ART. V.-M. DE SAULCY'S DISCOVERIES IN SYRIA.*

SADDENED by the decease of his wife, and anxious to perfect the education of his son, Monsieur De Sauley, a distinguished member of the French Institute and an intelligent Roman Catholic, determined to travel where there might be perils enough to occupy his mind, and acquisitions enough to repay his toil. The neighborhood of the Dead Sea seemed more than any other region to combine the hazard and the mystery: and, making up a party of inquiring Frenchmen, one of whom has just issued a work in the spirit of a Latin monk upon "the Holy Places" of Palestine, he left Paris in the autumn of 1850, determined to shun no labor, expense, hazard, or exposure, in procuring intelligence for his scientific brethren and the Occidental world.

He possessed evident advantages for the self-imposed task. An accomplished linguist, he could communicate with the Syrian in his own tongue, and read the Holy Record the Syrian "Guide-Book "-in its original; an ardent student of Nature, every new flower and every strange insect engaged his attention; a true Frenchman, he could make the best of all the disagreeables in his way, could rise elastically from excessive fatigue, could face unterrified the howling blasts of Lebanon, could ford a swollen winter-torrent with a boy's joy, and could fast cheerfully like a sworn friar. His mind, too, notwithstanding the depression of bereavement, was all alive with hope: he kept in a constant glow of wonder, and gave himself up with a young man's enthusiasm to investigate every monument and record, every trivial incident, of his journey. We were slow to give him credit for an independent investigation of the Hebrew Scriptures: but on all questions of locality he appears to have studied them thoroughly, and to have done his best to harmonize their varying statements; though we cannot doubt that he went into the country predisposed to the singular conclusions which have given his name

Narrative of a Journey round the Dead Sea and in the Bible Lands, in 1850 and 1851. By F. DE SAULCY, Member of the French Institute. Edited by COUNT EDWARD DE WARREN. London: Richard Bentley. 1853. 2 vols. 8vo. pp. 568, 658.

some notoriety abroad, predisposed by the Scriptures themselves, honestly, patiently, and eagerly studied in the original languages. If he was something of a coward,* seeing robbers in every hiding-place, shooting one poor bush-ranger because he did not answer a question which he might not have understood; if he lavished money like a prince, contracting a loan of solid silver even in the Eastern Desert; if, with two Arab tribes as his defenders, he suffered the same robber-settlement which Lieutenant Lynch kept in awe with a handful of Americans, to levy black mail upon him and insult him at pleasure, — we are to remember that all virtues are not comprised in the same character; and that his narrative might have been far less interesting, had his mind been less easily inflamed by sights and sounds so strange to civilized eyes and

ears.

The impediments to Syrian sight-seeing the reading public understand pretty well. Journeying day after day through an actual desert, the traveller is obliged to depend upon his own resources, for drink sometimes, and for food generally: he is compelled to sleep, if sleep he can, in miserable mud-holes called "khans," where he is not always protected from the rain, and is uniformly abandoned to the most insatiable vermin. He is obliged to push on through the protracted storms, because the bridgeless streams must be crossed before they have swollen any more. He must expect to feel threatenings of fever, sun-stroke, and other disorders incident to the sultry climate of the low plains, especially infesting the sunken crater of the Dead Sea, and provoked of course by anxiety, exhaustion, unsuitable food, vexatious delays, and numberless annoyances. With our superior facilities of travel, with our speed, comfort, economy, and certainty of locomotion, it may be hard to believe that an old country like Palestine should possess no wheel-carriage of any kind; no road that we should name such; no suitable refuge from the long winter-rains; no Chris

* Vol. II. p. 239. At the tomb of St. James, on the hill-side facing Jerusalem, a single Arab, armed only with a knife which he never drew, frightened M. De Sauley and the Abbé Michon so that one of them presented his pistol, and both considered themselves remarkably preserved. The Arab's only demand was for a little money; and the idea of his extorting it from two resolute, armed Europeans is as good as that of the Irishman, who alone "surrounded seven men." Probably the beggar was starving.

tian nourishment along a pilgrim-trodden road. But Turkish tyranny and Bedouin robbery have worked together for centuries to strip the "Land of Promise" of every thing but its hallowed memories and its countless ruins. And there is not a suffering, not a peril, encountered by M. De Saulcy's well-equipped and admirably ordered party, not a famine-stricken or storm-driven march, which the ordinary traveller must not expect, to endure as well as he can; but with results far less than those which animated our author in opening, as he thinks, a new chapter in the restoration of the buried past.

Others, we hope, will share the impatience which we felt, not to visit scenes so frequently described as to become a household word, and which more and more of our friends see every year, so much as to penetrate the treasure-house which, under the name of a " Chargé d'une Mission Scientifique," this French savant has laid open to the world.

M. De Saulcy and his five friends reached Beyroot, December 7, 1850, and, as he thought, hastened his journey to Jerusalem as much as possible, though it consumed more than twice the six days in which we made the same journey a month afterwards. Arriving there in season to witness the Christmas solemnities at Bethlehem, he does not linger to rehearse those monkish le gends with which the streets of Jerusalem are filled, but hastens, compass in hand, into a "field white to the harvest," as he believes. His route to the Dead Sea was the usual one through the convent hospitality of Santa Sâba. This romantic, castellated monastery crests a mountain named after the most influential hermit Syria has probably had, whose bones rest now in the midst of the inclosure which his followers still guard with their lives and have often hallowed with their blood. Friars of the Greek Catholic Church, they are bound by peculiar vows to admit no female, keep no servant, use no animal food, within their battlemented walls; and as the world with its cares and follies, amusements and ambitions, finds no entrance, all things being in common, and all under the control of the patriarch at Jerusalem, as their look-out is over a scene of frightful desolation, especially along the barren gorge of the Kidron, over which their cells

hang on the mountain-side, — as they have but a very few books, and those in little use, in the upper room of the watch-tower, as no person comes within sight of their forlorn retreat, save the dreaded Arab and an occasional pilgrim to the "Lake of Lot," hardly the tenants of our state-prison know so melancholy a lot as has fallen upon these dried-up monastics. And, that the one worst ingredient may not be wanting, it is believed that this self-imposed doom is sometimes the penance of sin, and that actual criminals may be wearing out a weary existence in fasting, solitude, labor, and prayer. To repeat day after day the same unmusical chant in their stone chapel, to till a little garden within their ancient walls, to repair the mountain roads to and from the convent, and "entertain" an occasional traveller, seemed the whole occupation of their existence. Even the excitement of danger has deserted them since the Syrian invasion of Ibrahim Pacha; and though their hospitality is bestowed with the same jealous care as when murderous assaults were frequently made by the spiteful Arabs, and the visiter has to be reconnoitred a long time after he has made his appeal at the low iron postern, even this pulse of human feeling has ceased to beat along with that of religious zeal.

After enjoying the only comfortable night's rest to be found in the neighborhood of the Dead Sea, the party, under the protection of an Arab force, took a directly eastern course to the water's edge, then proceeded southerly for twenty days, examining thoroughly every thing in their way, then turned the lower extremity of the sea, and went northeasterly as far as Schihan (Shihon), embracing three quarters of the whole circumference of what they name the Asphaltic Lake.

The first point of interest is their careful examination of the ancient Masada, which Dr. Robinson* saw from a distance, but did not enter, and which De Sauley did not recall at the time as the altar of self-sacrifice of nearly a thousand Jews, besieged by the Romans. His description is a specimen of the scientific manner in which he surveyed every object of interest. We abridge it of some superfluous words to bring it within our limits.

* Robinson's Biblical Researches, Vol. II. p. 240.

"The ascent is steep and the rocky fragments roll under our feet. After some minutes the path becomes more difficult, and goats alone might be content with it: it is one continual scalingladder, several hundred feet in perpendicular height. If you venture a glance to the left, a bottomless abyss threatens you with a kind of fatal fanaticism. At last we reach a platform rent by a chasm. The area soon becomes wider, and we find ourselves encircled by fragments of walls, and heaps of other ruins, unquestionable signs of ancient habitations. To our left, the crest of the precipice is protected by a wall heaped up without order, and this wall dips rapidly with the rock that bears it to the bottom of the chasm. There is no mistaking the locality; Josephus calls it Leuké. To our left begins the snake, the path we have just followed, leading down to the Dead Sea. Facing eastward, we have before us the perpendicular rock of Masada, two hundred feet in height, on the smoothly scarped side of which appear a few excavations resembling those of a necropolis. There could have been no access but by subterranean passages from the interior of the fortress. A ridge as narrow as the blade of a knife leads along the top of an artificial causeway of earth; this causeway, uniting Leuké to the side of the rock of Masada is all that remains of Silva's mound. platform by which it was surmounted has crumbled down, by the action of time and the rains on the soft soil which formed the foundations. The stones have all rolled over into the preci pices on either side, and there remains no passage but this dan gerous ridge, which we must venture on like rope-dancers, without even the advantage of a balancing-pole. In a few seconds we have crossed the abyss, and are hanging to the side of the rock of Masada. Another desperate escalade, and we reach the remains of a flight of stairs fifty feet higher up on the side of the precipice, and on the ruins of a buttress built of fine freestone.

The

"At last we gain the summit; and the small remnant of a path inclosed between the precipice on one side and the ruins of a freestone wall on the other leads us to a well-preserved gate of beautiful workmanship, with an ogival arch. The invention of this form of arch is thus carried back to the epoch of Herod the Great, or, at the very latest, that of Titus and the destruction of Masada. Beyond this gate a level space appears before us, the platform of Masada. The crest we have attained is furnished with buildings resting against the surrounding wall. These are mostly square cells in tolerable preservation, with many small apertures like the holes in a pigeon-house. Within a hundred yards is a ruin resembling a church, with a circular apsis. The whole is of elaborately worked freestone; the supporting walls are covered with a very hard plaster inlaid with