Chapter 16

OLD BATTLEFIELDS

The next day papa was so tired that he would not go anywhere. So I had to be quiet too. It was no hardship. I was rather glad, to take in leisurely the good of all I had before and around me, and have time for it. Our tents were pitched by the beautiful fountain Aines-Sultân; which the books told me was Elisha's fountain. I wandered round it, examining the strange trees and bushes, gathering flowers; I found a great many; studying the lights and shades on the Moab mountains, and casting longing looks towards the Dead Sea and the Jordan. I took my maid with me in my wanderings, and Suleiman also kept near me like a shadow; but nobody of all our caravan behaved to me with anything but the most observant politeness. The Arabs, taught, I suppose, by other travellers whom they had attended, were very eager to bring me natural curiosities; birds and animals and shells and plants. I had no lack of business and pleasure all that day. I wanted only some one to talk to me who could tell me things I wanted to know.

The day had come to an end, almost; the shadow of Quarantania had fallen upon us; and I sat on a rock by the spring, watching the colours of the sunset still bright on the trees in the plain, on the water of the sea, and on the range of the Moab hills. From all these my thoughts had at last wandered away, and were busy at the other end of the world; sad, with a great sense that Mr. Thorold was away from me; heavy, with a moment's contrast of pleasures present and pleasures past. My musings were suddenly broken by seeing that some one was close by my side, and a single glance said, a stranger. I was startled and rose up, but the stranger stood still and seemed to wish to speak to me. Yet he did not speak. I saw the air of a gentleman, the dress of a European in Syria, the outlines of a personable man; one glance at his face showed me a bronzed complexion, warm-coloured auburn hair, and a frank and very bright eye. I looked away, and then irresistibly was driven to look back again. He smiled. I was in confusion.

"Don't you know?" he said.

"Not -?"

"Yes!"

"Can it be, - Mr. Dinwiddie?"

"Is it possible it is Daisy?" he said, taking my hand.

"Oh, Mr. Dinwiddie, I am so glad to see you!"

"And I am so glad to see you - here, of all places, at Elisha's fountain. The first question is, How came we both here?"

"I persuaded papa to bring me. I wanted to see Palestine."

"And I heard of you in Jerusalem, and felt sure it must be you, and I could not resist the temptation to take a little journey after you."

"And you are travelling through Palestine too?"

"In one way. I am living here - and life is a journey, you know."

"You are _living_ in Palestine?"

"In Jerusalem. I came here as a missionary, five years ago."

"How very nice!" I said. "And you can go with us?"

He shook my hand heartily, which he had not yet let go, laughing, and asked where we were going?

"I want to see the Dead Sea, very much, Mr. Dinwiddie; and papa was in doubt; but if you were with us there would be no more difficulty."

"I shall be most happy to be with you. Do you know where you are now?"

"I know a little. This is Elisha's fountain, isn't it?"

"Yes; and just hereabouts are the ruins of old Jericho."

"I did not know. I wondered, and wanted to know. But, Mr. Dinwiddie, have you got a tent?"

"I never travel without one."

"Then it is all right," I said; "for we have a cook."

"I should not miss that functionary," he said, shaking his head. "I am accustomed to act in that capacity myself. It is something I have learned since I came from Virginia."

We were called to dinner and had no time then for anything more. Our table was spread in front of the tents, in a clear spot of greensward; in the midst, I thought, of all possible delights that could be clustered together - except one. The breeze was a balmy, gentle evening zephyr; the sunlight, hidden from us by the Quarantania, shone on the opposite mountains of Moab, bringing out colours of beauty; and glanced from the water of the Dead Sea, and brightened the hues of the green thickets on the plain. Jericho behind us, the Jordan in front of us, the confusions of the world we live in thrust to a great distance out of the way, - I sat down to the open-air meal with a profound feeling of gratitude and joy. It was also a relief to me to have Mr. Dinwiddie's company with papa; he knew the land and the people and the ways of the land, and could give such good help if help were needed. He could be such good society too.

I fancied that papa's reception of Mr. Dinwiddie was rather slack in its evidence of pleasant recollection; but however, every shadow of stiffness passed away from his manner before dinner was over. Mr. Dinwiddie made himself very acceptable; and there, where we had so much to talk about, talk flowed in full stream. It was arranged that the new member of our party should be our guest and our travelling companion during as much of our journey as his duties allowed; and I went to sleep that night with a deep and full sense of satisfaction.

Papa declared himself still the next day unable for a very long and exciting day's work; so it was decided that we should put off till the morrow our ride to the Jordan and the Dead Sea, and Mr. Dinwiddie proposed to conduct me to Mount Quarantania to see the hermits' caves which are remaining there. Of course they remain; for the walls of caves do not crumble away; however, the staircases and rock ways which led to the upper ones have many of them suffered that fate.

We had a delicious walk. First along the foot of the mountain, skirting a little channel of running water which brings the outflow of another fountain to enrich a part of the plain. It was made good for the cultivation of a large tract; although very wild and disorderly cultivation. As we went, every spot within sight was full of interest; rich with associations; the air was warm but pleasant; the warble of the orange-winged blackbird - I don't know if I ought to call it a warble; it was a very fine and strong note, or whistle, - sounding from the rocks as we went by, thrilled me with a wild reminder of all that had once been busy life there, where now the blackbird's cry sounded alone. The ruins of what had been, - the blank, that was once so filled up, - the forlorn repose, where the stir of the ages had been so restlessly active. I heard Mr. Dinwiddie's talk as we went, he was telling and explaining things to me. I heard, but could not make much answer. Thought was too full.

A good distance from home, that is, from the tents, we reached the source of all that fertilising water the channel of which we had followed up. How wild the source was too! No Saracenic arch over that; the water in a full flow came out from among the roots of a great tree - one of the curious thorny dôm trees that grow in thickets over the plain. I believe our Arabs called them dôm; Mr. Dinwiddie said it was a Zizyphus. It was a very large tree at any rate, and with its odd thorny branches and bright green foliage canopied picturesquely the fine spring beneath it. All was wild and waste. The Arabs do not even root out the dîm or nubk trees from the spots they irrigate and cultivate; but the little channels of water flow in and out among the stems and roots of the trees as they can. Times are changed on Jericho's plain.

I thought so, as we turned up the slope of rock rubbish which leads to the foot of the cave cliffs. The mountain here is a sheer face of rock; and the caves, natural or artificial, pierce the rock in tiers, higher and lower. The precipice is spotted with them. The lowest ones are used now by the Arabs to pen their sheep and quarter their donkeys; Mr. Dinwiddie and I looked into a good many of them; in one or two we found a store of corn or straw laid up. Many of the highest caves could not be got at; the paths and stairs in the rock which used to lead to them are washed and worn away; but the second tier are not so utterly cut off from human feet. By a way chiselled in the rock, with good nerves, one can reach them. My nerves were good enough, and I followed Mr. Dinwiddie along the face of the precipice till we reached some sets of caves communicating with each other. These were partly natural, partly enlarged by labour. Places were cut for beds and for cupboards; there was provision of a fine water tank, to which, Mr. Dinwiddie told me, there were stone channels leading from a source some hundreds of feet distant; cistern and tubes both carefully plastered. A few Abyssinian Christians come here every spring to keep Lent, Mr. Dinwiddie said. How much more pains they take than we do, I thought.

"Yes," said Mr. Dinwiddie, when I said my thought aloud, - " 'Skin for skin; all that a man hath will he give for his life.' But when the conscience knows that heaven is not to be bought that way, then there is no other motive left that will use up all a man's energies but the love of Christ constraining him."

"The trouble is, Mr. Dinwiddie, that there is so little of that."

"So little!" he said, - "even in those of us who love most. I do not mean to say that this love had no share in determining the actions of those who used to live here; perhaps they thought to get nearer to Christ by getting nearer to the places of His some time presence and working in human flesh."

"And don't you think it does help, Mr. Dinwiddie?" I said.

He turned on me a very deep and sweet look, that was half a smile.

"No!" he answered. "The Lord may use it, - He often does, - to quicken our sense of realities and so strengthen our apprehension of spiritualities; but just so He can use other things, even remote distance from such and all material helps. Out of that very distance He can make a tie to draw the soul to Himself."

"There must have been a great many of those old Christians living here once?" I said.

"Yes," said Mr. Dinwiddie. "On this face of the mountain there are thirty or forty caves - I think there are many more in the gorge of the Kelt, round on the south face. Do you see that round hole over your head?"

We were standing in one of the caverns. I looked up.

"I cannot get you up there," he went on, - "but I have climbed up by means of a rope. There are other rooms there, and one is a chapel - I mean, it was one, - with arches cut to the windows and doorways, and frescoed walls, full of figures of saints. Through another hole in another ceiling, like this, I got up into still a third set of rooms, like the ones below. Into those nobody had come for many a year; the dust witnessed it. Back of one room, the chapel, was a little low doorway; very low. I crept through - and there in the inner place, lay piled the skeletons of the old hermits; skulls and bones, just as they had been laid while the flesh was still upon them; the dust was inches deep. A hundred feet higher up there are more caverns. No, I should not like to take you - though the Abyssinian devotees come to them every spring. Yet higher than those, far up, near the top of the mountain, I have explored others, where I found still more burial caves like the one just here above us. Chapels and frescoes were up there too."

"And difficult climbing, Mr. Dinwiddie."

"Very difficult. Broken stairs and dizzy galleries, and deep precipices, with the vultures floating in air down below me."

"What a place for men to live!"

"Fitter for the doves and swallows which inhabit the old hermits' houses now. Yet not a bad place to live either, if one had nothing to do in the world. Sit down and rest and let us look at it."

"And I have got some luncheon for you, Mr. Dinwiddie. I should have missed all this if you had not been with me. Papa would never have come here."

There were many places in front of the cells where seats had been cut out in the rock; and in one of these Mr. Dinwiddie and I sat down, to eat fruit and biscuit and use our eyes; our attendant Arab no doubt wondering at us all the while. The landscape in view was exceedingly fine. We had the plains of Jericho, green and lovely, spread out before us; we could see the north end of the Dead Sea and the mouth of the Jordan; and the hills of Moab, always like a superb wall of mountain rising up over against us.

"Do you know where you are?" said Mr. Dinwiddie.

"Partly."

"The site of old Jericho is marked by the heaps and the ruins which lie between us and our camp."

"Yes. That is _old_ Jericho."

"Over against us, somewhere among those Moab hills, is the pass by which the hosts of the 'sons of Israel' came down, with their flocks and herds, to the rich plains over there, - the plains of Moab."

"And opposite us, I suppose, somewhere along there in front of old Jericho, is the place where the waters of the river failed from below and were cut off from above, and the great space was laid bare for the armies to pass over."

"Just over there. And there - Elijah and Elisha went over dry shod, when Elijah smote with his mantle upon the waters; and there by the same way Elisha came back alone, after he had seen his master taken from him."

"Those were grand times!" I said, with a half breath.

"They were rough times."

"Still, they were grand times."

"I think, these are grander."

"But, Mr. Dinwiddie, such things are not done now as were done then."

"Why not?"

"Why, how can you ask?"

"How can you answer?"

"Why, Mr. Dinwiddie, the river is not parted now, this river nor any other, for the Lord's people to go over without trouble."

"Are you sure?" said he, with the deep sweet look I had noticed. "Do they never come now, in the way of their duty, to an impassable barrier of danger or difficulty, through which the same hand opens their path? Did you never find that they do, in your own experience?"

A little, I had; and yet it seemed to me that a very Jordan of difficulty lay before me now, rolling in full power. Mr. Dinwiddie waited a moment and went on.

"That old cry, 'Where is the Lord God of Elijah?' - will bring down His hand, now as then; mighty to hold back worse waves than those of the 'Descender.' Aaron's rod, and the blast of the priests' trumpets, were but the appeal and the triumph of faith. And before that appeal stronger walls than those of Jericho fall down, now as well as then."

"Then it must be the faith that is wanting," I said.

"Sometimes" - Mr. Dinwiddie answered; "and _not_ sometimes. That earnest Sunday-school teacher, who prayed that the Lord would give him at least one soul a week out of his Bible class, and who reported at the end of the year, _fifty-two_ brought to God, - what do you think of his faith? - and his Jericho?"

"Is it true?" I said.

"It is true. What are the walls of stone and mortar to that? We wrestle not with flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world. - But our Captain is stronger."

I think we were both silent for some time; yet there was a din of voices in my ear. So it seemed. Silence was literally broken only by the note of a bird here and there; but the plain before me, the green line which marked the course of the Jordan, the Moab mountains, the ruins at my feet, the caves behind me, were all talking to me. And there were voices of my own past and present, still other voices, blending with these. I sat very still, and Mr. Dinwiddie sat very still; until he suddenly turned to me and spoke.

"Will nothing but a miracle do, Miss Daisy?"

The tone was so gentle and so quietly blended itself with my musings, that I started and smiled.

"Oh, yes," I said; - "I do not suppose I want a miracle."

"Can a friend's counsel be of any use?"

"It might - of the greatest," I answered; - "if only I could tell you all the circumstances."

"Before we go to that, how has it fared with my little friend of old time, all these years?"

"How has it _fared_ with me?" - I repeated in doubt.

"There is only one sort of welfare I know," he said. "It is not strength to the body, or gold to the purse. I am 'well' only when God's favour is shining on me and I am strong to run the way of His commandments."

"I am not strong," I said.

"You know I do not mean my own strength, or yours," he answered.

"I have never forgotten what you used to tell me," I said.

"Good. And yet, Miss Daisy, I would rather you could tell me you had forgotten it; that you had gone on so far from that beginning as to have lost it out of view."

"Ah, but I have not had so many friends to teach me, and help me, that I could afford to forget the first one," I said. "I have one dear old friend who thinks as you do, - and that is all; and I cannot see her now."

" 'If any man lack wisdom, let him ask of God, who giveth to all men liberally and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him,' " Mr. Dinwiddie said.

"I lack wisdom, very much; but it does not seem to come, even though I ask for it. I am sometimes in a great puzzle."

"About what to do?"

"Yes."

"You can always find out the first step to be taken. Jesus will be followed step by step. He will not show you but one step at a time, very often. But take that, holding His hand, and He will show you the next."

"So I came here," I said.

"And what is the work to be done here? on yourself, or on somebody else?"

"I do not know," I said. "I had not thought it was either. Perhaps I am learning."

He was silent then, and I sat thinking.

"Mr. Dinwiddie," I said, "maybe you can help me."

"I will gladly, if I can."

"But it is very difficult for me to put you in possession of the circumstances - or in the atmosphere of the circumstances. I do not know that I can. You know that papa and mamma do not think with me on the subject of religion?"

"Yes."

"There are other things in which I think differently from them - other things in which we feel apart; and they do not know it. Ought I to let them know it?"

"Your question is as enigmatical as an ancient oracle. I must have a little more light. Do these differences of feeling or opinion touch action? - either yours or theirs?"

"Yes, - both."

"Then, unless your minds are known to each other, will there not be danger of mistaken action, on the one part or on the other?"

"Telling them would not prevent that danger," I said.

"They would disregard your views, or you would disregard theirs, - which?"

"I must not disregard theirs," I said low.

Mr. Dinwiddie was silent awhile. I had a sort of cry in my heart for the old dividing of the waters.

"Miss Daisy," he said, "there is one sure rule. Do right; and let consequences break us to pieces, if needs be."

"But," said I doubtfully, "I had questioned what was right; at least I had not been certain that I ought to do anything just now."

"Of course I am speaking in the dark," he answered. "But you can judge whether this matter of division is something that in your father's place you would feel you had a right to know."

I mused so long after this speech, that I am sure Mr. Dinwiddie must have felt that he had touched my difficulty. He was perfectly silent. At last I rose up to go home. I do not know what Mr. Dinwiddie saw in me, but he stopped me and took my hand.

"Can't you trust the Lord?" he said.

"I see trouble before me, whatever I do," I said with some difficulty.

"Very well," he said; "even so, trust the Lord. The trouble will do you no harm."

I sat down for a moment and covered my face. It might do me no harm; it might at the same time separate me from what I loved best in the world.

"Cannot you trust?" he repeated. " 'He that putteth his trust in the Lord shall be made fat.' "

"You know," I said, getting up, "one cannot help being weak."

"Will you excuse me? - That is precisely what we _can_ help. We cannot help being ignorant sometimes, - foolish sometimes, - short-sighted. But weak we need not be; for 'in the Lord Jehovah is everlasting strength;' and 'he giveth power to the faint.' "

"But there is no perfection, Mr. Dinwiddie."

"Not if by perfection you mean, standing alone. But if the power that holds us up is perfect, - what should hinder our having a fulness of that? 'If ye shall ask anything in My name, I will do it.' Isn't that promise good for all we want to ask?"

I sat down again to think. Mr. Dinwiddie quietly took his place by my side; and we were still for a good while. The plains of Jericho and the Jordan and the Moab mountains and the Quarantania, all seemed to have new voices for me now; voices full of balm; messages of soft-healing. I do think the messages God sends to us by natural things are some of the sweetest and mightiest and best understood of all. They come home.

"Do you think," I asked, after a long silence, "that this mountain was really the scene of the Temptation?"

"Why should we think so? No, I do not think it."

"But the road from Jericho to Jerusalem - there is no doubt of that?"

"No doubt at all. We are often sure of the roads here, when we are sure of little else."

There was a pause; and then Mr. Dinwiddie broke it.

"You left things in confusion at home. How do you feel about that?"

"At home in America?" I said. "I do not feel about it as my parents do."

"You side with the North!"

"I have lived there so much. I know the view taken there; and it seems to me the right one. And I have lived at the South too; and I do not like the view held there, - nor the practice followed."

"There are some things I can fancy you would not like," he said musingly. "I have not known what to think. It seems to me they have made a false move. But it seems to me they must succeed."

"I don't know," I said. "Perhaps."

He looked at me a little hard, and then we left the hermits' caves and went down the plain to our encampment.