THE

HOLY LAND AND THE BIBLE.

CHAPTER I.

JOPPA AND ITS NEIGHBOURHOOD.

A BREADTH of apparently level foreground, backed by a range of purple hills, so nearly of equal height that they seem to form a table-land, is the first aspect of Palestine as the voyager coasts along it from Egypt in one of the numerous steamers which now touch at the different ports. Our destination is Joppa-" the Beautiful," or, perhaps, "the High "-one of the oldest cities in the world, and the first possible landing-place as we sail northwards. There it is, at last, rising before us on its sloping hill, a hundred and fifty-three feet high; the flat-roofed houses looking down, terrace after terrace, on the waters. Half a mile out, steam is let off and the anchors slipped, for it is unsafe for large vessels to go any nearer the town. A strong west wind might drive them on the rocks, as there is no breakwater or harbour to offer shelter, and sudden steaming to sea must always

be easy.

There is no difficulty, however, in getting ashore, if one have faith in the oarsmen who swarm round as soon as a vessel anchors. Competition reigns at Joppa as

1 Jaffa is Jaapu in Assyrian.

B

elsewhere. Many more boats than can find passengers crowd towards the steps let down to the water from the deck. A Babel of cries, unintelligible to Western ears, fills the air. The motley throng of deck passengers of the most varied nationalities, who have till now littered three-fourths of the deck with their bedding and baggage, fare best in the noisy exodus, for they are virtually at home, knowing the language of the boatmen, and able at once to strike a bargain with them, without a contest about prices. For the last half-hour they have been busy packing. Veiled women who sat apart with their children, in a spot railed off for them, are now on the wing with the rest. Figures in every variety of Eastern costume; Arabs with shawls over their heads, and striped brownand-white" abbas," or mantles; black Nubians with red fezzes, blue cotton jackets and trousers; brown Levantines in European dress; Syrians or Egyptians, in turbans and flowing robes of all shades, press towards the stairs, many of them throwing their softer packages over the ship's side into the boat they have chosen, to facilitate their departure. Bare legs and feet are mingled with French boots and red or yellow slippers; smooth faces, with formidable black beards, or venerable white ones. But the storm is too violent to last. Each minute sees it by degrees subside, as boat after boat shoots off under the oar-strokes of strong-armed rowers, no less strange in their dress than any of their passengers.

The boats for Europeans and those who shrink from the native crowd, have not long to wait, and at last we too are sweeping towards the town. But it needs skill as well as strength to make the voyage safely. The nearly flat-bottomed cobles have to steer through an opening in the reefs only about a hundred feet wide, and the swell which rises with the daily forenoon land breeze

may carry them too much to one side or the other. If the sea be rough there is real danger, for boats are occasionally lost, and as sharks are not unknown, they and the water offer two ways out of the world. The rocks stretch north and south before the town, in a semicircle, some of them rising high out of the water; others only indicated by the surf breaking over them; the perilous entrance being known only to the local boatmen. Once through it, however, danger is past, and we find ourselves in a broad but shallow harbour. There is a wider opening to the north, seldom used on account of its distance from the port; and there was once, apparently, a third place of possible landing, at the Moon-pool, to the south, but this has long been closed by silt and sand.

Landing is itself a new sensation for Europeans. Some twenty or thirty yards from the shore you are seized and carried off in the bare arms or on the back of a boatman; the water being too shallow to permit a nearer approach to the old tumble-down quay, built of stones from the ruins of Cæsarea; the base or capital of a pillar sticking out here and there, mixed with great bevelled blocks of conjectural antiquity. Strong arms lift and push you up a rough step or two, and you are fairly ashore, to find yourself amidst the houses, streets, and people of a new world.

There has always been the same difficulty in landing, for the rocks have been as formidable from the beginning of time, the water over them as treacherous, and the inside bay as shallow off shore, so that you have fared no worse than bead-eyed Greeks or hook-nosed Romans did thousands of years ago. While Palestine was held by the Christian nations, Venice organised a spring and autumn packet-service to Joppa, and built a mole, of

which the remains were still visible last century, to protect the shipping. It appears, however, to have been of little use, and since then, under the Arab and Turk, everything has relapsed into a state of nature. On a coast so exposed the beach must always have been strewn with wrecks after great storms, before steam enabled vessels to bear out to sea and escape. About thirty years ago the remains of a galley of great antiquity were dug up, in some excavations on the shore; and Josephus tells us of a terrible loss of life in a gale off the port in the reign of Vespasian.1 Phoenician, Egyptian, Syrian, Roman, Crusading, and modern fleets have all alike paid their tribute to the angry waters.

But I must mount my donkey and get to the hotel, at the north end of the town. No trouble has been given at the Custom House; indeed, I had nothing to do with it, a dragoman, or guide, who speaks English, managing all, for me and the rest of the European passengers. The road leads along a miserable apology for a street. Once paved, the stones have long ago risen or sunk into the ideal of roughness. No thought of drainage crosses the mind of an Oriental; the space before his door serving for a sewer. Dust-bins are equally a Western innovation, of which the East has not heard, so that every kind of foulness and abomination bestrews the way, or rises in pestilent heaps at its side. The buildings are of stone, with little or no wood in any part, timber being so scarce in Palestine that stone is used instead. The arch is, hence, universal, alike in places of business, houses, piazzas, or offices. As you jog on, you see that no light enters the shops except from the front-that they are, in fact, like miniatures of the gloomy holes made out of railway-arches among us.

1 Jos. Bell. Jud., iii. 9, 3. Even Josephus describes Joppa as not naturally a harbour.

Still on, till we pass under an arch over which is built the chief mosque of the town, with a six-sided minaret on the right side of it surmounted by a narrow projecting balcony for the muezzin, when he calls the faithful to prayers; a verandah-like roof sheltering him on all sides, with a short, round, dome-topped tower, of smaller diameter than the rest of the minaret, rising as its crown above. Stalls of all kinds abound. Tables of cakes or sweetmeats line the narrow street, which is more or less shaded by rude awnings of mats-often sorely dilapidated-or breadths of tent-cloth, or loose boards, resting on a rickety substructure of poles stuck where the owner pleases. The emptyings of carts of stone would make as good a pavement, and the same rich aroma of sewage from the houses as we have already inhaled follows us all the way. A turbaned water-carrier with a huge skin bottle on his back -a defunct calf, in fact, filled with water instead of veal, and minus head, legs, and tail-forces us to turn to one side, to pass him. A bare-armed and bare-legged apparition in a ragged skull-cap, cotton jacket, and cotton knickerbockers of very simple pattern, is chaffering with a roadside huckster for some delicacy costing a farthing or two, from some of the mat baskets on a table; the bearded vendor, bare-armed and with bare legs, sitting, as he tries to sell, his head swollen out with a white-and-red turban, and his body in striped pink-and-white cotton. Of course there is a lounger at his side looking on. An Arab in his "kefiyeh," or head-shawl, with a band of camels'-hair rope, very soft, round his head, to keep the flowing gear in its place, and a brown-and-white striped "abba" for his outer dress, is trying to cheapen a bridle at a saddler's, who sits cross-legged on a counter running along the street, under a shaky projection of wood and reeds, which gives him much-needed shade. At last we emerge into freer air.