The Emigrants

They must have crossed the whole of Turkey by rail, down to Adana, and gone on from there to Aleppo and Beirut, and seem to have spent the best part of a fortnight in the Lebanon, for it is not till the 21st of November that "passage to Jaffa" is entered. The day they arrived in Jaffa, through an agent at Franks Hotel, Dr Immanuel Benzinger, they hired two horses at a cost of 15 francs each for the twelve-hour ride up from the coast to Jerusalem. The luggage went ahead by rail. Early on the morning of the 25th, Cosmo and Ambros were on their way through the orange groves and on, in a southeasterly direction, across the plain of Sharon and towards the mountains of Judaea. Through the Holy Land, writes Ambros, often far off the track. The rocks all around radiantly white in the light. For long stretches not a tree, not a shrub, scarcely so much as a meagre clump of weeds. Cosmo very taciturn. Darkened sky. Great clouds of dust rolling through the air. Terrible desolation and emptiness. Late in the afternoon it cleared once more. A rosy glow lay upon the valley, and through an opening in the mountainous terrain we could see the promised city in the distance — a ruined and broken mass of rocks, the Queen of the desert… An hour after nightfall we ride into the courtyard of the Hotel Kaminitz on the Jaffa Road. The maitre d'hotel, a pomaded little Frenchman, is utterly astounded, indeed scandalisé, to see these dust-caked new arrivals, and shakes his head as he studies our entry in the register. Not until I ask him to see that our horses are properly looked after does he recall his duties, whereupon he deals with everything as fast as he is able. The rooms are furnished in a most peculiar manner. One cannot say what period or part of the world one is in. View to one side across domed stone rooftops. In the white moonlight they resemble a frozen sea. Deep weariness, sleep till well into the morning. Numerous dreams with strange voices and shouts. At noontime a deathly silence, broken only by the eternal crowing of cocks. - Today (it reads two days later) a first walk through the city and into the outer districts. All in all, a frightful impression. Vendors of souvenirs and devotional objects in almost every building. They crouch in the gloom of their shops amidst hundreds of olivewood carvings and junk decorated with mother-of-pearl. From the end of the month the faithful will be coming to buy, hordes of them, ten or fifteen thousand Christian pilgrims from all around the world. The more recent buildings of an ugliness hard to describe. Large quantities of filth in the streets. On marche sur des merdes!!! Pulverized limestone ankle-deep in places. The few plants which have survived the drought that has lasted since May are covered in this powdery meal as if by a blight. Une malédiction semble planer sur la ville. Decay, nothing but decay, marasmus and emptiness. Not a sign of any business or industry. All we passed were a tallow-and-soap factory and a bone-and-hide works. Next to this, in a wide square, the knacker's yard. In the middle a big hole. Coagulated blood, heaps of entrails, blackish-brown tripes, dried and scorched by the sun. . Otherwise one church after another, monasteries, religious and philanthropic establishments of every kind and denomination. On the northerly side are the Russian cathedral, the Russian Men's and Women's hospice, the French Hópital de St Louis, the Jewish Home for the Blind, the Church and Hospice of St Augustine, the German school, the German Orphanage, the German Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb, the School of the London Mission to the Jews, the Abyssinian Church, the Anglican Church, College and Bishop's House, the Dominican Friary, the Seminary and Basilica of St Stephen, the Rothschild Girls' Institute, the Alliance Israélite College of Commerce, the Church of Notre Dame de France, and, beside the pool of Bethesda, the Monastery of St Anne; on the Mount of Olives are the Russian Tower, the Church of the Assumption, the French Church of Pater Noster, the Carmelite nunnery, the building that houses the Empress Augusta Victoria Foundation, the Russian Orthodox Church of Mary Magdalene, and the