out their cattle, and their children, and he must have been confirmed in this idea, by their carrying with them the bones of Joseph. But the terror of the last dreadful visitation probably hung over him, and prevented his pursuing them, while they continued their proper route, and seemed under the guidance of their Almighty Leader; but when they turned aside, and were actually entangled in the land, and shut in by the wilderness, he had reason to hope that he might again recover so valuable a body of slaves. This is the reason assigned by Scripture for his pursuit ; and I cannot, therefore, agree with Mr. Bruce, that he was influenced by resentment at the Israelites carrying away the jewels. In fact, the idea is absurd, that he should feel tranquil while they were carrying off the spoils of the Egyptians to a country whence he could never hope to bring them back, and that his anger should be roused when they were once more, apparently, in his power. The sufferings of Egypt, in consequence of the residence of the children of Israel among them, were only temporary; but there is good reason to suppose that the benefits were permanent. By the policy of Joseph, the whole of the land of Egypt became the property of the sovereign, and the people and their children his slaves; an event which, however unpropitious it might be in any other country, was necessary there, where every harvest depended on the Nile, and where the equal distribution of its waters could alone produce a general cultivation. When the lands of Egypt were private property, would it be possible to induce individuals to sacrifice their possessions, that they might be turned into canals for the public benefit? or, when the canals were constructed, would it be possible to prevent the inhabitants of the upper provinces from drawing off more water than was requisite for their own use, and thereby injuring the cultivators lower down? But when the whole belonged to one man, the necessary canals would be constructed, the distribution of water would be guided by prudence, each district would receive its necessary proportion, and the collateral branches would then, as they are now, only be opened when the height of the river justified such a measure for the public benefit. It is evident that no canals were constructed before the time of Joseph, for Herodotus even attributes these mighty works to Sesostris, who did not reign till three hundred and ninety years afterward. Valencia's Travels, vol. iii. p. 354. years 1802-1806. VIEW OF THE DEAD SEA. FROM CHATEAUBRIAND'S TRAVELS. WE proceeded for fifty minutes over a level plain, and at length arrived at the last range of hills that form the western border of the valley of the Jordan and the Dead Sea. The sun was near setting, we alighted to give a little rest to our horses, and I contemplated at leisure the lake, the valley and the river. When we hear of a valley, we figure to ourselves a valley either cultivated or uncultivated: if the former, it is covered with crops of various kinds, vineyards, villages, and cattle; if the latter, it presents herbage and woods. It is watered by a river, this river has windings in its course; and the hills which bound this valley have themselves undulations which form a prospect agreeable to the eye. exhibits heaps of chalk and sand, whose form bears some resemblance to piles of arms, waving standards, or the tents of a camp seated on the border of a plain. On the Arabian side, on the contrary, nothing is to be seen but black perpendicular rocks, which throw their lengthened shadow over the waters of the Dead Sea. The smallest bird of heaven would not find among these rocks a blade of grass for its sustenance; every thing there announces the country of a reprobate people, and seems to breathe the horror and incest whence sprung Ammon and Moab. Here nothing of the kind is to be found. Figure to yourself two long chains of mountains running in a parallel direction from north to south, without breaks and without undulations. The eastern chain, called the mountains of Arabia, is the highest; when seen at the distance of eight or ten leagues, you would take it to be a prodigious perpendicular wall perfectly resembling Jura in its form and azure colour. Not one summit, not the smallest peak can be distinguished; you merely perceive slight inflections here and there, as if the hand of the painter, who drew this horizontal line along the sky, had trembled in some places. The western range belongs to the mountains of Judea. Less lofty and more unequal than the eastern chain, it differs from the other in its nature also: it The valley, bounded by these two chains of mountains, displays a soil resembling the bottom of a sea that has long retired from its bed, a beach covered with salt, dry mud, and moving sands, furrowed as it were by the waves. Here and there stunted shrubs with difficulty vegetate upon this inanimate tract; their leaves are covered with salt, which has nourished them, and their bark has a smoky smell and taste. Instead of villages you perceive the ruins of a few towers. Through the middle of this valley flows a discoloured river, which reluctantly creeps toward the pestilential lake by which it is ingulfed. Its course amidst the sands can be distinguished only by the willows and the reeds that border it; and the Arab lies in ambush among these reeds to attack the traveller and to plunder the pilgrim. Such is the scene famous for the benedictions and the curses of Heaven. This river is the Jordan; this lake is the Dead Sea; it appears brilliant, but the guilty cities entombed in its bosom seem to have poisoned its waters. Its solitary abysses cannot afford nourishment to any living creature ;* never did vessel cut its waves ;t its shores are without birds, without trees, without verdure; and its waters excessively bitter, and so heavy, that the most impetuous winds can scarcely ruffle their surface. When you travel in Judea, the heart is at first filled with profound disgust; but when, passing from solitude to solitude, boundless space opens before you, this disgust wears off by degrees, and you feel a secret awe, which, so far from depressing the soul, imparts life, and elevates the genius. Extraordinary appearances every where proclaim a land teeming with miracles: the burning sun, the towering eagle, the barren fig-tree, all the poetry, all the pictures of Scripture are here. Every name commemorates a mystery; every grot proclaims the future, every hill re-echoes the accents of a prophet. God himself has spoken in these regions: dried up rivers, riven rocks, half open sepulchres attest the prodigy; the desert still appears mute with terror, and you would imagine, that it had never presumed to interrupt the silence since it heard the awful voice of the Eternal. The celebrated lake which occupies the site of Sodom and Gomorrha, is called in Scripture, the Dead, or Salt Sea; by the Greeks and Latins, Asphaltites; Almotanah and Bahar Loth by the Arabs; and Ula Deguisi, by the Turks. I cannot coincide in opinion with those who suppose the Dead Sea to be the crater of a volcano. I have seen Vesuvius, Solfatara, Monte Nuovo, in the lake of Fusino, the peak of the Azores, the Mamelif, opposite to Carthage, the extinguished volcanoes of Auvergne, and remarked in all of them the same characters, that is to say, mountains excavated in the form of a funnel, lava, and ashes, which exhibited incontestible proofs of the agency of fire. The Dead Sea, on the contrary, is a lake of great length, curved like a bow, placed between two ranges of mountains, which have no mutual coherence in form, no homogeneousness of soil. They do not meet at the two extremities of the lake, but continue, the one to bound the valley of Jordan, and to run northward as far as the lake of Tiberias; the other to stretch away to the south till lost in the sands of Yemen. Bitumen, warm springs, and phosphoric stones are found, it is true, in the mountains of Arabia; but I met with none of these in the opposite chain. But then, the presence of hot springs, sulphur, and asphaltos, is not sufficient to attest the anterior existence of a volcano. With respect to the ingulfed cities, I adhere to the account given in Scripture, without summoning physics to my aid. Besides, I follow the general opinion; though, as will be presently seen, it is, perhaps, unfounded. Strabo, Pliny, and Diodorus Siculus, speak of rafts on which the Arabs go to collect asphaltos. Diodorus describes these rafts which were composed of matts of interwoven reeds, Diod. lib. xix. Tacitus makes mention of a boat, but he is obviously mistaken. if we adopt the idea of professor Michaelis, and the learned Busching, in his Memoir on the Dead Sea, physics may be admitted in the catastrophe of the guilty cities, without offence to religion. Sodom was built upon a mine of bitumen, as we know from the testimony of Moses and Josephus, who speak concerning wells of bitumen, in the valley of Siddim. Lightning kindled the combustible mass, and the cities sunk in the subterraneous conflagration. M.Malte Brun ingeniously suggests, that Sodom and Gomorrha themselves might have been built of bituminous stones, and thus have been set in flames by the fire of heaven. Strabo speaks of thirteen towns swallowed up in the lake Asphaltites; Stephen of Byzantium reckons eight; Genesis places five in the vale of Siddim, Sodom, Gomorrha, Admah, Zeboim, and Bela, or Zoar, but it mentions only the two former as having been destroyed by the wrath of God. Deuteronomy mentions four, omitting Bela, and Ecclesiasticus speaks of five, without enumerating them. From the remark of James Cerbus, that seven considerable streams fall into the Dead Sea, Reland concludes that it discharges its superfluous waters by subterraneous channels. Sandys, and some other travellers, have expressed the same opinion; but it is now relinquished, in consequence of Dr. Halley's observations on vaporation; observations admitted by Shaw, though he calculates that the Jordan daily discharges into the Dead Sea six millions and ninety thousand tons of water, exclusively of the Arnon, and seven other streams. Several travellers, and among others Troilo and d'Arvieux assert, that they remarked fragments of walls and palaces in the Dead Sea. This statement seems to be confirmed by Maundrell and father Nau. The ancients speak more positively on this subject: Josephus, who employs a poetic expression, says, that he perceived, on the banks of the lake, the shades of the overwhelmed cities. Strabo gives a circumference of sixty stadia to the ruins of Sodom, which are mentioned also by Tacitus. I know not whether they still exist; but as the lake rises and falls at certain seasons, it is possible that it may alternately cover and expose the skeletons of the rep robate cities. The other marvellous properties ascribed to the Dead Sea, have vanished upon more rigid investigation. It is now known that bodies sink or float upon it according to the proportion of their gravity to the gravity of the water of the lake. The pestilential vapours said to issue from its bosom are reduced to a strong smell of sea water, and puffs of smoke, which announce or follow the emersion of asphaltos, and fogs that are really unwholesome like all other fogs. Should the Turks ever give permission, and should it be found practicable to convey a vessel from Jaffa to the Dead Sea, some curious discoveries would certainly be made in this lake. The ancients were much better acquainted with it than we, as may be seen by Aristotle, Strabo, Diodorus Siculus, Pliny, Tacitus, Solinus, Josephus, Galen, Dioscorides, and Stephen of Byzantium. Our old maps also trace the figure of this lake in a much more satisfactory manner than the modern ones. No person has yet made the tour of it, except Daniel, abbot of St. Saba. Nau has preserved in his travels the narrative of that recluse. From his account we learn, that "the Dead Sea, at its extremity, is separated as it were into two parts, and that there is a way by which you may walk across it, being only mid leg deep, at least in summer; that there the land rises and bounds another small lake of a circular or rather oval figure, surrounded with plains and mountains of salt; and that the neighbouring country is peopled by innumerable Arabs." Nyembourg gives nearly the same statement; and of these documents the abbé Mariti and Volney have availed themselves. Whenever M. Seetzen publishes his travels we shall probably possess more complete information on the subject. There is scarcely any reader but what has heard of the famous tree of Sodom, a tree said to produce an apple pleasing to the eye, but bitter to the taste, and full of ashes. Tacitus in the fifth book of his History, and Josephus in his Jewish war, are, I believe, the two first authors that made mention of the singular fruits of the Dead Sea. Foulcher de Chartres, who travelled in Palestine about the year 1100, saw the deceitful apple, and compared it to the pleasures of the world. Since that period, some writers, as Ceverius de Vera, Baumgarten, de la Valle, Troilo, and certain missionaries, confirm Foulcher's statement; others, as Reland, father Neret, and Maundrell, are inclined to believe that this fruit is but a poetic image of our false joys; while others again, as Pococke and Shaw, absolutely question its existence. Amman seemed to remove the difficulty. He gave a description of the tree, which, according to him, resembles the hawthorn. "The fruit," says he, "is a small apple, of a beautiful colour." Hasselquist, the botanist, followed, and he tells a totally different story. The apple of Sodom, as we are informed by him, is not the fruit either of a tree or of a shrub, but the production of the solanum melongena of Linnæus. "It is found in great abundance," says he, "round Jericho, in the vallies near the Jordan, and in the neighbourhood of the Dead Sea. It is true that these apples are sometimes full of dust; but this appears only when the fruit is attacked by an insect, tenthredo, which converts the whole of the inside into dust, leaving nothing but the rind entire, without causing it to lose any of its colour." Who would not imagine, after this, that the question had been set completely at rest, by the authority of Hasselquist, and the still greater authority of Linnæus, in his Flora Palæstina? No such thing. M. Seetzen, also a man of science and the most modern of all travellers, since he is still in Arabia, does not agree with Hasselquist in regard to the solanum Sodomeum. "I saw," says he, "during my stay at Karrack, in the house of the Greek clergyman of that town, a species of cotton resembling silk. This cotton, as he told me, grows in the plain of El Gor, near the southern extremity of the Dead Sea, on a tree like a fig-tree, called Abescha-ez; it is found in a fruit resembling the pomegranate. It struck me, that this fruit which has no pulp or flesh in the inside, and is unknown in the rest of Palestine, might be the celebrated apple of Sodom." Here I am thrown into an awkward dilemma; for I too have the vanity to imagine that I have discovered the long sought fruit. The shrub which bears it grows two or three leagues from the mouth of the Jordan; it is thorny, and has small taper leaves. It bears a considerable resemblance to the shrub described by Amman; and its fruit is exactly like the little Egyptian lemon, both in size and colour. Before it is ripe, it is filled with a corrosive and saline juice; when dried it yields a blackish seed, which may be compared to ashes, and which in taste resembles bitter pepper. I gathered half a dozen of these fruits; I still possess four of them, dry, and in good preservation; they may, perhaps, be deserving of the attention of naturalists. BETHLEHEM. BETHLEHEM received its name, which signifies the House of Bread, from Abraham; and was sirnamed Ephrata, the fruitful, after Caleb's wife, to distinguish it from another Bethlehem, in the tribe of Zebulon. It belonged to the tribe of Judah, and also went by the name of the city of David, that monarch having there been born, and tended sheep in his childhood. Abijah, the seventh judge of Israel, Elimelech, Obed, Jesse, and Boaz were, like David, natives of Bethlehem, and here must be placed the scene of the admirable eclogue of Ruth. St. Matthias, the apostle, also received life in the same town where the Messiah came into the world. The first Christians built an oratory over the manger of our Saviour. Adrian ordered it to be demolished, and a statue of Adonis erected in its stead. St. Helena destroyed the idol, and built a church on the same spot. The original edifice is now blended with the various additions made by the Christian princes. St. Jerom, as every reader knows, retired to the solitude of Bethlehem. Conquered by the Crusaders, Bethlehem returned with Jerusalem under the yoke of the Infidels; but it has always been the object of the veneration of the pilgrims. Pious monks, devoting themselves to perpetual martyrdom, have been its guardians for seven centuries. With respect to modern Bethlehem, its soil, productions, and inhabitants, the reader is referred to the work of Volney. I have not, however, remarked in the vale of Bethlehem the fertility which is ascribed to it under the Turkish government, to be sure, the most productive soil will in a few years be transformed into a desert. At four in the morning of the 5th of October I commenced my survey of the monuments of Bethlehem. Though these structures have frequently been described, yet the subject is in itself so interesting that I cannot forbear entering into some particulars. The convent of Bethlehem is connected with the church by a court enclosed with lofty walls. We crossed this court, and were admitted by a small side door into the church. The edifice is certainly of high antiquity, and though often destroyed and as often repaired, it still retains marks of its Grecian origin. It is built in the form of a cross. The long nave, or if you please, the foot of the cross, is adorned with forty-eight columns of the Corinthian order, in four rows. These columns are two feet six inches in diameter at the base, and eighteen feet high, including the base and capital. As the roof of this nave is wanting, the columns support nothing but a frieze of wood, which occupies the place of the architrave and of the whole entablature. Open timber work rests upon the walls, and rises into the form of a dome, to support the roof that no longer exists, or that perhaps was never finished. The wood work is said to be of cedar, but this is a mistake. The windows are large, and were formerly adorned with mosaic paintings, and passages from the Bible in Greek and Latin characters, the traces of which are yet visible. Most of these inscriptions are given by Quaresmius. The abbé Miriti notices, with some acrimony, a mistake of that learned friar in one of the dates: a person of the greatest abilities is liable to error, but he who blazons it without delicacy or politeness, affords a much stronger proof of his vanity than of his knowledge. The remains of the mosaics to be seen here and there, and some paintings on wood, are interesting to the history of the arts; they in general exhibit figures in full face, upright, stiff, without motion, and without shadows: but their effect is majestic, and their character dignified and austere. The Christian sect of the Arminians is in possession of the nave which I have just described. This nave is separated from the three other branches of the cross by a wall, so that the unity of the edifice is destroyed. When you have passed this wall, you find yourself opposite to the sanctuary, or the choir, which occupies the top of the cross. This choir is raised two steps above the nave. Here is seen an altar dedicated to the wise men of the East. On the pavement at the foot of this altar, you observe a marble star, which corresponds, as tradition asserts, with the point of the heavens where the miraculous star that conducted the three kings became stationary. So much is certain, that the spot where the Saviour of the world was born, is exactly underneath this marble star in the subterraneous church of the manger, of which I shall presently have occasion to speak. The Greeks occupy the choir of the Magi, as well as the two other naves formed by the transom of the cross. These last are empty, and without altars. Two spiral staircases, each composed of fifteen steps, open on the sides of the outer church, and conduct to the subterraneous church situated beneath the choir. This is the ever-to-be revered place of the nativity of our Saviour. Before I entered it, the superior put a taper into my hand, and repeated a brief exhortation. This sacred crypt is irregular, because it occupies the irregular site of the stable and the manger. It is thirty-seven feet six inches long, eleven feet three inches broad, and nine feet in height. It is hewn out of the rock; the sides of the rock are faced with beautiful marble, and the floor is of the same material. These embellishments are ascribed to St. Helena. The church receives no light from without, and is illumined with thirty-two lamps sent by different princes of Christendom. At the further extremity of this crypt, on the east side, is the spot where the Virgin brought forth the Redeemer of mankind. This spot is marked by a white marble, incrusted with jasper, and surrounded by a circle of silver, having rays resembling those with which the sun is represented. Around it are inscribed these words: HIC DE VIRGINE MARIA JESUS CHRISTUS NATUS EST. A marble table, which serves for an altar, resis against the side of the rock, and stands over the place where the Messiah came into the world. This altar is lighted by three lamps, the handsomest of which was given by Louis XIII. At the distance of seven paces toward the south, after you have passed the foot of one of the staircases leading to the upper church, you find the manger. You go down to it by two steps, for it is not upon a level with the rest of the crypt. It is a low recess hewn out of the rock. A block of white marble, raised about a foot above the floor, and hollowed in the form of a manger, indicates the very spot where the Sovereign of Heaven was laid upon straw. Two paces further, opposite to the manger, stands an altar, which occupies the place where Mary sat when she presented the Child of Sorrows to the adoration of the Magi. Nothing can be more pleasing, or better calculated to excite sentiments of devotion, than this subterraneous church. It is adorned with pictures of the Italian and Spanish schools. These pictures represent the mysteries of the place, the Virgin and Child, after Raphael, the Annunciation, the Adoration of the Wise Men, the coming of the Shepherds, and all those miracles of mingled grandeur and innocence. The usual ornaments of the manger are of blue satin embroidered with silver. Incense is continually smoking before the cradle of the Saviour. I have heard an organ, touched by no ordinary hand, play during mass, the sweetest and most tender tunes of the best Italian composers. These concerts charm the Christian Arab, who, leaving his camels to feed, repairs, like the shepherds of old, to Bethlehem, to adore the King of Kings in his manger. I have seen this inhabitant of the desert communicate at the altar of the Magi, with a fervour, a piety, a devotion unknown among the Christians of the west. "No place in the world," says father Neret, "excites more profound devotion. The continual arrival of caravans from all the nations of Christendom; the public prayers; the prostrations; nay, even the richness of the presents sent hither by the Christian princes, altogether produce feelings in the soul which it is much easier to conceive than to describe." It may be added, that the effect of all this is heightened by an extraordinary contrast; for, on quitting the crypt, where you have met with the riches, the arts, the religion of civilized nations, you find yourself in a profound solitude, amidst wretched Arab huts, among half naked savages and faithless Mussulmen. This place is, nevertheless, the same where so many miracles were displayed; but this sacred land dares no longer express its joy, and locks within its bosom the recollections of its glory. From the grotto of the Nativity we went to the subterraneous chapel, where tradition places the sepulchre of the Innocents: "Herod sent forth and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under. Then was fulfilled that which was spoken by Jeremy the prophet, saying: in Rama was there a voice heard," &c. The chapel of the Innocents conducted us to the grotto of St. Jerom. Here you find the sepulchre of this father of the church, that of Eusebius, and the tombs of St. Paula, and St. Eustochium. In this grotto St. Jerom spent the greater part of his life. From this retirement he beheld the fall of the Roman empire, and here he received those fugitive patricians, who, after they had possessed the palaces of the earth, deemed themselves happy to share the cell of a cenobite. The peace of the saint, and the troubles of the world produce a wonderful effect in the letters of the learned commentator on the Scriptures. St. Paula and St. Eustochium were two illustrious Roman ladies of the family of the Scipios and of the Gracchi. They relinquished the delights of Rome, to live and die at Bethlehem in the practice of the monastic virtues. Their epitaph, written by Jerom, is not a very good one, and is so well known, that I shall not insert it here. In the oratory of St. Jerom is a picture in which the head of that saint exhibits much the same air that has been given to it by the pencil of Caracci and Domenichino. Another painting contains the figures of Paula and Eustochium. These descendants of Scipio are represented reposing in death in the same coffin. It was an affecting idea of the painter to make the two saints the perfect image of each other. The daughter is to be distinguished from the mother only by her youth and her white veil; the one has been longer, the other more expeditious in performing the voyage of life; and both have reached the port at the same moment. Among the numerous pictures which are to be seen at the sacred stations, and which no traveller has described,* I imagined that I sometimes discovered the mystic touch and inspired tone of Murillos; it would be a singular circumstance if the manger or the tomb of our Saviour should be found to possess some unknown masterpiece of any of the great paint ers. We returned to our convent, and I surveyed the country from the top of a terrace. Bethlehem is built on a hill which overlooks a long valley, running from east to west. The southern hill is covered with olive-trees, thinly scattered over a reddish soil bestrewed with stones; that on the north side has figtrees on the same kind of soil. Here and there you perceive some ruins, among others, the remains of a tower called the tower of St. Paula. I went back into the monastery, which owes part of its wealth to Baldwin, king of Jerusalem and successor to Godfrey of Bouillon: it is an absolute fortress, and its walls are so thick that it would be capable of sustaining a siege against the Turks. • Villamont was struck with the beauty of a St. Jerom. CHURCH OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE. I REPAIRED to the church which encloses the tomb of Jesus Christ. All preceding travellers have described this church, the most venerable in the world, whether we think as philosophers, or as Christians. Here I am reduced to an absolute dilemma. Shall I give an accurate delineation of the sacred scenes? If so, I can but repeat what has been said before: never was subject less known to modern readers, and never was subject more completely exhausted. Shall I omit the description of those places? In this case should I not leave out the most important part of my travels, and exclude what constitutes their object |