BEDAWEEN ARAB-HIS MARE BROWSING ON STANDING BARLEY. CHAPTER I. STRANGENESS OF THE PICTURES. ALMOST everything in the Holy Land is different from our life here. It is scarcely possible to state this too strongly. Writers on the manners and customs and natural features of Palestine have not made it plain enough. It is truly a wonderful thing that men with A the same wants as ourselves, and sprung from the same family of the human race, should do everything exactly opposite to the way in which we do it, and that they should live amongst surroundings which present a countless number of total contrasts to ours. We shave the face and let the hair grow on the head, but they always allow the hair to grow on the face and shave the entire head.1 We wear short, close-fitting clothes, whilst they-men, women, and children-wear garments very loose, flowing, and long. We, too, have frequently changing and very varied fashions for most parts of our attire, but they, from age to age, in the memory of man, have never made. any change in dress in those districts where purely Oriental usages have prevailed. How wonderfully this curious fact exhibits the changeless life of Bible lands! The poets with one voice have agreed to represent the female mind as fickle. It is true, they were male poets, and perhaps knew no better. But their universal sentiment on this subject is well expressed in the words of Sir Walter Scott, when, poet-like, he slily seeks to enhance the tribute he is about to pay to woman for her beautiful graces of The Mohammedans leave just one long lock of hair on the top of the head, by which they believe they will be raised by the angels into a sitting posture when called to account on the day of judgment, and if accounted righteous, borne by the angel Gabriel to Paradise. The wearing this lock is thought to have been a mark of the worshippers of Thammuz. |