September 14 Saturday
The Pilgrims depart Sirghaya and travel to Damascus, making a side trip to Figia. The journey to Figia is approximately 19.8 miles and the final leg to Damascus, and additional 14.2 miles.
A Matter of Conscience
September 13 Friday:
If ever an oppressed race existed, it is this one we see fettered around us under the inhuman tyranny of the Ottoman Empire. I wish Europe would let Russia annihilate Turkey a little—not much, but enough to make it difficult to find the place again without a divining-rod or a diving-bell. The Syrians are very poor, and yet they are ground down by a system of taxation that would drive any other nation frantic.
September 12 Thursday
The group broke camp at 6:30 AM. and traveled to Temnin el Foka. From Sam’s notebook:1867 "Passed up the Valley & camped on l. side under the dews of Hermon. –first passing through a dirty Arab village & visiting the tomb of Noah, of Deluge notoriety.
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.