CHAPTER XXVI.

CAMPED ON MOUNT ZION.

OUR camping-place is on that part of Mount Zion which is outside the walls of Jerusalem, to the south of the city, and on the bank of the Valley of Hinnom. Zion has a heavenly sound about it, but this Valley of Hinnom is also Ge-hinnom and Gehenna, from which recent authorities derive our word "hell." Such a situation makes us serious, quite regardless of the old grey towering walls all around, that, in a sort of harp shape, shut us out from the holy city. We could liken this heavenly-sounding Zion and this valley of hell to what Christian found at the end of his journey in those similar places which took each to themselves one of the travellers— dividing for ever himself and Ignorance. It wanted, indeed, Bunyan's brilliant fancy to mix up anything of the New Jerusalem with that one now before us, but then the dark rough-looking casket might yet have a "City Beautiful" within its walls. We postpone going within until we have been around, and seen that which lies without.

"Jerusalem-mountains encompass her!"-built, though it is, on a mountain top. It is on one part of a range that is in length from Beersheba to Esdraelon, and in width from the Jordan to Sharon's Plains. The limestone rock runs into peaks and ravines everywhere about, so that this hill-top city is surrounded by hills and dales. Springs, that are here dignified as "fountains," occasionally appear on the rocky hillsides, and wild vines and olives thrive somehow in the triturated stone and dust which is all the earth, or substitute

Valley of Hinnom.

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for it, that is to be found in some places of the hungry-looking surface. On the tops of the range of the Blue Mountains in New South Wales, there is a wealth of verdure and scenery that keeps attention alive, and the outward eye delighted. All such is quite wanting here. It is all dearth, drought, and desolation-the mind's eye alone can be interested in that which is seen.

With which wretched state of things all additions to it agree. Among the mounds of foul rubbish that are everywhere about are half-naked Arabs, beggars of all sorts, whining lepers, and fanatics even from far Australia, who have come here, as the Austral one tells me, to "await the fulfilment of prophecy!" Like the Jews within the walls, they think themselves entitled to be kept at the expense of others. To be more holy than one's fellows is too often, all over the world, to be less of a labourer and more of a loafer.

This Valley of Hinnom, on whose bank are our four tents, runs away to the south and joins the ravine called Kidron, at times a brook, which goes away to the eastward to join another ravine called the Valley of Jehoshaphat, the sides of which are more thickly strewn with Jewish towns than it is possible to imagine. We turn to our Bibles and read in Jeremiah, "They have built Tophet, which is in the valley of the son of Hinnom, to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire." Hassan points out the place of Tophet, to be seen from our camp, and tells us that there a statue of Moloch was put up, having a man's body and a bull's head. In the hollow interior was a furnace, by which its brazen metal was made red-hot. The children offered as sacrifices were then placed in the figure's arms and there roasted, drums being set going to drown their screams. We turn to chapter eleven of the First Book of Kings, and find that this "abomination of Moloch" was instituted, of all men, by Solomon himself. It was, however, in those evil days when the seven hundred and the three hundred that troubled him "had turned away his heart." There is no madness to which that number of legitimates and supernumeraries might not drive a man.

And thus we get our ideas of the world hereafter from the dead world of the past! Our camping-ground was part of Zion, and that dreary-looking city was Jerusalem, from which Zion and which city, as giving a name to the New Jerusalem, we borrow blissful notions. I shall similarly find the Elysian fields just outside Naples to be now but a miserable cemetery. and the fearful Avernus there to be but a sulphurous pool. This Gehenna, or Hell, on the bank of which we are camped, is but a valley or ravine, into which the bodies of malefactors and others were brought from the city and therein thrown, to be consumed by fires, so often burning as to be thought never quenched. Hassan details all this to us as matters of common information known to everybody, and we receive it with the judicious silence that says we know all about it.

We go round the walls, which at our limping pace over the stones takes two hours, but can be done in much less, so small is the circuit of the city. The hills are as notable as the valleys. To the east is the Mount of Olives, and overhanging our dreadful Hinnom is the Hill of Evil Counsel, and the house of Caiaphas in which it was taken. The walls of the city are about thirty feet high, and five feet thick. They date back only to 1542, but are of the stones of previous walls. Quite useless against modern cannon, they now only serve for shutting out Bedouins and lepers, and helping to illustrate history. There are five gates pointed out to us, named Damascus, Joppa, St. Stephen's, Zion, and Dung gates. Two gates, Herod's and another, the Golden Gate, are walled up. The Damascus and Joppa gates are those most used.

It

Hassan, our dragoman, knows all the story of this native land of his, and condenses history into a nutshell as we go along. Judging from a tomb, which I am to see inside the city, an early settler here, if not the earliest, was Adam himself. must have been a land adopted by him after his expulsion from Paradise; as, if he had been here first introduced to the world, and the country was then as we now see it, he would likely in disgust have let his race die out with himself in the veriest charity to it.

The Jebusites have earliest mention as the people of Jerusalem. David came from the country to the east towards Bethlehem, where in his youth he had served as a shepherd, and with the help of Joab took the city, and became its minstrel-monarch. His line lasted to Zedekiah, who was taken in chains by Nebuchadnezzar to Babylon with all the Israelites left alive. Fifty years after came Cyrus and his Persians to Babylon, and set the Israelites free, who returned to Jerusalem and rebuilt the temple, continuing there until Antiochus came and conquered them, dedicating their temple to Jupiter. Maccabeus next arose to restore Jewish power, until the Romans came, and Herod was made king in Jerusalem. His line ended in Agrippa, against whose deputy-governor the Jews revolted. Vengeance for that came in the invasion of Titus, the massacre of a million, and the destruction of the temple. Emperor Hadrian afterwards rebuilt it, and it continued for Jupiter's worship until Constantine adopted Christianity, making it a State religion, and his wonderful mother, Helena, came here to work changes of all kinds.

We wash all this history down with water at the pool of Siloam, to which we descend, as into a pit, from the Valley of the Kidron. A woman is there filling a pitcher, from which I am given a drink, and then pick scriptural hyssop from the well's side before scrambling up again. It is a mere pool, to which a dozen irregular stones serve as steep steps. We can listen further now to Hassan's story how the Romans kept the city until Chosroes and his Persians took it and massacred its people. To the Persians succeeded the Arabs, under that Caliph Omar who destroyed the Alexandrian library. Next came the destroying Druses under their chief, Hakim, another fanatic of the Omar sort, who pulled down all the monuments of the city. To him succeeded the Turks under Ortok, and then came Peter the Hermit, who, seeing Turkish misrule then, as we see it now, went back to Europe and preached up the wrongs of Syria, and brought to its rescue those crusaders of whom another edition is so much wanted now, and for the same reasons. New crusaders have the

old ones to avenge, as the Turks drove them hence nearly seven hundred years back, and have since then-alike to the disgrace of Jews, Christians, Europe generally, and the world at large-defiled Palestine, and outraged civilization in its length and breadth.

Beyond our camp valley of Hinnom are the pools of Gihon, that at rainy seasons overflow into "the brook Kidron," whose dry course we next look at. It runs away from Jerusalem's walls through that wilderness of Judea in which John the Bap

tist wandered, and then away for fifteen miles to the valley of Jordan, and to that Dead Sea in which, like the Jordan, it is lost. We wander along Kidron's banks and down the valley of Jehoshaphat, picking our ways among the tombstones, on which not a description is now decipherable, and so come to the Mount of Olives. Its sides are terraced in some places for planting of grain, and its whole surface specked with olive-trees dark as the cypress, and in appearance antiquated as a camel.