The Innocents Abroad - (35)

We had left Capernaum behind us.  It was only a shapeless ruin.  It bore no semblance to a town, and had nothing about it to suggest that it had ever been a town.  But all desolate and unpeopled as it was, it was illustrious ground.  From it sprang that tree of Christianity whose broad arms overshadow so many distant lands to-day.  After Christ was tempted of the devil in the desert, he came here and began his teachings; and during the three or four years he lived afterward, this place was his home almost altogether.  He began to heal the sick, and his fame soon spread so widely that sufferers came from Syria and beyond Jordan, and even from Jerusalem, several days' journey away, to be cured of their diseases.  Here he healed the centurion's servant and Peter's mother-in-law, and multitudes of the lame and the blind and persons possessed of devils; and here, also, he raised Jairus's daughter from the dead.  He went into a ship with his disciples, and when they roused him from sleep in the midst of a storm, he quieted the winds and lulled the troubled sea to rest with his voice.  He passed over to the other side, a few miles away and relieved two men of devils, which passed into some swine.  After his return he called Matthew from the receipt of customs, performed some cures, and created scandal by eating with publicans and sinners.  Then he went healing and teaching through Galilee, and even journeyed to Tyre and Sidon.  He chose the twelve disciples, and sent them abroad to preach the new gospel.  He worked miracles in Bethsaida and Chorazin--villages two or three miles from Capernaum.  It was near one of them that the miraculous draft of fishes is supposed to have been taken, and it was in the desert places near the other that he fed the thousands by the miracles of the loaves and fishes.  He cursed them both, and Capernaum also, for not repenting, after all the great works he had done in their midst, and prophesied against them.  They are all in ruins, now--which is gratifying to the pilgrims, for, as usual, they fit the eternal words of gods to the evanescent things of this earth; Christ, it is more probable, referred to the people, not their shabby villages of wigwams: he said it would be sad for them at “the day of judgment”--and what business have mud-hovels at the Day of Judgment?  It would not affect the prophecy in the least --it would neither prove it or disprove it--if these towns were splendid cities now instead of the almost vanished ruins they are. Christ visited Magdala, which is near by Capernaum, and he also visited Cesarea Philippi.  He went up to his old home at Nazareth, and saw his brothers Joses, and Judas, and James, and Simon--those persons who, being own brothers to Jesus Christ, one would expect to hear mentioned sometimes, yet who ever saw their names in a newspaper or heard them from a pulpit? Who ever inquires what manner of youths they were; and whether they slept with Jesus, played with him and romped about him; quarreled with him concerning toys and trifles; struck him in anger, not suspecting what he was?  Who ever wonders what they thought when they saw him come back to Nazareth a celebrity, and looked long at his unfamiliar face to make sure, and then said, “It is Jesus?”  Who wonders what passed in their minds when they saw this brother, (who was only a brother to them, however much he might be to others a mysterious stranger who was a god and had stood face to face with God above the clouds,) doing strange miracles with crowds of astonished people for witnesses?  Who wonders if the brothers of Jesus asked him to come home with them, and said his mother and his sisters were grieved at his long absence, and would be wild with delight to see his face again?  Who ever gives a thought to the sisters of Jesus at all?--yet he had sisters; and memories of them must have stolen into his mind often when he was ill-treated among strangers; when he was homeless and said he had not where to lay his head; when all deserted him, even Peter, and he stood alone among his enemies.
    Christ did few miracles in Nazareth, and staid but a little while.  The people said, “This the Son of God!  Why, his father is nothing but a carpenter.  We know the family.  We see them every day.  Are not his brothers named so and so, and his sisters so and so, and is not his mother the person they call Mary?  This is absurd.”  He did not curse his home, but he shook its dust from his feet and went away.
    Capernaum lies close to the edge of the little sea, in a small plain some five miles long and a mile or two wide, which is mildly adorned with oleanders which look all the better contrasted with the bald hills and the howling deserts which surround them, but they are not as deliriously beautiful as the books paint them.  If one be calm and resolute he can look upon their comeliness and live.
    One of the most astonishing things that have yet fallen under our observation is the exceedingly small portion of the earth from which sprang the now flourishing plant of Christianity.  The longest journey our Saviour ever performed was from here to Jerusalem--about one hundred to one hundred and twenty miles.  The next longest was from here to Sidon--say about sixty or seventy miles.  Instead of being wide apart--as American appreciation of distances would naturally suggest--the places made most particularly celebrated by the presence of Christ are nearly all right here in full view, and within cannon-shot of Capernaum. Leaving out two or three short journeys of the Saviour, he spent his life, preached his gospel, and performed his miracles within a compass no larger than an ordinary county in the United States.  It is as much as I can do to comprehend this stupefying fact.  How it wears a man out to have to read up a hundred pages of history every two or three miles--for verily the celebrated localities of Palestine occur that close together. How wearily, how bewilderingly they swarm about your path!
    In due time we reached the ancient village of Magdala.
    CHAPTER XLVIII.
    Magdala is not a beautiful place.  It is thoroughly Syrian, and that is to say that it is thoroughly ugly, and cramped, squalid, uncomfortable, and filthy--just the style of cities that have adorned the country since Adam's time, as all writers have labored hard to prove, and have succeeded.  The streets of Magdala are any where from three to six feet wide, and reeking with uncleanliness.  The houses are from five to seven feet high, and all built upon one arbitrary plan--the ungraceful form of a dry-goods box.  The sides are daubed with a smooth white plaster, and tastefully frescoed aloft and alow with disks of camel-dung placed there to dry.  This gives the edifice the romantic appearance of having been riddled with cannon-balls, and imparts to it a very warlike aspect.  When the artist has arranged his materials with an eye to just proportion --the small and the large flakes in alternate rows, and separated by carefully-considered intervals--I know of nothing more cheerful to look upon than a spirited Syrian fresco.  The flat, plastered roof is garnished by picturesque stacks of fresco materials, which, having become thoroughly dried and cured, are placed there where it will be convenient.  It is used for fuel.  There is no timber of any consequence in Palestine--none at all to waste upon fires--and neither are there any mines of coal. If my description has been intelligible, you will perceive, now, that a square, flat-roofed hovel, neatly frescoed, with its wall-tops gallantly bastioned and turreted with dried camel-refuse, gives to a landscape a feature that is exceedingly festive and picturesque, especially if one is careful to remember to stick in a cat wherever, about the premises, there is room for a cat to sit.  There are no windows to a Syrian hut, and no chimneys.  When I used to read that they let a bed-ridden man down through the roof of a house in Capernaum to get him into the presence of the Saviour, I generally had a three-story brick in my mind, and marveled that they did not break his neck with the strange experiment.  I perceive now, however, that they might have taken him by the heels and thrown him clear over the house without discommoding him very much.  Palestine is not changed any since those days, in manners, customs, architecture, or people.
    As we rode into Magdala not a soul was visible.  But the ring of the horses' hoofs roused the stupid population, and they all came trooping out--old men and old women, boys and girls, the blind, the crazy, and the crippled, all in ragged, soiled and scanty raiment, and all abject beggars by nature, instinct and education.  How the vermin-tortured vagabonds did swarm!  How they showed their scars and sores, and piteously pointed to their maimed and crooked limbs, and begged with their pleading eyes for charity!  We had invoked a spirit we could not lay.  They hung to the horses's tails, clung to their manes and the stirrups, closed in on every aide in scorn of dangerous hoofs--and out of their infidel throats, with one accord, burst an agonizing and most infernal chorus: “Howajji, bucksheesh! howajji, bucksheesh! howajji, bucksheesh! bucksheesh! bucksheesh!”  I never was in a storm like that before.
    As we paid the bucksheesh out to sore-eyed children and brown, buxom girls with repulsively tattooed lips and chins, we filed through the town and by many an exquisite fresco, till we came to a bramble-infested inclosure and a Roman-looking ruin which had been the veritable dwelling of St. Mary Magdalene, the friend and follower of Jesus.  The guide believed it, and so did I.  I could not well do otherwise, with the house right there before my eyes as plain as day.  The pilgrims took down portions of the front wall for specimens, as is their honored custom, and then we departed.
    We are camped in this place, now, just within the city walls of Tiberias. We went into the town before nightfall and looked at its people--we cared nothing about its houses.  Its people are best examined at a distance. They are particularly uncomely Jews, Arabs, and negroes.  Squalor and poverty are the pride of Tiberias.  The young women wear their dower strung upon a strong wire that curves downward from the top of the head to the jaw--Turkish silver coins which they have raked together or inherited.  Most of these maidens were not wealthy, but some few had been very kindly dealt with by fortune.  I saw heiresses there worth, in their own right--worth, well, I suppose I might venture to say, as much as nine dollars and a half.  But such cases are rare.  When you come across one of these, she naturally puts on airs.  She will not ask for bucksheesh. She will not even permit of undue familiarity.  She assumes a crushing dignity and goes on serenely practicing with her fine-tooth comb and quoting poetry just the same as if you were not present at all.  Some people can not stand prosperity.
    They say that the long-nosed, lanky, dyspeptic-looking body-snatchers, with the indescribable hats on, and a long curl dangling down in front of each ear, are the old, familiar, self-righteous Pharisees we read of in the Scriptures.  Verily, they look it.  Judging merely by their general style, and without other evidence, one might easily suspect that self-righteousness was their specialty.
    From various authorities I have culled information concerning Tiberias. It was built by Herod Antipas, the murderer of John the Baptist, and named after the Emperor Tiberius.  It is believed that it stands upon the site of what must have been, ages ago, a city of considerable architectural pretensions, judging by the fine porphyry pillars that are scattered through Tiberias and down the lake shore southward.  These were fluted, once, and yet, although the stone is about as hard as iron, the flutings are almost worn away.  These pillars are small, and doubtless the edifices they adorned were distinguished more for elegance than grandeur.  This modern town--Tiberias--is only mentioned in the New Testament; never in the Old.
    The Sanhedrim met here last, and for three hundred years Tiberias was the metropolis of the Jews in Palestine.  It is one of the four holy cities of the Israelites, and is to them what Mecca is to the Mohammedan and Jerusalem to the Christian.  It has been the abiding place of many learned and famous Jewish rabbins.  They lie buried here, and near them lie also twenty-five thousand of their faith who traveled far to be near them while they lived and lie with them when they died.  The great Rabbi Ben Israel spent three years here in the early part of the third century. He is dead, now.
    The celebrated Sea of Galilee is not so large a sea as Lake Tahoe --[I measure all lakes by Tahoe, partly because I am far more familiar with it than with any other, and partly because I have such a high admiration for it and such a world of pleasant recollections of it, that it is very nearly impossible for me to speak of lakes and not mention it.]--by a good deal--it is just about two-thirds as large.  And when we come to speak of beauty, this sea is no more to be compared to Tahoe than a meridian of longitude is to a rainbow.  The dim waters of this pool can not suggest the limpid brilliancy of Tahoe; these low, shaven, yellow hillocks of rocks and sand, so devoid of perspective, can not suggest the grand peaks that compass Tahoe like a wall, and whose ribbed and chasmed fronts are clad with stately pines that seem to grow small and smaller as they climb, till one might fancy them reduced to weeds and shrubs far upward, where they join the everlasting snows.  Silence and solitude brood over Tahoe; and silence and solitude brood also over this lake of Genessaret.  But the solitude of the one is as cheerful and fascinating as the solitude of the other is dismal and repellant.
    In the early morning one watches the silent battle of dawn and darkness upon the waters of Tahoe with a placid interest; but when the shadows sulk away and one by one the hidden beauties of the shore unfold themselves in the full splendor of noon; when the still surface is belted like a rainbow with broad bars of blue and green and white, half the distance from circumference to centre; when, in the lazy summer afternoon, he lies in a boat, far out to where the dead blue of the deep water begins, and smokes the pipe of peace and idly winks at the distant crags and patches of snow from under his cap-brim; when the boat drifts shoreward to the white water, and he lolls over the gunwale and gazes by the hour down through the crystal depths and notes the colors of the pebbles and reviews the finny armies gliding in procession a hundred feet below; when at night he sees moon and stars, mountain ridges feathered with pines, jutting white capes, bold promontories, grand sweeps of rugged scenery topped with bald, glimmering peaks, all magnificently pictured in the polished mirror of the lake, in richest, softest detail, the tranquil interest that was born with the morning deepens and deepens, by sure degrees, till it culminates at last in resistless fascination!
    It is solitude, for birds and squirrels on the shore and fishes in the water are all the creatures that are near to make it otherwise, but it is not the sort of solitude to make one dreary.  Come to Galilee for that. If these unpeopled deserts, these rusty mounds of barrenness, that never, never, never do shake the glare from their harsh outlines, and fade and faint into vague perspective; that melancholy ruin of Capernaum; this stupid village of Tiberias, slumbering under its six funereal plumes of palms; yonder desolate declivity where the swine of the miracle ran down into the sea, and doubtless thought it was better to swallow a devil or two and get drowned into the bargain than have to live longer in such a place; this cloudless, blistering sky; this solemn, sailless, tintless lake, reposing within its rim of yellow hills and low, steep banks, and looking just as expressionless and unpoetical (when we leave its sublime history out of the question,) as any metropolitan reservoir in Christendom--if these things are not food for rock me to sleep, mother, none exist, I think.
    But I should not offer the evidence for the prosecution and leave the defense unheard.  Wm. C. Grimes deposes as follows:--
    “We had taken ship to go over to the other side.  The sea was not more than six miles wide.  Of the beauty of the scene, however, I can not say enough, nor can I imagine where those travelers carried their eyes who have described the scenery of the lake as tame or uninteresting.  The first great characteristic of it is the deep basin in which it lies.  This is from three to four hundred feet deep on all sides except at the lower end, and the sharp slope of the banks, which are all of the richest green, is broken and diversified by the wadys and water-courses which work their way down through the sides of the basin, forming dark chasms or light sunny valleys.  Near Tiberias these banks are rocky, and ancient sepulchres open in them, with their doors toward the water.  They selected grand spots, as did the Egyptians of old, for burial places, as if they designed that when the voice of God should reach the sleepers, they should walk forth and open their eyes on scenes of glorious beauty.  On the east, the wild and desolate mountains contrast finely with the deep blue lake; and toward the north, sublime and majestic, Hermon looks down on the sea, lifting his white crown to heaven with the pride of a hill that has seen the departing footsteps of a hundred generations.  On the north-east shore of the sea was a single tree, and this is the only tree of any size visible from the water of the lake, except a few lonely palms in the city of Tiberias, and by its solitary position attracts more attention than would a forest.  The whole appearance of the scene is precisely what we would expect and desire the scenery of Genessaret to be, grand beauty, but quiet calm.  The very mountains are calm.”
    It is an ingeniously written description, and well calculated to deceive. But if the paint and the ribbons and the flowers be stripped from it, a skeleton will be found beneath.
    So stripped, there remains a lake six miles wide and neutral in color; with steep green banks, unrelieved by shrubbery; at one end bare, unsightly rocks, with (almost invisible) holes in them of no consequence to the picture; eastward, “wild and desolate mountains;” (low, desolate hills, he should have said;) in the north, a mountain called Hermon, with snow on it; peculiarity of the picture, “calmness;” its prominent feature, one tree.
    No ingenuity could make such a picture beautiful--to one's actual vision.
    I claim the right to correct misstatements, and have so corrected the color of the water in the above recapitulation.  The waters of Genessaret are of an exceedingly mild blue, even from a high elevation and a distance of five miles.  Close at hand (the witness was sailing on the lake,) it is hardly proper to call them blue at all, much less “deep” blue.  I wish to state, also, not as a correction, but as matter of opinion, that Mount Hermon is not a striking or picturesque mountain by any means, being too near the height of its immediate neighbors to be so. That is all.  I do not object to the witness dragging a mountain forty-five miles to help the scenery under consideration, because it is entirely proper to do it, and besides, the picture needs it.
    “C. W. E.,” (of “Life in the Holy Land,”) deposes as follows:--
    “A beautiful sea lies unbosomed among the Galilean hills, in the midst of that land once possessed by Zebulon and Naphtali, Asher and Dan.  The azure of the sky penetrates the depths of the lake, and the waters are sweet and cool.  On the west, stretch broad fertile plains; on the north the rocky shores rise step by step until in the far distance tower the snowy heights of Hermon; on the east through a misty veil are seen the high plains of Perea, which stretch away in rugged mountains leading the mind by varied paths toward Jerusalem the Holy.  Flowers bloom in this terrestrial paradise, once beautiful and verdant with waving trees; singing birds enchant the ear; the turtle-dove soothes with its soft note; the crested lark sends up its song toward heaven, and the grave and stately stork inspires the mind with thought, and leads it on to meditation and repose.  Life here was once idyllic, charming; here were once no rich, no poor, no high, no low.  It was a world of ease, simplicity, and beauty; now it is a scene of desolation and misery.”
    This is not an ingenious picture.  It is the worst I ever saw.  It describes in elaborate detail what it terms a “terrestrial paradise,” and closes with the startling information that this paradise is “a scene of desolation and misery.”
    I have given two fair, average specimens of the character of the testimony offered by the majority of the writers who visit this region. One says, “Of the beauty of the scene I can not say enough,” and then proceeds to cover up with a woof of glittering sentences a thing which, when stripped for inspection, proves to be only an unobtrusive basin of water, some mountainous desolation, and one tree.  The other, after a conscientious effort to build a terrestrial paradise out of the same materials, with the addition of a “grave and stately stork,” spoils it all by blundering upon the ghastly truth at the last.
    Nearly every book concerning Galilee and its lake describes the scenery as beautiful.  No--not always so straightforward as that.  Sometimes the impression intentionally conveyed is that it is beautiful, at the same time that the author is careful not to say that it is, in plain Saxon. But a careful analysis of these descriptions will show that the materials of which they are formed are not individually beautiful and can not be wrought into combinations that are beautiful.  The veneration and the affection which some of these men felt for the scenes they were speaking of, heated their fancies and biased their judgment; but the pleasant falsities they wrote were full of honest sincerity, at any rate.  Others wrote as they did, because they feared it would be unpopular to write otherwise.  Others were hypocrites and deliberately meant to deceive. Any of them would say in a moment, if asked, that it was always right and always best to tell the truth.  They would say that, at any rate, if they did not perceive the drift of the question.
    But why should not the truth be spoken of this region?  Is the truth harmful?  Has it ever needed to hide its face?  God made the Sea of Galilee and its surroundings as they are.  Is it the province of Mr. Grimes to improve upon the work?