Birdseye Views of Far Lands Part 9

On the plain just east of the river the Children of Israel were encamped when Moses went up on Mount Nebo, looked over the Promised Land, folded his arms and peacefully pa.s.sed into the great beyond. It must have been an exciting day for the entire camp when they last saw their great leader become a mere speck on the mountain side and finally disappear altogether. They not only never saw him again but they never were able to find a trace of his body.

There must have been much speculation among these people as to what became of Moses until in some miraculous way Joshua was informed that the great leader was dead and that he must now take charge and lead the people across the Jordan into the Promised Land. After thirty days mourning for Moses, the great company marched down to the river; it was opened for them and they crossed on dry ground. The record also states that this crossing was at the time when the river was out of its banks and this whole bottom, nearly a mile wide, was a rus.h.i.+ng torrent.

Perhaps this accounts for the fact that the enemies who had taken possession of the Promised Land were totally unprepared for their coming, feeling secure while the river was so high and dangerous.

Another great event which occurred was when the old prophet Elijah and the young prophet Elisha crossed the river together and the young man came back alone later on for Elijah was taken up to heaven in a whirlwind. Now fifty young men had followed the two prophets to the river and when Elisha came back alone and told them how the chariot of fire came after Elijah they simply couldn't believe it and finally went across and searched the mountains for three days trying to find his body. Failing to find the body, together with the fact that they had witnessed the parting of the waters when the two men went over and the same when Elisha came back alone, was sufficient evidence to them that the young prophet had told the truth.

Evidently this event created a great impression all over the country and young men came to the school for the prophets which was located near, that the buildings had to be enlarged. Every student borrowed an ax and went to work felling trees along the river bank. In one case the ax flew off the handle and went into the water. The young man was greatly troubled about this for it was a borrowed one. Word reached the prophet Elisha and he came out and caused the ax to come to the surface.

But perhaps the greatest of all events that occurred at this place was the baptism of Christ. John the Baptist must have been the Billy Sunday of his day for the crowds that came to hear him were immense. One day among others who came was a fine looking young man who asked for baptism. But the preacher knew him and refused, saying that he was unworthy to do this, but the young man, who was no other than the Master himself, explained the situation and the preacher hesitated no longer.

In connection with the River Jordan and the bodies of water at each end, it is interesting to note that the first man to take the level and give to the world the remarkable facts about the physical characteristics of this wonderful and world-famous river, was an American. His name was Lynch and he was a lieutenant in the American Navy. At the close of the Mexican War, our Government permitted Lieutenant Lynch to take ten seamen and two small boats and make this exploration. The boats were taken overland to the Sea of Galilee and launched and this man and his helpers went down the river to the Dead Sea in them, and thus gave to the world the remarkable facts about this wonderful country.

CHAPTER XVIII

THE PLAYGROUND OF MOSES--EGYPT

Next to Palestine, Egypt is perhaps the most interesting country on the globe to visit. For great antiquity and splendor no land surpa.s.ses this cradle of civilization. The science, art and architecture of the Egyptians is the marvel of leading men even to this day. The schools of Egypt produced the greatest characters of all ages before the coming of Christ. The wisdom of this ancient race as well as some of the engineering feats command the respect of these modern days.

Take a map of Texas and California together, place a map of modern Egypt upon it and you will have enough left to make West Virginia. Ancient Egypt was only about one-fourth as large as modern Egypt. The greater portion of the land always has been and is today a desert. The thirteen million people practically live on the narrow valley of the Nile in a strip of territory from five to fifteen miles wide except down near the sea.

Not far from Cairo is a place called Fayoum. The name means "A Thousand Days." A missionary told me how it got this name. When Joseph was an old man some of the younger officers wanted him deposed and they said that he was no longer fit to be at the head of affairs. They said that near the city was a great swamp and if he were capable he would have drained this land. They, of course, did not think this was possible, hence the suggestion.

Putting their heads together they went to the old councillor and persuaded him to put the impossible task up to Joseph believing that his failure would be so ignominious that he would be deposed. At once Joseph called Egypt's greatest civil engineers, outlined his plan, took hundreds of laborers, went to work and in sixty days the swamp was completely drained. When the old adviser was taken out to see how well the work was done, he was so amazed that he exclaimed: "That would have been a mighty work for a thousand days," and it is called Fayoum to this day. Today the gardens and orchards of Fayoum are among the finest and most productive in all Egypt.

No one can go over this land without walking in the footsteps of Moses, for Egypt was his playground. Of course I was shown the exact (?) spot where the little ark was found among the bullrushes in the River Nile.

When Pharoah's daughter saw the little child she was touched and thus the destiny of a nation hung on the cry of a little child. Miriam, the sister of Moses appeared just in the nick of time and when the princess told her to call one of the Hebrew women her feet hardly touched the ground in her effort to get her mother to the spot. When the little hands were held out toward the joyous mother she was told to take the child and nurse him and thus she was paid wages for bringing up her own child upon whom the sentence of death had been p.r.o.nounced.

Not far from the spot mentioned above is the famous Nilometer that Moses looked upon many a time. As I went down the steps to get a nearer view of this measuring apparatus a panorama of the old days seemed to come before my eyes. The very life of the people depended upon the overflow of the Nile. June 17th was one of the great days for on that day almost as regular as the sunrise the upper Nile began to rise. A few days later an anxious crowd gathered to see the water mark on the Nilometer begin to come up. About July third the criers started on their daily rounds through the city announcing the measurement. If it was up to normal the people were happy and if not they were sad. When the rise was about twenty feet the "Completion" or "Abundance of the Nile" was announced and preparation was made for the opening of the ca.n.a.l which time was a regular jubilee among the people.

All night long before this ceremony rockets were fired at intervals and in the morning at the appointed time the governor and those with him "cut the dam" and the inundation started. For more than a month the ca.n.a.ls were full, and the fields were flooded and a thin coat of fine pulverized soil was spread over the ground like a carpet and when seed was placed in the ground it grew like in a hothouse. At Cairo the Nile would often rise twenty-five feet.

During these days a great deal of irrigating is done all through the season. In some places ponderous machinery is used but to this day a large portion of work is done by hand. One of the most common sights along the Nile is the shadoof. This is a long pole with a weight on one end and a bucket on the other. Hour after hour half dressed men and women will dip up water and pour it into irrigation ditches. Great wooden waterwheels are also used and an ox or donkey or man or woman or a blinded camel will go round and round and you can hear this wooden wheel squeak for a mile. The little buckets on the waterwheel keep an almost endless stream flowing into the irrigation ditch.

Another method is a sort of a paddle wheel on a windla.s.s upon which a native will walk hour after hour. This turns a kind of an endless chain something like the old-fas.h.i.+oned cistern pump with which we are all familiar. In Egypt nearly everything is done by hand as man power is cheaper than machinery. I saw them grading a railroad with wheelbarrows, not even a cart or a donkey on the job. The great bridge across the Nile used to be opened by hand and boats pulled through by hand. It was a most interesting sight to the writer for a hundred or more men to get hold of a large rope and begin to heave-to. Soon the boat would begin to move slowly.

As a rule people in Egypt are very poor. The plague of flies has not yet ceased in Egypt. Children are dirty and often diseased and the streets of the old portion of the city of Cairo literally swarm with them. While the people generally look quite hearty and well fed, yet beggars are everywhere. "Backsheesh" is about the first word the little child learns to speak and the last word an old beggar lisps before he dies. From noon until two-thirty or three o'clock shops are closed and thousands of people drop down where they are and go to sleep. Riding through old Cairo at this time of day my donkey had to pick his way, often stepping over people who were sound asleep.

Many of the customs of Egyptians always have been different from those of other nations. Here women seldom pray to any G.o.d but men pray to all of them. Women carry burdens on their shoulders while men carry them on their heads. Women buy and sell in the market while their men sit at home and spin. The daughter instead of the son is supposed to care for the old folks when they become feeble and helpless. In kneading dough they use their feet while in handling mud they use their hands. Other peoples consider themselves above the beasts but the Egyptians made G.o.ds of the beasts and wors.h.i.+pped them. When an ancient enemy attacked Egypt, dogs, cats, and other beasts were driven at the head of the army and the Egyptians would surrender rather than run the risk of killing their sacred animals.

The people in Egyptian cities do not eat their evening meal until from eight to ten at night. The restaurants have their tables in the streets and the people eat and shop at the same time. Watching the people at a large restaurant in Cairo, one night, I wrote down a list of the articles offered for sale while they were eating their evening meal.

Here is the list: Alarm clocks, nuts, bread, lead pencils, fish, knives, cards, live chickens, cigars, cigarettes, cakes, eggs, mutton, matches, melons, watches, flowers, rugs, fancy boxes, stands, socks, perfumes, balloons, fruits of all kinds, slippers, canes, neckties, whips and guns.

In addition to these venders, blind beggars and cripples, traveling musicians, gamblers with all kinds of devices, fortune tellers with wheels of fortune and many others were among the people all the time.

After eating, many of the people drink wine and play cards until the early morning. All this time nearly everybody was talking at once and it was a regular circus to watch them. Several times hot words were pa.s.sed but as a rule the people were in good humor and seemed to be having a good time.

One of the much used and often abused beasts in Egypt is the camel.

Riding a camel for the first time is quite an experience. The beast will lie down, but it is continually snarling and when it gets up you go through all kinds of motions. As I rode around the great pyramid and sphinx on one of these beasts the swing was not unlike that of a great rocking chair and while this s.h.i.+p of the desert did not seem to be going fast I noticed that the driver was running and the donkey alongside was on the gallop most of the time.

At the time I was in Egypt one could purchase a fairly good camel for a little less than one hundred dollars. These beasts can live on next to nothing. They will strip a shrub of leaves and stems. A camel can eat and drink enough at one time to last it a week or ten days. The natives say that it lives on the fat of its hump. When a camel is weary from a long march across the desert the hump almost disappears and then as it eats its fill the hump becomes strong and hard again. It will carry a burden of from five to six hundred pounds.

The city of Cairo is full of interesting sights. The streets of the better portion of the city are well paved and the buildings substantial and several stories high. The streets are sprinkled by hand. These men carry a skin of water--often half a barrel--and by means of a nozzle they throw it everywhere. There are many beautiful parks and drives in and about the city. The wonderful palms and other trees furnish shade and although the sun s.h.i.+nes very hot it is quite cool under these trees.

Runners go ahead of carriages containing prominent persons telling people to get out of the way for so and so is coming. Many people stop and look as they go by. An interesting sight was a wedding procession.

It was headed by a band and an enclosed carriage with a black cloth over it contained the bride while the groom walked alongside holding on to the carriage. Following along behind on foot were the relatives and the rabble of the streets. My guide explained that when a wedding takes place a cloth is hung from the window and kept there for three days so one can go through the city and pick out the homes where they have had a wedding within that time.

One of the lost arts is the Egyptian method of embalming the bodies of the dead. It seems that they believed that the spirit will return to the body in the course of time and they undertook to preserve the body as near perfect as possible until that time arrived. There are multiplied thousands of these mummies in Egypt. In the great museum in Cairo the mummy of the Pharoah who made the burdens of the enslaved Hebrews heavier can be seen today. Little did he think that in thousands of years the descendants of these people would spit in the face of his mummy, but they often do that very thing.

In the old days it is said that they used to license robbery and govern it by law. The spoil was taken to the robber chief and the victim could go and claim his property and by paying a certain per cent of its value recover the property, after which the man who did the stealing could secure from the chief his portion of the proceeds. We laugh at this but how much worse is it than some of the things we license today?

I had a most pleasant visit in the home of Dr. Ewing, a United Presbyterian missionary. The United Presbyterian people have done and are doing a most remarkable work in Egypt. A visit to their mission in Cairo was wonderfully interesting to say the least. I was presented with some coins there, the smallest of which was worth, at that time, one-sixteenth of a penny, but the missionaries a.s.sured me that those coins were seldom used except in church collections.

CHAPTER XIX

A COUNTRY WITH A THOUSAND RIVERS--VENEZUELA

Years ago two miners worked together for months and finally came to know each other as Tom and Jack. One day Tom was not well and could not do much but watch Jack dig. After noting some movements of the body that seemed familiar he said: "Jack, where did you come from?" The two men sat down and talked of boyhood days and found that they were born in the same community and had played together when they were small boys. Here they had worked together for months without knowing that they were neighbors; they actually got up and shook hands with each other.

Venezuela is our nearest neighbor to the south. This country is nearer to Florida than New Orleans is to New York and yet we have lived side by side for four hundred years and hardly knew we were neighbors. We might have been friends and greatly a.s.sisted each other all these years. Is it not about time we were getting acquainted and shaking hands with each other?

It is surprising to know that Venezuela is as large as Maine, New Hamps.h.i.+re, Vermont, Ma.s.sachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, the two Virginias, North and South Carolina and Georgia combined. It is a country that has a thousand rivers. In some parts of it you can travel for days in regions where as yet no white man has ever set his foot. One writer says that of all the countries in the world Venezuela is the one for which G.o.d has done the most and man has done the least.

This great country has been called the hunting ground of South America.

This is not so much because of the abundance of game, although all kinds of wild animals are plentiful; it has been given this appellation because of its unstable government. Its treasury has been looted again and again. Even the president of Venezuela was for years a criminal. He robbed merchants of other countries who tried to do business with his government. He imprisoned those who refused to a.s.sist him and ran things in a high-handed way. Business firms of other lands found this out and did not care to do business with such a country or help develop its resources in any way.

We are not ashamed of our revolution in 1776 for its purpose was to gain our independence. During the past seventy or eighty years Venezuela has had more than a half hundred revolutions but generally they were gotten up to give an excuse for pillage and robbery rather than to make a better country or government. Things are better now, however, and a new day is dawning for these unhappy people.

The main port or entrance to this country is La Guaira and sailors say it is about the worst port to enter in the world. This port city contains about fifteen thousand people and has but a single street. The high mountains are so near the sea that there is only a narrow strip of land at the foot and on this narrow strip the city is built. The sea is nearly always rough and the weather always hot. How people can endure such extreme heat all the time is a mystery.

All along this coast strip of Venezuela are plantations generally covered with cocoa trees. From the beans of this tree are made cocoa and chocolate. Coffee is also a staple crop. At the piers will be noticed bags of coffee and cocoa beans, great quant.i.ties of rubber and piles of hides. As we are nearer to them than other foreign countries we now use much of their products. The population of this great country is only a little more than that of the state of Iowa.

Back only six or eight miles, in a direct line, from La Guaira and the blue waters of the Caribbean sea, high up in the mountains is a great valley in which is located the capital city of Venezuela. This city, Caracas, is about as large as Sioux City, Iowa, but to get to it is some job. It is only about twenty-five miles by rail and this railroad was about as difficult to build as any of our mountain railroads. The tracks cling to the mountain sides almost like vines cling to brick walls, and the curves are so short that one riding in the end coach can nearly reach the engineer. One can look hundreds of feet into caverns and gorges that seem almost like the bottomless pit.

Venezuela got its name from Venice, Italy, in the following way. One of the earliest explorers sailing along the coast saw the Indian villages built on piles in the water along the sh.o.r.e and was reminded of the Italian city and called the country Venezuela, which means "little Venice."

Here lived Las Casas, a priest who was the Indian's greatest champion in the early days and who is said to be the father of African Slavery in the new world. It was he who suggested that negroes be imported to labor in the fields and mines that the Indians might have an easier time.

Brought from Africa to work that the Indians might rest, these black people became the slaves of all.

Venezuela was the birthplace of the great Simon Bolivar and other patriots who were fired with enthusiasm against Spanish oppression and literally gave their lives that the colonies might be free. Even the coins of the old days were stamped with Bolivar's name and everywhere he is revered as the George Was.h.i.+ngton of that country.

In one of the large museums is a room in which are kept the great liberator's clothing, saddle, boots and spears and these things are as sacred to them as the Ark of the Covenant was to the Jews. In this same room is a portrait of Was.h.i.+ngton upon which is the inscription: "This picture of the liberator of North America is sent by his adopted son to him who acquired equal glory in South America."