PALESTINE REVISITED:

New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 148, 24 April 1942, Page 10

PALESTINE REVISITED:

ON their way from Egypt to Syria to take up the positions _held by the repatriated Australians, troops of the N.Z.E.F. will pass through Palestine. Their impressions of this ancient but modernised land may be much the same as those recorded by the writer of the article

Palestine. "Don’t travel anything but first-class, and don’t ever talk to Arabs, especially not those who think themselves gentlemen," was the advice that I was given before starting. "No English lady ever travels anything but first class." I decided that I wasn’t particularly a lady and was more New Zealand than English, and so got into a comfortable second class compartment on the train at Kantara. An Arab gentleman of comfortable figure and benevolent smile joined me. "Egypt? Pah!" he said as he drew off his shoes and shook the dust off them out of the window, " Palestine, that is the land for me. I come to Egypt for business but my home is in Palestine.’ "I think mine is, too," I said. " At least my mother and grandmother were born there." " Aha, then we are friends," he said. He ordered cushions and offered me Palestine cigarettes. Finally he tucked me up for the night in my rug, for it was nearly. midnight. Never had any British stranger shown such charming and impersonal solicitude for my comfort. I slept with a feeling of perfect security, not remembering until the morning the awful warnings that I had been given. * * * HE Jerusalem that I had known as a child had grown and shrunk. There was much more of it. Little mushroom settlements spread all around the old city in a most suburban fashion. But the Old City itself was smaller, and the huge walls that surround it no longer reached quite to the sky. The complicated narrow streets and winding alleys that had seemed full of dangers now fell into reasonably straightforward patterns — Armenian Quarter, Jewish Quarter, Greek Quarter, Latin Quarter, Moslem Quarter. But they were essentially the same. There were no beggars, nor S ‘Pate years ago, I revisited

hideous cripples, nor naked, starving little boys such as had once run piter us in the streets and made us feel ashamed and overdressed in our respectable European clothes. But there were still the smells, the shouting, and the noises. And what smells! Rich and fruity smells from the bales of piled oranges" and grapefruit, from the confectioners shops of nuts roasting, sugared almonds, and the rich and oily sweetmeats so dear to the Arab. There were smells of camels and donkeys-as they made their way up and down the flights of steps; and of the piles of vegetables carried by the market women, of the leather makers, of the men’s long hookah pipes as they squatted smoking, bubbling, and gossiping. Through the narrow shop openings the craftsmen were busy at work hammering brass or polishing mother-of-pearl, mending carpets or selling silk cloth, tarbooshes or shawls and embroideries. At a _ street corner, in apparently the most inconvenient place, a group of men would be crouched over a brazier sniffing at a pan of frying rissoles. And always the streets were narTow, running down long flights of steps turning here into a quiet courtyard or there into a black tunnel. Here unexpectedly I saw the high walls of a convent, the solid masonry of a Roman building of two thousand years ago. * x * ONE day as I wandered through the city I came out through the Damascus Gate. A little way along I saw what looked like the entrance to a cave and a notice "Solomon’s Quarries." I remembered that these quarries, rediscovered at the end of the last century, were the quarries from which Solomon is supposed to have drawn his stone, for the building of the temple three thousand or so years ago. "All right. Here goes," I thought to myself. Two Arabs were standing at the entrance. I paid admission and found myself standing in a huge cave of gleaming white stone. The floor was covered

with chips of masonry and on the cut walls were the marks of chisels-perhaps these of Solomon’s Phoenician workmen. The Arab guide gave me a piece of candle and beckoned me to follow. I * followed further and further into the cave. It narrowed and we went along rocky passages. There were pools of water on the floor, and at times precipitous pitfalls. Passages branched off in various directions. The Arab went on into the maze. I suddenly felt I had had enough. I stopped. The Arab came and seized my arm. Another Arab appeared on my other side. The incident swelled and grew to enormous proportions. "I must not get panicky," I said to myself, but I could not help thinking with regret that no one knew I was here or had the faintest idea where I was going that day. I might disappear very completely in this great underworld that stretched under the humming streets of Jerusalem. Fortunately my sense of proportion returned. Why on earth should these old Arabs want to mufder me, anyhow? I hadn’t more than a few piastres with me, Slowly, in English but. with a smatter of Arab words and the mention of a high-placed official or two, I explained that I was being met at the gate; that I must be there at twelve. I pointed to my watch. It was just noon. I must not keep my " official " waiting. The grip on my arm relaxed. I returned and walked firmly in the direction that I imagined I should go-and felt very small when I had to ask for guidance as to the route. % ae XK HIS was not the only cave I visited. We went one day over the hills south of Bethlehem to visit the caves of Adullam where David is supposed to have hidden from Saul. And. well he might have done so! These caves stretch for very many miles under the hills and unlike most cold and dripping caves I (Continued on next page)

(Continued from previous page) know of, they are very hot, stifling, and dry. This time I was also afraid that I would never get out — not because I would be murdered, but because I thought I would stick. At first we walked, then we bent, then we crawled. By this time it was too narrow to turn, so I had to go on; now no longer crawling but wriggling like a ‘worm on my belly. There would be a sharp bend or a drop or a crawl up or round. We were in the place only about half-an-hour but it seemed a_ life-time. * * * HE most striking thing to a New ‘ Zealander in Palestine is the overshadowing past. There are antiquities everywhere, and of course a host of antiquarians, archeologists, historians, Biblical scholars, Arab scholars, Hebrew scholars-all investigating this or that. I would stop by a fountain or gate and ask its age. "Oh, that is modern. Twelfth century I should think." My mind flitted to the ancient monuments of Britain a mere four or five centuries old. " What about this courtyard, or that wall, or those pools? "Only Roman," would come the scornful reply. "The name Solomon’s Pools is quite misleading. Now I will show you something really old and interesting," and I would be taken under the building and shown some ancient steps. " These are probably Nehemiah," "Here is the place where

David’s Jerusalem stood," or, delving even further into the past, I would be taken to see the excavated mud walls of Jericho; or to the Gaza of the Philistines where Sir Flinders Petrie, still young in mind and active at 80, had uncovered a whole city; or to the cave where some paleolithic wanderer had left his skeletal remains, ° * * * _ VERYWHERE in Palestine, past and present jostle together. On the one hand you see the Arab villages, the primitive hand-made tools, the domed stone houses; on the other, the communal farms of the Zionists and the modern Tel Aviv so near the ancient Jaffa in physical distance, so far away in time. In the streets, in the bazaars, in the houses on all sides, there is the war between the ancient and the modern. Already there are signs that the modern is winning. Woolworth hardware replaces the ancient pots and cooking bowls, and the modern maidens of Nazareth come to draw water with kerosene tins on their heads. One thing has been ever present in Palestine and that is the soldier — Egyptians, Syrians, Assyrians, Romans, Mohammedans, Crusaders, and Turks. And now New Zealand soldiers pass over Palestine from Egypt to Syria, exchanging the sand and flies of the desert for hills, not unlike our own hills of New Zealand.

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