Part 5 (1/2)
In 1890 he came up to Jerusalem, and at last I met him. The first time that I called upon him I was in company with my father, my uncle the judge, the son of the Chief Rabbi, and another Rabbi, one of the judges of the Jewish Court.
'The Chief Rabbi appoints twelve judges, who each serve a term of three months every year, and every dispute between Jews must first be brought before them, and, if needs be, is referred by them to the Turkish Court.'
In time the writer became a Christian and was baptized. He adds:
'It was my desire to get the training that would make me a good Christian teacher, but I could not travel without a pa.s.sport, and could not get this except through the application of my father, who, instead, gave strict orders that no pa.s.sport should be made for me.
After a year of vain endeavour, I was able to persuade a friend who was in the office where they are written, on the score of friends.h.i.+p, to give me a _tishcara_, or local pa.s.sport, which, however, he did not dare to record; off in the country it served me well. My plan was to start on a trip through the country and seize any opportunity that might offer of getting to Egypt. I started from the Damascus Gate, my faithful horse being my only companion. We travelled first to Nablous, the ancient Sichem, and finding that the Samaritans were soon to keep their pa.s.sover, I waited to see their celebrated sacrifice. Each family took a lamb, and they went out and pitched their tents on Mount Gerizim before the tomb of Sichem, the son of Hamor, whom they hold in great reverence, and camped out there for eight days. On the first day their high-priest sacrificed a lamb for each family, and every day he himself mixed the unleavened cakes.
Leaving Nablous, I struck across country till I came to an Arab village on the Jordan, and then followed its course until I came to Tiberias. Along this part of the country many of the villagers knew me, and wherever I was acquainted they entertained me freely with their proverbial hospitality. At one Bedouin encampment they insisted on roasting an entire sheep. This they did in a very primitive fas.h.i.+on. They dug a ditch in the earth, and made fire within it until it was very hot, and then, removing the fire, they laid the lamb, well seasoned, on the hot ashes, and then buried it for a couple of hours. It then made a very savoury dish, of which we all partook, dipping into the same dish.
'Tiberias is one of the four sacred cities of the Jews, and there I found a large number residing. It is also a favourite resort because of its hot springs of healing qualities. I had left Jerusalem almost ill, and so was very glad to take a course of baths here.
'From Tiberias I journeyed towards Nazareth, and visited the Tomb of Jethro, near the horns of Ha.s.sau, where probably our Lord preached His wondrous Sermon on the Mount. At Nazareth I was hospitably entertained at the Latin Convent, and a priest showed me all the sights of the town. Next day 400 or 500 French pilgrims arrived, and I shared their entertainment.
'After three days I resumed my journey, with the intention of embarking at Haifa and pa.s.sing on to Egypt without being seen at Jaffa.'
And in due time the writer made his escape, and was welcomed in America, mainly owing to the a.s.sistance of Mr. Ben Oliel, who had been the means of his conversion.
CHAPTER XIII.
ALEXANDRIA.
We left Jaffa on the Monday, and in twenty-four hours after were landed at Alexandria. Alexandria is not a desirable place to land at; travellers have to trust generally to native boatmen, who are a race of robbers. For instance, an American gentleman described to me how it fared with him on attempting to land a few years since. He and a friend made a bargain with a respectable man to put them ash.o.r.e. He called a boatman, into whose boat they got with their luggage. No sooner had the man rowed a little way from the s.h.i.+p than he stopped and demanded the instant payment of a sum four times the amount that had been agreed upon.
The travellers said they had made an agreement with his master, and he was bound to carry it out. He replied that he had no master; that the boat was his, that the oars were his, and that he would neither take them back to the s.h.i.+p nor row them ash.o.r.e unless they complied with his request. One of the gentlemen had a revolver, which he held at the rascal's head, telling him to prepare for instant death. The man sullenly obeyed, but no sooner had he reached the sh.o.r.e than he landed and preferred against the travellers a charge of attempting to murder him. The affair promised to be serious, but it was discovered by the judge that the revolver was not loaded, nor ever had been loaded, and the travellers were at length allowed to depart in peace. I heard of another case of a Frenchman shooting his boatman, who refused to fulfil his contract. In my case, happily, I landed on the quay, and had no trouble with the boatmen at all.
At length I am fairly landed in the land of the Pharaohs-a land whose records are engraved in stones, and date thousands of years before the birth of Christ. You see nothing of Alexandria till you approach it, and then it spreads out before you in all its charm, from Pharos, the most ancient lighthouse in the world, on one side, to Pompey's Pillar on the other. Soon after I land at the quay, I make my way to the railway-station in a carriage and pair, for which I had agreed to pay a s.h.i.+lling. At the station the driver has the impudence to demand two s.h.i.+llings, which I refuse to give, whilst a dragoman, who has fastened himself on to me, though I have attempted to get rid of him, demands a s.h.i.+lling for his unnecessary attendance. I offer him threepence; he is indignant. 'I am a dragoman,' he exclaims in an angry tone. 'What do you take me for?' At length I give him sixpence, and he goes away in peace. I smoke my first pipe of excellent Egyptian tobacco, swallow a tiny cup of coffee, all sugar and grounds, and survey the scene from the outside of the excellent railway-station, which is a credit to the city.
Every minute a blacking boy begs me to let him clean my boots, but as I need not his services they are declined. On my way I have seen every sign of industry and wealth: s.p.a.cious shops, and a fine square adorned with handsome houses, and with a good statue of Ibrahim Pasha-the man to whom modern Egypt owes its first dawn of revived prosperity. The munic.i.p.al authorities of the place have [Picture: Pompey's Pillar, Alexandria] done much to promote its prosperity. The traveller will find it to his advantage to stop here a day or two. The hotels are excellent, and, with one exception, by no means dear. The harbour is full of s.h.i.+pping and steamers, and the number of trains laden with merchandise running between Cairo and Alexandria seems incessant. The railway-carriages are an immense improvement on those which take you from Jaffa to Jerusalem. Alexandria has a population of over 300,000, and its prosperity has greatly increased of late. The English reside princ.i.p.ally at Ramleh, five miles off, to which there is a local train service. On your way you pa.s.s the battlefield between the English and the French, where our General, Sir Ralph Abercrombie, lost his life in the hour of victory.
Commerce seems to have had her birthplace in Egypt. In the time of Joseph, we read, all countries came there to buy corn. Fifteen hundred years before the birth of Christ its merchants brought indigo and muslins from India, and porcelain from China, and the fame of its mariners was great. The trade route was down the Persian Gulf, along the Tigris, through Palmyra-the Tadmor of old-down to the cities of the Mediterranean. Arab mariners also sailed from India, keeping close to the coast till they reached Berenice, in the Red Sea, whence the goods were transported to Captos, thence down the Nile to Alexandria. 'Under such Emperors as the cruel and dissipated Commodus,' writes Mr. R. W.
Fraser, in his 'British India,' 'the plundering barbarian, Caracalla, and the infamous Heliogabalus, the wealth that came from the East through Alexandria to the imperial city of Rome, pa.s.sed away to Constantinople and the rising cities along the Mediterranean.'
The glory of Alexandria in the olden time was the Serapeum, sacred to the wors.h.i.+p of Serapis, a G.o.d originally wors.h.i.+pped in Sinope, and brought to Alexandria by the Emperor Ptolemy-wors.h.i.+pped eventually by the Romans as the Supreme Being, the beneficent Lord of Life and Death. It is clear the Ptolemies-at one and the same time Egyptian Pharaohs and Greek princes-felt the need of a real and presiding deity for the great city, with its enormous population, not only from Greece and its colonies, but from all the nations and tribes of the Mediterranean and the East.
As the seat of a G.o.d-wors.h.i.+p became important, so did the deity its patron. When Alexandria became the official and mercantile capital of Egypt, Serapis became the chief of all the G.o.ds of the land, and there his shrine was wors.h.i.+pped for nearly one thousand years. The wors.h.i.+p of Serapis was the last to fall before the advancing force of Christianity.
The philosopher saw in Serapis, writes Macrobius, nothing more than the _anima mundi_, the spirit of whom universal nature is the body; so that by an easy transition Serapis came to be wors.h.i.+pped as the embodiment of the one Supreme whose representative on earth was Christ. This is clear from a letter written by the Emperor Hadrian A.D. 131. 'I am now become,' writes Hadrian, 'fully acquainted with that Egypt which you extol so highly. I have found the people vain, fickle, and s.h.i.+fting with every change of opinion. Those who wors.h.i.+p Serapis are, in fact, Christians; even those who style themselves the bishops of Christ are actually devoted to Serapis. There is no chief of a Jewish synagogue, no Samaritan, no Christian bishop, who is not an astrologer, a fortune-teller, or a conjurer. The very Patriarch of Tiberias is compelled, when he comes to Egypt, by one party to adore Serapis, by another to wors.h.i.+p Christ.'
And this seems to show that some Christians, in order to escape persecution, enjoyed their own faith under the cover of the national and local wors.h.i.+p, which was susceptible of a spiritual interpretation quite cognate to their own ideas. A similar case occurred in Spain, as the historical reader may remember, when so many Jews, in fear of the Inquisition, nominally became Roman Catholics. Accordingly, it is clear that the tone of the higher, the fas.h.i.+onable society in Alexandria was to believe that on some grander or philosophic theory all these religions differed in form, but were essentially the same; that all adored one Logos or Demiurge under different names, all employed the same arts to impose on the vulgar, and all were equally despicable to the real philosopher.
The wors.h.i.+p of Serapis was abolished in the reign of Justinian, and of the former glory of the Serapeum nothing now remains, unless it be Pompey's Pillar, which was said by some to have formed part of the Serapeum. According to Tacitus, sick persons were accustomed to pa.s.s a night in the Serapeum in order to regain their health. The colossal statue of Serapis was involved in the ruin of his temple and religion.
It was believed that if an insult were offered to that statue, chaos would ensue. When a Christian soldier aimed his first blow, even the Christians trembled for the event. The victorious soldier, Gibbon tells us, repeated his blows; the huge idol was overthrown and broken in pieces, and the limbs of Serapis were ignominiously dragged through the streets of Alexandria. His mangled carcase was burnt in the amphitheatre amidst the shouts of the people, and many persons attributed their conversion to this discovery of the impotence of their great deity. A process something similar, attended with similar results, has more than once occurred in the history of missionary enterprise.
Deeply interesting is Alexandria from a historical point of view. It was founded by Alexander the Great more than 300 years before Christ. King Ptolemy, the first of that name, made it the capital of his kingdom, laid the foundations of its enormous library, and held out inducements to men of learning to come from all parts of the world to settle there. During the siege of the city by the Romans the library was burnt, but Antony afterwards gave the library a large collection of ma.n.u.scripts, which formed the nucleus of a second library. In the early centuries of our era the town was torn with religious dissensions about the Jews and religious dogma. It was here the beautiful Hypatia, the fair heroine of Kingsley's celebrated novel, was torn to pieces by an infuriated mob.
St. Mark is said to have preached the Gospel here. It was here that there arose fierce discussions between Arius and Athanasius and Cyril.
The Christians were persecuted with great severity by Decius, by Valeria.n.u.s, and Diocletian. The city then declined in wealth and importance. Its population dwindled away. All fanatics, Christian or pagan, seem to me equally to blame.
It was at one time, as I have said, the headquarters of the wors.h.i.+p of Serapis. The temple stood to the east of Alexandria, near Pompey's Pillar. It is said to have been one of the most remarkable buildings in the world, and was filled with excellent statues and other works of art.