CHAPTER XV.

Expedition to the Monastery of St. Sabba--Reports of Arab Robbers--The Valley of Jehoshaphat--The Bridge of Al Sirat--Rugged Scenery--An Arab Ambuscade--A successful Parley--The Monastery of St. Sabba--History of the Saint--The Greek Hermits--The Church--The Iconostasis--The Library--Numerous MSS.--The Dead Sea--The Scene of the Temptation--Discovery--The Apple of the Dead Sea--The Statements of Strabo and Pliny confirmed.

As we wished to be present at the celebration of Easter by the Greek Church, we remained several weeks at Jerusalem, during which time we made various excursions to the most celebrated localities in the neighbourhood. In addition to the Bible, which almost sufficed us for a guide-book in these sacred regions, we had several books of travels with us, and I was struck with the superiority of old Maundrell's narrative over all the others, for he tells us plainly and clearly what he saw, whilst other travellers so encumber their narratives with opinions and disquisitions, that, instead of describing the country, they describe only what they think about it; and thus little real information as to what there was to be seen or done could be gleaned from these works, eloquent and well written as many of them are; and we continually returned to Maundrell's homely pages for a good plain account of what we wished to know. As, however, I had gathered from various incidental remarks in these books that there was a famous library in the monastery of St. Sabba, in which one might expect to find all the lost classics, whole rows of uncial manuscripts, and perhaps the histories of the Preadamite kings in the autograph of Jemshid, I determined to go and see it.

It was of course necessary for every traveller at Jerusalem to "_do his Dead Sea_;" and accordingly we made arrangements for an excursion in that direction, which was to include a visit to St. Sabba; for my companion kindly put up with my aberrations, and agreed to linger with me for that purpose on our way to Jericho, although it was at the risk of falling among thieves, for we heard all manner of reports of the danger of the roads, and of a certain truculent Robin Hood sort of person, called Abou Gash, who had just got out of some prison or other.

Abou Gash was vastly popular in this part of the country: everybody spoke well of him, and declared that "he was the mildest-mannered man that ever cut a throat or scuttled ship;" but they all hinted that it might be as well to keep out of his way, and that, when we went cantering about the country, poking our noses into caves, and ruins, and other _uncanny_ places, it would be advisable to keep a "good" look-out. For all this we cared little: so, getting together our merry men, we sallied forth through St. Stephen's gate. A gallant band we were, some five-and-twenty horsemen, well armed in the Egyptian style; with tents and kettles, cocks and hens, and cooks and marmitons, stowed upon the baggage-horses. Great store of good things had we--vino doro di Monte Libano, and hams, to show that we were not Mahometans; and tea, to prove that we were not Frenchmen; and guns to shoot partridges withal, and many other European necessaries.

We tramped along upon the hard rocky ground one after the other, through the Valley of Jehoshaphat; and looked up at the corner of the temple, whence is to spring on the last day, as every sound follower of the Prophet believes, the fearful bridge of Al Sirat, which is narrower than the edge of the sharpest cimeter of Khorassaun, and from which those who without due preparation attempt to pass on their way to the paradise of Mahomet will fall into the unfathomable gulf below. Gradually as we advanced into the valley, through which the brook Kedron, when there is any water in it, flows into the Dead Sea, the scenery became more and more savage, the rocks more precipitous, and the valley narrowed into a deep gorge, the path being sometimes among the broken stones in the bed of the stream, and sometimes rising high above it on narrow ledges of rock.

We rode on for some hours, admiring the wild grandeur of the scenery, for this is the hill country of Judea, and seems almost a chaos of rocks and craggy mountains, broken into narrow defiles, or opening into dreary valleys bare of vegetation, except a few shrubs whose tough roots pierce through the crevices of the stony soil, and find a scanty subsistence in the small portions of earth which the rains have washed from the surface of the rocks above. In one place the pathway, which was not more than two or three feet wide, wound round the corner of a precipitous crag in such a manner that a horseman riding along the giddy way showed so clearly against the sky, that it seemed as if a puff of wind would blow horse and man into the ravine beneath. We were proceeding along this ledge--Fathallah, one of our interpreters, first, I second, and the others following--when we saw three or four Arabs with long bright-barrelled guns slip out of a crevice just before us, and take up their position on the path, pointing those unpleasant-looking implements in our faces. From some inconceivable motive, not of the most heroic nature I fear, my first move was to turn my head round to look behind me; but when I did so, I perceived that some more Arabs had crept out of another cleft behind us, which we had not observed as we passed; and on looking up I saw that from the precipice above us a curious collection of bright barrels and brown faces were taking an observation of our party, while on the opposite side of the gorge, which was perhaps a hundred and fifty yards across, every fragment of rock seemed to have brought forth a man in a white tunic and bare legs, with a yellow handkerchief round his head, and a long gun in his hand, which he pointed towards us.

We had fallen into an ambuscade, and one so cleverly laid that all attempt at resistance was hopeless. The path was so narrow that our horses could not turn, and a precipice within a yard of us, of a hundred feet sheer down, rendered our position singularly uncomfortable. Fathallah's horse came to a stand-still: my horse ran his nose against him and stood still too; and so did all the rest of us. "Well!" said I, "Fathallah, what is this? who are these gentlemen?" "I knew it would be so," quoth Fathallah, "I was sure of it! and in such a cursed place too!--I see how it is, I shall never get home alive to Aleppo!"

After waiting a while, I imagine to enjoy our confusion, one of the Arabs in front took up his parable and said, "Oh! oh! ye Egyptians!" (we wore the Egyptian dress)" what are you doing here, in our country? You are Ibrahim Pasha's men; are you? Say--speak; what reason have ye for being here? for we are Arabs, and the sons of Arabs; and this is our country, and our land?"

"Sir," said the interpreter with profound respect--for he rode first, and four or five guns were pointed directly at his breast--"Sir, we are no Egyptians; thy servants are men of peace; we are peaceable Franks, pilgrims from the holy city, and we are only going to bathe in the waters of the Jordan, as all pilgrims do who travel to the Holy Land." "Franks!" quoth the Arab; "I know the Franks; pretty Franks are ye! Franks are the fathers of hats, and do not wear guns or swords, or red caps upon their heads, as you do. We shall soon see whether ye are Franks or not. Ye are Egyptians, and servants of Ibrahim Pasha the Egyptian: but now ye shall find that ye are our servants!"

"Oh Sir," exclaimed I in the best Arabic I could muster, "thy servants are men of peace, travellers, antiquaries all of us. Oh Sir, we are Englishmen, which is a sort of Frank--very harmless and excellent people, desiring no evil. We beg you will be good enough to let us pass." "Franks!" retorted the Arab sheick, "pretty Franks! Franks do not speak Arabic, nor wear the Nizam dress! Ye are men of Ibrahim Pasha's; Egyptians, arrant Cairoites (Misseri) are ye all, every one of ye;" and he and all his followers laughed at us scornfully, for we certainly did look very like Egyptians. "We are Franks, I tell you!" again exclaimed Fathallah: "Ibrahim Pasha, indeed! who is he, I should like to know? we are Franks; and Franks like to see everything. We are going to see the monastery of St. Sabba; we are not Egyptians; what care we for Egyptians? we are English, Franks, every one of us, and we only desire to see the monastery of St. Sabba; that is what we are, O Arab, son of an Arab (Arab beni Arab). We are no less than this, and no more; we are Franks, as you are Arabs."

Upon this there ensued a consultation between this son of an Arab and the other sons of Arabs, and in process of time the worthy gentlemen, knowing that it was impossible for us to escape, agreed to take us to the monastery of St. Sabba, which was not far off, and there to hear what we had to say in our defence.

The sheick waved his arm aloft as a signal to his men to raise the muzzle of their guns, and we were allowed to proceed; some of the Arabs walking unconcernedly before us, and the others skipping like goats from rock to rock above us, and on the other side of the valley. They were ten times as numerous as we were, and we should have had no chance with them even on fair ground; but here we were completely at their mercy. We were escorted in this manner the rest of the way, and in half an hour's time we found ourselves standing before the great square tower of the monastery of St. Sabba. The battlements were lined with Arabs, who had taken possession of this strong place, and after a short parley and a clanging of arms within, a small iron door was opened in the wall: we dismounted and passed in; our horses, one by one, were pushed through after us. So there we were in the monastery of St Sabba sure enough; but under different circumstances from what we expected when we set out that morning from Jerusalem.

Fathallah had, however, convinced the sheick of the Arabs that we really were Franks, and not followers of Ibrahim Pasha, and before long we not only were relieved from all fear, but became great friends with the noble and illustrious Abou Somebody, who had taken possession of St. Sabba and the defiles leading to it.

This monastery, which is a very ancient foundation, is built upon the edge of the precipice at the bottom of which flows the brook Kedron, which in the rainy season becomes a torrent. The buildings, which are of immense strength, are supported by buttresses so massive that the upper part of each is large enough to contain a small arched chamber; the whole of the rooms in the monastery are vaulted, and are gloomy and imposing in the extreme. The pyramidical-shaped mass of buildings extends half-way down the rocks, and is crowned above by a high and stately square tower, which commands the small iron gate of the principal entrance. Within there are several small irregular courts connected by steep flights of steps and dark arched passages, some of which are carried through the solid rock.

It was in one of the caves in these rocks that the renowned St. Sabba passed his time in the society of a pet lion. He was a famous anchorite, and was made chief of all the monks of Palestine by Sallustius, Patriarch of Jerusalem, about the year 490. He was twice ambassador to Constantinople to propitiate the Emperors Anastasius the Silent and Justinian; moreover he made a vow never to eat apples as long as he lived. He was born at Mutalasca, near Cæsarea of Cappadocia, in 439, and died in 532, in the ninety-fifth year of his age: he is still held in high veneration by both the Greek and Latin churches. He was the founder of the Laura, which was formerly situated among the clefts and crevices of these rocks, the present monastery having been enclosed and fortified at I do not know what period, but long after the decease of the saint.

The word laura, which is often met with in the histories of the first five centuries after Christ, signifies, when applied to monastic institutions, a number of separate cells, each inhabited by a single hermit or anchorite, in contradistinction to a convent or monastery, which was called a cœnobium, where the monks lived together in one building under the rule of a superior. This species of monasticism seems always to have been a peculiar characteristic of the Greek Church, and in the present day these ascetic observances are upheld only by the Greek, Coptic, and Abyssinian Christians, among whom hermits and quietists, such as waste the body for the improvement of the soul, are still to be met with in the clefts of the rocks and in the desert places of Asia and Africa. They are a sort of dissenters as regards their own Church, for, by the mortifications to which they subject themselves, they rebuke the regular priesthood, who do not go so far, although these latter fast in the year above one hundred days, and always rise to midnight prayer. In the dissent, if such it be, of these monks of the desert there is a dignity and self-denying firmness much to be respected. They follow the tenets of their faith and the ordinances of their religion in a manner which is almost sublime. They are in this respect the very opposite to European dissenters, who are as undignified as they are generally snug and cosy in their mode of life. Here, among the followers of St. Anthony, there are no mock heroics, no turning up of the whites of the eyes and drawing down of the corners of the mouth: they form their rule of life from the ascetic writings of the early fathers of the Church: their self-denial is extreme, their devotion heroic; but yet to our eyes it appears puerile and irrational that men should give up their whole lives to a routine of observances which, although they are hard and stern, are yet so trivial that they appear almost ridiculous.

In one of the courts of the monastery there is a palm-tree, said to be endowed with miraculous properties, which was planted by St. Sabba, and is to be numbered among the few now existing in the Holy Land, for at present they are very rarely to be met with, except in the vale of Jericho and the valley of the Jordan and the Dead Sea, in which localities, in consequence of their being so much beneath the level of the rest of the country, the temperature is many degrees higher than it is elsewhere.

The church is rather large and is very solidly built. There are many ancient frescos painted on the walls, and various early Greek pictures are hung round about: many of these are representations of the most famous saints, and on the feast of each his picture is exposed upon a kind of desk before the iconostasis or wooden partition which divides the church from the sanctuary and the altar, and there it receives the kisses and oblations of all the worshippers who enter the sacred edifice on that day.

The ικονοsτασις is dimly represented in our older churches by the rood-loft and screen which divides the chancel from the nave: it is retained also in Lombardy and in the sees under the Ambrosian rule; but these screens and rood-lofts, which destroy the beauty of a cathedral or any large church, are unknown in the Roman churches. They date their origin from the very earliest ages, when the "discipline of the secret" was observed, and when the ceremonies of the communion were held to be of such a sacred and mysterious nature that it was not permitted to the communicants to reveal what then took place--an incomprehensible custom which led to the propagation of many false ideas and strange rumours as to the Christian observances in the third and fourth centuries, and was one of the causes which led to several of the persecutions of the Church, as it was believed by the heathens that the Christians sacrificed children and committed other abominations for which they deserved extermination; and so prone are the vulgar to give credence to such injurious reports, that the Christians in later ages accused the Jews of the very same practices for which they themselves had in former times been held up to execration.

In one part of the church I observed a rickety ladder leaning against the wall, and leading up to a small door about ten feet from the ground. Scrambling up this ladder, I found myself in the library of which I had heard so much. It was a small square room, or rather a large closet, in the upper part of one of the enormous buttresses which supported the walls of the monastery. Here I found about a thousand books, almost all manuscripts, but the whole of them were works of divinity. One volume in the Bulgarian or Servian language was written in uncial letters; the rest were in Greek, and were for the most part of the twelfth century. There were a great many enormous folios of the works of the fathers, and one MS. of the Octoteuch, or first eight hooks of the Old Testament. It is remarkable how very rarely MSS. of any part of the Old Testament are found in the libraries of Greek monasteries; this was the only MS. of the Octoteuch that I ever met with either before or afterwards in any part of the Levant. There were about a hundred other MSS. on a shelf in the apsis of the church: I was not allowed to examine them, but was assured that they were liturgies and church-books which were used on the various high days during the year.

I was afterwards taken by some of the monks into the vaulted chambers of the great square tower or keep, which stood near the iron door by which we had been admitted. Here there were about a hundred MSS., but all imperfect; I found the 'Iliad' of Homer among them, but it was on paper. Some of these MSS. were beautifully written; they were, however, so imperfect, that in the short time I was there, and pestered as I was by a crowd of gaping Arabs, I was unable to discover what they were.

I was allowed to purchase three MSS., with which the next day I and my companion departed on our way to the Dead Sea, our friend the sheick having, from the moment that he was convinced we were nothing better or worse than Englishmen and sight-seers, treated us with all manner of civility.

On arriving at the Dead Sea I forthwith proceeded to bathe in it, in order to prove the celebrated buoyancy of the water, and was nearly drowned in the experiment, for, not being able to swim, my head got much deeper below the water than I intended. Two ignorant pilgrims, who had joined our party for protection, baptized each other in this filthy water, and sang psalms so loudly and discordantly that we asked them what in the name of wonder they were about, when we discovered that they thought this was the Jordan, and were sorely grieved at their disappointment. We found several shells upon the shore and a small dead fish, but perhaps they had been washed down by the waters of the Jordan or the Kedron: I do not know how this may be.

We wandered about for two or three days in this hot, volcanic, and sunken region, and thence proceeded to Jericho. The mountain of Quarantina, the scene of the forty days' temptation of our Saviour, is pierced all over with the caves excavated by the ancient anchorites, and which look like pigeons' nests. Some of them are in the most extraordinary situations, high up on the face of tremendous precipices. However, I will not attempt to detail the singularities of this wild district; we visited the chief objects of interest, and a big book that I brought from St. Sabba is endeared to my recollections by my having constantly made use of it as a pillow in my tent during our wanderings. It was somewhat hard, undoubtedly; but after a long day's ride it served its purpose very well, and I slept as soundly as if it had been read to me.

At two subsequent periods I visited this region, and purchased seven other MSS. from St Sabba; among them was the Octoteuch of the tenth, if not the ninth, century, which I esteem one of the most rare and precious volumes of my library.

We made a somewhat singular discovery when travelling among the mountains to the east of the Dead Sea, where the ruins of Ammon, Jerash, and Adjeloun well repay the labour and fatigue encountered in visiting them. It was a remarkably hot and sultry day: we were scrambling up the mountain through a thick jungle of bushes and low trees, when I saw before me a fine plum-tree, loaded with fresh blooming plums. I cried out to my fellow-traveller, "Now, then, who will arrive first at the plum-tree?" and as he caught a glimpse of so refreshing an object, we both pressed our horses into a gallop to see which would get the first plum from the branches. We both arrived at the same moment; and, each snatching at a fine ripe plum, put it at once into our mouths; when, on biting it, instead of the cool delicious juicy fruit which we expected, our months were filled with a dry bitter dust, and we sat under the tree upon our horses sputtering, and hemming, and doing all we could to be relieved of the nauseous taste of this strange fruit. We then perceived, and to my great delight, that we had discovered the famous apple of the Dead Sea, the existence of which has been doubted and canvassed since the days of Strabo and Pliny, who first described it. Many travellers have given descriptions of other vegetable productions which bear some analogy to the one described by Pliny; but up to this time no one had met with the thing itself, either upon the spot mentioned by the ancient authors, or elsewhere. I brought several of them to England. They are a kind of gall-nut. I found others afterwards upon the plains of Troy, but there can be no doubt whatever that this is the apple of Sodom to which Strabo and Pliny referred. Some of those which I brought to England were given to the Linnæan Society, who published an engraving of them, and a description of their vegetable peculiarities, in their 'Transactions;' but as they omitted to explain the peculiar interest attached to them in consequence of their having been sought for unsuccessfully for above 1500 years, they excited little attention; though, as the evidence of the truth of what has so long been considered as a vulgar fable, they are fairly to be classed among the most curious productions which have been brought from the Holy Land.