September 11, Wednesday

Sam, Dr. George Birch, William Church, Joshua Davis, William Denny, Julius Moulton, Dan Slote, and Jack Van Nostrand left Beirut, Lebanon on horseback at 3 PM . . Our caravan numbers 24 mules & horses, & 14 serving men—28 men all told.

"The fact is, we find here, and not elsewhere, a complaint which may be called `Holy Land on the Brain.' It is no obscure cerebral disorder, like the morbid delusions of the poisoner it rather delights to announce its presence, to flaunt itself in the face of fact.  This perversion of allowable sentiment is the calenture which makes patients babble of hanging gardens and parterres of flowers, when all they beheld was sere and barren.

We anchored here at Yalta, Russia, two or three days ago. To me the place was a vision of the Sierras. The tall, gray mountains that back it, their sides bristling with pines—cloven with ravines—here and there a hoary rock towering into view—long, straight streaks sweeping down from the summit to the sea, marking the passage of some avalanche of former times—all these were as like what one sees in the Sierras as if the one were a portrait of the other.

Odessa is about twenty hours’ run from Sebastopol, and is the most northerly port in the Black Sea. We came here to get coal, principally. The city has a population of one hundred and thirty-three thousand, and is growing faster than any other small city out of America. It is a free port, and is the great grain mart of this particular part of the world. Its roadstead is full of ships. Engineers are at work, now, turning the open roadstead into a spacious artificial harbor.

Passports

“Palestine is desolate and unlovely. And why should it be otherwise? Can the curse of the Deity beautify a land? Palestine is no more of this workday world. It is sacred to poetry and tradition - it is dreamland.” With these words Mark Twain closed his pilgrimage to Palestine, and in them can be seen the complex attitude of nineteenth-century Americans toward the Orient. For many nineteenth-century Americans, Palestine was a dreamland, a region of the world to be visited through the Bible and travel literature.

Railway to Ephesus

This has been a stirring day. The Superintendent of the railway put a train at our disposal, and did us the further kindness of accompanying us to Ephesus and giving to us his watchful care. We brought sixty scarcely perceptible donkeys in the freight cars, for we had much ground to go over. We have seen some of the most grotesque costumes, along the line of the railroad, that can be imagined. I am glad that no possible combination of words could describe them, for I might then be foolish enough to attempt it.

Ashore, it was—well, it was an eternal circus. People were thicker than bees, in those narrow streets, and the men were dressed in all the outrageous, outlandish, idolatrous, extravagant, thunder-and-lightning costumes that ever a tailor with the delirium tremens and seven devils could conceive of. There was no freak in dress too crazy to be indulged in; no absurdity too absurd to be tolerated; no frenzy in ragged diabolism too fantastic to be attempted. No two men were dressed alike.