HfewCs *4, Lcn^ ^ I - ' WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR. - o - I. CHRONICLES OF THE SCHONBERG-COTTA FAMILY. Crown 8vo. Price 5s. 11 . SKETCHES OF CHRISTIAN LIFE IN ENGLAND IN THE OLDEN TIME. Crown 8vo, cloth. Price 6s. III. THE DIARY OF MRS. KITTY TREVYLYAN. A Story of the Times of Whitefield and the Wesleys. Crown Svo, cloth. Price 6s. 6d. T. NELSON AND SONS, LONDON, EDINBURGH, AND NEW YORK. A/'jj «/s/S WANDERINGS OVER BIBLE LANDS AND SEAS. Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2018 with funding from Getty Research Institute https://archive.org/details/wanderingsoverbiOOchar JERUSALEM. (View taken from the south part of the City-Wall, and looking in north-West direction.) WANDERINGS OVER BIBLE LANDS AND SEAS. FORDS OF THE JORDAN. Page 93. - 0 -- T. NELSON AND SONS, LONDON, EDINBURGH, AND NEW YORK. WANDERINGS OVER BIBLE LANDS AND SEAS. By the A nthor of “CHRONICLES OF THE SCHONBERG-COTTA FAMILY &c. LONDON: T. NELSON AND SONS, PATERNOSTER ROW; EDINBURGH; AND NEW YORK. PHILADELPHIA: LIPPINCOTT AND CO. . ' ■ , . . II. III. IY. V. VI. VII. VIII. IX. X. XI. XII. XIII. XIV. XV. XVI. XVII. XVIII. XIX. XX. THE VOYAGE TO MALTA, MALTA, EGYPT, THE JOURNEY TO JERUSALEM, JERUSALEM, THE HILLS AROUND JERUSALEM, THE TEMPLE, THE DEAD SEA, THE JORDAN, AND JERICHO, ... THE MOUNT OF OLIVES, THE TWO VALLEYS—HINNOM AND JEHOSHAPIIAT, Solomon’s gardens, hebron, and bethleiiem, THE CHURCH OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE, AND THE LAST VIEW OF JERUSALEM, BETHEL, SHILOH, AND THE WELL AT SYCHAR, ... SYCHAR, SAMARIA, AND THE PLAIN OF JEZKEEL, SHUNEM, NAIN, AND NAZARETH, TABOR AND THE SEA OF GALILEE, GALILEE, TYRE, THE SHORES OF TYRE AND SIDON—THE LEBANON AND DAMASCUS, ... DAMASCUS, BAALBEC. AND THE COAST OF ASIA MINOR, Page 5) 15 23 49 57 63 73 85 101 113 121 14\ 157 179 199 217 243 265 271 287 WANDERINGS BIBLE LANDS AND SEAS. Cbc 0oiiage to UUalfa. Ax Sea, Sunday , May 4, 1856. (E are having the best possible weather— bracing, clear, and calm. We passed quite close to the woods and slopes of the Isle of Wight, and then to the Needles. The white point of the island looked like a piece chipped out of a china plate. We had not lost sight of the Devonshire coast when we came down for the night; it lay like a faint, faint haze in the distance. Seeing it seemed to bring me nearer to you all. Wednesday .—Yesterday we had a fair specimen of a Bay of Biscay gale. It rained all day, and every one was at various levels of wretchedness. The io THE VOYAGE TO MALTA. nearest approach I could make to the deck (and the cabins were very oppressive) was to have a camp stool placed at the top of the cabin stairs, and from that sheltered nook to look out on the grand waves, as the ship plunged into their hollows or bounded over them. The waves, at times, curved above the stern, so that standing upright there you might have stretched your hand up and touched them. There is something very majestic in the heavy swell and long sweep of these great Atlantic waves, heaving, evi¬ dently, up and down, not advancing in succession as the breakers on the shore, but restlessly tossing their ponderous masses to and fro; the same waves ever changing, the wind every now and then catching their tops and breaking them into crests of foam, or wildly tearing them and tossing them into the air in wreaths and mists of spray. The meaning of the story of the waves seems so entirely different here and on shore. Here it seems endless, aimless unrest with irresistible power ; there, it is progress, conflict; proud waves advancing with steady, resistless force, one beyond another; and, then, in the ebbing tide, the same waves, as magnificent and mighty, but reined in by an invisible hand stronger than they, dashing on as proudly, yet at every charge baffled and driven back a step further ; and then there are the solid traces of the ceaseless battle left in shells and drifted sea-weed, and ribbed sands and wave-scooped caverns. From the shore each individual wave seems to have a separate conscious life : we think of them as crested warriors; as war-horses curving their proud necks and tossing their white manes as they dash onward. THE VOYAGE TO MALTA. II In a ship, on the contrary, you become conscious of the mighty unity of the sea; you feel in the grasp of one gigantic power, and the waves on which you are thrown from depth to height are but the wild tossings of its giant limbs, and the heavy heavings of its restless heart. The saloon is full of Indian officers and cadets ; so I am endeavouring to write a scrap to you in our cabin, in the hope of having it posted on Friday at Gibraltar. We have had a lovely fresh, bright day, and have caught sight of the most southern land I have yet seen, the group of bare rocks called the Burlings, with a lighthouse on them. We passed them about four miles off. Four ladies have made their appearance. It is a strange life here, so much in public, in this little world isolated on the ocean ; but when one can stay on deck, as to-day, till half¬ past eight, in the fresh breeze, it is delightful; de¬ licious, wholesome idleness. At night ones feelings are different. One loses the proud sense of riding the waves, and feels only helplessly tossed about on them. It is blessed to remember then who rules them,— The ocean is a peaceful place To hearts at peace with Thee. Thursday, on deck , beyond Cape St. Vincent .— We saw the bare rocks and the white walls of the ruined convent of St. Vincent quite clearly; they re¬ minded me of the Western Cornish coast, as rugged and abrupt, with caverns hollowed out by the con¬ stant beat of the same ocean, and little sandy beaches here and there. Beyond, the next point is 12 THE VOYAGE TO MALTA, a quiet little harbour, sheltered from the Atlantic; and there we came on a number of little vessels at anchor. Behind, in the beautiful clear atmosphere, rose the faint wavy outline of the mountains. Since then the faint coast line of Algarva continues to bound the horizon. Friday evening .—It is difficult now to write at all except in the evening, we are all day coasting by shores of such interest and beauty. At four o'clock this morning we entered the Straits of Gibraltar ; by five we were on deck looking up to the Rock of Gibraltar, rising abruptly, but not precipitously, from the sea, covered ,with a short grass which a month or two later will be burned brown. On a ledge at the base of the hill stands the town. When we walked through it the streets seemed very still, every one avoiding the sunshine as much as possible, and sitting or listlessly leaning in door-ways under projecting balconies, and m every available spot of shade. The roofs were low and tiled. The costumes were very varied; the long black robe of the Barbary Jew; the red fez and short dark-blue dress of the Egyptian ; the white turban and white bornous of the Barbary Moor ; the monk in his woollen cloak, all apparently quite at home. Then the beauty of that broad bay, bounded apparently on one side by Africa, and on the other by Europe ! It was full of ships, many of them transports returning from the Crimea. We went through the great excavated fortifications, called the Galleries. The embrasures for the cannon make beautiful frames for the various pictures of the bay. On our way back we met a 7 HE VOYAGE TO MALTA. 13 Spaniard wlio, after directing us in the right road, politely offered us to come to his house and rest. We could not refuse, and entered his garden-gate, climbing to the house by a flight of stone steps, with peaches, figs, and vines overhanging us on each side, and the prickly pear springing out of the crevices of the terrace. After we had rested a little while in the cool, dark rooms, with their broad verandahs shaded by Venetians, the daughter of the house took us into the garden, and, before we left, gave us two beautiful bouquets of geraniums, lilies, roses, and heliotropes. It was a fragrant little island of Southern life in the midst of our se # a voyage. The sunset was glorious this evening, reflected in the distance, from the snowy peaks of the Sierra Nevada. Saturday .—We have been coasting by Africa to¬ day, by Algeria, not seeing any places of interest, but now and then spying a sand}^ beach at the foot of the cliffs, or a Moorish castle on a crag. Monday, off Cape Bon .—We have seen porpoises, gulls, and several times, to my great delight, some exquisite little paper nautiluses floating on the blue waves a few feet below me; as I lay on the sofa in our cabin, they looked like bubbles, or little crystal globes glittering with all the colours of the rainbow. The African coast, by which we coasted all Sunday, is very varied in outline, a succession of conical hills rising one out of another, not a village or a wood to be seen. * * * * * St. Paul’s voyages have been much in our minds. It is strange to coast by these African 14 THE VOYAGE TO MALTA . shores. The best telescope in the world would, show us now no traces of the African churches which once bordered the whole north of that dark continent. Augustine’s voice has no echo at Hippo now, and the cities where he preached are gone, like Chorazin and Bethsaida, Thyatira and Laodicea. The sands of the desert of Mohammedanism have swept over that green strip of Christendom. Was it, as some one has suggested, because this African Church was content to be a narrow strip of light outside the darkness instead of seeking to penetrate it ? The sunsets have been glorious ; the radiance of “pure gold, as it,were transparent glass,” rubies, and topazes ; clouds brilliant as jewels with the sun shin¬ ing through them, melting into soft tints like delicate flower-petals as the sun went down and shone back on them. Bird of Paradise plumes, golden boats floating in opal seas, with the purple outline of the African hills, and the blue Mediterranean heaving below. It is a great delight to be allowed to see such things, and to be on the waters around which all the great dramas of the world’s history have been acted. II. gU 11». Off Malta, Thursday , May 15, 1856. IBgLT seven on Tuesday morning we went on shore and climbed the steep streets of Val- etta. Immediately after breakfast in the Imperial Hotel we took a carriage with a pair of small Maltese horses, and drove to Citta Yecchia in the interior. Malta is the most dazzling, barren place you can conceive. Imagine Dartmoor without one stream, without gorse or heather, with the short grass burnt up, and dazzling, light brown earth showing through ; every hundred yards walls of loose stones of the same dazzling tint cross¬ ing each other. Occasionally you pass a field of barley of a dry, dull green, with square stone buildings in the middle of the fields covering wells. Twice we crossed rocky hollows which seemed like water-courses, and in these some dusty, thirsty-look¬ ing trees and shrubs were growing; but not a drop of water trickled there in that May sunshine. Every now and then we came to a high ground, and had a wide view over an expanse of intense blue sea, stretching from bay to bay, the low brown points of land running some miles out into the blue In the stone i6 MALTA. walls there are no gates, only gaps filled up roughly with loose stones. Everywhere, in houses, soil, hedges, roads ; through the thin, dry vegetation glares the same dazzling rock, the colour of Maltese vases. The flat roofs of the houses made them at a distance look like ruins, to our unaccustomed English eyes. * # » % * On Wednesday morning we drove to St. Paul’s Bay, having satisfied ourselves from Mr. Smith’s book that it really was the scene of St. Paul’s shipwreck. Therefore we could quietly listen to the stories of our guides about the chapel built on the very spot where the barbarians lighted the fire, and St. Paul shook off the viper. It is at least refreshing to have traditions so near the truth as these, instead of legends of eleven thousand virgins and mediaeval nuns and monks. It does thrill one’s heart to hear even the name of that noble apostle honoured. It is intensely interesting thus to come within the range of Bible history and geography with our bodily eyes,—to see the scenes apostles saw, to have all the sights and sounds, the very stars, and seas, and shores, which made their visible heavens and earth audibly and visibly around us. Superstition fondly treasures the dead relics of the past,—some poor crumbling bone of the body God watches over, and will raise incorruptible, some spot of dust on which holy feet have trod. Faith revivifies the past by a community of life with those who lived in it; “ they are not dead, but living, for all live unto him.” To our faith Hud¬ son’s Bay, of which apostles never heard, is as holy as the Sea of Galilee; and the streets of London, MALTA. 17 which Christians tread, as sacred as the streets of Jerusalem, “ where our Lord was crucified/’—because the tread of those blessed feet has consecrated the whole earth, if any part of it, and the majesty of that living presence fills the whole universe. The least blade of grass which pierces the clods to-day with its green tapering spear is sacred with the touch of his hand; the waves of the Mediterranean are con¬ secrated because his present power curves and crisps them to-day, not because St. Paul was shipwrecked by them eighteen hundred years ago. But our reli¬ gion is a religion of facts as well as of truths ,—a his¬ tory of things which have been done, as well as a re¬ velation of unseen realities which are eternal; and it is this which gives the undying interest to Eastern travel. St. Paul was a man who suffered and rejoiced, as well as a prophet of immortal truth,—a man who, centuries since, was shipwrecked among the rocks at the entrance of this bay now called by his name, was drifted on a broken plank through those waves, then dashing wildly in the storm, to this low, sandy, shelv¬ ing beach at the head of the bay, and so escaped safe to this shore ; and it does help our imagination, and may strengthen our faith, to stand here and see and feel how his natural world—his body with its dangers and wants—was the very same as ours, just as his heart, and the truths which warmed and fed it, were the same. The bay seems nearly to close at the entrance; it is sheltered by two rocky headlands which look like islands, but are joined by a low ridge to the shore. The shores are in some places precipitous, in others i8 MALTA. sloping, in all bare and rocky, except at the head of the bay, which is a sandy beach or “ shore.” The rocky almost isolated headland at the entrance breaks the currents and tides, and must cause eddies where the “ two seas ”—the divided and recoiling waves— rush round and “ meet ” again. There, near that headland, the sailors had run the ship aground, and the waves were still dashing against the wreck and breaking it in pieces, while the shipwrecked men, tossed one by one on the beach, stood shivering on the wet sands, the rain pouring on them, and no shelter in sight. They must have begun to know St. Paul by this time : he had encouraged them to take their last meal, before the Egyptian wheat, which made their cargo, was thrown into the sea. They knew that he had a God in whom he trusted, and who spoke to him, and had told him the truth. They had seen him give thanks before any hope of safety appeared. The cen¬ turion had learned to value him, and preferred the risk of losing all the other prisoners to the risk of not saving Paul. And now, of all the soldiers and sailors, men inured to hardships, it was Paul—“ Paul the aged ’’—who gathered the bundle of sticks among those low bushes in the valley, and laid them on the lire. Fancy St. Paul stirring busily about in the rain gathering firewood for that shivering, desponding crew. In its way, I would as soon have seen that as have heard him preach on the Areopagus. The faith which had made him sublimely courageous in the great peril, made him cheerful and helpful in little difficulties; and that faith makes him grander in a MALTA 19 Christian’s eyes than the miracle which so soon after¬ wards made him seem a god to those poor kindly islanders. They had certainly never seen any one so like God before, as he went in and out among them healing rich and poor. Many races in their migration westward have paused on Malta since then,—Roman colonists, Arabs, and Crusading knights; but the name of the ship¬ wrecked Jewish prisoner is still honoured there. Can we not feel how they must have clung to the stranger who brought such blessings with him, free alike to the Roman colonists and the barbarous people ? What the religion of the islanders was we know very imperfectly. They certainly believed in an avenging power which pursued crime; and surely in his three months’ sojourn the apostle taught them of the redeeming love which forgives sin, and of the atoning sacrifice which takes it away. They knew that sin brings misery; surely he did not fail to tell them of Him whose precious blood and redeeming death blots out sin. They thought of crime as an indelible stain only to be out- stained by a deeper stain ot vengeance ; surely he told them of the precious blood which can wash out that indelible stain, and make the crimson white as snow. One would like to know how the apostle, who met the Stoics and Epicureans on their own ground, and Pharisees on theirs, spoke to these barbarians. What a model for missionaries to the South Seas and all uncivilized tribes ! But the Bible does not give us model sermons ; it gives us living truths, to live first in our hearts, and thence be sown in those of others. 20 MALTA. No variety of models could suit our infinite variety of circumstances, but life adapts itself to all. And then, after those three months of honours and courteous hospitality, with the whole crew laden with neces¬ saries (no doubt for his sake), the apostle patiently left in another Alexandrian ship, again a prisoner, calmly giving himself up to imprisonment and martyr¬ dom, or rather, as we know from his own words, joyfully going forth to the crown of glory, and to the Lord who gives it. After this the knights of Malta seem very modern and. secular; but their noble struggle with the Turks is the next event of world-wide interest in the his¬ tory of Malta. In the afternoon, after seeing St. Paul’s Bay, we took a boat and rowed across the Grand Harbour to the old city, which from the brave and victorious defence the knights made of it, was called afterwards Yittoriosa. You remember Pres¬ cott’s narrative of the siege in his Philip the Second. After the Turks were finally driven off, the Grand Master, La Yalette, the hero of the siege, built Yaletta on the opposite side of the harbour to that on which the oid city stood, on the tongue of land between the Quarantine Harbour where our ship lay, and the Grand Harbour. The old Fort of St. Elmo, so gallantly de¬ fended by its little isolated garrison of knights, stood on the point of this tongue of land (then unpeopled, now the city of Yaletta), and it was from that point that the messenger swam across the Grand Harbour, by the Turkish fleet, to the great Fort of St. Angelo, close to Yittoriosa. We went over the Fort of St. Angelo, saw the old chapel of the knights (now an MALTA. 21 armoury), and tlie prison where the Turkish prisoners were kept. We looked from the battlements where the knights watched so often vainly for succour. The commandant kindly showed us his garden (once that of the knights), with almond and pepper- trees, and an Oriental looking fountain. The old hall of the knights, with its massive walls, and deep windows, is now transformed into a pretty English drawing-room, with Turkey carpets and Persian rugs thrown over the stone floors, carved flower-tables of Maltese stone, and books ; a charming mixture of English comfort and Oriental picturesqueness. St. John’s Cathedral at Yaletta has magnificent mosaics. The whole pavement is a mosaic of red marbles, and the great span of the roof of the prin¬ cipal aisle, with its frescoes, was very striking. The narrow side aisles are also richly ornamented ; the narrowness of these aisles, the depth of the walls, and the massiveness of the pillars, give them the effect of being excavated rather than built. The monuments of the Grand Masters are there, but the church is not old. There are one or two crosses, and a Byzantine picture with the drapery of the figures gilded and jewelled (like the pictures in Greek churches) said to have been brought from Rhodes by the knights when driven thence. But the Maltese sacristans are not clear about dates ; inasmuch as they informed us that two of the churches were two thousand years old. * % * * * Now we are again at sea,—Malta vanishing into a faint haze in the distance. It is strange to look 22 MALTA. at it and think of the two points in its history which stand out illuminated from the obscuritv or common «/ place of the rest. The first gives us a brief glimpse of it in the light which the Bible throws around the infancy of the Church, and shows us its inhabitants, simple, cour¬ teous, kindly, suffering from various diseases, and in terror of avenging superhuman powers; and the ship¬ wrecked apostle, out of weakness made strong, bringing oealing and blessing with him because he had com¬ munion with superhuman redeeming love. The next salient point in Maltese history, fifteen centuries after, shows us the ascetic misrepresentation of the Christianity St. Paul preached run to seed in the military monastic order of the Hospitallers ; and yet, even in such decay, nobler than anything else the world had to offer, and strong enough by endu¬ rance and daring valour to keep at bay the whole Mohammedan power. Cairo, Thursday, May 22. [GYPT is not, as the old woman thought, a place somewhere between the earth and sky. We are treading its soil, and breath¬ ing its air, with no Lethe between us and you. God’s parables are written on actual places, and in real histories. This country is so strange and picturesque, so con¬ stantly startling one with all manner of sights and sounds, forms, costumes, scenes, incidents strange to see, all the more because so familiar to one’s mind. that I can scarcely do anything but look and sketch. The waiters at dinner in long blue cotton robes, or white ones, like surplices, with red fezes or white turbans ; the form and material of the earthen water bottles, like those of ancient Egypt, the varieties of Oriental features in the faces ; all interest you by their novelty; whilst everything becomes picturesque in this brilliant sunshine and crystal atmosphere. At two o’clock in the afternoon we started with the familiar English railway whistle for Cairo. We were detained for five hours at the station half-way, 24 EGYPT. where we had to cross the Nile in a ferry boat. There we dined and chatted till the Arabs had brought up the eleven waggons, full of Indian specie, from the Nile. It was well worth waiting to see the scene. Below the platform on which the carriages were shunted aside, between it and the Nile, was a Bedouin encampment, tents which looked like dirty blankets stretched on poles, and Arab women huddled up in their robes and veils, seated on the ground, with children dressed like miniature men, playing round them. As it grew dark the Bedouin and Fellahin (the native peasants) began rushing down to the river side with torches, scattering sparks in all directions. Then commenced the drawing the wag¬ gons up the inclined railway. Oxen were harnessed to them, some of the Arabs pushed, the rest yelled and shouted behind and before the waggons. The Egyptian officials flogged the peasants, and the peasants flogged the oxen, and now and then, when they came to a peculiarly steep place, they shouted in a monotonous chorus what sounded like Allah, Allah, responding in choirs. In a pause of the din, we heard a wail from the Arab encampment, mingled with loud sobs. We were told it was a woman be¬ wailing her dead. Imagine this scene, as the darkness deepened and the muddy banks, with the Arab tents, the palm- trees, and fields on the opposite side, melted into two masses of light and darkness, the river shining between the low dark shores, and the bright sky above. All this we watched from a railway carriage with morocco linings, ventilators, and lamps, as on EGYPT. 25 the Great Western Kail way; and marvelled at the quaint contrast. The scenery from Alexandria to Cairo is not in¬ teresting, at least at this season, fields burned up, rice grounds, cotton cut down (only the stalks being left, at distances of a few feet from each other) ; occasionally, indeed, we had glimpses of palms and of a drove of camels. We arrived at Cairo very tired, at midnight, and so ended our first day in Egypt. The railway rather spoiled the associations, but I can never forget the drive from the quay to the Great Square at Alexandria. The first sight of all the varied costumes of an Oriental town, costumes, many of them probably dating from Abraham or Ishmael, or the earliest Egyptian dynasty, produces an impression unlike anything else. There were the women of the better classes in their veils, strapped across the forehead with a silver, brass, or jewelled clasp, to the long strip of black or white which de¬ scends from the eyes and covers the face ; the camels stretching out their necks with that curious submis¬ sive-looking bend; the gaily caparisoned donkeys, with richly dressed men riding them, apparently deeming themselves in a dignified position; the groups of pilgrims from Barbary to Mecca, standing and sitting around the door of the French Consulate in their dirty bornouses, which they have vowed not to wash or change till they return, a period, perhaps, of two years. Those Eastern cities carry you into the Arabian Nights. The country, on the other hand, recalls you to the Bible. On Tuesday we engaged our dragoman, Gabriel, a 26 EGYPT. Protestant Copt, brought up, he informed us, in Mrs. Lieder’s school. He is our servant for the time being, waiting on us at meals; and very obliging and grand he is in his red and yellow fez or turban, his shawl girdle with silk fringes, his embroidered blue jacket, with loose sleeves, showing the full white under-sleeves, his wide white or blue trousers, his white stockings and dandyish shoes, with his dark Coptic face, like those on the Egyptian tombs, and his brilliant black eyes. Very superior he is to the gentlemen in blue and white cotton night-dresses and night-caps, who sleep on the divans which are our seats at dinner, and perform housemaid’s and parlour¬ maid’s duties for the hotel. We took a carriage drive first to the citadel, whence there is a fine view of that green valley of the Nile, which is Egypt, with the desert sands and hills on each side of it. The Pyramids looked like distant hills. I suppose the very enormity of their size prevents one’s realizing it. Unconsciously one compares them with mountains, and other natural features of the landscape. We went next to the Mosque of Mahomet Ali, had our shoes taken off (the first time this Oriental mark of reverence had been required of us), and then glided noiselessly about on the marble floors. The pleasantest feature in these mosques is the large stone- roofed fountain, where the worshippers wash their hands and faces. It is Ramadan, the great Mohammedan fast, and numbers of Mussulmans were going through their pro¬ strations in each mosque we visited, whilst many EGYPT. 27 more were stretched out asleep in the shade. They are glad to forget the fast in sleep, until the sunset gun gives them permission to seek the happier obli¬ vion of the pipe. How deeply this idea of self-denial for the sake of self-denial is ingrained in most false religions! In Christianity only the true root is reached, and self-sacrifice is honoured but as the fruit of love. “ Who loved me and gave himself for me," is the key-note of Christian self-denial. The mosque of Sultan Hassan is the most inter¬ esting we saw ; the concave, shell-like Moorish carv¬ ing of the roof and porch, and the ornamental Arabic inscriptions, are really beautiful. But all is ruinous ; birds building nests in the decayed roof of the foun¬ tain, the richly-carved wooden lattices and fretwork broken, and the delicate yet gorgeous painting and gilding worn off. © © Mohammedanism also had its golden age of art, contemporary with that of Gothic architecture, but its inspiration seems to have been rather from the genius of a race than the enthusiasm of a religion. Moslem art is not Mohammedan, but Moorish, and with the Moors and their caliphates it died away. Mohammedanism proclaimed a truth which gave it a temporary force ; it had no life to renew the impulse when its first force grew feeble. The mosques at Cairo are strangely typical of the religion. Con¬ trasted with the dark, encumbered Greek and Coptic churches, with their narrow divisions between plergy and laity and their wretched ornaments, .there is something very grand and impressive about the great spaces of the mosques. You feel they are built in 28 EGYPT honour of the Unseen and Eternal, and that the wor¬ ship offered there at least recognises an invisible power. Yet the name of Allah is scarcely more than a personification of destiny; and there is a melancholy appropriateness in the worship of destiny amidst ruined temples. What, indeed, is ruin but the im¬ press of the iron hand of their deity ? It is said that the Moslems think it sacrilege to repair what the hand of fate has stamped with decay. Therefore, the beautiful old Moorish mosques, costly in materials, gorgeous in colouring, and delicate in workmanship, are left to decay, whilst, beside them, rises the taste¬ less modern building, with its common materials, tinsel ornament, and coarse workmanship. The tragedy and the tinsel of modern Oriental life came before us in close and impressive contrast as we went from the Court of the Mamalukes to the Pasha’s palace. In that small court the remains of a dynasty were massacred in cold blood, one only escaping by desperately leaping his horse from a perilous height through a breach in the wall. The Pasha’s palace is scarcely worth describing except as a t}^pe of modern Oriental civilization, and as such it is significant in¬ deed. Instead of the cool, carved, Oriental lattices, bad glass in rattling, badly-fitted window frames; an old painted wooden wardrobe in the Pasha’s dressing-room; in the great council hall, magnificent damask cover¬ ing the divans, and a poor oil-cloth the floor; every¬ where bad French taste decorating Oriental dirt and discomfort; gaudy second-rate European furniture, with no wife to choose it, and no housemaids to keep it in order. Everywhere old things passing away, EGYPT 29 and the new foreign patches vainly seeking to con¬ ceal the decay. Ludicrous as the contrast often is, there is really more of the pathetic in these vain efforts to copy a civilization of which the life and spring are lacking. In the Bazaars it is quite different. There you have the old unchanging Oriental life, fresh as from the Arabian Nights. Narrow-roofed streets, with stalls on each side as deep as a large bay window, where the merchants sit on Persian carpets, coolly watching the passers-by, as if they had nothing to do but to criticize them. The characteristic pipe is ab- * sent now because of the Ramadan, and some grey bearded men sat gravely chanting the Koran, pausing to gaze at us if we stopped, and then continuing their monotonous intoning; some, they told us, were tell¬ ing the names of Allah on rosaries of beads. The scene is brilliant and confusing beyond description ; donkeys pass with those shapeless masses of black or white on them, which you know to be veiled women; occasionally a richly dressed turbaned Turk glares on you from a donkey’s back with that air of dignity which strikes you as so strange in such a position; Bedouins look down on the world perched on their camels, apparently as impassive as their deserts; strings of asses press on, regardless of consequences, laden with dried palm-leaves to be made into ropes, or with kid-skins full of water ; a cavalry soldier in magnificent accoutrements, clashes and flashes by. There are black Nubians dressed in white, and Jews in red and yellow robes, and Fellah women in blue dresses, carrying water jars on their heads, and Copts 30 EGYPT. or dandyish Greeks in full trousers, embroidered jackets and fezes, and all these varieties of humanity jostling each other in a lane scarcely six feet wide, bargaining, swearing, crying wares, everybody shout¬ ing to everybody else to get out of the way, which nobody does; the shopkeepers, meanwhile, coolly squatting on their sheltered recesses, as if the whole busy, noisy, brilliant scene were a drama got up for their entertainment. So much for the clothing and furniture of modern Oriental life as it first strikes an European in the old city of the caliphs. Of the dark depths of hopeless¬ ness and corruption which lie beneath, who can ven¬ ture to speak, in a land sunk in the shadow of Mohammedanism, and of Mohammedanism which is itself dead ! On Wednesday, May 21 st, we started for the great Pyramids of Ghizeh, on donkeys attended by two lively donkey-boys. The road to the Pyramids, sandy and dry, led between stubbly fields, and was bordered by ditches, overgrown with tall reeds and flags; so tall as to throw quite a shadow across the road, yet so slender that the lightest wind might shake, so as to “ bruise” them, and it must indeed be a gentle touch which would not break one so “ bruised.” Every now and then we passed through large groves, or rather forests of palms ; their beautiful queenly plumes waving high above us in the breeze which did not descend to us, and their symmetrical giant stems regularly knotted like the sculpture of a Moorish roof. For miles after we first caught EGYPT. 31 sight of the Pyramids, we rode directly towards them, keeping them full in view along all that straight road across the level land, watching them gradually enlarge until they filled the field of vision ; and so, slowly, we grew to feel their size. There are four Pyramids at Ghizeh, the two great ones, called Belzoni’s and Cheops, after the modern western traveller, who first re-opened one, and the ancient Egyptian king over whose remains the other closed,—and two smaller ones. Just as we reached the sand-hills on which they stand (the rocks beneath which are honey-combed with ancient Egyptian tombs), we encountered the Bedouins who encamp there, against whose exactions every one is warned. We engaged four half-clothed swarthy savages at once as guides; but this did not secure us from the rest, as the whole band kept buzzing about us, each persisting he was one of the four we had chosen. At length, however, in spite of the clamour, the candles were lighted, and we set off to explore the dark recesses within the great Pyramid, four brawny pairs of arms seizing ours. They dragged and lifted us over the great blocks which obstruct the dark narrow slippery stone passage, shouting, “ Allah, Allah, Meshallah,” in a monotonous chant. This passage is so lofty that the faint light of our candles could not reach the roof. When we were landed in the great chamber, called the king’s chamber, where the empty sarcophagus is, they burst into a simultaneous yell of “ hurrah!” These wild Arabs shouting and laughing, with their white dresses, black shaggy hair, and gleaming 32 EGYPT. eyes, flashing about the candles so as to throw faint rays of light on point after point of the granite walls and roof, leaving impenetrable depths of dark¬ ness around and above, was a picture not to forget. Sometimes they amuse themselves with putting out the candles, and refusing to return without further backsheesh; but the names of Mr. and Mrs. Lieder, the missionaries, had some weight with them, and they behaved not much worse than guides at- Kill- arney or anywhere else. The race of guides to show-places, and of donkey-boys, has strange points of resemblance all over the world. They are the Bedouins of every land. Our next achievement was to ascend the Pyramid, and this also the Arabs accomplished for us; we were in no respect free agents. They lifted me so completely from one great block of stone to another, holding me by each arm, that I did not feel the fatigue until I reached the narrow platform at the top, and there I fainted. Fortunately an Arab boy had brought some water up in an earthen pitcher, and by the help of this, and one of them holding his bornoos over us as an umbrella, they soon recovered me. From the summit we looked out over the sand- wastes over the tombs, partly unburied, amongst them, and over the great sphinx, across the green valley of the Nile with its palm forests, and across white Cairo, with its pearly minarets, to the sand- wastes on the other side of Egypt, and the Mokattam hills which bound the eastern horizon; the hills through a pass of which Israel went forth to their miraculous crossing of the Bed Sea. The whole EGYPT. 33 Bible-land of Egypt lay spread before us—Goshen, On, the buried priestly city where Moses studied; the fields where the Hebrews toiled; the river where the babe lay among the bulrushes; that strange familiar land of the great river, between the glowing sands of the Arabian desert, and the Libyan desert on the edge of which we stood. The descent was accomplished much in the same way as the ascent, and then we sat down to lunch on sherry and cold chicken, in the shade of one of the ancient tombs. Then commenced the strangest scene, the Bedouin pleading for backsheesh, seating themselves in a semicircle on the sand, around the door of the tomb, wrapped in their brown and white dresses; the old Sheikh Mahommed, distinguished by a red tasselled fez, leaning in dignified silence against the entrance, letting the younger men fight it out, only occasionally authoritatively stretching out his skinny muscular brown arm, when the tumult became too violent, and hushing it. The great contest lay between the Arabs and our dragoman Gabriel, who stood for the most part per¬ fectly still in the centre of the clamorous group, with folded arms,looking grandly down on the storm. “The gentleman, very good gentleman, the dragoman hum¬ bug, cheat English and Bedouin/' then a torrent of Arabic. We had no resource but to leave it to Gabriel, and understand nothing. Their chief plea was that it was Ramadan, and they needed more men than usual to do the work, and, therefore, more backsheesh, because they were weak with fasting. I sketched the group, and by degrees the storm wore