On the 26th of October Ambros writes: Collected the photographs of the white boy from the studio today. Later, made enquiries at the Chemins de Fer Orientaux and the Banque Ottomane concerning our onward journey. Also bought a Turkish costume for Cosmo and one for myself. Spent the evening with timetables, maps and Karl Baedeker's handbook.
The route they took from Constantinople can be followed fairly closely from the diary notes, despite the fact that they are farther apart now, and at times stop altogether.
They must have crossed the whole of Turkey by rail, down to Adana, and gone on from there to Aleppo and Beirut, and seem to have spent the best part of a fortnight in the Lebanon, for it is not till the 21st of November that "passage to Jaffa" is entered. The day they arrived in Jaffa, through an agent at Franks Hotel, Dr Immanuel Benzinger, they hired two horses at a cost of 15 francs each for the twelve-hour ride up from the coast to Jerusalem. The luggage went ahead by rail. Early on the morning of the 25th, Cosmo and Ambros were on their way through the orange groves and on, in a southeasterly direction, across the plain of Sharon and towards the mountains of Judaea. Through the Holy Land, writes Ambros, often far off the track. The rocks all around radiantly white in the light. For long stretches not a tree, not a shrub, scarcely so much as a meagre clump of weeds. Cosmo very taciturn. Darkened sky. Great clouds of dust rolling through the air. Terrible desolation and emptiness. Late in the afternoon it cleared once more. A rosy glow lay upon the valley, and through an opening in the mountainous terrain we could see the promised city in the distance — a ruined and broken mass of rocks, the Queen of the desert… An hour after nightfall we ride into the courtyard of the Hotel Kaminitz on the Jaffa Road. The maitre d'hotel, a pomaded little Frenchman, is utterly astounded, indeed scandalisé, to see these dust-caked new arrivals, and shakes his head as he studies our entry in the register. Not until I ask him to see that our horses are properly looked after does he recall his duties, whereupon he deals with everything as fast as he is able. The rooms are furnished in a most peculiar manner. One cannot say what period or part of the world one is in. View to one side across domed stone rooftops. In the white moonlight they resemble a frozen sea. Deep weariness, sleep till well into the morning. Numerous dreams with strange voices and shouts. At noontime a deathly silence, broken only by the eternal crowing of cocks. - Today (it reads two days later) a first walk through the city and into the outer districts. All in all, a frightful impression. Vendors of souvenirs and devotional objects in almost every building. They crouch in the gloom of their shops amidst hundreds of olivewood carvings and junk decorated with mother-of-pearl. From the end of the month the faithful will be coming to buy, hordes of them, ten or fifteen thousand Christian pilgrims from all around the world. The more recent buildings of an ugliness hard to describe. Large quantities of filth in the streets. On marche sur des merdes!!! Pulverized limestone ankle-deep in places. The few plants which have survived the drought that has lasted since May are covered in this powdery meal as if by a blight. Une malédiction semble planer sur la ville. Decay, nothing but decay, marasmus and emptiness. Not a sign of any business or industry. All we passed were a tallow-and-soap factory and a bone-and-hide works. Next to this, in a wide square, the knacker's yard. In the middle a big hole. Coagulated blood, heaps of entrails, blackish-brown tripes, dried and scorched by the sun. . Otherwise one church after another, monasteries, religious and philanthropic establishments of every kind and denomination. On the northerly side are the Russian cathedral, the Russian Men's and Women's hospice, the French Hópital de St Louis, the Jewish Home for the Blind, the Church and Hospice of St Augustine, the German school, the German Orphanage, the German Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb, the School of the London Mission to the Jews, the Abyssinian Church, the Anglican Church, College and Bishop's House, the Dominican Friary, the Seminary and Basilica of St Stephen, the Rothschild Girls' Institute, the Alliance Israélite College of Commerce, the Church of Notre Dame de France, and, beside the pool of Bethesda, the Monastery of St Anne; on the Mount of Olives are the Russian Tower, the Church of the Assumption, the French Church of Pater Noster, the Carmelite nunnery, the building that houses the Empress Augusta Victoria Foundation, the Russian Orthodox Church of Mary Magdalene, and the
Church of Agony; to the south and west are the Armenian Orthodox Monastery of Mount Zion, the Protestant School, the Sisters of St Vincent, the Hospice of the Knights of St John, the Convent of the Sisters of St Clare, the Montefiore Hospice and the Moravian Lepers' Home. In the centre of the city there are the Church and Residence of the Latin Patriarch, the Dome of the Rock, the School of the Frères de la Doctrine Chrétienne, the school and printing works of the Franciscan Brotherhood, the Coptic Monastery, the German Hospice, the German Protestant Church of the Redeemer, the United Armenian Church of the Spasm (as it is called), the Couvent des Soeurs de Zion, the Austrian Hospital, the Monastery and Seminary of the Algerian Mission Brotherhood, the Church of Sant'Anna, the Jewish Hospice, the Ashkenazy and Sephardic Synagogues, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, below the portal of which a misshapen little man with a cucumber of a nose offered us his services as a guide through the intricacies of the aisles and transepts, chapels, shrines and altars. He was wearing a bright yellow frock coat which to my mind dated far back into the last century, and his crooked legs were clad in what had once been a dragoon's breeches, with sky-blue piping. Taking tiny steps, always half turned to us, he danced ahead and talked nonstop in a language he probably thought to be German or English but which was in fact of his own invention and to me, at all events, quite incomprehensible. Whenever his eye fell on me I felt as despised and cold as a stray dog. Later, too, outside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, a continuing feeling of oppressiveness and misery. No matter which direction we went in, we always came up at one of the steep ravines that crisscross the city, falling away to the valleys. By now the ravines have largely been filled with the rubbish of a thousand years, and everywhere liquid waste flows openly into them. As a result, the water of numerous springs has become undrink-able. The erstwhile pools of Siloam are no more than foul puddles and cesspits, a morass from which the miasma rises that causes epidemics to rage here almost every summer. Cosmo says repeatedly that he is utterly horrified by the city.
On the 27th of November Ambros notes that he has been to Raad's Photographic Studio in the Jaffa Road and has had his picture taken, at Cosmo's wish, in his new striped Arab robe. In the afternoon (he continues) out of the city to the Mount of Olives. We pass a withered vineyard. The soil beneath the black vines rust-coloured, exhausted and scorched. Scarcely a wild olive tree, a thorn bush, or a little hyssop. On the crest of the Mount of Olives runs a riding track. Beyond the valley of Jehoshaphat, where at the end of time, it is said, the entire human race will gather in the flesh, the silent city rises from the white limestone with its domes, towers and ruins. Over the rooftops not a sound, not a trace of smoke, nothing. Nowhere, as far as the eye can see, is there any sign of life, not an animal scurrying by, or even the smallest bird in flight. On dirait que cest la terre maudite. . On the other side, what must be more than three thousand feet below, the Jordan and part of the Dead Sea. The air is so bright, so thin and so clear that without thinking one might reach out a hand to touch the tamarisks down there on the river bank. Never before had we been washed in such a flood of light! A little further on, we found a place to rest in a mountain hollow where a stunted box tree and a few wormwood shrubs grow. We leant against the rock wall for a long time, feeling how everything gradually faded… In the evening, studied the guidebook I bought in Paris. In the past, it says, Jerusalem looked quite different. Nine tenths of the splendours of the world were to be found in this magnificent city. Desert caravans brought spices, precious stones, silk and gold. From the sea ports of Jaffa and Askalon, merchandise came up in abundance. The arts and commerce were in full flower. Before the walls, carefully tended gardens lay outspread, the valley of Jehoshaphat was canopied with cedars, there were streams, springs, fish pools, deep channels, and everywhere cool shade. And then came the age of destruction. Every settlement up to a four-hour journey away in every direction was destroyed, the irrigation systems were wrecked, and the trees and bushes were cut down, burnt and blasted, down to the very last stump. For years the Caesars deliberately made it impossible to live there, and in later times too Jerusalem was repeatedly attacked, liberated and pacified, until at last the desolation was complete and nothing remained of the matchless wealth of the Promised Land but dry stone and a remote idea in the heads of its people, now dispersed throughout the world.