The Holy Land [antikvár]

FOREWORDBehind the passage of invading armies, behind the turmoil of political struggles, behind the procession of the pilgrims and their deep devotion at the Holy Places, Palestine has had through the ages her own life of the soil and the harvest, with its rhythm of toil and rest, of rain, fruitfulness and drought.The peasant in the Egyptian Delta toils all the year round in the intensive cultivation of any plot to which Nile water can be caused to flow. But in Palestine the very marked rhythm of the climate brings to the peasant his happy pauses, when the dry fields lie at rest till the breaking of the rains, or when on some winter day the heaven opens and every path runs with the torrents that fall from heaven. Therefore in the villages of Palestine, as compared with those mud villages of the Egyptian Delta, we find a richer harvest of the finiits of leisure. Women's dresses flower out into embroideries, dancers know how to improvise a song to the rhythmical clapping of the neighbours' hands, and above all, the story comes into its own.As one who has spent holiday weeks in collecting fairy tales fi"om the villages of both countries, I can testify to a freer, wilder, more romantic and less muddy imagination in the tales of Palestine. But the longer story that beguiles a winter evening is set in a whole world of lesser imaginings and jeux d'esprit^word-plays on local place names, explanations of the shape of some hill or rock, tales of the saint or prophet whose tomb lies beside the village, stories of the mysterious power of certain waters or the virtues of certain plants, and legends woven round the names that everyone knows and loves, Abraham, El Khidr, Solomon the great King, or Mary and her Son. All this is interwoven in thevu