The Holy Land and SyriaCarpenter, Frank G. (Frank George)
Religion
The Holy Land and Syria
Carpenter, Frank G. (Frank George)
Palestine -- Description and travel; Syria -- Description and travel
The roads are usually high above the rest of the country. They run along
the canals, and consist of the dirt banked up to hold back the waters.
The side roads are chiefly camel paths or foot paths, and one sees
everywhere the traffic moving along through the fields. Even on the main
roads there are few wagons. Most of the freight is carried on donkeys
and camels, which are the common riding animals as well. Long-legged
Egyptians in turbans and gowns sit on the rumps of little donkeys, their
feet almost dragging; and fierce-looking Bedouins, their headdresses tied
on with ropes, bob up and down as they ride on their camels, their heads
bowing at every step of the beasts. There are camels loaded with alfalfa,
the grass so covering them that they look like haystacks on legs. There
are donkeys laden with boxes and bags, and mules and bullocks carrying
freight of one kind or another. Out in the fields one now and then sees a
buffalo with a half-naked boy perched on it, and at nightfall the paths
are lined with men coming from the fields riding these ungainly beasts
and balancing their one-handled ploughs in front of them.
It was in Goshen that the Israelites worked after they were enslaved by
the Egyptians. Here they built for Pharaoh the treasure cities of Pithom
and Rameses, referred to in Exodus, from which they were sent out to
build other cities and towns in various parts of the Nile Valley.
[Illustration: The Land of Goshen still gets much of its water by the
primitive wheel turned by a blindfolded and resentful camel. This is
the land which fed Jacob and his family through the years of famine in
Canaan]
[Illustration: It was through rocky wastes such as this that Moses
climbed to the top of Mount Sinai and there received the Ten
Commandments, and there the Lord spoke with Moses “face to face, as a man
speaketh unto his friend”]
The archæologists now excavating in Egypt tell me that they frequently
find bricks which were undoubtedly made by them, and assert that the
sun-dried bricks of to-day are practically the same as those the children
of Israel moulded under the lash of their taskmasters.
This is true of the ruins of Bubastis, or the city of the worship of
the cat. The remains of this town, which was situated within a stone’s
throw of the Zagazig of to-day, are still to be seen. Its many buildings
of mud brick have crumbled almost to dust, but here and there the walls
are plainly visible. There are several hundred acres of such ruins and I
spent an hour or so to-day driving through them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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