VOL. XXVII.

No. 5

T

THE NEW YORK

PUBLIC LIBRARY,

LENOX AND

HE questions we are asked most frequently about our trip are: How did you like the Holy Land? Is it hard to travel there? Did you feel repaid for your expenditure of time and money?

I hope in this article to give, for the benefit of the readers of THE ROSARY, our views on these questions. The trips that may be made by rail, such as I have already described, and the journey from Joppa to Jerusalem are easy and inexpensive, as are also the carriage drives over the few fine roads which the Holy Land possesses.

The most interesting parts of the Holy Land are to be reached only in the saddle. Over some routes ponies may be used; on others even the sure-footed donkey is none too safe. On the trip to Emmaus, we often felt that walking was best of all.

Cook provides a trip overland with every comfort-and little satisfaction. His parties are usually made up of persons not congenial to each other. His guides know all about every spot relating to events chronicled in the Old Testament, little about the New Testament localities, and absolutely nothing about any locality or incident made memorable. by their connection with the Blessed. Virgin and the saints. They have been

EN

trained by the non-Catholic tourists, who love to linger over Jacob's well or Abraham's tomb, but who flippantly scoff at the stories about the life of the Holy Family. Finally, Cook's tours are slow and very expensive. As I wrote last month, we made the trip on our own responsibility. It cost us very little financially, but a great deal otherwise and much loss of comfort. I would not advise any one not inured to hardship to attempt to ride overland through Palestine. We left Nazareth on a beautiful morning in March determined to reach Jerusalem in three days, partly because the fourth day was Palm Sunday, and partly because we could thus spend the nights at priests' houses. As they were the only persons along the route known to the Fathers at Nazareth who could talk French (and no one in that country talks English), it was important that we should spend the nights with them.

We set out from Nazareth at 6 A. M. with a "moukari" (a muleteer) who furnished three ponies for three days, carrying our baggage on his own, and provided his own food and lodging for twenty dollars. As it would require two days for him to make the return journey, it meant four dollars a day for his services and that of his three ponies. He added to this by carrying mail, un

stamped and contraband, between the different towns, and by bringing back freight from Jerusalem to Nazareth. As he could speak no word of any language known to us, we were spared the loquacity and misinformation of the average dragoman.

We said good-bye reluctantly to the good Fathers at Nazareth, and took one last look at the hospice, which, by the way, is called "Our Lady of America" in grateful acknowledgment of the generous Americans who made its erection possible. We were most sorry to part with our good friend Frere Lazare, who had been our companion on the trip to Cana, Tiberias and Mt. Tabor. He had partly promised to go to Jerusalem with us, but the rain and hail of the preceding day had, he said, started the rheumatism

in his old bones, while we (so he said) were young. After that last remark, we forgave his desertion. So few tell us that nowadays! When I bade my pony to get up, he promptly got down on all fours on the slippery pavement. That was encouraging in view of what was before us, but, to give him his due, it was his only misstep. For three days he carried me safely over many dangerous spots. One of the worst places we met was in descending from Nazareth to the plain of Esdrelon. The sharp declivities, the rocks worn smooth by running water, and the loose stones, made travelling slow and dangerous. The plain of Esdrelon is a very fertile stretch of bottom land stretching southeastward from the Mediterranean at Caifa to the Jordan. It is about thirty

six miles long, and, at its widest part, covers fifteen miles. Like all the valleys of the country, it seems made up of the soil which once clung to the hills, which have been washed bare through the centuries. Unless these hills, now bleak and barren, were at one time covered with soil, it is impossible to explain how the great numbers mentioned in the Old Testament could have lived in this country. The plain is as flat and uninteresting as an Illinois prairie. We crossed it by noon and arrived at Jenive, the town where our Lord healed the ten lepers. It is a town of three thousand persons, sixteen of whom are Catholics, the others being Mohammedans. We alighted for lunch in a little grove near the town beside the clearest stream we saw in all Palestine. Our moukari asked us by signs which satchel contained our lunch. We looked at each other in blank consternation. Some one had

blundered, and after six hours in the saddle, with six more before us, we had nothing to eat. The moukari extracted. from some mysterious pocket in his flowing robes a flat cake of unleavened bread and offered to share it with us, but we were not to be tempted by the unsavory, soggy stuff. We visited the town, but as we could converse with no one our search for food had little result. We found two hard-boiled eggs and about half a pound of sweet wafers; also a can of sardines, which I suspect had been abandoned by some party of Cook's tourists. The sardines were certainly abandoned - wanton, even- and one plunge of a pocket-knife through the tin forbade all further investigation. It was the eve of the feast of the Annunciation and, willy-nilly, a fast day for us. We did not rest long after lunch in the hope of hastening the hour for dinner. Our way during the afternoon lay through a

broken country, with small patches of fertile valley surrounded by barren mountains. The little valleys were planted in wheat, and goats covered the mountain sides. The peasants raise just enough of grain to support themselves. The unleavened bread, the goats' milk, with an occasional taste of goat's flesh, constitute their entire bill of fare. Sometimes they may indulge in chicken, but not often. In all the small towns we saw goats' heads, boiled, for sale. They looked like skulls devoid of meat, yet the people were buying them everywhere. Zababdie, where we spent the night, was perhaps no more wretched than many other towns in Palestine, but a close inspection of it disclosed the miserable hovels of six hundred human beings, one-fourth of whom are Catholics.

The town is on no map which I have ever seen, but it has a stone church and school, a resident pastor, and two sisters of St. Joseph. The priest is a fine little. gentleman, a native, who studied at Jerusalem. The sisters are also Arabs, and one of them speaks no language but the Arabic. The expenses of the church and school are paid out of the Holy Land fund, as the poor people have scarcely enough to support themselves. At my Mass, on the feast of the Annunciation, there were about seventy-five persons present, including the children of the school, of whom there were about twenty-five. There was not a pair of shoes or slippers among them, and their persons and clothing looked as if soap and water were unknown amongst them. After eighteen centuries of Christianity,

this is the only Catholic parish between Nazareth and Naplouse, a distance of more than sixty miles; and this cultured priest and these two gentle sisters are saving their souls trying to keep alive the spark of faith in this little band of Christians, surrounded on all sides by the followers of Mahomet, in the land. made holy by the footsteps of the Son of God.

After travelling through the Holy Land the American Catholic returns to much maligned Chicago, with its million of devout Catholics, convinced that this is, indeed, God's country. We took a picture of the school children at Zababdie in the early morning, before starting for Naplouse. The way in which

Father Amalchite bade us good-bye, and the pathos with which he said: "If you only knew what comfort you have been to me, you would prolong your stay," filled us with sympathy for him, deprived as he is entirely of the company of his fellow priests. He told us that he received the daily papers two or three times a year from his brother in St. Louis.

After leaving Zababdie, we rode again through many mountains with small valleys between. On one of the steepest and most dangerous hillsides, we met a party of Cook's tourists. Two ladies of the party whom we had met in Egypt, one a lady of seventy-two years from LaFayette, Ind., the other a younger