-
i
■
'
I
//.
^W PRINCETON, N. J. *#
Presented by \i~o\ . J OV^r .o^\\3 0<2AA vcSc~
US 10 7
,3 L7
V.2
Division Section
Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2010 with funding from
Princeton Theological Seminary Library
http://www.archive.org/details/jordanvalleype02libb
tm mm
T I
Th
i
\Tbe Ifcntt
cr P
The Jordan Valley and Petra
William Libbey, Sc.D.
Professor of Physical Geography, Princeton University and
Franklin E. Hoskins, D.D.
Syria Mission, Beirut, Syria
With 159 Illustrations
Two Volumes II
G. P. Putnam's Sons
New York and London Zbe IRnickerbocfcer press
J9°5
COPYKIGHT, 1905 liY
WILLIAM LIBBEY
Ube Ifcnfcfectbocfeer ipress, IRcw JPorfe
CONTENTS
I. — Kerak to Shobek II. — Shobek to Petra III. — Edom and Petra . IV. — Into Petra V. — Petra .... VI. — Petra in Detail . VII. — Theatre — Fairy Dell and High Place VIII. — The Second High Place at Petra
IX.— The Deir
X. — Mount Hor ......
XI. — Petra to the Dead Sea XII.— The Dead Sea ....
i 33
57 69
117
144
160
191
208
231 262 280
APPENDICES
I. — Travelling Time II. — Barometric Elevations III. — Travellers to Petra . IV. — The Hedjaz Railroad . V. — The Mosaic Map of Madeba VI. — Scriptural References VII. — Fossils Collected Index .....
|
• |
323 |
|
324 |
|
|
325 |
|
|
325 |
|
|
328 |
|
|
3Si |
|
|
353 |
|
|
377 |
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Vestibule of House at Kerak . Frontispiece
Kerak Valley from the South .... 3
Ahsa Canyon — Flint Mountain 9
Ahsa Canyon — Flint Bed of Tributary Stream . 13
Tafileh ......••• 17
Tafileh — Prayer Platform — Fountain — After- noon Tea . . . . . • • .21
Shobek from the East ...... 27
Shobek Valley from the Citadel .... 31
Roman Road ........ 39
Camp at the Entrance to the Sik ... 45 Entrance to the Sik — -Beginning of the Sand- stone ........ 49
Entrance to the Sik — First Rock Carvings . 53
Entrance to the Sik — Outer End ... 57
Gorge of Sik ........ 71
Gorge of Sik ........ 73
First View of the Treasury from the Gorge . 77 Treasury — View from the Entrance of the
Gorge ........ 79
Treasury from the Northern Side ... 83 Entrance of the Sik — From Interior of the
Treasury ... .... 85
Gorge of the Sik — Beyond the Treasury . . 89
VI
List of Illustrations
Inner Entrance of the Sik ....
Petra Valley — The Last of the Water
Petra Valley — General View to the South
Petra — Western Wall of Valley
Petra — Site of Ancient City
Petra — General View of the Valley to the East
Petra — Tombs on the Wall of the Eastern Side
of the Valley ......
Petra — Citadel Rock .....
Petra — Temple on Eastern Wall
Petra — Remains of Arch of Triumph .
Petra — Temple near Citadel Rock
Petra — The Unfinished Tomb
Petra — The Columbarium ....
Petra — Corinthian Tomb and Temple .
Petra — Sheikh and Prisoner
Petra — The Amphitheatre ....
Petra — Fairy Dell, on the Road to the First
High Place, near the Treasury Petra — On the Road to the High Place; Quarry
and Pyramids ......
Petra — Court of High Place Petra — Altar of High Place Petra — View of Site of City from Altar of High
Place .......
Petra — Descent from High Place
Petra — Nabathean Inscription
Petra — Rainbow Temple. Entrance to Western
or Exit Gorge ......
Petra — Balustrade on Path to the New High
Place .....
List of Illustrations
Vll
Petra — The New High Place
Petra — Altar in New High Place
Petra — Looking East from Citadel Rock ove
New High Place .....
Petra — Western Gorge from New High Place Petra — A Lateral Valley from the South Petra — Road to the Deir, Looking West . Petra — Road to the Deir; Stairway . Petra — Road to the Deir ....
Petra — Road to the Deir ....
Petra — The Deir ......
Petra — Roman Hand-mill ....
Petra — -Road to Mount Hor. Southern Valley Petra— Mount Hor .....
Petra — Mount Hor. Aaron's Tomb Petra — View from Mount Hor, Looking North Petra — View from Mount Hor, Looking East Petra — View from Mount Hor, Looking South
west ........
Petra — View from Mount Hor, Looking West
Shobek from the South .
Tafileh from the South
Bir Mlih on the Road from Tafileh to the Ghor
Tafileh Plateau from the Ghor .
Camp in the Ghor ....
Native House-Tent
Inhabitants of the Ghor
Apples of Sodom ....
Road across Salt Morass — Southern End of
Dead Sea ..... Western Side of Salt Morass
PAGE 197
20I
203 205 209 213
21S 219
221 225 229
233 237 24I
245 249
253 257 265 269
275 28l 283 287 289 293
295 299
viii List of Illustrations
PAGE
Jebel Usdum from the South . . . 301
Dead Sea Beach from Jebel Usdum . . . 305
Calcareous Sandstone, back of Jebel Usdum . 307 Mountains West of Northern End of Jebel
Usdum 3IT
Northern End of Jebel Usdum .... 313 Dead Sea from the Northern End of Jebel
Usdum 3X7
Northern End of Dead Sea, Varying Beach
Levels ........ 321
The Mosaic Map of Madeba . . . . 331
Fossils (Plates A, B, and C) 371
PLATES
Bird's-Eye View of Location of Petra . . 48
Clay Water Pipe, Petra 87
Plan of Petra 97
The Jordan Valley and Petra
THE JORDAN VALLEY AND PETRA
CHAPTER I
KERAK TO SHOBEK
THE journey from Kerak to Petra is sometimes made in three long and hard days. Those who must rush through in this fashion lose much that is worth seeing, and severely test the strength and endurance of men and animals. So here again we departed from the usual plan, and transformed a most difficult stage of the journey into a delightful ride. We broke the journey from Kerak to Tafileh into two stages, and spent a night again in the wilderness. We did the same between Tafileh and Shobek, and would most heartily recommend this plan to all who may fol- low us in the short winter days. It involves only the carrying of extra barley for the animals and charcoal for cooking purposes. There is an abund- ance of water and good camping-places. Our
2 The Jordan Valley and Petra
riding time between Kerak and Tafileh was five and a half hours one day, and four and a half the next, or ten hours in all. But our muleteers re- quired seven and six hours, or thirteen hours in all, which would have been an impossibility for any winter day, and cruelty to men and animals in the heat and drought of summer. From Tafileh to Ain el Gelaidat, we took four hours, and on to Shobek in five hours, but our muleteers required five and six and a half hours respectively, or nearly twelve hours in all. To journey thirteen hours one day, with muleteers and camping outfit, and twelve the next, not mentioning the time and labor required to take down and set up the tents, is not pleasure, but unnecessary hardship and even cruelty. The stage from Shobek to the Sik, or entrance to Petra, can be made easily by the muleteers in six and a half hours, and therefore with comfort. A large part of the difficulties and dangers encountered by travellers in such regions arises from their attempt- ing to do too much, or to do the impossible.
Mules and muleteers can do very hard work, and stand much hardship, if only they can have food and rest and be treated fairly. But when driven beyond their strength, the men lose their tempers, the mules get sore backs, and if cold and rainy weather or the pangs of thirst are added, camp life loses all its charms. The pleasures of a whole jour- ney may be dissipated by the attempt to save or gain a day at the wrong place. And those who elect, as we did, to take muleteers into a country
Kerak to Shobek 5
where only camels are supposed to live, must make due allowance, in time and the weight of the loads. When they do this, they can expect to enjoy travelling in this extremely barren region. Otherwise they had better remain in the beaten tracks west of the Jordan.
Among the remarkable features of the road between Kerak and Petra is the matter of the eleva- tions and depressions. Our tents in Kerak were at an elevation of three thousand four hundred feet, and in Petra itself about three thousand feet, but we clipped once to seventeen hundred and fifty feet, and climbed twice to five thousand six hundred and five thousand eight hundred feet, with half a dozen smaller variations. A glance at the diagram, Vol. I., p. 35, will explain better than many words can our experiences along this line.
Here aeain we noticed a ofreat increase in the number and thickness of the layers of flint. Portions of the side walls of these canyons exposed surfaces where there was a sheer precipice of from eight hundred to a thousand feet, much of which was solid flint. The layers varied from one to fifty feet in thickness, and in one instance a single layer exceeded a hundred feet in thickness. All of the darker portion of the rock shown in the photograph on page 9 is composed of flint. This mass is to be found almost in the bottom of the canyon of the Ahsa, and on its northern side. We named it Flint Mountain.
In portions of the bottom of the gorge, where lateral or tributary streams enter, we found that
6 The Jordan Valley and Petra
where the stream had reached a flint layer that it apparently could not manage, it flowed over this polished bed, leaving a surface like glass, and which glistened like the reflecting surface of water, when seen from a distance. When the stream reached the edge of the stratum bordering on the main val- ley, it dropped over the solid cliff, and began the process of undermining. The underlying limestone was more easily acted upon, and when a sufficient quantity had been removed, the weight of the stratum of flint was all that was needed to break the layer down of itself. Great quantities of such boulders were found near the mouth of such trib- utary streams, and in this slow manner the waters were eroding their bed back into the main mass of the rock.
Everywhere traces could be found of the exist- ence of intense heat sometime in the past, as shown in the fusion of the rocks, but there were no signs of lava.
We left Kerak at 8 a.m., by passing through the breach in the southern wall, just west of the great castle, and in twenty minutes had dropped into the narrow valley. We paused several times to enjoy the wonderful view of the castle and city wall be- hind us (see photograph, Kerak Seen from South). The ramp of the castle at the point where the hill hides it was fully one hundred and fifty feet high, which, with more than one hundred feet of the tower, makes an unbroken wall of two hundred and fifty feet still standing.
Kerak to Shobek 7
During the ride of four hours, we reckoned that we had seen at least thirty ruins of towns and vil- lages, and many signs of the industry of former generations. At n a.m., we had climbed again to forty-three hundred and fifty feet, and stood on the brink of the Wady el Hessi or el Ahsa. Then within two hours we had dropped twenty-seven hundred feet, and found the descent rather harder for the animals than the descent to the Arnon. Half-way down we passed a rather extensive ruin called Abdy, which from its location might have been a small fort or guard-house. The road is easily found by following the telegraph poles.
Wady el Hessi is one of those valleys which boasts more than one name. Some write it Hissa, but we heard "el Ahsa" more frequently than any other form. It is called also " Wady el Sid- diyeh," " Seil Ghoraby," and in its lower course " Wady el Kurahi." It forms the southern bound- ary of the district of Kerak. In ancient times it was the boundary between Moab and Edom (Deut. ii., 13, 14; Num. xxi., 12). Like the Arnon it is not one valley but several, and the various names for the branches have occasioned confusion. At times one of the names is applied to all the system, and at another each branch seems to have a sepa- rate name. The valley, where we crossed it, differed from the Arnon in having a level floor, not less than two hundred yards wide. Toward the west the sides closed in, but are not nearly so precipitous as those of the Arnon. Toward the east the valley
8 The Jordan Valley and Petra
divided, and from a distance it looked as though most of the smaller valleys would be passable. A fringe of oleanders, reeds, and scrubby trees, in places one hundred yards wide, lined the stream where we camped, and our animals enjoyed picking at the herbage among the bushes. We walked up and down the valley, but did not see a sign of any living being, though we suspected the existence of wild boars, and had heard that amoncr the cliffs toward the Dead Sea leopards had frequently been shot. We amused ourselves by kindling fires along the stream and when the reeds, twenty to thirty feet high, began to burn fiercely, there was a con- tinuous series of reports like those of a small can- non. We watched and hoped for a sight of a startled boar, but failed to see one. Nothing could exceed the stillness and loneliness of this spot. But while we saw no sign of any living creature, we did not fail to set a sharp watch on our animals all night long, and to wake the echoes by volleys from our guns at intervals. Arabs who steal horses and mules will follow a caravan for days, waiting for the chance to get away with an animal.
It was delightful sleeping in this wild spot, but before morning we had a taste of the winds which sweep up such canyons, and found our tents rock- ing and lurching about in a manner that made us hasten to get into our clothing. Before we had swallowed breakfast, things were Mapping at a great rate, and it required the help of every hand in camp to get the tents down and rolled into their
Kerak to Shobek 1 1
coverings. By the time we had packed up, big rain- drops began to fall, and we made preparation for facine the storm, which threatened to break in violence. Our road out of the valley, after crossing the stream, struck up a flint-floored canyon where the rock was worn as smooth as shining brass. The strokes of ten thousand hoofs beating upon it for thousands of years have not made so much as a foothold into this stratum, which ascends at an easy grade for miles. Here and there occurs a change from one stratum of flint to another, where a cliff-like wall threatens to end all farther progress, and the road has been carried with great difficulty round the debris on either side.
Our barometers gave the floor of the valley an elevation of sixteen hundred and fifty feet. In half an hour we had climbed to twenty-one hundred ; then made a descent of about three hundred feet. After that there came a steady climb of two hours until the needles of our barometers stood at forty- two hundred feet again. A little later they dropped to four thousand feet, and kept at that elevation until we came into siorht of Tafileh.
At one point on the road, about an hour south of the Ahsa, we saw ten huge heaps of stones, piled up irregularly along the road. A few years ago some Arabs swooped in from the desert, stole cattle from the Kerak people, and were escaping along this road with their plunder. The Kerakese fol- lowed, and came up with the Arabs at this spot. A free fight followed, in which six of the Arabs
12 The Jordan Valley and Petra
were shot dead and four wounded. Afterwards the Arabs raised a heap of stones to mark each of the ten pools of blood. We were unable to find out whether the feud or account was still open, but no Arab of that particular tribe will pass there without adding an oath and a stone to the heaps already so prominent.
But what will make this day's ride a memorable one was the howling storm which broke upon us as we climbed the southern slope of the valley. Many a time we thought of the saying, current in Moab, " O Lord, do not listen to the prayers of the travellers ! " Travellers are always supposed to ask for fair weather, and if we called for fair weather that day the prayers of the people prevailed and the heavens gathered for a storm. We foresaw its coming, and eot out our heaviest clothing and rubber coats. It came from the west and south, and proved to be one of the most pitiless we ever faced. Half an hour away from camp, as we climbed over a small ridge, it struck us fairly in the face. Our horses quailed before it, and struggled up the steep road. We buttoned our clothing tighter and made light of it. But the higher we climbed the fiercer it blew, and at many a turn it seemed as though both we and our horses would be carried bodily over the precipices or down the rough slopes.
Most of a man's clothing buttons over from left to rieht, and we never saw the great disadvantage of this before. The fierce wind lifted one fold after
H
fe
o
Kerak to Shobek 15
another of clothing, and the cold rain beat in at every crevice, until it seemed almost madness to push on. But there was nothing else to do. And so for over four hours, more than half of which was along the mountain ridge at an elevation of four thousand feet, we pushed against the howl- ing storm until the last drop in the road brought us below the ridge and in sight of Tafileh. Half an hour later we were sheltered inside the half-built government building, beating our chests and kicking our legs out to rouse a little warmth within. We were soaked to the skin around our necks and high up above our knees. Our big over- coats were completely waterlogged and weighed not less than forty pounds ! The building was without doors or windows and the winds swept through it with violence. Our muleteers while on the trail at times had to hide below the rocks, and were two hours behind us. Just as they came toil- ing round the shoulder of the mountain towards the town, the howling winds slackened up and the sun broke through the clouds, giving us an hour or two in which to set up our camp among the olive trees. We dug around the tents and Milhem brought a huge sack of chaff which we spread inside and around the tents, and saved our baggage from being dumped into the mud. Barring our wet clothing we managed to make ourselves fairly comfortable. The thermometer dropped to 510, and the wind and rain kept up most of the night. The storm proved to be so violent that our men
1 6 The Jordan Valley and Petra
sought shelter for their animals and themselves in the town. After some bargaining as usual, they rented a house which would take them all in for eleven cents, and were happy.
This wind was most peculiar in some of its features. It died out about sunset but sprang up again about ten o'clock at night and continued to increase in violence until the morning, when it amounted to a gale. It is quite doubtful whether our tents would have stood this searching test of their strength if we had not pitched them in an olive grove, which gave us considerable shelter.
Our position gave us a clue to the cause of this disturbance. Looking directly down the valley in front of our tents we could see the Dead Sea, and the wind followed that line directly, as though it were a great chimney, to relieve the pressure upon the surface of that body of water. This may afford an explanation of those sudden and terrific gales which descend upon the Dead Sea. The over- heated eastern plateau starts an ascending current, and the numerous canyons which cut through the great eastern boundary of the Sea afford an ex- cellent channel to start " a draft," as it were, from below, and this in its turn brings about serious con- sequences upon the Sea when the equilibrium of the atmosphere is upset. It is thus easy to see why it is that a moderate storm is almost an impossibility in this region. The phenomenal atmospheric pres- sures developed in the depression of the Ghor, and
Kerak to Shobek 19
the ease with which they can be disturbed, are a constant menace to peace and quiet, thus making the Dead Sea a species of perpetual " storm centre." Tafileh is one of the hapax legomena of the Bible. It is mentioned as " Tophel " in Deut. i., 1, and never appears again. That it was an im- portant place in Crusader days is evidenced by the large fortified tower which still stands on the highest point of the knoll, and is occupied by a garrison of two hundred Turkish soldiers. It is a large village of seven hundred houses. The inhabitants are nearly all in the middle stage, between dwellers in tents and dwellers in cities. On our return some ten days later we saw them getting out their hair tents, mending and repairing them preparatory to taking to the nomad life for the summer months. The town is beautifully situated on the side of a hill, with a well-watered and well-cultivated valley below it. There are no less than eight springs in and around the village. The one on the main road with a small Moslem prayer platform beside it is esteemed the best drinking water. The olive groves, vineyards, and fig orchards are like an oasis in the desert. Kerak on the inside is a dust and rubbish heap, but Tafi- leh is a beautiful little garden town. The view from the top of its castle over the Dead Sea is of exceptional beauty and interest. That quiet water surface seemed well within the reach of a rifle ball although it was five thousand feet below us ; but, as we found out later, it required more
20 The Jordan Valley and Petra
than fourteen hours to reach it, down a terrible road.
We had expected to find a friend in Tafileh to whom we carried special letters from Beirut, Abd el Ghanny Pasha, an enlightened man from an old Beirut family. As a young man he acted as "yawar" or aide-de-camp to the Sultan Abd el Aziz prior to the latter's death in 1876, and has served the Turkish government in some capacity ever since. Evidences of his activity as Pasha of Tafileh, and desire to improve the country, appeared in the repairing of the roads all round the town. A new mosque had been built and occupied, a telegraph office and the new government build- ing were fast approaching completion. He aided Rasheed Pasha in building the great school build- ing at Kerak, and in stretching the telegraph wires to Mecca and Medina. We were sorry to miss seeing him, but the judge and the telegraph operator did all they could to make our stay pleasant.
Next day we left Tafileh (thirty-six hundred and fifty feet) and crossing a ridge or two were soon mov- ing along; amoncr well-watered fields at an elevation of forty-four hundred feet. At Ain el Beidah (one hour and forty minutes) a stream of clear water flows across the main road. For more than an hour we had Buseirah, the little Bozrah, in siofht, as we wound round the deep ravines which cut it off on three sides from the main table-land. It has a strong natural position in this lawless region. It
<
< o
Kerak to Shobek 23
was an important town of Edom and is mentioned in Scripture under the name of Bozrah of Edom. There are many signs of extensive buildings all round the region, and an abundance of water.
Just east of Buseirah is a shrine called Neby Haudefeh, a rude stone building, around which are piled timbers and farming utensils, under the protection of the owner of the shrine. It is one of those strange places where the Moslems offer bloody offerings. The custom here is to carry the sheep to the roof, cut its throat above the doorway, and allow the blood to run down the walls. The blackened streaks and cakes of dried blood are visible from a distance.
At the brook beyond the Neby our barometers registered forty-one hundred and fifty feet, and dur- ing- the course of the next hour we climbed an easv, grassy slope, until we reached a beautiful fountain called Am el Gelaidat, at five thousand two hundred and fifty feet above the sea. Here we pitched our tents and allowed all the animals to graze until sunset. During the night the thermometer dropped to thirty-one degrees, and, while the wind was not very high, the muleteers found it almost too cold to sleep, and as a consequence were moving about lonor before the dawn. It was one of the most beautiful of all our camping-places and, though there were no places of great interest in sight, the outlook was exceedingly wide and exhilarating.
The sky had a rainy look in the early morning, but it soon cleared off cold, and the ride on to
24 The Jordan Valley and Petra
Shobek was another delightful day in the wilder- ness. Half an hour beyond the camp, we looked down from fifty-six hundred feet upon the little village of Dana, once surrounded by forests of oak which are dwindling rapidly away. We enjoyed beautiful views of the Wady Dana a deep cleft below the town, whose precipitous sides rise from five hundred to one thousand feet at the angles of a railroad cutting, and extend for miles in a straight line out and down to the Arabah.
Beyond Dana we turned eastward, and catching again the wide curve of the ancient Roman road, we wound down the eastern slope, passing exten- sive ruins on a bluff, to the wide plateau. For two and a half hours we rode over this miniature desert, at an elevation of forty-six hundred feet, where nothing but sage-brush was to be seen for miles and miles, north, east, and south. Toward the west, we caught glimpses of the Arabah and the barren mountains beyond.
About 10 a.m. we sighted Shobek, off to the right, with an apparently unbroken plain between us and the castle. And here we bade farewell to our faithful guides — the telegraph poles and wires — which we had followed for nine days down the highlands. They swung off eastward to Maan and the caravan road to Mecca, while our road struck over the plain, straight toward the castle. Without much warning we suddenly found our- selves on the brink of a deep chasm, and began a sharp descent into what proved to be Wady
Kerak to Shobek 25
Shobek. In half an hour we had dropped to thirty-seven hundred and fifty feet in a perfect landslide of black basalt boulders. For more than an hour we wound along this valley, until we reached a fine grove of olive trees, not far from the base of the hill upon which stands the castle of Shobek— the Mons Regalis of the Crusades. It was built by Baldwin I., in a position of great natural strength, and within easy distance of the great caravan route between Cairo and Damascus. This fortress, with a single difficult entrance, stand- ing as it does in an almost inaccessible location, must have been impregnable before the intro- duction of firearms. Nothing but starvation, with no hope of relief, could have forced any garrison to surrender. We know that Saladin made more than one desperate and fruitless attempt to cap- ture it. Like the Kerakese, the people of Shobek have clung tenaciously to their semi -indepen- dence all through the centuries. It has, no doubt, changed hands many times, but the Arab tribe who possessed it have had a strong place to fall back upon, whenever pressed by an enemy. The Turk- ish government took this part of the country in 1893, and placed here a small garrison of mounted soldiers. In May, 1895, some trouble arose be tween the garrison and the people over the de- mands the soldiers made to have the women carry water from the valley below to water the soldiers' horses. The people drove out the soldiers, pro- visioned themselves, shut the gate, and defied the
26 The Jordan Valley and Petra
ofovernment at Kerak. The Mutaserrif called upon them to surrender. They answered that while willing to pay all taxes imposed upon them, they would no longer admit any soldiers to dwell in the city. The government gathered some six hundred foot soldiers and one hundred cavalry, and, planting two cannon on a neighbor- ing hill, laid siege to the place. Occasional skir- mishes lasted for weeks. Then some Bedawin came to the relief of the besieged, but they were stampeded and put to flight by the cavalry and the band of military music ! The soldiers bombarded the city for days, and we saw plainly where the walls and houses had been splashed with lead from the Martinis and shattered by the cannon balls. The government forces eventually took the city, after two hundred of the people and twenty of the soldiers had been killed, and at the time of our visit maintained a guard of eleven horsemen there. We renamed the castle " the Mailed Fist," for, seen from almost every side, it is the most insolent and threatening fortress we ever saw. We pitched our tents by a small spring to the south, and then proceeded to ride up into the fortress itself. The northern slope of the hill is fully six hundred feet high, but from our camp to the city gate was a climb of three hundred feet. The road encircles two sides of the hill in its easy winds. The hill itself is of limestone, but with hundreds of plate- like strata of flint, standing at an angle of forty-five degrees, and looking very like great plates of steel.
Kerak to Shobek 29
After the Crusaders abandoned the place, some of the Moslems repaired it, and inserted great Arabic inscriptions like a frieze round the castle walls. The letters of these inscriptions are two and three feet in height, and extend for hundreds of feet unbroken. It is perhaps within the truth to say that nearly half a mile of inscriptions still exist. No doubt they express the joy and pride of those who fought so long and so savagely against the Crusade banners in these regions. The walls on all sides are very fine and the winding road is commanded by them at every foot of its ascent. The present gate is a breach among the ruins of a tower and is closed by a rude wooden wicket. Inside the wall is a confused mass of strong buildings, arches, vaults, stairways, wTith story above story of the present filthy dwellings. At one point are the re- mains of an enormous building with a tablet telling something of its history. There are also the ruins of a church of the Crusaders ; in fact the old masonry seems to be entirely of Crusading origin, even though the site may well have been occupied by one of the dukes of Edom. The most curious feature of the city is a deep well among the ruins, with some three hundred and seventy-five steps leading down to the water. So that with food to eat the fortress could hold out indefinitely against an enemy. Several springs of water burst from the sides and base of the hill, and are led away to irrigate the gardens, which are in a state of great neglect though capable of being made valuable.
3° The Jordan Valley and Petra
The present people have been accustomed to plough and sow only as far as a bullet would carry and protect a growing crop !
The view from the castle is fine and extends far over the plain to the north and east.
We met the sheikh of the place, whose name is Deeb (wolf), in the room of the Zabit, and the sight was a strange one. Deeb was a good type of an aristocratic Arab, lithe in figure, lone, slender hands, dressed in desert costume with sword and Mowing garments. The Zabit was as good a type of a brutal Roman soldier, and his chief pleasure seemed to be that of gloating over Deeb and his followers. He used his tongue like a whip- lash, told us the story of their ineffectual attempts to hold the castle against the government, anc[ ended each paragraph with an invitation to Deeb to say : " Allah Yansur es Sultan " — " May God make the Sultan victorious." For reasons that need no explication here Deeb would make the proper response, and the Zabit would then curse him, and tell him that it came from his lips only and not from his heart. It recalled another Arab saying that no Anglo-Saxon can fully understand, " Kiss the hand that you cannot break and bide your time."
We had difficulty in securing barley at Shobek. The Mecca caravan had passed southward some twenty days before us, and all these highland towns had been scoured for provisions of all kinds. This was one reason, but a far more powerful one was
Kerak to Shobek 33
the presence of the eleven government horsemen whose animals needed barley every day. Our muleteers came back in daylight with empty bags, but at sunset some of the people came stealthily and an hour later we had all the barley we needed. Had they declared in daylight the existence of barley in their homes the soldiers would have had either barley or the money very soon.
In hunting for the meaning of Shobek, the mod- ern name of the castle and town, and in searching for some possible connection with the Crusader name, Mons Regalis, we came across a thread of coincidence which may some day lead to a solu- tion. We state it for what it is worth. The last Crusader chief who held Kerak and this out- post of Mons Regalis was Reynald, or Renau de Chatillon, the audacious freebooter, whose perfidy towards Saladin brought on the final slaughter which ended the Kingdom of Jerusalem at Hattin (see Vol. I., p. 115). Chatillon in French has the meaning of a diminutive for the lamprey eel, and it is not a long stretch of the imagination to suppose that Reynald carried somewhere on his armor or banners some symbol connected with this slippery creature. This would of course be a well-known sign to the warriors of Saladin. Mons Regalis, with Kerak, shared the rigors of siege and bloody assault. Reynald must more than once have been shut up within its walls, after raiding the regions round about. Perhaps the final act of the drama, east of the Jordan, was played here, and when at
34 The Jordan Valley and Petra
last the " lamprey eel " was caught, in this almost impregnable fortress, the Saracens, quick then as their descendants are to-day, changed the name, in fine derision, from Mons Regalis to Shobek, for Shobek means in Arabic a fishing-net. The great inscriptions round the fortress walls will some day be gathered, and it is almost certain that some reference will be found in them to the last great scene in the tragedy.
Latin literature should eventually give us the ancient name of Shobek. The fact that there are two Roman roads between Shobek and Petra points clearly to its importance long before the days of the Crusaders.
T
CHAPTER II
SHOBEK TO PETRA
HIS last stage was an exciting one. The dream of twenty years was about to come true. The long journey of twenty-five days from Beirut was almost accomplished. All diffi- culties had been overcome, and there was only one short day's ride between us and the goal. Could the actual Petra equal our expectations, or even rank well with the many interesting sights we had seen on our way to it ? The cool air of the moun- tain-tops, and afterwards the warm sunshine, was as beautiful as any winter day could be, and the day will live forever in our memories, as a fitting climax to all that preceded it.
There are two, if not three, roads between Sho- bek and Petra. We chose the easterly one in going and a more westerly one in returning. We struck camp and were on the march at 8 a.m. Because we no longer had the telegraph-poles to guide the muleteers, and because we were acting as our own guides, we kept our baggage train in sight all day. Our camp in Shobek was south of the fortress, and our barometers registered forty-
35
36 The Jordan Valley and Petra
seven hundred feet. We climbed out of the valley by a road bearing east, and in fifteen minutes were on the plateau, level with the fortress. Ten min- utes later we crossed the watercourse, and, leav- ing the mill about three hundred yards to the left, pulled slowly up a low ridge, and across two small valleys, our road rising gently all the way. About 9.30, we left the main road and turned up a slope, reaching Bir Kadaa at 10.15. Then we went due south, through a long, narrow valley, up which ran an easy road to the crest, where the barometers marked fifty-seven hundred and fifty feet, or more than one thousand feet higher than Shobek. Crossing this watershed, we dropped into another narrow valley filled with butm trees and carpeted with fresh, green grass. Here and there we saw traces of bears' claws, where these animals had searched for acorns, after the snows had melted away. Beyond another hillside, which showed ruins of some sort, we crossed a ridge, went down a steep slope, and, at 11.40, joined the main road a^ain, which had made a lone swine around the mountains to the west of our higher route. After twenty minutes we reached a fine spring among extensive ruins, and sat down for a good luncheon. Our barometers here stood at fifty-four hundred feet, and a few minutes beyond rose again close to fifty-seven hundred feet. Here we found ourselves on the back of a rid^e, with a wide view east and west. Then, for a distance of three or four miles, we followed the best bit of Roman road we had
Shobek to Petra 37
ever seen. It was almost unbroken, and showed exactly what it was eighteen hundred or two thou- sand years ago. It was made of basalt blocks, at either side a fence-like row protruding above the ground like a border. The street within was triple ; there was a road in the centre, paved with large blocks, and two paved ways on either side. These side roads sloped each way from the central di- viding line of bia; blocks to the fence-like rows on either side. The way this road swung around the mountain-tops and over ravines, disdainful of every difficulty, holding steadily to its course south- ward, was grandly impressive. We thought of the days when a Roman chariot and its proud war-horses could have travelled from these lonely mountain- tops of Edom, up through Asia Minor, over the Hellespont through Europe, and hard up to the borders of Scotland, on just such roads as this. No power but Rome ever held Eastern Palestine secure against the desert, and her roads and bridges are still an enduring monument to her greatness. Among the travellers who preceded us more re- cently in these regions were two German scholars, Professors Brunnow and Euting, and part of their work was the recovering of the ancient Roman milestones, such as we saw at the Arnon (Vol. I., p. 313). Between Irbid and Petra they have dug up more than two hundred, many of which are covered with fine inscriptions. We saw traces of their efforts at many points, and heard of their work at many places that we did not take time to visit.
38 The Jordan Valley and Petra
After an hour along this magnificent mountain ridge, and before we had ceased to mention and admire the works and power of the ancient Ro- mans, we swung out to the end of the headland. The outlook southward expanded, and suddenly there burst into view, a thousand or fifteen hundred feet lower down and not more than three or four miles away, a wonderful mass of castellated peaks, domes, pinnacles, and other fantastic shapes, with indescribable coloring, from snow-white at the base to purples and yellows and crimsons higher up, bathed and transformed in the brilliant sunshine, till it seemed like an enchanted fairyland. The main mass from side to side was not less than fifteen miles in extent, and the height, as it cleared the surrounding ridges, appeared to be not less than four thousand feet above the sea. All the outlines were smoothed and rounded, as though covered with a veil of diaphanous light. Beyond this mass to the left stood the sharper peak of Mount Hor, with Aaron's tomb glistening in the sunlight, and below them both, five thousand feet down and some distance beyond, was the deep cleft of the Arabah, reaching southward toward the Gulf of Akabah. We gazed enchanted, for somewhere in the heart of this brilliant mass lay the ancient city of Petra, about which we had read and dreamed and were now to see with our own eyes.
And here we experienced a genuine surprise. After all we had read and studied, we had failed to realize that the entrance to Petra from the north
Shobek to Petra 4*
was a descent, a down-hill road, into the heart of the great rocky mountain, and not an ascent, up some rocky ravine, into an eagle's nest of a city.
The original founder of this stronghold, we now began to realize, must have been a strategist of no mean powers, — a man who was not afraid to break away from precedent, and do an original act.
Most fortified spots in the world's history have been elevations, because men chose to co-operate with nature in making her almost inaccessible places perfectly safe resorts by their ingenuity and skill. We had seen many such places from the beginning of the trip until now. Here, however, wa*s a hole in the ground, as it were, which had proven just as efficient a protection to its inhab- itants as a hilltop could be. What a splendid location it was, and how thoroughly guarded by nature, will appear as we proceed. From our standpoint, we could only make out that some- where, out in the central portion of this tangled and badly eroded mass, there was a depression, deep enough for its surrounding natural walls to hide its bottom from view. A simple inspection of the surface of the sandstone was sufficient to deter us from attempting to cross it, as a more un- even, ragged mass is hard to imagine. It seemed as though, not content with its ordinary work, erosion had produced enormous pinnacles and cut deep fissures beside them, until the natural che- vaux-de-frise forbade all access from the foot of the limestone walls to the edge of the depression,
42 The Jordan Valley and Petra
which was about two miles away. The following sketch will give a diagrammatic idea of the region, as it would look from the direction of the Arabah in a bird's-eye view.
,(,v
'!;i\W
Sandstone Sffif
w
it'i
-& f
ft
iiai
^SfiP!8?W
BIRD'S-EYE VIEW OF THE LOCATION OF PETRA
We had been journeying along a limestone ridge, with here and there an outcrop of basalt or flint from which the Romans built their splendid road. And now we came to the southern edge of the limestone formation with a cliff-like slope of one thousand feet, and were looking down into an an- cient geological bay, which nature had filled with this matchless mass of many-hued sandstone.
This bay, in the eastern side of the great Jordan depression, immediately attracted our attention. It was almost semicircular in form, being about twenty miles in length, north and south, and about twelve or fifteen from east to west at its widest portion.
Shobek to Petra 43
The sandstone mass seemed to fill it to about the same height throughout its entire extent, as far as our telescopes could enable us to judge, Mount Hor itself being but one of many "fragments" left in place during the erosion of the upper surface of the sandstone. All of the elevations upon this lower level were below the point of contact of the sand- stone with the limestone, and we found afterward that even the summit of Mount Hor was some four hundred feet below this line.
The line of contact between the two formations is non-conformable, and varies up and down through several hundred feet, as far as we were able to in- vestigate it, at the point where we descended from the upper level to the lower. The limestone strata retain their nearly horizontal position throughout the whole eastern side of the bay, and appear in the same position between the masses of sand- stone, giving the latter the appearance, so plainly shown in some of the photographs, of having been plastered against the limestone.
The structure of the sandstone throughout indi- cated that it had been a brackish-water formation, and it varied in consistency even in the same mass ; which would account for some of the fantastic forms of erosion so evident on every hand.
We were standing at an elevation of nearly fifty-five hundred feet, and began here our plunge downward into Wady Musa. The limestone rock ceased at forty-seven hundred feet, and there the sandstone formation began. For an hour and a
44 The Jordan Valley and Petra
quarter we continued the steep descent, and, leav- ing the town of Elji on the left, made our way into the bottom of the valley along which flowed the stream, lined with a thick growth of oleanders. Twenty-one hundred feet had disappeared from the barometric record noted when we stood on the limestone cliff on the edge of the limestone head- land above, and we pitched our tents (Camp out- side Sik) at an elevation of thirty-four hundred feet, beside the stream at a point where the valley contracts for the last time before it disappears in the great mass of rocks beyond.
While still on the descent, we were met by Arabs from Elji, who asked if we had " the government " with us, and added that they had stringent orders to take to Maan all who came unattended. At this time the caravan was some distance behind us, and Hasan remained with them as pfuard, while we carried our rifles for protection. We calmly asked them if they had five hundred men to turn us back, and proceeded on our way, for just at that time our men came over the edge of the cliff, making noise enough for an army. Before our tents were up, a number of the Elji people had col- lected, and, keeping them at a distance, we pro- ceeded to give them some advice as to how they should treat travellers in the future ; explaining to them that since the government had taken actual possession of this region, they could no longer worry strangers and extort bakhshish from them under any pretext whatever. If they came to treat
Shobek to Petra 47
strangers decently, travellers would come without guards, and all such expenses, instead of being paid to the soldiers, would fall into their pockets. They promised to profit by our admonitions, and certainly they gave us no trouble during our stay.
It was now 3 p. m., and our feet were almost within the enchanted ground. We pitched our camp outside for several reasons. We had been assured that pack animals could no longer make their way through the narrow gorge. Besides, Elji was already an hour behind us, and the mule- teers were obliged to go back to purchase barley, making a journey of two hours going and coming. To have entered the city would have added an- other hour's journey, making the purchase of bar- ley impossible before nightfall. Then, the known character of the lawless people added another con- sideration that we could not ignore. In Beirut, on our return, our children asked, " But how could you wait another night ? " Our answer was, " We could not, and did not ! " Taking a rifle and a shotgun, and a small lad as guide, we were soon picking our way into the strangest region we had ever seen. The photographs will help tell the story and make the whole scene clearer than many words can do.
A glance at the photograph (p. 45, Camp out- side Sik) will show how the sides of the narrow valley crowded in towards each other. The dark mass between the tents is the growth of olean- ders along the descending brook, which bends
4-8 The Jordan Valley and Petra
toward the right below the tents. The " View from above the entrance," was taken from a point on the rocks to the right of our camp and looks across the narrow valley, down which we followed the stream. It gives an idea of how the sandstone masses crowd in upon the gorge and completely conceal its existence. Our road among the olean- ders was only a cattle path, and was half the time in the brook itself. About two hundred yards from our tents, we came upon the first signs of human handiwork. On the right side of the valley two detached pedestals (photograph, Entrance to Sik, tomb, etc., p. 57), about eighteen feet square and thirty feet high, guarded the entrance to a small lateral valley, in which are many beautiful rock- hewn temples and tombs. They were once sur- mounted by elongated pyramids of natural rock, such as are seen in the following photographs, but which have been broken or quarried away by later occupants of the gorge and city. We won- dered if they did not contain a tomb or sarcopha- gus on top, but lacking anything in the shape of a ladder, we could not examine them. Some one hundred yards beyond, on the left bank of the stream, is a fine specimen of a two-story cutting (p. 53, Tomb at entrance). The lower tomb once had a fine facade, and many rooms in the rock, but facing the weather it has suffered greatly from storm and wind. A broad stairway, plainly seen on the left, led up to the upper tomb or temple, above which are seen four of the elongated pyramids just
Shobek to Petra 51
mentioned. The height of this double rock carving- is not less than sixty feet. The tortoise-shaped rock on the right is a detached mass which has been hollowed out, and being supplied with doors and windows, once probably formed a guard shelter or served some such purpose, at the entrance of the city.
Another turn in the narrow valley brought us to the outer end of the gorge (End of Sik outside, p. 55), where amidst a marvellous tangle of stream and oleanders are ruins of what seems to have been a massive portal to the gorge. As far as we could make out the lines, they formed four sides of an octagon, one of which, 2-3, stretched across and closed the narrow entrance to the defile. One might easily reach this point, and even then turn back with- out finding the entrance, so wild and impossible seems the whole scene. The way appeared to be completely choked with the mass of oleanders, heaps of cut stones, old foundations, pillars, remains of arches, while the rocks about are cut and carved into blind doors and windows, stairways and pyramids. But, following the stream through a dense mass of brush, we heard it dropping and rushing over a pile of rocks, and suddenly we were face to face with a cliff, which is rent from top to bottom. At last we had reached the entrance to the famous Sik or cleft. Its extreme width is not more than twenty feet, while its sides, only a few feet inside the entrance,
52 The Jordan Valley and Petra
reach up perpendicularly to eighty or a hundred feet. It was here that a great arch was thrown across1 from side to side some fifty feet above the water, forming an inner gateway, and per- haps connected with the semi-octagonal wail re- ferred to. But the arch has fallen, and only the lower stones remain clinging to the sides of the cliff.
Into this gloomy looking gorge we pushed, and every step onward added to the charm and mystery of the whole experience. For more than a mile we splashed along among the undergrowth of wild fig trees, oleanders, and ivy. The ravine with its clear stream, and the remains of the ancient paved road along its bed, wind about as if they were the most flexible of objects instead of being confined in a rent through a mighty mountain wall. The pre- cipitous rocky sides towered above our heads at first one hundred feet, then two hundred feet, and at times more than five hundred feet. There were many places where the gloomy sides leaned over the roadway, threatening to crack, and in their crumbling, crush us between their awful masses. Now and then a sharp turn in the defile would carry us out from between the shadowy walls, and apparently straight against a precipice, over which the sunshine fell in cascades of colored light.
To lift one's eyes from the little stream, with its fringe of green, to the gloomy walls overhanging
1 Existing when Stanley visited Petra in 1S52.
I
W
x
H
Shobek to Petra 55
it, and up through the many-hued layers of sand- stone, each growing brighter with the increasing light, to the sinuous ribbon of blue sky, bordered by the sunlit purples of the upper rocks, glowing in the sunshine, produced an effect that beggars description, and would defy a painter's power to reproduce. Seen at morning, at midday, or at midnight, the Sik, this matchless entrance to a hid- den city, is unquestionably one of the great glories of ancient Petra. We wandered on, amazed, en- chanted, and delighted, not wishing for, not expect- ing anything that could be finer than this, when a look ahead warned us that we were approaching some monument worth attention, and suddenly we stepped out of the narrow gorge into the sunlight again. There in front of us, carved in the face of the cliff, half revealed, half concealed, in the grow- ing shadows, was one of the largest, most perfect, and most beautiful monuments of antiquity, — Pharaoh's Treasury !
Almost as perfect as the day it came fresh from beneath the sculptor's chisel, fifteen hundred or two thousand years ago ; colored with the natural hues of the brilliant sandstones, which add an in- describable element to the architectural beauty ; flanked and surmounted by the cliff, which had been carved and tinted in its turn by the powers of nature ; approached by the mysterious defile, it is almost overpowering in its effect.
Such is the ancient entrance to the strangest city on our planet. Along its cool, gloomy gorge, filed the
56 The Jordan Valley and Petra
caravans of antiquity, from Damascus and the East, from the desert, from Egypt and the heart of Africa. Kings, queens, conquerors, have all marvelled at its beauties and at its strangeness. Wealth untold went in and out of it for centuries, and now for over thirteen hundred years it has been silent and de- serted. We had seen enough for one day. Out of the fading light, into the deepening gloom of the entrance gorge, we picked our way back to the tents among the oleanders with some impressions that death can hardly efface.
CHAPTER III
EDOM AND PETRA
THE scene around our camp at the entrance to Petra was one of rejoicing. Even the mule- teers awoke to the strangeness of the country we had entered, and were eager for the sights and experiences of the mysterious city below us in the heart of the mountain. The air was mild and moist, our tents were in a sheltered spot, compared with our other camping-places, and after doubling the guard, the rest of the men turned in early. We had reached another vantage-point in our jour- ney, and before we slept we went back in imagina- tion over the centuries of history and legend which overlay and interlap like the debris of ancient cities, and were represented around us in such an interesting manner.
When we crossed the Ahsa, between Kerak and Tafileh, we left the land of Moab and entered Edom, whose wild life touches that of the Children of Israel at so many points. This region comes into history as Mount Seir in the days of Chedar- laomer and Abraham. It then embraced the moun- tainous district from the Dead Sea, south of the
59
6o The Jordan Valley and Petra
Zered ( Ahsa) to the east arm of the Red Sea ; it was bounded on the east by the desert and on the west by the deep valley of the Arabah. Its principal peak was Jebel Neby Harun, known as Mount Hor, which bears the ancient name of the region to the present day. It was the home of the Horites, who emerge at the dawn of human history. It has been supposed that the name "Horites" means "cave- dwellers," but it may also signify " the white race." Professor Maspero identifies it with Khar, the Egyptian name for Southern Palestine.
Sometime after Jacob had fled to Paddan-aram from the anger of his brother, Esau left Isaac his father and made his home in MountSeir. Eventually his descendants dispossessed1 the Horites of Mount Seir, gaining possession of the country both by war and by marriage with the inhabitants, and the result of intermarriage was the mixed race known as the Edomites. Their kino-s reigned in the land of Edom at the time when the Children of Israel were in Egypt. When the Hebrews at length escaped from Egypt and reached the borders of Edom, they found that the fierce fires of Esau's anger still burned in the hearts of his descendants, and neither the king nor the people of Edom would listen to their request for permission to pass through Edom, on their way to the Promised Land, although they offered to pay for both food and water which they might consume (Deut. ii., 4-8), as they passed through. In order not to wage war with a kindred
1 Deut. ii., 12
Edom and Petra 61
people the Children of Israel turned back from the borders of Edom and marched southward through the desert down the Arabah, between the cliffs of the Tih on the west and the range of Edom on the east, until they reached the Red Sea, when they turned to the left. They rounded the southern end of the mountains of Edom and then marched north along the eastern border of Edom toward Moab. This churlish refusal of the Edomites was never forgotten by the Israelites ; though the Edomites were regarded as brethren by the law, and were allowed certain privileges beyond some other nations, the hostility of the two peoples to each other disfigures all their mutual relations, until the Edomites disappear forever from history. The Edomites were conquered by David (2 Sam. viii., 14), Jehosaphat, and Amaziah (2 Chr. xxv., 11). In the time of Ahaz, when Pekah and Rezin made war against Judah, the Edomites invaded the land and carried off captives, and a century and a half later when Nebuchadnezzar (587 b. c. ) besieged Jerusalem, the Edomites joined in the taking and sacking the city, and appropriated a portion of its territory. Israel's prophets never spared Edom. Joel predicts its desolation, Amos denounces judg- ment upon it, but foretells the ultimate incorpora- tion of the remnant of Edom with Israel. Jeremiah makes it the subject of one of his minatory poems. Obadiah speaks of little else but the cru- elty of Edom to Israel, and the certainty that the Edomites will be destroyed in spite of their rocky
62 The Jordan Valley and Petra
fastnesses, their numerous allies, and their far- famed wisdom. Ezekiel declares the vengeance of Jehovah that awaits it, and Malachi pronounces that its overthrow is to be perpetual.
The Greeks modified the name Edom and called the country Idumea, and its people Idumeans. But it does not appear that the Greeks ever founded any colonies south of Madeba and the Arnon. If they did their remains have yet to be discovered and identified.
About the time of Alexander the Great, an Arabian tribe pushed up from the desert, into the highlands of Edom, and completely supplanted what remained of the Edomites. This tribe or tribes were known as Nabateans, or Nabatheans.1 Settling down in Edom they devoted themselves partly to agriculture, and partly to commerce. About ioo b. c. they had become a powerful king- dom, and their influence extended all round Syria, from Damascus, which fell into their hands 89 b. c, to Gaza, and far into the centre of Arabia. Their inscriptions are being found all over Eastern Pales- tine, in the heart of Arabia, and as far west as Italy, proving the extent of their trade connections and influence. A little more than half a century before the Christian Era, the " King of Arabia" intervened in Jewish affairs. He issued from his palace at Petra, at the head of fifty thousand men, horse and foot, entered Jerusalem, and uniting with
'Their derivation from Nebajoth, the eldest son of Ishmael, Gen. xxv., 17, is at best problematical.
Edom and Petra 63
the disaffected Jews besieged Aristobulus the King in the Temple, and was only driven off by the ad- vance of the Romans. An Idumean, Antipater, was made procurator of Judea by Julius Caesar ; and Herod, son of Antipater, was created King of Judea. In the time of Paul " an ethnarch under Aretas the King held the city of the Damascenes " (2 Cor. xi., 32, and Acts ix., 23).
Aretas IV. seems to have reigned from 9 b. c. to 40 a. d., over the Nabatheans. The relations of the Romans and Nabatheans during the first Christian century have yet to be dug from the records of the past, but inscriptions make it almost certain that their boundary against the Romans in 65 a. d., perhaps also 96 a. d., lay north of Bosra and Salkhat, which were still Nabathean cities. But in 106 a. d., Trajan, by the hands of Cornelius Palma, Governor of Syria, brought the whole Nabathean kingdom into the Empire, and created out of it the new province of Arabia with Bosra as its capital. The Roman dominion relaxed with the decline of the Roman Empire, and into the aban- doned cities the Arabs of the desert drove their flocks. There have been no other dwellers in them for more than a thousand years. The ruins of Jerash, Amman, and Madeba, the grass-grown Roman roads of these mountains of Edom, prove beyond a peradventure that no dwellers in cities, except the Crusaders, and that only for a fitful century, have occupied these highlands since the days of the Romans.
64 The Jordan Valley and Petra
Petra, the Rock City, has been to these regions and these peoples what Rome was to the Romans, and Jerusalem to the Jews. Horites, Edomites, Nabatheans, and Romans have all rejoiced and boasted in the possession of this unique stronghold, and most remarkable city of antiquity. If the name " Horites" refers, as many have contended, to the fact that its owners were " cave " or " rock dwellers " and was derived from their mode of life in Mount Seir, then there can be little doubt but that what we know as Petra was one of their earliest homes and strongholds. Even if we can never find a trace of the Horites themselves, the natural features of the locality, the brook and stronghold, like the Nile in Egypt, prove it to be the natural dwelling-place of man. There is no other location in all the Land of Seir that can be reckoned a rival to it.
Like the region, the name of the city has changed from age to age. Under the Edomites it was called Sela, "the Rock," the same in Hebrew as Petra in Greek. Under this name it is men- tioned twice in the Old Testament, that is, in 2 Kings xiv., 7, when it was captured by Amaziah, and in Isaiah xvi., 1 ; but the revisers have placed Sela in the text at Isaiah xlii., 11, and at three other places.1 The natural features of the city answer the requirements in every particular. Ama- ziah (2 Chr. xxv., 12) would have no difficulty in throwing ten thousand of the Children of Seir from
1 Judges i., 36 ; 2 Chr. xxv., 12 ; Obad., 3.
Edom and Petra 65
the top of the city (see photograph, Deir), and it is natural to suppose that he would have made this exhibition of justice or revenge in the most promi- nent and public spot of the national capital. The reference in Obadiah 3 to those dwelling " in the clefts of the rock," fits literally the thousands within the city of Petra who made their homes in the side valleys that cut the wall-like mountains on every side.
It was, most probably, in the days of the Naba- theans that Petra became the central point to which the caravans from the interior of Arabia, Persia, and India came laden with all the precious commodities of the East, and from which these commodities were distributed through Egypt, Pal- estine, and Syria, and all the countries bordering on the Mediterranean, for even Tyre and Sidon derived many of their precious wares and dyes from Petra. It was, at that time, the Suez of this part of the world, the place where the East and West met to trade and barter. It was also, in fact, a great " safe deposit," into which the great cara- vans poured, after the vicissitudes and dangers of the desert. Its wealth became fabulous, and it is not without some P;ood reason that the first rock structure one sees in Petra, guarding the mysteri- ous entrance, is still called " Pharaoh's Treasury." It must have been the Nabatheans who developed the natural beauties of the situation, and increased the rock-cut dwellings and tombs to the almost in- terminable extent in which they are found to-day.
VOL. II. 5.
66 The Jordan Valley and Petra
While 1 06 a. d. is the date when the Romans seized the country, and made Petra the capital of this division of Palestine, they did not apparently attempt any extermination of the inhabitants, but extended the same mild sway as that exercised over the Greek cities of the Decapolis. And, just as the cities of the Decapolis continued their life as Greek cities under the Roman sway, so Petra seems to have continued her Nabathean life under the Ro- man eagles. Rome has left us her tribute to the greatness of the Edomite city in the fact that she stretched two Roman roads into it from the north, and that among the almost shapeless masses in the floor of the " Rock City" can be traced the ruins of an arch of triumph, temples, a forum, and other accessories of Roman civic life. When Rome's power waned, and the fortified camps on the edge of the desert were abandoned, no doubt her soldiers were withdrawn also from such cities as Petra. Then the Romanized Nabatheans or Nabatheanized Romans held their own against the desert hordes as long as they could, and went down, probably, about the same time as the cities of the Decapolis. From that time onward Petra's history becomes more and more obscure, and for more than a thousand years Edom's ancient capi- tal was completely lost to the civilized world. Until its discovery by Burckhardt, in 1812, its site seems to have been unknown except to the wandering Bedawin.
During all those centuries, Jews and Christians
Edom and Petra 67
and scholars of all civilized lands clung to the ancient name of Petra for the city, and Arabia Petrasa for the whole region. But when the long- lost city again comes to light, the nomad dwellers seem to have lost the records of the Eclomite, the Nabathean, and the Roman occupation, and refer everything in the region to the days of Moses and Aaron.
According to the Koran and its commentators, it was here that Moses struck the rock, and the same fountain still flows under his name, from the village of Elji, an hour above our camp ; and the valley is called Wady Musa. No one in all this region knows it by any other name. The " Sik," or entrance, is called " Sik Wady Musa." All the modern dwellers in that region, and the tradition is centuries old, say that "as surely as Jebel Haroun is so called from being the burial-place of Aaron, so this Sik is the cleft made by the rod of Moses when he brought the stream through into the val- ley beyond." While Petra had been in our minds during all these years, our permit from Damascus was to visit Wady Musa ; our dragoman and cara- van were hired for the same point ; in all our con- versations with the people of that country we never made use of any other term but Wady Musa. And we found to our amusement and surprise that perhaps not a single tent or house in all that mountain region was without a " Moses" among its children or old people. Moses has taken posses- sion of the reo-ion. Notwithstanding the attach-
68 The Jordan Valley and Petra
ment of the name of Moses to the locality, modern biblical scholars and explorers generally, with the distinguished exception of Dean Stanley, reject the tradition that Petra is Kadesh-Barnea.
The "Horites" and "Mount Seir " carry us back to the early chapters in Genesis, " Edom " touches the history of the Children of Israel, from the days of the wilderness to Malachi, "Idumea" binds its history to the New Testament times, "Petra" links the region to the dominion of the Romans, and " Wady Musa," neglecting all that lies between, brines the Hebrew lawgiver and the earliest of the Hebrew prophets into closest con- tact with the Prophet of Islam and the Moham- medan religion. What we have yet to find is the history of the third, fourth, and fifth centuries after Christ. Madeba, Kerak, and Shobek, have yielded up a part of their secrets, and Christian scholars have been surprised at the extent and strength of Christianity in these regions. There are not lacking suggestions of Petra's greatness, but the veil of mystery has not yet been lifted.
CHAPTER IV
INTO PETRA
ON page 325 (Appendix III) is a list of the tra- vellers who have entered Petra during the nineteenth century, or at least those who have left some record of their visits. Nearly all entered by stealth, more than half were driven out after a hurried glance at the wonders and myster- ies of the place. Not more than three or four were allowed to spend a night within the ruins, and nearly all paid well for the privilege. We were certainly the first Americans to enter openly, to pitch our tents for five days, and to float the American flag unmolested within the ancient city. The story and record of the unsuccessful attempts to reach the site would make a very long chapter. Gray Hill, Esq., of Jerusalem and Liverpool, made four unsuccessful attempts in 1890, 1891, 1893, and 1895, and succeeded at the fifth attempt, in 1896. Hull, Kitchener, and Armstrong, in 1883, paid a bakhshish of £34, English money, for six persons to get a hasty view of Petra and Mount Hor. Almost every traveller of the past century has come back with stories of the iniquity and perfidy of the
69
yo The Jordan Valley and Petra
people of that region. Thanks to the Waly of Damascus, with the co-operation of the officials in that region, by keeping a firm hand over the mem- bers of our caravan, and by treating all we met with fairness and politeness, we entered and re- turned without any untoward event, beyond re- buking some of our own men for presuming on our strength and prestige in their financial dealings with the people of El j i.
When we awoke on March ist, it was raining soft showers on our tents, but by 7.45 a.m. the clouds broke away, and by nine o'clock our whole caravan was in motion, and they passed with diffi- culty among the oleanders, as we approached the nar- row defile. The day before we had entered on foot, and in our pleasurable excitement had paid little attention to the pools of water, the heaps of debris left by the winter floods in the narrow gorge, the masses of oleander and wild fig trees, which almost closed the defile at points, but when we attempted to ride through, and lead our heavily laden mules, with their bulky loads of tents and canteen, we found it no easy task, and realized the wisdom of having camped outside on our arrival. At a dozen places along the defile we saw the muddy line of the winter floods which, dammed by heaps of rocks and stones caught by the trees and bushes, had risen ten, fifteen, and twenty feet up the sides of the gorge, before the temporary barrier had given way and allowed the imprisoned waters to rush on- ward. It was easy to imagine that a sudden heavy
Into Petra 75
shower in the winter months might close this exit to any who might be camping inside. We had been assured at many points of our journey that we could not get our loaded animals through the o-orge ; but by rolling boulders out of the way, fill- ing in pools here and there, paying no attention to the tearing of tent wrappings and the banging of our canteen and other boxes against the rocks, we succeeded in getting all the caravan safely as far as the " Treasury of Pharaoh," and then paid no at- tention to them, for beyond that all was easy.
Having the whole day before us for the short distance and the setting up of our camp, we moved leisurely, using the cameras more frequently than ever, and endeavored to verify many of the state- ments of preceding travellers.
The length of the Sik or defile, not all of which is seen on Laborde's plan, has been variously esti- mated, but after passing through it three times and timing our passage, it is safe to say that from the fallen arch to the Treasury of Pharaoh— which is the real Sik— it is about one and a half miles long, or about twenty minutes' walk.1 If we add another ten minutes from the Treasury to the Am- phitheatre which marks the beginning of the city, then the defile is two miles long. It would require much time to plot it accurately, but the general contour is a wide semicircular swing from the right to the left, with innumerable short bends, having sharp curves and corners in its general course.
1 G. L. Robinson in 1900 made it twenty-two minutes.
76 The Jordan Valley and Petra
The width of the Sik varies from twelve feet, at its narrowest point, to thirty-five or forty in other places. Where the gloomy walls actually over- hang the roadway, and almost shut out the blue ribbon of sky, it seems narrower ; and perhaps at many places above the stream the walls do come closer than twelve feet. (See Petra, gorge of the Sik.) Photographs of these narrower and darker portions of the defile are impossible. Only where the walls recede, and one side catches the sunlight, was it possible to secure any views that would re- veal the actual beauties of the place. Then no camera could be arranged to take in the whole height of the canyon. The photograph, page jj (Pharaoh's Treasury from the gorge), is a fair sample of the effect produced by the winding sur- faces of the walls during fully seven tenths of the distance through the gorge.
Travellers have estimated the height of these perpendicular side cliffs to be from two hundred to one thousand feet.1 Heights, like distances, in this clear desert air, are deceptive, but after many tests and observations we are prepared to say that at places they are almost sheer for three hundred to four hundred feet. This represents the canyon proper, for the rounded upper portions do not cut much figure under the circumstances. The face of the cliff at Pharaoh's Treasury must be well up to two hundred feet in height, and the masses above the Sik generally are higher, as we saw clearly
1 Hornstein, 1895: " 80-200 feet." Stephens, 1837 : " 500-1000 feet."
First View of the Treasury from the Gorge
Into Petra 81
from the High Place, which is nearly four hundred feet above the floor of the valley in front of the Treasury. The " View from inside Pharaoh's Treasury," of the Sik, gives an excellent idea of the opening as seen by one going out of the city, though here also the camera fails to get in the full height. The visible portion of the cleft is fully one hundred feet high.
The floor of the Sik was once paved from end to end with huge blocks of stone about eighteen inches square. These appear in situ at several points, and are covered by debris at others, but in the narrower portions the scouring of the winter floods has torn them all away. Stephens in 1837 entered Petra from the south over the rocky ram- part, and when he came to the Treasury he saw a full stream of water crushing through the narrow entrance and filling up the whole mouth of the Sik. With difficulty he forded this, at times on the shoulders of his guide, and made his way into the defile for a short distance. How the ancients man- aged these storm-bursts cannot now be told, but the waters of the fountains in the valleys above were all lifted out of the floor of this gorge and carried along either side of the ravine in aque- ducts, cut from soft sandstone, which are still in evidence at a hundred places. On the right side of the defile are the remains of a more modern aqueduct, which is plainly Roman. A clay pipe about eight inches in diameter was let into the face of the cliff, and secured by
82 The Jordan Valley and Petra
Roman cement. So strong and durable was this cement that even to-day the pipe is detached with difficulty. While the floor of the valley drop- ped lower and lower, the pipe rose higher and higher above the roadway, bending with every turn of the sloping walls, and below the Treasury it was led around the face of tombs and temples, in and out of rocky ravines, and ultimately it emptied its waters somewhere in front of the Corinthian tomb, fully two miles away from the point where it received its supply from the brook. It is plain, therefore, that the waters of the Fountain of Moses were led carefully into the city itself, and not allowed to be polluted and lost in the floor of the defile and valley below. In all our later explora- tions we saw abundant evidence of the existence of running water all about the city.
The structure of this pipe and its method of jointing were so interesting from an engineering standpoint that it is worth mentioning, as our best modern ideas on such matters are scarcely an ad- vance upon this old piece of work. The sections of the pipe were about eighteen or twenty inches long, and had double spigot ends. They were made of a fine-grained clay, and probably formed in a wicker mould, with the hand, by placing ring after ring of a continuous spiral of clay inside the mould, and then roughly smoothing the inner sur- face, and pressing the rings together. This pro- duced a series of slight riffles on the inside, which were reproduced in the formation of the calcareous
85 Entrance of the Sik, from the Interior
of the Treasury
Into Petra
87
deposit with which the inside of the pipe has be- come encrusted. The thickness of the clay did not vary much from a quarter of an inch at any place in the pipe, and all those sections which we could examine were carefully made and as carefully fire- baked. The pipes were joined together with a double sleeve, one outside and the other inside, which must have been put on the pipes in halves, the inner one being placed in position through the end of the pipe after the outer one had been se- cured in place.
While this method of construction undoubtedly constricted the lumen of the pipe, a very strong and secure key-joint was the result, which made it most difficult to break, even after all these years. This key is shown in the darkly-shaded portion of the drawing of a cross section of a pipe given below.
The constriction produced by the inner collar may also explain the regular and even coating of deposit from this hard water, which is practically uniform in thickness on all por- tions of the interior of the pipe, and is thicker and many times stronger than the pipe itself. The deposit was not as thick on the collar itself, as on the pipe between the collars, a result probably pro- duced by the retardation of the current of water.
"
CROSS SECTION THROUGH CLAY WATER-PIPE-PETRA.
88 The Jordan Valley and Petra
Such is the Sik, the famous gorge which in ancient times was the chief, if not the only usual approach to the strangest city in this region. It was the great glory and the strength of Petra, and is still unique among the sights of the earth.
When we stepped again from the narrow defile into the open space at Pharaoh's Treasury, we were hardly prepared for the vision of beauty that burst upon us. A glance at the plan (p. 97) will show that the Treasury is almost directly in front of the end of the Sik, and that the mountain mass is cut again at right angles to the Sik, by two transverse ravines, which form with the Sik a perfect cross. The ravine to the right is an inaccessible one, that to the left we named the Fairy Dell (see p. 165). The morning showers had started a thousand little rills of sparkling water, white fleecy clouds floated in the blue sky above, and down this Fairy Dell came the floods of the morning sunlight. We reached the spot at a moment when all nature seemed conspiring to enhance the thrilling effect of the scene. The surrounding cliff, more than five hundred feet from side to side, cut and fashioned by the hand of time, the frost, the heat, and the tempest, its enchanting forms dripping with rain- drops, which caught and seemed to hold the slant- ing sunbeams ; all these formed a matchless setting for the gem of Pharaoh's Treasury, carved like a cameo at its base. If the combination of the sun- light, the coloring, and the work of time on the cliff was passing beautiful, then that of the sunlight, the
»9
Gorge of the Sik beyond the Treasury
Into Petra 93
coloring, and the work of the hand of man as seen in the carving at its base surpasses the powers of language to express the emotions produced by it at such a time. Descriptions of the width and height and the details of this monument of antiquity may enable many to reproduce for themselves some of its striking features. The beautiful photographs on pages 79 and 83 will add still more to the pleasure of those who have never seen it, but neither language, measurements, nor pictures can give more than a bald idea of the temple and its charmino- surroundings.
Men may differ in their discussions as to the purity of the architecture, its age, its purpose, but measured by the impressions it is sure to produce upon every one who visits the spot, it must surely rank anions the first of the beautiful monuments of antiquity. John Stephens, coming direct from the banks of the Nile, and writing years afterward, said : " Even now that I have returned to the pur- suits and thoueht-enoTOssina- incidents of a life in the busiest city of the world, often in situations as widely different as light from darkness, I see before me the facade of that temple ; neither the Colis- seum at Rome, grand and interesting as it is, nor the ruins of the Acropolis at Athens, nor the Pyra- mids, nor the mighty temples of the Nile, are so often present in my memory." The secret of its magic seems to be the combination of one of man's best efforts with the powers and beauties of nature.
94 The Jordan Valley and Petra
Located at the end of a long and difficult jour- ney, whether one comes from the valley of the Euphrates, from Sinai, from Egypt, or from any part of Syria, east or west of the Jordan ; set in the mountains of mystery, at the gateway of the most original form of entrance to any city on our planet ; carved with matchless skill, after the conception of some master mind ; gathering the beauties of the stream, the peerless hues of the sandstone, the towering cliffs, the impassible ravine, the brilliant atmosphere, and the fragment of the blue sky above, — it must have been enduring in its effect on the human mind. We saw it in its desolation, a thousand years after its owners had fled, after a cycle of storm, tempest, flood, and earthquake had done their worst, aided by the puny hand of the wandering Arab, to mar and disfigure it, and we confess that its impression upon our hearts and memories is deathless. Again and again we re- turned to the spot, each time to discover some- thing new, and to carry away some new reverence for the hearts that thus communed with nature, and toiled to produce what would continue forever to deeply delight and impress the human soul.
The open space in front of the " Treasury " is not more than one hundred feet wide, and hence it was difficult to secure a front view that would take in the whole height. The photograph (No. i ) con- sequently does not show the full height of the tem- ple. Floods at different times have carried the rocks and soil up into its portico, so that the olean-
« y«
Pwramidf"
v \\ Hig-n Place
Into Petra 99
ders now touch the bases of the columns. The height of the cutting [n the rock for the temple facade is about ninety feet, and one can get a com- parative idea of its size by noticing the two horse- men among the oleanders, and the figure on the top of the broken column. The carving and lines on the architrave are nearly as clear and sharp as they were when fresh from the chisel thousands of years ago. The figures in both the upper and lower story seem to have been done in a softer stratum, and have no doubt been marred and mutilated by Mohammedan iconoclasts. The upper story is solid, and the urn and ball over the central dome is the fabled depository of Pharaoh's treasures, and is the point at which the modern Arabs drive their bullets in the hope of shattering it. It will be noted in Photograph No. 2 that the two side sec- tions have the pyramidal extension which joins to the cliff above. Within the porch there are three doors, each opening into rock-hewn chambers. The central room is almost a perfect cube of forty feet each way. It shows no sign of decoration of any kind, only the beautiful natural colors of the sand- stone. The two side chambers are entered from the porch and do not communicate with the central one. They are smaller and just as plain in every way. Circular windows pierce the wall over the two side doors. The central door is nearly thirty feet high and fifteen feet wide. What seem like Roman eagles are still to be seen over the two side doorways.
ioo The Jordan Valley and Petra
Before we had completed our examination of the Treasury, the clouds sent down fresh showers of rain, and we found the porch an excellent shelter. We had allowed our riding animals to go on into the city with the caravan, but we were joined by three Arabs — Musa ibn Sabbah, who afterwards became very useful as a guide ; a suspicious-look- ing specimen called Solomon, and a rollicking boy named Rshood. We had our revolvers, and for more than one reason amused ourselves by firing at marks chosen in the opposite cliff, a hundred and fifty or two hundred feet away. Our smoke- less powder, singing bullets, and the empty car- tridge shells which these fellows fought over were all commented upon at great length by our ragged spectators. Solomon carried an unusually long weapon of antique workmanship, with flint-lock and a wide pan for the powder. After we had chipped the rocks many times with our bullets, we persuaded him to try at the mark with his gun. He produced a little powder from his ragged cloth- ing, and after arranging it carefully in the pan, he raised his antique weapon and pointed it toward the mark. Our desire to see the gun shoot was tempered by the fear that a charge of good pow- der would surely blow the weapon to pieces, to the sorrow of the owner and all who watched him. But curiosity overcame our scruples, and we stood near enough to see. After he had sighted the mark, he pulled the trigger, we all winked, and — nothing hap- pened. When we opened our eyes, Solomon was
;
|
im |
|
>
o
>
Into Petra 103
hanging on to the mark, the powder was sizzing in the pan, and continued to do so for fully a second and a half, burning his beard, and then came the explosion, which was terrific. Flames and smoke issued from the muzzle, while the breech kicked like a mule, and Solomon made haste to extinguish his smoking beard, and condole with his jaw, which had received the kick of the weapon. The bullet flew wide of the mark, and we were relieved to find the man alive and unharmed. We then tore open some shot-gun cartridges and gave him the powder and shot, as a reward for his bravery in standing behind such a gun. We also charged him not to use more than half as much of our powder when he reloaded.
Wrhile we stood and talked with these men, we noted two facts which go far to tell the story of how they live, and the poverty and insecurity of the region. When Solomon proceeded to reload his gun, he had neither rags nor paper to use as wadding. The only rags in the region were those on his back, and paper was unknown. So after pour- ing in the powder, he stooped and picked up some goat droppings, and used them for wadding below and above the shot. This we afterwards found was the universal custom in those parts. We noticed also that while Solomon had a gun sling of common rope by which he carried the weapon when not in use, he had also an iron chain of about four feet in length wound round the stock just behind the trieeer. Seeing- our interest in this, he smiled and
104 The Jordan Valley and Petra
said he was sure we did not know the meaning of the chain. We confessed that we did not ; then he went on to tell us that his gun was about his only possession, and the country was such that he never let go of it by day or by night. By day the rope was a sufficient guard, but every night be- fore sleeping he unwound the chain, and tied the wretched gun to his left arm, lest an enemy should come and steal it while he slept. If tied by a rope, a knife would easily sever that bond, but tied by a chain the gun was safer ! This was one of
<_>
the modern specimens of poverty and lawlessness dwelling near and roaming through this ancient seat of wealth and security !
Toward noon the showers ceased for a time, and we started down the main ravine to the right of the Treasury. From the Treasury onward the side walls are not so hio-h nor so close together as in the Sik proper, and are or have been an almost un- interrupted series of rock-hewn rooms and tombs. Many of these are inaccessible, because their stair- ways are worn away by the elements or broken down by the rocks falling from above. Stanley well called it the " Appian Way " of the ancient city. We passed the amphitheatre, and a thousand other rock cuttings, and made our way to the camp, which had been pitched on a level space near the ruins of the triumphal arch. Here we could un- pack in earnest, for here we planned to rest longer than we had at any place since leaving Beirut, just twenty-five days before. Our men went for barley
.1 *•*■.*
"•M.
Into Petra 109
to Elji, an hour away ; a shepherd was sent for, and arrangements for milk and the purchase of a sheep were concluded. After a luncheon we took our shot- guns and went for a preliminary walk, having also in mind some partridges, to add to our larder for the Sabbath. We found two kinds of these gamy birds ; the large variety we had shot all the way from Banias {Caccabis chukar), and the smaller rock partridge found only in the Jordan Valley and the southern wilderness {Ammoperdrix heyi). The chukar, called " hajl " elsewhere in Syria, is here known as the "shinnar," and Musa and Rshood assured us that each bird was " as large as a rooster 5' ! We soon bagged enough for the Sabbath, and the recurring showers drove us into one of the rock-hewn rooms for refuge.
Here we saw another sight and learned another lesson from our ragged companions. While we were at luncheon, Musa aimed his gun at a black- bird and wounded it so badly that rollicking Rshood caught it, and when we sat down in the cave he produced the wounded bird from his bosom. After watching them try to kindle a fire with the steel and flint, we offered a match, and soon had a cheerful little blaze to sit around. Rshood then took out his knife and cut the throat of the blackbird, and began a process of cooking that recalled the stories we had heard of our most remote ancestors. Instead of plucking off the feathers, he dangled it over the flames until he had singed away everything but the wing feathers.
no The Jordan Valley and Petra
He then tore off the head and extremities of the wings, and spitted the bird on a stick. After browning it considerably on the outside, he tore it open, and removed a part of the entrails. At this point he needed salt. So, balancing the spitted bird near the fire, he went to the inner walls of the cave, and with his knife scraped off some of the dirt and filth containing saltpetre. This he sprinkled on the bird, and plastered inside of it. Then he held it over the fire, turning it and tear- ing it until it was roasted as brown and as juicy as any game ought to be ! His fingers and teeth finished the process, and in a short time there was not an atom of it to be seen !
When we returned to camp we found the lamb slaughtered, the oven in the midst of the flames, the bread on the way to baking, and everybody in a famous eood humor. Towards nio-ht the mules and horses were all taken into a huge rock dwelling two hundred yards away, and after tightening our tent ropes, and ditching round the camp, we lay down to sleep in Petra, careless of the beating rains which kept up for nearly half the night.
The next morning the bed of the Wady Musa, in front of our tents, which had been dry the day be- fore, was occupied by a fine stream of pure water, eight or ten feet wide, and several inches deep. By noon, however, the elastic little stream, which doubtless shortens or lengthens with each shower, had slackened in its flow and disappeared entirely among the rocks, swallowed by the thirsty soil. See
>
|
►J < |
0 |
|
X |
U3 |
|
w |
T3 |
|
2 |
d |
|
w |
oS |
|
O |
CO |
< o
Into Petra 1 13
photograph, page 95, " Last of the water." In an- other twenty-four hours we had to walk a couple of hundred yards up the bed of the stream for our water supply. The pure water from the sand- stone, which was filtered and aerated by nature, was pleasant to drink, after our experiences with the hard, limestone water, often badly polluted, which we had been forced to use up to this point on our trip.
VOL. II 8.
PETRA
It seems no work of man's creative hand,
By labor wrought as wavering fancy planned ;
But from the rock as if by magic grown,
Eternal, silent, beautiful, alone !
Not virgin-white like that old Doric shrine
Where erst Athena held her rites divine ;
Not saintly-grey, like many a minster fane
That crowns the hill and consecrates the plane ;
But rosy-red as if the blush of dawn
That first beheld them were not yet withdrawn ;
The hues of youth upon a brow of woe,
Which man deemed old two thousand years ago.
Match me such marvel save in Eastern clime,
A rose-red city half as old as Time."
From Burgon's Prize Poem, " Pet/a.
TT4
CHAPTER V
PETRA
BEFORE entering upon the detailed examina- tion of the wonders of Petra, it will be of service to the reader to have in mind some general observations concerning the three great features of the ancient city — the site itself, the marvellous coloring of the rocks, and the amount of the excavations. The reader will do well to keep the excellent plan of Laborde and Linant open before him. The site is a natural amphi- theatre, fully three miles in circumference, and encompassed on all sides by rugged mountains, of most fantastic shape, which rise sheer in many places from two hundred to six hundred feet. Any general view of this is almost impossible, but the two on p. i S i and p. 185 taken from a point more than six hundred feet above our camp (Petra, view from High Place) will well repay examination with a magnifying-glass. This rocky rampart is cut at only two places, where the brook enters by way of the Sik, already described, and where the brook escapes, after crossing the site of the city, by a ravine that descends in tremendous leaps toward the Arabah and the Dead Sea.
"7
1 1 8 The Jordan Valley and Petra
The floor of the amphitheatre is an irregular trapezoid, whose northern and ' southern sides are nearly paral- lel. The northern boundary is about one thousand yards across, while the southern is about half as much, and the two sides are roughly twelve hundred yards long.
The brook enters at the southeast corner, swings round a hillock, and crosses from east to west. This floor is by no means level except one fine wide space lying toward the northeast,1 but in general it rises from the brook to the north and to the south. Even though the whole of this area was covered with a mass of dwelling-houses, palaces, temples, and triumphal arches, all pros- trate now in almost indistinguishable confusion, it would prove very narrow limits for such a city as we are sure Petra was at many stages in her history.
But a glance at Laborde's plan (p. 97) will show that from this trapezoidal floor of the valley open out more than a dozen huge fissures which extend for thousands of feet up into the rocky ramparts, as, for example, the Sik, the Fairy Dell (p. 165) the road to the Deir (p. 213), the route to Mount Hor (p. 233) : and these interminable ravines and extensions made the city so much lareer than the narrow limits would seem to allow.
1 See photograph, p. 105.
Ah
Petra 1 2 1
A square space a mile on every side will not suffice to cover these ramifications. And while the floor of the main depression is a mass of ruins almost everywhere, it was in the rocky walls and these ravines, extending upwards on all sides, that the ancient dwellers hollowed out more theatres, tombs, and temples than any one has ever been able to count.
In short the site itself, when viewed from above, seems like one huge excavation whose depth in certain parts is fully half the width of the city's floor. Seen from below, however, nothing can be finer than the immense rocky rampart which almost completely encloses it. Strong, firm, and as im- movable as nature itself, it seems to mock at the walls of other cities, and the puny fortifications of the greatest builders of the earth. Taken together with its matchless entrance, it is certainly one of the most wonderful locations in the world.
To portray the marvellous coloring of these masses of sandstone, and to give anything like a correct view of this unique feature of Petra, is something we attempt with misgivings. From the moment we sighted the great castellated mass in which the city lies hidden,1 until we took our last glimpse from the highlands above, we never ceased to wonder at the indescribable beauties of the purples, the yellows, the crimsons, and the many- hued combinations. Whether seen in the gloom of the Sik, or the brilliant sunshine that seemed to
1 See p. 38.
122 The Jordan Valley and Petra
kindle the craggy, bristling pinnacles into colored flames, they alike inspired our surprise.
Travellers have vied with each other in their attempts to describe these beauties. Some have seen less than they expected, and some have seen more, and the reasons are not hard to imagine. Some have entered the lonely city tired and worn by the long journey over the desert from Egypt, carrying their lives in their hands, and able to make only the most hurried examination. Others have lacked the eye of the artist, and perhaps also the gift of color in their mental make-up; but even the most sober and least sentimental have left testimonies that fully substantiate Petra's claim to being unique among the many sights of the earth.
John Stephens, in 1835, speaks of the dark back- ground of the " stony rampart, with veins of white and blue, red, purple, and sometimes scarlet and light orange, running through it in rainbow streaks," and " within the chambers where there had been no exposure to the action of the elements, the freshness and beauty of the colors in which these waving lines were drawn gave an effect hardly in- ferior to that of the paintings in the tombs of the Kings at Thebes."
Edward Robinson, in 1838, speaks of "an end- less variety of bright and living hues, from the deepest crimson to the softest pink, verging also sometimes to orange and yellow. These varying shades are often distinctly marked by waving lines,
>
PL,
Petra 125
imparting- to the surface of the rock a succession of brilliant and changing tints, like the hues of watered silk, and adding greatly to the imposing effect of the sculptured monuments."
Dr. Stephen Olin, in 1840, says in his narrative : " The rocks of Petra are adorned with such a pro- fusion of the most lovely and brilliant colors as I be- lieve it is quite impossible to describe. Red, purple, yellow, azure or sky blue, black and white, are seen in the same mass in successive layers, or blended so as to form every hue and shade of which they are capable, as brilliant and as soft as they ever appear in flowers, or in the plumage of the birds, or in the sky when illuminated with the most glorious sun- set. The red perpetually shades into pale or deep rose or flesh color. The purple is sometimes very dark, and again approaches the hue of the lilac or violet. The white, which is often as pure as snow, is occasionally just dashed with blue or red. The blue is usually the pale azure of the clear sky or the ocean, but sometimes has the deep and peculiar shades of the clouds in summer when agitated by a tempest. Yellow is an epithet often applied to sand and sandstone. The yellow of the rocks of Petra is as bright as that of saffron. It is more easy to imagine than describe the effect of tall graceful columns, exhibiting these exquisite colors in their succession of regular horizontal strata.
"They are displayed to still greater advantage in the walls and ceilings of some of the excava- tions where there is a slight dip in the strata. This
126 The Jordan Valley and Petra
gives in the perpendicular sides of the excavation, greater breadth and freedom to the exhibition of colors, while in the ceiling, the plane of which makes a very acute angle with that of the strata, the effect is indescribably beautiful. The colors here have full play and expansion, and they exhibit all the freedom of outline and harmonious blending of tints observable in a sunset scene. The ceiling of a large excavation just at the entrance of Wady Syke, and nearly opposite to the amphitheatre, af- fords an example of the magnificent effect which I so vainly attempt to describe. In the northern half of the ceiling a brilliant deep red is the predomi- nant hue, intermingled, however, with deep blue, azure, white, and purple. No painter ever trans- ferred to his canvas with half so much nature and effect, the bright and gorgeous scene painted on the western clouds by a brilliant sunset in summer. On the northern or front part of the ceiling these hues are deeply shaded into black, and no one, I am sure, can look upon it without being strongly reminded of a gathering tempest, and almost im- agining that he listens to the voices of coming winds or thunder. I shall probably fall under the suspicion of extravagance and exaggeration in what I have written upon the subject, and I would plead guilty to a charge of imprudence, in attempting to portray in words scenes which painters alone can exhibit with any approach to the reality."
Dean Stanley, in 1852, entered from the south and characteristically describes his impressions ;
Ph
M'
■ '■ * X. \
OS
( MIL .
s--
Petra 1 3 1
" After descending from Mount Hor we found our- selves insensibly encircled with rocks of deepening and deepening red. Red indeed from a distance, the mountains of ' Red ' Edom appear, but not more so than the granite of Sinai ; and it is not till one is actually in the midst of them that this red becomes crimson and that the wonder of the Petra colors fully displays itself."
" Two mistakes seem to me to have been made in the descriptions. All the describers have spoken of bright hues — scarlet, sky blue, orange, etc. Had they taken courage to say instead, dull crimson, indigo, yellow, and purple, their accounts would have lost something in effect, but gained much in truth. Nor would they have lost much in any way. For the colors, though not gaudy, or rather because they are not gaudy, are gorgeous. You are never, or hardly ever, startled by them. You could never mistake them for anything else but nature ; they seem the natural colors of the place."
" Another mistake is that the descriptions lead you — or at least they lead me — to suppose that wherever you turn at Petra you see nothing but these wonderful colors. I have already said that from a distance one hardly sees them at all. One sees the general contrast only of the red sandstone cliffs standing out against the white limestone and yellow downs which form their higher background. But when one comes in face of the very cliffs them- selves, then they are, as I have said, a gorgeous, though dull crimson, streaked and suffused with
132 The Jordan Valley and Petra
purple. These are the two predominant colors, and on the face of the rocks the only colors. But the whole region is in a constant state of moulder- ing decay. You can scarcely tell where excava- tion begins and decay ends. It is in the caves and roofs and recesses, whether natural or artificial, very numerous it is true, but not seen till you are close within them, that there appears that extra- ordinary veining or intermixture of colors in which yellow and blue are occasionally added — ribbon- like to red and purple. Of these three com- parisons usually made — mahogany, raw flesh, and watered silk, — the last is certainly the best."
Edward Hull, in 1883, looking with the stony eye of a geologist, says : " The coloring of the sand-stone cliffs of Wady Musa should not pass unnoticed ; it is wonderfully gorgeous, possibly altogether unique. I have seen colored sand- stones in the British Isles and in Europe, but never before colors of such depth and variety of pattern as these. The walls of rock reminded one of the patterns on highly painted walls, Eastern carpets, or other fanciful fabrics of the loom. The deepest reds, purples, and shades of yellow are here arranged in alternate bands, shading off into each other, and sometimes curved and twisted the into gorgeous fantasies. These effects, due to infiltration of the oxides of iron, manganese, and other substances, are frequent in sandstones to various degrees ; but nowhere, as far as my obser- vation goes, do they reach the variety of form and
Petra 135
brilliancy of coloring to be found in the Wady Musa amongst the ruins of Petra."
Lord Kitchener — then Colonel (1883), — with the eye of the soldier, speaks of the " colors of the rocks as wonderfully variegated and most brilliant ; red to purple and blue are the most predominant colors, and these are set off by a cold gray back- ground of limestone hills."
If then the gentleman traveller, the trained geographer, the brilliant church historian, the col- lege president, the geologist, and the great soldier, only one of whom (Stephens) spent a night in- side of Petra and saw something of the sunset and sunrise glories, were so deeply impressed with the variety and brilliancy and beauty of the coloring, we shall be pardoned if we make continual refer- ence to it, as we pass in and out among its many monuments and winding ravines. We shall be listened to if we say with all soberness that " the half was never told " of the effects of this many-hued landscape ; for we saw it glistening with the raindrops after the showers ; we saw it before the sunrise, and in the weird beauty of the afterglow ; we saw it under the noonday sun ; and we noticed, as perhaps no one had done before us, the way in which those ancient sculptors fixed the levels of their tombs and temples and dwellings so as to make most artistic use of the more beauti- ful strata in the mountain walls ; and we marvelled again and again, in the never-ending ravines, how those ancient dwellers consciously practised a kind
136 The Jordan Valley and Petra
of landscape gardening, where instead of beautiful effects produced by banks of fading flowers, all was carved from the many hued and easily wrought solid stone which took on new beauties as it crumbled in decay.
Some travellers have expressed themselves as dis- appointed with the number of excavations visible from any one point, and even Dean Stanley wrote — " I had expected to be surrounded by rocks honeycombed with caves — but in the most popu- lous part that I could select, I could not number in one view more than fifty and generally fewer." But, like so many other travellers, Stanley camped somewhere south of Petra, entered in the forenoon, passed through the amphitheatre, and out again the same day. But even in that case he must have passed the eastern wall, where for a thousand feet or more the face of the cliff to a height of three hundred feet was once completely honeycombed with these tombs. Exposed to the storms from the south and west, the decay has been very great, but even now it contains a marvellous amount of exca- vation (see p. 123 Temple in east wall). And the view at the end of the Sik and of tombs near the inner entrance (p. 1 15) will show clearly that Dean Stanley was napping when he wrote that sentence. Add to this the fact that a camera at most takes in an angle of thirty to sixty degrees and we see that an observer at any of the three points mentioned above could count hundreds of excavations. Fur- thermore, a glance at Laborde's plan and the red
Petra 139
dotting in the various fissures and ravines will recall the fact already referred to, that these ramifications are almost numberless, and that here abound exca- vations interminable. These excavations are not always " caves," but roads and stairways, platforms, tombs, dwellings, and temples, many of which no modern traveller has yet seen, and which no man has ever counted. Thousands are now inaccessible, because the approaches have been weathered or washed away. Thousands more are filled or covered with debris. After five days inside the city — and the following pages will show how much climbing we did— we are prepared to say that a man might spend a month in attempting, and then fail, to visit and examine all the rock-cuttings in the valley. Their number and extent can no more be determined by a glance from the floor of the valley, than the streets and houses of a great city can be enumer- ated by one taking a hasty view from the public square.
And here we may give a suggestion or two to trav- ellers who will follow us. None of the so-called "guides" will take strangers to see everything. They are jealous, and cannot rid themselves of the conviction that we are hunting only for hidden treas- ures, and will carry away what rightly belongs to the dwellers in that region. Therefore explorers must be their own guides, and never accept the proffered information, " There are no more excavations in that direction." One of the more friendly fellows, Musa ibn Sabbah, who served Messrs. Brunnow and
140 The Jordan Valley and Petra
Euting, came to us repeatedly, not to our drago- man, and offered to lead us by night, to see some- thing that he dare not show us by day. While having no reason at all to suspect anything like foul play, we did not give the matter enough at- tention, for after we left Petra we received infor- mation that leads us to believe that somewhere among the tombs is still to be seen a mummy, which some one else may have the pleasure of bringing to light. Certainly many of the tombs, rifled lontr aao, must have contained the bodies of wealthy merchants, who died and were embalmed along the banks of the Nile, and then carried across the desert to their own rich tombs in Petra.
And finally, if the traveller, in nearing Petra, will remember the fact that originally the whole valley, from its beginning at the door of the Sik until its exit among the fissures at the southern end of the Dead Sea, is one huge excavation made by the powers of nature, — the torrent and the earth- quake ; and that the hand of time, the frost, the heat, and the tempest have been busy through the ages, cracking, smoothing, chiselling mountain-top, deep ravine, and towering cliff into a myriad of fantastic forms ; and that the subtler, silent agen- cies of nature's alchemy have been adding the most brilliant hues to mouldering sandstone strata, he cannot but be charmed and amazed by the result of her handiwork. Then when he enters the city by the winding valley of the Sik, gazes at the stupen- dous walls of rock which close the valley and en-
Petra 1 43
circle this ancient habitation, and marks how man himself, but an imitator of nature, has adorned the winding bases of these encircling walls with all the beauty of architecture and art, with temple, tomb, and palace, column, portico, and pediment, while the mountain summits present nature in her wildest and most savage forms, the enchantment will be complete, and among the ineffaceable im- pressions of his soul will live the memories of a visit to this silent, beautiful " rose-red city half as old as Time."
CHAPTER VI
PETRA IN DETAIL
SU N DAY dawned clear and bright after the rain and clouds of midnight. The air was cool and pleasant, and the whole camp of men and ani- mals enjoyed to the full the rest after the long jour- ney. We reviewed much that we had read before, in the few books we carried with us, and then strolled out of camp, and went for a long walk down the western ravine, through which the brook escapes from Petra. At the beginning of the exit, the towering sides are not more than sixty feet apart but open out at two points below where lateral valleys or fissures come down to the bed of the stream. The floor of the ravine, when not com- pletely filled with the shingle and the stream, was choked with an almost impassable growth of olean- der and other bushes. At places we made our way with difficulty, and more than once were turned back to find another opening. The fall of the stream for nearly a thousand yards in its winding was gentle enough but making a sudden turn toward the north it began to drop by great leaps, and we found ourselves scrambling along a steep
144
Petra in Detail 145
embankment of debris at the base of the cliffs which towered above us, until further progress was im- possible. We looked down into a yawning abyss, that seemed to us forever impassable to any human foot. Several hundred feet below us, we caught sight of a colony of conies, which, like a dozen litters of little pigs, were running in and out among the rocks in great trepidation. We amused our- selves, but not the conies, by starting great rocks, weighing half a ton, on frightful journeys down the slopes of the chasm. They leaped and bounded and crashed in a way that was terrific, sending the booming echoes reverberating up and down the gorge. The conies must have thought the end of the world had come, and the startled par- tridges went clucking and calling into places of safety.
We noted that for fully five hundred yards, after leaving the city level, the walls of the gorge were lined with excavations, which extended tier above tier to a height of from sixty to a hundred feet. Then, for the next thousand yards, the ravine had evidently served as the ancient quarries of the city, and the sides were smoothed in places to a height of fully a hundred feet. There was an abundance of mason marks and rude carvings on the face of these cliffs, left by the workmen at all stages of their work. Many of the marks were plainly legible, others were made out by the aid of an opera-glass, because they are wholly inaccessible. At one point we discerned a rude representation of two trees,
146 The Jordan Valley and Petra
standing on either side of an altar, like the drawing below.
The trees seemed meant to represent palms, but of this we could not be certain.
The mode of quarrying was plainly exhibited by the work left in all stages of its execution. The
men climbed by means of footholds cut into the rock, up the face of the cliff, for say one hundred feet, and gaining a stand- ing place on some ledge proceeded to hollow out a half dome-shaped cavity, where they could rest and perhaps sleep at the end of the day. With their chopping tools, the same as used all over Syria to-day, and toothed in the same way, they proceeded to cut a channel, both ways from the dome-shaped cavity, as far as they wished. By deepening this channel, day by day, the result was to detach from the cliff a slice, say fifty feet long, and eight or ten feet thick, according to their needs of large or small stone ; as they worked be- hind the mass, they were in no danger, and from time to time, they threw down the detached masses into the valley below, and in the course of months, they would again be working at the level of the floor of the valley. This process was apparently repeated for centuries, since the quarries are very extensive. Modern quarrymen climb the face of a cliff, work a huge blast in behind a great mass, and throw it down to workmen below, who then
irl
Petra — Sheikh and Prisoner
Petra in Detail 149
cut it into shape for handling. These ancient quarrymen, lacking powder and dynamite, did prac- tically the same thing, but dislodged their mass by the slow and more laborious way of chopping in a channel just wide enough to accommodate the human body.
On our return we found the camp in commotion, and a wretched specimen of an Arab 1 was tied to a clump of bushes, in the central space between our tents ; his arms were tightly pinioned behind him, and his back was covered with a mass of bleeding welts. Our men were excited, and it was some time before we could get the story pieced to- gether. They had made arrangements with the fellow to supply us with a certain amount of milk, and on his appearance to-day had quarrelled with him over the price. When pressed too harshly, he whipped out a huge revolver, and threatened to shoot some one. The camp rose as one man ; Hashim, our soldier, rose with them ; the poor feilow made for his life, and in his attempt to escape, threw away his belt, his cartridges, and what little money he possessed, expecting according to the customs of the country to return some day and find them again. But the men caught him, dis- armed him, and gave him a most frightful beating with a whip. They soon saw from our faces that we did not approve of any such proceedings. Then be^an a series of discussions and negotiations, that lasted three days. We shamed our men for allowing
1 Photograph, Prisoner and Sheikh.
i5° The Jordan Valley and Petra
a difference of perhaps a cent or two to issue in such a fracas. When they began to hedge, the fellow claimed to have lost two or three dollars in his flight, and they had it back and forth for hours. Hashim claimed the revolver, and declared his firm resolve to deliver the man to the prison authorities in Maan. But Maan was a journey of six hours away, and while Hashim was safe in our camp, he might have met other treatment by the way. Later on the Sheikh of Elji came down, and the con- ferences lasted most of the night. We held aloof until the proper time, and intervened to end the matter by releasing the prisoner and secretly assuring the Sheikh that the revolver would be re- stored, if they all kept peace during our stay. They promised faithfully, and they kept their promises, and we had nothing further to complain of. We mention this matter for several reasons. It was positively the only occurrence, from the be- ginning to the end of our trip, that might have ended unpleasantly. It was needless in every way, and would never have occurred had we been in camp. It may teach others the necessity of keep- ing a firm hand on the members of their caravan ; for camp followers and even dragomen are in danger of presuming upon the power that is sup- posed to lie behind the travellers, and forget both wisdom and politeness in dealing with the people of such regions.
Toward evening a second soldier, a strapping fellow, mounted on a good horse, came into camp
Petra in Detail 151
from Maan. He had been sent in response to tele- grams from Kerak, to the Governor at Maan, telling of our presence in Petra. He made himself useful, and his presence that night was of value in guarding our horses. The next day, however, we assured him that we needed no other guard than Hashim and our own men, and so after giving him a proper present and a polite letter of thanks to the Governor, we sent him on his way rejoicing.
When travellers speak of Petra being entirely encircled by its rocky rampart, it is not meant that this is one unbroken rocky ring. The eastern wall, continuing the wall of the Sik, is unbroken from Pharaoh's Treasury for fully two thousand yards, but breaks down somewhat at the extreme north- eastern corner of the valley, and here is where the Romans made a second road into the ancient city. The western wall is unbroken for fully two thou- sand yards, except where cut in twain, in the centre, by the exit of the brook. It is higher at the north- ern end, in the region of the Deir, and breaks down at the extreme southeast, and here also the Romans, by extensive cutting, carried their road out to Mount Hor, and on toward the Gulf of Akabah. Both the northern and the southern boundaries are deeply indented by the lateral fissures and ravines extend- ing up into them. These fissures and ravines are filled with rock cuttings, but it is in the faces of the eastern and western walls that we find the most imposing monuments. Beginning at our camp, which was pitched near the ruins of the triumphal
152 The Jordan Valley and Petra
arch, we will make a circuit of these rocky walls.
The photograph giving a distant view of the west wall (p. 105) shows the irregularity of the skyline. That marked Citadel Rock (p. 119) shows a completely detached mass encircled by ravines which drain into the exit of the Wady Musa brook. These latter ravines are exceedingly narrow and grand, and only careful examination reveals the fact that the Citadel Rock is detached on all sides. The general view west of camp, page 107, shows the northern end of Citadel Rock, and then a deep break, and here, hundreds of feet below the skyline, is the bed of the brook, and the exit already referred to. The northern continuation of the western wall is seen in the picture of the valley (p. 105) but mostly hidden by a mound covered by ruins, which is in turn separated from the wall by the deep valley leading to the Deir. No general view to the north was obtainable, except that from the High Place (p. 181), where this side lies to the left of the brook. The view marked " Exit" (p. 205) gives the general contour of the north- eastern corner of the trapezoidal floor, and the ram- part, which is lower here than at any other point.
The eastern wall can be seen in its whole extent in the other view from the High Place, and it is covered with excavations from end to end. One of the best distant views is that on page 181, where this wall is seen from within the exit gorge, and across the whole extent of the city from west to
Petra in Detail 1 53
east. The view marked " Corinthian tomb, and temple" (p. 141) gives a closer view of the same section. Those marked " Temple in eastern wall" (p. 123) and " Tombs near inner entrance " (p. 115) carry us to the inner end of the Sik.
The southern boundary is bold and rocky near the Sik, and the mass in which the Treasury and the Amphitheatre are carved contains perhaps the most remarkable fissures and ravines of Petra, and is crowned by the High Place, whose details and magnificent approaches will be described in a later chapter. This mass is also detached on three sides, and is perhaps unapproachable from the side where it is joined to the main mass. The southeast corner of the trapezoid breaks down low enough for the exit of the Roman road so that in ancient times a traveller o-oing- towards the south could enter the city at the northeast corner and go out at the southwest, but both entrance and exit by this route involved climbing up and down some steep, rocky roads.
The floor of the ancient city, especially on both sides of the brook, is an endless mass of shapeless ruins, among whose debris are heaps of broken pottery and ancient roof-tiles an inch thick, like those found at Baalbec. Laborde and others have picked out the ruins of at least six temples, many bridges, large and small, and other massive walls, whose real character and use remain to be ascer- tained. It is almost certain that at one period the brook was arched over for two or three hundred
154 The Jordan Valley and Petra
yards, and that the main public street of the Roman city ran parallel to it, or even at places immediately over it.
Alono- this main street were ranged most of the finest public buildings, and spanning it toward the west stood an arch of triumph. Parts of the side walls of this are seen in the photograph page 129. And here for more than fifty yards the ancient pave- ment is in situ. A hundred yards from the arch is the only structure of mason work standing in Petra, by some called a temple, but known among the people as Kasr Firaun, or the Castle of Pharaoh. The valley is the valley of Moses, but the Treasury and the Castle are named for Pharaoh. This build- ing is thirty-four paces square and the walls are nearly entire. The front, which looks toward the north, was ornamented with a row of columns, four of which are standing. Back of the columns was an open piazza, which extended the whole length of the building. A noble doorway, not less than thirty-five feet in height, opened into the inner com- partments. The picture on page 129 (Temple near Citadel Rock) gives a view of the eastern side of it, which is surmounted by a handsome cornice. The dark lines in the walls mark the groves into which the builders let huge beams of wood, ap- parently for the purpose of securing plates of metal, with which the edifice was once probably covered. The same arrangement is seen inside. This struc- ture was not a temple, because it was divided into stories, whose stairways have now disappeared.
Petra in Detail 155
The walls everywhere seem to have been covered by plates of some kind for ornamentation. The timbers let into the walls have rotted away in places, but in others are still sound. We sorely desired to secure pieces of these, but failed through the lack of ladders and tools with which to cut off any sec- tions. The ruins in the vicinity of this building will well repay the study of the skilled archaeolo- gist who can take the time necessary to master their details.
Immediately to the left of the Kasr, in the rocky wall, is seen the unfinished tomb so often referred to, showing that the ancients did their carving, as they did their quarrying, by working from the top downward. A hole at the base of this monu- ment leads to a cavity behind the projected pillars, and a rude stairway ascends to the level where the workmen were engaged, when some change in the life of the city drove them away forever.
Not many yards to the left of this point is an- other object of interest— the Columbarium (see p. 137) cut into the solid rocks. The existence of a place of sepulture of this sort shows clearly that the people of Petra at some time burned their dead. This was probably during the Roman pe- riod. The dark opening in the centre of the picture is a doorway leading to another chamber, whose walls were covered with similar niches.
So much debris has fallen along this western wall, and especially below the ancient citadel, that the lower lines of excavation are almost wholly
156 The Jordan Valley and Petra
destroyed or filled up and inaccessible. But it was here in the steep face of this rocky mass that we noticed some of the most brilliant of all the hues in the sandstone. Here, also, in a sheer preci- pice, can be seen the greatest variety of the strata, and when colored photography is perfected, this spot will yield some of the finest effects imagin- able. We secured our best samples of the sand- stone from this region, but here again we felt the lack of proper tools, and advise other travellers to carry hammers and chisels with them for this purpose.
In the photograph of the temple and western gorge is seen a small temple whose left door-jamb is broken at the bottom. A beautiful inclined way once led up to this spot. And inside this temple is beyond all comparison the most beautiful color effect we saw in Petra. The walls and the ceiling" were arranged at such a level as to include the most brilliant strata in the mountains — a perfect quilt of ribbons, which wave like flags, swirl like watered silk, rising, falling, and producing the most wonderful effects. The traveller who fails to look in at this doorway has missed one of the sights of Petra. We would name this the Rainbow Temple. It is undoubtedly the ever busy action of the ele- ments that keeps the coloring brilliant. In colder and damper climates a building whose stones are white and clean from the quarry soon loses forever its freshness and delicate natural colors. But in Petra the perpetual wearing away of the sandstone
Petra in Detail 157
keeps the coloring of the rocks and monuments as freshly beautiful as they were two thousand years or more ago, and will do so until they disappear.
A little to the north of this temple is another great carving which travellers have named the Corinthian Tomb, or Tomb in Three Stories. Where the cliff ends the tomb was carried up in courses of masonry. This has fallen into ruins, to the great damage and disfigurement of the appear- ance of the whole structure. One of the acque- ducts brought its water to this line of monuments. The space in front of them was one of the plazas of the city. From this spot we saw one of the Mazzebah pillars of the High Place, standing out against the skyline like a church steeple. This vicinity was plainly the centre of the greatest wealth and beauty in Petra. Being the eastern wall, it has caught the force of the storms which come from the south and west, and shows more clearly the decay and destruction wrought in the lapse of centuries.
The most imposing monuments after the Treas- ury and the Deir were carved in this eastern wall. The lack of any elevated vantage-point makes it difficult to get any near views of them. The view taken from inside the western gorge (p. 193) gives a distant view. That marked " Temple in eastern wall " takes in a large expanse, includ- ing one of the great temples, which in its glory must have been very impressive. The cutting in the rock is even now more than sixty feet wide and
i58 The Jordan Valley and Petra
deep, and this platform was greatly extended city- wards by enormous sub-structures, like the plat- forms in Jerusalem. These arches have mostly fallen, but their outlines and debris are enormous. The height of the cutting in the face of the cliff at this point is more than a hundred feet, and the rooms hollowed out are reached by stairways in- side the rock.
In some of the tombs the floors were perfectly level, as they were when first hewn from the rock, in others we found a series of rectangular openings ranging from twenty inches to two feet in depth, and varying in size according to the dimensions of the body to be buried. The floors of several tombs which we visited were completely covered by such openings, whereas in others there were but one or two. All of these tombs were quite empty. At some time they were covered with stone slabs, which had been cut to fill a step-like ledge around the upper edge of the grave. Many of the frag- ments of the covers of these openings were found, but none of them were inscribed in any way.
Our camp was set among the ruins near the Kasr and the arch ; behind us was a slope covered with the debris of the city ; another mound across the brook was also a shapeless mass. Back of these ruin-covered slopes, and on either side of us to the east and west, rose the enchanting cliffs, carved by ages of wind and storm. Over all, the decay- ing hand of time has spread a crumbling mantle, half revealing, half concealing their indescribable
Petra in Detail 159
beauties. Add to this impression the utter loneli- ness and desolation, with not a sight or a sound that even faintly recalls any object or event within a thousand years, — and, between the sunset glories and the clouds flying over this scene at night, one has room for sensations as strange, as weird, and as enchanting as one can hope to experience on this curious earth of ours.
CHAPTER VII
THEATRE— FAIRY DELL AND HIGH PLACE
BY Monday, we had made every preparation for careful exploration, and decided to at- tack the detached mass lying at the inner end of the Sik, standing, as it does, almost in the heart of the ancient city. On its eastern flank is the Treasury of Pharaoh, and the great amphitheatre ; into its heart extends one of the finest fissures of the valley ; up its sides wind at least three of the famous rock stairways, each bordered with endless excavations, and on its summit the cathedral of ancient worship — the High Place of Edom. Musa, our guide, was on hand early, and loaded with camera, plates, and rifles we left camp, and swing- ing round the ruins south of the brook we came at once to the inner end of the Sik.
The view of the tombs near the inner entrance will give an idea of the way in which the eastern wall is honeycombed at this point (p. 115) and shows one of the finest carved masses in Petra. From the floor of the valley to the sky-line there was some tomb or monument in nearly every stratum, while to the left of the centre appears the
160
Theatre— Fairy Dell and High Place 163
enormous cutting of the great amphitheatre, and above it towers the peak on which was carved the High Place. A nearer view of the amphitheatre will give a clearer idea of its size, especially when one finds the individual who stands gun in hand among- its rows of seats. This theatre is a strange and unexpected sight in this Appian Way of Petra ; with tombs on every side and even above it, this pleasure resort is hewn from solid rock, and one is forced to make the astonished comment, 44 Amusement in a cemetery ! a theatre in the midst of sepulchres ! "
The diameter of the floor, or stage, is one hun- dred and twenty feet, around which rise thirty-three rows of seats, so well preserved that an audience might easily take their places to-day and watch whatever tragedy or comedy the wandering Arabs might act on the level floor below. Burckhardt estimated it as accommodating three thousand persons, but we estimated from our measurements that fully five thousand spectators could have been seated in it when the tiers of seats were complete. The excavation from the floor to the edge of the cutting above is considerably over one hundred and thirty feet, and more than three hundred feet from side to side. Here also the coloring of the sandstone is brilliant, and at certain points in the excavation the tiers of seats are literally red and purple alternately in the native rock. Shut in on nearly every side, these many-colored seats filled with throngs of brilliantly dressed revellers, the rocks
1 64 The Jordan Valley and Petra
around and above crowded with the less fortunate denizens of the region, what a spectacle in this valley it must have been ! What an effect it must have produced upon the weary traveller, toiling in from the burning sands of the desert, along the shadows of the marvellous Sik, past the vision of the Treasury, and into the widening gorge that resounded with the shouts of the revellers, and reverberated with the applause of the populace, in the days of its ancient glory !
" To me," wrote Stephens many years ago, "the stillness of a ruined city is nowhere so impressive as when sitting on the steps of its theatre : once thronged with the pleasure-seeking crowds, but now given up to solitude and desolation. Day after day these seats had been filled and the now silent rocks had re-echoed to the applauding shouts of thousands ; and little could an ancient Edomite imagine that a solitary stranger, from a then unknown world, would one day be wandering among the ruins of his proud and wonderful city, meditating upon the fate of a race that has for ages passed away. Where are ye, inhabitants of this desolate city ? Ye who once sat on the seats of this theatre, the young, the high-born, the beautiful, the brave ; who once rejoiced in your riches and power, and lived as if there were no grave ? Where are ye now ? Even the very tombs, whose open doors are stretching away in long ranges before the eyes of the wondering traveller, cannot reveal the mystery of your doom ; your dry bones are gone ;
i6s Petra — On the Road to the First High Place near the Treasury
Theatre — Fairy Dell and High Place 167
the robber has invaded your graves, and your very ashes have been swept away to make room for the wandering Arab of the desert."
Again we passed into the defile whose rocky banks are strewn with the fragments of the ancient city ; again we gazed upon the tiers of the rock cut- tings, the broken stairways, the ruin wrought by masses shaken loose by the earthquake, until we stood spellbound once more in front of the Treas- ury. Each visit seems to enhance its beauties, and deepen the charm of its silent glories — its power was the same but changed, as seen at sun- rise, at sunset, in the shower, or in the blaze of noonday.
None of the guide-books or records of former travellers had spoken of a road leading up the fissure to the left of the Treasury. The dense growth of oleander in the floor of the opening and the trees and bushes among the rocks hide one of the most charming bits in Petra, which we named the Fairy Dell. Later in the day the shadow of the cliff fell across it and so it was our lot to take this morn- ing view or nothing. A glance at the picture will show on the right the cliff into which the Treasury is carved, and on the left the mass at the end of the Sik, while in between rises the dell, which is more like fairyland than anything we ever saw in our childhood dreams. It is a promontory between two fissures, and the mass of iris-hued and fantastic sandstone between the rifts was cut into a maze, where we found cascades, stairways, platforms,
1 68 The Jordan Valley and Petra
seats, and sheltered nooks. For a height of nearly two hundred feet, all is now overgrown with cling- ing plants and bushes. The edges of the sand- stone, worn by wind and water, have melted into shapes most beautiful, with colors soft, sweet and harmonious — a most exquisite bit of landscape gardening, with all the colors of the flowers, and yet in solid stone ! We saw it just at the right time, — after the showers, when the ancient pools and channels were filled with water, and the little cas- cades came tumbling down the rocks and enhanced their beauty.
As we climbed the ruined stairways, and saw everywhere the marks of human handiwork, in the nooks, the channels, the pools, the little tunnels, the seats, arranged to command the valley and the Treasury below, we marvelled at the taste, the in- genuity, and the skill of those ancient races who, entering this wildest of Nature's fastnesses, pro- ceeded to subdue and refine its beauties until it must have been, as it certainly is still, one of the most charming spots that the eye of man has ever rested upon.
As we climbed higher and lost sight of the dell, the pathway broadened into a road that we felt must lead to something of importance. At one point the roadway was cut for a hundred and fifty feet through a shoulder of the rock, ten feet wide, and with a depth varying from five to fifteen feet. At places the action of the weather had completely destroyed the old path, but we followed its line
Pi
<
Theatre — Fairy Dell and High Place 171
until we were fully five hundred feet above the level of our tents. We made our way across the top of the mass in an easterly direction, and soon came upon another roadway coming from the vicinity of the theatre, through a great cutting, and after join- ing they pass on to the base of the famous " mazze- bah" or pillars, which mark the ancient High Place of Edom. The picture (p. 169 mazzebah) gives an excellent idea of the spot. The eastern pillar is five feet by five and a half feet at the base, and twenty-four feet high. The westerly one is ten by six feet, and twenty feet high. They were not built, but were formed by cutting the native rock away from around them. The whole amount of cutting which took place in this region is tre- mendous.
The process of quarrying was evidently still be- ing carried on here when it was stopped by some violent occurrence. Directly in front of the near- est pyramid, in the picture, can be seen a num- ber of rectangular lines, now marked by a growth of weeds and grass, where blocks of stone have been outlined, preparatory to forcing them loose by wedges. Some blocks had been loosened, but had not been taken away ; others were still connected with the main mass. The fine grain and delicate color of the rock in this quarry must have been the reason for the demand made upon it. It appeared to have been used in the construction of the Kasr Firaun. In color and texture it resembles the famous Carlisle sandstone. The whole face of the
172 The Jordan Valley and Petra
great cliff in the centre of the picture must have been cut away in this manner.
Immediately across the great roadway, on the top of the highest point, are the shapeless ruins of a building that was once fully a hundred and fifty feet long. To the left of this building, and opposite the mazzebah, is another cutting which seems to have formed a grand staircase, leading up behind the large building to the very summit of the rocky mass, where we found the object of our search — the most ancient High Place.
Our camp in Petra was about three thousand feet above the sea and our barometers registered thirty- seven hundred at this point, or seven hundred feet higher than the floor of the city about the brook. The first view of the High Place, to one approach- ing it from this direction, is that of the sunken court, which is forty-seven feet long and twenty feet wide. In its centre, cut from the native rock, is a small raised platform, four feet ten inches by two feet seven inches, and four inches high. The whole court slopes perceptibly to the east and south, and was drained through a cutting at the southeast corner.
The second view (High Place — Altars) gives the arrangement of the pools, the two altars on the west side of the sunken court, with the raised plat- form immediately in front. On the left is a pool cut into the rock five and a half feet long and about sixteen inches deep. To the right of it and between it and the steps, is another smaller cavity,
Theatre — Fairy Dell and High Place 175
hollowed out and connected by a channel with the round altar just above it (see Plan, p. 97). The round altar is formed by two concentric depressions cut into the rock, the outer one being forty-six inches in diameter and the inner one seventeen inches. If this was the spot for slaying the bloody sacrifices, then the blood would run down and collect in the cavity close to the stairway.
The other altar is a detached rectangular block, nine by six feet, with the passage-way all round it. It is approached by the stairs seen in the pictures and plan, and, in addition to the strange cuttings on the corners, contains a depression forty-three inches long and four inches deep, possibly for liba- tions, or parts of the burnt offerings. At the northern end of the sunken court is a cutting that seems to have been intended for a seat accommo- dating at least ten persons. Thirty feet south of the southern end of the court is a large pool, seven feet eight inches by ten feet, and three feet deep, cut into the solid rock.1 The worshipper or priest who ascended these altar stairs, and then turned to face the court, found himself looking towards the rising sun.
We had carried with us the Biblical World for January, 1901, and carefully re-read Professor Rob- inson's article, "The High Place at Petra in Edom," on the spot itself. We are convinced that the altars, pools, and stairways are an ancient piece of workmanship, and most certainly intended for the
1 For a more detailed description see Pal. Exp. Quarterly, S. I. Curtis.
176 The Jordan Valley and Petra
purposes of worship. We noted also that while Petra is cut into the lower strata of the friable red and white sandstone, this particular peak reaches in its summit the harder strata which appear every- where in the plateau and mountains round about. This fact alone probably explains the excellent pre- servation of this monument of antiquity, for had it been hewn in strata similar to that of some of the crumbling sandstone of the city below, it would not have been distinguishable after the lapse of so many centuries. This layer of harder rock has acted as a roof to the whole peak. There is plenty of crumbling red sandstone two hundred yards away, and only fifty or sixty feet lower down, but the cap in which this High Place is preserved is of harder consistency. Comparing the weathering on this rock with the other ancient buildings and cuttings in Syria, there can be no doubt as to the very great antiquity of this record of past ages.
As to the outlook from this peak, it is sublime, and worthy of a place among the noted mountains of the Bible, and marvellously fitted to stir within the human heart those emotions which have ever found their rightful vent in the worship of powers far above all things human.
As to location, it is much more central than other explorers have realized. We have described the im- pressive pathway leading from the Treasury through the Fairy Dell to this spot. We have noticed the roadway coming from a point in the valley south of the theatre, and still another stairway came
|
. |
\ |
|
\ |
|
|
~>u |
|
|
• |
* |
d,
Theatre — Fairy Dell and High Place 179
from a point west of the theatre. We attempted to descend this path, but found it impossible with- out ropes and ladders, though the remains of the ancient stairways are visible at a dozen points. The photograph marked "Descent from High Place" (p. 185), looks down this fissure, and was taken from a spot near where the photograph of the in- scription on the road to the High Place was taken. To the left of this inscription is a rude cutting of an altar approached by stairs. In addition to the three approaches named, there was still a fourth, coming from the southwest. This was a longer and hence easier approach than any of the other three. It was bordered for hundreds of yards with fine cuttings, in one of which is still to be seen a well-preserved inscription in the Nabathean characters.
Three separate inscriptions are visible on the rock in the picture.
The upper one on the right is partly concealed in the photograph by the foliage: the ends of the two lines consist of the words —
— his son
— his daughter.
A lower inscription on the right is also partly concealed by the foliage and discoloration of the rocks. The portion that is visible reads
Remembered be Kayyamat, son of —
The upper central inscription is almost entirely
180 The Jordan Valley and Petra
legible; certain letters which are in doubt are in- dicated by underscoring them. The translation is :
Remembered be Hayyu, son of Balitu, in goodness and peace before Dushara.
The inscription is similar to hundreds of others in the region, cut in the rocks by men who had abundant leisure, and wished to perpetuate their names.1
The position of this High Place, within the ancient capital of Edom, its magnificent central location, its four main approaches hewn from the solid rock, with their endless excavations, carried by cuttings and stairways around and up towering cliffs, three of which roadways unite in front of the "mazzebah," and then make the remainder of the ascent by a colossal stair to the High Place itself — these facts easily establish its claim to being the chief place of worship, the cathedral rock of ancient Edom.
From the days of Abraham to Solomon, the Bible makes many references to the worship on the high places. It was a natural and at first an innocent impulse, which led men to resort to the hills for worship. There the worshippers were brought nearer to the heavens, and the separation of those retired eminences from the scenes of the usual routine of daily occupation suggested the idea of sacredness. Sinai, Hor, Nebo, Ebal and
1 We are indebted to Professor Davis of the Princeton Theological Sem- inary for this translation.
<
>
Theatre — Fairy Dell and High Place 183
Gerizim, Ramah and Jerusalem, play an important part in the history of the religious life of the Chil- dren of Israel. The literature of other nations, and their attempts to build in the low-lying plain structures that would imitate the mountain heights bear testimony to the same impulse and instinct.
Leaving the fuller discussion of the more recon- dite questions as to how far the Israelites, coming from Egypt, were influenced by the example of the Moabites and Canaanites to wider and later study, we may point out briefly some of the matters that come into prominence. That these spots were for worship, and not for ceremonies connected with the burial of the dead alone, is evidenced by the elevated location of the main High Place in Petra, and the absence of tombs anywhere within hundreds of yards of it. That the worship included the ele- ment of sacrifice is proved by the accessories of all such well-preserved locations. That they reproduce in a striking manner the main features of Israel's tabernacle, — the sanctuary, the court, the lavers, the altars, etc., is undeniable. Now, whether the Israelites borrowed from the Moabites, or the Moa- bites from the Israelites, or both from another source, is of course an interesting question ; but one of the plainest and most valuable inferences lies on the surface and is this, — these high places bear the strongest testimony, along with older references in literature, to the great age of the idea and practice of sacrifice, pushing it back into the earliest periods. Whether it was animal or
1 84 The Jordan Valley and Petra
human, or both, will perhaps some day be known more fully.
In the reign of Solomon we are suddenly con- fronted by an unusual development of the worship on high places. It was one of the sins of this great King that he burnt sacrifices on so many of these high altars. His foreign wives induced him to build high places for " Ashtoreth, the abomination of the Zidonians ; for Chemosh, the abomination of the Moabites, and for Milcom, the abomination of the Children of Ammon" (i Kings xi., 17 ; 2 Kings xxiii., 13). In spite of the construction of the Temple, this idolatrous worship introduced from foreign nations, and the tvorship of Jehovah on high places went on increasing for many years. The conflict between the two is sugfaested in Solomon's days. Elijah complains that the altars of God are thrown down and neglected, and he himself burns incense on the reconstructed altar on Mount Carmel. This conflict grew sharper in the day of Asa and the kings who followed him, until the impression is sharply defined that all the wor- ship on these high places was idolatrous and hence illegitimate. Then followed the centralizing of worship and sacrifice at the one altar in Jerusa- lem, and the warfare wa^ed against all the high places in the Holy Land. The reasons for this are not far to seek. The ritual and worship at these myriad local altars, after Solomon's acces- sion, degenerated from the older and simpler standard, and their heathen practices had been
4m, \: < ~% s
Theatre — Fairy Dell and High Place 187
introduced into the city of Jerusalem itself. Any reform in Jerusalem must needs have issued in a warfare against all the local shrines. Hence the interesting fact that to find the mazzebah and other accessories of this worship on high places we must go to Edom and other portions of Syria, which lay beyond the sphere of the Jewish king- dom's influence and control. And here in Petra are certainly the most perfect specimens of these interesting remains of the centuries before the monarchy and perhaps the Exodus.
Two other features of these ancient high places, connect them curiously with our religious life of to-day. The ancient worship in Petra em- braced the double altar of their matchless high place.
The other connecting link is the relation between the pillar or the pillars, marking the location of these ancient places of worship, and the minaret and church steeple. It does not require a great stretch of imagination to connect this pillar with the minaret of Islam and the steeple of the Christian church. The Mohammedans added a winding stair, like the approaches to the ancient high place, and a human voice to call men to prayer ; while the Christians added a bell or a set of chimes. The Jews, curiously enough, en- joined and urged the destruction of all the groves and " pillars " and accessories of the " high places," and they did not leave one pillar standing west of the Jordan. They never seem to have built
1 88 The Jordan Valley and Petra
anything corresponding to the minaret or the church steeple in connection with their synagogues.
Christian church architecture has also decreed that the altar shall face the east, as the altars of the High Place at Petra do, but with this important change : the sunken court at Petra lies to the east of the altars, while in Christian cathedrals the nave lies to the west. All the sun temples, however, follow, of course, the order of the High Place in Petra. The temples at Baalbec, and at thirty other places in that region, invariably face the east, the rising sun entering the opening door and lighting up the altar which stands against the western wall. The Jews afterward opened their windows and prayed toward Jerusalem, and the Moslems, no matter where they may be, pray toward Mecca. It remained for evangelical Christianity to shake it- self free from the points of the compass, from Jeru- salem, from Rome, from human traditions of every sort, from all created objects, and lift its face and heart heavenwards in the worship of God in spirit and in truth.
Note — The High Place was seen by Mr. E. L. Wilson and party in 1862. Described by Prof. S. I. Curtis, who visited it in iSg8. See also Prof. G. L. Robinson's article in the Biblical World, January, 1901.
CHAPTER VIII
THE SECOND HIGH PLACE AT PETRA
THE next day we had the pleasure of discover- ing a second 4< high place." Early in the morning we climbed to the top of the " Citadel Rock " by a badly ruined road and stair ; and, while examining the ruins of what seems to have been a small Crusader fortress, — for a band of Crusaders once entered Petra, — we saw in the gome below, riorht behind the " Citadel," cuttings which recalled the original high place. An hour or two later, we made our way to the location, and found all the accessories of a second " high place," in one the grandest and wildest spots about Petra.
The main street and brook in Petra run from east to west, as pointed out in a preceding chapter (p. 1 1 8). On the eastern side of the city stand the Corinthian tomb and a great temple. Toward the west, the main street passes through the Arch of Triumph, in front of the Kasr Firaun, and then by a gentle incline upwards runs towards the base of the " Citadel Rock," which was one mass of tombs and carvings. From the " Kasr Firaun " to
191
192 The Jordan Valley and Petra
the base of the Citadel, it is some seventy yards to where we found the ruins of an inclined way, with here and there broad steps, leading up to the " Rainbow Temple," which was formerly and is still, one of the most beautiful objects in the valley. This fine inclined road is broken in places by the falling in of the caves and tombs beneath it, but soon after passing the " Temple," it winds round the northern base of the Citadel Rock, and into the exit gorge, by a gallery cut into the rock, from four to ten feet wide, with a solid rock balustrade, at places six to seven feet high. This gallery where it enters the gorge, which at this place is about sixty feet wide, is some fifty or sixty feet above the floor of the brook. It then continues around the Rock, with a width varying from three to fifteen feet, for a distance of over two hundred yards, until it comes to an open platform of rocks (see photograph of the vicinity of the second high place), sixty feet above the floor of the brook, where another valley from the south joins the gorge. Here we reached the altar. Towering rocks two hundred to four hundred feet high surround the weird spot on every side (see views of rocks round high place and rock architecture). Standing on the point beside the altar, one looks back through the narrow gorge, and across the city to the Corinthian tomb (view of lower eoree — looking west from new hio-h place), down the gorge into an abyss, and through a cleft toward the east one might see the rising sun. The open space is perhaps five hundred feet
1 ; J/M
.
I
i rwiiflp
1 ?ii ' ' '„
«
PL,
PL,
The Second Hi^h Place at Petra 199
i&
square, and the rocky walls on every side contain hundreds of tombs and rooms carved into the sand- stone. While not more than five hundred yards away from the Arch of Triumph, one might imagine that he had gone a day's journey into the heart of the mountains. At least four large stairways, six to ten feet wide, ascend from the valley below to the platform, in addition to the gallery leading from the main street of the city.
And here, as in the High Place above, are all the accessories of worship. The altar faces the east (see plan — p. 97). In front of it is a sunken court, seventeen by eighteen feet, with a seat around it with a natural rock back. Immediately contiguous is a second and lower sunken court, now a grass plot because filled with soil, ten by twenty-two feet, and beyond that a still larger cutting in the rock, making another court eighteen by twenty-one feet. At the southeast corner of the grass plot a large piece of the natural rock is left, and in it is cut a pool, three and a half feet long by two feet wide, and some eighteen inches deep. In the bottom of the pool is a smaller cavity, and fitting snugly into it is a stone plug. To the right of the pool is another small platform, measuring eight by ten feet, which appears to have been once roofed over by the nat- ural rock. Above the pool and platform, on the great rock, and some forty feet away, are the re- mains of a large pool, seven by eight and a half feet, which, instead of being hollowed down into the rock, was made by cutting the rock away and leav-
200 The Jordan Valley and Petra
ing the box-like pool standing above the rock. While much worn by wind and rain, one corner still shows a height of thirty-four inches above the rock.
Not far away from the large pool are two circular cuttings in the rock, six to twelve inches deep, sim- ilar to the round altar in the main High Place. The photographs, p. 197 et seq., will tell the rest of the story.
To sum up we have in this location:
1. An altar, much worn, but with one libation hole still visible.
2. A court, with seats around it, with the remains of a back-rest, of the natural rock.
3. A grass plot, most likely a lower court, or an extension of the altar court.
4. Rock cuttings to enlarge and extend platforms.
5. A small pool in the rock, with a round cavity in the bottom.
6. A recess near by, once roofed over by the original rock, as a shelter or receptacle.
7. A large pool, or laver, near at hand.
8. Four stairways, and a gallery leading to the spot; two stairways at the rock, and two other fine ones within a hundred and fifty feet.
9. Tombs in the high rocks all around the locality. That it was a public gathering-place is evident
from the various approaches, wide enough to ac- commodate any formal procession. That it was in- tended for worship is almost as certain. That it belongs to the centuries before the Christian era
£
o
W
Oh
The Second High Place at Petra 207
is
is evident from the numberless considerations drawn from the history of the city and region.
The more we explored, the deeper grew the con- viction that similar places of worship will yet be found in other parts of the city and its surrounding rocky rampart. Up at the place called the Deir, we saw many rocks circled with stairways reaching to their summits. These stairways are in most cases worn away in places by wind and weather, making it difficult to mount these isolated rocks. It may possibly be that the main high place was the " Cathedral " of the city, and the second high place a sort of winter church, much easier of access, the same arrangement beine found in the case of the " sun temples " of Northern Syria, which are frequently arranged in pairs, one high above the city or village on a mountain-top, available in summer for the purpose of worship, and a second structure, in the town itself, accessible in the colder and stormier days of the winter.1
1 As seen at Bludan, Niha, Hadeth, and Liaalbec itself.
CHAPTER IX
THE DEIR
FREQUENT reference has already been made to the many fissures or ravines which extend from the floor of the valley up into the heart of the rocky walls of the city. We have noticed three in connection with the High Place, but the northern wall of the amphitheatre is indented with at least half a dozen of them, as yet largely unex- plored. But the most remarkable and by far the most interesting one is that leading to the Deir. It lies close against the northern half of the western wall, and after running due north for some six hun- dred yards, it turns at right angles and extends nearly due west for another eight hundred yards. The winding path and stairways would stretch per- haps twice this distance, since the elevation of the Deir above our camp was more than seven hundred feet.
Leaving camp we crossed the brook at the mouth of the exit gorge, and turned up the bed of a tor- rent more than a hundred feet wide at its point of juncture with the gorge, but narrowing rapidly un- til one could almost touch the walls on each side
208
The Deir 211
with the outstretched hands (photograph, Road to Deir, p. 215). Then we left the torrent bed to ascend a staircase hewn out of the rocks. The steps are not continuous, except at steep places ; here a flight of ten, then a curving incline, then a flight of forty; sometimes the steps are a series of platforms, placed four and five feet apart, and then they mount as steeply as the pitch of the ascent demands. Often it is ten feet from side to side of the roadway, and passing through the various strata the colors include all that can be seen or found in Petra.
The ascending road winds past beautiful nooks, where the seats and niches and cuttings rival the Fairy Dell, as seen in the photograph, p. 165 (Ascent to Deir) ; then along the brink of a precipice, be- low which is a fissure almost equalling the Sik (Road to Deir, Looking West). At places a bal- ustrade of the natural rock has been left, but at others we looked directly down into the yawning abyss. For nearly the whole of the distance the cliffs and little side fissures are filled with number- less excavations. Stairways seem to run every- where, some with no beginning, some with no ending, leading to caves that have crumbled away, or to the top of rocks now inaccessible. Again, we noted the little channels and pools to catch the rain or to convert its flow into miniature cascades, which added an artistic charm to the pathway.
At one point we saw an extensive system of channels and pools, in which to catch and store
212 The Jordan Valley and Petra
the precious rain-water. Here, as everywhere else in Petra, the winds and the storms have eroded the colored sandstones into ten thousand curious shapes, and everywhere thrown a veil of decay over the cut- tings and chisellings that enhance the charm many fold. It is another journey up into fairyland.
At length the road made some final curves among- the boulders of the white strata of sandstone and emerged in the wide plaza of the Deir, a sloping space many hundreds of feet from side to side, and surrounded with the same fantastic rocky tops that appear everywhere above the Petra mass. At the right of the road as it enters this square, and on its lower side, stands the second great monument in Petra, called the Deir or monastery (photograph, p. 225). It is carved from the side of a mountain- top, but not protected by any overhanging mass. It is larger than the Treasury, being a hundred and fifty-one feet wide and a hundred and forty-two feet high,1 but not nearly so fine in coloring or de- sign. It is impressive in its size, in its surround- ings, but it cannot be called beautiful. Stanley compares it with a London church of the eigh- teenth century, massive, but in poor taste, and with a somewhat debased style of ornamentation. Like the Treasury, it is in two stories, and sur- mounted by an urn and ball of stone. The five niches may once have contained statues, but these decorations, if they existed, evidently were not carved from the native rock.
1 Hornstein's figures.
*
1
*
^ »■**"- >'v »
IB
1P::1.;^^
(^
The Deir 217
A colossal doorway, thirty feet high and seven- teen feet wide, opens into the single large room, carved in the rock behind it. Like the room at the Treasury, it is nearly a hollow cube, measuring thirty- six feet nine inches by thirty-nine feet eight inches. At the north end of the room, opposite the doorway, is a recess carved in the rock, fourteen feet wide by eight feet deep, and is approached by steps from either side, which lead to its floor. It is raised four feet above the floor of the main room. Travellers have called this an altar for a Christian church, and there is good reason for accepting this explanation, since the Deir has certainly served such a purpose at some period of its history.
The "Deir" means the " Monastery," and the existence of this name is a pretty positive clue to a time when Christians inhabited Petra. Moham- medans at the time of their invasion honored Pharaoh and Moses in the new place-names for Petra, and completely ignored the Horites, the Edomites, the Idumeans, and the Romans. It is just as certain that they never, of their own accord, gave the name of a Christian place of worship to any spot. They must have found the name of " monastery " clinging to the building when they entered and took possession. Nor did the Mo- hammedans ever carve the altar-like recess, and it is also certain that Christians have not permanently inhabited Petra since the time of the Mohammedan invasion. The city was occupied by Baldwin I. of Jerusalem, and formed the second fief of the barony
218 The Jordan Valley and Petra
of Krak (Kerak), under the title of Chateau de la Vallee de Moyse or Sela. It remained in the hands of the Franks till 1189, and the statement exists that as late as 1 2 1 7 there was a small monastery on Mount Hor. But quite likely in the days of the Christian occupation of the Madeba plain, and the hallowing of such sites as Nebo, Christian men did not forget that not far off Aaron slept on Mount Hor; and the view from the upper edge of the plaza, where this monastery stands, commands the finest possible view of Aaron's grave and mountain, just across the yawning chasm which carries the Wady Musa brook from Petra toward the Dead Sea.
But the original purpose of the plaza and its vicinity, whatever its name may have been, was that of a great pleasure resort. Immediately in front of the Deir, on what is almost a greensward, we traced the circle of a theatre, which had a back wall of masonry and several rows of seats. The circle is still plainly marked. No matter what the state of the country may have been outside the valley, while the city guards held the strong en- trance of the Sik the whole of the inhabitants of the wealthy city could climb the rocky stairways and make holiday here in absolute security from every enemy. As far as we can see or learn, the spot is wholly inaccessible, except by the one rocky stairway and winding path up which we came. Again we were impressed by the taste and skill of those ancient races, in finding and utilizing such a
^:i
Ph
*v 1
J&
ypi..
m
The Deir 223
grand spot. It is true that the effects of brilliant coloring fade, as one climbs higher by this path, but when once the mountain-top is gained, other charms comes into play : the crystalline atmosphere, the ragged, fantastic bits of the wildest forms of na- ture, and then the extensive views, first of the whole Petra mass, then of the plateau from which we first saw the region ; and, lastly, of the chasms and abysses toward Mount Hor, leading down to the Arabah, which sometimes stretch away southward toward the Gulf of Akabah.
Opposite the Deir once stood a peak about a hundred feet high, and in its face, toward the plaza, stood a most elaborate temple. The bases of columns still mark the portico in front ; and behind them are the remains of the great inner rooms, which extended back into the solid rock. It was a massive structure, larger than the Deir itself. Above this temple, on the top of the peak, are the ruins of what was once a lar^e tower. From this exalted spot the views are superb in every direc- tion, except where one mountain mass cuts off the region of the Dead Sea.
There is not a rock or a cliff within a thousand feet of this plaza which does not show the traces of human handiwork. Doors and windows abound, indicating the existence of rooms behind them, and stairways in all stages of ruin run up and down in every direction. A number of rocks have been cut into huge cubes, and their upper surfaces lead one to think that they were once surmounted by the
224 The Jordan Valley and Petra
familiar pyramidal masses. Other detached rocks are encircled with stairways, making one suspect the existence of small " high places." We climbed several and found cuttings that suggested pools and even altars, but the lack of time and the want of ropes and ladders made a careful examination im- possible. We carried away the impression that somewhere in this region will be found another high place to match, perhaps to surpass, that in the city itself ! The one isolated rock, which seemed to exhibit the closest resemblance to the re- mains of platform, pool, altar, and drainage, looks down the magnificent gorge into the city, in just the same manner as the other High Place com- mands a view of the city. It is also probable that the higher masses behind the Deir may yield up some new treasures for the Biblical archaeologist. We thought we could see the decayed bases of two pillars, with traces of carving about them, but were not able to climb up to them.
As we reviewed the whole conception of that rocky stairway, mounting seven hundred feet from the brook, penetrating into the heart of the mount- ain, following- the windings of the fantastic gorge, crossing every stratum of the many-hued sandstone ; the steps, now yellow, now red, now banded, now white, now waving like a banner in the wind ; the sides of the roadway adorned with seats and pools, and tablets and shrines ; the smaller fissures filled with stairways leading into nooks unseen and un- suspected ; the deep cuttings undertaken wherever
, ■ ■
)
;A
■ ' j.
Ed - .
\3
rf/f 1*7
1 >$/&** ¥<
'4 - "^
^4*2*3^
1 -i- ■' h ** IP
•V • ' Y*rV
u
&T
The Deir 227
the precipice left a space for a human foot ; then this plaza surrounded by the wildest beauties of nature and the most wonderful structures ; the views down the gorge into the city, over the whole Petra mass, over the chasms to Mount Hor and Aaron's tomb, and down the Arabah — it seemed to us that the combination is certainly one that no other city on earth can easily equal. And again and again we were forced to recognize the superior genius of the spirits and men who saw the possibilities of the sit- uation, and added to nature the charms of art.
While we were wrapt in the contemplation of the beauties of the scene, an episode occurred that ap- pealed to another side of our nature, the very mem- ory of which causes one's heart to sink. We had been informed of the existence of the ibex in these mountain fastnesses, but somehow the o-uide Musa did not make the matter impressive enough. So, thinking only of the existence of blue rock pig- eons and partridges, we made the sad mistake of carrying only a shotgun and the camera, leaving both Winchester rifles at the tents. While one of us was on the peak admiring the views and the other was manipulating the camera, we were dis- turbed and amazed by seeing seven ibex come out of a gorge, run across the greensward, and disap- pear into a narrow ravine ! The man on the peak came down at a pace that endangered his life and limbs, and made breathlessly for the opening of the ravine, expecting to find the seven graceful crea- tures caught as in a trap. But what was our con-
228 The Jordan Valley and Petra
sternation, our dismay, and our despair to see those seven ibex go cantering up the apparently impos- sible rocks, not more than a hundred yards away, at the speed of an express train ! One bullet drop- ped hastily into the choke-bore was sent flying in vain at the receding figures. With our rifles we could have fired half a dozen shots before they dis- appeared. None but a real hunter will ever know the emotions of our hearts, and the impression made of what might have been ! Some uncompli- mentary remarks were flung out concerning the whole art of photography, as our first chance to shoot an ibex, and perhaps our last, slipped away forever.
On our way down we failed to enjoy the beauties of the fadinQf sunlight in the eora-e, because those seven ibex kept running across the seat of memory in our brains. The blue rock pigeons seemed to mock us, and the partridges clucked more defiantly than ever. We paused long enough to discover and photograph an ancient Roman hand-mill, cut from a block of basalt. It lacks the cone of ba- salt upon which it fitted and revolved, but shows plainly the sockets into which its handles fitted.
We went to rest early that evening, but all night long those seven ibex kept galloping over the rocks, and we, in our dreams, were hunting in vain for the rifles !
CHAPTER X
MOUNT HOR
THE region of Petra, and more especially of Mount Hor, is "paved with the good in- tentions " of travellers unfulfilled. Burck- hardt (1811) struggled hard to ascend Mount Hor, but was obliged to halt on the little plain half-way up, without reaching the top. Neither Laborde (1827), nor Robinson (1838), was allowed to make the attempt. Many other parties since their day have seen the white tomb on its summit from afar, and sadly against their will turned away from it forever. But since the roads have been better known, and travellers have been able to dispense with native guides, the ascent has been made by a number who have left some records of their experiences.
The difficulties are not physical, but arise from the jealousy, the cupidity, and the superstitions of the people, who claim the shrine and guard its ap- proaches. The Bedawin who roam over the land of Edom have been described by travellers as the worst of their race. Pococke speaks of the Arabs about Akabah and the Arabah as bad people. He
231
232 The Jordan Valley and Petra
calls them notorious robbers, who are always at war with all others. Joliffe alludes to the district as one of the wildest divisions of Arabia. Burck- hardt says that in this region he felt fear for the first and only time during his travels in the desert, and that this route was the most dangerous he ever travelled. He had nothing with him that ought to have attracted the notice of the Bedawin, or have excited their cupidity, and yet they even stripped him of some rags that covered his wounded ankles. Leigh and Banks, and Irby and Mangles (1818), were told that the Arabs of Wady Musa were a most savage and treacherous race, murder- ing pilgrims from Barbary, and acting toward all comers as the Edomites did toward the Israelites, when they refused them passage through this coun- try on the way to the Promised Land. It is a mystery why this ancient, world-old churlishness should appear in the modern dwellers, but so it is. They seem to have drawn it from the soil or to have absorbed it from the fountains. But what- ever its explanation, here it is, three thousand years and more since Moses was rebuffed.
Aaron's tomb on Hor is now a Moslem shrine. Like Moses' tomb below Nebo it has been coveted and fought for by Christians, and more especially by Jews, whose reverence for both these Israelite heroes is well known to the Moslems. It will be woe to the poor Jew, for many years to come, who is found within twenty-five miles of that sacred spot on Hor !
Mount Hor 235
Another element entering into the situation is the deeply rooted superstition connected with the tomb, according to which the people firmly be- lieve that evil will surely befall, before the year is out, the wretched man who commits the sacrilege of aiding or guiding any stranger to the sacred spot at the top of the mount. It is true that their cupidity now and then overcomes their fears, but the deep-rooted superstition and the dread of evil raise the price demanded. As late as 1883 the party made up of Kitchener, Armstrong, and Hull, paid ^"34 ($170.00) for the privilege of one day to visit Mount Hor, and afterwards passing through Petra. Ordinarily the amount of bakhshish de- pends upon the number of men who get wind of the strangers' coming, and who reach the spot in time to claim a share. It is then "many men, many money." When their superstitions and cu- pidity have not availed, they have often thwarted parties by threatening to plunder their camp or car- avans while the owners were climbing the moun- tain, and a party strong enough to hold its own while united, dared not sub-divide itself and become an easy prey to the unscrupulous people.
Even at the present time they will not act as guides up Mount Hor, no matter how willing they are to serve a camp in Petra. Our man Musa begged off from having anything to do with our going up Mount Hor. He afterwards compro- mised with his conscience, and promised to meet us on the top if we ever reached there. He kept
236 The Jordan Valley and Petra
his promise and appeared on the summit, but we never learned how he placated the " Neby " or the villagers, who would have killed him had they seen him.
Travellers who wish to visit Aaron's tomb must allow at least six hours for the trip if they wish to return to Petra. We were two hours on horse- back from camp to the base of the peak. The latter part of the ascent must be made on foot. We rode from camp to within fifteen minutes of the summit, and in the course of our journey proved con- clusively the existence of a second road leading out of the Petra valley. Our route led up the southern slope from the brook, past a solitary column standing on the watershed, and down into the small ravines which drain into the gorge be- hind the Citadel Rock. Then passing up a dry torrent-bed, lying parallel to and not far from the great western wall, we moved southward, ascend- ing all the time, until we came to the southeastern corner of the Petra valley. The bed of the ravine gave place to a broad road, which wound beauti- fully among the humps of colored sandstone until it began to mount rapidly in great curves to a break in the ramparts, through which it passed easily into the open country or plateau beyond. The photograph marked "Road to Mount Hor" gives a backward view of the road from a point near the exit and much higher up. The nearer we came to the exit the greater the amount of excava- tion, but the rock here being of the softer white
/'-.* 4 •,Vv,%
"SI
i
Iff 1*- >
.:-'■•
Mount Hor 239
strata these excavations have almost melted into complete ruin. We noticed the existence of huge cube-shaped blocks guarding the entrance from this quarter, just as we found them at the entrance of the Sik. At the extreme outer face of the sunken rampart are two massive pedestals, measur- ing ten by eighteen feet.
The road leading out of Petra at this point is called the Gaza road, because after two hours it swings round south of Mount Hor, climbs the low ridge, and drops into a ravine which leads to the Arabah, from which it finds its way across Southern Judea to the seacoast at Gaza. This road was once a Roman road, as is plainly seen at a score of points. It crosses the plateau in sight of the deep exit gorge of the Wady Musa brook, and then strikes into a winding valley that ascends gently to the south, almost parallel with the mass of Mount Hor. After three quarters of an hour 's ride from the two pedestals marking the exit from Petra, a smaller road leaves the main one at right angles and begins to climb the steep slope towards Aaron's tomb, which is visible at many points along the main road after it emerges from the Petra valley. A stiff climb of nearly an hour, over a very rough bit of road which winds back and forward round the base of the peak, brought us to the saddle between the two highest masses, and we dismounted at some lizari trees, which grow in a notch of the peak.
J ust here is a wide, sloping space, where thousands
240 The Jordan Valley and Petra
of men and animals can and do camp in the open air, at the annual feast and pilgrimage to the shrine. We saw only one human being by the way, and we went well armed but unattended by any one, except Mustapha the Kurd, who was in ill-humor all day, but obliged to go along and care for the three horses.
We carried luncheon and a supply of water, for Musa had assured us that no water existed outside of the valley. We found later that even Musa could lie, for in the same notch, a hundred feet higher up, was an excellent cistern in which was water in abundance, but unobtainable except by the use of a fifty-foot rope and some vessel to draw it with. Musa joined us before luncheon, but seemed to be in mortal dread lest some inhabitant of the region should see and recognize him.
The last two hundred feet of the climb is up the steep rock by means of long stairways, steeper than any ladder, and positively dangerous at places. There are many traces of other stairways, which have been hewn in the rock, used for cen- turies, worn out, and abandoned. We left Mus- tapha to guard the animals, and had Musa with us for the final climb, which was a stiff one of fully fifteen minutes.
Travellers coming from the south speak of Mount Hor as the highest mountain in sight along the route. Its mass of reddish sandstone and con- glomerate " rises in a precipitous wall of natural masonry, tier above tier, with its face to the west.
Mount Hor 243
The base of the cliff of sandstone rests upon a solid ridge of granite and porphyry, and the summit of the sandstone is somewhat in the form of a rude pyramid." " No more grand monument could be erected to the memory of a man honored of God, than that which nature has here reared up. For amidst this region of natural pyra- mids, Jebel Haroun towers supreme. Jehovah in passing sentence of premature death upon His servant, for a public act of disobedience, left him not to die without honor, and forever after the most conspicuous peak in all this country has been inseparably connected with his name and stands as a monument to his memory." l
Mount Hor, called by the Arabs "Jebel Haroun," or Aaron's Mount, is one of the few spots connected with the wanderings of the Israelites which ad- mits of no reasonable doubt. Dr. H. C. Trumbull has suggested Jebel Madirah, an isolated hill near Ain Kadis, as the real scene of Aaron's death.2 Travellers who have visited both locations have
1 Hull (1883).
8 The twentieth chapter of Numbers, 23-29, gives the account of Aaron's death.
23. And the Lord spake unto Moses and Aaron in mount Hor, by the coast of the land of Edom, saying,
24. Aaron shall be gathered unto his people; for he shall not enter into the land which I have given unto the Children of Israel, because ye rebelled against my word at the water of Meribah.
25. Take Aaron and Eleazar his son, and bring them up unto mount Hor;
26. And strip Aaron of his garments, and put them upon Eleazar his son: and Aaron shall be gathered unto his people, and shall die there.
27. And Moses did as the Lord commanded: and they went up into mount Hor in the sight of all the congregation.
28. And Moses stripped Aaron of his garments, and put them upon
244 The Jordan Valley and Petra
little hesitation in affirming that this peak in Edom more perfectly fulfils all the requirements of the Bible narrative.
"It may also be presumed that as Moses was permitted to view the land of Canaan from Mount Nebo, Aaron was permitted to do the same from Mount Hor. The summit of Mount Hor affords a commanding- prospect of the great valley of the Arabah, and the borders of Seir, of the depression of the Ghor itself, and the table-land of Southern Palestine ; and we may well suppose the eyes of the high priest of Israel were allowed to rest upon the hills of Judea ere he resigned his priestly robes and prepared himself for his resting-place, perhaps in the little cave which is covered by a Moham- medan shrine, whose white walls are visible to the traveller for many miles around." 1
Stephens noticed an aperture in the floor of the shrine, and, descending, found a narrow chamber, at the end of which was an iron grating and behind it a tomb cut in the native rock. No writer makes special mention of it since. Sir Charles Wilson in iSgS made a careful examination of the interior, but makes no reference to any subterranean apart- ment. It has been repaired many times within the
Eleazar his son; and Aaron died there in the top of the mount: and Moses and Eleazar came down from the mount
29. And when all the congregation saw that Aaron was dead, they mourned for Aaron thirty days, even all the house of Israel.
It is to be noted here that the Bible says expressly that " Aaron died there on the top of the mount."
1 Hull (1SS3).
Mount Hor 247
century, and it may be that the present guardians have sealed the lower tomb up by extending the new pavement over the aperture. Sir Charles Wilson says : " The present structure has evidently taken the place of a Byzantine shrine, for we found one stone with a cross upon it, and another with a mutilated Greek inscription." We noticed quite extensive ruins on the west face of the southern horn of the peak, some five hundred yards away, but did not visit them.1 The Christian name pre- served in the Deir, just across the ravine, and the existence of crosses and Greek inscriptions here on Mount Hor, together form a beginning of the evidence which may some day substantiate the early Christian occupation of all the region, and add their testimony to the identification of these Old Testament sites.
The tomb as we found it is shown in the photo- graph, p. 241. It had been repaired, replastered, and whitewashed within a few months. The door was firmly closed and locked, so we made no at- tempt to examine the interior. We were fortunate in having a perfect winter day for our ascent, and having climbed to the flat roof of the tomb we en- joyed the splendid view. East and south were the ruddy tops of the mountains of Edom. Some have compared the desolation of the scene with the wild- ness of the region about Sinai. It is true that they are bare and naked of trees and verdure, but the
1 They may be the ruins of the Crusader monastery mentioned as existing
here as late as 1217.
248 The Jordan Valley and Petra
fantastic shapes into which they are weathered and the subdued glow of their coloring go far toward redeeming them from utter desolation. West- ward we looked over a still more desolate extent of twisted strata, impassable gorges, bottomless ravines, to the plain and desert of the Arabah, which was visible for fully fifty miles of its extent, while beyond it were the lower masses of Southern Judea.
Toward the northwest lay the southern end of the Dead Sea ; and the Lisan, which extends far out into its waters from the base of the mountains of Moab, was plainly visible. The view north, (see photograph, p. 245) gives an excellent idea of the rocky wall which shuts in the Petra vaL^y. On top of this mass, across the chasm lying between, we could plainly see the Deir, white and clean against the darker mass behind and around it Nearer views of some of the peaks reveal a rugged grandeur that is indescribable.
It is true that in this wide landscape there is a "scarcity of marked features," compared with some other views in Syria and the Holy Land, but it also remains true that the outlook from Mount Hor is one of the grandest conceivable over a waste of mountain solitude and the chasm of the Dead Sea. Our barometers registered forty-six hundred feet1 ; adding to this the twelve hundred and ninety feet, we have a depth of fifty-eight hundred and
1 The height given by Kitchener in 18S3 is 45S0 as determined by trian gulation.
o
in O
w §3
C5 £
S o
O -rJ
o w
i -
5 «
ffi 5
C-i 'A
z ^
O CO
a *
> be
I o
Mount Hor 251
ninety feet to the shores of the Salt Sea. And be- tween its steel-blue waters and the ruddy peaks around Mount Hor lies one of the grandest sweeps of nature's wildest handiwork that can fall beneath the eye of man. Lord Kitchener describes it as follows : " The scenery is exceptionally fine, and I do not consider former writers have exaggerated the grand appearance of Mount Hor ; the brilliant colors of the rocks have been remarked by all trav- ellers, but surpassed what I expected to find."
The bird's-eye view obtained from the top of Mount Hor threw a flood of light upon some structural problems which had been taking shape in our minds from the time we left Banias up to this moment. They were not much advanced be- yond the stage of a theory until we crossed the Arabah on our return journey, when we obtained so much additional evidence upon the subject which supported the theory that it is given at this point, because it was on Mount Hor that the theory really emerged in our minds. That it is at vari- ance with the theories usually advanced for the formation of the valley has nothing to do with the case. If the evidence brought forward in its sup- port is not sufficient it will nevertheless have served the purpose of calling attention to some factors in the problem heretofore overlooked.
In order to have the subject clearly in mind, it may be well to state the problem as follows :
Every one, it is believed, is agreed, that the Jor- dan Valley is a great rift, approximately parallel
252 The Jordan Valley and Petra
with the border of the Mediterranean, and forming1 a portion of the great system of fractures in the earth's crust, which separated Europe and Asia from Africa. That this rift occupied a nearly straight line from the end of the Lebanon group of mountains to the Gulf of Akabah, is also un- doubted, since the structural evidence for it is com- plete, and needs no repetition here.
That this rift valley contained a river, or rather a system of rivers which drained the eastern and western plateaus bordering it, through the rift as a main artery, is not a difficult proposition to accept. Why the open connection with the sea should have been interrupted, is a more difficult thing to explain, because it involves more than half of the whole length of the rift.
The first physical feature of the valley which attracted our attention was the steady increase in the altitudes along the eastern plateau. This has already been referred to, and is clearly seen in the diagram, Vol. I., p. 34, showing the variations of our camps above sea-level. If we make due allowance for the horizontal distances involved between the camps, which are necessarily neglected in such a diagram, the gradual character of this rise in eleva- tion is at once seen. The natural inference to be drawn from such a condition of things, where the strata were originally horizontal, is that a general cause operated throughout the whole region, and that the force which produced the effect operated with greatest intensity at the south.
o
o
g
5
o o
>
^■Bm>^6
Mount Hor 255
The next feature of importance noted was the character of the sedimentary rocks in Petra. It was evident that this deposit took place in shallow and brackish water. A study of the peculiar banded lines in a number of the pictures herewith pre- sented will be convincing evidence of this fact. If we take as examples the bands in the lower part of the picture of Aaron's tomb, p. 241, and those on the left-hand side of the picture of the balus- trade, along the pathway, leading to the second High Place, p. 195, we have illustrations, drawn from two points in the series of rocks, differing in position from one another by about thirteen hun- dred feet vertically. They both display the well- known features of brackish-water formations, and when we add that we observed these characteristics throughout the whole of the intervening series the only explanation which can be given is, that at least this series of rocks was formed while the whole mass was undergoing an exceedingly slow positive movement, that is, a movement toward the centre of the earth, and the water covering this sur- face must have been shallow and brackish. The problem immediately presents itself as to the thick- ness of these deposits and their extent up the valley, which might be regarded, at the time when this was going on, as an arm of the sea.
In Petra, the highest points at which we observed the sandstones varied in elevation from forty-six to forty-eight hundred feet above the sea-level, and they were upon the borders of the eastern plateau.
256 The Jordan Valley and Petra
From the top of Mount Hor we made out with our telescopes and levels that other points of contact existed somewhat higher than these, but this can be taken as the upper limit of these rocks. That they were nonconformable with the limestone pla- teau was clearly seen as we passed down its slopes to Elji, as the limestone strata maintained their horizontal position between the masses of sand- stone, which looked at a little distance as though they had been plastered against the wall of the plateau. The difference in elevation above sea- level between the top of the sandstone and the sur- face of the plateau is between fifteen hundred and two thousand feet at Petra. Mount Hor can there- fore be considered as a gigantic remnant which has resisted the elements better than the rest of the mass on account of the tougher character of most of its components or the bond which united them.
The ragged contact line of sandstone and lime- stone is plainly seen in all places where the eastern plateau is included in any photograph, see pp. 211 and 249. This is true of those taken from Mount Hor, also in the view of the Petra valley proper from the High Place, which