us more inexplicable. We seldom go into a graveyard except to pay the last offices to a departed friend, and for years afterward we never find ourselves in the same place again without a shade of melancholy coming over us. Not so in the East; to-day they bury a friend, to-morrow they plant flowers over his grave, and the next day, and the next, they tend and water them, and once a week, regularly, they sit by the grave. On every holyday it is a religious duty to go there; and as often as they walk out for health or pleasure, they habitually turn their footsteps to the burial-ground. To them the grave is not clothed with the same terrors. It is not so dark and gloomy as to us. They are firmer believers than we are, though, as we think, in a false and fatal creed; and to them there is a light beyond the grave, which we of a better faith can seldom see. It was a beautiful picture to behold the graveyard thronged with Turkish women, in their long white veils. It would, perhaps, be too poetical to look upon them all as mourners. Perhaps, indeed, it would not be too much to say that, of the immense multitude who, day after day, are seen flitting among the tombs, many a widowed fair one, over the tomb of a dead lord, is dreaming of a living lover.

But there was one whom I noticed every day; she was always sitting by the same stone, and I always noticed her as one of the first to come out and one of the last to return. She was a young Sciote girl, mourning over the tomb of her young lord; and well she might, for he had been to her a friend and protector, and she had been his only bride. When her father's house was laid in ruins, and her grayheaded sire and her manly brothers were slain before her eyes, he had saved her from the bloody cimeter, or from a fate worse than death; and he had wooed her, not as a Turk and master, but as a lover. He had won her young heart; and she had forgotten her kindred and her country; he had died with his bloody cimeter in his hand, and she thought only of the dead when she stood beside his grave.

DESERT OF ST. JOHN.

195

CHAPTER XIV.

Desert of St. John.-A Midnight Procession.-Road to Jericho.-A Community of Women.-A Navigator of the Dead Sea.-A Dance by Moonlight.-A rude Lodging.

IN company with Mr. Whiting, I started for the Desert of St. John the Baptist. Passing the Pool of Gihon, where Saul was anointed king by Zadoc and Nathan, we came to the Convent of the Holy Cross, the great altar of the chapel being erected, as the monks pretend, over the spot where grew the tree from which the cross was made. Moving on among hills and valleys, on our right was a distant view of Ramah, the country of Samuel the seer; and before us, crowning the very top of a high hill, were the ruins of the palace and the burial-place of the warlike Maccabees. The Convent of St. John is built on the spot where John the Baptist was born. There is no doubt of this, say the monks; for beneath the great altar of the church is a circular slab of marble, with an inscription almost effaced: "Hic natus est precursor dei," here the forerunner of the Lord was born. This convent is in a fine situation; a small Christian village is attached to it; the top commands a beautiful view of the mountains, cultivated in terraces; and directly in front is the great Valley of Turpentine, or Elah, the battle-ground of the Israelites and Philistines, of David and Goliath. Taking a Christian boy with us as guide, we entered the valley; and, following the stream to its source, in about two hours we came to the place where, it is said, Saul and the men of Israel pitched by the Valley of Elah, and set the battle in array against the Philistines. It was

precisely the spot where the scene, so graphically recorded in Scripture, might have taken place. "And the Philistines stood on a mountain on the one side, and Israel stood on a mountain on the other side, and there was a valley between them.” On each side of me was a mountain, and the brook was still running near from which the shepherd-boy gathered the five smooth stones. The boy who accompanied us told me that the precise stones had never yet been found, though the monks had often searched for them.

At the extreme end of the valley is the Desert of St. John, where was heard, for the first time, the voice of one crying in the wilderness, "Prepare ye the way of the Lord; make his paths straight." Directly in front, at the top of the mountain bounding the valley, is an open door in the rock, leading to the grotto in which the prophet lived. There is no appearance of a desert in this place, except solitude; and if it be merely a locality fixed upon by the monks, they could not have selected one more inappropriate. It is one of the prettiest and best cultivated spots in the Holy Land; and sitting in the door of the grotto, with an Armenian pilgrim by my side, and looking out upon the valley and the mountains, all around terraced and cultivated to the very summits, all still and beautiful, I thought I had never seen a place better qualified to inspire a pious, philosophic, and happy state of mind, than this Desert of St. John. We returned by a different road, searching on our way for the pool where Philip baptized the eunuch of Queen Candace; but, after losing ourselves once or twice, and fearing a threatening shower, we returned to the city unsuccessful.

At about ten o'clock that evening, the monks, under a guard of soldiers and a crowd of pilgrims, each with a candle in his hand, left St. Stephen's Gate in solemn procession. With a loud chant they crossed the Valley of Jehoshaphat, wound around the foot of the Mount of Olives to Bethpage and Bethany, said mass in the tomb of Lazarus,

and returning, prayed and chanted on the Mount of Olives and in the Garden of Gethsemane; and at about daylight the next morning returned to the convent.

For several days I had been preparing for a journey to the Dead Sea; but a mysterious influence seemed still to hang about the borders of that water; and now, when all the rest of the Holy Land was perfectly tranquil, the Fellahs were in commotion among the barren mountains around it. I had waited two or three days at the request of the governor; but, hearing of nothing in particular to prevent me, I determined to set out. The Sicilian priest who had proposed to accompany me could not go; and at about eight o'clock I was sitting on my horse alone, outside the St. Stephen's Gate, waiting for Paul, who had gone to the governor for a letter which he had promised me to the aga of Jericho. Attracted by the uncommon beauty of the morning, half the population of Jerusalem had already gathered without the walls. Joining a party of pilgrims, I followed once more the path I had so often trodden across the Brook Kedron and the Valley of Jehoshaphat; and, parting with them at the foot of the Mount of Olives, I wound around its base, and fell into the road to Jericho and the Jordan. We must have passed Bethpage, though there is nothing to mark where it stood; and in about an hour we came to Bethany, now a ruined Arab village, though the monks still show the house of Martha and Mary, the tomb of Lazarus, and even the barren fig-tree which was cursed by our Lord. The tomb of Lazarus is a large excavation in the rock; and the sepulchral chamber is at the foot of a staircase of ten or twelve steps.

Not far from Bethany we came to a fountain enclosed with marble, and soon after to a valley, where, the monks

say, our Saviour, in coming from beyond the Jordan, at the prayer of the sisters of Lazarus, reposed with the disciples. In about two hours we were among the mountains. The scene every moment became wilder and more rugged; and, except in the wilderness of Sinai and among the wastes of Idumea, I never travelled so dreary a road as in "going down to Jericho." It is on this desolate route that our Saviour lays the scene of the parable of the good Samaritan; and nowhere could a more forcible illustration be given of the heartlessness of the priest and the Levite, in "passing by on the other side." Ascending for some distance by the precipitous side of a yawning chasm, where a false movement of my horse might have dashed me to atoms, from the top of the Mountains of Desolation I looked to the left upon a higher and still wilder and more dreary range; and, towering above all the rest, in gloomy grandeur, its naked sides pierced with doors for the cells of hermits, was the mountain of our Saviour's fasting and temptation; before me were the plains of Jericho, the Valley of the Jordan, the Mountains of Arabia, and the Dead Sea. A high, square building, like a tower, marked the site of Jericho, and a small stream, running between two banks of sand, was the hallowed Jordan.

Descending the mountain, on our left, directly at the foot, were the remains of an aqueduct and other ruins, which, in all probability, were part of the ancient city of Jericho. The plain commences at the foot of the mountains; the land is fertile, and well watered with streams emptying into the Jordan; but for the most part wild and uncultivated. About half way across we passed the edge of a stagnant pool, nearly covering a Mussulman burying-ground; the tombstones were washed from their places, and here and there the ghastly skeletons were visible above the muddy In one place, crossing a stream, we met three Abyssinians, who had come from the remotest point in the inte

water.