rains came this whole mount 1 Job xxx. 4. 4 Matt. vi. 30. 2 Mark iii. 10. Heb. vi. 4, 8. 3 Mal. iv. 1. ain side was in a blaze. Thorns and briers grow so luxuriantly here, that they must be burned off always before the plow can operate. The peasants watch for a high wind, and then the fire catches easily, and spreads with great rapidity. It is really a beautiful sort of fire-works, especially seen at night. This practice of burning over the grounds is very ancient in other lands besides this, and, as there are neither fences nor habitations in the open country to be injured by the fire, there is no danger in it. Every schoolboy will re member what Virgil sings about it: "Long practice has a sure improvement found, Yes, but these Arab peasants would think the poet but a stupid farmer to puzzle himself with half a dozen speculations about the possible way in which this burning is beneficial, as whether the "hollow womb of the earth is warmed by it," or some "latent vice is cured," or redundant humors "driven off, or that new breathings" are opened in the chapt earth; or the very reverse— "That the heat the gaping ground constrains, New knits the surface, and new strings the veins; Or scorching suns too violently beat," etc., etc. The Arab peasant would laugh at the whole of them, and tell you that two very good reasons not mentioned by the poet were all-sufficient. That it destroyed and removed out of the way of the plow weeds, grass, stubble, and thornbushes, and that the ashes of this consumed rubbish was a valuable manure to the land. David has a terrible imprecation against the enemies of God in the 83d Psalm, based upon this operation, perhaps : As the fire burneth a wood, and as the flame setteth the mountain on fire, so persecute them with Thy tempests, and 1 1 Georgic. THORNS-FIRE IN WHEAT-FIELDS. 529 The woods of this make them afraid with Thy storms. country are almost exclusively on the mountains, and hence the allusion to them. I have known several such catastrophes since I came to Syria, and am always reminded by them of this passage. In Nahum i. 10 the prophet has a striking comparison, or rather double allusion to thorns and fire. Speaking of the wicked, he says, For while they be folden together as thorns, and while they are drunken as drunkards, they shall be devoured as stubble fully dry. Now these thorns, especially that kind called bellan, which covers the whole country, and is that which is thus burned, is so folden together as to be utterly inseparable, and, being united by thousands of small intertwining branches, when the torch is applied they flash and flame instantly, like stubble fully dry; indeed, the peasants always select this bellan, folden together, when they want to kindle a fire from their matches. There is another allusion to fire among thorns which you, as a farmer in this neighborhood, must have occasion to notice. Moses says, If fire break out and catch in thorns, so that the stacks of corn, or the standing corn, or the field be consumed therewith, he that kindled the fire shall surely make restitution.1 Yes, we are obliged to charge our nâtûrs, or watchmen, as harvest-time advances, to guard with the utmost care against fire. The reason why Moses mentions its catching among thorns only, I suppose is because thorns grow all round our fields, and actually intermingle with the wheat. By harvest-time they are not only dry themselves, but are choked up with tall grass dry as powder. Fire, therefore, catches in them easily, and spreads with great rapidity and uncontrollable fury; and as the grain is dead ripe, it is impossible to extinguish it. When I was crossing the plain of Gennesaret in 1848, during harvest, I stopped to lunch at 'Ain et Tîny, and my servant kindled a very small fire to make a cup of coffee. A man, detached from a company of reapers, came immedi VOL. I.-Z 1 Exod. xxii. 6. ately and stood patiently by us until we had finished, without saying what he wanted. As soon as we left, however, he carefully extinguished our little fire, and upon inquiry I found he had been sent for that purpose. Burckhardt, while stopping at Tiberias, hired a guide to the caves in Wady el Hamâm, and says that this man was constantly reproving him for the careless manner in which he threw away the ashes from his pipe. He then adds, "The Arabs who inhabit the valley of the Jordan invariably put to death any person who is known to have been even the innocent cause of firing the grass; and they have made it a public law among themselves that, even in the height of intestine warfare, no one shall attempt to set his enemy's harvest on fire." The ordinance of Moses on this subject was a wise regulation, designed to meet a very urgent necessity. To understand the full value of the law, we must remember that the wheat is suffered to become dead ripe, and as dry as tinder, before it is cut; and farther, that the land is tilled in common, and the grain sown in one vast field, without fence, ditch, or hedge to separate the individual portions. A fire catching in any part, and driven by the wind, would consume the whole, and thus the entire population might be stripped of their year's provisions in half an hour. DESCENT TO GENNESARET. 531 XXIV. EL MUGHAR-TABIGA. March 21st. Our route for this day leads down to, and then along the shore of that beautiful Gennesaret, so interesting to every Christian mind, and to the ruins of those cities where our Lord wrought most of his mighty works. We are in the very centre of that region in which he passed the greater part of his life on earth, and on all sides are the deserted sites of villages and towns which he must have visited. They have the usual marks of antiquity, but nothing is known of their history. His eye, however, saw them crowded with inhabitants, and from them poured forth the thousands of Galilee to hear his sermons, eat his miraculous loaves, and be healed by his divine skill. This half hour has brought us down in the world immensely. And there is still a heavy descent to the lake, which lies full six hundred feet below the Mediterranean, according to my aneroid. This small plain which we are now crossing is called Kaiserîyeh (Cæsarea) by some lost historical association, and below it we must pick our way over and through a very rocky waar for half an hour. We are passing over limestone, with strata dipping at a sharp angle into the wady. I had expected to find trap rock as we approached the lake. So we shall below Rŭbudîyeh, and the same volcanic formation continues to the south of us quite down to Beisan. And now we have reached the bottom of Wady Sulamy, and find it entirely dry. The stream that drove the mills west of el Mughar has vanished beneath the strata, only to reappear, however, lower down, where it takes the name of Rubudîyeh, and is carried by canals over a considerable part of the fertile plain of Gennesaret. This Rubůdîyeh was once a considerable town, as appears from the extent of ground cumbered by these shapeless heaps of rubbish. These farmers about us belong to el Mughar, and their land extends to the declivity immediately above Gennesa |