Hurlbut's Life of Christ For Young and Old: A Complete Life of Christ Written in Simple Language, Based on the Gospel NarrativeHurlbut, Jesse Lyman
Religion
Hurlbut's Life of Christ For Young and Old: A Complete Life of Christ Written in Simple Language, Based on the Gospel Narrative
Hurlbut, Jesse Lyman
Jesus Christ -- Biography
While we are passing by these lands on the left, we are also sailing
past Morocco and Algiers, and Tunis and Tripoli on the right. We stop at
Alexandria in Egypt, at one of the mouths of the river Nile, and soon
after we leave the big steamer at Port Said, where the great Suez Canal
begins.
There in the afternoon about ten days after our leaving America, we go
on board a smaller ship, and sail northward past the eastern shore of
the Mediterranean Sea. The next morning we awake to find our ship at
anchor in front of a city on a hillside, rising up in terraces from the
water.
That city is now called Jaffa, or Yafa; and it is the place where the
steamers stop to send ashore those who are about to visit the Holy Land,
for that is the name given to the land where Jesus lived. Do you
remember in the Old Testament the story of Jonah, the prophet who tried
to run away from God's call to preach in the city of Nineveh? Well, it
was from this city of Jaffa, then called Joppa, that Jonah started on
his voyage, which ended inside the big fish. Perhaps you remember also
the story of Dorcas, in the New Testament, that good woman who helped
the poor; and after dying was raised to life through the prayer of the
Apostle Peter. Dorcas too lived at Joppa; and they show the house where,
it is said, Peter stayed while he was visiting in that city.
[Illustration: The Mediterranean Sea]
Here at Jaffa or Joppa we end our long sea-voyage of about six thousand
miles. We go ashore in a small boat, tossing up and down on the waves,
for there is no wharf where a steamer can land its passengers. And now
we are standing on the soil of the Holy Land, where Jesus lived. In
Christ's time this land was called Judea. In our day its name is
Palestine.
It is a small country. If you will turn to the map of the United States,
and look at New Hampshire, you will see a state in form quite like
Palestine, and only a little smaller in size; for Palestine, or the Holy
Land, contains about twelve thousand square miles, and New Hampshire a
little more than nine thousand.
[Illustration: There is no real harbor at Jaffa. Steamers must anchor
some distance out, and passengers are landed by rowboats]
From Joppa we must go across Palestine if we would look at the part of
the land among the mountains where Jesus lived. We can now ride in a
railroad train, something that Jesus never saw while he lived on the
earth; or we can go in a carriage, or on a horse, or on the back of a
camel, as you will see some people riding, or in what they call "a
palankeen," which is something like a coach-body set not on wheels, but
between two pair of shafts, one in front, the other behind, and a mule
harnessed in each pair, so that the rider has one mule in front and the
other back of him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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