CHAPTER II THE SHADOW OF DEATH

We now turn sharply to the other side of things, and it must be apparent to every one that we are passing from the smaller to the vastly greater element in the spirit of Syria. The text in Deuteronomy which we quoted[35] shows us joy commanded at the sword’s point, as if the nation were unwilling and unlikely to obey easily the happy command. Even when Jesus Christ repeats the injunction in His great words, “Rejoice and be exceeding glad,” it is a defiant gladness He enjoins. The context shows that the rejoicing is that of persecuted and slandered men. A recent writer has bitterly described our march through life in the words: “We uphold our wayward steps with the promises and the commandments for crutches, but on either side of us trudge the shadow Death and the bacchanal Sex.”[36] The words sound profane to Western ears, but they are not untrue of the spirit of Syria. It is of “the shadow Death” that the present chapter treats.

As primitive religion decayed and men lost their{191} sense of kinship and their easy and friendly relations with the old gods, they were left alone with death, which everywhere stared them in the face and claimed them for its own. Next to God, death is the most impressive fact in human experience, with sin for its sting. When old and defective views of God are passing away, two courses are open to men. As death closes in upon them, and they feel its grasp upon their unprotected souls, they may appeal from it to God, and find Him revealing Himself, with eternal life for them in the knowledge of Him. This was what the noblest of Israel’s thinkers did, and the growing revelation of the Bible was their reward. God showed Himself to them in ever-increasing clearness, until one and another and another of them found that the hand that grasped them was “not Death but Love.” But another course is open. They may enthrone death in place of the broken gods—“Death is king, and vivat rex!” They may “say to corruption, Thou art my father; to the worm, Thou art my mother, and my sister.” Then the emphasis of thought will fall on the grave, and all men’s imaginations will grow morbid.

The tombs of the Holy Land are of many patterns. In his Haifa, Laurence Oliphant describes several different kinds of them, from the cave-sepulchres, or the underground galleries, to the little wayside graves or narrow holes driven into rock which seem such tightly-fitting homes for the dead. There are, of course, the modern graves sacred to the wives and children of missionaries who have laid down their lives{192} in the loving service of Christ and man. Buckle the historian sleeps in the Christian burying-ground at Damascus, and Henriette Renan was laid to rest in Byblus. These graves and others dear to the Western world are, as graves have been since Abraham’s day, symbols of the strangers’ inheritance and lot in the Holy Land. From these, back to the tombs of hoariest antiquity, the country is bound by an unbroken chain of death. Through all the centuries the dead have been thrust upon the notice of the living in a fashion so obtrusive as to make this the most obvious impression of the land. Most of the graves are those of persons now unknown and quite forgotten. Small and great, common men and heroes, are alike conspicuous in death. Each of the invaders has left his memorial, and the sites of ancient cities are traced by help of their burying-grounds.

Moslem tombs are everywhere. Most of them are oblong structures of rude but solid masonry erected over shallow graves. In some cases a painted tarbush (fez-cap) marks the head and a little upright stone the feet. A slight hollow is often cut in the flat top for birds to drink from. Tombs are clustered among their iris-flowers beside the walls of villages. They have crept up to the very summit of the hill which Gordon identifies as Calvary. They have encroached on the palace of Herod’s daughter at Samaria. They crowd the ground outside the built-up “Gate Beautiful” at Jerusalem. There is, to our feelings, a certain indecency in this promiscuous invasion of the grave: Mohammedans seem{193}

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THE CHURCH OF THE NATIVITY AT BETHLEHEM.

From a garden on the opposite hill.

to bury their dead anywhere. The Crusaders have left fewer memorials of themselves in the shape of tombs than one might have expected. Barbarossa’s tomb we have already visited. For the rest, their memorials are mostly those great buildings whose ruins stand to this day. Early Christianity, too, has left its tombs—catacombs and single graves, especially in the southern part of the coast, and eastwards in Hauran. People of importance have sometimes more than one tomb, like St. George, who is buried both in Lydda and Damascus. But the graves of humbler Christians are more precious than these, for their inscriptions remain, breathing forth the faith and peace with which Christ had blessed the world. Such memorials of victory over death are inextinguishable lamps hung in the sepulchres of Syria. And these lamps are kindled at the Great Light. Never was symbolism more appropriate than that of the Holy Fire in the Church of the Sepulchre. The very heart and soul of Syria is a tomb—the reputed grave of Jesus Christ. To this day the chief pilgrim song repeats with exultant reiteration the words, “This is the tomb of Christ.” It is a song which has never been silent in the land. In the Crusader camps a herald closed the day with the loud cry, “Lord, succour the Holy Sepulchre”; and the sentinels passed the word from post to post, “Remember the Holy Sepulchre.”

It is not, however, the victory over death that impresses one as the spirit of Syria. It is death itself, unconquered, mysterious, and dark. Its Christian{194} tombs are few and far between compared with the countless multitude of sepulchres where there is no lamp alight. Most common and most impressive of these are the Roman and Greek graves. The sands of Tyre and Sidon are strewn with sarcophagi. Here a man’s magnificently carved stone coffin serves for a drinking-trough, there a little child’s stands alone and desolate near a river mouth. In Sidon the ancient cemetery is on a scale whose rifled grandeur speaks volumes concerning the vanity of earthly greatness. At Gadara, the eastward road is a miniature Appian Way: hollow to the tread of horses as they cross the excavated rock, and adorned with sarcophagi carved with crowns and garlands, but bearing inscriptions without hope in them. Farther north, on the eastern slopes of Hermon, we found a far older monument near one of the Druse villages. We were crossing a little brook, when we noticed that the bridge consisted of two huge monolithic slabs of limestone, which, on examination, appeared to be the lids of ancient sarcophagi. The carving on the ends was obviously intended to represent figures of cherubim or some such winged creatures. The heads were gone, but the plumage of the wings was very perfectly preserved. No one in the locality knew anything about their origin. Their general appearance seemed to connect them with the far East.

The Jewish tombs are those which impress the imagination most with the bitterness of death in Syria. They are so sad, with their antique solemnity—so severely simple and unadorned. Where there is{195} carving it is almost always of Roman or Christian workmanship. A few stones with such symbols as the seven-branched candlestick engraved on them are the only unquestionable remains of ornamental Jewish work. Few of the Jewish sepulchres have escaped appropriation by Gentiles. The more famous of them have been appropriated by the Mohammedans, and early Christian tradition is responsible for many other indentifications. The saints and heroes of Israel, claimed also by Mohammedans and Christians, have achieved a kind of funereal immortality which makes the whole land seem one vast graveyard. Every prospect is dotted with tombs. The tomb of Jonas shines white from its hill-top north of Hebron, that of Samuel north of Jerusalem, while Joseph’s tomb commands the view where the Vale of Shechem opens on the wider valley of Makhnah. None of them, however, is at all so impressive as the tomb of Rachel, where a modern house and dome cover a rough block of stone worn smooth with the kisses of centuries of Jewish women. The wailing, as we saw it there, is a memorable custom. The women were mostly elderly or aged, but they were weeping real tears and wailing bitterly as they kissed the stone. It is an old story that consecrates that rough stone, but how eternal is its human pathos: “And they journeyed from Bethel; and there was but a little way to come to Ephrath: and Rachel travailed, and she had hard labour.... And Rachel died, and was buried in the way to Ephrath, which is Bethlehem.”[37]

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The earlier fashion of Jewish work seems to have been the “pigeon-hole,” in which the corpse was thrust into a little tunnel six feet long driven at right angles to the rock face. Later, troughs were excavated to fit the body along the line of the rock. In some instances these graves, especially the former kind, are found in detached groups in wayside rocks, whose perpendicular faces front the open air. For the most part they are grouped in larger numbers within natural caves or subterranean excavations, whose low doorway is blocked by a large circular stone running in a groove. A later example of such a cave is that which is shewn as the “new tomb” of Joseph of Arimathea, close to Gordon’s Calvary. A few specimens of another sort, built of masonry without cement, are to be found in Galilee.[38] Nothing could be gloomier than the constantly repeated ruins of ancient Jewish graves in Syria. No day’s journey is without them. They meet you casually, as it were, at every turning. They are not, indeed, quite dark like the pagan tombs; but the twilight, in which the hope of immortality just broke the darkness for ancient Israel, is grey and cheerless, and the contribution of Jewish graves to the spirit of Syria is a very sombre one.

The typical spot for this side of the spirit of Syria is the town of Hebron.

The lanes and the dark bazaar are filthy and foul-smelling. The mosque is an impressive building, suggestive of military rather than devotional ideas.{197} The Tomb of Abraham, which it covers, is one of the sights which only a very few Christian eyes have seen. It is permitted to none but Mohammedans to approach nearer the entrance to it than the seventh step of the lane, or staircase, alongside its eastern wall. There is a hole in that wall which is supposed to communicate with the cave below. Jews write letters to Abraham, and place them in this hole, to tell him how badly they are being treated by the Moslems. But the Moslem boys are said to know that the hole has no great depth, and to collect these letters and burn them before Abraham has seen them. The tomb is the very heart and black centre of the Shadow of Death in Palestine.

There is no part of man’s faith in which it is more necessary to be thoroughgoing than in his thoughts about immortality. Egypt and Greece furnish examples of great significance here. Egypt held an elaborate doctrine of the future life, and it dominated all her thought concerning this life. Men built their tombs and kings their pyramids as the most important of their life’s achievements. The earthly house of the Egyptian was but an inn where he spent a little time in passing; his tomb was his eternal house and real home. Thus the tombs were glorified copies of the dwelling-houses, either of the present, or more often of a former generation.[39] Greece, on the other hand, did not believe in a life beyond the grave. Her funeral celebrations were{198} full of lamentation, and her inscriptions sound sad enough to us. But it was a principle with Greece and Rome to decorate tombs exclusively with glad symbols such as sculptured flowers and even dances.[40] The point to be observed about these is that neither of them was morbid. Morbidness appears to avoid a robust faith or a frank scepticism,[41] and to cling about the thought which is neither sure of one thing nor another.

Israel’s position in regard to the belief in immortality is extremely difficult to define. It was obviously with her a thing of gradual development, as her revelation opened its broadening light upon life’s problems. He would be a bold critic who would sum up the situation of Isaiah’s time as Renan does in the statement, “not looking beyond the world for reward and punishment,” the Hebrew life “has a heroic tension, a sustained cry, an unceasing attention to the events of the world.” Everything goes to shew that long before the faith in immortality had grasped the imagination and the belief of the people in general it had been revealed to chosen spirits. As for the others, it had been working its way among them, occupying their minds in speculation, and leading them, as it were, among the shades of the nether world. There was something in the genius of the nation which rendered this interest in death quite inevitable. The natural bearing of the people has a strange solemnity about it, which finds constant expression in{199} pose and gesture, and often strikes the stranger with sudden vividness. Women may be often seen, especially when clad in thin white garments on holidays, who might stand just as you see them as models for monumental sculpture. Along with all its activities, there is a distinct sympathy with death in the genius of Israel.

This phenomenon is, of course, due to very complex causes. It is a deep-rooted Semitic instinct, which seems to be not altogether unlike that of the Egyptian feeling to the tomb as the real home. Some parts of Arabia are very rich in sacred tombs and spots of holy ground, and pilgrimages are made to these both by Moslems and by Jews. Long strings of mules, laden with coffins, wend their way to such sacred places as Nejf, and thousands of corpses are sent thither even from India.[42] Old tombstones are held in peculiar veneration by the more devout Arabs. The well-known reverence with which the Syrian Jews regard the tombs of their ancestors may be in part explained on the ground of patriotic loyalty. Such scenes as those which may be witnessed at the tomb of Rachel, remind us that a sense of the pathos of human life and its mortality is also developed strongly and enters as a very real factor into the spirit of Syria.[43] Nor can there be any doubt that a certain moral or didactic use of death is also characteristic of the East, such as is expressed in the sententious rhymes of old graveyards{200} in this country. The reader will recall the famous instance of this, which Sir Walter Scott has made familiar—the shroud which served for the banner of Saladin, with its inscription, “Saladin must die.”[44]

If, however, such elements have entered into earlier thoughts of death, it is to be feared that Palestine of the present day has little of them left. The great light of Christ illuminated the sepulchres of Christian Syria; but with the Mohammedan conquest darkness fell again, and all the morbid fascination of the grave reasserted itself. There is little reverence for the ordinary man’s place of burial now, whether it be of ancient or of recent date. Dr. Merrill tells how he has found Arabs actually stealing graves, i.e. clearing out old ones to make room for a newly-deceased body, on the plea that “the dead man who was buried there could not possibly want his grave any longer.”[45] On many a hillside the rock tombs are rent and split, like pictures from Dante’s Inferno, where they have been blasted open with gunpowder in the search for treasure; and sometimes parties of natives may be seen prowling about a hillside on that business. The find may consist of glass bracelets, which have to be taken from the bone of a baby’s arm, or gold earrings beside the skull whose face was once fair; but they excite no emotion except that of money values. Laurence Oliphant had difficulty in restraining the natives who searched with him from smashing the cinerary urns they found, on{201}

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JERUSALEM—EXTERIOR OF THE GOLDEN, OR BEAUTIFUL, GATE.

This gate, which was walled up by the Arabs after the conquest of Jerusalem, forms a tower projecting from the Eastern Wall of the Temple Area. The tombs in the foreground are part of the great Mohammedan Cemetery extending along the Eastern Wall of Jerusalem.

the plea that “they are so very old that they are not worth anything.”

With the decay of reverence for the dead, however, there seems to have been a recrudescence of that morbid and charnel-house interest in death which marks the spirit of the land. At times one is shocked by the apparently total indifference displayed—houses being built close to the mouths of graves or even, it is said, upon the roofs of them. Yet any one who has seen a festival at a holy tomb, whether Jewish or Mohammedan, must have realised the strong attraction by which death and the grave draw men. A curious instance of this is that of the “Jews’ Burning” at Tiberias.

Tiberias has been a Jewish centre since the time of Vespasian. Before that time, Jews avoided the city, because in building it Herod had disturbed a burial-place. To-day, by a strange coincidence, it is a tomb that gives it its special popularity for the Jews—the grave of the famous Rabbi Meir. Conveniently near the tomb there are large baths, whose warm and sulphurous water is considered highly medicinal. At this tomb a curious spectacle may be seen on the second day of May each year. Jewish pilgrims from near and far assemble, bringing with them their oldest garments, which are immersed in a great cauldron of oil, and then piled up and burned. The honour of setting fire to the pile is sold to the highest bidder, and the sum paid reaches ￡15 or more.

The same fascination of death, seen as it were past a byplay of irreverence and grotesqueness, is felt in the burial customs as they are seen to-day. At the Moslem{202} funerals we saw there was no appearance of mourning. The men were dressed in gay colours, and they trotted along behind the corpse talking and gesticulating with an apparent gusto. It may have been the unusual appearance of the thing which impressed strangers more powerfully than natives; but to us it seemed that the realism of death was here in more crude and aggressive consciousness than in Western funerals. The corpse lay on a board, shoulder-high, with a gorgeous crimson and purple pall covering his body and limbs instead of a coffin. The head, wrapped tight in a napkin, rested on a pillow, and the features of the face stood prominently out against the sky. The man seemed, in an altogether gruesome way, to be attending his own funeral, and to be thrusting the fact of his presence on the spectators.

This may be subjective criticism, and it is always unfair to judge the burial-customs of other peoples without intimate knowledge of their origin and inner meaning. In one respect, however, it is certain enough that the Shadow of Death rests upon the land of Syria. That is Fatalism. We have all heard of the fatalism of the East; and strange stones have become familiar, of soldiers selling cartridges to their enemies, of villagers refusing to drain the swamp that was decimating them by its malaria, or even to desist from poisoning their own springs with foul water. “It is Allah!” ends all questioning and checks all energy. Yet the constant recurrence of living instances of fatalism shocks the traveller, however well he was prepared for them. A{203} traveller asked a Mohammedan in Damascus what they had done to the workman who upset his brazier and burned the great mosque. “Oh nothing,” said he, “what should we do?” “I should have thought you might have killed him.” “No,” he replied; “in the West you say when such things happen, ‘It is the devil’; in the East we say, ‘It is God!’” Still more impressive was a conversation with one of the camp-servants during a long ride near Jezreel. He had told the pathetic story of his life—how they had lived comfortably till the father died, leaving no money; then came work, begun too early and with no providence and little hope of success, until it had come to be “eat, drink, sleep, then again, eat, drink, sleep—then die and sleep, no more eat nor drink.” The Syrian character of the present day has been well expressed on its negative side in three traits. These are, want of concentration, want of will-power, and an absolute want of the sense of sin. Of sin they literally do not understand the meaning, the substitute for conscience being a dread of the opinion of friends and of the public. They do not think about the problem of evil as in any sense a practical problem. “The Lord said unto Ahriman, I know why I have made thee, but thou knowest not”—that is their philosophy of the moral mystery of things. Conder sums up the situation in striking words: “Christian villages thrive and grow, while the Moslem ones fall into decay; and this difference, though due perhaps in part to the foreign protection which the native Christians enjoy, is yet unmistakably connected with the listlessness{204} of those who believe that no exertions of their own can make them richer or better, that an iron destiny decides all things, without reference to any personal quality higher than that of submission to fate, and that God will help those who have lost the will to help themselves.”[46]

The spirit of Syria is darkened by a shadow of death that has grown not only familiar but congenial, as darkness does to all who choose it rather than the light. Strange that Syria should thus have “made a covenant with death,” she from whom shone forth once the Light of the World. But that was long ago. These many centuries this has been one of that sad multitude of nations and of individuals who have sent forth a spirit that has inspired and moved the world, and who yet themselves sit desolate and listless.