I went down to Jericho to meet Liz, an acquaintance from Glastonbury. She’s on a trip in search of clues about Byzantine icons. She had travelled by train from Britain to Romania and then Istanbul, then made a quick visit to a Sufi sheikh in Cyprus, then back to Istanbul, then a flight to Amman in Jordan and over the border to Jericho. When she emerged off the bus we stood there chatting, waiting for the taxi driver I had befriended, who was coming in five minutes half an hour ago, as they do. We talked to a policeman too, who told us of his Bedouin boyhood as a shepherd and who seemed rather uncharmed by the job of a policeman, even though Palestinian uniforms are pretty smart.
Then we went to Tell es-Sultan (the Hill of the King), the site of the world’s oldest city, founded in 8000 BCE. I still haven’t found out how the world’s oldest continually-inhabited city happens also to be in the lowest place on Earth (1,200ft or 400m below sea level). Perhaps I never will.
We stopped for tea and a munch at an outdoor cafe and then went up onto the Tell. The atmosphere is palpable – the place-memory of souls who have lived here for countless generations since just after the end of the ice age, right up to modern times before the city sprawled around it. The view was spectacular: here we were in the world’s lowest place, looking over the flattish floor of the rift valley to the majestic mountains of Jordan on the other side. Looking the other way are the cliffs of the western side of the rift, with the Judaean massif rising at least 2,000ft before us. Around us it is green, with palm, banana and date trees, watered by the copious springs here.
One segment of the cliff above Jericho is called the Mount of Temptation, where Jesus went through the temptation after forty days and nights in the Judaean desert. An Orthodox monastery is perched up there, together with caves in which the earliest Christian hermit monks lived, in the centuries immediately following Jesus’ life.
Our taxi-man took us up there. It was stirring. The limestone cliffs and a canyon cutting into them, with ancient caves up its sides hollowed into the rock, were high and daunting. Just to spoil the fun, the Israelis have stuck a thoroughly uncaptivating surveillance station on top of the mountain, to keep their eyes on Jericho and the border.
We milled around amongst a group of Greek pilgrims, drank fresh orange juice and then spent ten minutes dissuading our taxi driver from taking us on a tour of tourist sites. Though he did show us one historic site of a recent kind. It was the compound to which Yasser Arafat had moved when he first returned to Palestine in 1994 following the Oslo Accords, after his decades-long exile in Jordan, Lebanon and Tunisia.
In the Accords the PLO recognised Israel, a two-state solution was agreed and the ‘peace process’ began, which was supposed to lead Palestine to independence by about 2001. It never happened. But the compound is significant to Palestinians because they were at that time regaining control over parts of former Palestine, which was a step forward from the total military occupation they had lived under for twenty years since the Six Day War of 1967, when Israel took the West Bank from Jordan and Gaza from Egypt. The bit that went wrong was that they were supposed to receive more of the West Bank and to have independence. Twenty years later, we’re still waiting.
Our taxi-driver was convinced there was no direct service taxi to Bethlehem but I knew he was incorrect. I wanted him to drop us at the terminal where the buses come in from King Hussein Bridge but he wouldn’t have it, dropping us at another place and declaring that a bus would go from here in one hour to Hebron, via Bethlehem. I had my doubts but we didn’t complain, got some coffee and cakes and sat talking. It’s much warmer down here in Jericho, 3,500ft lower than Bethlehem, and I was rather enjoying it. But we got restless and a taxi driver agreed to take us to Al Azariya (Bethany) on the way to Bethlehem for 40 shekels each (£8 or $10).
On the way, convinced like the previous driver that all Westerners do tourism, he swung off the main road to take us into the desert to Nabi Musa, and it was worth it. Stuck out in the desert hills amidst utter silence, this monastery-like Muslim shrine, dating back to at least the 1200s, had a hospitable numinescence to it which was surreptitiously uplifting.
For centuries it had served as a travellers’ hostel and a hospice for the infirm. It claims to be the mausoleum of Moses, though I thought he was buried over at Mount Nebo in Jordan or even in Kashmir. Whatever, it’s a power place, and clearly pre-Muslim in origin – its placing makes it obvious that this site was significant from the very first time humans trod these parts.
Eventually we arrived in Al Azariya and, after a wait followed by a virulent argument between two service-taxi drivers over who should take us, we went by a round-about route to Bethlehem, had tea in Manger Square and returned home with a taxi-driver who had been looking for me for two weeks. On my last trip to Jerusalem I had bought a pipe for a Palestinian friend and I had lost it on the way home – I’d guessed in this man’s taxi, but wasn’t sure. He had kept it for me and now proudly returned it to me. The next day I gave it to the gentleman I’d promised it to. This was a boon for him because, when he entered his cafe, where I was sitting with Liz waiting for him, he was in a foul mood, and he chirped up immediately. “Until you came along, Mr Balden, this was a bad day.”
That wasn’t the only heartening compliment. Another man called me wise and a true Palestinian. Another said that it was good that I didn’t fall for all their appeals for money, because it taught them to see Westerners as people. And when Liz and I were strolling along Milk Grotto Street, round the back of the Nativity Church, looking at olive-wood carving workshops, one workshop owner told us to go up on his roof, adding, in a Australian-Palestinian accent (if you can imagine that), “It’s alright, you don’t have to buy anything!”. That wasn’t a compliment, but it took something full cycle for me – after all, I’ve moaned in previous blogs about being treated like a walking ATM and buying-machine.
We struggled up the steep Ottoman steps to the rooftop and beheld an impressive sight. The day was clear, with soft golden light and patches of light and shade under a part-cloudy, part-sunny sky – a photographer’s gift. In one direction, two church towers and the Omar Mosque minaret stood upright over the town, with the hill of Beit Jala behind, making a perfect shot. In another direction the Herodeon towered majestically over the countryside, and in another we could see over the Judaean Desert to the Dead Sea and Jordan. All around the fine buildings of Bethlehem, with their softly light stone, practised architectural relaxation under the afternoon sun. Bethlehem was glowing.
Later in the Nativity Church it was the Armenian Christmas (celebrated on 18th January). In a lightly layered mist of frankincense, the priests’ singing was superb, almost operatic, enchanting, echoing something anciently reminiscent somewhere deep in my soul or in the history of this place. I remarked to Liz that, although the deep interiority and devotion of Muslims is impressive when you see hundreds of them praying together, the Christians certainly put on a remarkable show, with candles, bells, robes, incense, chanting and ritual. Though my spiritual preferences are simple and I prefer the rustling of the leaves in the trees to ceremonial drama and high religiosity, as an historian with a nose for cultural depth, human roots and deep memory, this stuff fascinates me.That day we made progress seeking out an icon painter for Liz too – this was one of her quests while here. I took her to see John, a Christian in his sixties who runs one of the better souvenir shops in town (don’t tell my other shop-owning friends I said that!). At first, with a mystified look on his face, he thought we sought an expert on coins. After tea he took us to the municipal tourist information centre. Hmm, I thought, we’re just going to get an official answer. But no, the husband of the Polish woman at the desk was Bethlehem’s top icon painter. Good on you, John! An arrangement was made to meet him and another icon painter from near Ramallah and, inshallah, it might even work – watch this space.
