rv''■^^:v':^^^.^v■.^^,^;-.■^-^t^f.>' 
 
5^S 
 
 -.3 
 
 Cornell UniDetaitg SItbratg 
 
 3)tt|aca. l^tm ^avk 
 
 BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE 
 
 JACOB H. SCHIFF 
 
 ENDOWMENT FOR THE PROMOTION 
 
 OF STUDIES IN 
 
 HUMAN CIVILIZATION 
 
 1918 
 
CORNELL UNVERSITY L 
 
 BRARY 
 
 3 1924 103 700 229 
 
BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 
 THE FRENCH IN THE HEART 
 OF AMERICA 
 
■k:- 
 
 A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 

 1> 
 
 
 »— t 
 
 
 Oi 
 
 
 1— 1 
 
 
 r« 
 
 
 1— I 
 
 
 I— 1 
 
 
 u 
 
 
 <v 
 
 
 Si 
 
 
 a 
 
 
 
 
 s 
 
 o 
 
 <ij 
 
 C\ 
 
 •-^ 
 
 ^ 
 
 a: 
 
 r-i 
 
 •XH 
 
 fi 
 
 <«-, 
 
 <ij 
 
 o 
 
 
 s 
 
 en 
 
 C3 
 
 3 
 
 v. 
 
 tH 
 
 3 
 
 a* 
 
 =5 
 
 ^ 
 
 -« 
 
 bn 
 
 •5 
 
 C3 
 
 
 
 r 
 
 (h 
 
 a; 
 
 1) 
 
 ■4^ 
 
 ^ 
 
 G 
 
 
 <V 
 
 i* 
 
 >> 
 
 »o 
 
 -D 
 
 -c 
 
 a 
 
 c>» 
 
 (V 
 
 '<*» 
 
 
 ».. 
 
 
 ^ 
 
 < 
 
 c3 
 
 li 
 
 
 t^ 
 
 
 <v 
 
 ass 
 
 a 
 
 
 
 
 :^ 
 
 
 05 
 
 
 <b 
 
 
 s 
 
 
 a 
 
 
 S 
 
 
 ^ 
 
 
 c» 
 
 
 s 
 
 
 •*!*» 
 
 
 •*-i 
 
 
 K 
 
 
 •-** 
 
 
 a 
 
 
 p>. 
 
 
 <» 
 
 
 •« 
 
 
 ^*» 
 
 
 »> 
 
 
 k, 
 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of this book is in 
 the Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924103700229 
 
A PILGRIM 
 IN PALESTINE 
 
 BEING AN ACCOUNT OF 
 
 JOURNEYS ON FOOT BY THE FIRST AMERICAN 
 
 PILGRIM AFTER GENERAL ALLENBY*S 
 
 RECOVERY OF THE HOLY LAND 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN FINLEY 
 
 ILLUSTRATED 
 
 NEW YORK 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER S SONS 
 
 1919 
 
COPYRIQHT, 1918, 1919, BT 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
 PubUshed April, 1919 
 
 Copyright, 1901, by HARPER & BROTHERS 
 
 Copyright. 1918, by THE OUTLOOK COMPANY 
 
 Copyright. 1919, by THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY COMPANY 
 
TO 
 
 M. B. F. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 A FEW nights before I left America 
 for the Holy Land, she who was 
 Eleanor Robson and who as Mrs. 
 August Belmont has done such womanly 
 valiant work for the Red Cross, gave me a 
 copy of a letter written by a British *' Tom- 
 my" out in Palestine to his wife in Eng- 
 land. I have carried it to Palestine and 
 back and from Jaffa to Jericho and from 
 Beersheba to Dan; and now I make it my 
 preface to this unpremeditated book which 
 has grown out of some casual notes made 
 especially for the "pastor": 
 
 "Ay, Dearie — When I comes home again and 
 
 please God that will be soon now Dearie, the 
 
 Pastor can't say nothin* to me Dearie about the 
 
 Holy Land, but I'll have sommat to say to he. He 
 
 only knows it from books and such like Dearie, an' 
 
 [vii] 
 
PREFACE 
 
 showed it on lantern slides — while all these days 
 I'm here walkin' in holy places, an' knows 'em like 
 Dearie, fightin' for 'em, which you would be sur- 
 prised to know where I'm writin' Dearie. Ay ! I'll 
 have zommat to say to Pastor, so will close Dearie. — 
 
 "From your loving husband." 
 
 I've seen him out there walking in holy 
 places. I've enviously seen him fighting for 
 them. And now I have to thank him and 
 his great leaders for making it possible for 
 Christendom to walk again in its holy places 
 free of the Turk. I assume to say this word 
 of gratitude for Christendom because I was 
 the first of pilgrims to follow ** Tommy " into 
 some of them, the first to walk the breadth 
 and the length of the Holy Land after its 
 deliverance. 
 
 I am consenting to the publication of 
 these notes in the hope that they may help 
 other pilgrims, and especially those who can- 
 not in person go and on foot to these holy 
 
 [ viii ] 
 
PREFACE 
 
 places, to recover this little land again for 
 themselves. More particularly, I hope that 
 these pages may be found to have some- 
 what in them for the "pastor," of what- 
 ever creed, who can only know this land 
 of his devoted daily traversing "from books 
 and such like" and lantern slides; though I 
 do not pretend to speak to him as a Biblical 
 scholar or to vouch for the authenticity of 
 all the local traditions which I unquestion- 
 ingly accept. 
 
 But beyond this I should like, in grati- 
 tude to her who made Palestine the near- 
 est other country of my boyhood, to help 
 put upon the horizon of all America this 
 religious homestead of Christian and Jew, 
 of Cathohc and Protestant alike; not alone 
 that we may still learn of its ancient and 
 sacred teaching but that we may too bring 
 
 our glory into it. 
 
 John Finley. 
 
 [ix] 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 VAOB 
 
 I. The Way to the Holy Land . . 3 
 
 "Via Dei." Poem 5 
 
 II. General Allenby. (With Intro- 
 ductory Note) 7 
 
 III. The Camel-Train. Poem ... 45 
 
 IV, On the Mount of Olives in the 
 
 Year of Our Lord 1918 ... 46 
 
 V. AiN Karim. Poem ... .64 
 
 VI. From Jaffa to Jericho .... 66 
 
 Vn. St. Dismas. Poem 92 
 
 VIII. From Beersheba 94 
 
 IX. I Walked Last Night in the Shep- 
 herds' Field. Poem .... 124 
 
 X. To Dan 126 
 
 [xi] 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGB 
 
 XI. Armageddon. Poem 163 
 
 XII. Beyond Jordan 170 
 
 The Rose of Jericho. Poem . 204 
 
 XIII. The House of My Pilgrimage . 205 
 
 XIV. A LA Terre Sainte. Poem . . . 247 
 
 XV. Odysseus' Bark. Poem .... 250 
 
 [xii] 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 General Allenby entermg Jerusalem, December 11, 
 
 1917 ... Frontispiece 
 
 FACINO PAGE 
 
 The First British arriving at Jaffa Gate, December 
 
 9, 1917 8 
 
 General Edmimd H. H. Allenby, the Commander-in- 
 Chief, at Headquarters near Ramleh ... 10 
 
 The Crusaders' Tower near Ramleh 14 
 
 Colonel Ronald Storrs at the Golden Gate when 
 making a tour of the walls of Jerusalem with 
 the author ... 18 
 
 «c 
 
 Iambic, bearing each its mystic load" .... 45 
 
 Via Dolorosa. Mount of Olives in the distance . 50 
 
 Jerusalem as seen from the Mount of Olives . . 58 
 
 Woman at the Spring of Ain Karim, reputed home of 
 
 Elizabeth 64 
 
 Road to Jericho. Mountains of Moab in the dis- 
 tance 82 
 
 The graves of English soldiers under a tree at the 
 foot of the Last Hill before reaching Jerusalem, 
 on the Jaffa-Jerusalem Road 84 
 
 [xiii] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 VACIMG PAQB 
 
 Mount of Olives as seen from St. Stephen's Gate SS 
 
 A scene in Jericho 90 
 
 The temple area on Mount Moriah ^^ 
 
 The author as he appeared after going from Beer- 
 
 sheba to Jerusalem . . 1^^ 
 
 Tower of the Ascension on the Mount of Olives in the 
 background. Belfry of Greek Chapel in the 
 foreground .... 122 
 
 Evacuated village near the front 130 
 
 Abandoned German lorry on hill just outside of 
 
 Nazareth 156 
 
 Carpenter and boy in Nazareth 158 
 
 Franciscan brother (Sebastian) in a grotto back of 
 the Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth, 
 making altar wafers just after the occupation . 160 
 
 Two shepherd boys on the hills of Galilee 
 View of the Sea of Galilee from Tiberias . 
 Colonel T. E. Lawrence in Arab costume 
 Odysseus' Bark 
 
 [xiv] 
 
 * • 
 
 190 
 192 
 198 
 250 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
THE WAY TO THE HOLY LAND 
 
 THE way leading to the Holy Land 
 in the time of the Crusades was 
 called the "Via Dei" — the way of 
 God. It was a devious way, but if only it 
 led toward the Holy City it was the "Via 
 Dei." — ^For a little company of devoted and 
 skilled doctors, nurses, social workers, and 
 sanitary engineers, under the guidance of a 
 yoimg and capable surgeon who had taught 
 for years in Syria, it led from New York 
 City, in March of 1918, by ship around the 
 Cape of Good Hope, to Ceylon, and by the 
 Suez to Port Said, and thence by rail to 
 Jerusalem. I cannot in this book tell of 
 this crusade of mercy. It was my great 
 privilege to join these crusaders in Egypt, 
 
 [3] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 going myself a month later from the same 
 American port by way of England, France, 
 Italy, Albania, Serbia, Macedonia, and the 
 iEgean Sea to Port Said. But from Egypt 
 I found a swifter way than any crusader 
 ever dreamed of. I found the "Via Dei" in 
 the skies ; and in two and one-half hours de- 
 scended upon the foot-hills of the land 
 which the children of Israel were forty 
 years in reaching by their roundabout way. 
 
 [4] 
 
THE WAY TO THE HOLY LAND 
 
 "VIA DEI" 
 
 "Via Dei" — ^this the sacred phrase 
 By which they named the thousand ways 
 That led from palace and from cell. 
 From hut and shop and citadel, 
 O'er mountain, river, sea, and plain. 
 Through heat and cold and drought and rain. 
 Toward the Holy Land. 
 
 II 
 
 But with the wings of morning I 
 A "via Dei" of the sky 
 Have found amid the paths of light 
 Where airmen make their pilgrim flight 
 High in the heav*ns — the ways ne'er trod 
 Save by the glowing feet of God 
 Above the Holy Land. 
 
 [5] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 III 
 
 O'er Pyramid and Sphinx we flew. 
 Dry-shod th' unparted sea passed through, 
 Crossed in an hour the wilderness. 
 Saw Sinai looming terrorless. 
 High o'er the gates of Gaza leapt. 
 And low across the plain of Sharon swept 
 Into the Holy Land. 
 
 IV 
 
 And then I saw Jerusalem 
 Lying an opalescent gem. 
 Or breastplate, 'mid the ephod's blue 
 And gold and purple ambient hue, — 
 A city from the skies let down 
 To be henceforth the whole earth's crown 
 Set 'mid the Holy Land. 
 
 [61 
 
II 
 
 GENERAL ALLENBY 
 
 Before beginning my pilgrimage on 
 foot in the Holy Land, I wish to make 
 known to the reader the great soldier and 
 man whose recovery of the Holy Land 
 opened the roads to my going and whose 
 interest in my journeys there made him 
 my companion in the way — General Alien- 
 by, who was for the time being my Com- 
 mander-in-Chief. I do not pretend to 
 speak out of an intimate acquaintance 
 with him nor as one to whom any con- 
 fidences were given, but merely as one who 
 saw him several times amid the dust of 
 the road, or in the streets of the Holy City, 
 or out at his Headquarters near Ramleh, 
 in the days when the greatest event of all 
 
 [7] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 the centuries of the Christian era since 
 the first was being enacted and under his 
 guidance; with a confidence, as he said 
 to his troops August 4, 1918, *' based on 
 the justice of our cause and faith in the 
 sustaining help of the Almighty." 
 
 I HAVE to begin by taking away from 
 the reader a doubtlessly treasured pic- 
 ture of the great Commander-in-Chief 
 entering Jerusalem. The immortal fact 
 of the entrance I do not disturb. Nor do 
 I touch the background of the picture 
 which the ex-Kaiser provided when he 
 caused a new gate to be cut in the thick 
 walls of the Holy City, a few feet from the 
 old Jaffa Gate, in order to signalize his 
 own entry in 1898 — a pompous entry which 
 now seems so childishly, if not insanely 
 vain. I found in a church in Jerusalem a 
 
 [8] 
 

 1> 
 
 I— I 
 
 
 O 
 
 1-8 
 
 ■(-> 
 
 fcJD 
 
 oj 
 
 CO 
 
 
 en 
 
 
GENERAL ALLENBY 
 
 photograph of the painting which the 
 Kaiser had caused to be made of that en- 
 try, showing himself attired in the helmet 
 and white garb of a Crusader, on a capar- 
 isoned white horse, riding at the head of a 
 procession with imperial banners, an awed 
 welcome being painted on the faces of the 
 people. 
 
 When General AUenby entered it was 
 by the same gate (for he declined to have 
 the "Golden Gate" opened for him), 
 on foot, and without so much as a single 
 victorious flag. But — and this is why the 
 picture in the memory of so many must be 
 revised — General AUenby did not appear 
 in the most conspicuous place. He mod- 
 estly kept that position which was his ac- 
 cording to British custom. It was an aide 
 who marched first. 
 
 So it was that when I first saw General 
 AUenby with my own eyes I had suddenly 
 
 [9] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 to make over my own image of him. It 
 was another man than the one whom I 
 had pictured that greeted me at General 
 Headquarters in the valley between the 
 hills of Judsea and the sea, where the 
 "embassies and armies of two continents 
 had passed to and fro": of Thothmes and 
 Rameses, Tiglath-Pileser, Shalmaneser and 
 Sargon, Sennacherib, Necho and Nebu- 
 chadnezzar, Cambyses and Alexander the 
 Great, Geoffrey, Richard Coeur de Lion, 
 and Napoleon. Here I was face to face 
 with the real Deliverer of the Holy Land. 
 
 I suppose that a German general im- 
 presses one first of all as a soldier, but — 
 and it may Tdc due in part to the semi- 
 civilian British uniform — the English of- 
 ficer impresses one first of all as a man. 
 When I saw General AUenby I did not 
 think of this man of powerful shoulders, 
 of high forehead, of the kindliest of eyes, 
 
 [10] 
 
General Edmund H. H. Allenby, the 
 Commander-in-Chief, at Head- 
 quarters near Ramleh. 
 
GENERAL ALLENBY 
 
 of blunt, staccato speech, and of most 
 genial manner, as a soldier. I was in the 
 presence of a great human being. And it 
 was so when I met Marshal Foch, in the 
 days before he was a marshal. 
 
 It was at General Headquarters that I 
 first saw General AUenby. I had driven 
 over from Jerusalem with one of my Red 
 Cross associates to spend the night with 
 the "C-in-C," or the "Chief," as he is 
 called by his officers and men. And I 
 may at this distance confess that I went 
 with some timidity. In the first place, I 
 was not yet inured to my military title 
 (and that was the only one by which I was 
 known out there). In the next place, I 
 had never had an acquaintance with the 
 British beyond that of meeting a few of 
 them visiting in America, and I was an- 
 ticipating a frigid formality even in that 
 semitropical and remote country. 
 
 [11] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 But I soon forgot, in the warmth of the 
 reception, that my host was a general and 
 that I was not a civilian, that he was an 
 overcritical Britisher and I a provincial 
 American. We soon found ourselves fel- 
 low inhabitants of ancient Palestine — of the 
 Old Testament land. And when we left 
 the dinner-table it was to pore over George 
 Adam Smith's "Geography of the Holy 
 Land" — a classic which is more than a 
 geography, a veritable epic poem in prose 
 form — and then to turn to certain passages 
 in the Old Testament. 
 
 It is not the part of a guest to speak 
 of what he has seen and heard at Head- 
 quarters, and certainly what was said that 
 night was not intended for hearing beyond 
 the walls of the old farmhouse, temporarily 
 used as Headquarters; but I am sure that 
 the Commander-in-Chief will let me share 
 my memory of it with others, especially as 
 it can give no comfort to the enemy. 
 
 [12] 
 
GENERAL ALLENBY 
 
 I remember particularly that we read 
 the thirty-fourth chapter of the Book of 
 Isaiah, in which the utter destruction of 
 this land (once the Land of Promise) was 
 prophesied, when the streams should be 
 "turned into pitch," when thorns "should 
 come up in her palaces, and nettles and 
 brambles in the fortresses thereof." And 
 I recall asking him, who had come up into 
 the land by way of the Desert, whether 
 the "pehcan and the porcupine" were ac- 
 tually to be found there; what the "ar- 
 rowsnake" was, and the "night-monster"; 
 what sort of a cry the "satyr" made in 
 calHng to his fellow; whether "ostriches" 
 still held court in the land, and jackals 
 still "made it their habitation"? I dis- 
 covered that he knew the fauna of this 
 prophecy of desolation, and that he sup- 
 ported by a Bible dictionary his own 
 theories as to the identity of these crea- 
 tures, whose names varied in the different 
 
 [13] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 versions. The prophesied desolation had 
 certainly come upon the land. The "line 
 of confusion" had been stretched over it 
 for centuries. And the "plummet of emp- 
 tiness" had touched even its valleys that 
 once "flowed with milk and honey." 
 
 It was not many nights later that, 
 within five miles of the very place where 
 we sat reading this chapter in Isaiah, I 
 heard in our Red Cross camp, within moon- 
 light sight of the Crusaders' Tower that 
 still stands in Ramleh, the mournful, half- 
 human cry of jackals, giving literal con- 
 firmation of the prophecy. And another 
 night I heard the same cry from hundreds, 
 or so they seemed in number, out upon 
 the sand plain just beyond the Jordan, 
 near the place where the children of Israel 
 must have crossed into this very Land of 
 Promise. 
 
 But I read on into the thirty-fifth chap- 
 
 [14] 
 
s»>. 
 
GENERAL ALLENBY 
 
 ter — the chapter of the prophecy of the 
 Great Restoration, which was also seem- 
 ingly coming to pass. And the imperious 
 but modest man before m.e was the Re- 
 storer. In the habitation of the jackals 
 grass was beginning to grow again; "glow- 
 ing sands" had become pools. Waters 
 had literally broken out in the wilderness 
 and streams in the Desert. All the way 
 up from Egypt, nearly one hundred and 
 fifty miles, has the water of the Nile been 
 led to break forth in the places of desola- 
 tion. 
 
 There is an Arab legend which I heard 
 often out in the East, that not until the 
 Nile flowed into Palestine would the Turk 
 be driven from Jerusalem — a picturesque 
 way of intimating that the Turk would 
 stay there forever (as in Virgil's First 
 Eclogue a like prophecy was made, two 
 thousand years ago, of the impossibility 
 
 [15] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 of the Germans reaching the Tigris). But 
 the Nile now flows into Palestine, not 
 metaphorically but literally. I have seen 
 the plant at Kantara, where (under the di- 
 rection of a Canadian engineer) the sweet 
 water of the Nile is filtered and started on 
 its journey through a twelve-inch pipe 
 across the Desert toward Gaza. The 
 mound of sand that protects it is visible 
 a few yards from the railroad all the way 
 from the Suez to the edge of Palestine. 
 And the Turk has been driven from Jeru- 
 salem by the same forces that caused the 
 water of the Nile to flow into Palestine. 
 
 I have wondered whether those who se- 
 lected General AUenby for this command 
 were influenced to the selection in any de- 
 gree by his name. Not that there is need 
 of reason beyond his surpassing technical 
 and personal qualifications to lead this par- 
 ticular expedition. But it is a singular co- 
 
 [16] 
 
GENERAL ALLENBY 
 
 incidence and a happy omen that his very 
 name may well be interpreted to carry a 
 prophecy of his achievement. I suspect 
 that it is of Irish association, but an Oriental 
 origin may easily be found for it in the 
 euphonious union of two Arab words, ** Al- 
 lah" meaning "God," and **Nebi" meaning 
 "prophet." So "AUah-Nebi," a God- 
 prophet. And surely no one in the history 
 of Palestine in the Christian era has come 
 with a more Godlike prophecy. If it were 
 not known that every movement of his 
 campaign of deliverance was planned down 
 to the last meticulous detail, what he has 
 accomplished would seem a miracle, some- 
 thing of supernatural achievement. 
 
 It is gratifying that the Deliverer of Pal- 
 estine is a man who exemplifies the qualities 
 that civilization seeks to develop in mankind 
 under free institutions, courage, courtesy, 
 honesty — those qualities which our Justice 
 
 [17] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 Holmes has summarized in the "adorable 
 faith " of the soldier. And not only is Gen- 
 eral Allenby the sort of a man whom the 
 civilization that had its cradle in the Holy 
 Land would choose to represent it, but he 
 has in turn chosen men of noblest, cleanest 
 purpose and highest qualification to serve 
 with him in helping the people of that land 
 to come into the full fruits of justice and 
 freedom. For example, the chief of the 
 Occupied Enemy Territory Administration 
 (for they do not call it conquered territory 
 or British territory, and no flag did I see 
 flying anywhere in Palestine except the Red 
 Cross flag over hospitals), the chief of 
 O. E. T. A., General Sir Arthur Money, who 
 had been Chief of Staff under General 
 Maude at Bagdad, is as high-minded, con- 
 scientious, and just a man and adminis- 
 trator as I have ever known. Another is 
 Colonel Ronald Storrs, military governor of 
 
 [18] 
 
t-l 
 
 o 
 
 
 c 
 
 3 
 
 o 
 
 o 
 o 
 
 •4-1 
 
 c 
 
 O 
 c 
 
 O 
 
 O 
 
 a 
 
 o 
 
 o 
 
 .1 «*«'«8» 
 
GENERAL ALLENBY 
 
 Jerusalem, a highest-honor man at Cam- 
 bridge, who has Hved and labored and stud- 
 ied in the East for the most of his life since 
 he left the university. He speaks Arabic 
 and Turkish, besides the classical languages 
 and those of modern Europe. And one 
 morning I came upon him composing a New 
 Year's greeting in Hebrew to the Jewish 
 residents of Jerusalem. I have said again 
 and again that I could wish no better fate 
 for Palestine and the Holy City than that 
 their people should be guided by such men 
 as these till they reach their own self-deter- 
 mined government, and that even then they 
 should have relation to the Christendom 
 that has sprung from this land, through 
 men of such liberal ideals and just and rev- 
 erent spirit. 
 
 I invited the Commander-in-Chief, be- 
 fore I left him that June night in Ramleh, 
 to join us on the Fourth of July in Jerusa- 
 
 [19] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 lem, in opening our Red Cross headquarters 
 and in celebrating incidentally our natal 
 day. And he came, covered with the dust 
 of the thirty-mile automobile journey on 
 that hot July afternoon. We emphasized 
 the fact that, while this was Independence 
 Day, the birthday of the Daughter of Eng- 
 land, we celebrated it now as "Interdepen- 
 dence Day." He, in response, with his 
 curt, soldier speech, made the day mem- 
 orable for Americans in that part of the 
 world, and notable among the Fourth of 
 July celebrations in all parts of the world. 
 But, in compliance with a courteous inti- 
 mation from Headquarters, no flag was fly- 
 ing over our building. There was to be no 
 sign of any foreign nation in the Palestinian 
 skies even on that day. This did not pre- 
 vent, however, the intertwining of the em- 
 blems of the Allies inside the building, where 
 the Commander-in-Chief, surrounded by 
 
 [20] 
 
GENERAL ALLENBY 
 
 the representatives of France, Italy, and 
 America, as well as by his own officers and 
 by the heads of the various religious com- 
 munities in Jerusalem — Moslem, Jewish, 
 Greek, Latin, Armenian, and Protestant — 
 illustrated the ideal state which I hope will 
 some day rise to give more glorious fulfil- 
 ment than that even of which Isaiah made 
 prophecy in the chapter which I read with 
 the General that night down at the entrance 
 to the Plain of Ajalon — at Ajalon, where, I 
 found, they so scrupulously depended upon 
 known meteorological laws that they did 
 not, as Joshua, count upon any supernatural 
 intervention to stay the sun in its setting 
 over the plain, but synchronized their 
 watches three times in the day before going 
 into battle in order to take full advantage 
 of the sun and to make even the stars 
 "fight with them." 
 
 But there was a more significant day in 
 
 [21] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 my acquaintance with General Allenby than 
 that in whose night I read the prophecy. 
 It was the day in which one caught a ghmpse 
 of the Apocalyptic vision rather than of the 
 Isaian. I was again at Headquarters. It 
 was the morning of the 20th of September, 
 when the army that had "dug in" fifteen or 
 twenty miles north of Jerusalem, and had 
 waited patiently for months, was at last 
 advancing to the complete recovery of the 
 Holy Land. (It was ready to make the 
 attack in May, I have heard, and the day 
 was set, but the exigencies of the western 
 front demanded a sudden change, a trans- 
 fer of some of the divisions, and the devel- 
 oping of a new army.) I had driven over 
 from Jerusalem in the early morning in my 
 Ford car. The "C-in-C" was outwardly 
 placid and even playful; for a child, an 
 American child, was at Headquarters, hav- 
 ing just arrived by train that morning with 
 
 [22] 
 
GENERAL ALLENBY 
 
 her mother, from Egypt, on her way to 
 Jerusalem, and the Commander-in-Chief 
 was for the hour the host. One could not 
 have guessed that over the hills to the north 
 the most momentous battle of all the Chris- 
 tian era in Palestine was being waged under 
 his direction and in accordance with plans 
 made to the last minutest detail. How mo- 
 mentous it was I did not then, of course, 
 surmise. And when the General a few min- 
 utes later smilingly announced, as he came 
 from his map-room, that his cavalry were 
 at "Armageddon," I did not then give to 
 the announcement the interpretation which 
 came to me later, as I reread the chapter in 
 the Book of Revelation, describing the gath- 
 ering of the hosts on the Plain of Megiddo, 
 which is in the Hebrew "Armageddon." I 
 do not impute to the General this interpre- 
 tation; but I think that what was happen- 
 ing that morning up on the Plain of Me- 
 
 [23] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 giddo, as it is sometimes called, or Armaged- 
 don, or Esdraelon, was as fateful for the 
 good of the world as that which is fore- 
 told with such striking analogies in the 
 Apocalypse. 
 
 There has been no more completely suc- 
 cessful campaign in all this world war, I 
 suppose. An English military observer and 
 critic has written more emphatically and 
 unreservedly: "There never was a victory 
 more absolute in the history of war. . . . 
 It was a battle without a morrow." And 
 certainly none more dramatic, with this 
 wonderful background of scenery and sa- 
 cred and secular history. "What a plain 
 it is !" says Sir George Adam Smith, "upon 
 which not only the greatest empires, races, 
 and faiths. East and West, have contended 
 with each other, and each has come to judg- 
 ment." One has but to read his chapter on 
 Esdraelon to see the mighty pageant that 
 
 [24] , 
 
GENERAL ALLENBY 
 
 has been enacted upon this plain since the 
 days of Deborah and Barak. 
 
 It was out to the north of this Plain of 
 Armageddon (Megiddo, or Esdraelon) that 
 I next saw the Commander-in-Chief a few 
 days later. He had sent me a message one 
 morning to tell me that if I would wait, that 
 is, postpone my return to America a few 
 days longer, I might perhaps find it possible 
 to walk to Dan (for I had already walked 
 from Beersheba up to the old front). I 
 acted immediately upon this intimation, 
 starting out that very evening and walking 
 all night to Janin, the edge of the plain, then 
 the next night to Nazareth, then on to the 
 Sea of Galilee. It was on this walking jour- 
 ney that I saw the "Chief's" car go flying 
 past me, he and his general so engrossed in 
 the panorama that they did not see the pil- 
 grim at the roadside. And I think I never 
 saw a more enticing landscape than that 
 
 [25] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 before me as I came down toward the Sea 
 of Galilee that late afternoon. I was ready 
 to say with the rabbis: "Jehovah hath cre- 
 ated Seven Seas, but the Sea of Gennesaret 
 [the Sea of Galilee] is His delight." I recall 
 only one scene to put beside it in my own 
 experience, and that was sunset over the 
 Lake of Geneva in Switzerland. It has the 
 colorful beauty of the Yellowstone without 
 its awesomeness. And I have General Al- 
 lenby in the foreground of that memorable 
 Galilee landscape. 
 
 I tried to imagine what General AUenby's 
 satisfaction must be in recovering for Chris- 
 tendom this crown of Palestine, this valley 
 where the Great Teacher had spent most of 
 his days on the earth, but when I saw him 
 that evening in Tiberias, down by the sea, 
 with his staff about him in a quiet comrade- 
 ship, to which I was admitted for a few min- 
 utes, and tried to express to him my con- 
 
 [26] 
 
GENERAL ALLENBY 
 
 tinuing congratulation on his masterful 
 achievement, he extended his hand in a mo- 
 tion to ward off what I was saying, and at 
 the same time to turn it toward his Chief of 
 Staff. 
 
 I had a few days before sent my more 
 formal congratulations by a special des- 
 patch-rider to Headquarters, where I sup- 
 posed, however, they would be lost among 
 the messages from all the world. I had in- 
 cluded a bit of verse (to a melodious well- 
 known tune) which I had written some 
 weeks before as an intimation of my pre- 
 victorian prayer and my feeling as an Amer- 
 ican. I told him that its publication down 
 in Egypt had been forbidden by the censor 
 (whether for literary or military reasons I 
 could not be certain) . To my surprise there 
 came in acknowledgment a long letter in his 
 own hand, in which he not only expressed 
 his appreciation of my congratulations, but 
 
 [27] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 explained the probable reason for the sup- 
 pression of the lines. By the change of one 
 word I have obviated this particular mili- 
 tary objection; 
 
 ALLENBY, O ALLENBY 
 
 {To the tune of '^ Maryland, My Maryland'') 
 
 (written before the advance) 
 
 O Knight of all the Earth's acclaim, 
 
 AUenby, O AUenby ! 
 A prophet in thy very name, 
 
 AUenby, O AUenby ! 
 Upon the "far-flung battle-line*' 
 Thy soldiers fight in cause divine. 
 Deliverer of Palestine, 
 
 AUenby, O AUenby. 
 
 The stars that fought with Deborah 
 And Barak fight to-day with thee 
 
 Against the modern Sisera 
 Of iron-cross barbarity ! 
 
 [28] 
 
GENERAL ALLENBY 
 
 Would our own stars might fight there too, 
 Shining by day in field as blue 
 As were the skies that Barak knew, 
 Allenby, O Allenby ! 
 
 The sound of marching in the trees 
 
 That led to David's victory. 
 Is borne again by every breeze 
 
 From Ephraim and Galilee. 
 It bids thee forward at its call 
 Till Moslem, Hebrew, Christian — all. 
 Shall be released from Teuton-thrall — 
 God lead thee on, O Allenby ! 
 
 II 
 
 (written after the advance) 
 
 And God has led thee on, O Knight, 
 
 AUenby, O Allenby ! 
 In thy great battle for the Right, 
 
 Allenby, O Allenby ! 
 The Earth's free nations now will bring 
 Their genius to its glorying 
 And they who sat in darkness sing 
 
 Fore'er of thee, O Allenby ! 
 
 [29] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 It was my great honor to be asked to 
 accompany the Commander-in-Chief, with 
 two of his generals and his aides, as he went 
 up from Tiberias at dawn the next morning 
 to Damascus. There was no formal entry, 
 and, as I suppose, there had been no public 
 announcement of his coming. He drove 
 through the clouds of obscuring dust to the 
 hotel (fitly named Victoria), where he was 
 received by the temporary governor of Da- 
 mascus, Colonel F. A. Lawrence, the young 
 archaeologist, an Oxford don, who had for 
 the years of the war been living with the 
 forces of the King of the Hedjaz, and had 
 been their Allied leader. The Commander- 
 in-Chief was then called upon by the son of 
 the King, Feisal, who was to succeed this 
 young archaeologist; at any rate, when I 
 reached the hotel I found a throng of the 
 followers of the prince about the door, wait- 
 ing the return of their leader from the con- 
 
 [30] 
 
GENERAL ALLENBY 
 
 ference, and an hour later I saw them in 
 front of the government building, where the 
 first Arab flag was flying. 
 
 In another hour the pillar of cloud was 
 leading us across the dusty plateau, back 
 to the Jordan, where I was permitted to 
 alight from the automobile and continue my 
 Beersheba-to-Dan journey on foot, for the 
 way was now clear all the way to the foot 
 of Mount Hermon. 
 
 So I am able to say that I remember him, 
 the great Deliverer of Palestine, who was 
 for the time being also my commander-in- 
 chief, "from the land of the Jordan and of 
 the Hermons, from the hill Mizar." 
 
 I think that as a general he must have a 
 forever glorious rank in the world's war. 
 "He has revealed himself," to quote further 
 the English military critic, "as a soldier sec- 
 ond to none that we ourselves [the British] 
 possess. Not only so. It is simple truth 
 
 [31} 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 to say that in brilliancy of plan, irresistible 
 energy of execution, comprehensiveness and 
 finality of success, no living soldier of any 
 nation has surpassed this Battle of Arma- 
 geddon — to give it what happens to be 
 geographically its real name. What makes 
 it absorbing to every student of war is that 
 it was a case of a kind which hardly comes 
 off half a dozen times in as many centuries. 
 It was an idea which has been imagined and 
 aimed at a thousand times for once that it 
 has been actually done. It was in method 
 and effect precisely the soldier's 'battle of 
 dreams' which every famous leader has 
 longed to realize some day, but which few 
 indeed have ever compassed in practice." 
 
 But whatever glowing words may be 
 spoken of him as a general, I am glad to be 
 able to say of my own knowing, as I saw 
 him out in the Holy Land, that he deserves 
 as a man to take his place with the greatest 
 
 [32] 
 
GENERAL ALLENBY 
 
 of those whose deeds are recorded in the 
 book which we, together, pored over on that, 
 for ^e, memorable night out in the Vale of 
 Ajalon. 
 
 I saw him once more. It was the night 
 of my starting home for America. I stopped 
 to say good-by to the Commander-in-Chief. 
 He entered the very door through which I 
 had first seen him come on our Isaian night 
 — and this was to be his last night in the old 
 Headquarters, for he was moving northward 
 in the morning. He asked if I had heard 
 the news: One of their airmen flying above 
 Palestine had caught the German wireless 
 message that Germany was ready to accept 
 the terms proposed by America. Some one 
 of the little company said: "It is the end." 
 And so this dramatic episode which will 
 make an epoch for all the East came to its 
 end. And the beginning of the end of the 
 Great War with the Beast, I shall ever be- 
 
 [33] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 lieve, was the advance of AUenby's men out 
 upon the Vale of Armageddon. 
 
 Note 
 
 The oflficial despatch from General Al- 
 lenby to the British War OflBce, describing 
 the last campaign in Palestine and Syria, 
 was not published until after this chapter 
 was written and in the hands of the pub- 
 lisher. I am, therefore, appending a sum- 
 mary of the despatch, that the reader 
 desiring to do so may get a comprehensive 
 view of this campaign, particularly as it 
 relates to Palestine. 
 
 I quote first in part the editorial com- 
 ment in the London Times of December 31, 
 which presents his despatch: 
 
 We have to-day General AUenby's despatch on 
 the decisive battles in Palestine — a plain and almost 
 prosaic tale about the most spectacular operation 
 of the whole war. Historians will dwell on it with 
 
 [34] 
 
GENERAL ALLENBY 
 
 admiration and delight. Its object was achieved 
 with artistic completeness. It gave almost unique 
 opportunities to the cavalry and the air arm, and 
 both took advantage of them. It was fought over 
 country that enshrined the most sacred memories 
 and traditions — whose familiar place names stir the 
 deepest emotions of all who read the despatch. . . . 
 No other Allied military conception during the 
 whole war, in fact, was so symmetrical in its design, 
 so naturally dramatic in its setting, so perfectly 
 fitted in its execution to the highest hopes of its 
 author. Yet General Allenby describes it as though 
 it had been a mere matter of course — a thoroughly 
 British trait, and with which no one will be overdis- 
 
 posed to quarrel. 
 
 • ••••••• 
 
 This ruin of the Turk in Palestine — swift, over- 
 whelming, wholly complete — made it impossible 
 for Turkey to continue the war. That was the re- 
 ward of the autumn campaign fought by General 
 Allenby, his men, and his Allied contingents — a 
 campaign that was a model of perfection in the 
 achievement of all arms, as brilliant in execution 
 as in design. 
 
 [35] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 But the world will remember, I think I 
 may add to these words of consummate 
 praise, not only that General AUenby put 
 Turkey out of the war, but that he delivered 
 Palestine. 
 
 The "plain and almost prosaic" tale 
 that is told in the despatch is in outline 
 as follows : 
 
 With the exception of a small and scattered re- 
 serve, the whole of the Turkish force [the Seventh 
 and Eighth Armies] west of the Jordan, was enclosed 
 in a rectangle forty-five miles in length and only 
 twelve miles in depth. . . . The destruction of these 
 armies, which appeared to be within the bounds of 
 possibility, would leave the Fourth Army [east of the 
 Jordan] isolated, if it continued to occupy the coun- 
 try south and west of Ammon. ... I determined, 
 therefore, to strike the blow west of the Jordan. 
 ... I decided to make my main attack in the 
 coastal plain rather than through the hills north of 
 Jerusalem. . . . The route along the plain would 
 enable the cavalry to pass through the hills of Sa- 
 
 [36] 
 
GENERAL ALLENBY 
 
 maria into the Plain of Esdraelon at the narrowest 
 point, thus insuring greater speed and less likeli- 
 hood of being checked. 
 
 By reducing the strength of the troops in the 
 Jordan Valley to a minimum, and by withdrawing 
 my reserves from the hills north of Jerusalem, I 
 was able to concentrate five divisions and the French 
 detachment for the attack of these defences [de- 
 scribed as lying in the narrow plain, which is some 
 ten miles wide at Jilgulieh, the ancient Gilgal]. . . . 
 In addition to the infantry, two cavalry, and one 
 Austrahan mounted division were available for this 
 point. 
 
 The rains . . . usually commence at the end of 
 October, rendering the plains of Sharon and Esdra- 
 elon impassable for transport, except along the few 
 existing roads. Consequently, operations could not 
 be postponed beyond the middle of September. 
 
 I entrusted the attack on the enemy's defences 
 in the coastal plain to Lieutenant-General Sir Ed- 
 ward Bulfin, commanding the Twenty-first Corps. 
 ... I ordered him to break through the enemy's 
 defences between the railway and the sea, to open 
 a way for the cavalry, and at the same time to seize 
 
 [37] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 the foot hills southeast of Jilgulieh. The Twenty- 
 first Corps was then to swmg to the right . . . and 
 advance in a northeasterly direction through the 
 hills, converging on Samaria and Attaro, so as to 
 drive the enemy up the Meessudic-Jenin road into 
 the arms of the cavalry at El-Alfule. 
 
 I ordered Lieutenant-General Sir Harry Channel, 
 commanding the Desert Mounted Corps, also the 
 Australian and New 'Zealand Mounted Division, to 
 advance along the coast directly the infantry had 
 broken through and had secured the crossings over 
 the Nabr Falik. On reaching the line Jelameh- 
 Hudeira, he was to turn northeast, cross the hills 
 of Samaria and enter the Plain of Esdraelon. . . . 
 Riding along the plain, the Desert Mounted Corps 
 was to seize El-Alfule, sending a detachment to 
 Nazareth, the site of the Yilderim General Head- 
 quarters. SuflScient troops were to be left at El- 
 Alfule to intercept the Turkish retreat there. The 
 remainder of the corps was to ride down the Valley 
 of Jezreel and seize Beisan. 
 
 I ordered Lieutenant-General Philip Chetwode . . . 
 commanding the Twentieth Corps, to advance his 
 line east of the Bireh-Nablus road, on the night 
 
 [38] 
 
GENERAL ALLENBY 
 
 preceding the main attack [the night on which Sir 
 Philip was dining with me and excused himself 
 early in order to carry forward the movement], so 
 as to place the Fifty -third Division in a more favor- 
 able position to advance jand block the exit to the 
 lower Jordan Valley. I ordered him to be prepared 
 to carry out a quicker advance with the Fifty-third 
 and the Tenth Divisions on the evening of the day 
 on which the attack in the coastal plain took place, 
 or later as circumstances demanded. 
 
 The main difficulties lay in concealing the with- 
 drawal of two cavalry divisions from the Jordan 
 Valley, and in concentrating secretly a large force 
 in the coastal plain. 
 
 To prevent the decrease in the Jordan Valley 
 being discovered by the enemy, I ordered Major- 
 General Sir Edmund Chaytor to carry out ... a 
 series of demonstrations with the object of inducing 
 the enemy to believe that an attack east of the Jor- 
 dan was intended, either in the direction of Madeba 
 or Ammon. The enemy was thought to be antici- 
 pating an attack in these directions, and every pos- 
 sible step was taken to strengthen their suspicions. 
 
 At this time a mobile column of the Arabs, being 
 
 [39] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 accompanied by British armored cars and a French 
 mountain-battery, was assembling . . . fifty miles 
 east of Amman. The real objective of this column 
 was the railway north, south, and west of Deraa. 
 
 The concentration on the coastal plain was carried 
 out by night, and every precaution was taken to 
 prevent any increased movement becoming ap- 
 parent to the Turks. Full use of the many groves 
 round Ramleh, Ludd, and JaflPa was made to con- 
 ceal troops during the day. The chief factor in 
 the secrecy maintained must be attributed, however, 
 to the supremacy in the air which had been obtained 
 
 by the Royal Air Service. 
 
 • •••••• ■ 
 
 The operations which followed fall into 
 five phases: 
 
 The first phase was of short duration. In thirty- 
 six hours between 04.30 on September 19 and 17.00 
 [that is, 5.00 p. m.,] on September 20, the greater 
 part of the Eighth Turkish Army, had been over- 
 whelmed and the troops of the Seventh Army were 
 in full retreat through the hills of Samaria, whose 
 exits were already in the hands of my cavalry. [It 
 
 [40] 
 
GENERAL ALLENBY 
 
 was on the morning of that day that General Alien- 
 by said to me : " I have just had word that my cavalry 
 are at Armageddon."] 
 
 In the second phase, the fruits of this success 
 were reaped. The infantry, pressing relentlessly on 
 the heels of the retreating enemy, drove him into 
 the arms of my cavalry, with the result that prac- 
 tically the whole of the Seventh and Eighth Turkish 
 Armies were captured with their guns and trans- 
 ports. 
 
 This phase also witnessed the capture of Haifa 
 and Acre, and the occupation of Tiberias and of 
 the country to the south and west of the Sea of Gali- 
 lee. 
 
 As the result of the rout of the Seventh and 
 Eighth Armies, the Fourth Turkish Army, east of 
 the Jordan, retreated and Maan was evacuated. 
 
 The third phase commenced with the pursuit of 
 this army by Chaytor's force, and closed with the 
 capture of Ammon and the interception of the re- 
 treat of the garrison of Maan, which surrendered. 
 
 The fourth phase witnessed the advance by the 
 Desert Mounted Corps to Damascus, the capture 
 of the remnants of the Fourth Army and the ad- 
 
 [41] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 vance by the Twenty-first Corps along the coast 
 from Haifa to Beirut. 
 
 In the fifth phase, my troops reached Homs, and 
 Tripoli without opposition. My cavalry then ad- 
 vanced on Aleppo and occupied that city on October 
 26. Aleppo is over three hundred miles from our 
 former front line. The Fifth Cavalry Division cov- 
 ered five hundred miles between September 19 and 
 October 26, and captured over 11,000 prisoners and 
 52 guns. During this period the Fifth Cavalry Di- 
 vision lost only 21 per cent of its horses. 
 
 Between September 19 and October 26, 75,000 
 prisoners have been captured. Of these, 200 oflScers 
 and 3,500 other ranks are Germans or Austrians. 
 
 In addition 360 guns have fallen into our hands, 
 and the transport and equipment of three Turkish 
 armies. 
 
 [42] 
 
THE PILGRIMAGE 
 
T'^'?;Tir" 
 
 n3 
 O 
 
 
 c« 
 
 (Li 
 
 S 
 
Ill 
 
 THE CAMEL-TRAIN 
 
 MY thoughts of thee would be, if 
 writ and scanned. 
 As trains of camels o'er the snow- 
 white sand 
 Dawn-travelling toward the Holy Land 
 
 With slow and rhythmic feet. 
 Iambic, bearing each its mystic load. 
 Together making a majestic ode — 
 I but the blue-clad driver with the goad 
 Upon the swaying seat. 
 
 [45] 
 
IV 
 
 ON THE MOUNT OF OLIVES IN THE 
 YEAR OF OUR LORD 1918 
 
 THIS mount seems to belong to the 
 people of America as to all the rest 
 of the peoples who go to pray on 
 its summit and slopes. I saw it in my boy- 
 ish imagination rising amidst the prairies of 
 Ilhnois. I have seen it in my mature years 
 looking sombrely down on New York City 
 or standing as the shadowy Helderbergs on 
 the horizon of Albany. And often in a 
 summer's dusk it has crept with its solaces 
 in among the dearest of all our mountains 
 —the "White Hills" of New Hampshire. 
 But now it is the mount not of my imagina- 
 tion but of my actual physical inhabiting 
 from which I write. It is my suburban 
 home where I spend nights after the busy 
 
 [46] 
 
ON THE MOUNT OF OLIVES 
 
 days down in the city. My feet touch the 
 very ground on which He walked. My eyes 
 see in the dusk the very outUnes of the 
 hills upon which He looked. 
 
 The Patriarch of the Greek Church, who 
 at Easter comes forth with new fire from 
 the tomb in the Church of the Holy Sepul- 
 chre, to set aglow the candles of the frenzied 
 multitude, is a prisoner in Damascus. And 
 so it is that I have been permitted by those 
 of his Order to occupy his summer residence 
 within the monastery walls on the summit 
 of the Mount. British troops with horses 
 are encamped just outside the walls on one 
 side, and refugees from the hills beyond 
 Jordan on the other, but within are only a 
 few priests for fellow tenants, almost as 
 silent as the shadows of the trees under 
 which they stand or sit in their pious occu- 
 pations. 
 
 A chapel faces the court with an encir- 
 
 [47] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 cling inner wall as of an inner sanctuary. 
 This wall carries inscriptions in Greek from 
 the Bible, its entire circumference both in- 
 side and outside. In the midst of the court 
 is a well with the sacred symbol over it. 
 From this court one enters the Patriarch's 
 chambers. I feared my Scotch ancestors 
 within me might make protest in the pres- 
 ence of all the ritualistic emblems, and es- 
 pecially against my occupancy of the Patri- 
 arch's cot; but they were, after much argu- 
 ment, reconciled and forgot their differences 
 in their approach to this hallowed place 
 (though I am bound to say that the de- 
 nominational partisanship of many seems 
 to be intensified at this source of three of 
 the world's great religions). 
 
 A garden with olive-trees and vines and 
 cypresses gives wide borders to the monas- 
 tery, extending from one side of the summit 
 to the other. At the verge away from Jeru- 
 
 [48] 
 
ON THE MOUNT OF OLIVES 
 
 salem one looks down upon the Dead Sea, 
 three thousand feet below and fifteen miles 
 away, though it seems so near in some lights 
 that one could throw a stone into it. The 
 white stretches of the Jordan Valley reach 
 up among the hills and give weird setting 
 to the mountains of Moab beyond — the 
 mountains from one of whose lonely heights 
 Moses himself looked across the "Prom- 
 ised Land." 
 
 My first night on the Mount was fortu- 
 nately the night of the full moon — the har- 
 vest-moon; at any rate it was at this very 
 time of year that Boaz was gathering his 
 harvest in the field near Bethlehem which I 
 had visited that very day in search for the 
 children of a dying woman who was lying 
 in the hospital — children whom we found 
 in the last little hut in Bethlehem down 
 toward the field. 
 
 [49] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 It was late when I started for the Mount 
 from my place down in the city, and I hur- 
 ried to reach the summit before moonrise. 
 So it was that I took the shortest course, 
 which led me through the Damascus Gate 
 and through the gloom of the Via Dolorosa, 
 a dark, rough, and sorrowful street by day 
 but a more woeful one by night. There 
 was but one lamp burning its entire length. 
 One needs torches as that company of long 
 ago to make one's safe way and to identify 
 the stations of His agony along the dolorous 
 way. The arches, gates, and flying but- 
 tresses which give character to the street 
 by day make it seem a way of sepulchres 
 by night, and the few stray persons I met 
 or passed as wanderers among the tombs. 
 When I emerged at the lower gate, called 
 the "Lady Mary" Gate, I was actually 
 among the graves outside the wall, but the 
 starlit sky stretched wide overhead and I 
 
 [50] 
 

 «3 
 
 O 
 
 O 
 
 o 
 
 03 
 O 
 
 o 
 
 rt 
 
ON THE MOUNT OF OLIVES 
 
 could easily distinguish the brow of Olivet 
 before me. From below rose a sound as of 
 falling water, as if the Brook Kedron, dry 
 at this season, were suddenly in flood. 
 But it was only for a moment that I could 
 deceive myself, for almost immediately I 
 recognized it as the sound of innumerable 
 hoofs upon the hillside road that runs be- 
 tween the city walls and Gordon's Calvary. 
 Were they the hoofs of Solomon's spectre 
 horses whose seemingly empty stables I had 
 seen a few days before beneath the Temple 
 Area? It was only a moment later that 
 this illusion of my archaeological evoking 
 disappeared and that I saw the black line 
 of living horses with their British riders, 
 who might have been thought Crusader 
 Knights of the Middle Ages, except for the 
 low-voiced fragments of very modern songs 
 into which one or another of the riders 
 broke forth. But they were Crusaders none 
 
 [51] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 the less and as devoted and fearless as ever 
 were their brothers of the earlier age. 
 
 I threw myself into the dark stream and 
 was swept by its current down to the black 
 depths of the Vale of Jehosaphat, where its 
 course turned off to the right, encircling 
 the Mount. There I took the narrow camel 
 road and footpath to the left, leading to 
 paths that became white farther up the 
 slope. But before beginning the ascent, I 
 paused for a little between the walls of the 
 Gethsemane Gardens to see the shadowy 
 procession pass on — on out of this valley 
 into the "valley of decision," like the 
 stream which Joel saw issuing from the 
 Holy City to water the valley of his dreams 
 over toward Moab. As I saw face after 
 face silhouetted against the sky as full of 
 stars as ever I have seen a sky, I wondered 
 how many would come singing back along 
 that same road from Bethany around Oli- 
 
 [52] 
 
ON THE MOUNT OF OLIVES 
 
 vet, and how many would find their 
 Calvary down in that valley, in the 
 cause for which they were riding into the 
 night. 
 
 I was an ashamed spectator standing 
 there at the Gethsemane Gate, feeling that 
 we had been sleeping when we should have 
 been watching, when we should have been 
 preparing for defense against the German 
 Judas who had professed devotion to the 
 teachings of Him who spoke the Sermon on 
 the Mount. Did not the great German 
 Hospice stand most conspicuously on the 
 Mount that its pilgrims might dip their 
 bread in the very sop of the Master's dish ? 
 And do not the towers of the German 
 churches stand out most prominently (and 
 oflFensively) in the Inner City? One can 
 but think of those of Christ's time who 
 stood upon the street corners and prayed 
 that they might be seen of men, as one sees 
 
 [53] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 these Pharisaical towers. And the blas- 
 phemous paintings on the ceiling of the 
 "Stiftung" fill one with the righteous 
 prayer that some day this building may be 
 used to metal the road over which the am- 
 bulances and lorries creep along to and from 
 the front. 
 
 The passion of Peter rose in me as I stood 
 there. A mounted oflScer came back from 
 the column and peered with suspicious eyes 
 at me till assured by my Red Cross uni- 
 form of my sympathy, he joined his com- 
 mand and rode on. If only he could have 
 known of my desire to change places with 
 him or even with one of his men, and have 
 part in freeing the Holy Land from the tyr- 
 annies of both Teuton and Turk, he would 
 not have taunted me by his look as one 
 who stood by the fire and warmed himself 
 as a neutral when that to which he had 
 
 [54] 
 
ON THE MOUNT OF OLIVES 
 
 made loud professions of loyalty was in 
 peril. 
 
 America! You must send not only the 
 Red Cross to this front. You must send 
 that which Christ said he came to bring — a 
 sword. Gloriously as you are fighting at 
 the other end of the line, you should make 
 common cause with the forces of justice 
 against the demons of cruelty here — ^you 
 must have a part in the redemption of the 
 Holy Land. 
 
 I took the narrow way between the high 
 walls of the several Gethsemane Gardens, 
 each of which wished to keep exclusively 
 the memory of his sacred presence, but 
 wishing myself that all these walls were 
 razed and that all, Armenians, Greeks, and 
 Latins alike, would merge their gardens 
 into one garden that would beautify the 
 
 [55] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 whole hillside, instead of fencing each their 
 little tract and leaving the greater part of 
 the hillside as bare and broken and desolate 
 as a bit of ''No Man's Land." Perhaps it 
 was because of this, because no one claimed 
 as his particular garden that rough, stony, 
 barren, unoccupied bit of solitude near the 
 city that as I climbed by one of the white 
 tortuous paths up from the Kedron, I 
 found the Christ more consciously there 
 than inside the formal gardens with their 
 walled and ritual beauty. Moreover, I 
 agree with those who hold that our Lord 
 must have gone higher up the hill, a little 
 farther apart, a little more remote from the 
 noise of the city and of the highway, for his 
 meditations. 
 
 When I reached the summit of the 
 Mount, not far from the traditional place 
 of His ascension, the full moon was just 
 rising over the ever-mystical mountains of 
 
 [56] 
 
ON THE MOUNT OF OLIVES 
 
 Moab. They seemed to hang as a veil 
 below the eyes of the sky (after the mode 
 of some of the Orient women), with the 
 sheen upon the Dead Sea showing as a bit 
 of broidery below the veil and above the 
 shoulders of the hills of Judah. One could 
 hear the trumpeting of the guns that had 
 made the modern and wall-less Jericho to 
 fall, and that were now advancing toward 
 other cities which under other names than 
 those that they now bear met like fate at 
 the hands of the ancient "Desert Corps," 
 who had spent forty years wandering in the 
 wilderness between the Jordan and the 
 Nile. But except for this occasional sound 
 of distant thunder and a flashing as of heat- 
 lightning in the cloudless sky, the valley 
 had hidden behind its hills all signs of war, 
 and seemed to have upon it the peace of 
 near-by Bethany, just under the Mount, 
 which He often sought. 
 
 [57] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 But the other verge of the Mount soon 
 called me away from the moon's tempta- 
 tion of the wilderness to look upon the Holy 
 City, which the same light had converged 
 into a white, silent dream of the hot, dusty, 
 huddled, and not too clean city that I had 
 left an hour or two before. The shadows 
 of the Mount were still upon Gethsemane 
 and Kedron, but the city was sitting like 
 an angel in white beside a tomb — an empty 
 tomb. 
 
 It was the morning, however — the morn- 
 ing after a night on the Mount, with no 
 sound but of the wind unceasingly sorrow- 
 ing — that gave, by the miracle of its first 
 light, a vision of the city such as one might 
 have to wait years to catch again. I had 
 waked (literally at the crowing of the cock) 
 at dawn, had seen the sun come up over 
 Moab, whose dim ridge was now sur- 
 mounted by a great plain of golden cloud 
 
 [58] 
 
en 
 0) 
 
 O 
 
 o 
 
 a 
 o 
 
 
 o 
 a 
 
 (-1 
 
 1-5 
 
ON THE MOUNT OF OLIVES 
 
 or desert beyond, and then had hastened 
 to see the city lying in the new light. I 
 was disappointed, for a mist was sweeping 
 up from the valley, completely blotting out 
 both the dusty city of the day before and 
 the white city of the night before (the only 
 reconciling circumstance of the moment 
 being that the outwardly abhorrent and 
 inwardly blasphemous German building on 
 the neighboring summit of the Mount was 
 also obliterated. This building, in which 
 the ex-Kaiser is represented in the ceiling 
 of the chapel in a companion panel with 
 Deity, in which the Psalmist is painted 
 with the moustache of a German general, 
 and in which the ex-Kaiser is moulded in a 
 figure of bronze as a Crusader. The city 
 had disappeared as if the statement of the 
 Master as to its rebuilding were to be liter- 
 ally tested. Not one stone stood upon 
 another. Not one structure of man's build- 
 
 [59] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 ing remained. Nothing was to be seen 
 save the very crest of the hill back of the 
 city, to which no houses had ascended, and 
 it seemed suspended in mid-air, after the 
 manner of the rock on Mount Mori ah. 
 
 But even as I looked toward the place of 
 the ancient and holy city, the gray curtain 
 of mist or fog parted as if drawn aside by 
 invisible hands. A golden rift immediately 
 over the city — over the Church of the Holy 
 Sepulchre itself — slowly widened, till in a 
 few minutes there stood as in an Apocalypse 
 before me, a city shut away from the outer 
 city, and from all about, as if rebuilded in 
 the golden and jewelled image of itself, or 
 as if actually let down from heaven — a 
 celestial city "having the glory of God" 
 upon it, with its "great high wall" and its 
 gates open to the nations with their gifts of 
 "glory and honor." 
 
 I had asked an American who was giving 
 
 [60] 
 
ON THE MOUNT OF OLIVES 
 
 a splendid service on the Palestine front to 
 spend the night with me on the Mount, 
 but he had not come. I was rather glad of 
 it when I saw the fog in the valley hiding 
 everything, but I now regretted that he 
 was not with me to bear witness to this 
 miraculous epiphany. I had no camera, 
 and no camera could have caught the full 
 glory of it. But it was not of my imagin- 
 ing. I hurried down the Mount, however, 
 without looking again at the city, wishing 
 to keep the vision of it as I had seen it 
 come out of the cloud. 
 
 A refugee was going down the same foot- 
 path toward the city gate. I looked into 
 his face as I passed to see if the light of the 
 vision I had beheld was upon it, but the 
 effulgence of my Apocalypse had evidently 
 faded into the common light of day, or his 
 eyes were holden that he could not see. 
 This sight of Jerusalem given to me in such 
 
 [61] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 dramatic way will always remain as an 
 intimation of that which Americans, in 
 common with all who are fighting for jus- 
 tice in the earth, must help to bring into 
 this Holy City. Many that make abomi- 
 nation and lies in the world have entered in 
 the past, but under the British Government 
 it is being cleansed, and prepared for the 
 genius of the nations, and especially of 
 those whose religions found cradle here — 
 Moslem, Jewish, and Christian — to adorn 
 it, make it the most beautiful citv on the 
 planet and give it most fit setting amid 
 the mountains round about it — "as the 
 stars of a crown glistening upon his 
 land." 
 
 Here is a prayer that comes to one's lips 
 on the Mount of Olives, and that may be 
 helpful to those who can but look toward 
 this place of radiant dawn and of glorious 
 twilight : 
 
 [6£] 
 
ON THE MOUNT OF OLIVES 
 
 O Thou whose feet upon the mountains of Moab 
 are beautiful with the golden tidings of a new day, 
 who dost walk upon the sea with sandals of silver 
 and dost hasten across the desert hills, which Thou 
 makest to glow as jewels, on Thy way to this moun- 
 tain of light where Thou didst often meet Thy Son 
 when on Earth. Here shall I come each day though 
 far away, on sea or land, to meet Thee on this holy 
 hill, and do Thou go with me to the day's work in 
 whatever city it lies, near or far. Help me to do 
 it, whatever and wherever it be, in the spirit of 
 Him who prayed here. — Amen. 
 
 [63] 
 
AIN KARIM 
 
 (Meaning the " fountain of mercy/* at the traditional birthplace 
 of John the Baptist, where Mary came to visit Elizabeth after 
 the Annunciation.) 
 
 O SPRING of Mercy, that for untold 
 years 
 Has flowed unceasing from these 
 sacred hills 
 O'er which the Virgin hastened as she went 
 To tell her secret to Elizabeth, 
 Singing her wondrous canticle of Him 
 Who "hath put down the mighty from 
 
 their seat," 
 Who "hath exalted them of low degree" 
 And showeth tender mercy unto men, 
 ■ • • ••••• 
 
 Here did she come with balanced jar. 
 Here bathe her face and feet as she who 
 stands 
 
 [64] 
 
o 
 
 cC 
 SI 
 
 w 
 
 o 
 
 S 
 
 o 
 
 s 
 
 o 
 
 
 a 
 
 o 
 
AIN KARIM 
 
 To-day before the splashing, sparkling 
 
 stream 
 Ere lifting to her head the living gift. 
 
 Water of Life was He who came of her, 
 The heart's own proof of that same lasting 
 
 love 
 Which flows from sources pure and infinite 
 And knows nor time nor circumstance — 
 Only man's thirst for the immortal thing, 
 Eternal life with everlasting love. 
 
 Divine Ain Karim, I would drink of thee. 
 And so have life and love eternally. 
 E'en though my body lie in lonely grave 
 Deep in some cypress-mourning vale of 
 
 earth. 
 As they of British mothers born who died 
 Regaining hills that first knew Mary's 
 
 Son — 
 But Ufe with love, for endless life alone 
 Were an eternal death, or deathless hell. 
 
 Jerusalem, 1918. 
 
 [65] 
 
VI 
 
 FROM JAFFA TO JERICHO 
 
 SO great are the distances between two 
 oceans in the United States that Pal- 
 estine when seen by Americans will 
 seem pitiably small — insignificant in area 
 and natural product. From the top of a 
 hill outside Jerusalem one can see both the 
 Mediterranean Sea and the Dead Sea. For 
 Palestine is not as wide as the State of New 
 Hampshire, which I have crossed on foot in 
 a day. It was the memory of this walk 
 across New Hampshire that perhaps sug- 
 gested traversing Palestine in the same 
 way. Or was it, after all, the impulse 
 which has driven hundreds of thousands, 
 and even millions, over the same road in 
 the two thousand years of the Christian 
 era, that made me wish to travel the whole 
 
 [66] 
 
FROM JAFFA TO JERICHO 
 
 sacred way on my feet ? At any rate, the 
 longing of the first weeks, encouraged by 
 memories of White Momitain walks of sixty 
 and seventy miles, has had its satisfaction 
 in accomplishment, and now has its memo- 
 ries as I look out from the Mount of Olives 
 across the westward mountains through 
 which I made my pilgrimage from the sea 
 that hes toward America, and across the 
 eastward wilderness through which I 
 reached the other edge of the Holy Land. 
 This pilgrimage (for "pilgrimage" it was, 
 and no ordinary walk) had a fit and glorious 
 preparatory night out near JafiFa, one of 
 those perfect Holy Land nights when the 
 stars come nearer earth — such a night as 
 that in which David must have walked 
 when he came from playing to the mad 
 spirit of Saul, when "the stars of night beat 
 with emotion." I slept in a tent on the 
 very edge of the cliff overlooking the sea 
 
 [67] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 (as close to it as one could lie without dan- 
 ger of falling into the sea). The sound of 
 the waves was as that of the wind in the 
 trees of the Mount of Olives, which is sel- 
 dom quiet. 
 
 And the "pilgrimage" had also a fit and 
 glorious morning. The sun was received 
 as he came resplendent and burning from 
 the very moment of his appearance on the 
 farthest Judsean mountain, by the sound of 
 bagpipes (for I was with the famous "Black 
 Watch" on this the fourth anniversary of 
 the beginning of the war). And the tim- 
 brels of Miriam or the sackbut and psaltery 
 of David could not have made more stir- 
 ring noise unto the Lord of the Day. But 
 it was only the preface to a service more 
 memorable and impressive to me than even 
 that which I attended in Edinburgh at St. 
 Giles's the Sunday after the beginning of 
 the war, when I sat beneath St. Gaudens's 
 
 [68] 
 
FROM JAFFA TO JERICHO 
 
 "Stevenson," saw the city councillors in 
 their scarlet going in procession with the 
 clergy, and heard the solemn and moving 
 prayers for the men who were going out to 
 Flanders. And here they were still fight- 
 ing on a line stretching all the way to the 
 edge of the Desert of Arabia and the Valley 
 of the Euphrates — to the very cradle of the 
 race. The Highlanders stood in a hollow 
 square opening toward Jerusalem, with the 
 sea close at their backs. They sang the 
 ancient hymns of the church (among them 
 *'0 God, Our Help in Ages Past"), bowed 
 to the prayer of the "padre" (as every 
 chaplain is called), and listened with real 
 interest, and not simply from Scotch habit, 
 to his stirring but calm and simple sermon. 
 The colonel had said that the "padre" was 
 a "topper," and that he would "give me a 
 
 good sermon." And the padre rose 
 
 to his reputation. He read for the Old Tes- 
 
 [69] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 tament lesson the sixth chapter of the Sec- 
 ond Book of the Kings, which tells the 
 story of Elisha and his servant who found 
 themselves surrounded by an army out on 
 the plain of Dothan, not fifty miles away; 
 and for the New Testament lesson the de- 
 scription by St. Paul of the Christian sol- 
 dier. He took for his text the verse from 
 the Old Testament lesson (the words of the 
 prophet to his panic-stricken servant whose 
 eyes were suddenly opened to see the 
 "horses and the chariots of fire round about 
 Elisha"), "Fear not; for they that be with 
 us are more than they that be with them." 
 His sermon was punctuated by reports from 
 the guns not far away, but it had a star- 
 tling climax when, just as he was coming 
 to its close, an aeroplane flying overhead 
 toward the enemy's lines, appeared as a 
 "chariot of fire" in the morning sun. The 
 young Scotch minister, standing before 
 
 [70] 
 
FROM JAFFA TO JERICHO 
 
 these men facing the fifth year of the war, 
 was as the ancient prophet who, not fifty 
 miles (but more than twenty-five centuries) 
 away, beyond Shechem, on which the army 
 was now advancing, made visible the celes- 
 tial army; for he too made every man feel 
 that the invisible forces of right were fight- 
 ing with them — a faith that was strength- 
 ened by the message which came from the 
 Commander-in-Chief that morning express- 
 ing his "hope and confidence based on the 
 justice of our cause and faith in the sustain- 
 ing help of the Almighty." 
 
 The pilgrimage upon which I set out later 
 in the day had been made by thousands, 
 but at a pace suggested by the etymological 
 derivation which Thoreau in an essay on 
 walking has given to the word "saunterer" 
 — one who goes "a la Sainte Terre," a 
 " sainte-terrer," a "saunterer." My pil- 
 grimage was no sauntering, as will be in- 
 
 1711 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 ferred from the fact that I made the jour- 
 ney from Jaffa to Jericho, walking every 
 step of the way, a distance of somewhat 
 more than sixty miles as I walked, in 
 twenty-two hours, elapsed time, or in be- 
 tween eighteen and nineteen hours in actual 
 walking time. I have no doubt that Peter, 
 hastening in the opposite direction toward 
 the house of Tabitha or Dorcas, walked as 
 fast, unless indeed he rode on a donkey. (I 
 actually met an American Red Cross doc- 
 tor going like Peter from Ludd to minister 
 to some one in Joppa, but in a Ford car). 
 Many a Middle Age Crusader doubtless 
 'travelled over some portions of the road in 
 double-quick time, advancing or retreating. 
 And no doubt many a traveller on the road 
 to Jericho hurried over other portions of 
 the way to escape the fate of the nameless 
 one who has made the "good Samaritan" 
 immortal. But I think that neither dis- 
 
 [72] 
 
FROM JAFFA TO JERICHO 
 
 ciple, Crusader, pilgrim, nor sightseer (the 
 last category being now no longer on the 
 roads) usually went at this pace, or at any 
 rate the whole way. Certainly the gait of 
 pedestrians of to-day is more leisurely. I 
 passed scores, and indeed hundreds, on the 
 road, soldiers, fellaheen, Egyptian laborers. 
 But I was alone till the darkness came on, 
 ^hen I became conscious not only of the 
 moving presence of spirit pilgrims out of 
 the past — of ancient warriors from Joshua's 
 time, for Ajalon and Beth-horon were 
 among the foot-hills, and of Crusaders, for 
 the great tower of Ramleh stood for a time 
 in majesty against the afterglow in the 
 western sky, but also the living pilgrims of 
 the night. Pushing along in the darkness, 
 dimly luminous with the stars (and no- 
 where have I seen more beautiful nights 
 than in Palestine), I would suddenly be- 
 come aware that a procession of some sort 
 
 [73] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 was passing in the muffling dust of the earth 
 road on one side or the other of the white 
 metalled road in which I was walking. 
 Bending low to get the forms against the 
 sky, I would discover now that it was a 
 train of camels with their mysterious bur- 
 dens, or perhaps a pattering procession of 
 pack-donkeys. Again it would be a body 
 of Egyptians of the great "Egyptian Labor 
 Corps," which is giving such valuable ser- 
 vice in building and maintaining the roads 
 and other public works, going from one 
 camp to another. Then the creaking of 
 heavy wheels, or the clanking of harness, 
 or the tramping of shod feet, or the quiet 
 singing by a "Tommy," would tell of an- 
 other sort of procession to or from the front 
 line, the flashes of whose guns were almost 
 continuously illuminating the northern sky 
 like heat-lightning. At one time I came 
 upon many East Indian soldiers, in twos 
 
 [74] 
 
FROM JAFFA TO JERICHO 
 
 and in small groups, walking in the same 
 direction with me in the metalled road. A 
 little later I overtook large groups of these 
 picturesque figures — ^who seem detached 
 and mystical even by day, but as inscru- 
 table as men from Mars in the darkness, 
 which was not deep enough to obscure their 
 differences from the man of the Occident. 
 I found as I walked on, passing one sedate 
 and silent group after another, that they 
 were but the tired "stragglers" from the 
 column ahead. It took well on to an hour 
 to reach the vanguard of this column so 
 long was it — ^and so tired was it when I 
 came to the very head of it that the men 
 were lying down in their tracks in the white 
 road, and evidently with as much comfort 
 as if lying between white sheets on mat- 
 tresses. I was not yet sleepy or tired my- 
 self, though I learned that they had started 
 at the same hour as I and several miles this 
 
 [75] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 side of Jaffa. (A few hours later I was 
 finding the rough stone coping at the side 
 of a bridge a very welcome and as comfort- 
 able a bed for a few minutes as they the 
 roadbed itself, with its coverlet of dust.) 
 I found the commanding oflBcer, a fellow 
 colonel, who offered me the courtesy which 
 is universally characteristic of the English 
 officer. (In all my travels, on foot, by 
 train, or by car, I have known but one 
 exception.) I then had a clear road alone 
 for the rest of the night, except for the fel- 
 laheen with their camels or donkeys. Or 
 almost alone, for shortly after passing the 
 Indian column and saying good-night to 
 their English officers, I became conscious 
 that some one was following me at a good 
 pace on foot. I did not wish a companion, 
 and so I quickened my gait, only to find 
 that he was still close upon me. Faster 
 and faster I went till I reached the camp 
 
 [76] 
 
FROM JAFFA TO JERICHO 
 
 at Latron, where I stopped for water. I 
 was led back some distance from the road 
 by the hospitable guard to a spring, as I 
 supposed, but, as I found instead, the 
 "fantasia," the universal fountains, the 
 great rectangular cans such as the camels 
 carry by thousands. (I estimated that if 
 the "fantasia" that I saw on another jour- . 
 ney, borne by one camel-train, were put 
 end to end they would make a pipe-line 
 or aqueduct nearly a mile long.) But while 
 I quenched my thirst the mysterious fig- 
 ure, in costume that appeared to be white 
 or very light, disappeared. I afterward 
 learned that the place where I stopped was 
 the traditional birthplace of the "good 
 thief," canonized as St. Dismas. Indeed a 
 church stands somewhere in the deeper 
 shadows of the hill just back of the camp. 
 I suspect that my fellow traveller and fol- 
 lower was only the shade of Dismas walk- 
 
 [77] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 ing in penance the path of his prepenitent 
 nights, and that he turned in to his shrine 
 for the rest of the night. At any rate, I 
 continued alone my journey across the 
 Valley of Sharon, its night-air pungent 
 with an aromatic fragrance. But if there 
 were roses growing in Sharon they were 
 gray roses, for the dust was deep upon 
 everything. 
 
 As I neared the foot-hills I followed the 
 example of the Indian soldiers, choosing, 
 however, as I have said, the coping of a 
 stone bridge for my mattress and pillow. 
 I would better have laid myself down on 
 the road, for when I was wakened a few 
 minutes later by a camel-bell I found that 
 the cover of my canteen had fallen off into 
 the wady (brook) below, and that all the 
 water had followed it into the dry bed of 
 the brook. The thought of four or five 
 hours ahead without water only increased 
 
 [78] 
 
FROM JAFFA TO JERICHO 
 
 my thirst and made me sympathize with 
 the genii of the wady, who receive not a 
 drop from the skies or hills for months. 
 But they must have been grateful for the 
 drafts from my canteen, and have found a 
 way to show their gratitude, for a little 
 way up the pass through the lower hills, 
 when I was about famished for a drink of 
 water, I overtook an Arab boy with two 
 donkeys (on one of which he was mounted) 
 and two camels. By signs I made known 
 my thirst, whereupon he dismounted and 
 led me to a place at the roadside from 
 which he dipped cupful after cupful of as 
 delicious water as I ever tasted. (I found 
 on a later journey that this was a stone 
 basin, or, cistern, which is daily filled from 
 a spring near by,) I wish that I had asked 
 the boy his name that I might have thanked 
 him more adequately and tangibly. How- 
 ever, he will have from a higher sour.ce the 
 
 [79] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 reward promised to those who give a cup 
 of cold water in the name of Christ. He 
 was certainly a Christ-soul boy. He was 
 insistent that I should mount either one of 
 his donkeys or camels (making a fork with 
 his fingers to suggest the straddle). I de- 
 clined as kindly and gratefully as I could, 
 with no such effective symbolism available, 
 and passed on. A half-hour away I could 
 hear this Arab youth below me singing his 
 happy but plaintive song as I was mount- 
 ing through the olive-groves (where it is 
 said David once lived when fleeing from 
 Saul) to the heights of Enab, that was once 
 known as Kirjath-jearim, where for twenty- 
 five years the Ark of the Covenant rested 
 in the house of Abinadab. 
 
 I missed the main road at the top of the 
 hill and found myself on a rocky path down 
 into the valley on the other side. If the 
 ark was taken down this path, I can under- 
 
 [80] 
 
FROM JAFFA TO JERICHO 
 
 stand why the oxen stumbled, and why 
 Uzzah put out his hand to stay the ark — 
 an act for which one feels with David that 
 Uzzah should not have been smitten. 
 There is a threshing-floor not far beyond, 
 the first that I had seen in Palestine on 
 my first journey into Jerusalem, and I have 
 wondered whether the primitive threshing 
 with the unmuzzled ox had gone on season 
 after season on that same floor since the 
 time of Joshua and David. Perhaps it was 
 the very threshing-floor of Nachor near 
 which the oxen stumbled. At any rate, it 
 must have been through this very valley 
 that the ark was borne toward Jerusalem, 
 with the playing on instruments of fir-wood, 
 with timbrels and castanets and cymbals. 
 Somewhere beyond, it was left (because of 
 the untoward incident that angered David) 
 in the house of Obed-Edom, where the 
 three months' blessing fell upon all his 
 
 [81] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 household, while all the house of Abinadab 
 mourned the loss of Uzzah. 
 
 It was to be a valley of expectation and 
 disappointment when I first passed through 
 it by day, for I expected to see the Holy 
 City gleaming below when I reached the 
 height at the farther side of it, but I was 
 disappointed to find, when I reached the 
 summit, that there was still another range 
 of hills that kept the City another hour or 
 two from my view — a real disappointment, 
 though my pilgrimage had taken more 
 years than the Children of Israel wandered 
 in the wilderness — that is all the years of 
 my life — the wilderness of which I was 
 having the first glimpse in seeing the faint 
 mountains of haze toward the east. 
 
 But the next intervening valley, whose 
 farther wall makes one of the "mountains 
 round about Jerusalem," is so beautiful as 
 
 [82] 
 
■"••^a'^^M ■ 
 
 4) 
 O 
 
 d 
 
 a; 
 
 O 
 
 
 a; 
 
 ►-5 
 
 o 
 
FROM JAFFA TO' JERICHO 
 
 to help one forget the disappointment of 
 the Kastel hill. In this valley it was that 
 Mary came to visit Elizabeth near the 
 fountain (pictured on page 64) that has 
 drawn about it the most beautiful village in 
 southern Palestine, and kept it high on the 
 hillside from slipping down into the val- 
 ley's depths. It was here that the boy, 
 John the Baptist, was hidden to escape the 
 threat of Herod. It was, perhaps, through 
 this valley that Christ walked to Emmaus. 
 And by night, though one could not see 
 the beauty of the vale, one could the more 
 easily evoke the past that had lived and 
 loved and laid itself down to die in its dust, 
 or had risen to immortality, and some of 
 that past but recently become dust; for at 
 the foot of the last hill there are six graves 
 of English soldiers who were killed there 
 the day before the entrance of the first 
 
 [83] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 brigade of British troops into Jerusalem. I 
 went back later and wrote this epitaph for 
 the six graves : 
 
 THEY DIED CLIMBING 
 
 " Beyond the hill the Holy City lies; 
 These never saw its glories with their eyes, 
 
 They never reached its crest; 
 They perished climbing these last sacred heights. 
 But when they died, like true Crusader knights 
 
 Their feet were on the Quest." 
 
 But as I began to climb from this last 
 hill, the gibbous moon was making a gray, 
 silvery light in the eastern sky. It was, 
 however, as was St. John of the true Light, 
 but the "prodrome" of the greater light 
 that was just rising beyond the Mount of 
 Olives as I entered the Holy City. 
 
 It was not the side from which one would 
 choose to enter, for one does not see the 
 City till one is actually in it, and then one 
 cannot see its beauty or feel its antiquity 
 
 [84] 
 
a 
 
 en 
 
 P 
 
 <V 
 1-5 
 
 o 
 
 <y 
 
 o 
 
 X 
 
 •^ 
 
 
 in 
 
 
 C3 
 
 
 yA T3 
 
 
 « 
 
 0; 
 
 r, 
 
 
 tf 
 
 «4M 
 
 o 
 
 a 
 
 
 1' 
 
 4-1 
 
 
 O 
 
 ci 
 
 o 
 
 cc 
 
 «*-l 
 
 i-i 
 
 
 
 •*-' 
 
 1 
 
 
 5t= 
 
 
 c« 
 
 ^ 
 
 1-5 
 
 
 a; 
 
 •+J 
 
 A 
 
 ce 
 
 •¥■> 
 
 tri 
 
 c 
 
 i> 
 
 o 
 
 TD 
 
 
 c 
 
 
 p 
 
 
 '/) 
 
 
 tH 
 
 
 <v 
 
 
 • i-N 
 
 
 n3> 
 
 
 
 
 O 
 
 
 Cfl 
 
 
 X 
 
 
 c« 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 bC 
 
 
 C 
 
 
 w 
 
 
 «4-l 
 
 
 o 
 
 
 (W 
 
 
 IK 
 
 
 K* 
 
 
 a; 
 
 
 u, 
 
 
 tc 
 
 
 a- 
 
 
 ^ 
 
 
 H 
 
 
FROM JAFFA TO JERICHO 
 
 because of the modern shabby houses that 
 line the JaflFa Road. It was the side, how- 
 ever, from which its recent conquest had 
 been made, and it was by the Jaffa Road 
 that General AUenby and his men entered 
 the Inner City — where the Kaiser had cut 
 in the ancient walls, beside the old Jaffa 
 Gate, a few feet away, for his august and 
 farcical entry, several years ago, in the 
 garb of a Crusader. There could be no 
 more marked or significant contrast than 
 that which General Allenby's unostenta- 
 tious entry presented. 
 
 I stopped at the new reservoir in the hill, 
 just inside the City, known as "Abraham's 
 Vineyard," for a drink of water, brought 
 into the City by the British engineers from 
 the hills beyond Bethlehem. In David's 
 day warriors went to the Bethlehem spring, 
 through hostile lines, to get a drink for 
 their leader. It took a British army to 
 
 [85] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 bring water from beyond Bethlehem, and 
 it was only sixty-seven days from the day 
 when they started at the springs of Arub — 
 the old springs from which Pontius Pilate 
 brought water to Jerusalem — that water 
 was flowing at the taps in the Holy City 
 with a capacity of three hundred thousand 
 gallons a day. Had I reached the City 
 two days earlier I should have had to find 
 a cistern, for only the day before my arrival 
 had the water-bearers, the British Royal 
 Engineers, reached the City. I poured out 
 a libation to them as David poured that 
 which was brought to him, because it was 
 "as the blood of those that went at the 
 peril of their lives," but I also drank in 
 gratitude (for here was water enough for 
 both the libation and the quenching of my 
 thirst), and the water from the well of 
 Bethlehem could not have been sweeter in 
 David's memory. 
 
 [86] 
 
FROM JAFFA TO JERICHO 
 
 After two hours in Jerusalem, where I 
 had a bath and breakfast — the only food I 
 had tasted on the way — I started on again 
 down through the Damascus Gate, over the 
 rough Via Dolorosa, out of St. Stephen's 
 Gate, and down to the Garden of Gethsem- 
 ane at the foot of the Mount of Olives. 
 But instead of climbing over the hill by 
 familiar paths, I followed the white road 
 round the mount, enveloped most of the 
 way by clouds of gray dust from the lorries 
 and ambulances, down into and through 
 the village of Bethany, white as the sepul- 
 chre of Lazarus from these same clouds. 
 The Master could have found no rest there 
 in these days and nights, where the great 
 honking cars pass to and from the Jericho 
 front. 
 
 Beyond Bethany there is not a tree — at 
 least I did not see one until I reached the 
 plain of Jericho. And never did I long 
 
 [87] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 more for the shade of one, however meagre. 
 I even looked for the shadow of a rock 
 when the morning sun became almost un- 
 bearable. I have never known such heat 
 except at the mouth of a furnace. How 
 the British troops spent months in that 
 inferno is beyond my comprehension. I 
 made other journeys down into the valley 
 carrying hospital supplies and, later, refu- 
 gees back to their beyond-Jordan homes, 
 but most of the way by night. About two 
 miles out of Jericho, and a mile from the 
 plain, I came upon a cave, whose darkness 
 was most welcome. It was large enough to 
 hold the fifty prophets whom Obadiah hid 
 from the hate of Jezebel, and fed on bread 
 and water, but it had only the memories 
 of tinned goods lying about. I rested, and 
 even slept for a few minutes, with a stone 
 for a pillow, and then pushed on, refreshed 
 by the shadow, which was as food brought 
 
 [88] 
 
Oil 
 
 o 
 
 rfi 
 
 
 O 
 
 d 
 
 O 
 
FROM JAFFA TO JERICHO 
 
 by a raven, and by water from my canteen, 
 which was as the brook Cherith near by 
 till it dried up. And my canteen was rap- 
 idly approaching the condition of the brook 
 (which in this land does not have the habit 
 of going on forever, as Tennyson's) when 
 the prophet Elijah was commanded to leave 
 this region and go to Zerephath, over on 
 the coast from which I had walked. I found 
 myself wondering how long it took the 
 prophet to walk the same distance in the 
 opposite direction. 
 
 There had been some movement in the 
 air among the mountains, but when I 
 reached the plain there was not enough to 
 stir the frond of a palm. Everything was 
 as if cast in bronze or brass, overhanging 
 mountains, sky, and the glistering plain 
 with its motionless life. I could believe 
 that Dore had come to this region for some 
 of his illustrations for Dante's "Inferno." 
 
 [89] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 I felt myself to be clothed as some of 
 Dante's creatures in hell, in garments of 
 lead. Now and then a lorry or an ambu- 
 lance darted across the sand like an insect, 
 but there was otherwise only the silence 
 and immobility of the solitude, for it was 
 the siesta hour (2 o'clock) for all himian 
 life in the valley. There was no firing at 
 the front. Heat had brought a temporary 
 armistice — ^it had made this place a com- 
 plete wilderness for the moment, and called 
 it peace. 
 
 Entering the City, which had no chal- 
 lenging sentinel nor forbidding wall, as it 
 had in the days of Joshua, I found the wel- 
 coming gate to the "compound," officially 
 occupied by the military governor. He 
 was not in, so I flung myself down beneath 
 a tree — a palm I think it was, as it should 
 have been in this city of palm-trees (I after- 
 ward found, on a later journey, from the 
 
 [90] 
 
o 
 
 .a 
 
 a 
 o 
 
FROM JAFFA TO JERICHO 
 
 testimony of a camera showing a real camel 
 resting under the same tree, that it was 
 not). I was by no means exhausted, but I 
 felt disposed in the enjoyment of its shade 
 to obey the injunction given to certain 
 ones in Scriptural days, to "tarry in Jericho 
 until their beards be grown." 
 
 [91] 
 
vn 
 
 ST. DISMAS 
 
 (At Latron, in Palestine^ there is a chapel erected to the memory 
 of "The Good Thief," known as St. Dismas, who is said to 
 have been born in this village.) 
 
 iWIXT Ramleh and Latron one 
 night 
 Upon the Jaffa Road, gray- white, 
 Some one beneath the stars' dim light 
 My steps apace was following. 
 
 White was his face, the starlight showed, 
 White was his habit as the road. 
 White with the Sharon dust, he strode 
 As my own body's shadowing. 
 
 I quickened my own pace a bit. 
 He quickened his to equal it. 
 Till, his guessed purpose to outwit, 
 I turned to find a wayside spring. 
 
 [92] 
 
ST. DISMAS 
 
 And he too, but, to my relief, 
 
 On toward a shrine, as one in grief, 
 
 A shrine erected to the thief 
 
 Who'd hung with Christ in suffering. 
 
 And now I know he was the sprite 
 Of this "Good Thief" who on that night 
 Along the Jaflfa Road, gray-white. 
 My steps apace was following. 
 
 As in his nights, prepenitent. 
 He walked again these roads in Lent 
 And then at twelve of midnight went 
 To pray the Lord's remembering. 
 
 St. Dismas, should the lot be mine 
 To walk again in Palestine, 
 I'll find thy robber penant shrine 
 And make this bold petitioning: 
 
 That though to Paradise I go. 
 The God from whom all blessings flow 
 Will let me walk by night below 
 In roads of my earth wandering. 
 
 [93] 
 
VIII 
 FROM BEERSHEBA 
 
 IN the phrase that is current wherever 
 the Bible is read, Beersheba is at the 
 end of the journey, and not at the be- 
 ginning. It was the farthest outpost of 
 the Land of Promise. It was off into the 
 wilderness, beyond Beersheba, that Hagar 
 wandered with her boy Ishmael, and that 
 Elijah fled from the woman- wrath of Jeze- 
 bel, for when he left Beersheba he went "a 
 day's journey into the wilderness." 
 
 But one of the most appealing and most 
 picturesque journeys of all history, though 
 a brief one, was made from Beersheba as 
 the starting-point; it was the journey on 
 which Abraham set out when he went with 
 
 [94] 
 
FROM BEERSHEBA 
 
 his little son Isaac to offer him up for a 
 burnt offering on Mount Moriah. 
 
 And it was from the well which Abraham 
 is said to have digged (or one of seven), the 
 well to which the very name Beersheba, the 
 place of oath, is memorial (because it was 
 there, in witness of the digging of the well 
 that Abimelech and Abraham swore unto 
 one another and made covenant), it was 
 from this well that I started on my journey 
 northward as far as I could at that time go 
 in Palestine toward Dan. I would go as 
 Abraham to Mount Moriah, and thence I 
 would go, if the English advances made 
 this possible, at least to Shechem, where 
 the Israelites buried the bones of Joseph 
 who had been "embalmed and put in a 
 coffin" in Egypt, after they had carried 
 these bones forty years in the wilderness. 
 
 I started, not as Abraham, early in the 
 morning, but at noon, when the mid- August 
 
 [95] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 sunshine was blazing over the desert to the 
 south. But before evening I passed him 
 somewhere near the foot-hills of Judaea, in 
 the level stretches of the land of Simeon — 
 Simeon, who in Jacob's roster of his sons, 
 was set down immortally as one who "in 
 anger slew men and in self-will houghed 
 oxen." But Abraham had very good rea- 
 son for not wishing to get to the end of his 
 journey earlier than he must, for when he 
 reached the Mount he was, for aught he 
 knew, to sacrifice his only son through 
 whom the promise of his becoming the 
 father of a multitude of nations was to be 
 fulfilled. I saw him and Isaac toiling slowly 
 on the way far ahead of me toward evening. 
 They stopped early for the first night. The 
 father was very gentle with the boy, who 
 did not suspect his own fate. As I passed 
 them I could see Abraham looking away 
 from the boy toward the heaven and its 
 
 [96] 
 
d 
 o 
 
 o 
 
 O 
 
 OS 
 
 u 
 cd 
 
 S 
 
 -t-J 
 
FROM BEERSHEBA 
 
 stars without number, and thinking, doubt- 
 less, that Ehezer of Damascus might, after 
 all, become the possessor of his house. 
 
 I thought of this ancient father and son 
 through the night, but I thought, too, of 
 the thousands of fathers whose sons were 
 marching to sacrifice that very night, in 
 Europe, marching to the places of burnt 
 offering on hundreds of mounts from Kem- 
 mel to Moab, and with no certainty of any 
 such substitute for their sons as Abraham 
 found at the last moment. And now 
 America has come to the trial of her faith 
 in the tenets of her profession and her 
 teaching. As an American I am proud of 
 the response to the test. America has not 
 questioned the call of justice and of human 
 right. I see the millions going forward, 
 not slowly, as did Abraham, who took three 
 days to make the journey to the site of 
 Mount Moriah (and in my heart I, a father, 
 
 [97] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 forgave him), but by forced marches. 
 America's going up from her Beersheba is 
 indeed a more glorious chapter in history 
 than Abraham's. America looks at the 
 stars in her own heavens, not doubting that 
 the sacrifice, whatever it may be, will not 
 quench that which these stars symbolize. 
 
 As for myself, I kept praying that if I 
 had my own lads with me under these 
 stars, I should not loiter nor saunter. As 
 it was, I travelled in one afternoon and 
 night over the road that it took Abraham 
 and his son more than three days to travel, 
 for it was on the morning of the third day 
 that Abraham "lifted up his eyes and saw 
 the place afar off," and then went forward 
 with the boy alone, carrying the fire in his 
 hand and a knife, while the boy bore the 
 wood. 
 
 It is said in guide-books to Palestine, 
 published before the war, that one who 
 
 [98] 
 
FROM BEERSHEBA 
 
 travels below Hebron should take a "dra- 
 goman and horses and tents," together with 
 an "escort of Turkish soldiers"; and I have 
 since my journey been told that one in those 
 days needed for safety an escort of a dozen 
 men. But that precaution, now that the 
 English have come, seems not to be neces- 
 sary. I travelled alone through the night 
 without serious molestation. I was stopped 
 by a group of men at dusk and asked rather 
 savagely for cigarettes and "backsheesh," 
 both of which requests I had to refuse, after 
 some parleying, because I had no cigarettes, 
 and I was not disposed to give "back- 
 sheesh," but no violence was offered (though 
 I had no weapon beyond my hickory stick, 
 which had come with me from far America's 
 trees, with rings of many seasons in its 
 memory, and with the names of places 
 where it has been the companion of my 
 walks, from London to Beersheba). 
 
 [99] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 On the contrary, great courtesy and hos- 
 pitality were shown me along the way by 
 the fellaheen as well as by the British offi- 
 cers and men. This wayside kindness 
 showed itself chiefly in keeping me supplied 
 with water. (I can understand why bless- 
 ings were promised by Christ to those who 
 gave cups of cold water.) In the heat of 
 the afternoon, when the supply in my two 
 canteens was getting low (and I wished to 
 preserve in each a little of the water with 
 which I had filled them at the very start 
 from Abraham's well, or one of his seven 
 wells) , I came upon a company of men put- 
 ting up telephone-lines froin Hebron to 
 Beersheba. They filled one brimming cup 
 for me from their "fantasia," and then told 
 me of their camp, six or seven kilometres 
 beyond, where I should find other "fan- 
 tasias" — as I did, with most hospitable 
 attendants, who offered also bread and 
 cheese and syrup. 
 
 [100] 
 
PROM BEERSHEBA 
 
 In the late afternoon I passed the only 
 village at the roadside between Beersheba 
 and Hebron — the ancient village of Debir, 
 which now has the name of Dahariyeh, 
 but has probably much the aspect of its 
 ancient self, except that in Joshua's time it 
 doubtless had walls. It was then the vil- 
 lage of the giants — the Enakim — ^who stood 
 out against the Israelites till Othniel, a 
 kinsman of Caleb, overcame the city, en- 
 couraged to such hardihood by Caleb's prof- 
 fer of his sister in marriage to the warrior 
 who should first enter its citadel. In place 
 of the citadel stands the most conspicuous 
 object as one approaches from the south, 
 the great compost-heap, higher than any of 
 the houses, even that of the sheik himself. 
 It is the village store of fuel, and so far from 
 being looked upon as an offensive place, is 
 a centre where the women gather when 
 they are free from their work, which must 
 be seldom, for the women of Palestine are 
 
 [101] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 a tirelessly industrious lot, not for the most 
 part in work in which they can have the 
 satisfaction of seeing things of beauty, or of 
 lasting use, develop under their hands, but 
 in the ceaseless bearing of burdens, the 
 carrying of water, the grinding of wheat or 
 corn, the endless drudgeries with not the 
 slightest relief — or so it would seem to a 
 casual observer. A hard lot they have, 
 and a sad, unhappy, dejected sex they 
 seem. Seldom does one see a smiling face. 
 The men are solemn enough, but except for 
 those who live sedentary lives in the cities, 
 they seem sturdy and physically virile. 
 They "lord it" over the women. It is not 
 an infrequent scene to see a man mounted 
 on his donkey, the wife following on foot, 
 usually carrying a burden. 
 
 It was on this road to Jerusalem, near 
 Bethlehem, that I saw a father so mounted, 
 the wife following, carrying the child, and 
 
 [102] 
 
FROM BEERSHEBA 
 
 another child following her. I think the 
 father was becoming conscious of our West- 
 ern attitude of women and children first, for 
 while I was preparing to take a snap-shot 
 of the little family the father was having 
 the child shifted to his arms. Or was it his 
 paternal pride showing itself in his desire 
 to have the child photographed with him- 
 self.? 
 
 I have often thought of this scene and 
 expressed the hope that Joseph did not treat 
 Mary so, that he did not make her walk 
 and carry the child as they journeyed down 
 into Egypt. 
 
 But, not to get to my own journey's end 
 before I have actually traversed it, I wish 
 to speak too of the hospitable spirit of the 
 villages along the way. At this particular 
 village of the ancient giants, the "muktar" 
 called to me as I was passing, whether in 
 friendliness or in hostility to the passing 
 
 [103] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 stranger I could not tell, till by signs he 
 made me understand that he was asking if 
 I would not stop and sleep in his village, or 
 have food and drink. I gladly accepted his 
 proffer of water, and he sent a bright little 
 fellow pattering off up the hill to the well 
 with one of my canteens. When it came 
 back filled and coolly moist, he tried to 
 prevent my giving the boy a bit of imme- 
 diate reward for his act of kindness. 
 
 I had stopped at this village for a few 
 minutes in the morning, attracted by the 
 scene on the opposite side of the road, 
 where between fifty and a hundred villagers 
 were threshing millet, some driving the oxen 
 round and round, some winnowing with 
 the pitchfork, some sifting with the sieve, 
 some gathering the grain, some carrying 
 away the straw. It was an interesting and 
 picturesque scene, but it was also one of the 
 happiest scenes, suggestive of the wide- 
 
 [104] 
 
FROM BEERSHEBA 
 
 spread and higher happiness that might 
 come — will come again to the Holy Land 
 when the hills as well as the plains are blos- 
 soming and men are laboring profitably in 
 some intelligent co-operation with Provi- 
 dence, and incidentally giving the women 
 freedom to live as creatures with souls, to 
 enjoy Browning's "Saul," let us say, more 
 than the gossip at the compost-heap. 
 
 The walk across the plains had been hot 
 and imeventful but not uninteresting to 
 one born on the prairies of the United 
 States and accustomed to great level 
 stretches and horizons. There was, how- 
 ever, the added charm of the wilderness 
 mountains rising hazily on the eastern edge 
 of the plain, and of the Judaean hills ahead 
 — Si charm which was a little disturbed by 
 the thought of having to make the ascent. 
 But even the winding white road had its 
 own fascination, and when, as several times 
 
 [105] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 happened, I saw a gray cloud going before 
 me in the soUtude, though I knew it was 
 only a little whirlwind that was moving 
 along and whirling the dust, I could under- 
 stand how the children of Israel might have 
 seen in such a natural phenomenon the 
 *' pillar of cloud" that gave them guidance 
 on their way across the desert not far away. 
 Once the cloud became clearly a great gray 
 cross lifted against the blue sky over the 
 Judsean hills. 
 
 Nowhere else in lower Palestine was the 
 far past so close. There was no near as- 
 sociation for the most of the way across 
 the plain to disturb the consciousness of the 
 past, and I was free to spend most of the 
 time in the company of Abraham and his 
 boy Isaac, Elijah, David, and others of 
 those ancient days. 
 
 And when the night came on it was al- 
 most as light as day, for the moon rose in 
 
 [106] 
 
FROM BEERSHEBA 
 
 full orb out of the desert of Maon, where 
 once dwelt the churlish Nabal and his wife 
 Abigail, who, after her drunken husband's 
 "heart had died within him and he became 
 a stone," received a proflFer of marriage 
 from David, and who (though insisting with 
 a humility which is expected of the man 
 rather than the woman, in America, that 
 she was only a servant fit to wash the feet 
 of the servants of such a man) hasted and, 
 attended by her five damsels, went in 
 stately procession to become his wife. One 
 could find here a setting for a romance if 
 the Scriptural record did not tell us in the 
 next sentence that "David also took Ahi- 
 noam of Jezreel, and they were also both of 
 them his wives." As it is, it gives fit back- 
 ground to the incident, which must appeal 
 to every boy, of David's taking the spear 
 and cruse of water from behind the head 
 of Saul as he lay asleep in his place "among 
 
 [107] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 the wagons," when in pursuit of David; 
 and to that incident which followed the 
 next day when David, on one of the bare 
 hilltops called to Abner, and in treasured 
 sarcasm rebuked the war-lord for not keep- 
 ing better watch over his king. 
 
 And one is ready, too, to believe the tra- 
 dition that Judas Iscariot (Judas of Keriot) 
 was born somewhere over in this wilderness 
 to the east, which turns to blackness when 
 the moon crosses the path and lights the 
 western hills toward Gaza. 
 
 Among the Judsean hills one has other 
 attendants. One to whom I was especially 
 indebted was the daughter of Caleb, Ach- 
 sah, she to whom he gave the "upper 
 springs and the nether springs." Not far 
 from Hebron had been pointed out to me 
 the "upper springs" as I went to Beer- 
 sheba in the morning of the day, but toward 
 midnight I was more anxious to find the 
 
 [ 108 ] 
 
FROM BEERSHEBA 
 
 "nether springs." It was not Achsah who 
 discovered them to me, but it must have 
 been one of her descendants, this lone wan- 
 derer who came out of the fields, and who 
 not only showed me the springs, but also 
 instructed me in the best way to lap up 
 water with both hands (instead of but one, 
 as did the successful candidates for Gideon's 
 band). I never dreamed, Achsah, when I 
 stumbled over your name as I read it at 
 my mother's knee (and my mother's name 
 meant in Scotch "daughter of the place of 
 the upper springs"), that I should some 
 day be grateful to you for asking your 
 father to give you those springs that have 
 continued to flow on through the centuries 
 since and quench my thirst in the twentieth 
 century A. D. 
 
 Refreshed, I went on toward Hebron, a 
 place where Western travellers in days past 
 had been badly treated, I am told, but 
 
 [109] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 where I had found most cordial welcome as 
 I had passed southward in the morning (the 
 keeper of the Cave of Machpelah showing 
 me every possible courtesy, insisting that I 
 look into the place where Joseph's bones 
 were kept, since I might not be able to go 
 to Shechem, where, according to the Book 
 of Joshua, they were buried, and offering 
 me more privileges than I could accept). 
 But instead of walking down through the 
 shadowed streets of the city, by night I 
 took a by-path, a lane with high walls on 
 either side, down through the Vale of 
 Eschol, where the Israelitish spies had 
 found the marvellous grapes. 
 
 It is the law of custom in the East, I am 
 told, that one may enter a vineyard and 
 eat all one wishes, but may not carry any- 
 thing away. I had been without food on 
 the journey, and my "mouth watered" for 
 grapes (for, as when the spies entered He- 
 
 [ 110 I 
 
FROM BEERSHEBA 
 
 bron, it "was the time of the first-ripe 
 grapes ")> aiid yet at that time of night I 
 hardly dared to enter one of the continu- 
 ous vineyards, not knowing whether some 
 watchman sleeping in the towers that 
 guard them might not take me for a ma- 
 rauder instead of an honest but hungry 
 pilgrim. In vain I searched the vines 
 hanging over the walls to find a chance 
 cluster, and went on my way with no such 
 fortune as the two men who, long ago, 
 found there one cluster so large that it took 
 both of them to carry it. 
 
 Higher up in the hills, near the place of 
 the "upper springs," I passed a village in 
 its slumbers, a village that had slept through 
 a million and a half of nights, for it was 
 one of the Canaanitish cities taken by 
 Joshua and given as an inheritance to 
 Judah. 
 
 I had visited this village in the morning 
 
 [111] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 of the day, a village that is four thousand 
 years old, but without certain facilities 
 which the newest town in Oklahoma would 
 insist upon having in as many hours as this 
 village has known years. It stands, or 
 rather sits, upon a hill almost bare of trees, 
 and looks by day at the left between the 
 mountains to the Mediterranean Ocean, 
 and at the right across the Dead Sea to the 
 mountains which give their background of 
 mystery to so many places in Palestine. It 
 could have seen the star over Bethlehem if 
 it had been awake on the holy night. And 
 if it had risen and moved itself to the other 
 edge of the hill, it might have seen the 
 burning lamp that passed between the car- 
 casses in Abraham's dream beneath the 
 oaks of Mamre, a few miles away. 
 
 This village, Halhul, is more like one of 
 our Indian adobe towns than any other 
 communities in the States, except that the 
 
 [m] 
 
FROM BEERSHEBA 
 
 huts are of stone. There are no streets, 
 only winding, labyrinthian paths round 
 and about, up and down, sometimes over 
 the roofs of the huts — ^paths made by the 
 feet of men, women, children, and donkeys 
 through the centuries. There are no vehi- 
 cles, wagons, automobiles, or street-cars. 
 There is no post-office, for never a letter 
 comes to the village, I suppose. There are 
 no newspapers, no schools, no places of 
 amusement (there is one man, at least, who 
 plays a primitive pipe), no running waters, 
 no signs, no stores, so far as I could see, no 
 libraries nor books, no women's clubs, no 
 telephones — ^there was nothing to give the 
 inhabitants communication with the world 
 beyond the sight of their eyes or the reach 
 of their feet. And few, I suppose, had 
 journeyed beyond Hebron to the south, or 
 Jerusalem at the north. 
 
 Women and children fled as birds or 
 
 [113] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 prairie dogs into their burrows at our ap- 
 proach in the morning. They had remem- 
 bered reason to fear the stranger, especially 
 the stranger in uniform, the Turkish officer, 
 and they hid as by instinct without wait- 
 ing to discover what sort of uniform it was. 
 At last, in one corner of the labyrinth, we 
 found the older men of the village gathered 
 under a great tree just outside the "guest- 
 house,'* a dark, windowless, single-roomed 
 hut, with a platform running along three 
 sides. The interpreter, with much salaam- 
 ing, told of America (a land of which, I 
 suppose, they had no knowledge, for I 
 think no one had gone from that village to 
 the far-away country), and expressed our 
 special interest in the children of Palestine. 
 There was most polite response in true 
 Oriental fashion, tempered, however, by 
 a reticence of fear lest the children might 
 be made the basis for a new tax. Gradu- 
 
 [114] 
 
FROM BEERSHEBA 
 
 ally this suspicion was dissipated and the 
 children came out of their hiding, pale, 
 miserably clad. Perhaps the sturdier ones 
 were out in the vineyards. 
 
 Halhul ! What a new life would come 
 into your old stone body if the children of 
 a typical American village could come to 
 sing and play with your children. Halhul ! 
 How many summers will you sleep in the 
 sun, how many winters will you shiver in 
 your windowless huts, before the civiliza- 
 tion which has come up to your gates, 
 across the seas and up from the ports of 
 Egypt, shall not only pass like the automo- 
 bile at your feet or fly like the aeroplane 
 over your head, but will enter your heart 
 with its joys, its higher joys and its deeper 
 sorrows. Halhul ! Will not the new Joshua 
 give you an inheritance not merely to some 
 particular tribe or nation, but to the world, 
 that it may add its cosmic gifts in this age 
 
 [115] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 to those which you have gathered out of 
 your long past with its narrow horizon — a 
 horizon whose edge is not cut by the sky- 
 scrapers of America ! 
 
 Halhul! I should like to come to you 
 in the year of our Lord 2000 ! 
 
 I did not wish to disturb this village in 
 its sleep, though I wondered whether the 
 world outside would ever miss it if it did 
 not wake up again from its houses that 
 seemed more like tombs than homes. In- 
 deed the Roman rock-tombs near by seemed 
 more homelike, for in the cave open to the 
 moonlight, where I had in the morning 
 seen the hundreds of niches that once held 
 cinerary urns, I saw the maidenhair-ferns 
 clinging like weeping human memories over 
 some of the niches, but in deeper mourning, 
 for the green of the daylight had been 
 turned to the blackness of crape. And the 
 gray lizards and the black serpents were no 
 
 [116] 
 
FROM BEERSHEBA 
 
 longer astir as in the morning, to take one's 
 thought from those who had laid them- 
 selves down to rest in the Jewish and Chris- 
 tian caves near by. 
 
 It was up on the hill just outside this 
 village that, according to tradition, the 
 prophet Jonah was buried. Jonah, that 
 first municipal reformer, who complained 
 against the Almighty because the fate 
 which he predicted did not overtake the 
 city of Nineveh, Jonah who was '* angry 
 for the gourd" that grew up in the night 
 and perished the next day. If thou couldst 
 but see this eternal village in which thou 
 art sleeping, Jonah, thou wouldst indeed 
 know that the Lord was *'a gracious God, 
 and full of compassion." 
 
 I was challenged in a valley not far be- 
 yond by a lone sentry at the roadside, the 
 only person I had seen for hours except 
 the native "pilgrims of the night" on camels 
 
 [117] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 or donkeys or in groups on foot, the sound 
 of whose voices, mingled with the tinkling 
 of the camel-bells, remains as music in my 
 ears, for all gave that melodious salutation 
 which was as soft upon the air as the inton- 
 ing of a benediction — "Sai-ee-da," "Sai-ee- 
 da" (like Aida, with a soft, sibilant prefix), 
 all through the night. The ''Halt !" of the 
 sentry in simulated English gave a mo- 
 ment's shock and disturbed my converse 
 with those of the past who had accompanied 
 me, but were unseen of the sentry. They 
 all fled as I tried to make the East Indian 
 guard with his menacing rifle understand 
 that I was a "friend." Whether I had suc- 
 ceeded I did not know, for I could not un- 
 derstand whether he was permitting me to 
 proceed or ordering me to turn into the 
 guard-house (where indeed I should have 
 been glad to repose for a while), but I 
 started on, and as he did not fire I assumed 
 
 [118] 
 
FROM BEERSHEBA 
 
 that he recognized me for the friend I was, 
 with no desire as to the springs he was 
 guarding (the springs from which the water 
 was led into Jerusalem), except that I might 
 drink of them. 
 
 Over hills and through valleys that were 
 awesome with the moon shadows — ^were 
 these not perhaps the very valleys that had 
 given the Psalmist his metaphor of the 
 "Valley of the Shadow"? — ^I journeyed on 
 by the winding road, down at last past Solo- 
 mon's Pools (one empty of water, one al- 
 most empty, and the third planted in toma- 
 toes and other vegetables), down into the 
 fruitful Vale of Urtas, which Solomon may 
 have had in mind when he wrote of de- 
 scending into the garden "to see the fruits 
 of the valley, to see whether the vine flour- 
 ished and the pomegranates budded," filled 
 now with Anzac troops beginning to stir 
 themselves at the first premonition of day. 
 
 [119] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 Then on till the roofs of the little town of 
 Bethlehem began to appear in the dawn. 
 The morning star was burning in the sky 
 above it with a brilliancy that seemed su- 
 pernal. Over the Bethlehem on my horizon 
 it stood, toward the Shepherds' Field, till 
 the walls of the little city itself hid it from 
 my view. 
 
 Beyond Bethlehem the once narrow camel - 
 road over which the Magi had come broad- 
 ened into a dusty highway and began to fill 
 with a throng of people going to and from 
 the Holy City. The refugees from Jericho, 
 encamped in the field opposite the tomb of 
 Rachel, were rising frowzled from their no- 
 mad beds. Lorries and ambulances were 
 starting from camps at the roadside for the 
 hellish places from which these refugees had 
 fled, down where the British forces were 
 holding their trenches awaiting the day of 
 advance. A battalion of Anzac cavalry 
 
 [120] 
 
a 
 
 O 
 
 be 
 
 C 
 
 'S 
 
 be 
 
 -M 
 
 a 
 -a 
 
 CO 
 
 O 
 
 :3 
 
FROM BEERSHEBA 
 
 was passing in the opposite direction for its 
 period of rest after the night's riding. In- 
 dian lancers and Indian infantrymen, pic- 
 turesque even in khaki, looked and knelt 
 toward the dawn and their own Himalayas. 
 Trains of camels from somewhere bore their 
 compact loads that might be myrrh or the 
 daily manna for the troops. Hundreds of 
 donkeys, " Allenby's white mice," went pat- 
 tering along. Aeroplanes were mounting 
 and circling, with their hum, to scout or 
 perhaps to bomb beyond the hills toward 
 Shechem. Barefoot women with varicol- 
 ored burdens on their heads walked with 
 all the stateliness of queens toward the 
 City of Peace — the City of Peace amid 
 shepherds' fields, now become munition 
 magazines, which were daily augmented by 
 what the trains brought up from Egypt, 
 and daily diminished by what the trains 
 toward the front were carrying northward 
 
 [121] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 for the redemption of Samaria and Galilee, 
 the ancient land of the tribes of Benjamin 
 and Ephraim and Manasseh and Issachar 
 and Zebulon and Asher and Naphtali and 
 Dan — Dan, which I would yet reach — ^but 
 that is another story. 
 
 For the day I was content to stop at the 
 Mount within the walls of Jerusalem, where 
 Abraham ended his sacrificial journey, fire 
 and knife in hand; the Mount whose top- 
 most rock was regarded as the centre of 
 the world, the "stone of foundation," on 
 which the Ark of the Covenant once rested ; 
 the Mount from which Mohammed is said 
 to have ascended on his miraculous steed; 
 the Mount over whose edges the orthodox 
 Jew does not dare to venture lest he tread 
 upon the "Holy of Holies," but wails at 
 the wall of lamentation without; the Mount 
 at whose verge the Christ was crucified and 
 buried, and from whose rock-hewn tomb 
 
 [122] 
 
r^a^s^ 
 
 
 a 
 
 t-i 
 O 
 
 
 13 
 
 d 
 
 o 
 
 o 
 
 
 •4-> 
 
 o 
 
 a> 
 
 a 
 o 
 
 ci 
 o 
 
 CO 
 
 G 
 
 a 
 CO 
 
 < 
 
 
 o 
 H 
 
 d 
 d 
 o 
 
 too 
 
 t-i 
 
 o 
 
PROM BEERSHEBA 
 
 te rose. It seems indeed the "centre of 
 the world," and over it all, as I saw it that 
 morning, the Tower of the Ascension stood 
 on the Mount of Olives against the sunrise. 
 
 [123] 
 
IX 
 
 I WALKED LAST NIGHT IN THE 
 SHEPHERDS' FIELD 
 
 I WALKED one night in The Shepherds' 
 Field; 
 The stars in their wonted courses 
 wheeled 
 And no new glory the skies revealed — 
 
 There was no peace on earth. 
 But as I climbed the Bethlehem hill 
 I saw one bend o'er one who was ill 
 And another bearing coals to fill 
 A neighbor's empty hearth — 
 And I knew that the Christ was there. 
 
 II 
 
 I walked up the Mount a little space 
 And peered through the shadows for His face 
 
 [124] 
 
m THE SHEPHERD'S FIELD 
 
 But found Him not in the pictured place 
 
 Beneath the olive-trees; 
 Then turning toward Kidron in the night 
 I saw the men on their way to fight 
 In Jordan's hell for a thing called Right, 
 
 Nor hating their enemies — 
 And I knew that the Christ was there. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Then I walked alone in Galilee 
 Where He fed the thousands by the sea 
 And taught and wrought in His ministry 
 
 Of human brotherhood. 
 There did a Presence my way attend 
 And there I heard the voice of a Friend 
 Say, "Lo, I am with you to the end." 
 
 And my heart understood — 
 I knew that the Christ was there. 
 
 [125] 
 
X 
 
 TO DAN 
 
 A FTER the delivery of the Holy City, 
 A\ in December of 1917, the deliverers 
 "dug in" about fifteen miles north 
 of. Jerusalem, their trenches and barbed- 
 wire entanglements stretching intermit- 
 tently from the Mediterranean Sea to the 
 Jordan River. And seldom a day passed 
 of the months that I was there that one 
 did not hear the sound of the guns some- 
 where along the line in that little theatre of 
 battle that has been the stage of war's trag- 
 edy and pageantry since the wanderers in 
 the desert crossed the Jordan into Jericho, 
 following their wooden ark, under promise 
 that the living God would drive out the 
 Canaanite and the Hittite and the Hivite 
 
 [ 126] 
 
TO DAN 
 
 and the Girgashite and the Amorite and 
 the Jebusite before them, and give them a 
 land "flowing with milk and honey." 
 
 A little theatre ! A mere ' ' sector " ! But 
 with nearly all the peoples of the Allies 
 there except our own : East Indian, Anzac, 
 Armenian, French, Algerian, Italian, Eng- 
 lish with their first Irish Regiment, and a 
 battalion of the Black Watch, and the 
 Welsh, and the South African. (It was a 
 great strapping South African fellow, named 
 Hornby, that carried me in his aeroplane 
 the morning that I made the trip through 
 the sky [''Via Dei"] from Egypt to the 
 Judsean hills.) And at the far end of the 
 line the Hebrew regiment over in the land 
 of Moab, toward the valley where I one 
 day saw the great gun, "Jericho Jane," 
 lying "in the burn," as one of the Scotch 
 oflScers said. 
 
 For myself I felt the reproach of Debo- 
 
 [127] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 rah, who said to Reuben after the battle 
 with Sisera — Reuben, at whose water- 
 courses there were "searchings of heart": 
 "Why sattest thou among the sheepfolds 
 to hear the pipings for the flocks, while the 
 people of Zebulon jeoparded their lives 
 unto death?" The response to this re- 
 proach came not long after from the West- 
 ern Front, and it was down on the edge of 
 the sands of the desert that I heard it, the 
 splendid response made by the behavior of 
 our Americans at Chateau-Thierry. None 
 the less, I regretted that we of America 
 could not have been with that little world 
 army in the recovery of this sacred land 
 from the hand of the Turk, though it was 
 a great satisfaction to be of that little 
 American army of Red Cross doctors and 
 nurses, social workers and engineers, min- 
 istering to those who suflFered most from 
 the war. We "sat among the sheepfolds," 
 
 [ 128] 
 
TO DAN 
 
 but not to hear the "piping for the flocks''; 
 there were no flocks to pipe for. It was to 
 care for the human beings that were scat- 
 tered Hke lost sheep among the hills of 
 Judaea, or huddled like starving ones within 
 the walls of the villages. 
 
 For though the Amorite and the Jebusite 
 and all the others mentioned by Joshua 
 had gone and the land had been cleansed, 
 it was like the house mentioned in the para- 
 ble, from which the devil had been driven 
 out, but to which other devils returned, so 
 that the last state was worse than the first. 
 
 And so it was that the only milk with 
 which the land flowed (except of goats) was 
 that which the quartermaster brought up 
 through Egypt, from far pastures, in con- 
 densed-milk tins. I did taste honey but I 
 felt as favored as Jonathan on the day 
 when, following close upon the fleeing Philis- 
 tines, he thrust his rod into a honeycomb 
 
 [129] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 and tasted of the honey, when all the rest 
 were forbidden to eat. Once, by the kind- 
 ness of the general in command of all Pal- 
 estine, I was able to know how the Chil- 
 dren of Israel fared in the desert, for we 
 had quail — live quail that covered our 
 camp, flying in from the desert toward 
 Gaza. The bread did not come as hoar- 
 frost upon the ground, but as daily ration, 
 shipped in with all the meticulous provi- 
 dence of a wonderful system of provision. 
 And the water was not gotten by smiting 
 a rock, but by carrying it long distances in 
 pipes or on the backs of camels. 
 
 So it was for months that the army and 
 the people were fed and given to drink, 
 while all looked forward to the day of the 
 complete deliverance, the day of the final 
 battle "in the Valley of Decision." 
 
 Wishing to walk instantly forward when 
 that day or night arrived, to be "ready 
 
 [130] 
 
d 
 o 
 
 -d 
 ■<-> 
 
 a 
 <v 
 
 C! 
 
 c3 
 
 
TO DAN 
 
 when the bridegroom came/* I determined 
 to go to the farthest front in the direction 
 of Dan, and so it was that at two o'clock 
 one morning I set out for a hilltop identified 
 to me on the map as Tel-Azur (Mountain 
 of Azure, I wished to translate it), the out- 
 look from which one could at least see 
 ^'over the top." 
 
 The General in charge of this particular 
 sector of the front by a special passport re- 
 quired all the guards along the way to 
 show me every possible courtesy (as they 
 did without such orders, even to the "Tom- 
 mies" out toward the front, who shared 
 their morning coflfee with me, not recogniz- 
 ing me for the Colonel that I was) ; and the 
 General in command of the Occupied En- 
 emy Territory, which stretched up to 
 within a civil distance of the front, gave 
 me safe-conduct, but directed me on no ac- 
 count to venture beyond Bireh before day- 
 
 [131] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 light. With such credentials, though I 
 got to the mountain-top without a single 
 challenge or questioning (except of m;^ 
 own in trying to find the way), and under 
 such restraint, though it proved to be need- 
 less, since I could not have reached Bireh 
 before daylight except by sprinting, I set 
 forth from Jerusalem. There was no watch- 
 man upon the walls impatiently waiting for 
 the signs of the morning and the relieving 
 watch, and no policeman or sentry in the 
 street. I passed in silence through the 
 Valley of Jehoshaphat, but the day of de- 
 cision was not yet come; for the stars had 
 not "withdrawn their shining," and the 
 moon was not yet darkened, and the brooks 
 of Judah were not "flowing with waters." 
 It was not until I reached the first village 
 on the left that I again came upon the 
 ancient travellers, for the living one had 
 not yet risen, and the first naturally enough 
 
 [ 132] 
 
TO DAN 
 
 was David — David, whom I had seen upon 
 every road fleeing from Saul. This par- 
 ticular place was the village where the 
 priest, Abimelech, gave him, in his hunger, 
 the shewbread from the altar, and the 
 sword of Goliath which had been kept 
 there since the day of the memorable com- 
 bat. 
 
 It was a little way beyond here, as I re- 
 call, near Gibeah, that pilgrims of the day, 
 returning to their homeland, were accus- 
 tomed to look back toward the Holy City 
 and cry: 
 
 If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand 
 forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let 
 my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I pre- 
 fer not Jerusalem above my chief joy. 
 
 But Gibeah is not a place of agreeable 
 associations for "pilgrims of the night." 
 One who has a good memory of the Old 
 
 [ 133] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 Testament added to a lively imagination 
 would find it a gruesome neighborhood. 
 For it was at Gibeah that the Levite, when 
 he was returning to Shechem with his errant 
 wife from Bethlehem-Judah, whither he 
 had gone to persuade her home, was set 
 upon by 'Hhe sons of Belial," and so vilely 
 treated as to his wife that "no such deed 
 was done or seen from the day that the 
 Children of Israel came up out of the land 
 of Egypt" till that day; so vilely that the 
 Levite "divided her together with her bones 
 into twelve pieces, and sent her into all 
 the coasts of Israel in order that the inhabi- 
 tants might consider it and take advice"; 
 so vilely that Israel did come together as 
 one man, "from Dan to Beersheba," and 
 not only spoke their minds concerning this 
 "lewdness and folly," but resolved to ex- 
 terminate the evil-doers, and so began the 
 Benjamite war. 
 
 [ 134] 
 
TO DAN 
 
 And, according to the record, there were 
 more men gathered in and about Gibeah on 
 that day than there were British and Arabs, 
 Turks and Germans, all told, in the lines 
 across Palestine the night of my journey — 
 more men, indeed, that "drew sword" than 
 there are inhabitants in all Palestine to- 
 day. And such deeds were done in a day, 
 it is interesting to note in passing, when 
 there was • no king in Israel, and when 
 every one did what seemed right in his own 
 eyes, a time of voluntary enlistment and 
 of theocratic individualism. 
 
 But though the vanquished Benjamites 
 were given women of Jabesh-Gilead for 
 wives, and when these sufficed them not 
 were permitted to "catch every man his 
 wife from among the daughters of Shiloh 
 when they came out to dance their dances," 
 Gibeah, that afterward became the capital 
 of Saul when Israel insisted upon having a 
 
 [135] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 king, has become a deserted, treeless hill- 
 top. It required no imagination to see 
 Rizpah standing there on its lonesome crest, 
 guarding the bodies of the sons of Saul 
 who had been hanged on that same hill, 
 "suflFering neither the birds to rest upon 
 them by day nor beasts of the field by 
 night." 
 
 And then one saw dimly the hill of Ra- 
 mah, but the "sound of ^bitter weeping" 
 had ceased. They who had been refugees 
 had returned again "to their own loved 
 border." Indeed, when I visited the vil- 
 lage by day, not long after, with those of 
 our company who were finding water for 
 the oxen which we were purchasing to let 
 to the villagers that they might plough 
 again their stony fields, a little child was 
 brought out — the pride of their village — 
 wearing a helmet-shaped hat covered with 
 coins, as is the custom in some villages. 
 
 [136] 
 
TO DAN 
 
 And with the child the medicine-woman of 
 the village (I do not know by what other 
 name to call her), doubtless practising her 
 art much as did the ancient witch of En- 
 dor, who summoned the spirit of the 
 prophet Samuel from his grave on that 
 very hill to confront King Saul in his dis- 
 tress before the battle of Mount Gilboa. 
 
 One would have to spend the entire day 
 going these few miles to Bireh, the village 
 that I expected to reach by sunrise, if one 
 stopped to parley with the past, for every 
 mile of the way is populous with memo- 
 ries. It is the very particular memory of 
 this road, which one must pause to wel- 
 come in one's thought on the dusty way, 
 that Joseph and Mary, with the company 
 of their kinsfolk, when returning from the 
 Feast of the Passover in Jerusalem to Gali- 
 lee, did spend a whole day walking these 
 same few miles, for it is recorded in Luke 
 
 [ 137] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 that they "went a day's journey" before 
 they missed the boy Jesus; and the tradi- 
 tion is that the place at which they missed 
 him was Bireh. It is now a Moslem vil- 
 lage, sitting or kneeling on the eastern slope 
 of the watershed, with its back toward the 
 Christian village of Ram-Allah, a village 
 which looks off toward the sea and the 
 land across the sea, for six hundred men 
 have gone out from that village of more 
 than three thousand people to America, 
 and it was reported that two hundred of 
 these had entered the army. Between the 
 two villages stands the school established 
 by the French. One does not have to go 
 farther to know why so many men of that 
 region had gone out to the land of those 
 who established and maintained so eflS- 
 ciently this school on the hill. 
 
 Bireh was the ancient Beeroth, whose in- 
 habitants, with the camouflage of mouldy 
 
 [ 138] 
 
TO DAN 
 
 bread and old shoes and garments, passed 
 themselves oflf to Joshua as pilgrims from 
 a far land, and so persuaded Joshua to 
 make a league of peace with them, which 
 he did, and would not renounce when he 
 found that he had been deceived by the 
 near neighbors of those whom he had al- 
 ready conquered. But though he let these 
 dissimulating slackers live, he made them 
 in punishment "hewers of wood and draw- 
 ers of water unto all the congregation"; 
 and the dwellers in this village seemed still 
 to be of that great multitude, for I saw 
 hundreds of them on their way to labor in 
 laying ties for the railroad and in making 
 trenches for the water-pipe, both of which 
 were creeping day by day toward the front. 
 Beyond Bireh the main road leads to 
 Shechem, the road which the Levite must 
 have taken with his dead wife — a road now 
 filled with ambulances and lorries all the 
 
 [ 139] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 day long. But my way led to the right, 
 past the village that was known in Abra- 
 ham's time as "Luz," and after Jacob's 
 time as "Bethel." If I had not been 
 under orders not to go beyond Bireh before 
 daylight, I should have tried to reach 
 Bethel in the night, for its entrancing mem- 
 ory is of the night, when angels descended 
 and ascended the golden ladder upon its 
 rocky summit, in Jacob's dream. But by 
 day I saw the terrestrial instead of the 
 celestial inhabitants of Bireh, and they 
 were more courteous to me than the an- 
 cient inhabitants were to the prophet 
 Elisha, and quite as hospitable as one of 
 their ancient citizens was to another itiner- 
 ant prophet, who was so overcome by their 
 hospitality as to disobey the orders of 
 Jehovah, and was in consequence devoured 
 by a lion on his return trip. One need fear 
 however, neither the fate of those who 
 
 [ 140] 
 
TO DAN 
 
 mocked nor of him who was too good a 
 guest, for neither bear nor Kon could find 
 range among those hills filled with soldiers, 
 and threaded out roads and paths bearing 
 loved names of home places in the British 
 Isles. 
 
 Whenever I asked the way to my "ob- 
 jective," the answer always was, ''It is 
 the hill with the trees on it," for all the 
 other hills were bare; baldness had come 
 upon them, partly, perhaps, because of the 
 ancient pious cutting down of the groves 
 of Baal in high places, but largely because 
 of the wanton and greedy destruction by 
 the Turks. Here and there one saw a hill- 
 side covered with olive-trees, and now and 
 then one saw the trees climbing even to 
 the summits of these little hills, an intima- 
 tion of the verdure and fatness that might 
 cover all the hills. But like the trees in 
 the ancient fable — the first of all fables — 
 
 [141] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 pronounced by Jotham, not fifty miles away 
 — the trees of the land had chosen the 
 bramble to rule over them, and it had con- 
 sumed them, even to the cedars of Lebanon. 
 I found no pathway to the summit of 
 Tel-Azur from the main road along which 
 the troops were passing to and fro. But 
 when I reached the shade of the summit 
 trees the view was worth all the effort of 
 the climb. I could "view the landscape 
 o'er," as did Moses from Nebo, which 
 must have been in sight, though I could 
 not identify it. I could see, as did he, 
 "the land of Gilead unto Dan," and the 
 "land of Ephraim and of Manasseh and of 
 Judah, unto the utmost sea," and the 
 "plain of the valley of Jericho." The land 
 to the north lay like a great, peaceful Vale 
 of Tempe, filled with gray and brown hills, 
 with no sign, visible to the naked eye, of 
 the combat, though the thunders were rum- 
 
 [142] 
 
TO DAN 
 
 bling from one end to the other of the Hne. 
 My only fear was that I should have to go 
 back to America before entrance could be 
 had to this "promised land.'* 
 
 On my return to Jerusalem the Chief of 
 the Occupied Enemy Territory said that 
 they must manage to move their lines far- 
 ther north in order to give me more room 
 for exercise. I could wish that this motive 
 had some part in impelling the "push" or 
 "drive" of the mighty advance that soon 
 came to clear the way through Samaria and 
 GaUlee and even beyond the mountain of 
 Lebanon. 
 
 On the night of the 18th of September a 
 corps commander who had joined our com- 
 mission and a few distinguished guests at 
 a dinner in honor of our American repre- 
 sentative in the mixed court in Egypt (the 
 night of the arrival of the quail from the 
 desert near Gaza) said to me, quietly and 
 
 [ 143] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 aside as he entered, that he would have to 
 ask to be excused early, as the "drive" 
 was on. I marvelled at the placidity of 
 the general, who made no further reference 
 to the world-startling event that was just 
 beginning (except to remark as he looked 
 at his wrist that the first movement was 
 being at that moment made by his men), 
 but took an interested part in the discus- 
 sions of the evening, and then drove back 
 to his headquarters on the Mount of Olives, 
 and started oflf in the night toward the 
 front. 
 
 After the guests had gone I followed the 
 General up the Mount, past the white 
 graveyard of the soldiers, whiter than ever 
 in the full moonlight, to the monastery 
 which was awake with the bustle of the de- 
 parting troops that had been sitting out- 
 side its walls for weeks awaiting this night. 
 There was little sleep on the Mount that 
 
 [144] 
 
TO DAN 
 
 night, and when dawn came I found the 
 priests walking back and forth beneath the 
 oHve-trees, looking off toward the north, 
 as if the Day of Judgment had at last come 
 over the Vale of Jehoshaphat, across which 
 the thunders were rumbling. 
 
 The battle begun that night is undoubt- 
 edly the most memorable, the most impor- 
 tant, and the most spectacular of all the 
 battles of all the centuries in that little 
 land. As a battle it was, as I have quoted 
 a critic in saying, "a battle without a to- 
 morrow" in its complete success, "a battle 
 of dreams" in the accurate response by 
 every part of this complex machine, despite 
 the fact that there was so much of the 
 human in it. And to crown it all, it was 
 carried on against the richest historical 
 background in all the earth. 
 
 It was the next morning after the day of 
 this glorious dawn that I drove, in the 
 
 [145] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 early hours, across the hills and down upon 
 the plain to General Headquarters, where I 
 found the Commander-in-Chief as imper- 
 turbable in the midst of this "battle of 
 Armageddon" that was in its drive to pierce 
 the Berlin-Bagdad backbone of the Teuton 
 beast and bring the collapse of Turkey, as 
 calm and imperturbable as if he had no 
 thought for the day except the reviewing 
 of the Red Cross work in Jerusalem, which 
 had been planned for that very afternoon. 
 Victory was on his horizon, but he was as 
 imperturbed as were the people when I 
 passed through England just after the cap- 
 ture of Kemmel Hill by the Germans. 
 There was no sign of flurry nor fever of 
 excitement. When back in Jerusalem that 
 night or perhaps the next, the report of the 
 capture of the first ten thousand prisoners 
 was received, all that any one said was that 
 "it was a good show"; and the Military 
 
 [146] 
 
TO DAN 
 
 Governor of Jerusalem went on with the 
 organization of his intercommunity chess 
 club. 
 
 It was not many mornings later that the 
 Commander-in-Chief sent a message by 
 telephone to my office that if I would re- 
 main in Palestine a few days longer I might 
 find it possible to walk to Dan. It was evi- 
 dently his own personal suggestion which 
 had later confirmation in a message by let- 
 ter, a bit more cautious, intimating that 
 for the present one might not be able to 
 go beyond Lake Huleh, the "waters of 
 Merom." This was enough to start me 
 out on my journey toward Dan before 
 nightfall, for the tribe of Dan dwelt close 
 upon the further shores of Lake Huleh. 
 
 At dusk I was passing through "No 
 Man's Land," between the lines of the old 
 and now abandoned trenches and the maze 
 of wire entanglements, for "No Man's 
 
 [147] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 Land" stretched into Asia, and trenches 
 were in the land of Benjamin as in the days 
 of David. I was actually on the way to 
 Galilee. 
 
 The roads were not such as I had found 
 back of the old lines, when I had walked 
 from Jaffa to Jericho, or from Beersheba to 
 Bireh and Bethel, and I had rough going in 
 the starlit darkness. Besides the stones 
 over which I stumbled and the ruts into 
 which I fell, there were shell-holes now and 
 then and blasted bridges, but to be walking 
 with my own feet on the now free soil in 
 the van of the new millions of pilgrims was 
 an ecstasy that made me oblivious of the 
 harshness of the roads. If it had been a 
 condition of my going that I should walk 
 barefooted I should have been ready to 
 take off my shoes as on holy ground, for 
 the Master of Men had walked these same 
 paths. 
 
 [148] 
 
TO DAN 
 
 When, after a winding ascent over a high 
 ridge in Ephraim and a winding descent 
 into the valley of Samaria beyond (for one 
 "must needs pass through Samaria"), I 
 found myself still a few miles from the well 
 of Sychar and my "pilgrim's bottle" nearly 
 empty, I happened upon three "Tommies" 
 at the roadside, and asked them where I 
 could get water. They pointed to lights 
 farther down the valley. I asked what the 
 place was and they answered: "The camp 
 of the First Irish Regiment." An Irish 
 regiment in the heart of Palestine ! But it 
 is only characteristic of these Irish fellows 
 that they should have gotten to the heart 
 of what they set out for; and it had been 
 valiant going and brave fighting that had 
 won this place for them in the midst of the 
 Holy Land, One of the ' ' Tommies ' ' offered 
 to accompany me down into the camp, and 
 led me through a bypath to the place where 
 
 [149] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 the water cans, brought in by the camels 
 during the day, were in charge of a fine 
 strip of an Irish lad. He was lying in his 
 tent reading by candle-light, but got up at 
 once to give me a drink and fill my water- 
 bottle. As he was pouring out the warm- 
 ish water I said to him: "And from what 
 part of Ireland do you come?" *^Ah," he 
 said, "I come from Tipperary, sir." I 
 looked up at the portentous mountains of 
 Ebal and Gerizim, dimly visible not far 
 away, the mountains on which the children 
 of Israel stood three thousand years or 
 more ago, and shouted across the interv-en- 
 ing valley their "Amens" in the mightiest 
 antiphonal out-of-door service ever held, 
 perhaps, the service of the Blessing and 
 the Curse, ending with the imprecation: 
 "Cursed be he that confirmeth not the 
 words of this law to do them." I looked 
 up at these fateful mountains and I said: 
 
 [150] 
 
TO DAN 
 
 "Well, my lad, you are, indeed, a long, long 
 way from home." 
 
 When, an hour or two later, I passed 
 alone through the august portal made by 
 these mountains, where only a few days 
 before another mighty antiphonal service 
 had been held — the guns of the Turks and 
 Germans on one side and of the British on 
 the other — ^I said to myself, as I had said 
 to the Irish lad: *'You are indeed a long, 
 long way from home." And yet I was in 
 the very homestead of America — the Amer- 
 ica that has written on its coins its trust 
 in the God to whom Joshua built an altar 
 "in Mount Ebal," and has dated them from 
 the birth of Him who "wearied with his 
 journey" sat by the well on this same 
 mountainside, and said to her who gave 
 him to drink: "Neither in this mountain 
 [alone] nor in Jerusalem shall ye worship 
 the Father." 
 
 [151] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 Sir George Adam Smith, in his geographi- 
 cal epic, describes the panorama of all Pal- 
 estine to be seen from the summit of Mount 
 Ebal. But within the horizon of the spiri- 
 tual utterance made at the foot of this 
 same mountain even the farthest lands of 
 Christendom are visible. 
 
 Shechem, just beyond the grim portal 
 (the city, no doubt, to which the disciples 
 went to buy food while their Master waited 
 for them at the well), was sound asleep 
 that night after the months of wakeful 
 nights of warfare at her gates — Shechem, 
 that has taken the name Nablus, but has 
 not, apparently, made full atonement for 
 the wickedness of those "vain and light 
 fellows" of ancient Shechem, who for three- 
 score and ten pieces of silver slew three- 
 score and ten sons of Gideon on the same 
 stone (in order to have a monarchy instead 
 of an oligarchy) ; for the curse of the tyran- 
 
 [152] 
 
TO DAN 
 
 nical, bloody Ottoman "bramble" had been 
 upon it almost to that very midnight hour. 
 It is remembered, however, that the Master 
 abode there two days, and, I doubt not, 
 his spirit will find welcome there once more 
 now that AUenby has torn the bramble up 
 by its roots. 
 
 I could not find the path over the hill to 
 the site of the ancient capital of Israel, 
 where stood the "ivory house" that Ahab 
 built along with altars to Baal, so I followed 
 the road, deep with dust, around the foot 
 of the conamanding high place, and on to 
 Jenin, near Jezreel. It is written that 
 when Ben Hadad, King of Syria, was be- 
 sieging this city of Samaria, he was "drink- 
 ing himself drunk in his pavilions, he and 
 the thirty-two kings that helped him." 
 And this must have been the occupation of 
 the German officers in this same region last 
 year, for when I entered the house assigned 
 
 [153] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 to our medical section which we installed 
 that day at Jenin, a house hastily vacated 
 but a few days before by German oflScers 
 there were enough empty champagne and 
 other wine bottles lying about to have 
 made Ben Hadad and his thirty-two com- 
 panion kings drunk in their emptying. 
 How Ben Hadad in his condition "escaped 
 on a horse/' in the general slaughter, is not 
 easily understood. Some of the German 
 officers high in command of the Turks had 
 the same narrow escape. Of the captured 
 German under-officers and Turkish soldiers 
 (of whom I met thirty-five hundred in the 
 road just outside of Jenin) the Germans 
 seemed well fed, but the Turks ragged, 
 spiritless, and undernourished. 
 
 But in the very early morning, long be- 
 fore I reached Jenin, I passed across a plain 
 which is in the remembered background of 
 millions, even if its name has been forgot- 
 
 [154] 
 
TO DAN 
 
 ten by many of them — the plain of Dothan, 
 where Joseph, "the dreamer," found his 
 brethren feeding their father's flock and 
 where he was put into a pit and later sold 
 to the passing Ishmaelites. He had come 
 all the way from Hebron, expecting to find 
 his brothers in Shechem, but had had to 
 travel three miles farther, and perhaps a 
 hundred in all, before he was seen "afar 
 off" by his envious brothers, coming across 
 this plain, where I, three thousand years 
 later, happened upon a shepherd, in the 
 same costume, no doubt, as that of Jacob's 
 sons, leading his flock to the same pas- 
 tures — ^for all these tens of centuries shep- 
 herds have been saying: "Let us go to 
 Dothan." 
 
 Here it was, too, that the chariots of fire 
 appeared on the mountain, at the edge of 
 the plain, "round about Elisha." The 
 chariot had but recently passed that way 
 
 [155] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 again, and victoriously (as the "padre" of 
 the Black Watch had confidently prophe- 
 sied), and the road was filled with the 
 wreckage of the fires they had dropped 
 from the skies. 
 
 Not a hundred yards from one of these 
 wrecks of a lorry of the most eflScient and 
 expensive type, bearing the German eagle 
 upon it, I saw a native villager in the field, 
 beginning to plough again, now that peace 
 had come in the wake of these chariots of 
 fire, but with a plough that was at least 
 two thousand years behind the lorry in its 
 mechanism — which led to a meditation, in 
 that Samaritan dawn, on Christendom's 
 letting the home-farm get on for centuries 
 with agricultural implements of the most 
 primitive type while sending into it within 
 a few years tens of thousands of lorries, 
 machine-guns, cannon, and aeroplanes of 
 the world's destructive genius, and with- 
 
 [156] 
 
■*-> 
 
 O 
 
 O 
 -t-J 
 
 3 
 
 O 
 ire 
 
 s 
 
 O 
 
 V 
 
 o 
 c 
 
 <?1 
 
TO DAN 
 
 holding good seed from the sowing of its 
 fields while sending tons of anununition to 
 plant in them and in deeper furrows than 
 the peasant could turn with his scratching 
 plough. 
 
 In Jenin, where I spent the day, I saw 
 the British bringing order out of the Turk- 
 ish chaos and German wantonness, feeding 
 the prisoners of war, caring for their sick, 
 burying their dead, cleansing the streets 
 and purifying the waters. I saw, too, our 
 own American Red Cross medical section 
 installed in the house of German gluttony, 
 with nothing left in it except the empty 
 bottles and the German inscriptions on the 
 walls. Then I slept for a part of the night 
 on an improvised cot (thanks to the doc- 
 tor) in one of the bare rooms, and, rising at 
 two o'clock in the morning, found my way 
 down through the rough and narrow streets 
 of the sleeping town and, without challenge 
 
 [157] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 by the drowsy Indian guards, out upon the 
 plain of Esdraelon. 
 
 Two journeys of the scores that I have 
 made on foot will always be put above all 
 others: One, the journey of forty miles, 
 from near Amiens to Dieppe, the night of 
 the day on which the formal declaration of 
 war was made by Great Britain (August 4, 
 1914), the night out of which I walked into 
 the dawn of the day that woke all Europe 
 to war; the other this journey across the 
 plain of Esdraelon or Armageddon, in the 
 night out of which I walked into the dawn 
 of the Holy Land peace. 
 
 Of this journey I have written in the 
 lines which follow this chapter, but even 
 they fail to tell of the exalting experiences 
 of that miracled night and, to me, ever- 
 memorable morning in which I entered 
 Nazareth— " Christ's home town," some 
 Western paper is said to have called it, 
 when announcing in great head-lines Gen- 
 
 [158] 
 
0) 
 SI 
 
 O 
 
 d 
 
 a 
 
 ■)-> 
 
TO DAN 
 
 eral Allenby's taking of the little city. Ir- 
 reverent this way of putting it seemed at 
 first, but after all it stated, and in a homely, 
 simple language that we use in our daily 
 life (especially in these days of our return- 
 ing boys) the essential fact which makes 
 that city dear to the world. And it is 
 here, as Renan has said, that the memorials 
 of Christendom should rise rather than at 
 Jerusalem, where Christ died, or even Beth- 
 lehem, where He was born, for here He 
 lived through his childhood and youth and 
 into manhood. 
 
 I shall ever consider it the greatest privi- 
 lege and honor of my life that I was per- 
 mitted , first of Americans — ^af ter the Army 
 of Occupation and its attaches — and first 
 of pilgrims on foot to enter this **home 
 town" of the Christian world in this new 
 epoch and to enter it wearing the sign of 
 humanity's brotherhood, the Red Cross. 
 
 I shall leave the readers to find their 
 
 [159] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 several ways through the steep and narrow 
 streets (but if one desired a guide I should 
 suggest Doctor Scrimgeour, of Edinburgh, 
 who maintained a hospital there before the 
 war, and who went back with me to it on 
 another journey, for he knows every foot 
 of Nazareth and has written of it; one's 
 progress would, however, be slow, for the 
 people would flock about their doctor, 
 whom they all loved, Moslem and Chris- 
 tian alike). For myself, I asked a lad of 
 beautiful face — such as the Master must 
 have had — to show me the way to the 
 Church of the Annunciation, where I found 
 an English-speaking Franciscan brother. 
 He was in a grotto back of the chapel mak- 
 ing wafers (with the imprint of Christ's 
 form upon them) for the altar. I was 
 hungry enough to ask, as David did, for 
 the very shewbread from the altar, but 
 the brothers offered to share with me their 
 
 [160] 
 
as 
 
 £3 
 O 
 -t-J 
 
 < 
 
 1) 
 
 3 
 
 .2 
 o 
 
 o o 
 
 n3 
 
 X 
 
 ^ 
 
 
 - a 
 
 en 
 
 o 
 c 
 
 fe 
 
TO DAN 
 
 own ration of burnt-barley coflfee and black 
 bread. I wrote many years ago a tribute 
 to a brother of Saint Francis, which I can 
 now repeat with a deeper sense of brother- 
 hood; 
 
 (( 
 
 Priest of the white cord, thou and I 
 Are brothers, though my prayers I cry 
 Uncassocked, and 'neath fiercer sky 
 Than daily bends o'er thee." 
 
 When I gave this chapter the title "To 
 Dan/' I hoped to reach Dan at the end of 
 it. But I have met so many Biblical and 
 other friends on the road that I have still 
 many miles to go. Moreover, not far be- 
 yond Nazareth, in Galilee, I was unexpect- 
 edly caught up into a modern "chariot" 
 and carried over Jordan and far beyond 
 Dan. If the reader is willing to leave Naz- 
 areth (though for my part I cannot urge 
 his going farther), I can promise him that 
 
 [161] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 I will bring him back from beyond Jordan 
 and not leave him as Elijah left Elisha, 
 gazing at a receding whirlwind of dust in 
 the land of Gilead or Moab. 
 
 [162] 
 
XI 
 
 ARMAGEDDON 
 
 (Early in the morning of the 20th of September, while I was 
 at the General Headquarters of the army in Palestine, the 
 Commander-in-Chief, General Sir Edmund Allenby, coming 
 from the map-room, remarked, as accurately as I can recall 
 his language: *'I have just had word that my cavaby are at 
 Armageddon. The Battle of Armageddon is on.'* I do not 
 hold him responsible for the following exegesis of the chapter 
 in the Book of Revelation, but, looking back upon that day, 
 I can but think that this was the beginning of the end of the 
 battle with the Beast.) 
 
 I'VE seen the Angel pour the sixth gold 
 bowl 
 Off toward the great Euphrates, and 
 I've seen 
 The unclean spirits issue from the Beast, 
 The Dragon and the mouth of him who 
 
 posed 
 As Prophet — they who've led the whole 
 wide world 
 
 [ 163] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 "Together to the war of the Great Day'*; 
 
 For I have been in Armageddon's vale, 
 
 The Judgment Place, which John of Pat- 
 mos saw 
 
 In his Apocalypse. There have I walked; 
 
 There seen the Dragon's bayonetted tongue; 
 
 There gotten this Beast blood-splotch on 
 my boot; 
 
 There heard the Teuton-Baal Prophet cry 
 
 His blasphemy to stir a Holy War; 
 
 There seen the Allied Men on horses ride 
 
 Guided by "eyes that were as flame of 
 fire"— 
 
 Swift as these flaming eagles did they ride; 
 
 Swifter than Barak from Mount Tabor's 
 slopes 
 
 Rushing upon this plain; swifter than they 
 
 Of Gideon's band who swept upon Jezreel 
 
 From Mount Gilboa fronting this dread 
 field. 
 
 Where kings and emperors through cen- 
 turies 
 
 [164] 
 
ARMAGEDDON 
 
 Have perished since the dewless, rainless 
 
 days 
 When these same circling mountains 
 
 mourned for Saul 
 And Jonathan, whom death could not 
 
 divide. 
 Stronger than lions of the wilderness 
 Were they, these sons of lions of the isles, 
 Smiting with all the righteous wrath of 
 
 God, 
 Striking with all the summoned might of 
 
 right. 
 
 And after this sixth Angel had passed on. 
 
 On over Jordan to the desert's edge. 
 
 And still beyond to Bagdad's blistered 
 
 roofs, 
 Till all the blazing lava had been poured, 
 And Prophet, Dragon, Beast were taken all, 
 I saw another "standing in the sun" 
 At setting over Armageddon's vale. 
 Calling "the birds that in mid-heaven fly" 
 
 [165] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 To come together to the supper spread. 
 The great, grim supper of the Mighty God, 
 Out on the plain from Kishon to Beisan, 
 Where there was neither cloth, nor flower, 
 
 nor lamp, 
 Nor plate, nor knife — only the pecking beak 
 
 And tearing claw and hov'ring sable wing. 
 
 • ••••••• 
 
 That night I walked all night upon the plain 
 Whose loam was soft and grateful to my 
 
 feet 
 Sore from the harshness of Samaria's hills — 
 Soft as the loam of that far prairie farm 
 I ploughed long, long ago; and black as 
 
 that. 
 But black with tinge of crimson from the 
 
 hills. 
 All night I walked alone, save for the dead 
 Begging for burial — these and the gulping 
 
 birds. 
 No sound was there except of my own steps, 
 
 [166] 
 
ARMAGEDDON 
 
 Or now and then the scratching at my knees 
 Of brambles of Abimelech's ill rule, 
 Or braying of the beast of Issachar 
 Between the sheepfolds, couching at his 
 
 ease; 
 For dumbing death had stalked ahead of me. 
 
 Then toward the dawn there shone a won- 
 drous sign. 
 Such as Sir Bedivere when Arthur died 
 Beheld. From out Gilboa's rugged side 
 (Where Gideon had cried, "Jehovah's 
 
 sword," 
 Ajid put to flight the hosts of Midian, 
 And Saul had seen the gleaming scimitar 
 The Witch of Endor's presage of his fate) 
 Was thrust what seemed a crescent Dam- 
 ask sword 
 The color of dried blood upon a blade; 
 Slowly, as slowly as a rising star, 
 'Twas lifted upward by an unseen hand 
 
 [167] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 Until the coming of the morning light 
 Did hide it in a jewelled sheath as rich 
 And brilliant as an Arab ever wore. 
 I knew it was the dying, horned moon; 
 But had a sword been hanging in the sky, 
 'Twere not more like a sword than this red 
 
 moon 
 That shone in symbol of its drawing forth 
 And then its sheathing in the new Earth- 
 Peace. 
 There were the hideous wreckages of war. 
 There things lay stark that yesterday were 
 
 men; 
 Naught else to tell that Armageddon's day 
 Had come — ^had come and gone ! 
 
 And now there stood. 
 In clear command of all the placid plain. 
 The Mount on which He'd taught the world 
 
 to pray, 
 And where He'd breathed into immortal life 
 
 [168] 
 
 m 
 
ARMAGEDDON 
 
 The words of His divine Beatitudes, 
 Blessing those vaHant ones who'd fought 
 
 for peace 
 And now were called by Him the "Sons of 
 
 God." 
 
 • ••••••• 
 
 Pausing to look at this e'er-haloed height, 
 I heard the sound of sacramental bells, 
 Or so they seemed, but were the desert 
 
 chimes, 
 Borne by the camels of a caravan 
 Bringing the answer of the Tabor prayer 
 To those who prayed: "Give us our daily 
 
 bread." 
 Across my pathway to the Nazareth 
 That was the village of the Prince of Peace 
 They passed. 
 
 The "thousand years" had been begun. 
 
 [169] 
 
XII 
 
 BEYOND JORDAN 
 
 EYOND Jordan" has in it a sug- 
 gestion to the imagination of dis- 
 tance — of infinite distance. Even 
 when I came to see, morning after morning, 
 from the Mount of OKves, the mountains 
 of Moab or Gilead beyond the Jordan and 
 to know that they were only twenty or 
 thirty miles away, they still kept their dis- 
 tance, with their mystery as of infinity. 
 
 I remember, as with the memory of an 
 apocalypse, these mountains once when 
 they had all the semblance of celestial hills. 
 I had gone with the Governor of Jerusalem 
 to see the workrooms of the Russian pil- 
 grims in the cloistered stone buildings that 
 stood on the precipitous southeastern cliff of 
 
 [170] 
 
BEYOND JORDAN 
 
 the Mount of Olives. There we found these 
 pilgrun women (who had been stranded in 
 Jerusalem by the war) knitting, sewing, 
 spinning in the long, bare, clean rooms of 
 the one-time convent. Without stopping 
 their work, they rose to sing their home 
 church-songs, of moving pathos, and with 
 such wonderful richness and range of voice 
 that one could have easily believed them 
 to be a choir celestial in the New Jerusalem, 
 if one had not in the pianissimo passages 
 heard the clicking of their terrestrial knit- 
 ting-needles. Out through the narrow and 
 low, deep-set windows I could see the 
 mountains beyond Jordan in the late after- 
 noon light. The infinite was upon the very 
 near horizon of these very humble human 
 tasks, for which the American Red Cross 
 was incidentally furnishing the material to 
 these grateful women. 
 
 Out on the prairies of Illinois one had 
 
 [171] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 long ago, before the village or the city 
 grew upon one's horizon, the sense of in- 
 finity, but at great distances. Here one 
 had the feeling that eternity was looking 
 in at the windows from across the ascetic 
 and austere Judsean hills and over the kindly 
 roofs of Bethany. 
 
 Almost anywhere in Palestine one has 
 but to climb to a hilltop in order to see 
 beyond Jordan (and most of the villages, 
 for one reason or another, and this may 
 have been one of them, climbed long ago 
 to the hilltops or far up the hillsides and 
 have continued to sit there). I have won- 
 dered whether the physical fact of living 
 constantly in the presence of these mystical 
 mountains and looking out upon them from 
 the housetops did not in turn furnish one 
 of the reasons for the rise of so many of 
 the world's greatest prophets and religious 
 teachers in that little area between these 
 
 [ 172 1 
 
BEYOND JORDAN 
 
 mountains and the sea, the "hinter-sea," as 
 Moses called it, which was for the inhabi- 
 tants ever at their backs and seldom before 
 their faces ; for it was to the hills that they 
 looked — to the mountains round about, 
 upon which the angels of the Infinite One 
 came down and walked as with beautiful 
 feet even into their fields and streets and 
 to the very doors of their tents. 
 
 It was, historically, in a valley just be- 
 yond Jordan or the Dead Sea, into whose 
 never-overflowing laver the Jordan is con- 
 tinually pouring itself, that Moses was 
 buried, though "no man knoweth his sepul- 
 chre unto this day," for God "buried also 
 his grave." It was just beyond Jordan 
 that the prophet Elijah was caught up by 
 a whirlwind into heaven," and was not 
 found, though "fifty strong men" searched 
 for him three days, thinking that, perad- 
 venture, he had been cast "upon some 
 
 I 173] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 mountain or into some valley." It was 
 over these same mountains, though per- 
 haps farther to the south, that the prophet 
 Isaiah in his august imagery saw one com- 
 ing "with crimsoned garments from Bos- 
 rah." It was doubtless the heavens above 
 them that were, in the Psalmist's glowing 
 figure, the tabernacle from which the sun 
 rose as a bridegroom prepared for his day's 
 journey across the land. But some Hebrew 
 poet must have thought of the long, low 
 mountains themselves, when seen in their 
 mingled colors shining like a veil or curtain 
 stretched across the east, as the Tabernacle 
 of the wilderness, for so they seemed to 
 me many a morning, especially when a 
 cloud hung over them as over the "Tent 
 of Meeting," when the children of Israel 
 were still wandering in the desert upon 
 which Pisgah looked down in the land of 
 Moab. 
 
 [ 174 ] 
 
BEYOND JORDAN 
 
 I was reluctant to go out into that region ; 
 not for the reason that the orthodox Jew 
 fears to enter the Temple area in Jerusa- 
 lem, lest he should walk upon the site of 
 the Holy of Holies; but lest I should not, 
 after all, find the Holy of Holies out there 
 beneath the morning cloud or where I had 
 often seen the mysterious moving lights by 
 night as of "pillars of fire." 
 
 But, after weeks, I did at last venture to 
 the edge of the outer court of the Wilder- 
 ness Tabernacle, to the sand-dunes of the 
 Jordan Valley that stood in the moonlight 
 like golden boards which Bezalel and Oho- 
 liab had fashioned for the ancient taber- 
 nacle described in the Book of the Exodus 
 (even to the "crown of gold round about," 
 for there was a cornice, carved by the wind 
 and the water, as perfect as could be 
 wrought by "wise-hearted" workmen). I 
 had gone with two American Red Cross 
 
 [175] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 men in a Ford truck down to Jericho in 
 the evening to carry a hospital outfit to an 
 Anzac clearing-station out on the plain be- 
 neath the "Mount of Temptation." After 
 delivering our ominous load — ominous of 
 the advance in which there would probably 
 be need of these appliances — we went into 
 the city of Jericho (a squalid hell by day 
 at that season of the year and a jasper 
 heaven by night), and there left our truck 
 as a cot for our Red Cross driver (and some 
 day I hope a poet or prophet will preserve 
 in immortal letters liim and such as him 
 and his Ford car and such as his car, which 
 ploughing through the sands of the desert 
 made possible the new conquest of Canaan). 
 With the other of the two, an electrical 
 engineer and aviator, who if summoned 
 would not have hesitated to accompany 
 Elijah in his chariot of fire, we went in 
 search of the river, the river that runs 
 
 [176] 
 
BEYOND JORDAN 
 
 somewhere in the physical geography of 
 everybody, and that runs in the spiritual 
 geography of many, between life and death. 
 Not a human being did we meet or see 
 as we passed, like Virgil and Dante, through 
 the weird night landscape. Down, circle 
 below circle, through the ghostly canyons 
 we went. The inferno was having its mid- 
 night siesta. In one of these sand-canyons 
 we came upon a cavalry camp, or so it 
 seemed, horses, tents, and all; but, as we 
 soon found, absolutely lifeless, pure ca- 
 mouflage. The horses, I may reveal, now 
 that the war is over, were of the same ma- 
 terial as the famous Trojan horse, but with 
 no live soldiers in their interiors. Indeed, 
 some disarranged blankets showed that 
 they were such horses as carpenters use, 
 only of larger size. Every object stood or 
 lay motionless in the bright moonlight. 
 Just to make certain that what seemed to 
 
 [177] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 be a dog or a wolf crouching near the road 
 was not a Hving Cerberus, I threw a stone 
 at it, only to find that it, too, was made 
 of wood. In my travels later I met a sani- 
 tary engineer who had been ordered to lay 
 out this or a like camp, and when he had 
 objected to its location, for health reasons, 
 was told that it was to be occupied only by 
 beings created by the imagination of the 
 German aviators and the Turkish gunners. 
 I had all the sensation of walking in a 
 camouflage inferno, or of listening to pas- 
 sages of Dante, into whom my companion 
 was transfigured. 
 
 But as I neared the rolling stream, the 
 sound of its waters translated me instantly 
 out of the Dantean into a Biblical environ- 
 ment. My young companion as instantly 
 became the young prophet Elisha, and as 
 we came to the brink of the narrow but 
 tumultuous stream it had the appearance 
 
 [178] 
 
BEYOND JORDAN 
 
 of being divided, for in the bright moon- 
 light there was a white path over it almost 
 at the water's level, but what might have 
 been the brown or black mantle of Elijah 
 hung on either side (or was it the waters 
 piled up "in a heap"?). At any rate we 
 crossed the river dry-shod and were, before 
 we quite realized it, "beyond Jordan." 
 
 There the Far East rose instantaneously 
 out of the sands to challenge us, in the 
 person and habit of a Ghourka guard, the 
 first human being we had seen, though we 
 were quite ready to believe him to be but 
 an automaton or camouflage sentry rising 
 in response to some hidden spring which 
 our feet had unconsciously touched. At 
 any rate, he let us pass without other 
 coimtersign than the English "shibboleth" 
 on our tongue. (And we were careful to 
 say it using the accent of our English Gil- 
 eadite brothers rather than our customary 
 
 [179] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 American Ephraimitish pronunciation, for 
 we remembered the fate of the Ephraimites 
 who sought to cross the fords of the Jordan 
 higher up and, not being able to "frame to 
 pronounce" the countersign according to 
 the Gileadite fashion, were straightway 
 slain, to the number of "forty and two 
 thousand," I afterward read in the record. 
 
 As I looked about me the mountains that 
 had seemed so near the river when seen 
 from Jerusalem, had receded; the plain 
 with its scrubby trees stretched away 
 toward their dim and diminished heights, 
 which now looked like the "black tents of 
 Kedar" rather than the golden tabernacle. 
 Jackals were crying by the score or by the 
 hundred, oflF in the wilderness. Were they 
 the Lord's "howling for Moab," as Jere- 
 miah prophesied ? 
 
 After walking a little way out in the 
 sand we made our way back and through 
 
 [180] 
 
BEYOND JORDAN 
 
 the bushes that hid the farther shore, bap- 
 tized each himself in the turbid waters, im- 
 petuous and uncompromising as the Bap- 
 tist himself, filled each his pilgrim-bottle 
 with water for far christenings, and then, 
 offering the material of incense to the 
 Ghourka guard, again crossed the immortal 
 river, walked up through circle upon circle 
 of the silent inferno and across the plain to 
 Jericho, and, travelling through the early 
 morning hours over the rough purgatorial 
 road, now free of thieves, reached by sun- 
 rise the prototype of the "heavenly city," 
 the gate of '^Paradiso," our own Jerusalem. 
 
 But when I again looked out from the 
 summit of the Mount of Olives, the moun- 
 tains beyond Jordan were as distant, glow- 
 ing, and mystical as ever. 
 
 I had, however, early occasion to go 
 again beyond Jordan, and this time into 
 the very heart of these mountains. It was 
 
 [181] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 when, after the British advance, we of the 
 Red Cross were carrying back the first of 
 the refugees from that region (those virile 
 and stately people of Es-Salt, some of whom 
 claim descent from the Crusaders) to their 
 looted homes. This is again a Red Cross 
 story that I cannot tell here, but inciden- 
 tally in that night journey up through the 
 awesome ravine, with the flashings of the 
 guns in the skies above its black rims, I 
 heard the sound of waters as of the foun- 
 tain described by the prophet Joel that 
 should water the "Valley of Acacias" (for 
 that valley was somewhere in this region), 
 and early the next morning I had from the 
 top of a mountain near Es-Salt the same 
 view that Moses must have had with his 
 undimmed sight from a neighboring moun- 
 tain of the land that was to him the land 
 "beyond Jordan," a "land of hills and val- 
 leys," that "drinketh water of the rain of 
 
 [ 182] 
 
BEYOND JORDAN 
 
 heaven," a land upon which "are the eyes 
 of the Lord from the beginning of the year 
 unto the end of the year," but a land that 
 was, that summer morning, parched and 
 hungry and thirsty, with scant clothing to 
 cover her shame, with poison in the dust of 
 her feet, but with the vision of a new prom- 
 ise before her eyes, since the British with 
 their AUies had just swept the enemy op- 
 pressor out of the land from the dim edge 
 of the desert to "Lebanon with its rampart 
 of snow." Down the ravine, that seemed 
 awesome by night and sublime even by 
 day, I passed during the morning, past the 
 waters of Nimrim, doubtless into the very 
 Valley of Acacias from which the children 
 of Israel made their last day's march to 
 the Jordan. And by a happy coincidence 
 it was the Hebrew regiment that was guard- 
 ing the valley, with men among them that 
 were at one time students of mine in New 
 
 [183] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 York City. Such poetically fit lines does 
 history sometimes write when in the mood ! 
 As I came down upon the desert plain 
 again the thoughts that were uppermost 
 were, however, of the man who had come 
 crying out of this wilderness, in "raiment of 
 camel's hair and a leathern girdle about 
 his loins," who "while the sacred darkness 
 trailed along the mountains," through which 
 I had just come, could in the storm "hear 
 the voice of Elias prophesying loud to Him 
 whose face was covered by a cloud," who, 
 in the lines of Arthur O'Shaughnessy, which 
 I carried gratefully in my memory — 
 
 " Had not heard of the far towns. 
 Nor of the deeds of men, nor of kings' crowns. 
 
 Before the thought of God took hold of him. 
 As he was sitting dreaming in the calm 
 
 Of the first noon upon the desert's rim. 
 Beneath the tall fair shadows of the palm, 
 All overcome with some strange inward balm." 
 
 [184] 
 
BEYOND JORDAN 
 
 I could but remember, too, that on the 
 very day of my night journey to the Jor- 
 dan one who was sitting dreaming beneath 
 a pahn in Jericho had been beheaded by a 
 Turkish-German shell, and for a Teuton 
 cause not less unworthy than ''for Hero- 
 dias' sake, his brother Philip's wife" — an 
 unholy cause which has kept foreign pil- 
 grims from these banks for several years. 
 But the beheading guns are silenced and, 
 no doubt, the roads will fill again with the 
 thousands from other lands carrying their 
 shrouds to wash them in the Jordan against 
 the day of their burial. 
 
 There is, however, another road beyond 
 Jordan. It is the road through Samaria 
 and Galilee to Dan, the road on which I 
 stopped at the end of the last chapter to 
 pay my homage to the "Man of Nazareth," 
 and to let my reader follow his own inter- 
 ests in that sacred village. It is the road 
 
 [185] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 which leads one to the Sea of GaHlee and 
 the upper reaches of the Jordan. The Mas- 
 ter evidently sometimes followed the road 
 along the farther side of Jordan on his way 
 to and from Jerusalem; for it was there 
 that He blessed the children ; but his usual 
 way must have been over the hills and val- 
 leys by which we have come. However 
 this may have been, the way to the Sea of 
 Galilee must have been the one most fa- 
 miliar to his feet as boy and man, and the 
 view to the north, with its sweep from 
 Carmel to Hermon, the most dearly familiar 
 to his eyes, since it was toward the villages 
 out over the northern rim that he was 
 most often turning. It was over this ridge 
 toward the northeast that I climbed from 
 the well of the Virgin, where I filled my 
 canteen, alongside the village women and 
 children with their jars and the Anzac 
 soldiers who were guarding its waters. 
 
 [186] 
 
Beyond jordaK 
 
 The light Standard Oil tin so commonly 
 substituted for the heavy ancient earthen 
 water-jar south of the old British lines had 
 not come into use at the north, and the 
 women and children were still carrying the 
 same sort of jars as were doubtlessly used 
 by Mary and her boy. In Cana, through 
 which I passed two or three hours later, 
 they keep, I am told (for I did not stop to 
 see them) the jars in which the water was 
 put the night of the marriage-feast, brought, 
 no doubt, as I saw the women of Cana, 
 bearing it in their jars, and from the same 
 spring, no doubt, as that from which they 
 had borne it that night up the long street, 
 lined now on one side with orchards of figs 
 and pomegranates protected by a cactus 
 hedge, into the village. And they were as 
 happy that day of my walk through Cana 
 as at the wedding-feast of long ago, for 
 their deliverance had come. The Anzac 
 
 [187] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 cavalry were passing northward all the day, 
 and immense camel-trains were resting in 
 the fields beyond for their night journey. 
 (If ever this book comes into the hands of 
 any one of those fine, strapping Anzac 
 camel- train oflBcers, and he will send me 
 their names, I promise him that their 
 camels will follow them across the sands 
 and the seas to their Australian homes). 
 But it was to be the greatest day for Cana, 
 if the modern Nathaniels sitting under fig 
 and pomegranate trees and the fair women 
 and happy children whom I saw in the 
 streets but knew it, since the night of the 
 marriage -feast, or the day when the noble- 
 man of Capernaum sent to Cana to have ' 
 his son healed ; for before night of that very 
 day the Deliverer of Palestine himself was 
 to pass through the village. Well may the 
 beautiful daughters of Cana offer pome- 
 granates to those who pass, and the boys of 
 
 [188] 
 
BEYOND JORDAN 
 
 Cana dance in the street (as they did when 
 I was returning through the village, and 
 as shamelessly as David danced before the 
 ark of the Lord). The prophecy of Zecha- 
 riah that the streets of Jerusalem should be 
 ''full of boys and girls playing in the 
 streets" was being fulfilled even in Samaria 
 and Galilee. 
 
 For one of the greatest joys of these 
 journeys through these parts, as well as of 
 my experiences in Judaea, was to see the 
 joyful response of the children to the in- 
 terest of those who are trying in a very 
 practical way to bless them, as we would 
 our own, realizing that of such as these, 
 and not alone of such as our own, is the 
 kingdom to be in the earth. Certain Naz- 
 areth children whom I saw at the fountain 
 or at the mill, a handsome boy whom I 
 saw at a wayside well in Samaria, and two 
 shepherd lads out upon the hills of Gali- 
 
 [189] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 lee, I should expect to be the equals of any 
 of our New York State boys, if only they 
 had such training as is open to every one of 
 ours. Shall we, like Nathaniel of Cana, 
 continue to ask the damning question con- 
 cerning them, "Can anything good come 
 out of Nazareth?" when the angels of 
 genius have from the open heavens rested 
 upon the heads of so many children of that 
 land in the past ? 
 
 I have spoken (in the chapter on General 
 AUenby) of the approach to the Sea of Gali- 
 lee (or the Lake of Tiberias) of the entranc- 
 ing view of the blue lake as seen from the 
 Nazareth road. Here to hark back again 
 to the tabernacle figure, is the great shin- 
 ing laver that stands between the altar 
 and the Tent of Meeting. And if ever an 
 altar rises for all Christendom to the Man 
 of Galilee, it should be here upon these 
 hills where He walked, looking across the 
 
 [190] 
 
•f?^™ 
 
 4) 
 
 03 
 O 
 
 O 
 
 C/5 
 
 Oj 
 
 a 
 o 
 
 en 
 >> 
 
 O 
 
 -v 
 a 
 
 O 
 
 -( 
 
 % 
 
 4 
 
 '-^^ 
 
 
BEYOND JORDAN 
 
 sea and the plain (where Hiram of Tyre 
 had cast the great ''molten sea" for the 
 Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem) toward 
 the mountains that are the Tent of Meeting. 
 
 It is said that Christ never entered Tibe- 
 rias, but doubtless it was for other reason 
 than its heavy, suflfocating air, down under 
 the close-creeping mountains, six hundred 
 feet or more below sea-level. I was not 
 surprised to learn that many cases of 
 cholera had been that very day found in 
 the city by the British medical officers. I 
 should be proud to tell of what the Ameri- 
 can Red Cross doctors and nurses and bac- 
 teriologists and those of the American 
 Zionist unit did in co-operation with those 
 medical officers to stamp out the plague 
 promptly. 
 
 I slept that night on a terrace or roofless 
 porch at the headquarters of the Military 
 Governor, overlooking the sea. My bed 
 
 [191] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 was a bare bench, but had it been a rack 
 or a harrow I should have slept, I think, 
 nevertheless, after my eighty-mile walk 
 in the parts of two nights and of two 
 days, with little sleep. If the king of fleas, 
 who according to the Arab legend has his 
 court there, held his revels on the terrace 
 that night, I was wholly oblivious of the 
 "activities" of his subjects, and rose at 
 four o'clock refreshed for the ride to Da- 
 mascus, for as I have already proudly 
 related in the AUenby chapter, the Com- 
 mander-in-Chief had invited me to accom- 
 pany him and his staff on his first entry 
 into that orchard paradise of the Arabs. 
 In three automobiles, with an armored car 
 for vanguard and another for rear-guard, 
 we set out along the shore of the lake at 
 sunrise, and in an hour or more had come 
 down near to the "Waters of Merom" and 
 had crossed the Jordan at "Jacob's Bridge"; 
 
 [192] 
 
Li 
 
 Si 
 
 o 
 
 03 
 
 03 
 a; 
 
 
BEYOND JORDAN 
 
 for here, the tradition is, Jacob passed 
 when he was returning to his homeland 
 from serving Laban fourteen years for his 
 two daughters and six for his flock out in 
 Haran. It is a steep and was a sKppery 
 way (for the autumn rains were just be- 
 ginning in the Jordan valley) up the far- 
 ther bank to the plateau on which we rode 
 for two or three hours, the very plateau on 
 which Saul had been blinded by the light 
 out of heaven. My memory is of a light, 
 growing more intense and dazzUng, as we 
 hurried across the plain, now through camps 
 of Anzac cavalry, and now through desert 
 places where Bedouins were searching in 
 the fields for booty, on to Damascus, which 
 I can see at this distance only through a 
 cloud or halo of shining dust, with a shim- 
 mering, golden hill on the one side and a 
 green, restful meadow, with trees, winding 
 out across the desert on the other. I sus- 
 
 [193] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 pect that somewhat of this remembered 
 glamour was subjective, due to the con- 
 sciousness of approaching this city of an- 
 cient Oriental splendor and treasures on 
 this epochal day among the many eventful 
 days of the centuries of its shifting empire. 
 When Feisul, the son of the King of the 
 Hedjaz, had entered the city a few days 
 before (three, I think it was), men threw 
 themselves in front of his horse to be trod 
 upon, or pierced themselves with swords or 
 knives to show the intensity and genuine- 
 ness of their joy — such scenes as I suppose 
 will never be seen on the earth again. 
 General AUenby, the Commander-in-Chief, 
 who had made this picturesque entry pos- 
 sible, came himself unannounced and in 
 as unostentatious and matter-of-fact a way 
 as if it were all in the ordinary day's routine. 
 But despite this lack of pageantry and 
 pomp, it was the first day of a new epoch 
 
 [ 194] 
 
BEYOND JORDAN 
 
 for that old part of the world. An English 
 colonel had been for the three days of the 
 occupancy the acting governor of Damas- 
 cus; on that day an Arab was installed as 
 governor of his own people, after a Turk- 
 ish reign of four hundred years. And it 
 was all without ceremony. Feisul, with a 
 group of his attendants, called upon the 
 Commander-in-Chief at his room in the 
 Victoria Hotel; an hour later, as Emir, 
 Feisul was standing beneath the Arab flag 
 on the Government House, and in another 
 hour the Commander-in-Chief was making 
 his way in his gray Rolls-Royce car across 
 the dun plateau to the fords of the Jordan. 
 There is little that I can say of that day. 
 Its detail, aside from its mighty significance, 
 was commonplace enough. Companies of 
 lancers rode through the streets. I was 
 told that the shops were closed, but there 
 seemed little excitement. There were forty 
 
 [195] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 dead lying among the living in one of the 
 hospitals, but that was because doctors and 
 nurses and helpers had fled. There seemed 
 to be no lack of food. And in the middle 
 of the street I saw a sight which told me 
 more than statistics — a man was selling 
 fresh-cut flowers. 
 
 But I cannot leave Damascus without 
 speaking of him who, next to General 
 Allenby, I suppose, made possible this 
 epochal day. It was a young Oxford don, 
 an archaeologist only twenty-nine years old, 
 who bore the military title of "Colonel." 
 I had weeks before wished to go to the 
 Arab front, east and south of the Dead Sea, 
 and chiefly to see this young scholar, who 
 was Great Britain's representative in the 
 staff of the King of the Hedjaz. There were 
 reasons of state, however, for my not going. 
 But by a happy fortune (the reverse of 
 Mahomet's experience, for while I was not 
 
 [196] 
 
BEYOND JORDAN 
 
 permitted to go to the mountain, the moun- 
 tain had come to me) the Arab front came 
 to me in Damascus and more particularly 
 this young liaison oflBcer. At the hotel 
 in Damascus General Clayton, of General 
 Allenby's staff, entered the long dining- 
 hall, accompanied by a man in the Hedjaz 
 costume (with the golden octagonal head- 
 band instead of the round and black band. 
 I asked our military attache. Captain 
 Yale, whom I had the pleasure to find 
 there, whether this English-looking Arab or 
 Arab-appearing Englishman (for he looked 
 very much as President Wilson would have 
 looked in his younger days if attired in 
 the same costume) were by any chance 
 the archaeological oflScer whom I so much 
 wished to see. My question was answered 
 in a moment by being presented by General 
 Clayton to "Colonel Lawrence," who asked 
 if the seat next mine were occupied. As 
 
 [197] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 happily it was not, I had unexpectedly a 
 quarter of an hour for which I had been 
 willing to cross a desert and undergo hun- 
 ger, thirst, and peril. He told me much in 
 those minutes that I have not permission 
 to repeat; but that which was of especial 
 human and dramatic interest was that he 
 who had spent the three or four years of 
 the war out there in this unexpected and 
 surpassingly successful service, who had 
 seen this new power rise out of the ruins 
 of the ancient empires he had gone out, as 
 I suppose, to unearth and study; who had, 
 indeed, had a statesman's as well as a sol- 
 dier's part in evoking it from the sands, 
 who had himself, as governor of Damascus, 
 for three days sat in the seats of Hazael, 
 Darius, Antiochus, Tigranes, Pompey, and 
 all the rest better known to him than to 
 me, and who had, this gentle scholar, set 
 machine-guns in the street after the cap- 
 
 [198] 
 

 ■.y. :.:0/}y% /'mfm.' 
 
 g 
 
 ■t-i 
 (« 
 O 
 
 c 
 
 is 
 oj 
 
 W 
 
 H 
 
 o^ 
 'o 
 
BEYOND JORDAN 
 
 ture of Damascus, to prevent looting — that 
 he, having finished this piece of work, was 
 now, as he said to me, about to take off 
 his Arab costume, put the shoes of western 
 civiKzation on his bare or sandalled feet, 
 and go back to his don's task again. We 
 went out upon a little balcony of the hotel, 
 after the luncheon (a luncheon which prom- 
 ised to be the best that I had had since I 
 had reached Palestine, but which I forgot 
 to eat) and there, with the government 
 building in the background, over which the 
 first Arab flag was flying in Damascus, I 
 caught a view of this young student of the 
 history of the past and maker of the his- 
 tory of the present — a view which should 
 be precious to the world. 
 
 I had in this unexpected and eventful 
 journey meanwhile reached Dan and gone 
 far beyond it, but there was still a night's 
 journey of the way to be traversed on foot. 
 
 [199] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 I therefore asked the Commander-in-Chief 
 to let me descend from the automobile on 
 the farther side of the Jordan, on the bor- 
 der of the land of the tribe of Dan, that I 
 might walk to where he had caught me up 
 into his car, and so might touch with my 
 feet every mile of the length and breadth 
 of this sacred land and complete the cross 
 which the intersecting paths of my pil- 
 grimage had made. 
 
 It was my first night of cloud, and the 
 road down into the Jordan and up from it 
 was black, unlike the roads I had travelled 
 in other nights. But it had, none the less, 
 its memories, even if at times I had con- 
 fusedly the impression of walking in some 
 familiar place in the old black roads of the 
 Middle West. And first of the agreeable 
 memories that rose from this region was of 
 Mahanaim, where the people of the neigh- 
 borhood brought wheat and barley and 
 
 [ 200] 
 
BEYOND JORDAN 
 
 parched corn and honey and cheese to 
 David (David, whom I again encountered 
 on the road), just after Absalom had 
 crossed to the other side of the Jordan. I 
 wish I could remember the names of those 
 who shared their food with me that night 
 at Mahanaim, as the names of those who 
 gave to David are preserved in the Book of 
 Samuel, not that I could promise them such 
 immortaUty of record, but, at any rate, 
 thanks which will live as long as I. They 
 were themselves not only sharing with me 
 their food, which included fish from the 
 lake, but were gathering all the barley they 
 could find in the neighborhood to make 
 barley-water for the cholera patients in 
 Tiberias. If this village was not on the 
 site of the ancient Mahanaim, it should 
 have been. But I shall have no dispute 
 with archaeologists as to the sites of other 
 ancient villages that are said to lie along 
 
 [ 201 ] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 the way. I will let Chorazin and Beth- 
 saida lie in the oblivion of the night's dark- 
 ness. I will not even insist, though I 
 should like to, that Capernaum once lay- 
 where I wished to see it lying in the first 
 dim light that came across the lake. But 
 Magdala remains by the sepulchre of all 
 this departed past. The men and children 
 were just rising from their sleep on the 
 housetops, but Magdalene was already 
 bearing water back from the fountain, for 
 she had risen "early while it was yet dark." 
 My journey to Dan was ended (though I 
 afterward went farther up the Jordan val- 
 ley, along the western shore of the "waters 
 of Merom and across the southern Lebanons 
 to Tyre and Sidon and Beirut) . The young 
 man who had been my Elisha in the mid- 
 night walk to Jordan came out to meet me 
 at my journey's end, and while he was pre- 
 paring a simple meal for the both of us on 
 
 [202] 
 
BEYOND JORDAN 
 
 the shore of the Lake of GaUlee, I had a 
 morning bath in its waters. T was not dis- 
 posed to say, as Naaman when he was told 
 to go and bathe in the river Jordan: '^Are 
 not Abanah and Pharpar, the rivers of 
 Damascus, better than all the waters of 
 Israel?" To me the "waters of Israel" 
 were soft and healing and satisfying. And 
 if I could not only have borne back to my 
 home the baptismal water of the Jordan, 
 but, like Naaman, when he went back to 
 his home in Damascus, "two mules' burden 
 of earth" from the land through which the 
 "waters of Israel" flow, I should use that 
 bit of earth not for a grave, as many another 
 has done, but for a garden that it might 
 grow flowers such as I saw the vender 
 offering in the streets of Damascus — such 
 as would make the desert places in Judaea 
 and Samaria and Galilee to blossom again 
 as the rose. 
 
 [203] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 THE ROSE OF JERICHO 
 
 'What though the Flowers in Joseph's Garden grew 
 Of rarest perfume and of fairest hue. 
 That mom when Magdalene hastened through 
 Its fragrant, silent paths ? 
 
 She caught no scent of budding almond-tree; 
 Her eyes, tear-blinded still from Calvary, 
 Saw neither lily nor anemone — 
 Naught save the Sepulchre. 
 
 But when the Master whispered *Mary,' lo ! 
 The Tomb was hid; the Garden all ablow; 
 And burst in bloom the Rose of Jericho — 
 From that day * Mary's Flower.'" 
 
 [204 1 
 
XIII 
 THE HOUSE OF MY PILGRIMAGE 
 
 I DO not know that the Psahnist when 
 he sang of the house of his pilgrimage 
 had in his thought this land of my 
 pilgrimage from Dan to Beersheba, and 
 from the sea to the river. In all prob- 
 ability he had not; but I cannot think 
 of words more appropriate to write over 
 its door-posts than these, for it was to me, 
 as it has been for multitudes of others in 
 the centuries since Abraham first sojourned 
 in it, a "house of pilgrimage" — this land 
 with its spacious porches and garden-ter- 
 races reaching down to the water on either 
 side; with its courts, some of them adorned 
 with palms, as was that in which Deborah 
 
 [205] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 sat between Ramah and Bethel, when she 
 judged Israel; and with its lofty chambers 
 whose walls are covered with ever-chang- 
 ing tapestries, such as only the Orient suns 
 can weave. 
 
 The descendants of Abraham, who were 
 innumerable as the sands and "in multi- 
 tude as the stars,'* even in the days of St. 
 Paul's letter addressed to the Hebrews, — 
 and happily preserved, — "confessed that 
 they were pilgrims and strangers" in this 
 land which was to them as the earth: and 
 there have been many millions since, of 
 other than the seed of Abraham, who, look- 
 ing to a heavenly "house of many man- 
 sions," have found this the earthly proto- 
 type of that "other country": pilgrims 
 and Crusaders; saints in age and children; 
 emperors and shepherds; hermits and 
 popes. 
 
 As I begin this last chapter I am again 
 
 [206] 
 
THE HOUSE OF MY PttGRIMAGE 
 
 of their number. I am setting out upon 
 a second pilgrimage to this Holy Land in 
 the wake of hundreds of thousands who 
 have gone from other lands in other days, 
 and among the very first of those from the 
 New World in this new day. . Since that 
 night of my leaving Palestine, when an 
 English airman flying over the plain of 
 Sharon caught the German wireless that 
 was prophetic of the end, the peace has 
 come and I go back in no Crusader's peril 
 but only with a Pilgrim's discomfort — 
 back to the land which was to my migrant 
 fathers as it was to Abraham a house of 
 pilgrimage, and, as it was to Jacob, a 
 "Bethel," a very "gate of heaven." One 
 of my earliest memories is of hearing my 
 father, who had reached the last step in 
 that migrancy several generations long 
 from the highlands of Scotland, as he sat 
 by night in the only lighted room in a 
 
 [207] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 square mile of prairie darkness singing this 
 quaint migrant hymn : 
 
 "I'm a pilgrim and I'm a stranger 
 I can tarry, I can tarry but a night, 
 Do not detain me for I am going 
 To where the fountains are ever flowing. 
 I'm a pilgrim and I'm a stranger; 
 I can tarry, I can tarry but a night !" 
 
 For he and those who went before him 
 were "pilgrims" and not vagrants upon 
 the earth. They had a destination before 
 them in all their wanderings westward; 
 indeed a predestined place awaited them, 
 in their clear and confident Presbyterian 
 faith, of which the Biblical "land of 
 promise" was but the earnest. 
 
 But as I, beginning my second pilgrimage, 
 see the buildings on the shores of my own 
 land, that have been lifted till they seem 
 veritable "mansions in the skies," dwindle 
 and fade upon the horizon, and as I look 
 
 [208] 
 
THE HOUSE OF MY PILGRIMAGE 
 
 back with a summarizing consciousness of 
 the achievements and aspirations of that 
 land, which I have come to know from one 
 shore to the other, I realize that after all 
 it too is a holy land, full of holy places, 
 of which we are often not aware until we 
 see them from afar. 
 
 If I needed other than my own experi- 
 ence to tell me this, I should know it from 
 the tongues of such as Jacob Riis and Mary 
 Antin and Michael Pupin. I heard the 
 last-named of these, the great scientist, 
 and great poet as well, though I do not 
 know that he has ever written a line of 
 verse, tell one night of his conversation — 
 on a visit to his native land, Serbia, which 
 is lastingly to be thanked for giving him 
 to us and to the world — with an aged Ser- 
 bian who had returned from a pilgrimage 
 to the Holy Land and was describing the 
 wearying incidents of the journey and the 
 
 [209] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 agonizing joy of the day when he at last 
 looked upon the Holy City. Pupin said 
 to him: "Yes, Pilgrim, I can understand 
 your ecstasy; for I, too, have gone on a 
 pilgrimage to a holy city." "Where?" 
 asked the Old Pilgrim. "In America," 
 answered the Scientist. "But," said the 
 Pilgrim, "there are no holy places in Amer- 
 ica." "Yes," replied the Scientist, "there 
 are many." And then he told the incred- 
 ulous Pilgrim of a place called Albany, in 
 the State of New York, where Joseph 
 Henry, his scientific divinity, had made 
 the discovery of certain eternal forces and 
 laws, as potent and immutable as the fire 
 that burned in the unconsumed bush (like 
 modern electricity) or the laws announced 
 from Sinai. 
 
 America has its holy places, even if they 
 are not always surrounded by the lights of 
 candles — ^places where the Almighty mani- 
 
 [210] 
 
THE HOUSE OF MY PILGRIMAGE 
 
 fests Himself by some unmistakable sign, 
 as in the movement of multitudes, or where 
 the individual rises to the majesty of a 
 god in some divinely done deed or where 
 flesh becomes spirit in some undying ut- 
 terance. Only to-day have I seen in Paris 
 an Arab prince who turns to America to 
 find incarnate a sacred principle that was 
 first taught among those holy hills from 
 which I rode by automobile and within 
 a few hours, in my "beyond Jordan" jour- 
 ney, to his capital. And I have by me a 
 fragment of a letter from the head of the 
 Moslems in Palestine (the Moslems whom 
 the Kaiser hoped to stir to a Holy War) 
 ascribing to America as holy a function 
 as can be fulfilled by any nation. I quote 
 a bit of it with its thoroughly Calvinistic 
 preordination preamble: 
 
 Those to whom He was well-disposed he made 
 to do good; those pre-ordained to do evil, do evil. 
 
 [211] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 This is the law of God in this creation, and no one 
 can change his decrees. No one can dispute the 
 fact known to God and confirmed by your noble 
 history, O citizens of America, that out of com- 
 passion and charity He created you to do good to 
 humanity, and has through you always accomplished 
 good works, keeping you innocent of all evil-doing. 
 
 With such an imputed achievement and 
 destiny America must indeed have its 
 sacred places ! God help us to be worthy 
 of the ascription and keep us, in the words 
 of the Mufti's prayer, "innocent of all 
 evil-doing." 
 
 But the little land in which the Mufti 
 guards the Holy Rock, in which the Ark 
 of the Covenant so long resided, and in 
 which the Cross of the Christian world 
 had its foot near the Holy Cave, is to be 
 forever the Holy Land. The bread of its 
 sacrament has fed a world hungering for 
 righteousness; the blood of its testament 
 
 [212 1 
 
THE HOUSE OF MY PILGRIMAGE 
 
 has flowed through millions of cups to 
 thirsty lips; the fire of its burnt offerings 
 has kindled flames on altars innumerable. 
 And to it for all time the feet of pilgrims 
 will continue to go. 
 
 When I crossed France and Italy on 
 my first pilgrimage, I could see without 
 stretch of imagination the throng that 
 went out in the Middle Ages from the fields 
 and villages and cities along the very roads 
 through which I passed, for it was the 
 season of the year when, as Chaucer said in 
 his "Canterbury Tales," "men 'gan to go 
 on pilgrimages." Walter Besant has given 
 us this picture of their going in the First 
 Crusade: "With the first warm days of 
 early spring the impatience of the people 
 was no longer to be restrained. Refusing 
 to wait while the chiefs of the Crusade 
 organized their forces, laid down their 
 line of march, and matured their plans, 
 
 [213] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 they flocked in thousands to the banks of 
 the Meuse and the Moselle, clamoring for 
 their immediate departure. Most of them 
 were on foot, but those who by any means 
 could raise the price of a horse came 
 mounted. Some travelled in carts drawn 
 by oxen. Their arms were such as they 
 could afford to buy. Every one, however, 
 brandished a weapon of some kind; it 
 was either a spear or an axe, or a sword, 
 or even a heavy hammer. Wives, daugh- 
 ters, children, old men dragged themselves 
 along with the exultant host, nothing 
 doubting that they, too, would be per- 
 mitted to share the triumph, to witness the 
 victory. From the far corners of France, 
 from Brittany, from the islands, from the 
 Pyrenees, came troops of men whose lan- 
 guage could not be understood, and who had 
 but one sign, that of the Cross, to signify 
 their brotherhood. Whole villages came 
 
 [214] 
 
THE HOUSE OF MY PILGRIMAGE 
 
 en masse^ accompanied by their priests, 
 bringing with them their children, their 
 cattle, their stores of provisions, their house- 
 hold utensils, their all ! While the poorest 
 came with nothing at all, trusting that 
 miracles, similar to that which protected 
 the Israelites in the desert would protect 
 them also — ^that manna would drop from 
 heaven and the rocks would open to supply 
 them with water. And such was their 
 ignorance that, as the walls of town after 
 town became visible on the march, they 
 pressed forward eagerly demanding if that 
 was Jerusalem." 
 
 The Meuse and the Moselle were mobil- 
 ized for the rescue of nearer sepulchres, as 
 I passed through their valleys, but the 
 spirit of the Crusades was there as every- 
 where from these valleys to the far corners 
 of Brittany and to the Pyrenees. 
 
 As I return on my second pilgrimage, 
 
 [215] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 the nearer sepulchres have been recovered, 
 and already thousands of pilgrims are on 
 the way to visit them. 
 
 It is recorded that the cause of pilgrimage 
 had an enormous impetus in the early 
 eleventh century "by the conversion of 
 the Huns who had hitherto barred the 
 old Pilgrim Way." The twentieth century 
 "Huns" no longer bar the way to the val- 
 leys of the nearer sepulchres, nor to the 
 land of the far sepulchre, which these 
 "Huns" hoped to hold through their Is- 
 cariot treachery in selling their Christ to 
 the Turk. 
 
 And as I pass through redeemed France, 
 across the old Pilgrim paths through the 
 Alps, and down to the coasts of Italy to 
 take ship for the Holy Land again, I find 
 many eager to go upon the same pilgrimage 
 as those of the Middle Ages, of varied 
 tongues and creeds, Jew and Gentile (in- 
 
 [216] 
 
THE HOUSE OF MY PH^GRIMAGE 
 
 deed, my companion is a noble Jew), who 
 have "but one sign, that of the Cross [the 
 Red Cross] to signify their brotherhood"; 
 yet eager to go, not with a thought of selfish 
 personal celestial salvation, but only for 
 the earthly happiness and the immortal 
 good of others — to heal and nurse and 
 comfort, a new kind of crusading that has 
 only kindliness for the ancient foes of those 
 who bore a cross of narrower sympathy. 
 
 The Palestine to which I go on my second 
 pilgrimage is a different Holy Land from 
 that which was on the prairie horizon of 
 nay boyhood, though changed through the 
 years by artists and writers and pastors 
 and lecturers, down to Sir George Adam 
 Smith; different from the land which on 
 my first pilgrimage I saw from the Convent 
 of St. Onofrio on the Janiculum Hill over- 
 looking Rome, where I found some of the 
 sheets of "Jerusalem Delivered" in Tasso's 
 
 [217 J 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 own hand; different from the land which 
 I saw one morning in the iEgean as I looked 
 at sunrise eastward across the isle of Pat- 
 mos. For I have seen with my own eyes 
 its bare hills; I have passed through many 
 of its squaKd and huddled villages, and 
 over its lonely roads; I have drunk of its 
 broken fountains, I have knelt at its 
 sepulchres with their tinselled and faded 
 mementos; I have seen the procession 
 of sad-faced women burden-bearers, the 
 multitude of its joyless children without 
 hope of a kingdom of heaven here upon 
 the earth, the cumulative misery of cen- 
 turies of misrule and oppression, and the 
 ugliness of its religious jealousies and hat- 
 reds, but I go back to it with an even deeper 
 and more reverent "passion of pilgrimage" 
 than before, and with a hope not merely 
 of the restoration of its glory by the wash- 
 ing away of the putrid dust of centuries, 
 
 [218] 
 
THE HOUSE OF MY PILGRIMAGE 
 
 but of the enhancing of that ancient glory 
 by what the nations can bring afresh of 
 their "glories and honors" into it. 
 
 And I go at an expectant, crucial mo- 
 ment in the civilization which takes its 
 name from the land to which I am going. 
 The nations of the earth are gathering 
 around the peace-table this very day, the 
 first day of the week which these same 
 nations or most of them have kept, in name 
 at least, as a holy day in memory of a cer- 
 tain memorable morning in Jerusalem. I 
 can all but see the place of their initial 
 meeting from my windows, and the upper- 
 most wish in my thought, as I hear the 
 commonplace sounds of the street rise 
 about me and look out over the myriad 
 roofs, is that this peace conference might 
 have been held out in Palestine, despite 
 all the physical discomfort it would have 
 involved (even if such discomfort is not 
 
 [219] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 to be compared with that of the millions 
 of peacemakers who have fought for it 
 from the North Sea to Bagdad). 
 
 I wish that the nations through their 
 delegates might have assembled in this 
 land which was the common homeland 
 of their civilization, and made its sacred 
 plateau their table: 
 
 There where the East and the West meet in the 
 Near East and the Near West: 
 
 There where Mount Ebal and Mount Gerizim 
 might look down with their antiphony of national 
 curse and blessing upon those who take part in this 
 conference: 
 
 There where from the desert border to the south 
 the commandments of Sinai might be heard afresh, 
 face to face, with their original sanction, and with 
 the remembrance of the fate of those who worshipped 
 the golden calf and of those who drank its golden 
 dust — the commandments that are at the founda- 
 tion of all states, and should be remembered in all 
 the relations of states one with another: 
 
 [220] 
 
THE HOUSE OF MY PILGRIMAGE 
 
 There where was added the new commandment 
 "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself" than 
 which, with the first, " there is none other command- 
 ment greater": 
 
 There where was proclaimed with godlike au- 
 thority the doctrine of human brotherhood and 
 world neighborliness and the beatitude, "Blessed 
 are the peacemakers for they shall be called the 
 children of God." 
 
 There where in the humblest of places 
 the event occurred from which all the years 
 of our calendars are counted — for it is 
 "the year of our Lord" in which this World 
 Congress assembles. 
 
 There where the noise of making things 
 and the tumult of doing things have not 
 yet come to disturb the silences of the 
 eternal processes or to make inaudible 
 such a voice as that which Elijah heard 
 on Horeb. 
 
 There where is ever consciously present 
 
 [221] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 the "good-will of Him who dwelt in the 
 bush." 
 
 And to this wish there was added a 
 second, that, as Abraham digged a well in 
 Beersheba in witness of the contract of 
 peace which he made with Abimelech, a 
 well that became as a "fountain of gar- 
 dens" in the midst of the desert, so this 
 little land stretching away from the well 
 of Beersheba to the fountain of the Jordan 
 in Dan, might at the conclusion of the 
 world peace become a permanent witness, 
 in its returning and enhanced glory, to 
 this peace written by the spiritual descen- 
 dants of Abraham who are greater in num- 
 ber now than the countless stars in the 
 Palestinian skies, for Jew and Christian 
 and Mohammedan, all look back to him 
 as their father and to Moses as their Law- 
 giver. 
 
 As it is, since the peace is to be the 
 
 [222] 
 
THE HOUSE OF MY PILGRIMAGE 
 
 "Peace of Paris" or the "Peace of Ver- 
 sailles," and the first wish cannot be lit- 
 erally realized, the second rises to take 
 its place — the wish that even if the terms 
 of this peace cannot be written on this 
 plateau for a table, in the "City of Peace" 
 (which is the meaning of the word "Jeru- 
 salem"), these terms may yet have this 
 witness and confirmation: that wells shall 
 be digged, both hterally and figuratively, in 
 the dry places of that land, and that it 
 shall be made to illustrate in the small 
 that which the nations wish to see pervade 
 the whole earth. 
 
 And this "eternal excellency" is to be 
 reaUzed, as I beUeve, by making it an inter- 
 national reservation within the circle of 
 the whole earth, even as a great park is 
 set apart within the bounds of a single 
 country — a, reservation holy unto the cause 
 of the human brotherhood proclaimed there 
 
 [223] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 two thousand years ago by one who never 
 travelled beyond the horizon that could be 
 seen without glasses from the top of Mount 
 Ebal on a clear day, a reservation so ^mall 
 that its beautifying and enriching and 
 enhaloing would be no greater financial 
 burden for the nations gathered at the 
 Conference than is the maintenance of 
 Central Park with its Natural History and 
 Art Museums by the people of New York 
 City, or of the Lake Front parks of Chicago 
 with their buildings devoted to art and 
 science and education and recreation by 
 the people of that city. 
 
 It could be made a land of entrancing 
 beauty with its range of flora extending, 
 in the width of Long Island (to visualize 
 its narrowness to Americans) from that 
 of the subtropical plain, through that of 
 the temperate-zoned mountains, down to 
 that of the tropical valley more than a 
 
 [224] 
 
THE HOUSE OF MY PILGRIMAGE 
 
 thousand feet below the level of the Mediter- 
 ranean Sea — if only water were abundantly 
 available at all seasons. When Moses 
 looked out upon it, remembering the water- 
 less wilderness and back of that the land 
 of Egypt, where nothing grew except by 
 irrigation, he said, "It is not like the land 
 of Egypt from which ye came out where 
 thou sowedst thy seed and wateredst it 
 out of thy foot as a garden of herbs," but 
 a land whose blessing — the blessing of the 
 rain which Uterally contains in its drops 
 all the other physical blessings to man- 
 kind — was the rain given in season, "the 
 former and the latter rain"; and whose 
 ciu'se was the lack of rain. 
 
 Jeremiah's "Rhapsody of the Drought" 
 is the most eloquent of that curse: 
 
 They sit in black upon the ground. . . . Their 
 nobles send their Httle ones to the waters; they 
 
 [225] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 come to the pits and find no water; they return 
 with their vessels empty; they are ashamed and 
 confounded and cover their heads. Because of the 
 ground which is chapt for that no rain hath been 
 in the land, the ploughmen are ashamed, they cover 
 their heads. For the hind also in the field calveth 
 and forsaketh her young, because there is no grass. 
 And the wild asses stand on the bare heights; they 
 pant for air like jackals; their eyes fail because 
 there is no herbage. 
 
 "The chief thing in life is water," said 
 the ancient son of Sirach in his Wisdom 
 Book, ''water, bread, and a garment to 
 cover shame." And after walking over 
 the thirsty hills and through the valleys 
 whose streams were turned to pitch I could 
 understand why water was put before 
 bread in the list of the chief things, and 
 why Jeremiah wrote so eloquently of the 
 waterless days. 
 
 I heard often the sound of the grinding 
 
 [226] 
 
THE HOUSE OF MY PILGRIJVIAGE 
 
 in the house as I passed through the streets 
 of the villages; I have occasionally seen 
 the line of children at the public oven with 
 their flat loaves of barley (such no doubt 
 as the five which the boy of the miracled 
 multiplying of the loaves had) waiting in 
 turn for the baking; and I know with what 
 diflBculty whole villages find the patched 
 garments to cover their shame. (In Hebron, 
 I saw a girl, one day as I was passing, with 
 nothing but a piece of gunny sack to cover 
 her, and in Cana I remember seeing two 
 lads of twelve or more without even this 
 protection). But water is the chief thing, 
 beyond either bread or clothing. The one 
 characteristic universal figure in Palestine 
 is the erect woman with the water- jar upon 
 her head (replaced, as I have said, in some 
 places by the hghter if less picturesque 
 Standard Oil tin), or the bent man with 
 the goatskin upon his back (though he is 
 
 [227] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 now giving over his long-distance carrying 
 of water in some places to the iron pipe). 
 
 One appreciates, too, in travelling through 
 this land, in the summer at any rate, why 
 the prophecies of the "Great Restoration" 
 all had visions of streams or of pools of 
 water in them; why the British in their 
 restoration of it began by carrying water 
 first from the Nile to its borders and then 
 from the springs beyond Bethlehem to 
 Jerusalem; and why a river of pure water 
 is made to run through the heaven of the 
 Apocalypse in the ultimate Restoration. 
 
 Palestine has its annual rainfall of thirty 
 inches or thereabout, but every drop of 
 this rain falls within less than one-half the 
 y6ar. In the other half there is no rain 
 at all. The storage of water for these lean, 
 dry months — delightful as they must be 
 when they first come, when the winter is 
 over and gone and the rains are past and 
 
 [228] 
 
THE HOUSE OF MY PILGRIMAGE 
 
 the voice of the turtle is heard in the land 
 — becomes the supreme problem of the 
 land, for without a vision which has in 
 it a water-supply the people perish. 
 
 I have not as yet seen Palestine in its 
 wet season, but it must have been toward 
 the end of that season, when even the hills 
 of the Jordan wilderness are abloom with 
 myriad flowers, that Moses saw it as a literal 
 "land of promise." I wonder how it could 
 have seemed such a land if he had looked 
 upon it as I saw it in August, 1918, from 
 near Nebo, when its barrenness glistered 
 in the sun and the Britishers, "strong and 
 of good courage," who were fighting hke 
 Joshua to possess it, panted for the water- 
 brooks of their island home. And yet that 
 land became a veritable "land of promise," 
 a "house of pilgrimage" for the greatest 
 events in a thousand years of the earth's 
 history. 
 
 [ £29 ] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 And if such genius as enlarged by millions 
 of acres the fertile parts of the Nile Valley, 
 or built the Roosevelt Dam, or digged the 
 Suez or the Panama Canal, or has made 
 the Mesopotamian Valley to become fruit- 
 ful again (as if Eve, driven from her Para- 
 dise, and beyond child-bearing age, were 
 readmitted and given promise of a new 
 progeny), if such genius from the several 
 nations were to offer itself (and what genius 
 would not?) to impound the water or to 
 pass through the valleys of Baca and make 
 them wells, or to carry, like King Hezekiah, 
 the living streams underground but in iron 
 tubes, into which (to modernize the ancient 
 figure of sword and ploughshare) the gun- 
 barrels might be beaten and made service- 
 able in other trenches — if this consecrated 
 genius were to undertake this service, the 
 gardens of this land might be made per- 
 petual, its orchards be made, like Joseph 
 
 [230] 
 
THE HOUSE OF MY PILGRIMAGE 
 
 in Jacob's blessing of his children, ever 
 "fruitful boughs by fountains," and its 
 maritime plains flecked black with shadows 
 of groves of orange and almond trees as 
 "flocks of goats that lie along the side of 
 Gilead" (even in 1918 I saw one grove 
 of 30,000 trees upon this plain), while 
 fields would grow again with barley or 
 wheat, descendants of the wheat that once 
 grew wild there and became the mother 
 of the domesticated wheat-fields of the 
 Dakotas and Argentine, like the people 
 who once filled the hills and plains about 
 and have become domesticated in all the 
 fertile parts of the earth. 
 
 I do not know that the geologist could 
 find materials among the Judaean hills for 
 such walls as John saw in his Apocalypse, 
 but again I know that the geological, en- 
 gineering, architectural, and artistic genius 
 of these nations could and would find the 
 
 [ 231 ] . 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 quarries of these stones, fashion them, 
 adorn them, and carry them to embody 
 there this vision, or one which will better 
 translate a heavenly city into an earthly 
 habitation and keep it as clean as the streets 
 which St. John saw, "as of transparent 
 glass," though no earthly municipal re- 
 former could let them be paved with gold. 
 
 It is a happy though modest augury of 
 the coming to pass of such a translation 
 or municipal transfiguration that already 
 the Governor of Jerusalem not only has 
 plans, as I have said, for giving the Inner 
 City a worthy setting among the hills but 
 also has begun its cleansing. There are 
 special sweepers now to keep clean the 
 "Via Dolorosa" which the world has shed 
 enough tears in its memory to wash as the 
 "very heaven for cleanness." 
 
 For more than a "house of pilgrimage" 
 this land is to be, more than a "highway 
 
 [232] 
 
THE HOUSE OF MY PILGRIMAGE 
 
 • . . and a way,'' as Isaiah prophesied it 
 would be, and as it has been for those who 
 pass from one continent to another; more 
 than a place of sojourners, symbolic of a 
 celestial "other country"; more than a 
 round of shrines whose visitation will pro- 
 cure special heavenly privileges and release 
 from earthly duties; more than a place 
 of penance. It is the ground on which to 
 visualize in the earth the dreams of the 
 civihzation gathered at the peace-table, to 
 show a practicable internationalism, not a 
 nebulous thing, but a working model to 
 which the East may look up from one side 
 and the West from the other, and find 
 themselves, in looking toward the same 
 thing, brought into consciousness of a prac- 
 tical planetary brotherhood. The country 
 is so small (for I am thinking only of the 
 land west of the Jordan and south of the 
 Litany River) that even the twelve tribes 
 
 [233] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 could not squeeze themselves into it; and 
 yet it is so large in its significance that all 
 the nations can find a place for their glory 
 and honor in it. 
 
 We are, in our promotion of the theory 
 of self-determination, encouraging the divi- 
 sion of the earth into smaller and more 
 numerous aliquot parts. It is an essential 
 complement of this that somewhere there 
 shall be symbolized the supreme inter- 
 national planetary whole of which these 
 are but confessed national fractions. And 
 where in all the world can a place be found 
 more fit for this visualization than this 
 spot, where this civilization has had its 
 greatest prophets and noblest teachers .^^ 
 
 I should be presuming in suggesting the 
 fate of this land (being an American, whose 
 country had no direct part in its redemp- 
 tion) if I did not feel that through a long 
 line of pious ancestors it became a part 
 
 [234] 
 
THE HOUSE OF MY PILGRIMAGE 
 
 of my own heritage. I am sure, moreover, 
 that somewhere in that hne I should find 
 at least one ancestor who was buried with 
 his legs crossed, if indeed he did not lie 
 on the same hillside as the graves that I 
 saw on Ramah, and the Mount of Olives 
 and at the foot of the last hill outside of 
 Jerusalem on the JaflPa Road. In any event 
 they who have in these late years and in 
 the long centuries before them died there 
 as Crusaders would give approval to my 
 suggestion, if their "speech could whisper 
 out of the dust" — a dust so valiant when 
 breath was in it, and so potent when its 
 breath had departed, that, if one but 
 touched it, one would, though dead, be 
 restored to life as was the dead Moabite 
 when thrust into the sepulchre of Elisha. 
 
 This little land should be kept as an 
 "internationalized" reservation, I repeat. 
 Perhaps a better word would be "mutual- 
 
 [235] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 ized." This suggestion comes from a recent 
 experience of mine in being called upon to 
 act as one of three trustees to vote the 
 majority stock of a great American insur- 
 ance company in its **mutualization/' a 
 
 * 
 
 plan under which all the policyholders be- 
 come collectively the company, after pay- 
 ing a reasonable price for the stock to the 
 stockholders who by inheritance or pur- 
 chase came into its possession, and then 
 make it the common property of all those 
 who through the insurance of their lives 
 have an interest in it. So the nations might 
 equally "mutualize" this land by paying 
 a fair price to its present stockholders, 
 whoever they may be, and then keep it 
 for the benefit of all who have a spiritual 
 life interest in it, making certain so far as 
 that is humanly possible that "nothing un- 
 clean" enters it (even to the putting out 
 of the uncleanliness there) nor "any person 
 
 [236] 
 
THE HOUSE OF MY PILGRIMAGE 
 
 that maketh an abomination" — such as the 
 Germans for example have made there in 
 some of their professed piety — "or a Ke." 
 I am not concerned that this "interna- 
 tionalized " or " mutualized ' ' reservation 
 (the "old homestead" of civilization, the 
 "abandoned farm" of a wide-spread family 
 of nations) shall give support again to three 
 or five or more millions of people by its re- 
 covered fertility or its stimulated industry. 
 When the Devil, looking out over these 
 very hills, offered to do that very thing by 
 making stones into bread, the answer was 
 that man was not to live by bread alone. 
 If it were merely and solely a matter of rais- 
 ing more barley and wheat and fruits and 
 vegetables, or of planting and nurturing 
 again the orchards and groves of figs and 
 oUves and oranges and pomegranates, or 
 of covering the hills with flocks and herds, 
 I should not invite the thought of a reader 
 
 [237] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 to leave his Iowa farm, his California 
 groves, his New York orchard, or even his 
 New England garden ; though I hope never- 
 theless that the land will be made to "blos- 
 som again as the rose." I should leave, 
 however, the temporal interest of the agri- 
 culturist and the horticulturist and the 
 florist and the advice of their experts to 
 look to that development. 
 
 Nor am I concerned that God should 
 do, as John the Baptist intimated to those 
 who boasted that they looked to Abraham 
 as their father. He was able to do: raise 
 up from the stones of that same valley 
 upon which the Mount of Temptation 
 looks down enough new sons to give the 
 land the population which it is estimated 
 the bread made from the fertilized stones 
 could support. Though again, I should 
 like to see gathered in happiness there as 
 many sons of Abraham as can in such a 
 
 [238] 
 
THE HOUSE OF MY PILGRIMAGE 
 
 sympathetic environment serve humanity 
 better than through the nations whose hfe 
 their genius has penetrated and permeated. 
 I have long beUeved and often said that 
 the Jew, by reason of this very penetration 
 and permeation of his genius and the uni- 
 versaUty of his experience, was fitted above 
 others to help the nations reach that inter- 
 nationaUsm, of practice as well as of spirit, 
 through nationality. Perhaps in this their 
 ancient homeland they will have a greater 
 opportunity to promote this desired and 
 much-sought end; but, as I beheve, it is 
 not to be by going alone, by segregating 
 themselves from the nations they have 
 helped so marvellously to make, and be- 
 coming again a ''peculiar people" and a 
 separate nation. Their mission even in 
 going back to their homeland is, as I be- 
 lieve, to internationalize, not to intensify 
 and extend nationalization. 
 
 [239] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 A Homeland ? Yes ! But an interna- 
 tional Homeland; one which gives welcome 
 to every earth-child who turns toward its 
 holy hills with a pure heart and with clean 
 hands — not one which narrows sympathies 
 or accentuates diflferences of race or creed — 
 a Homeland whose tenantry shall be pri- 
 marily those who, like the families of Ger- 
 shon, Kohath, and Merari of old, care for 
 the sacred things of humanity, which must 
 now include the utensils of democracy — 
 not a Homeland to be peopled by persecu- 
 tions or pogroms of other lands, for these 
 can no longer exist, but a Homeland re- 
 peopled by its own appeal to a humanity 
 seeking not personal salvation nor ease 
 nor pleasure, but a hig£er common experi- 
 ence and an "eternal excellence." 
 
 I cannot think of a better guide, as I 
 have said, for this tenantry or a better 
 trustee for the nations, till out of their 
 
 [240] 
 
THE HOUSE OF MY PILGRIMAGE 
 
 varied faiths and longings the people of 
 this land find their own seK-determined 
 machinery of government, than the coun- 
 try of the Joshua who redeemed it — than 
 the country of '*Allah-Nebi," or, as it is 
 in its English form, AUenby. 
 
 For America I have toward this Holy 
 Land only this hope, that the spirit in 
 which she entered the land through her 
 agencies of mercy may unselfishly persist, 
 and that in this spirit she may liberally, 
 generously, disinterestedly give to the aid 
 of those who shall be the Holy Land trus- 
 tees. For this hope I find a concrete ex- 
 pression out of my own experience on the 
 hill overlooking the Holy City. 
 
 I was roused by a clamor of bells — ^just 
 outside my window it seemed. Where I 
 was I could not for the moment determine 
 — in Princeton, in New York City across 
 the street from St. Luke's, or in Albany 
 
 [241] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 on my sleeping-porch beneath the State 
 Street Church bell. But this bell or group 
 of bells was different in voice. I found 
 myself in the Patriarch's cot, on the Mount 
 of Olives, and, leaping to the window, I 
 saw it was a priest in the tower among the 
 cypresses summoning to the early mass. 
 His rather primitive chime-tune had its 
 climax in a wonderfully beautiful and rich 
 tone (like that of one of the Russian singers 
 in the New York church in 97th Street), 
 which, I found afterward, had come from 
 the bell-tower of the Russian church, the 
 Church of the Ascension, near by. 
 
 I dressed hastily and hurried to the 
 chapel across the court, where two priests 
 were already intoning an antiphonal ser- 
 vice. Soon Russian sisters, pilgrims, de- 
 tained in Jerusalem by the war, began to 
 slip quietly, almost stealthily in, with their 
 white kerchiefs caught tightly under their 
 
 [242] 
 
THE HOUSE OF MY PH^GRIMAGE 
 
 chins — the meekest, most docile, but de- 
 termined bodies I have ever seen. They 
 not only crossed themselves assiduously, 
 but bowed repeatedly touching the stone 
 floor with their foreheads. Later (for the 
 service lasted two hours) refugee women 
 from the city of Es-Salt beyond the Jordan 
 — large, handsome women of finely, strongly 
 moulded faces and of regal bearing — came 
 striding in, unabashed that they were (or 
 some of them) in their bare feet. One 
 carried a child astride her shoulder with 
 as great grace as a Madonna. There was 
 no bowing to the floor. Then came the 
 Es-Salt men, of the strongest faces and 
 sturdiest bodies seen in Palestine, their 
 white head-dress crowned with a black 
 aureole. They stalked with their heavy 
 shoes to the very front of the altar and 
 bowed before the priests or made their 
 circuit of the sacred emblems with as little 
 
 [US] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 self-consciousness as if they were in their 
 black tents just outside the convent walls, 
 or out in their Moab hills. 
 
 A sacristan, seeing that I was a stranger, 
 brought me a little square of carpet on 
 which to stand or kneel, and then a chair, 
 which I could not take, according to our 
 Western standards, while the women stood. 
 About twenty of the Russian women gath- 
 ered in a group in front of the altar and 
 sang most impressively their simple recita- 
 tives and choruses. Among them were 
 women of astounding voices. I said that 
 the Russian women were all meek in ap- 
 pearance. There was one exception. A 
 woman of sharp, eager face, as of a zealot, 
 with a gray shawl over her head, seeing 
 me standing near the door, approached me 
 and said in rather sharp voice (speaking 
 in French) ''Quelle croixf (What cross?) 
 I did not at first understand the import 
 
 [244] 
 
THE HOUSE OF MY PH^GRIMAGE 
 
 of her inquiry, though I realized that she 
 was putting to me an all-important ques- 
 tion: ^'Quelle croix? — grecque ou latine?'^ 
 ("What cross do you make, that of the 
 Greek Church or of the Latin Church?") 
 My answer was, "Za Croix Rouge'' (the 
 Red Cross), the sign of mercy universal, 
 the symbol not of a creed, nor even of a 
 Christian faith, but of human kinship and 
 brotherhood. 
 
 And in Palestine, of all lands in the earth, 
 where reUgious partisanship is, perhaps, 
 most bitter, where the world's alms have 
 been asked for the sake of Abraham, Christ, 
 and Mohammed — here above all other 
 places need to be invoked and here above 
 all other places should the nations find 
 the common ground for the expression of 
 their most exalted common ideal. 
 
 Palestine does not now seem to me so 
 far away. It is just over the edge of the 
 
 [245] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 horizon. The sun now comes up always 
 for me over the mystical mountains of 
 Moab and walks with shining sandals upon 
 the waters of the Dead Sea, where I saw it 
 so often from the Mount of Olives, which 
 is also known as the "Mountain of Light." 
 The sun now goes down always in the glory 
 that hangs over "Jerusalem the Golden." 
 The crescent moon will always have beneath 
 it the dome of the Mosque of Omar that 
 stands near the site of the Temple of Solo- 
 mon. The stars, since my journey by night 
 from Beersheba, will always be those that 
 Abraham was unable to count, and the 
 twilight shadows will always be those that 
 gather in the Valley of Kidron about the 
 Garden of Gethsemane. 
 
 It is this land that I should like to put 
 upon every horizon. 
 
 [246] 
 
XIV 
 A LA TERRE SAINTE 
 
 AS some gray pilgrim of the Middle 
 
 £\^ Age 
 
 (And I am of the middle age my- 
 
 seK, 
 
 That age when all is mystical — or else 
 
 All practical — when truth of spirit seems 
 
 More real than all the buoyant world of 
 
 youth, 
 When ever on the known's dim edge one 
 
 dwells. 
 Ever in conscious awe of what's beyond. 
 That age when seen things are but counter- 
 part 
 Of things unseen, or else the memory 
 Of something that has been — the happiest 
 age 
 
 [247] 
 
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE 
 
 Of man and life, unwithered yet of time 
 Yet free of all youth's blinding loves and 
 
 hates) 5 — 
 As some gray pilgrim of the Middle Age 
 I face each risen day, or bright or dull, 
 Tempestuous or calm, and pray my soul 
 Long leagues upon the way that souls must 
 
 take 
 Before they reach the far and fair Terre 
 
 Sainte 
 Whose shadow-bounded stretches we di- 
 vine 
 But in our longing for immortal life. 
 
 'Mid dust of earth, in heat and cold and 
 
 rain. 
 O'er far-horizoned heights, through narrow 
 
 vales. 
 Accompanied of glowing sun, or cloud. 
 Of one clear star or of the 'circling host, 
 My body journeys on through aging time, 
 
 [248] 
 
A LA TERRE SAINTE 
 
 But not to find an empty, open tomb 
 As one who sought the Asian sepulchre, — 
 I seek the Kingdom of the Risen one. 
 Within. — ^Long, long and toilsome is the 
 
 way. 
 Unceasing must the struggle onward be. 
 But there's no other way a la Terre Sainte, 
 A la Terre Sainte ! 
 
 [249] 
 
XV 
 ODYSSEUS' BARK 
 
 O DREAD Poseidon 
 Who didst turn to stone 
 Odysseus' bark 
 And anchor it 
 Beside the lovely isle 
 Where goddess-like Nausicaa 
 Still plays at ball 
 'Mid shadows violet 
 With her shrill maids. 
 Loose thou this ship. 
 With sombre cypresses for masts, 
 With dark monastic cells 
 For cabins, and the close. 
 Abloom, for deck ! 
 Loose it, I pray, 
 
 [250] 
 
'tn 
 a; 
 
 O 
 
ODYSSEUS' BARK 
 
 From its long anchorage 
 
 And let it take me back 
 
 To my loved Ithaca — 
 
 An island grown to continent, 
 
 America, 
 
 Lying beyond the seas 
 
 That are "the baths 
 
 Of all the Western stars." 
 
 Corfu, 1918. 
 
 [251] 
 
^f^