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Selah Merrill

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Selah Merrill From: Scribner’s Magazine , Volume 13, Issue 3. Disclaimer: This text was first published in March 1893 and is therefore in the public domain . It may be distributed for free to anyone without conditions. This text was re-typed from the original non-searchable text. The original text can be found at: http://digital.library.cornell.edu/cgi/t/text/pageviewer- idx?c=scri;cc=scri;rgn=full%20text;idno=scri0013-3;didno=scri0013- 3;view=image;seq=0297;node=scri0013-3%3A3 289 . The Jerusalem Station. THE JAFFA AND JERUSALEM RAILWAY. By Selah Merrill. If ever an act seemed like sacrilege it is the introduction of a railroad into Palestine, with the sound of whistle and rushing train among the old and quiet hills of Judea. Everybody believes, however, that Providence is guiding the march of civilization, hence there can be nothing unholy in the fact that its advanced guard has reached the walls of ancient Jerusalem. We had already the post-office, the management of which has notably improved during the past ten years ; we had also the telegraph ; and while one should not expect too much of Oriental lightning, and must sometimes be satisfied if it makes a full hundred miles in forty-eight hours, still the natives, both high and low, are gradually waking up to the idea that it means promptness and rapidity—that it is a kind of annihilator of space. But it was reserved for the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and ninety-two to introduce here the railway, with all its strange and stirring life. The present is a kind of "Columbus year" for Palestine, and in commemoration of the opening of this road in the Holy Land, an extra flag might be displayed at the great Chicago Exposition. During the month of August (1892), tens of thousands of people, for the first time in their lives, have seen a railroad and a train of cars. They have had a revelation, and in the great city as well as in the dirtiest village of the land, wonder is at its height. The excitement can hardly be realized by the inhabitants of other countries, to whom railroads perfected by the highest engineering skill and with lavish expense are objects as familiar and common as a daily newspaper. We forget that, not so very long ago, in our own country we had only bridle-paths and scarcely a yearly post, while railways and steamboats had not even been dreamed of. Let all the world rejoice if this mediaeval country is experiencing a sensation which it can hardly comprehend. The Station at Jaffa, showing also part of the Freight Depot. The significance of this event is not that fifty-three miles of railway have been built, or that the capital and the seaport have been united by iron rails ; it is that this has been done in Turkey, which has always, by all the prejudice and force of its religion, by all the arts of its diplomacy, and by every other means at its command, done all in its power to keep out Western civilization. It is, therefore, a well-aimed spear-thrust in the side of this old despotic, backward- looking government, and may foretoken for it either the dawn of health or the shadows of inevitable death. But no one can make use of this railroad until he gets into the country, and the process of landing at Jaffa is the same old bugbear that it was before the railroad was built. This process, however, in the large majority of instances, is not at all formidable, but the remaining instances are no doubt rather trying to sensitive nerves. The fact is that Jaffa has no harbor ; there is a bit of water protected by a reef of rocks where small boats can be sheltered if they succeed in shooting themselves into it before a storm overtakes them ; but steamers and large craft have to stand out to sea for safety. There is evidence that, on the north side of the present town, there was, in ancient times, a sort of harbor, small but safe, which is now silted up and covered with orange gardens. View of the Station at Jaffa from Window of the Jerusalem Hotel. The great public work most pressingly demanded at the present time is the construction of a breakwater of dimensions sufficiently ample for the protection of shipping of all kinds. The railroad during the slack season of the year—say during the entire summer, from May till October—might employ their forces in carting down one of the mountains of Judea, saying : "Be thou cast into the sea," and thus form an effectual barrier against the mad waves of the winter storms. Since any number of laborers can be obtained for twenty to thirty cents a day, furnishing their own food at that, the cost of such an undertaking ought not to be so great as to prevent its being done. Delicate women and dignified clergymen who have been tossed from the steamer's ladder into the great bear arms of a stalwart Arab boatman standing in a boat below, while steamer and boat and sea were dancing like captive rubber balls in a gale of wind, think nothing could exceed the discomfort which they experienced ; how, then, would they estimate the task of the railroad company, who had to get from ship to shore, in spite of rough seas, all the rails, ties, iron bridges, cars, engines, colossal water-tanks, and everything else that was required in the construction and equipment of the road ? The task, however, after much serious risk to life, many mishaps, and some discouraging and costly accidents, was accomplished ; but the difficulties overcome only emphasize the great need which Jaffa has of a suitable harbor and landing place. The reef just referred to, with its bit of sheltered water, is directly in front of the middle of the town, and the town itself is defended from the sea by a high wall from the top of which the houses begin. Travelers are hoisted up here, but all the materials for the railroad must be got ashore elsewhere. From a safe point on the north side of the town the company built a temporary track of rocks and timber, shored up in the strongest possible manner, so that it might not be swept away by the waves, which ran along in the shallow water under the wall of the town till it reached a certain point in the reef of rocks beyond which the water was deep. Hither from the steamers was brought, on strong lighters, the material for the road, and all seemed to be working well ; but one night a terrible storm, such as Josephus relates was long ago named by the Jaffa mariners "The Black Norther" ("Wars," iii., 9,3), ruined a large part of this structure ; as nothing was to be done but to try again, at great cost of time and money it was rebuilt, and finally served the purpose desired. Certain things, as, for instance, the boilers of the engines, were dumped into the sea, and, like great captive monsters, were easily towed to land. Everything that could be constructed thus was made in sections, and engineering skill contrived to handle these so that at last the materials were all landed without serious injury. Jaffa rises from the sea not in rugged outline, but round as a Roman arch, and is girded with a vast belt of green, made up of gardens, orange-groves, palm-trees, wells and water-courses, and white cottages just visible beneath luxuriant shade ; and looked at from either sea or land, it well deserves its ancient Hebrew name of "beautiful." Without patient human industry, however, all this would retrograde so that it would soon be described as "a little barren hill in the midst of a sandy waste." The town is Mohammedan. It possesses also a considerable population of Jews, but it is to the large Christian element that its present prosperity is chiefly due. It can boast of excellent hotels, hospitals, and schools. It has an unfailing vegetable market in Port Said, where great Indian ships are constantly passing to and fro. Of its enormous orange crop, forty millions to sixty millions are sent every year to Egypt, Europe, and London—enough to make thrice glad the children in half of the cities of the American Union. It sends abroad annually from four hundred thousand to six hundred thousand dollars' worth of native soap, making one wish that the people of the country would afford to use a little more and sell a little less ; while its exportations of wheat, barley, maize, olive-oil, wine, and other commodities, together with its imports, make its commerce mount up into respectable millions. Both north and south of Jaffa the coast is one continuous sand-bank, broken as points into low hills, running parallel to and a short distance back of the water limit. Through this bank the road must go, and a vast quantity of sand had to be removed before a proper roadway was secured. Passing for a mile or a mile and a half through these gigantic walls of sand, along the line of the road, we suddenly look out on to gardens and cultivated fields, beyond which a broad plain stretches, apparently without limit, toward the blue and far-distant hills. That is the Plain of Sharon, rich as the heart of man could wish, and justly famous in the Sacred Books ; and when, even now in spring-time, this great plain spreads out its flower-covered acres beneath the loveliest sky, the beholder forgets, for the moment, that he is in a land of ruins and desolation.
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