And listen to Mark Twain's account!
Palestine a Land virtually laid waste with little population
Mark Twain, in his inimitable fashion, expressed scom for what he called the "romantic" and "prejudiced" accounts of Palestine after he visited the Holy Land in 1867.
21 In one location after another, Twain registered gloom at his findings.Stirring scenes ... occur in the valley [Jezreel] no more. There is not a solitary village throughout its whole extent-not for thirty miles in either direction. There are two or three small clusters of Bedouin tents, but not a single permanent habitation. One may ride ten miles hereabouts and not see ten human beings.
22In fact, according to Twain, even the Bedouin raiders who attacked "so fiercely" had been imported: "provided for the occasion ... shipped from Jerusalem," by the Arabs who guarded each group of pilgrims.They met together in full view of the pilgrims, after the battle, and took lunch, divided the
baksheesh extorted in the season of danger and then accompanied the cavalcade home to the city! The nuisance of an Arab guard is one which is created by the sheikhs and the Bedouins together, for mutual profit...
23To find ". . . the sort of solitude to make one dreary," one must, Twain wrote dramatically,Come to Galilee for that... these unpeopled deserts, these rusty mounds of barrenness, that never, never do shake the glare from their harsh outlines, and fade and faint into vague perspective; that melancholy ruin of Capernaum: this stupid village of Tiberias, slumbering under its six funereal palms.... We reached Tabor safely .... We never saw a human being on the whole route.
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azareth is forlorn .... Jericho the accursed lies a moldering ruin today, even as Joshua's miracle left it more than three thousand years ago: Bethlehem and Bethany, in their poverty and their humiliation, have nothing about them now to remind one that they once knew the high honor of the Savior's presence; the hallowed spot where the shepherds watched their flocks by night, and where the angels sang, "Peace on earth, good will to men,"
is untenanted by any living creature... Bethsaida and Chorzin have vanished from the earth, and the "desert places" round about them, where thousands of men once listened to the Savior's voice and ate the miraculous bread, sleep in the hush of
a solitude that is inhabited only by birds of prey and skulking foxes.
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"Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes.... desolate and unlovely.. . Twain wrote with remone. it is dreamland."
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