Part 9

We have hired the vault from a Christian, and his family next door consists of his stepmother and four half-sisters, strapping, good-looking wenches, who are not yet married, for lack of the necessary dowers. With them is staying a cousin from Acre, one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen, quite Caucasian in type and complexion, which is white and transparent as that of any Western beauty. We have great difficulty in keeping this bevy of damsels out of our room, as Arabs have no idea of privacy, and they imagine that politeness consists in squatting round in a circle and asking silly questions. Excepting for the practice it gives one in Arabic, and for a certain insight which one thus gains into the manners and customs of the natives, these visits would be intolerable, and, indeed, we have found it necessary to take stringent measures to limit them. It is more interesting to go and sit in the cool veranda outside of the little Druse place of worship, and talk to the bright young man who is passing most of his time in studying the abstruse metaphysical system of his religion, and who is far more intelligent than the Syrian Catholic priest, who also comes and sits and smokes with us with the view of obtaining, which he has not yet succeeded in doing, some knowledge of our own religious belief. Now and then an episode occurs illustrating the conditions of native existence in these parts. One day I found the village excited at an outrage which a native mounted policeman had perpetrated. On learning that he had assaulted not merely one of the villagers, but my own servant, who had refused him access to our vault, I inflicted a little corporal punishment upon him, when his officer and the village notables interfered, and interceded in his behalf. I asked the latter why they were not glad to see a man punished who, like the rest of his class, was forever persecuting them; they said that when I was gone he would come back and take his revenge upon them. I finally made the man apologize to the Druse he had assaulted, and to my servant, all which he did very humbly, fearing that unless he did so I should insist upon his receiving a still severer punishment from the Caimacan, or local governor, at Haifa. The villagers were very grateful to see one of this arrogant and overbearing class humbled, but they say that unless one can stay and protect them their last state will be worse than their first.

THE DRUSES OF MOUNT CARMEL.

In Camp, Mount Carmel, Sept. 10.—It is not generally known that the Druse nation extends as far south as Carmel. The most southern village occupied by them in Syria is at Dalieh, about two miles from my present camp; their most northern home is at Aleppo. When, nine hundred years ago, Duruzi, the teacher from whom they take their name, came from Egypt to spread his new teaching, it was accepted by a tribe of people who lived in the neighbourhood of Aleppo, whither they had originally migrated from the province of Yemen, in Arabia. Adopting the new and mysterious faith, which, while it is a most interesting metaphysical and theological study, is too recondite to enter upon here, the body of the tribe migrated south, took possession of the valleys of the southern Lebanon, and made their headquarters at the foot of Mount Hermon. Spreading east from there, they crossed the tract known in ancient times as Iturea, and found a natural fortress in the volcanic region anciently called Trachonitis, the Biblical Argob, and in the mountains now called the Jebel Druse. Here they increased and multiplied, and in the early part of the seventeenth century produced that most remarkable warrior Fakr-Eddin, the only man of note of whom the Druses can boast. He conquered Beyrout and the southern coast towns, extending his sway as far south as Carmel, and as far east as Tiberias; and under his auspices the mountains of Galilee and Carmel became settled by Druses.

It is, therefore, not much more than two hundred and fifty years since the Druses first came to Carmel, and it is probable that when they did so they found the mountain wholly unoccupied, excepting by a few Christian hermits and devotees who lived in its caves—for the Carmelite monks had been driven away and their monastery destroyed three hundred years before; and, indeed, it was only at the time of the Druse occupation that the first attempt was made to restore it. For the two centuries during which the crusaders held the Holy Land prior to the end of the thirteenth century, Carmel was occupied by them, and the remains of their military posts are still to be found on many of the summits of the mountain; indeed, many of the old stones of which the village of Esfia is built, near which my camp is situated, bear their devices carved on them. Before the time of the crusaders there may have been Moslem villages on Carmel, but its glory departed when Palestine was conquered by the Saracens in the seventh century, and the last remains of Roman civilization, the traces of which still cover the mountain, were destroyed.

About the time of Christ, and for four or five centuries afterwards, it must have been in its full loveliness, its hillsides terraced with vineyards or clothed with magnificent forests, and its summits crowned with towns adorned with the grace and beauty of the architecture of the period. The discoveries I have made in proof of this I will postpone to another letter, as my intention now is to describe the present population by which the mountain is inhabited.

It is a curious fact that to this day there are no Moslems on Carmel proper. There are five or six Moslem villages at its base, on the various sides of the triangle which comprises the district, and they have lands running up into the mountain; but the actual population consists of two Druse villages, numbering together about eight hundred souls, and about fifty Christians, besides the twenty-five monks who inhabit the monastery. The mountain is nevertheless capable of containing a population of many thousands, as it evidently did in old times, and is a much larger district than is popularly supposed.

The eastern side, from the apex of the triangle, is thirteen miles in length, the western twelve, and the base nine, giving a total circumference to this highland region of thirty—four miles. The tract comprised in this area is beautifully diversified by wild gorges, grassy valleys, level or undulating plateaus covered with underwood, and rocky summits; and the scenery in places is as romantic as can well be imagined. The two Druse villages of Esfia and Dalieh are situated two miles apart, about three quarters of the way down the triangle from its apex (the projecting promontory on which the monastery is built), and occupy the most fertile part of the mountain.

When the Druses first settled here they founded no fewer than eight villages, but when, forty years ago, this country was conquered by Egypt and governed by Ibrahim Pacha, his rule was distasteful to the majority of Druses, and the inhabitants of six villages abandoned them, and migrated to the Jebel Druse. All these villages occupied the sites of ancient Roman towns, and were constructed of the ancient stones. In the course of my rambles I have visited them all. Of the two villages which remained, one, Dalieh, was occupied by some families which had migrated direct from Aleppo; the other, Esfia, is peopled by Druses from the Lebanon. There is a marked difference between the two, and the people of Dalieh are far superior to those of Esfia.

I went over there the other day, and spent the day and night as the guest of the sheik—or, I should rather say, of the sheiks, for there are two—one is the temporal and the other the spiritual head of the village—and I divided my attentions and my meals equally between them. They are very reluctant to talk about their religion, always turning the subject when any attempt is made to induce them to converse about it; but there is one question which they always ask, and that is whether there are any Druses in England. As it is an accepted fact among them that there are, any denial of it is considered a discreet reticence, and rather a proof than otherwise that one is somewhat of a Druse one's self. They also believe that the majority of Chinamen are, unconsciously to themselves, Druses; and they are firmly convinced that the world is drawing to a close, and that the appearance of Hakim, a divine incarnation, which was prophesied to take place nine hundred years after his last manifestation and translation, is now imminent, as the time is just about expiring.

The Druses are a sober, fairly honest, and industrious people, and have their own notions of morality, to which they rigidly adhere. They have only one wife, but they have great facilities of divorce. An amusing illustration of this came under my immediate notice while I was the sheik's guest. His son, a fine young man, had been my guide among some neighbouring ruins the day before. I had also made the acquaintance of the wife of the latter, a remarkably pretty woman, with a baby. Indeed, I was much struck with the beauty of the type of all the Dalieh women. Suddenly a tremendous uproar took place in the village. My host rushed out to restore order. While I looked down on the scene from an upper window, I saw his son, bareheaded, brandishing a huge stone in the air, and vehemently gesticulating, apparently in reply to a bevy of women who were screaming at him at the top of their voices. Indeed, all the women in the place seemed to have conspired to drive him to frenzy by their abuse. When the sheik appeared in the midst of them order was somewhat restored, for, to my surprise, he seemed to take part with the women, and dealt his son one or two sound blows. Then there was some palavering, and during the whole time I saw the wife of the enraged young man looking calmly on as a spectator. She had put her child in its cradle and was rocking it. Two or three old women were crying and still vociferating. Presently I saw a man come and lift the cradle with the baby, and the mother rose and followed him. They went into a neighbouring house, and were followed by the sheik and as many as could crowd in. Then ensued a long pause, until the sheik reappeared, with a document which he had been writing, in his hand, and the village population gathered around. At this time I could not see his son anywhere, but the wife was among the audience. When he had finished reading, the audience broke up and the sheik returned to me. When I asked what had been the matter, he replied, “Oh, foolish people quarrelling.” So I applied elsewhere for information, and was told that for some time past the sheik's son had been tired of his wife and in love with another woman, and had been seeking a cause of quarrel. He had apparently found it in some dispute he had just been having with his wife, and had uttered in his rage the formula of divorce, by which he dismissed her and sent her back to her family. Hence the feminine outbreak against him. The sheik had disapproved his son's conduct, as the wife was his own niece, and, therefore, her husband's first cousin, and he considered it a family disgrace; but, after what had happened, patching up the matter had become impossible, and he had nothing for it but, according to Druse law, to pronounce the divorce. I must say that the entire indifference manifested by the wife, when she followed her baby's cradle away from her husband's house, deprived her of the sympathy I should otherwise have felt.

From what I have been able to gather, the Druse women, if they are pretty, are a heartless lot. Another characteristic incident was a procession of Esfia Druses to the cave of Elijah, below the monastery, in fulfilment of a vow, when a child was dedicated to a religious life, and a goat was sacrificed to God, as in the times of old. After being sacrificed, it was nevertheless eaten, which seems somewhat to deprive the performance of its merit, as the share of the Deity was the bones. There was a great clanging of discordant instruments and loud singing as they came back, some of the men caracoling around on horseback, and others, with arms clasped, dancing in a measured step, followed by a group of dancing women, in dark-blue garments, with gaudy borders and fringes and sashes, and flowing white head-dresses bound with bright-coloured scarfs. They formed a most picturesque tableau, chanting their way to their home on this wild mountain hill-top.

One day a magnificent figure of a man, armed with sword and pistol, suddenly entered my tent. I asked him where he had come from. He said from the Jebel Druse, and, seeing a foreign tent, he had turned in to see who I was. So we exchanged confidences. He was, in fact, an outlaw. He had been fighting against the government, and was wandering from one Druse village to another, not daring to go back to his own, which was in the Lebanon. He said that at this moment the Druses of the Jebel Druse were in full revolt against the Turkish government; that no Druse dare show himself in Damascus, and no Turk dare show himself in the Jebel Druse. They had defied the Governor-General, who knew that it would be useless in their wild mountains to attempt to conquer them. He offered to take me to the Jebel Druse, if I would avoid all places where there were any Turks. He had a profound contempt for his coreligionists of Dalieh and Esfia. “I am ashamed of such Druses,” he said. “Why, I saw a Moslem insult one, the other day, and, instead of killing him, he walked away. Why don't they leave a place where they dare not punish insult, and come to the mountain?” I have rarely seen a finer specimen of humanity than this man was, and, with all the defiant recklessness and daring of his expression, there was the charm of entire frankness and good-nature combined with it.

Besides the two villages on Carmel, there are fourteen Druse villages, nearly all within sight of it, on the southern slopes of the mountains of Galilee. It is not improbable that, unable to support the military conscription and taxation which presses upon them, the inhabitants may, before long, abandon their present homes, and go to swell the numbers of their brethren in the Jebel Druse. The whole population of the Druse nation is about 120,000; they can put into the field 25,000 men of the best fighting material in Turkey; they are slowly migrating to the Jebel Druse, where about two thirds of the nation have already asserted their semi-independence.

EXPLORATION ON CARMEL.

Haifa, Sept. 24.—During the two months that I have been camped on the highest summit of Mount Carmel, I have visited no fewer than twenty ruins of ancient towns and villages. Of these I have discovered six which were heretofore unknown, the others having been found ten years ago by the officers of the Royal Engineers sent out to survey Palestine by the Society for Palestine Exploration.

Prior to that time, this historic locality was a _terra incognita_. The tourists who visited the mountain, like the pilgrims who journeyed thither for devotional reasons, satisfied themselves with a short stay at the convent, and even then did not understand that they were only on one mountain spur of a highland region thirty-five miles in circumference, where almost every hilltop was crowned with a ruin, and every gorge might open up new and unexpected beauties of scenery.

It is only after so exhaustive an examination as I have just accomplished that any idea can be formed of the extent of the population by which Carmel was once inhabited, of the high state of civilization which must have prevailed here, and of the extent to which its lovely hills and valleys were cultivated. These ruins bear a great resemblance to each other; and although none of them covers a very great extent of ground, they were built of most solid materials, and, to judge by some of the architectural remains, and the elaborate carvings and devices, they must have contained some handsome buildings.

The houses were built of blocks of drafted stone, usually four feet long by two and a half high, and two thick. The door-jambs and lintels, which in some instances are still in situ, were often seven or eight feet long by two feet six by two feet. In these were holes or sockets, in which the pivots worked. Some of the lintels over the doors were ornamented with devices; these were usually hexagons and circles, in the centre of which were ovals or other ornamental scrolls. Sometimes there was a bird or an animal, such as an eagle or a leopard, or seven-branched candlesticks, or raised bosses or crosses; here and there was a cornice with a florid carving, evidently of the Roman period, with fragments of columns or capitals. But some of these ruins have been inhabited by later inhabitants, who used the old stones for their modern constructions, and too often chipped off the carving. Indeed, they are the ready-made quarries of the country people of the present day, who come and carry off the stones to build their houses.

A notable and melancholy instance of this has occurred in the case of a place called Khurbet Semmaka. This was the most interesting ruin in Carmel, and was discovered ten years ago by the officers of the Palestine Exploration Survey. Here they found the portal of what once had been an ancient Jewish synagogue still standing, its door-jambs and lintels elaborately carved; part of the walls and fragments of the columns which formed an enclosing colonnade were in position, and formed the subject of much speculation, as it was the only specimen of Jewish architecture in this part of the country, and presented some features which were different from anything hitherto discovered; and it was therefore suggested that the building must have been built at a different period from any of those the remains of which still exist. Judge of my disappointment on visiting this spot to find that, with the exception of three feet of one door-jamb, all had disappeared; there was scarcely a stone left. The inhabitants of a Moslem village about two miles distant had within the last decade made a clean sweep of all these most interesting remains. Fortunately they still exist in the Palestine Society's Memoirs in the shape of most elaborate drawings and measurements, which were made by the Survey and have since been published.

Apart from the actual stones themselves and the carvings which are to be found upon them, the objects of interest which mainly characterize all these Carmel ruins are ancient olive-mills and wine-presses, often in a very perfect state of preservation, tombs and cisterns. First, in regard to the olive-mills. I found more than a dozen of these. On two occasions they were hewn out of the living rock. The lower stone, which was circular, had usually a diameter of eight feet, with a raised rim outside nine or ten inches high, and a raised socket in the centre, in which was a hole a foot square, where the upright was fitted to hold the lateral beam which worked the upper stone. This was usually five feet in diameter and eighteen inches thick, and had a hole pierced through the centre. Through this the long beam was passed, to which, as it extended far beyond the circumference of the lower stone, the horse was attached which worked the mill, the upper stone travelling on its broad edge around the lower stone, over the olives. From the lower stone a gutter was carved into the vat, also hewn out of the living rock, into which trickled the oil. I often found near these mills huge limestone rollers about three feet in diameter and seven feet long. On the sides of these were four vertical lines of sunk grooves, four or five grooves in each line. Taking 2.7 as the specific gravity of the stone, they must have weighed about two tons each. What their functions were, or whether they had anything to do with the olive-crushing process, I am at a loss to conjecture. The wine-presses were nothing more than huge vats, also hewn out of the living rock, sometimes above ground, in the shape of sarcophagi, sometimes pits eight or nine feet square and the same in depth.

The limestone hillsides in the neighbourhood of these ruins were almost invariably honeycombed with cave tombs, whose doorways were often rudely ornamented with devices, and in one instance I found an inscription in Greek characters so much defaced that I could not decipher it. They usually consisted of only one chamber, eight or ten feet square, but were sometimes larger, and contained either kokim or loculi under arcosolia, sometimes both. The kokim are tunnel-shaped excavations, usually seven feet long, two feet six wide, and the same in height—in other words, just large enough to contain a corpse. The loculus is an oblong tomb, with sides about two feet high, also large enough conveniently to contain a body. It is cut out of the living rock, as well as the arch which overspans it. Sometimes there is a large, arched recess opening out of the central chamber, containing several loculi. On more than one occasion I found a circular stone like a millstone in a groove in the doorway, which only required to be rolled a couple of feet to close the tomb completely, but the tombs are generally closed by an oblong stone slab, not unfrequently ornamented with devices. I also found several sarcophagi.

The cisterns are of two kinds, bell-mouthed and of demijohn shape, or open rock-hewn reservoirs or tanks. At one ruin I found an extensive system of these latter. There were no fewer than six, of which the largest was forty feet square, all close together, divided only by narrow ledges of the solid rock out of which they had been hewn. They were from fifteen to twenty feet to the soil at the bottom, now overgrown with shrubs, so that in reality they are probably much deeper. In some cases stone steps lead to the bottom, and on the sides were deep niches from which evidently sprang arches to form the roof, for there can be little doubt that the most of them were originally covered. From the great number and extent of these cisterns it is manifest that the inhabitants were, in some instances, entirely dependent upon them for their water supply.