CHAPTER I THE COLOUR OF THE LAND

Every land has a scheme of colour of its own, and while form and outline are the first, they are not the most permanent nor the deepest impressions which a region makes upon its travellers. It is the colour of the land which slowly and almost unconsciously sinks in upon the beholder day by day. We observe the outlines of a scene; we remember its colouring.

This is especially true of Palestine. Nothing about it is more distinctive than its colour-scheme; and nothing is perhaps less familiar to those who have not actually seen it. Syria may be treated as if it were Italy, or even Egypt—in hard intense colouring; or it may be treated as if it were England, in strong tones but with a certain homely softening of edge. Neither of these modes is true to Syria. Its edge-lines are sharp, but they are traced in such faint shades as to produce an effect very difficult either to reproduce or to describe, and yet impossible to forget.

The colours are manifold, and they vary considerably with the seasons of the year. Yet the bare hill-sides{8} (which form the greater masses of colour in most landscapes), the desert, and the distant mountain ranges, are ever the same. Most travellers make their first acquaintance with Palestine in Judea, entering it from Jaffa. When the plains are behind you, and you are in among the valleys up which the road climbs to Jerusalem, you at once recognise the fact that a new and surprising world of colour has been entered. In the valley-bottom there may be but a dry watercourse, or perhaps a rusty strip of cultivated land; but above you there is sure to be the outcrop of white and grey limestone. In some places it appears in characterless and irregular blotches whose grotesque intrusion seems to confuse and caricature the mountain side. This is, however, only occasional, and the usual and characteristic appearance is that of long and flowing lines of striation which generally follow pretty closely the curve of the sky-line. The colours of these strata are many. You have rich brown bands, dark red, purple, yellow, and black ones; but these are toned down by the dominant grey of the broader bands, and the general effect is an indistinct grey with a bluish tinge, to which the coloured bands give a curiously artificial and decorative appearance. As a work of Art Judea is most interesting; as part of Nature it is almost incredible.

In the northern district, near Bethel, everything yields to stone, and the brighter colours disappear. The mountain slopes shew great naked ribs and bars—the gigantic stairs of Jacob’s dream. On the heights your horse slips and picks his way over long stretches of{9}

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THE MOUNT OF TEMPTATION, FROM JERICHO.

The Mount of Temptation is one of the spurs of the mountains which overlook the deep valley of the Jordan on its western side. The central peak is the traditional site of the Temptation of Christ.

smooth white rock; in the valleys the soil is buried under innumerable boulders and fragments of broken rock.

The whole land is stony, but Judea shews this at its worst. It is an immense stone wedge thrust into Palestine from east to west. South of it lie the fertile valleys of Hebron, with their wealth of orchard and plantation. North of it open the “fat valleys” of Samaria, winding among rounded hills planted to the top with olives, or terraced for vines. Over these, here and there, a red cliff may hang, or the irrigation ditches may furrow and interline a vale of dove-coloured clay. But while the green of Judea is for the most part but the thinnest veil of sombre olive-green, a mere setting for the rocks, Samaria is a really green land, variegated by stone.

In the north of Samaria the land sinks gradually upon the Plain of Esdraelon. As we saw it first it was covered by a yellow mist through which nothing could be seen distinctly. But afterwards, viewed in its whole expanse from the top of Tabor in clear sunlight, the great battlefield of the Eastern world appeared in characteristic garb—“red in its apparel,” with the very colour of the blood which has so often drenched it.

Galilee repeats the limestone outcrop of Judea, but in far gentler fashion, the undergrowth and trees softening almost every landscape, and the mountains leading the eye along bold sky-lines to rest on that form of beauty and of light which masters and watches over the whole land—the white Hermon. Hermon is always{10} white. But sometimes when clouds are forming rapidly around its summit, it is a wonder of brightness. On no other mountain, surely, was it that “a bright cloud overshadowed” Jesus and his three friends. Even now, on many a summer day, Hermon is lost in a changing glory of frosted silver, when the sun strikes upon its cloudwork, and the long trails of snow in the corries stream towards the plain below.

The limestone runs on into Ph?nicia, and seems to grow whiter there. Nothing could be finer than the valleys east of Tyre at harvest time, when the fields of ripe grain wave below cliffs white as marble, and the whole scene, with its foreground of brilliantly robed reapers, is a study in white and gold. But in the higher valleys of Ph?nicia the rock breaks through a rich red soil, which in parts is gemmed with the curious and beautiful “Adonis stones”—little egg-shaped bits of sandstone, dyed to the heart of them with deep crimson, as if they had been steeped in newly shed blood. Little wonder if the women of old days “wept for Tammuz” at the sight of them.

The thing most characteristic of Syrian colour is its faintness and delicacy. Pierre Loti, who in this matter is a witness worthy of all regard, is constantly ending the colour adjectives in his Syrian books with -atre—“yellowish,” “bluish,” “greenish,” etc. The general impression is of dim and faded tints, put on, as it were, in thin washes. In the stoniest regions there seems to be no colour at all, as if the sun had bleached them. The curious colouring of the Judean valleys, which has{11} been described, is never aggressive, and it takes some carefulness of observation to see anything in them more than a blue green in the sparsely-planted olive-groves fading into faint greenish grey above. The valleys of ripe sesame and vetch are washed into the picture in pale yellow or yellow ochre. Where tilled earth appears it is generally a variegated expanse of light brown, or pink, or terra-cotta. The eastern slopes of Hermon, below the snow, shew vertical stripes like those of the haircloth and jute garments of the peasants, washed out with rain and sun; or they are spread upon the roots of the mountain like some vast Indian shawl cunningly and minutely interwoven with red and green threads, but worn almost threadbare. As you approach a village in strong sunlight, you see it as a dark brown mass shaded angularly with black; but it seems to float above a mist of the airiest purple sheen, where the thinly-planted iris-flowers stand among the graves before the walls. The Sea of Galilee, as we saw it, was light blue; the Dead Sea was light green, with a haze of evaporation rendering it even fainter in the distance.

If this be true of the near, it is doubly so of the distant, landscape. In a country so mountainous and so sheer-cleft as Palestine, distant views are seen for the most part as vistas, the “land that is very far off” revealing itself at the end of some V-shaped gorge or towering over some intermediate mountain range. Of course distant views are faint in all lands, but in Palestine the clear air keeps them distinct with clean-cut edge, however faint they are. Thus there is perhaps{12} nothing more delicate and spirituel in the world than those faint dreamlike mountains in the extreme distance of Syrian vistas—the hills east of Jordan grey, with a mere suspicion of blue in them, or the lilac and heliotrope mountains of the desert which form the magic background of Damascus looking eastward.

Reference has been made to the irises (the “lilies of the field”) near villages. These are but typical of the general sheen of that carpet of wild flowers which every spring-time spreads over the land. They are of every colour. There are scarlet poppies and crimson anemones, blue dwarf cornflowers, yellow marigolds, white narcissus (said to be the Rose of Sharon); but here they seldom grow in patches of strong hue. Each flower blooms apart, and the sheen of them is delicate and suggestive rather than gorgeous. They seem to share the reticence and shyness of the land, and tinge rather than paint it. Even the animal life conforms to this dainty rule; lizards are everywhere, but their colouring is that of their environment, now stone-grey, now wine-red, now straw-coloured. Chameleons are anything you please—green in growing corn, black among basalt rocks. Tortoises are blue at the sulphur springs, brown or slate in the muddy banks of streams.

This faintness is, however, but half the truth of the colour of Syria. Everywhere it is rendered emphatic by certain vivid splashes of the most daring brilliance. Wherever springs are found you have instances of this contrast, and Palestine is essentially the land of bright foregrounds thrown up against dim backgrounds.{13}

The Jordan valley is the greatest example, running south along its whole length, “a green serpent” between the pale mountains of the east and the faint mosaic of the western land. Its jungle is uncompromisingly distinct throughout the entire course, and its colour is living green, with a white flash of broken water or a quiet flow of brown bursting here and there through the verdure. Other streams are similarly marked, with luxurious undergrowth of reeds, varied by clumps of hollyhock or edged with winding ribbons of magenta oleander. But the most striking oases of this kind are the valley of Shechem and the city of Damascus. There is a hill seldom visited by tourists, but well worth climbing, set in the broad vale of Makhna, right opposite Jacob’s Well. North and south past the foot of this hill runs the broad valley. It is edged on the western side by the continuous line of the central mountain range of Samaria—continuous except for one great gash, where, as if a giant’s sword had cleft the range, the valley of Shechem enters that of Makhna at right angles. The whole landscape is in dim colour except for that valley of Shechem. Ebal and Gerizim guard its eastern end, dull and rocky both. But the valley which they guard is fed by countless springs and intersected by rivulets, so that below the shingle of their slopes there spreads a fan-shaped expanse of intensely vivid green, like a carpet flung out from Nablus between the mountains. The lower edge of the green is broken by the white wall of the enclosure of Jacob’s Well, and the cupola of{14} Joseph’s tomb. Damascus—surely the most bewitching of cities—owes its witchery to the same cause. The river Abana spends itself upon the city. As you approach it from the south it discloses itself as a mass of bold outline and high colour in the midst of a great field of verdure, flanked on the west by precipitous hills of sand and rock—sheer tilted desert. When you climb those hills you see the white city, jewelled with her minarets of many hues, resting on a cloth of dark green velvet whose edge is sharply defined. Immediately beyond that edge the sand begins, stretching into the farther desert through paler and paler shades of rose and yellow to the lilac hills in the eastern distance.

It is not only the water-springs, however, that provide the land with vivid foregrounds. Loti describes a little sand-hill in the desert “all bespangled with mica,” which “sets itself out, shining like a silver tumulus.” Such bold and detached features are by no means uncommon even on the west of the Jordan. The name of the cliff “Bozez” in Michmash means “shining,” and there are many shining rocks in these valleys—either masses of smooth limestone, or dark basalt rocks, from whose dripping surface the sun is reflected in blinding splendour after rain. Even without such reflection the sudden intrusion of black rock will often give character to an otherwise neutral landscape.

But the sun is the magician of Syria, who bleaches her and then throws up against his handiwork the boldest contrasts of strong light and shade. No one{15} who has seen the crimson flush of sunset on the olives, or the sudden change of a grey Judean hill-side to rich orange, or the whole eastern cliffs of the Sea of Galilee turned to the likeness of flesh-coloured marble, will be likely to forget the picture. Loti’s wonderful description of desert sunsets—“incandescent violet, and the red of burning coals”—is not overdrawn. Shadows will transform the poorest into the richest colouring. The tawny desert changes to the luscious dark of lengthening indigo at the foot of a great rock; and the shadows of clouds float across Esdraelon, changing the red plain to deep wine-colour as they pass. Silhouettes are of daily occurrence in that crisp air. One scene in particular made an indelible impression. It was a village on terraced heights, thrown black against a gold and heliotrope sunset. The figures of Arabs standing or sitting statuesque upon the sky-line were magnified to the appearance of giant guardians of the walls, and the miserable little hamlet might have been an impregnable fortress.

The inhabitants have entered with full sympathy into the spirit of this play of foreground. They are spectacular if they are anything. Their religion forbids them all practice of the graphic arts, and most of the Western pictures which are to be seen in churches are execrable enough to reconcile them to the restriction. But they obey the law in small things only to break it by transforming themselves and their surroundings into one great picture. Their clothing, their buildings, and their handiwork are a brilliant foil to the dull background.{16} From them Venice learned her bright colouring, and there are few English homes which have not borrowed something from them.

In part, this is thrust upon them by the sun. The interiors of houses are all Rembrandt work, as Conder has happily remarked. The rooms are dark, and the windows very small. But when the sun shines through the apertures, their rich brown rafters and red pottery gleam out of the shadow. One such interior is especially memorable, where a bar of intense sunlight lit up the skin and many-coloured garments of children sitting in the window-sill, while through the open door the green grass of the courtyard shone. Still more wonderful is the effect when one opens the door of a silk-winding room in sunlight, and sees the colours wound on the great spindles, or when one enters the dark archways of the bazaars where long shafts of light striking down slantwise upon a shining patch below turn the brown shadow of the arch to indigo. The natives see this, and love the lusciousness of it. They build minarets cased with emerald tiles, or domes of copper which will soon be coated with verdigris. Of late years a further touch has been added in the red-tiled roofs which are already so popular in the towns.

In proof of the genius of the Easterns for colour, nothing need be mentioned but their carpets and their glass. The glass of old windows in mosques beggars all description. It is an experience rather than a spectacle. The panes are so minute, and so destitute of picture or of pattern, that they are unnoticed in{17}

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CANA OF GALILEE.

This is the village of Kafr Kenná, believed to be the Cana of the New Testament, where our Lord performed His first miracle at the marriage feast.

detail, and the general effect is that of a religious atmosphere in which all one’s ordinary thoughts and feelings are lost in the overpowering sense of “something rich and strange.” After the magic of that light, with its blended purple and amber and ruby, the finest Western work seems harsh. It is hardly light; it is illuminated shadow. The rugs and carpets, with their intricate colouring, are more familiar and need not be described. The finest of them are of silk, and their delicacy of shade is marvellous. The patterns constantly elude the eye, promising and just almost reaching some recognisable figure, only to lose themselves in a bright maze. It is said that they were suggested by the meadows of variegated flowers; but they are intenser and more passionate—as if their designers had felt that their task was to supply an even stronger counterpart to the faint landscape.

The gay clothing of the East is proverbial. Even the poorest peasants are resplendent. “Fine linen” is still the mark of the rich man, but Lazarus can match him for “scarlet.” In certain parts the men are clad in coats of sheepskin, the wool being inside, and protruding like a heavy fringe along the edges. Almost everybody’s shoes are bright red. In one place we saw a shepherd whose sheepskin coat had met with an accident, and the patch which filled the vacant space in the raw brown back of him was of an elaborate tartan cloth. In another village all the men wore crimson aprons. When our camp-servants were on the march they seemed to be in sackcloth, or in thick grey felt which{18} suggested fire-proof apparel; but when they reached a town they blossomed out into a rainbow. Children playing in a village street, women at the wells, statuesque shepherds standing solitary in the fields, all seemed arranged as for a tableau. Everybody official—the railway guard, the escort, even the mourner at a funeral—is immensely conscious of his dignity; and on him descends the spirit of Solomon in all his glory. The man you hire to guide you for a walk of half a dozen miles will disappear into his house and emerge in gorgeous array. One of our guides decked himself in flowing yellow robes and marched before us ostentatiously carrying in front of him a weapon which appeared to be a cross between a carving-knife and a reaping-hook, through a land peaceful as an infant school. A procession marching to some sacred place across a plain lights the whole scene as with a string of coloured lanterns. Even where the natives have adopted European dress the fez is retained, and a crowd of men, seen from above, is always ruddy.

The delight in strong colour goes even one step farther. The rich hues of the flesh in sunny lands seem to suit the landscape, and one soon learns to sympathise with the native preference for dusky and brown complexions. To them a fair skin appears leprous, though bright flaxen or auburn hair are regarded with great admiration. Not satisfied, however, with their natural beauty, the Syrians paint and tattoo their flesh in the most appalling manner, and redden their finger-nails with henna. Fashionable ladies, and in some places{19} men also, paint their eyebrows to meet, and touch in their eyelids with antimony, whose blue shadow is supposed to convey the impression of irresistible eyelashes. In towns where “the Paris modes” are the sign of smartness, some of the girls paint their faces pink and white—faces painted with a vengeance, with a thick and shining enamel which transforms the wearers into animated wax dolls of the weirdest appearance. But that which shocks the unsophisticated traveller most is the tattooing of many of the women. Some of them are marked with small arrow-head blue patches on forehead, cheeks, and chin; others are lined and scored like South Sea Islanders, and their lower lips transformed entirely from red to blue.

All this is savage enough, but it illustrates in its own crude way that delight in strong colour which transforms the human life of the East into such a vivid foreground to the faint landscape. In the dress there is artistic instinct as well as barbaric splendour, and in the carpets, the mosaics, and the glass there is brilliant and matchless artistry. As to the general principle which has been stated in regard to natural colouring, this is as it always must have been. These were the quiet hues of the land, and these the brilliant points of strong light in it which Christ’s eyes saw, and which gave their colour to the Gospels.