Evening Republican, Volume 23, Number 250, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 18 October 1920 — Through Palestine By Rail [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Through Palestine By Rail

ONCE upon a time Moses took 40 years to travel from Egypt into the Promised Land. Today the Palestine Military railway is doing it between midnight and dawn, every day of the week, writes Clair Price In Asia. I stood at my carriage window, entering Palestine to the metronome-click of 30 miles an hour. Below me, the rails were bedded in golden sand, up the slope of which the green of the adjacent fields lay like surf on a yellow beach. Ludd was a small railroad yard in a vast pool of sand, with Welsh coal cinders specking its yellow expanse. With Its passengers leaning out its windows calling into the station crowd “Ya weled,” the Officers’ Special pulled In on its way to Haifa shortly after seven o'clock and came to a dignified stop alongside the little •‘jerk-water'’ train for Jerusalem. An Arab weled, wearing a fez and a station porter’s brassard, strapped my luggage to his head, transferred It to the Jerusalem train, demanded a tip of ten piastres (50 cents), accepted half the amount and was finally routed with the wrathful air of a man who has staked a gold mine and has found it contained only quartz. The Jerusalem train consisted of a London & Southwestern locomotive and three ancient Egyptian State Railways passenger cars, bearing on their wooden sides the chalked words which designated them for “officers,” “batmen” and “civilians.” Arrival at Jerusalem.

I finally lost interest in the fidgety train and went to sleep. It was an Arab porter’s “Khowajah. khowajah,” which brought me bolt upright and awake. He was gathering up my luggage. The rest of the passengers had left. I followed him out of the car and into the crowd of British soldiers in pith helmets and shorts, Egyptian military policemen in fezzes and shorts. Baluchistan soldiers in turbans and shorts, Zionists in khaki drill, and native porters, who moved about on the fenced-off platform. My porter led me into the cool dusk of the customs barrier, on toward the quarantine barrier and thence around to the area of the station. Jerusalem was nowhere in sight. I climbed into an arbuggy, with eyes narrowed to slits against the glare of the limestone surfaces, and was driven away from the station at a gallop to the accompaniment of a furious jangling of bells and the harsh grinding of Iron tires on a crushed limestone road. We rounded the low hill and sighted Jerusalem a mile away—a savage ravine ribboned with glaring white roads and crowded on the farther slope by a huge modern German ehurch with a brief length of ancient gray wall retiring modestly beyond It. On the very roof of Palestine, overlooking the Dead sea, a quarter of a mile below the keels of the craft off Jaffa, the walled city of Jerusalem lies between the Hinnom and Jehoshaphat ravines, as New York city lies between the North and East rivers. It overflows into a dusty red-and-whlte modern suburb to the north, as New Torii overflows into the Bronx. Haifa's New Importance.

The physical Jerusalem is small, but the spiritual Jerusalem Is the scene of such a world panorama that, although I went there to stay a day or two, I should be there yet, had I not cast a fleeting glimpse at the expense account With a movement order to Haifa, I finally drove back to the Jerusalem station one evening, and, feeling like All Baba returning to a stark - world after six miraculous weeks in the Robbers’ Cave, boarded the fussy little train that conveys officers over the Jerusalem-Ludd line. Haifa is like Atlantic City in the wash of its surf. It is like Florida in the wide, white streets of its German colony. It is like Manitou in its green Slopes of Mount Cannel. It is like the •riant tn the narrow, vaulted streets St

of empire, one column of which rests on South Africa and the other on India, ft is the peak of the British Cape-to-Cairo-to-Calcutta project. Leaving Haifa, we skirted the foot of Carmel and Issued into the broad plain, with the black skin-tents of Bedouin dotting the flat green distances and with 13 of us, all tangled up like the sultan’s signature, In a carriage built for eight, talking of the Crusaders and the Camel Corps, and untangling ourselves intermittently to hang out of the windows with our £odaks, as the low cone of the Mount of Transfiguration, disengaged itself from the horizon far ahead. We passed •Afuleh, where the greatest cavalry maneuver in military history enabled the Australians to smash the Turkish real* in September, 1918, and we squeezed across the car to see where “Nazareth lies just over that hill.” We saw the green plain give way gradually to a turiiultuous, burnt-up country; we saw our locomotive rounding sharp curves ahead of us, with “the hedgehogs” running along the footboards of the train in the free-and-easy, ride-as-you-please manner of the East. We began winding down into a scarred valtay of yellow buttes, a steep blue horizon and a wilting heat, with dynamited bridge-structures lying shapeless under the new bridges we crossed. To the accompaniment of the clicking of many kodaks, we finally sighted the twisting blue of the Jordan. Sighing for a watermelon we went down into the Gehenna of Galilee. Into Damascus in the Night.

Night came down overjhe Hauran; we lighted a stump of in our crowded carriage and dined on bully beef, eggs, apricots and a nip from somebody’s flask as a llquer. Some time in the night, the train moved slowly through the moonlit streets of a city of some size, and finally came to a stop under the electric lights of a moaern train-shed. We roused ourselves and stepped out upon the concrete platform of the magnificent new Kanawat station in Damascus. With the luggage leading, we creaked out into the moonlight and’the chorus of the bull-frogs along the Barada river. We crossed.the bridge and the distant thud of the Ramadan gun greeted us. Damascus Is purely Arab. It is as thoroughly of the desert as the Arab himself. Once it was greater than Aleppo, greater even than Bagdad; it was the greatest of the great old caravan ports that lie along the rim of the Syrian desert. It still faces toward the desert, and we hat-wearers who come up to it from salt water, come in by its back door. We lodge in its Levantine hotels (when we are able) and we spend our days In cursing its Levantine waiters and our nights in cursing its Levantine wines. For us, Damascus is old and dusty and tumbledown. But to the Arabs who come, through weeks of crossing the desert, to alight at last from their caravans of belled camels before Its East Gate, Damascus offers the .miracle of its rivers of running water. For them, Damascus wears the sacred green turban of its orchards. For them, Damascus is the City of Paradise.

Bedouins of Palestine.