CORRESPONDEN CE.

NOTES OF A PILGRIMAGE.

IV.-2.10IINT CARMEL.

IT was with a somewhat uncomfortable feeling that we made our first plunge into the unknown in the classic region of Carmel. So far, we had been travelling along well-trodden ways by known methods of conveyance, and sleeping under more or less solid roofs ; but here, at Haifa, we were to com- mence a life of wandering and dwelling in tents, with little: prospect of finding civilisation nearer than Damascus. To- emphasise our separation from the rest of mankind, we must begin by being in a manner marooned at Haifa—being dropped_ from our good European steamer, full of commonplace tourists, en route for Beyrout, at the dead of night into a clumsy native- boat, manned by decidedly unskilful oarsmen—and feel a- certain pride at the sight of the retinue which is waiting on the pier with paper-lanterns to light us on our way to the camp. It is upon record that Mr. Boswell, when he was summoned to dinner at Fort George by tuck of dram, felt a momentary pride in imagining himself to be a soldier ; we are tempted to flatter ourselves that there must really be- something adventurous about our enterprise, with all these- unusual surroundings. It is a pleasant illusion which we- conscientiously endeavour to keep up, even when the sur- roundings have become terribly matter-of-fact, and we find our- table constantly supplied with the veriest cockney delicacies.

The waking in strange lands is here an auspicious one. The- morning is fine, and the bay of Haifa lies before us, an un- broken sheet of tranquil blue, set off by the reddish colour of the sands beyond. The historic city of Acre is just visible- through the morning haze on the further shore, and over the low hills behind it we can catch at rare intervals a glimpse of the snow-capped summit of that shyest of mountains, Hermon,. —with which we are destined in time to become much better acquainted. Behind us rise the northern slopes of Mount Camel—not very interesting in appearance from this side— on which, just above the promontory which closes our view- to the westward, stands out the great monastery, a dis- appointing building, with none of the venerable attributes. which should distinguish the mother of all the Carmelite establishments in the world. It is, in point of fact, not seventy years old ; and even its predecessor, which was destroyed by the Turks some years before the present building was erected, only dated from the seventeenth century. The Order, of course, is of much greater antiquity ; but its fortunes have fluctuated, and many successive monasteries have been built and destroyed since its first institution. All that I can say of the present building is that it gives to the otherwise bare hill- side that sign of the presence of something living which always adds interest to a landscape ; and, as the gaide-books say, the traveller who visits it will be rewarded with a fine view : there is no gainsaying that.

There is, of course, in this neighbourhood no connection

with any part of the history which gives the greatest interest to the Holy Land; and even in the Old Testament there is little of interest in connection with Mount Carmel, except the one great scene of Elijah's contest with the prophets of Baal. But it appears, nevertheless, from the earliest times to have been endued with a peculiar sanctity, of which it has lost nothing to this day in the eyes of Christian, Jew, or Moslem. Perhaps this may account for the remarkable gathering of all varieties of sects which is found in the neighbourhood of the Carmel range. The Mahommedans, who are considerably outnumbered by the Christians and Jews, are not so well represented; yet there is at Acre a Persian prophet of great eminence, who has announced him- self to be the Bab, or Gate of Salvation, through whom the Deity must be approached, and is regarded with the pro- foundest reverence by the Mussulmans, especially those of his own country. Indeed, a story is told of a Persian noble- man who offered to give up all his possessions to this prophet on condition of being allowed to serve him even in the humblest capacity,—an advantageous offer which the holy man accepted. In the town of Haifa itself, the Melchites predominate, a curious sect who appear to hover upon the frontiers of the Greek and Roman beliefs without distinctly belonging to either. The Latins, indeed, have the benefit of their avowed adherence; but their practices must be much more satisfactory to the Greeks. They are, in fact, proselytes from the Greek Church, who stipulated as the price of their conversion that they should be allowed to retain their former customs upon three unimportant points,—the marriage of the clergy, the administration of the Communion in both kinds to the con- gregation, and the celebration of the service in the vernacular. These trifling concessions having been granted, they accepted the supremacy of the Pope and the Latin date of Easter with- out further difficulty.

Moslem or Christian, Greek or Latin, have done little in all the years they have had for the improvement, material and moral, of the town or neighbourhood. But in the last twenty years the Christian population has been increased by the arrival of a new contingent of a very different character. In our camp we are some distance from the narrow, crooked

streets of the Arab town, but a few steps will bring us into a broad, level road, bordered by double lines of trees and substantial, well-built houses, the very model of the chaussie of some little German summer resort. We are in the colony of the German Society of the Temple, which perhaps we may -consider the most extraordinary of all the sects assembled here. It is the rule of this singular people not to enter deeply into matters of doctrine, or, at any rate, to leave a great latitude for individual opinion, but simply to carry out in their lives the principles laid down in the Gospels,—a strange idea, indeed, but rather a sensible one when one comes to think of it. They have, indeed, some beliefs of their own, as that the second Advent is at hand, and that it will take place in Palestine, so that they have come here to be on the spot. There are other colonies at Jaffa and Jerusalem, as well as in Germany, America, and Russia : I believe Haifa was selected for the first settlement merely from reasons of convenience. The greater number of the colonists are from Wurtemberg and the adjacent parts of South Germany, though a considerable proportion— including Herr Schumacher, the Vorsteher of the Haifa com- munity—are German-Americans. Of their views we had no means of judging; their acts speak for themselves. It is to them that all the progress that has been made in this part of the country is due, the peaceful and successful cultivation of the land and the new immunity from brigandage, as also the fact that we could drive through the town from the pier in what we by courtesy could term a carriage, over something remotely resembling a road, and generally all the recent improvements. The peasantry are said to be greatly impressed with this new kind of Christians, whose honesty and benevolence can really be relied on; the traveller will be equally struck with their invariable friendliness and hospitality to strangers.

Our own pilgrimage to Mount Carmel was chiefly to see the scenes in which Laurence Oliphant spent the last years of his life. The man who can claim any connection of kindred or friendship with him is very welcome on Mount Carmel. The Germans have a loving recollection of him, and the Druses in the villages of the hills entertain an almost superstitious -veneration for his memory and that of Sitti Alice, his wife. Few, indeed, of the inhabitants whom we meet, but have stories to tell of his practical love of his neigh- bour and his chivalrous devotion to the cause of all whom he found to be oppressed. The case of the Roumanian Jews, who were sent out here by the Jewish Colonising Society of their country, and who, finding no preparations made to receive them, were left upon the streets of Haifa, homeless, penniless, and starving, till Laurence Oliphant took them up, maintaining the whole number at his own expense till satis- factory arrangements could be made for the establishment of the colony, is one of the beat known cases. But his chief work lay among the Druses, with whom he lived for half the year at the little village of Daliyeh, high up on Mount Carmel. Our road to Galilee was to pass over the hills by Daliyeh, a recognised station of our pilgrimage, and for this we accord- ingly started from Haifa, under the guidance of Laurence's friend and successor, Mr. Haskett Smith.

The first part of our journey was performed in a rough kind of conveyance, a sort of covered char-a-bancs, driven by an honest German who proudly asserts that he has driven the Herr and Fran Oliphant fifty times at least. The road lies across the long, level plain which stretches from Carmel as far as Jaffa. It is smooth and good till after we have passed the pretty Friedhof, where the mortal remains of Alice Oliphant are laid, but after that degenerates into a rough track, with cultivated fields on one side of it and on the other the singular natural barrier of rock which shuts off the sea-coast from the plain for many miles. A couple of hours' drive brings us to the ruins of the great crusading fortress of Athlit, which we approach through a passage cut out of the rock barrier. Here, in a pleasant green meadow near a little pond fringed with English-looking willows, our luncheon-tent is pitched, and here, too, the son of the Druse Sheikh is waiting for us with a small following,—a fine, martial-looking fellow, whose appearance is somewhat impaired by an old European great- coat, which he persists in wearing over his picturesque national dress, and of which, ugly and inappropriate as it is, he is inordinately proud. The ruins of Athlit lie out of the way of most travellers, and are not so often visited as they should be. It is difficult to imagine anything more impressive than the great, grim rain rising out of the sea on this exposed point, the waves dashing up within a few feet of the mouldering pillars of the ruined banqueting-hall, and the dirty, miserable Arab village forcing its way into all available nooks and crannies, like some foul parasite feeding on the decay of the noble building. The outer wall of the north tower is still standing, an imposing pile, in spite of wind and weather and vandal Turks, who regard ruins generally as quarries for building materials; but the most striking of all is the great hall by the sea, where the Templars met together for the last time before leaving Palestine, when every other stronghold had been taken by the Saracens, and the ships were waiting in the little bay outside to carry away even this last remnant of the Christian garrisons.

The rest of the way lay up Mount Cannel itself, along a winding path, skirting the picturesque Arab village of Ainhout and ascending through a pleasant country abounding in flowers and small trees, till we come in sight of the long, low white house built by Laurence Oliphant for a summer residence, and still inhabited by a little group of his friends. The Druse village lies close by. I have little space to speak of this strange

nation of the Druses, of whom every traveller has written some- thing, but few have been able to get any certain information.

Neither the family of nations to which they belong nor the country from which theycome can be decided with anything like certainty. The purity of the Arabic spoken by them has made some suppose them to be emigrants from the South of Arabia,

while others regard them as an Aryan race from eastern Asia, a theory borne out by their fair complexions, blue eyes, and

generally un-Semitic appearance. Others, again, see in them the survivors of a very ancient population inhabiting the same districts in which they are found to-day, from Aleppo to Mount Carmel. Their religion, again, is a thing entirely apart from

either Christian, Jewish, or Moslem beliefs, though some traditions of the other faiths appear to have crept into it. It is ostensibly taken with their name from one Duruzi, a

Mahommedan heretic of the eleventh century, who, however, appears rather to have aimed at founding a political party

than a religious sect ; perhaps his teaching was merely embroidered on to an older religion. The holiest mysteries of their beliefs are not even known to all Druses, but only to the initiated among them ; it is possible, however, that, as with other great mysteries, there is not very much to reveal. One of their most singular ideas is that there are many Druses in England—who are unaware of the fact themselves—and also in China, with which country they would appear to have some mysterious connection. That they should even be aware of its existence is sufficiently astonishing.

The Druses have been a great nation in their day ; indeed, the few Druse communities scattered about Galilee are the descendants of the conquerors of a former day who subdued the whole country from Aleppo to Carmel under their great leader Fakr-ed-Din. But their days of prosperity are past; they are still sufficiently formidable in the Hauran—a dis- trict south-east of Damascus, sometimes known as the Druse Mountain—and in the Lebanon, where they share the advan- tages of that privileged province with their deadly enemies, the Maronites. But the Druse of Galilee is a sojourner in a strange land, disliked by both Christians and Mahommedans, and plundered by the government which he is not strong enough to resist. When Laurence Oliphant came to Mount Cannel, he found the unhappy Drnses in despair, overburdened with apparently hopeless arrears of taxes, and he set himself to work to retrieve their position, so far with considerable success. Certainly, the community have a decent appearance of pros- perity, and the house we were introduced to when we were received by the sheikh had a very well-to-do appearance indeed. We were taken across a courtyard into a large, bare, vaulted room, with queer openings, like windows, giving access to other rooms in the same building, through which occasionally heads of men, or other animals, were pushed in to see what was going on. We were to have seen an exhibition of native dancing, and were regaled for some time with cinnamon tea while the preliminaries were arranged. But we never were allowed to see more than a somewhat uninteresting dance of men. Nothing would persuade the women to dance unless the men were quite out of reach—though nothing can be more decorous than the Druse women's dance. One little blue-eyed girl was half per- suaded, half bullied into beginning some steps at last, but she had hardly commenced before shyness got the better of her, and she covered her face with her hands and darted back into the shelter of the crowd.