The inhabitants of this camp are particularly vicious,
and stoned two parties of our pilgrims a day or two
ago who brought about the difficulty by showing their
revolvers when they did not intend to use them—a
thing which is deemed bad judgment in the Far West,
and ought certainly to be so considered any where.
In the new Territories, when a man puts his hand
on a weapon, he knows that he must use it; he must
use it instantly or expect to be shot down where he
stands. Those pilgrims had been reading Grimes.
There was nothing for us to do in Samaria but buy
handfuls of old Roman coins at a franc a dozen, and
look at a dilapidated church of the Crusaders and
a vault in it which once contained the body of John
the Baptist. This relic was long ago carried
away to Genoa.
Samaria stood a disastrous siege, once, in the days
of Elisha, at the hands of the King of Syria.
Provisions reached such a figure that “an ass’
head was sold for eighty pieces of silver and the fourth
part of a cab of dove’s dung for five pieces
of silver.”
An incident recorded of that heavy time will give
one a very good idea of the distress that prevailed
within these crumbling walls. As the King was
walking upon the battlements one day, “a woman
cried out, saying, Help, my lord, O King! And
the King said, What aileth thee? and she answered,
This woman said unto me, Give thy son, that we may
eat him to-day, and we will eat my son to-morrow.
So we boiled my son, and did eat him; and I said
unto her on the next day, Give thy son that we may
eat him; and she hath hid her son.”
The prophet Elisha declared that within four and twenty
hours the prices of food should go down to nothing,
almost, and it was so. The Syrian army broke
camp and fled, for some cause or other, the famine
was relieved from without, and many a shoddy speculator
in dove’s dung and ass’s meat was ruined.
We were glad to leave this hot and dusty old village
and hurry on. At two o’clock we stopped
to lunch and rest at ancient Shechem, between the
historic Mounts of Gerizim and Ebal, where in the old
times the books of the law, the curses and the blessings,
were read from the heights to the Jewish multitudes
below.
The narrow canon in which Nablous, or Shechem, is
situated, is under high cultivation, and the soil
is exceedingly black and fertile. It is well
watered, and its affluent vegetation gains effect by
contrast with the barren hills that tower on either
side. One of these hills is the ancient Mount
of Blessings and the other the Mount of Curses and
wise men who seek for fulfillments of prophecy think
they find here a wonder of this kind—to
wit, that the Mount of Blessings is strangely fertile
and its mate as strangely unproductive. We could
not see that there was really much difference between
them in this respect, however.
