Gethsemane

In the Steps of the Master

H. V. Morton

A timeless account of a journey through the Holy Land by the world's favourite travel writer .

(Extract: Garden Gethsemane, Mount of Olives, pp. 42-43)

. . . the warmth in the air, for the sun in Palestine leaps up into the sky like a ball of fire and is warm to the skin from the first second of his arrival.

I hear the call to prayer from the nearest minaret. As I turn the corner, I see the muezzin standing in his little railed-in balcony, lit by the first light of the sun, an old blind man who cries in a loud chanting voice: "AIlahu akbar, Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar ; ashadu an la ilaha illa-llah, ashadu anna Muhammedarrasulullah ... hayya 'alas-sala ... Allah is great; testify that there is no God but Allah and Mohammed is his Prophet . . . Come to prayer! "

And as he calls he does not cup his hands to his mouth, as artists always paint him, but he holds them behind his ears, the palms to the front and the fingers up.

I go on over the rough cobbles and, passing through the Gate of St. Stephen, I see ahead of me a blinding sandy road and the Mount of Olives with the sun above it.

In mountain country there is nothing older than a road.

Cities may come and go, the most splendid buildings may live and die, but the little road that runs between the rocks lives for ever. One is shown all kinds of sites in Jerusalem which may be open to doubt-such as. the very spot On which the cock crowed when St. Peter denied his Lord-but one looks at them with respect for the piety which created them, and with distaste for the principle which profits from them. On the Mount of Olives, however, one knows that these little stony tracks that twist and turn over the rocks are the very paths that He must have taken and that they are marked more truly with the imprint of His feet than any rock within a golden shrine.

The road runs downhill from St. Stephen's Gate into the Kedron Valley. It bends to the right, leading down to the stony place, and, when I look up, the walls of Jerusalem, with their crenellated sentry-walks, stand like a challenge, golden in the morning sun. At the bottom of the valley the road rises over the lower slopes of the Mount of Olives, and a little to the right stands a clump of cypress trees with a wall round them. This is the Garden of Gethsemane.

The Franciscan friars, who touch everything with beauty, grace and reverence, own the little Garden and, while they have built a church near by, they have not touched the Garden except to make flower-beds among the ancient olive trees.

In a land where the footsteps of Christ, real or imaginary, can be traced by huge churches built over stones and caves and legends, this quiet little Garden on the Mount of Olives stands out as an imperishable memory. Time has not altered this Garden. City has followed city on the hill opposite, but the Garden, so near that in the evening the shadow of Jerusalem's wall falls across it, has remained to-day as it must have been in the time of Jesus. There would have been a wall round it and probably an oil press to which the people on the Mount would have carried their olives to be crushed. Dotted about the garden are eight aged olive trees of tremendous girth. They are more like rocks than trees. Slim new shoots spring out of apparently dead wood, and the old trunks, vast as ancient oaks, are propped up with ramparts of stones and stout wooden poles. These trees still bear fruit from which the monks press oil.

An old monk, who is working in the Garden, unlocks the rate for me and turns again to his weeding basket and his rake.

He is a French monk who has spent many years in the Holy Land, and when I talk to him he straightens himself from the hedge of rosemary and stands, politely anxious to get on with his work, his brown gardener's hands folded across his brown habit, the fingers locked together.

He points out to me a rock which marks the place where Peter, James and John slept, and not far off is a column in the wall which is the traditional spot on which Judas betrayed Jesus with a kiss.

" And is it true," I ask him, " as so many believe, that these nre the actual trees that were growing in the time of Our Lord? "

" They may well be the trees," he replies, " for their age is lost in antiquity. I will tell you a very interesting thing about them. They have never paid the tax which, since the Moslem .on quest, was imposed on newly planted trees. That means that they were not young trees many centuries ago. That, my son, is an historic fact, but whether they sheltered our

rd I cannot say; but, for myself," and here the old man smiled gently and bent towards his rake and basket, " I believe they did."

There is no sound in the Garden of Gethsemane but the click of the Franciscan's rake among the sharp flints and the drone of bees among the flowers and, intermittently, that hot sound like a whip-lash that will always remind me of the blazing Sun of Palestine-the noise of grasshoppers.

And, as I stand in the shade of the olive trees, I look up and see, through a screen of leaves, the great yellow wall of Jerusalem on the ascending slope opposite, and the walled-up Golden Gate, the site of the triumphal entry into the city. In this quiet garden, striped with cool shadow, that wall seems cruel and terrible.

It Occurs to me that there could be no greater contrast than the proud, hard, yellow wall and this little garden among trees, where the lizards come out of holes in the stones to stare in the sunlight with their small frogs' heads lifted, listening and watching; where every leaf and every flower achieves an added beauty by reason of the barren harshness and the cruel heat beyond the garden.

"Then cometh Jesus with them unto a place called Gethsemane, and saith unto the disciples, Sit ye here, while I go and pray yonder. ... "

I finish the chapter of St. Matthew and close the Book. The monk has weeded to the end of his row. He stoops down, picks a stone from his sandal and bends again to his work. And above us the gaunt, cavernous trunks of the eight olive trees that will not die rise up like the columns of a crypt.

As the Franciscan lets me out of the garden he gives me a little slip of paper, which I place in my pocket as I walk back up the hot road to Jerusalem. Remembering it, as I pass in under the gate of St. Stephen, I open it and find pressed inside a spear-shaped olive leaf and a blue flower from the Garden of Gethsemane.

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