PALESTINE IS YIELDING TO PROGRESS, BUT SLOWLY.

Star (Christchurch), Volume LXVI, Issue 20360, 18 July 1934, Page 6

PALESTINE IS YIELDING TO PROGRESS, BUT SLOWLY.

Many Changes, Though Ancient Scenes Are Still Resisting Modern Ways.

By James Morgan. Returning to Palestine after an absence of twenty-one years, 1 came eager to see the changes wrought by the war and by the passing of the Holy Land into the keeping of Christendom for the first time in the more than six centuries since Saladin overthrew the Kingdom of the Crusaders. But / found myself more fascinated by the things that have not changed in this ancient scene and are stubbornly resisting modern ways. I was last here in the year before a world that had been our fools’ paradise suddenly crashed into the red hell of 1914, leaving us tossing these two decades in the anxious and painful birththroes of a new world. The Palestine I saw in 1913 still was under the paralysing hand of Abdul the Damned, the last of the Turkish Sultans, whose instinct of self-preservation made him an enemy of all progress.

N OT A TELEPHONE, an electric light or a newspaper was permitted. Jerusalem’s only rail connection was a little road that ran thirty miles or so down to the port of Jaffa There were but two automobiles on the unpaved primitive roads, and the only car that had yet made the grade up to the Holy City itself was driven by Charles J. Glidden. of Lowell, Mass., in his pioneer motor tour of the globe. The war brought a through railroad line, built by General Allenby across the desert from Egypt. Now, trains run from Jerusalem down to Cairo and up to Damascus, Aleppo and onward to Istanbul. Jerusalem speaks with London and New York over the telephone and listens, when conditions favour, to wireless broadcasts from the aerial towers of Europe. Electric lights, some of them deriving their power from the harnessed Jordan, twinkle in village windows everywhere. Traffic Police on Duty. Contending armies competed in the building of highways, and traffic police (with white sleeves) are necessary to guide the motor traffic which pours around the walls of Jerusalem Motor traffic in the air also speeds passengers in a few hours to Bagdad and other far-off places whose very names waft us back through the ages on the magic carpet of romantic imagination. It was my happy fortune to be welcomed aboard the ship at Haifa by the same good friend at Jerusalem who was the companion of my pilgrimage in 1913. Our spring wagon then was the better part of three days on its jouncing way from Jerusalem to Galilee. His car, driven by an Arab in a red fez, could now make the return trip over a smooth road in almost as few hours. But we preferred to jog along and give a whole afternoon to the journey of 100 miles. With Mount Carmel on one hand and the snowy peak of Mount Hermon glistening on the far northern horizon, we left the sandy, treeless shore behind us, and soon a green reach of the Plain of Esdraelon came out to greet us The newly-built villages of Zionist colonies were wrapped in silence, and the fields about them were untended. For it was a Saturday and a large group of our fellow* passengers on the ship did not hurry ashore in the morning with us Gentiles, but patiently waited for the sun to go down on the Jewish Sabbath before stepping foot in the Promised Land. Nazareth’s Only Spring. Turning aside from the signboard that pointed the direct road to Jerusalem, we spiralled up the steep hill of Nazareth. Near the entrance to the little home town of the Nazarene is the Virgin’s Fountain. Creeds and archaeologists may dispute the authenticity of various spots that are enshrined, but at the Fountain, with its blooming garden, we stood on undisputed ground. It is the only spring in Nazareth, and madonnas still were coming and going to and from it as in the days of Mary, their costumes a riot of colour and their water jugs tilted jauntily on erect and often pretty heads as they gossiped in pairs along their way Climbing into the stony, bare mountains of Samaria, w'hich yet are somehow beautiful in their outlines, we were in the Palestine of the Old Testament, over which the centuries have passed like summer clouds and left it very much as it must have been in the days of , Abraham. The railroads mostly avoid these rugged heights, and the Zionists wisely prefer the fertile vales and BB IS SI ® SB Eg ® ® S 3 f&i Si ffi BB @3 IS HI S BB HI © @

the lowlands, where they are valiantly striving to transform the old home of their rs.ce into a twentieth century community. But time stands still up here in sterile hills. The Arabs probably live in the same type of houses to-day as when they left off their nomadic life and first put a roof over their heads. Here and there are the black tents of the Bedouins, who stilj cling to the old rooming ways, moving about with their animals and all their possessions Within the Jaffa Gate. Nablus, the Biblical Shechem, with its dwindling colony of 150 Samaritans, who persist in remaining the peculiar peoole they were when Jesus held His interview with the woman of Samaria at Jacob’s Well, just below our road. . . Next a village that is the traditional landmark of the incident where Joseph and Mary, walking home from Jerusalem, missed their 12-year-old boy and turned back, to find Him talking with the elders in the Temple. From the brow of a hill a little farther i on we saw the far-spreading suburb that has sprung up outside the walls cf the Holy City and hidden it from view. This brilliant new Jerusalem looks as new as a boom city in Florida, and possibly it is in as much danger of collapsing from overinflation. ' Pass -within the 3 a^a Gate and in a few steps* more you have left behind the changing world, which beats and breaks against the old city wall. Here the colour and swarm of the Orient survive and immemorial customs are petrified. Bethl hem Women in Church. Descending in the Christian quarter on a slippery pavement whose stones are worn smooth by the feet of generations, we pass sbeps mostly given over to rosaries, crucifixes, altar candles and religious souvenirs, and come to the squat Church of the Holy Sepulchre, from whose. square the former traffickers in Christian symbols have been driven. Within the church, bearded friars are celebrating Mass, in the presence of a crowd, alternately standing and kneelThe one significant difference that the years had brought in this scene, and the only significant difference that I have seen within the walls of Jerusalem, met my eye at the entrance to the church Guarding the door in 1913, Turkish soldiers, after the manner of the chairless East, sat crosslegged in a recess in the wall somewhat above the floor, where now British police dangle their feet over the edge of the elevated seat. For 400 years before the World War the Turks had held possession of this supreme shrine of the Christian world. They had learned by bard experience to be zealous caretakers of its peace, lest some Western power should find convenient excuse for intervening, just as Russia had made the protection of the holy places a pretext for the Crimean War Who shall be the next to stand guard here in that dry, foretold by Macaulay—a day that befalls all empires and nations—when a traveller from New Zealand shall take his seat on a broken arch of London Bridge, in the midst of a vast solitude, to sketch the ruins of St Paul’s? . . . Dare we despair that mankind sometime will escape this stupid rotation in a vicious circle and, at last, embark on the great adventure of arming itself against time and destruction with the spirit of Him to whom this altar was raised? (N.A.N.A.—Copyright.) *l®®®®®®®®®®® «®®®ffi®®®ffi®ffi: