CHAPTER XVIII.

URTAS.

IN the valley of Urtas, and on the hills, flocks of sheep and goats, mingled together, were feeding, as Laban's flocks used to do long ago under the care of Jacob;1 the sheep, of course, all broad-tailed; that is, with a great mass of fat, in the middle of which the tail runs down like a dividing line, projecting from it at the lower end. There were also a few camels, and some cattle, so that on these apparently barren hill-sides there was nourishment for even the larger animals. The gardens ceased before the pasturage began; the gravelly soil soon drinking up the sweet rivulet which had been brawling over the pebbles and stones.

Tekoa, and also the Frank Mountain, where Herod the Great was buried, could both be visited better from Urtas than from any other point. It is a steady climb from the bottom of the wady to the table-land above; the track leading to the right, and the pleasant companionship of one of the old aqueducts, still supplying Jerusalem, brightens part of the journey. At one place, a spring pours out through two mouths under a canopy, its waters in part supplying Bethlehem; water-carriers were filling their skins at it, and carrying them to the town. This stream, no doubt, was once connected with the aqueduct that led from Solomon's Pools to the forecourts of the

1 Gen. xxx. 35.

Temple at Jerusalem. The aqueduct is still perfect for some distance; its bed measures about a foot deep and the same in width, with a covering of flat stones, which, however, was gone in some places, giving man and beast a highly-prized opportunity of quenching their thirst. The conduit was, in fact, exactly like that which I had seen on the north side of the Pools, and from which I had drunk ; indeed, it was a continuation of it.

The hills between Urtas and El-Fureidis-a diminutive of the Arabic word for Paradise-are very desolate and scorched, but had once been carefully terraced and cultivated. The mountain honoured by Herod as the site of his fortress rises steep and round-300 or 400 feet above the plain-like the cone of a volcano from which the top has been cut away. Yet it is only 190 feet higher than the village of Urtas, so that if the road had ascended for part of the way, there must have been a descent for the rest of it-the beginning of the slope towards the Jordan. This isolated height, Josephus tells us, Herod raised still higher, or, at least, filled up and trimmed to suit his design, erecting on the flat space at the top a great Roman castle, with rounded towers, and providing within it a magnificent palace for himself. The fortress was reached by a wonderful stairway of hewn stone, 200 steps high. At the foot of the hill other grand palaces were built for himself and his friends, and the whole plain around was covered with houses, forming a large town in the Italian style, with all the advantages of Western civilisation and refinement; the castle protecting the whole.

The name of "the Little Paradise," which the place still bears, may have arisen from the beauty of the gardens, no less than of the town, for, as I have said, Herod brought a plentiful stream from the Pools of Solomon, to irrigate

1

the soil and supply every want of the community, in an age when public and private baths were considered a first necessity of life. He had defended himself bravely against the Parthians at this spot, when pursued by Antigonus, and had been forced to flee from Masada, where his brother Joseph had command, and to seek refuge, first in Egypt and then in Rome. On his triumphant return, however, he resolved to fortify a spot not only dear to him from the memory of his escape from great peril, but also of high importance as commanding the gorges towards the Dead Sea. Here, also, he was at last buried with great pomp,1 his body being carried to its last resting-place 2 from Jericho, to which he had gone very shortly before his death from the warm baths of Callirrhoë, on the other side of the Dead Sea.

A steep ascent of ten minutes, on foot, brings one to the top of the hill, where the flat surface of the ground forms a space about 750 feet round. The whole of this is enclosed by the ruins of a circular fortress of hewn stones, with four massive round towers, standing, one at each of the cardinal points. Inside, the ground slopes to a hollow in the centre, as if the walls had been built on an artificial mound. There are no escarpments on the hill, as on that of Samaria, for though there are remains of terraces round the lower part of it, they have evidently been rather for cultivation than defence. The tradition of the locality is that Herod was buried at the foot of the hill, beside the great public reservoir; and a mound, which may one day repay a search, stands now in the centre of a long-dried pool. After the fall of Jerusalem, the Roman general took Herodium without resistance, and with this incident it passes from history. Since

1 Geikie, Life and Words of Christ, i. 36–48.

Ibid., i. 249.

then, however, the legend arose from which it got its present name in Western Europe-the Frank Mountain— the Crusaders being fabled to have held it against the Saracens for forty years after Jerusalem had been wrested from them. But, as Irby and Mangles remark,1 "the place is too small ever to have contained half the number of men which would have been requisite to make any stand in such a country; and the ruins, though they might be those of a spot once defended by the Franks, appear to have had an earlier origin, as the architecture seems to be Roman."

The view from the top is very wide towards the north, but less so towards the south and west. The Mount of Olives stands out as if close at hand, and on each side of it the eye notes hill beyond hill, each a venerable site. To the east and south the landscape is especially interesting, as that of the region consecrated by the story of David and St. John the Baptist. To the south stretches a desolate succession of earth-waves, sinking towards both south and east; their colour dark grey; their outline relieved by no tree or verdure, for the sparse growth to be seen here and there is dried up till it is brown, instead of green. Ruins on the hills add artificial to natural desolation, and the sense of this is deepened by the knowledge that these ridges of forbidding barrenness are, in many cases, the walls of yawning ravines, into whose depths the sunshine falls only in a passing gleam, as it crosses the narrow opening above. To the east, the same desert loneliness and lifeless silence prevail, till the eye rests on the blue waters of the Dead Sea, 3,000 feet below where you stand. Near you, the long undulations of rock, broken into countless gorges and small valleys, are like nothing so much as rudely crumpled, coarse, dark greyish-brown paper. You have

1 Travels, p. 310.

immediately before you the home of the viper, the locust, the wild bee, the fox, the jackal, the partridge, and the wild goat; for ages it has been shunned by man. Beyond this foreground, still looking eastwards, light, pinkish-yellow hills succeed, ridge beyond ridge, sinking ever lower and lower, till through their clefts the Dead Sea carries the eye across its deep blue to the light red or purple mountains of Moab, rising some hundreds of feet above the hills on this side, and seamed into wide ravines by the torrents of innumerable winters.

Over this wild, inhospitable region, David wandered when a shepherd, for no landscape in Palestine is so rocky or barren as not to afford pasture to wandering flocks of sheep and goats, either on the slopes or in the ravines. Here, also, he lived with his 400 outlaws, when hunted like a partridge by Saul; hiding in the caves SO numerous in every ravine, or in one or other of the countless valleys or gorges which cut up the face of the country into so tangled a network. or labyrinth that the whole district has been a favourite haunt, in all ages, of those who, from any cause, desired security from the interference of the outside world. Here, also, St. John the Baptist spent long years of solitary musing on the things of God, till his soul kindled into irresistible ardour, which drove him forth among men to plead with them to prepare for the coming of the Messiah. During the hot months it is a land of scorpions, lizards, and snakes, so that his experience readily supplied him with a comparison for his wicked contemporaries, whom he denounced as "a generation of vipers." Wild bees make their combs in the hollows of the limestone rocks; the aromatic thymes, mints, and other labiate plants, sprinkled over the face of the wilderness, furnishing them with honey, which is more

1 Matt. iii. 1, 5—7; Luke iii. 3, 7.