Part 13

These springs are situated on a plain about a mile long and half a mile broad, semicircular in shape, the chord of the arc consisting of a line of basalt precipices, from which it slopes gradually to the river, which forms the bow. It is watered by a good fresh-water spring, which rushes from the base of the cliffs. The hot sulphur stream which issues from the pool we first visited turns a mill and then flows into the long, oblong pond I first saw from above. Here, after the exertions of the day, I determined to bathe. I never enjoyed a swim more than the one in this soft sulphur water, with a temperature of 95°. The pool was about one hundred yards long and ten wide, and out of my depth nearly throughout its length. The rocks, upon which I could sit comfortably up to my neck, where the stream entered the pool were covered with a heavy white deposit. The sensation afterwards was one of delicious languor; but my full enjoyment of the bath was a little marred by the fact that I had to walk a quarter of a mile back to the tents afterwards. I had a long talk on my way, to the miller, the solitary resident of this lonely but enchanting spot, and tried to induce him to desert the mill, of which he was the guardian, and act as my guide up the river on the following day; but he was either too conscientious, too lazy, or too ignorant—I suspect the latter, as I found by experience that all the information he gave me of a topographical nature was utterly erroneous. It was, therefore, with a pleasing sense of anticipation that we retired to rest, determined to trust to our own geographical instincts alone for our proposed exploration.

EXPLORATION OF THE VALLEY OF THE YARMUK.

Haifa, April 30.—In my last letter I described the little-known hot sulphur springs of Amatha, with their extensive ruins, which indicate the celebrity they must have acquired in the days of the Romans. As the river Yarmuk above this point had, so far as I know, never been explored, I determined to push up the gorges through which it cleaves its way from the highlands of the Hauran to the valley of the Jordan.

Some years ago I had crossed it about thirty miles higher up, where it flows across a plateau at an elevation of 1800 feet above the sea. I was now standing on its margin, 550 feet below the sea. In the course of this thirty miles, therefore, it has a fall of 2350 feet. In other words, it was a fair presumption that there was a waterfall somewhere between those two points which had never been visited. The inquiries which I made from the natives on the point were unsatisfactory in their result. They seemed unable to discriminate between a rapid and a waterfall, and although they told me of many places where the water rushed with great violence, they seemed to know of none where it was precipitous. Upon one point they were, unfortunately, all agreed, which was that there was no path up the river-side, and that it would be found impossible at this time of year, when the stream was flooded, to force a way up. However, we determined to try. We thought we should be more free in our movements if we were unhampered by a guide, and directed only by our topographical instincts.

We therefore left our tents standing, as a sort of home on which to retreat in case of need, and struck across the small plain upon which the springs are situated, to a ford, which four days previously had been impracticable, but which we were assured we might now risk with safety. The stream was here a hundred yards broad, full of large rocks, and with a swift, turbid current that was by no means reassuring. The water came high up on our saddle-flaps, but we reached the other bank without mishap, and found ourselves skirting a dense thicket of tropical underwood, above which a grove of at least three hundred date-trees reared their tufted crests. It was a spot unlike any other to be found in Palestine, for, although the heat in the valley of the Jordan, owing to its depression below the sea, is as great as this, and at its southern extremity greater, nowhere throughout its length is to be found a spot where the vegetation is so dense and luxuriant. Here were wild orange, lemon, fig, almond, and mulberry trees, oleanders growing to a gigantic size, besides butm, sidr, carob, and other trees peculiar to the country, and thickets of cane twenty feet high, forming a splendid cover for the wild boars with which we were assured this jungle abounds.

The Arabs come here at certain seasons to gather the dates, weave mats from the reeds, and harvest the crops of the slopes behind, which were now all waving with young grain. During that time they live in mud hovels, partly excavated in the ground, which were now deserted. There was only one inhabitant, and he ran a small mill, picturesquely situated under some date-trees, which was turned by a stream of hot sulphur water issuing from a copious spring, with a temperature of 112°. The Yarmuk, which flows beneath a cliff of black basalt three hundred feet high, half encircles this unique spot, and I regretted that I had not time to explore it thoroughly; but the jungle was so impenetrable that it was impossible to make any impression upon it without an axe, and then it would have been a work of time.

We now followed a track which approached the river bank. The hills, fortunately, on our side sloped back gradually. Midway up the sheer face of the cliff opposite we saw here and there caves, which, from their regular shape, appear at one time to have been inhabited, but if so, the only approach could have been from above, by baskets lowered to the mouths, similar to the method used by the robbers who inhabited the Wady Hamam, behind the plain of Gennesareth, in days of old. Now, instead of robbers in baskets, we saw immense eagles sailing in front of the cliff, in the crevices of which they had placed their nests. Crossing a spur which jutted into the river from the mountains on our right, and which prevented our following it closely, we obtained a splendid view of its course for some miles. To our left were basalt and limestone cliffs, and above them steep, sloping grass lands, now carpeted with wild flowers. Above them again were more crags and cliffs, and then the rim which marked the edge of the plateau, fifteen hundred feet above us. To the right the hills sloped back more slowly, cleft here and there by wild, rocky valleys, while their summits were fringed with oak forests. Here and there the river foamed between precipices on both sides, and we began to perceive that the task of exploration was by no means easy. But it was perhaps all the more interesting. We made our horses scramble where only goats had been before, now along the base of the cliff over huge boulders, now half-way up its precipitous side, when prudence suggested that horse and rider should separate, and each be responsible for his own life and limbs. Now we forced our way through tangled thickets of flowering shrubs that clung to the rocky sides where they were less steep, and now, utterly baffled, diverging from the river and toiling up a steep grassy slope, only to slip and scramble down it again on the other side so as to regain the margin of the stream.

Our progress was necessarily slow, not only owing to the natural obstacles we encountered, but to the fact that we were mapping the country as we advanced; but the scenery by which we were surrounded was too romantic to be hurried over, and too interesting, from its novelty, not to be carefully noted. At last we reached a point where there had been a land-slide, leaving bare one precipice a thousand feet high, while it formed another above the stream, which it had displaced. Nothing remained for it but to attempt another ford, and try our luck on the opposite bank. This, to the amazement of some Bedouins, who watched us from it and waved us back, we succeeded in accomplishing, not without a narrow escape on the part of one of our party who, boldly leading the way, got entangled among the rocks and eddies. We were cordially welcomed by an Arab sheik, as we scrambled like half-drowned rats up the bank. He invited us to his tents, which were pitched a few hundred yards back from the stream, on a small plain. Here mats were spread for us, coffee roasted, pounded, and prepared, and, the young men gathering around, we proceeded, under the influence of an abundant distribution of cigarettes on my part, to exchange ideas. They told us they belonged to a village two and a half hours distant, and were therefore not nomads. They came hither at this season of the year to pasture their herds and look after their crops. I hardly like to report the conversation of these poor people as they came to confide their grievances to us, without our in any way inviting their confidence. Suffice it to say that the recent measure of the government by which it has been decided to substitute for the dime, which has heretofore been the share of the government in the entire produce of every village, an assessment based on the highest five years' average, has produced the greatest discontent among the rural population, whose poverty and distress, already extreme, owing to the extortion of the tax-gatherers even under the old system, and the withdrawal of the bone and sinew of the country by conscription, especially during the recent Russo-Turkish war, will thus be intensified. In fact, these poor people were driven to such desperation that they were most unreserved in their language, and although they are the most long-suffering and much-enduring of races, there is a point where the crushed worm will turn. However great the financial exigencies of the empire may be, they would better be met by a thorough reorganization and reform in the whole system of tax-collecting, than in adding to the burdens of the people, which are already greater than they can bear.

Our hosts assured us that we should find any further attempt to ascend the river impracticable, and that there was a place where the water fell for a considerable height, but we could only reach it by making a circuit, which would take a day. However, we determined to judge for ourselves, and succeeded in getting about a mile farther, when we found the river shut in by precipices on both sides. It was impossible to descend to it from the brow of the cliff on which we stood, much less to ford it afterwards, or to scramble up the precipice on the other side. There was nothing for it but to make an ascent of at least fifteen hundred feet, either to the high plateau of Jaulan, on the right, or to recross the river where we had already forded it, and scramble up the steep, wooded hillsides of Ajlun until we could find a path leading in the desired direction. This latter course we determined to adopt; so we returned to the Arabs tents, crossed the river more successfully than before, warned by our previous experience, and braced ourselves for a twelve-hundred-feet climb up the best track we could find, under the guidance of one of our recent Arab acquaintances. I had been on the lookout all through the day for ruins, and I was now cheered by the intelligence that I should find some on the summit of the hill we were climbing. Such proved to be the case. The situation, at an elevation by my aneroid of about eleven hundred feet above the sea, would indicate that in old time it was a fortress. It was supplied with water by cisterns, the remains of which still exist, some of them demijohn-shaped, and one about ten feet square and twenty feet to the bottom, which, however, was much filled up. There were many piles of huge blocks of drafted stone, but I did not observe any columns or carving, and I think the remains date from a period anterior to the Roman occupation. The modern name of the place is Tel el-Hösn, but its existence has heretofore been unknown, except to the Arabs of the neighborhood, and its discovery was some compensation to me for the effort I had made to reach it.

EXPLORATION ON THE YARMUK.

Haifa, May 15.—From the ancient fortress of El-Hösn we crossed a spur to a high projecting point, from which we could look down a sheer precipice one thousand feet high, which had been formed by a land-slip, to the bed of the river. Forcing their way impetuously through a gorge opposite, the tributary waters of the Rukkad mingled their clear stream with the turbid Yarmuk, after a rapid course from their source in the highlands of Jaulan, from which elevated plateau they are precipitated in a magnificent waterfall eight hundred feet high. All this scenery is as yet absolutely unknown and unexplored, this fall having only recently been discovered, by my travelling companion on this occasion. I regretted being unable to visit it, but we were limited for time, and although it was only hidden from view by a projecting spur of the valley, so broken up is this country by precipitous ravines and gorges, that it would have taken us a day's hard riding to reach it.

It was with regret that we found ourselves compelled to leave the elevated position on which we now stood, and which commanded an extensive view, limited in the extreme east by the lofty mountains of the Jebel Druze; and, steering our way by compass, struck a southeasterly direction, over a park-like, undulating country, covered with oak forest, with occasional patches of cultivation. This part of the country to the east of the Jordan, which is called the Keferat, is thinly inhabited, the villages being very small, squalid, and far apart, but it is a country all waiting to yield of its abundance to some future race who may turn its magnificent resources to good account. In many places the trees were festooned with vines, the grapes of this district being celebrated, but the population pay little heed to their cultivation, for it is impossible to protect them from robbers. The Bedouins consider the sedentary inhabitants as lawful spoil, and raid over these lands at will, practically almost unchecked by the authorities, whose administrative hold on the country is of the slenderest description. It is, in fact, chiefly exercised at those times when it is necessary to send the mounted police into the villages to collect the taxes, and they clear up all that the Bedouins may have left, so that these poor people are engaged in a perpetual struggle to keep body and soul together, and although they are surrounded by a fertile country which, if it were properly cultivated, would make them wealthy, they only cultivate enough for their barest necessities, and have not the heart to attempt to accumulate wealth which they would not be permitted to keep. Situated at an elevation of about eighteen hundred feet above the sea, these high, wooded, fertile table-lands form a district which, should this country ever come to be occupied under more favourable conditions than now exist, will certainly be among the first to attract an agricultural population. The wild, rocky gorges by which it is intersected render the task of exploration, without a guide, one attended with some uncertainty. We take our bearings by compass, gallop under the vine-trellised trees, over green, level slopes, or along inviting glades, till we are suddenly brought up by a precipice down which it is impossible to scramble, which opens unexpectedly in a gulf at our feet. The spot we are making for is not half a mile distant, but we have to follow the edge of the gorge in the opposite direction. Then we come upon another at right angles, which forces us to double back still farther; so at last we wind round the head, first of one ravine and then of another, till we find two hours have elapsed since we were driven back on our tracks; the half-mile has now extended over five or six, the sun is declining with a rapidity which seems accelerated because the daylight has become so precious to us that we cannot bear to anticipate the prospect of its vanishing. At last we reach the head of the valley which has baffled us so long, and are compensated by discovering a ruin. Here are sarcophagi, rock tombs and cisterns, and carved fragments. Fortunately we come across a peasant, the only one we have seen since leaving the river, and he tells us that its name is Haleebna. We write it down and take its bearings as well as we can, for it is unknown heretofore, but the day is too far spent for us to linger for minute examination. The peasant tells us that the best thing we can do, if we would get back to our tents, is to go down the valley we had intended to cross. We follow his advice and have no reason to regret it. It is a _Viâ Mala_ of grandeur and beauty, though on a small scale. We pass between curved limestone cliffs, the fissures in which are filled with underwood, the shrubs cling to the rocks, from which at one place gushes a copious stream of water, by the side of which we hurry with it down the valley, till we get back to the Yarmuk once more, and, wearied and exhausted, reach our tents in the gathering darkness. Here we find a picturesque-looking Kurd waiting to receive us; he is an old soldier, and shows us the scars of five wounds—not all, however, received in military service, but for the most part in Arab skirmishes. He is the agent of the government in these parts, and also of the native capitalist who is the practical owner of the land, which is cultivated by an Arab tribe whose tents are pitched near us; they are heavily indebted to the capitalist aforesaid, who allows them enough of the crops to keep them from starving and takes all the rest himself. And our Kurdish visitor is his collector of revenue. He seems to have some difficulty in protecting his employer's interests, and tells us triumphantly that only a few nights before he has shot an Arab whom he caught plundering. He says that during the bathing season as many as a hundred tents may be seen pitched round the sulphur springs of Amatha, and that their fame is so great that they are visited by invalids from Aleppo and Damascus. The fact, however, that Tiberias, which is five hours distant, is the nearest place in which supplies of any sort can be procured, and that the only accommodation to be obtained is the patient's own tent, must operate as a serious obstacle to the use of these springs, about whose curative value, however, there can be no doubt.

Our way from Amatha lay back across the Jordan valley, which at this season of the year is a sheet of waving grain, cultivated by a branch of the Beni Sukkr Arabs, whose large encampment, with the handsome tent of the sheik in the centre, we pass without stopping, for we are in full pursuit at the moment of five gazelles, which scamper across country, giving us a good run, in which we should have certainly overtaken them had we not been checked by a ravine. We cross the Yarmuk at a point near its junction with the Jordan, and where it carries a volume of water certainly equal to that stream. The Jordan here falls in a fine rapid of about thirty feet in a distance of less than a hundred yards, and would furnish splendid water-power for mills in a part of the country which is much in want of them. The ancient Jisr el-Medjamieh spans the stream at this point, guarded by a government toll-house. Crossing it, we determined to try a short-cut up the little-known Wady Bireh, which is watered by a clear, purling brook, which, if it were utilized, would make this valley one of the most fertile and attractive in this part of the country. After following its winding course for some miles, we found it finally narrowing into a crooked gorge, the sides of which approach so closely as scarcely to admit the passage of a loaded camel between the overhanging rocks. Indeed, when we afterwards described our route to the natives they said it was never used by them. However, it gave us an opportunity of seeing some most romantic scenery, and by shortening the way enabled us to reach Nazareth, jaded and worn out, it is true, the same night.

A DRUSE RELIGIOUS FESTIVAL.

Haifa, May 27.—Travellers who have gone from Nazareth to Tiberias must be familiar with the singular outline of a mountain which they perceive to the left of the road, with its two rocky crests separated from each other by a hog's back about a quarter of a mile long, and called the Horns of Hattin. The summit of the higher peak, one thousand feet above the sea, and about three hundred feet above the plain across which they are riding, forms a conspicuous object in a landscape which, at this point, is one of singular interest and beauty. Rising like a gigantic natural pulpit, tradition has since declared it to be the Mount of the Beatitudes, and asserts that it was from this picturesque elevation that Christ delivered that sermon which has exercised so vast an influence on mankind ever since.

Whether this be so or not, it is certain that the plain on which the audience was supposed to have gathered which listened to it, was the scene, about eleven hundred and fifty-seven years afterwards, of the most memorable conflict in which the Crusaders ever engaged, for it was the one which lost them Palestine, and which resulted in the triumph of Saladin, the Saracen, and the slaughter or capture of the most powerful and celebrated of the Crusading chiefs. At the extremity of the plain, and immediately beneath one of the horns of the mountain, there is a precipitous gorge, down which some of the hardly pressed Crusaders vainly attempted flight, the horses and their riders, heavily panoplied with armour, only escaping the spear of the Arab to meet an even more terrible fate, as they hurled themselves headlong down the rocky precipice. As, dismounting from my active steed, I allowed him to pick his own way down this dangerous defile, I looked with interest at the scene of the disaster, and listened to the story of my guide, who narrated how, only twenty years ago, a fight had taken place here between a celebrated Bedouin chief and a Kurdish tribe, in which the latter were signally defeated on the old Crusading battle-ground, and, seeking safety, like the Christian warriors, in the direction of this treacherous gorge, left sixty dead men and horses at the bottom.