The Adventure into the Desert

Two pack-horses were stamping their hoofs impatiently outside a house in Jerusalem in the early morning a week or two before Christmas.[65] Inside the house a man was saying good-bye to his wife and his three children.  He was dressed as an Arab, with a long scarf wrapped about his head and on the top the black rope of twisted goats’ hair that the Arab puts on when he becomes a man.

“Will you be long, Father?” asked his little four-year-old boy.

The father could not answer, for he was going out from Jerusalem for hundreds of miles into the sun and the thirst of the desert, to the land of the fiercest Arabs—­Moslems whose religion tells them that they must kill the infidel Christians.  It was difficult to tear himself from his wife and his children and go out to face death in the desert.  But he had come out here to carry to the Arab the story of Jesus Christ, who Himself had died on a Cross outside this very city.

So he kissed his little boy “good-bye,” wrenched himself away, climbed on top of the load on one of the pack horses and rode out through the gate into the unknown.  He thought as his horses picked their way down the road from Jerusalem toward Jericho of how Jesus Christ had been put to death in this very land.  Over his left shoulder he saw the slopes of the Mount of Olives; down below across the ravine on his right was the Garden of Gethsemane.  In a short time he was passing through Bethany where Mary and Martha lived.  Down the steep winding road amongst the rocks he went, and took a cup of cold water at the inn of the Good Samaritan.

Then with the Wilderness of Desolation stretching its tawny tumbled desert hills away to the left, he moved onward, down and down until the road came out a thousand feet below sea-level among the huts and sheepfolds of Jericho, where he slept that night.

With his face toward the dawn that came up over the hills of Moab in the distance, he was off again over the plain with the Dead Sea on his right, across the swiftly flowing Jordan, and climbing the ravines that lead into the mountains of Gilead.

That night he stayed with a Circassian family in a little house of only one room into which were crowded his two horses, a mule, two donkeys, a yoke of oxen, some sheep and goats, a crowd of cocks and hens, four small dirty children and their father and mother; and a great multitude of fleas.

The mother fried him a supper of eggs with bread, and after it he showed them something that they had never seen before.  He took out of his pack a copy of the New Testament translated into Arabic.[66] He read bits out of it and talked to them about the Love of God.

Early next morning, his saddle-bag stuffed with a batch of loaves which the woman had baked first thing in the morning specially for him, he set out again.

How could a whole batch of loaves be stuffed in one saddle-bag?  The loaves are flat and circular like a pancake.  The dough is spread on a kind of cushion, the woman takes up the cushion with the dough on it, pushes it through the opening and slaps the dough on the inner wall of a big mud oven (out of doors) that has been heated with a fire of twigs, and in a minute or two pushes the cushion in again and the cooked bread falls on to it.