On the Desert - Recent Events in Egypt/Chapter 20
CHAPTER XX.
THE MOSLEMS OF GAZA — A BRAVE MISSIONARY.
The message which awaked me Saturday night produced a strange tumult in my thoughts. "All well!" Did those words drop down from heaven, or from the top of the campanile at Florence, to be caught up by the night wind, and borne to this farthest corner of the Mediterranean? Was it strange if, under the cover of our tent, I felt as if "rocked in the cradle of the deep," and listening to the cry "All's well" from the ship's deck — a cry repeated all night long, marking the hours? But that cry sounded so far away that it seemed as if it were not uttered by any earthly guard or sentinel, but by some heavenly Watcher gliding before us through the darkness, and making a path of safety in the great waters. Such at least were the fancies that, waking or sleeping, filled my thoughts and mingled with my dreams, till the sun shone through the curtains of the tent, and lo! the Sabbath had come. It was broad day, and yet there was neither sight nor sound of motion in the camp. The camels were still prone on the earth, as if they had reached the end of their wanderings, and the desert should know them no more; while the men lay motionless, as if they were sleeping their last sleep. The sky was of the deepest blue, as if it had caught the reflection from the Mediterranean; and in the air there was
"The sense of something far more deeply interfused,"
which no philosophy can explain but as an Invisible Presence, before which nature stands still, and which fills the trembling heart with its own fulness of peace. That morning, at our family prayers, we felt a new overflow of gratitude at the thought that we had "moved our tent so many days march nearer" at once to our earthly and our heavenly home.
To give a sacred sweetness to the day, we had for the first time since leaving Cairo, a Christian service. There is no church in Gaza, not even a chapel, however small; but in the early days the disciples, in the land where we now were, assembled in an upper room, as in later times persecuted Christians found sanctuaries in crypts and catacombs; and so in the missionary's house we joined with his family and a few others, and listened to the worship of God in our own tongue wherein we were born. Mr. Schapira, as a missionary of the Church of England, read that service which I have heard on many a shore and sea. He is very liberal in embracing all Christians in his communion of saints, end made no scruple in asking me to conduct the service with him, and it was a sweet and sacred hour when we all knelt together, English and Americans and Syrians, end committed ourselves to Him who is the God and Father of all.
I have become very much interested in the work of this excellent missionary. He is of Jewish descent, and is a native of Russia, having been born at Odessa, on the Black Sea, but has married a German wile, and lived in England, where he learned to speak English perfectly, and labors under the auspices of the Church Missionary Society. Four years ago he came to Gaza — a town inhabited almost exclusively by Moslems of the most bigoted and fanatical kind. It was hardly possible to find a more discouraging and apparently hopeless field. When he passed in the streets, he was hooted at and cursed. But he bore all this silently, determined to see what patience and faith could do. He opened schools for the children of the very men who cursed him, and so slowly but surely did he win his way to their respect and confidence, that he now has two hundred children, most of them Moslems, who, it is to be hoped, will not be like their fathers.
Then he found that slaves were brought from Egypt and sold in Gaza. Indeed so open were the slave-dealers in their business, that hearing of the arrival of a Howadji, they thought they should find him a profitable customer — for of course he would prefer a slave to a hired servant — and came to ask if he did not want a "likely" boy or girl. So much was he annoyed by this that finally he determined to pay them in their own coin; and when they came again with the offer of a boy of unusual attractions, he said he could not decide to purchase till he had seen the lad, and had him in his house. So they brought him for a couple of days inspection. Apparently they had forgotten, if indeed they ever knew, that a slave thus in the house of a British subject is free. Straightway the missionary applied to the English Consul at Jerusalem, who forthwith gave the desired protection; so that when the slave-dealers (there were five of them) returned, they found that their prize was free, while they were put in prison for breaking the law! Nor did this brave missionary cease his efforts till the boy had been sent back to Egypt and up the Nile, to be restored to the home from which he had been stolen. After that he received no more offers of bargains in human flesh, and those who plied the iniquitous trade were more retired in their operations. So much for the Christian courage of one man!
Perhaps his interest in this matter was intensified by his experience in Africa. He had been for two years a missionary at Sierra Leone, during which time he made many excursions into the interior. On one occasion he was some twelve days march from the coast, where he found in a village a Mahometan missionary, who while endeavoring to turn the people to Islam, thought it not inconsistent with his sacred character to purchase a slave! He had bought a poor boy, whose feet, for fear of his running away, he had made fast in the stocks. Such a sight was enough to move a heart of stone, and deeply touched the missionary. But what could he do? He had no money to buy the poor child's freedom. Not long before this the Bible — which had been translated into Arabic by Dr. Van Dyck — had been printed at the press in Beirut, and thirty copies had been sent to Western Africa. One he had now with him. The sight of this excited the ardent desire of the apostle of Islam. Books are not common in that part of the world, but here was a volume in his own mother tongue. What would he not give to possess it! He offered the missionary any price, if he could but obtain one. This conversation took place in the presence of one of the African kings. Mr. Schapira listened to the earnest request, and finally made answer: "So you would give anything for a copy of the Arabic Bible? Well, you shall have it: it is yours. Now give me that boy!" "Oh — oh — oh! But — but — but!" exclaimed the Moslem. This was a turn of affairs which he did not expect, and he was now as anxious to recede from his rash offer as he had been to make it. But my friend held him to his agreement, asking if he intended to be put to shame before the king by breaking his word? The upshot of it all was that the Moslem priest took the Bible, and gave up the boy, whom Mr. Schapira forthwith despatched down to the coast, to be put into the missionary school at Sierra Leone, where (though long a sufferer from the torture inflicted upon him by having his feet made fast in the stocks) he found under the English flag protection and liberty, and experienced (what he never knew before in his short, sad life) true Christian kindness. At the last advices he was still there. He was thus snatched from a fate worse than death, and introduced to what, it is to be hoped, will prove a happy and useful life.
This touching incident was told not at all in the way of boasting, but was called out simply by the fact that Dr. Post was from Beirut, which led to a conversation in regard to the Arabic Bible, that had been translated and printed there, a copy of which had made its way into such a remote part of Africa, and been used to purchase the freedom of a child who seemed born to hopeless bondage.
In his present field at Gaza, this devoted missionary has need of a rare combination of wisdom, patience, and courage — of all the virtues indeed which go to make up a true hero. He is virtually an exile from his country. He and his wife are the only Europeans in the place, and have to meet all the disagreeable associations of a petty Oriental town. But worse still is the danger of ophthalmia. Nine out of ten persons in Gaza have lost either one or both eyes! From this the missionary himself has suffered greatly, while his wife finds her eyes so weakened that she cannot use them at all at night.
Mr. Schapira is the first man whom I have met who has expressed any hope of reaching the Bedaween. It is sufficiently discouraging to attempt to do anything for the people of the cities; perhaps as they are more bigoted Moslems, they are more unapproachable than the children of the desert. Their fanaticism extinguishes all natural feeling. They have not even the common instinct of gratitude for favors received. "No matter how much you do for them," said my friend, "it is never enough, and they are never grateful." He told me of a man whose poverty and destitution were such as moved him to pity, and he found him employment to keep him from starving. "And yet that man," he said, "would come behind me when walking in the street with my wife, and thinking we did not hear him, mutter the most horrible curses on our heads."
But, remembering how the Divine Master would do good even to those who reviled Him, this devoted missionary has sought to imitate that blessed example, and by his kindness to the children, whom he has gathered into his schools, has made some impression on their parents. In the same spirit of trying to save those for whom others have abandoned hope, he has gone literally into the wilderness to the fierce tribes, who, if more ignorant than the dwellers in cities, are less bigoted. Their mouths are not so full of cursing and bitterness. They preserve at least somewhat of the kindly instincts of nature, which have not been killed by religious fanaticism. And so, when discouraged, as he often is, and disheartened, by the ingratitude, of the Moslems of Gaza, he flies to the Bedaween of the desert. Of course he does not go with an ostentatious display of his condition as better than theirs, or anything which can excite their cupidity. They see him coming among them, a plain, simple man, and poor almost as themselves, with hardly more than a staff in his hand, certainly with little money in his purse. He goes to their black goats-hair tents, and claims their hospitality. He does not despise their homely fare; he dips his hand with them into the dish; and when they gather round their camp-fire, he sits with them as their guest, and leads their thoughts to things of which his own mind and heart are full He told me of his experience. At first he tried to read to them the Bible, but they yawned and almost went to sleep. He found that to persuade them to listen, he must not read out of a book; and so he laid aside the Bible, and began to tell them a story. It was "the old, old story" of the creation of the world, of the fall of man, and of the redemption by Christ, to which, coming in this new dress, they pricked up their ears and listened eagerly, as if listening to a story of the Arabian Nights, often interrupting him with an exclamation of wonder, like the Turkish "Mashallah!" Thus he had held them listening spell-bound till midnight, and in one case till two o'clock in the morning. After this, who shall say that the Gospel, brought in wisdom and in love, may not reach even the descendants of Ishmael, whose hands are against every man, and every man's hand against them?
In the afternoon word came to our tent that the Governor had sent to announce his intention to pay us a visit. An Oriental visit, especially from a high official, is a very formal affair, and it would be the extreme of rudeness to refuse to receive it. Accordingly we repaired to the missionary's house to await his coming. At the appointed hour he appeared, with a number of attendants (the badge of his office) who formed a circle round, but never presumed to utter a word. Coffee was brought and a long narghileh (in which the smoke is inhaled through water) for His Excellency. With an Oriental this is an indispensable preliminary to conversation; and when his lips had closed on the amber mouthpiece, he was in the serenest mood, and the flow of wisdom began. I sat on the sofa beside him, and with an occasional inquiry to draw him out, had little more to do than to listen to what he had to say. But that was full of interest, for the conversation took a wide range. The Effendi spoke with the utmost freedom of political affairs in the East. He appreciated all the difficulties of Turkey, but yet was not without hope for it, and dwelt with relief and pleasure on every redeeming feature in the situation. From Turkey he passed to Egypt and Tunis, and the other Mahometan States on the northern coast of Africa. Nor did he forget his own motherland of Arabia: for, as I have said, he is an Arab, and looks with hope to the future of his race. In all his observations there appeared a degree of intelligence and a liberal spirit which at once surprised and delighted us. If there were in Turkey many such men as Yusuf Effendi, there would be indeed hope for the future of that decaying Empire.
When we returned to our tents, our cameleers were preparing to depart — another leave-taking, which gave us a momentary pang. We went round among them with a friendly smile for all, and a special word of sympathy for our old soldier, who could not be comforted for the shame that had been put upon him; and it was a real pleasure to learn (though it was not till after I had reached America) that on his return to Nukhl he had gone back to the tribe that robbed him, and made his peace with them, and recovered his sword, with which badge of his military rank he returned home in all the pride of a soldier. Even our camels I looked upon with some tenderness, knowing that it was for the last time. Dr. Post wasted no sentiment on the beast that had vexed his soul from day to day, but was glad that he should never see her again. But my camel had become a pet; she had borne me patiently across the desert; and now as I stroked her neck, which she received as gently as a favorite pony would receive a caress, I felt a real sadness that I should see her no more.
Then the men mounted, and the camels rose up at the word of command, and filed out of the garden, and took the way of the desert. Hardly had they disappeared before we heard a jingling of bells, and in came the horses and mules that had been ordered from Jaffa to take us to Jerusalem. The muleteers took the place of the cameleers, and soon made themselves at home, camping beside us, to be ready for the morning march.
The sun was now sinking in the west, and the missionary joined us for a quiet walk out of the city, to meditate at eventide. Passing between the cactus hedges, we made our way through the deep drifted sand, and sat down by the sea, where perhaps Samson had once stretched himself upon the warm beach, displaying his Herculean limbs, which were the wonder and the terror of the Philistines. Gaza, still retains the memory of the deliverer of Israel, and to this day they point out the hilltop to which he bore the gates of the city, and the site of the Temple of Dagon, the pillars of which, they tell us, are buried under ground, divided in the middle, where they were broken by his giant arms.
Dr. Post had met here a young physician, who had been his pupil at the Medical College in Beirut, and who had just brought a wife from the Lebanon to his new home. They desired us, as we were to leave on the morrow, to come and spend our last evening with them. As we left the missionary's house, I offered my arm to his wife, who declined it with a smile, saying that it would attract such attention as to make us unpleasantly conspicuous. Mr. Schapira said that he never took his wife's arm in the streets of Gaza, as it would be regarded by the Moslems as an exhibition of the freedom of Christian manners! So much for the difference of customs in different countries, and among peoples of different religions.
As we came into the streets, a servant led the way with a lantern, which is quite necessary through streets that are not only narrow and winding, but generally pitch dark: for gas and even ordinary street lamps are little known in Eastern cities. But there was another reason for having a torch-bearer. Any native venturing into the streets at night without a lantern, would be arrested by the police: for these dark passages are the hiding-places for thieves who lie in wait for unprotected strangers. But little we thought of any precautions needed for our safety, as we entered a paved courtyard, and mounting by a stone staircase to the second story, found within doors the light and warmth and cheerfulness of a Christian home. The society of one such family is a great resource to a missionary who finds himself almost alone among strangers. To "hold the fort" in a city of Moslems, full of fanaticism and hatred, requires the courage of a soldier, as well as the faith of a Christian. But he who is equal to the task is doing a work the full result of which he cannot hope to see. At the beginning it is a very humble work — that of opening schools, and gathering in poor and neglected children; but the seed thus sown by education, accompanied by the influence of a Christian home, a Christian life and example, is not sown in vain, and will spring up and bear fruit long after he who scattered it has passed away.