H. L. Mencken Discusses Life in Palestine

H. L. Mencken, noted editor and author, recently returned from Palestine, which he visited during a Mediterranean tour. The following articles, of which this is the first, deal with his impressions of the Holy Land and will be published daily. This series is reproduced by courtesy of the Baltimore Sun.

The guide books give so much space to the sacred places, real and bogus, of the Holy Land that there is none left for the scenery, which is a pity, for it is lovely beyond words, and, in certain of its aspects, probably beyond compare. The curious thing about this loveliness is that it runs the whole scale from the paradisical to the infernal, and often within the space of a few miles. Coming down to Jerusalem from Haifa by train one travels for two hours through fat, flat farm lands that make even the Shenandoab Valley seem poor, and then, of a sudden, one is thrust among mountains so old and worn out, so bald and scorched and meager, so empty and reeking of death that even the gray wilderness of Arizona recalls itself as almost voluptuous.

Jerusalem itself is in those mountains, and shares their sepulchral austerity. All its surroundings are bare. To the south little Bethlehem clings precariously to what seems a huge ash pile; to the east the land stumbles down to the Dantesque abyss of the Dead Sea, and to the north and west there is only a museum of geological pathology. In David’s time these hills were green with forests, and up their slopes, on terrace above terrace, ran olive-groves and vineyards, but that was before the Arab began breathing his suffocating breath upon the land. Today the terraces are but crumbling traces, and the forests are gone and forgotten.

VIEW IS TREMENDOUS

The view from the campus of the new Hebrew University, just north of the Mount of Olives, is really tremendous. The whole landscape seems to be falling head over heels down to the Dead Sea, fifteen or eighteen miles away and the better part of a mile below. Overhead the sky is a piercing Mediterranean blue, and the irregular oval of the sea itself, much shrunk by distance, is a blue that is darker but no less rich, but everything else is the vague, depressing color of desolation — graveyard white in one light and malarious yellow in another, with now and then a smudge of rusty brown like an old bloodstain. In the far background, sharply outlined, but with no details, are the ghostly heights of Moab, whence Moses looked down upon the Promised Land. Later on, having come to the unhealthful age of 120, he died there, and was buried by Yahweh in some remote and private ravine, so that “no man knoweth of his sepulcher unto this day.”

But this, of course, is Judea, the glory of Israel as Ireland is of God, but only a kind of mummy today. The Zionists who now resume the land of their fathers have a high veneration for it, but as a practical matter they steer clear of it. Their capital is not Jerusalem, its ancient Rome and Lhassa, but brisk, sunshiny, spick-and-span Tel Aviv down on the coast, in what in Biblical days was the domain of the Philistines; and when they seek room for new farms they do not look for it in these scrofulous Judean hills, but in the lush Plain of Sharon, or in the Valley of Jezreel, or along the fertile shores of the Sea of Galilee.

COUNTRY IS COMPACT

Palestine is so small–roughly, 1,000 square miles smaller than Maryland–and lies so compactly that all of these places are within easy motoring distance of Jerusalem, but going to them is almost like going from Labrador to the tropics. An hour or two of chilly, metallic mountains–and around a bend one comes upon a vast warm basin of vivid green, criss-crossed in farms and with charming red-tiled villages climbing up the slopes. The red tiles are notice that Zionists dwell within, and wherever there are Zionists there is deep plowing, and with it tractors for the plows, and fat, sleek cows, and great swarms of Leghorn chickens, and the beginnings of a wood-lot. And every ten miles or so there is a village with a gasoline station, and a hardware store, and a stand that sells chocolate bars and chewing gum, and a shiny new police station of concrete, with a white turret on top of it, pierced for machine guns.

In the face of all this the poor Arabs simply curl up and fade away. They still scratch the stonier patches with their home-made wooden plows, unchanged since Abraham’s time, and on the hilltops they still live in their cold, tomb-like villages, along with their donkeys, their camels and their bitter reflections, but it is plain to see that most of them are not long for this world. If the law of the Koran still ran in Samaria they would descend anon and help themselves to their neighbors’ forage, but today the whole of Palestine lies under Magna Carta, and larceny is discouraged by cops on motorcycles.