One Clear Call I

by Upton Sinclair

  The guide was an Arab, his name Hafiz. He was elderly and lean, and wore a red tarboosh and a not very clean white robe; also a smile which was meant to be ingratiating, but unfortunately his teeth were bad. Lanny wondered if there was a school for dragomans, where they learned their elaborate discourses; there wasn’t a village, a ruin, a hill, or object of other sort about which he did not know everything and have a prepared spiel, with names, places, and dates—and this regardless of whether it was a Mohammedan, Hebrew, or Christian object. The tourists learned that it was best to let him reel it off, for if he was interrupted he would become disconcerted and unhappy. There was an etiquette for dragomans!

  II

  “Jerusalem the golden, with milk and honey blest!” So ran the hymn which little Laurel had been taught to sing. Perhaps it was a heavenly Jerusalem, a transported and transmogrified Jerusalem which the poet had had in mind; surely it could not have been this walled slum through which the American pair groped their way. They had traveled through China together, so the shock was reduced; this was the mess out of which human civilization had climbed, and it was the same on all the continents of the Old World: narrow, crooked streets, many of them roofed, swarming with dirty, ragged people with many signs of disease; camels, goats, and donkeys threading their way through the crowds and leaving their dung behind them; children playing underfoot, the older ones following the foreign visitors and begging for baksheesh. Such was every “old town,” all the way around the Mediterranean littoral.

  They found it the same in the Arab quarters and the Jewish; the costumes and the language differed, but the poverty and the smells were alike. All the trades of primitive times were carried on in full view of the throngs. Workmen with their trousers rolled up trod the oil from sesame seed in vats, and in the next dark place a camel harnessed to a pole went round and round, working a press which squeezed olive oil from loads of the fruit; the camel had a hood over his face, so that he wouldn’t see what he was doing, and might dream that he was out on the desert trails where he had been born. Next came an underground forge, where iron was heated and pounded out by hand—the method by which swords had been shaped and this land kept drenched with human blood for centuries beyond reckoning.

  The bazaars were most of them mere booths, hung with sackcloth, offering bread and meat and fish and produce from the country. Nothing was ever sold without arguing; everything was pawed over, and the heavenly powers invoked against extortionate prices. Presumably the different tribes came to the shops where their words were understood; or perhaps they relied upon gestures, facial expressions, and the counting of fingers. So many human kinds were here, so many languages, faiths, customs, and costumes. The Jews wore round black hats and beards as long as nature made them; the dervishes wore tall felt caps; the Druses wrapped their heads in white cloths; the Turks wore red fezzes and the Arabs their embroidered headgear. There were Syrians and Armenians; desert people in nondescript rags; peasants straight out of the Bible; and all the various religious orders—Coptic priests, Greek priests with black beards cut flat across the bottom, white-robed Dominicans, and brown-robed Franciscan friars. In the better streets one saw British troops in varied uniforms and a variety of people in European costumes.

  Jerusalem has been destroyed and rebuilt many times. The dust of the centuries has settled over it, and new buildings have been erected on the ruins of the old, often with the old materials. Egyptians and Jebusites, Hebrews and Babylonians, Assyrians, Romans, Persians, Saracens, Crusaders—and now it was the British, holding power under a mandate of the League of Nations. Somebody had to keep order and forbid these fanatical tribes to squabble and tear one another to pieces. Also, in modern times, somebody had to guard oil pipe-lines for a great fleet.

  There is a high wall which belongs to the Moslems; it is supposed to have been a part of the Temple of Solomon, so the Jews have chosen it as a place to come and mourn for the departed glories of their nation. They come, mostly bearded old men, many having traveled from far places to this sacred spot; they are so moved that the tears run down their cheeks as they kiss the stones. They sit before it and murmur, or they stand with open ritual books in hand and chant or recite or pray. Sometimes there will be hundreds of them, shouting in chorus, always, of course, in the sacred ancient Hebrew. Lanny read a translation of some of their liturgies: “For the palace that lies desolate, We sit in solitude and mourn. For the temple that is destroyed, We sit in solitude and mourn. For the walls that are overthrown,” and so on and on. Laurel had heard such litanies recited in the Episcopal churches as a child and had joined in the responses. The only difference was that she had been praying for her own soul and its welfare, whereas these cries were for a nation. “We pray Thee, have mercy on Zion! Gather the children of Jerusalem. Haste, haste, Redeemer of Zion! Speak to the heart of Jerusalem.”

  Here at this Wailing Wall Lanny and Laurel got their first glimpse of the problem they had come to solve. Hafiz told them of the dispute which had arisen here only a few years ago. For some reason the Jews had taken up the idea of fastening pieces of matting to this holy wall. Why they wanted to do it Hafiz didn’t know—he was too contemptuous of their nonsense ever to have asked. The wall was claimed by the Arabs, and they didn’t want it defaced by hanging rags, so they had forbidden the practice. The Jews had persisted, so a wave of fanaticism had run through the two quarters and had been fanned to fury by agitators. There had been riots, and a number of people killed, and British troops had intervened. The dispute was carried to the League of Nations in Geneva, where bewildered elder statesmen, laboring unsuccessfully to stave off World War II, had to stop and listen to harangues in strange tongues on the subject of pieces of matting being hung on an ancient weed-grown wall.

  It was necessary that the visitors should make a tour of the old city and inspect the various shrines which the dragoman had to show them. Each had its sacred associations, and Hafiz had a spiel which he reeled off. He was positive in every statement that he made: here was the portal through which Jesus had passed in entering the Temple, here was where He had sat in front of the Temple, here was where He had healed a leper, here was one of His footprints, miraculously preserved in stone. But Lanny could read in his Baedeker how, a hundred years after the death of Christ, the Romans had completely destroyed Jerusalem, plowed its site over, and erected a new city with a new name and no Jews admitted. So he was skeptical about these venerated spots; but there was no use hurting the feelings of their guide, and they let themselves be led down into ancient crypts and through tunnels which had been excavated by modern archeologists. The Bible events might not have happened in this or that particular chamber, but they had surely happened somewhere in the neighborhood. To a modern political investigator what mattered was not where they had happened, but where living people believed they had happened, and were ready to fly at one another’s throats to defend their beliefs.

  III

  The tourists also wished to see the country. This required a car, and the dragoman said it would be easy to hire one, but difficult indeed to get gasoline in wartime. Lanny had a secret to which he would not refer even by a smile; he went to the address the OSS had given him and presented the engraved visiting card reading “Mr. Franklin Delano Roosevelt” and commending the bearer to favor. Matters were quickly arranged with the British so that the President’s friend could buy what he needed. Incidentally, he was warned that native drivers were apt to be reckless of their own lives as well as of their passengers’ so he rented a car to drive himself. To arrange that he had to deposit cash in a bank. It appeared that in this Holy Land men did not trust one another so readily as in more secular places.

  They set out, with Hafiz riding in the back and delivering his speeches as if addressing a large audience. The highways were few but good, having been built by the British for war purposes. Eastward was the Dead Sea, only fifteen miles distant; the route was downhill all the way, that sea being the lowest place on the globe, the deepest depressi
on in the earth’s crust. It has no outlet—the rivers flow into it from all sides and the water sinks into the sand. It is a kettle of salt some fifty miles long and ten miles across, and a commercial concern was engaged in extracting potash on a great scale.

  Palestine is a tiny country, not much bigger than the state of Vermont, and all its history has been crowded together. At the northern end of the Dead Sea the River Jordan flows in, and they drove northward along its bank. On the way the dragoman told them that tourists, coming in great numbers before the war, had been accustomed to collect water of the river in bottles and take it home to be used in baptizing their posterity. Just now the river was yellow with mud, it being the rainy season, and Lanny did not collect his share. He and his wife had heard the singing of spirituals about crossing over Jordan, but they could look across and see that the same tamarisks and poplars grew on the east side as on the west. There were bridges by which they might have crossed, but beyond were only the Moabite hills of Transjordan, and no cities with streets paved with gold.

  A couple of hours’ drive up the river brought them to the Sea of Galilee, where they watched fishermen hauling their nets. This really moved them both, because their interest was in human beings, and these were without doubt the authentic types which had been doing that same work nineteen centuries ago. Lanny could not talk to them, except through a bad interpreter; but he wondered, if he had known their Syrian Arabic dialect, and had told them to leave their work and follow him, would they have obeyed? A well-dressed European in a motorcar, he could no doubt have offered money and obtained their services; but could he have won them without pay, and for a doctrine, a cause? He might have said, “I know a way to end poverty and war upon this earth, and it is only a question of persuading people to understand and follow.” But could he have got them to believe him?

  The difference was that Jesus had spoken in the name of God, and modern men had lost that habit. Lanny had prayed only when he was in deep distress; but now, standing on this historic shore, and recalling his deep emotions when he had first read the story of Simon and Andrew, and of James and John, the sons of Zebedee, he found himself aware that the men of his time had lost something important from their lives.

  The tourist couple did not stop to make any Socialist converts. They drove a few miles to the town of Nazareth, and enjoyed a good lunch at an inn kept by an English woman. Then they drove about this collection of white stone buildings spread out on a hill slope, and looked at places with legends and traditions which you were free to accept if it gave you pleasure. There was the church where the Annunciation had taken place, the cave in which Joseph had worked, the table at which Jesus had eaten, the well to which Mary had gone. The only one of these which seemed plausible was the well, for these do not change through the ages, and if filled up with debris can be cleaned out again. This will be done whether it be Crusaders or Saracens, Beibars or Allenbys who have conquered the district.

  What struck the tourists about this tiny land was its resemblance to the much more extensive land which they had visited only recently. Except for the buildings, and the costumes and speech of the people, they would have thought they were in Southern California. The climate was the same—rainy in winter and entirely dry in summer, blazing hot when the sun shone and nearly always cool at night. There is a joke about Los Angeles weather being always “unusual,” and it was the same here, for the combination of sea, desert, and mountains frequently caused the winds to box the compass in the course of twenty-four hours. Most of the hills were bare; the fig, the orange, and the olive grew only where they were planted and irrigated. The mountains were not high, and when you came down from them toward the Mediterranean it was like the San Gabriel plain.

  This was the promised land, the land of Canaan, the land flowing with milk and honey. “In the same day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, Unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river, and river Euphrates: The Kenites, and the Kenizzites, and the Kadmonites, And the Hittites and the Perizzites, and the Rephaims, and the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Girgashites, and the Jebusites.” The Lord had kept His promise as regards these tribes; they were no more. But there were Arabs and British; the Jews were still wailing at an Arab-owned wall and being kept in order by the Transjordan Frontier Force, under the command of Brigadier John Bagot Glubb, graduate of the Woolwich Military Academy and friend of the Arab world.

  IV

  Next morning the tourists set out for the coast, downhill again, an hour’s drive over a first-class road. Here were two cities, the ancient port of Jaffa and, just to the north of it, the modern Jewish city of Tel-Aviv. Jaffa had a long breakwater and a concrete dock on which railroad cars could be loaded for Cairo or Damascus. Between the two world wars much capital had come in, mostly Jewish, motivated by a convenient blend of religion and business, God and Mammon reconciled after long efforts. There was a cement mill and a great flour mill, and plants for making oil and soap; on Jaffa Street were hotels and office buildings, up-to-date and shiny as if it had been Seattle or San Diego. Near by was a new Jewish suburb called Bat Catlim, meaning “Daughter of the Wave,” with a large hotel built for the Jewish immigrants who were being smuggled in from all over the world.

  From there the travelers stepped gingerly through the Arab Old Town, another miserable slum, swarming with animals and humans, bleary-eyed children and adults who wore flowing black robes and stank like their goats. A terrible contrast, and no one seeing it could fail to understand that the underground war going on in this Holy Land was between the Old and the New. The Jews brought in modern techniques and taught these techniques in their schools; they produced goods and made money, and then bought land from the natives. Hafiz complained bitterly of this; he didn’t say, but Lanny could guess, that the natives, ignorant and improvident, spent their money soon and then discovered that they had been robbed and ousted by hated infidel dogs.

  All this became crystal-clear when the visitors came to Tel-Aviv, the new city, the all-Jewish city, where the moderns had been free to have their own way, unblocked by ancient shrines or taboos, Hebrew, Christian, or Moslem. They had gone out of their way to break completely with the past. Here were whole streets of apartment buildings of those fancy designs which have no corners and have little balconies outside of each apartment; “functional,” the architects call them, and vie with one another to produce something that nobody ever saw the like of. It is all new and white and shiny, fronting on a clean yellow beach.

  And when the travelers had got enough of modernism they drove northward up the coast until they came to a mountain—a long wedge-shaped, tree-covered mountain, which is none other than that Carmel from which the prophet Elijah ascended into heaven in a chariot of fire. They drove up that mountain, and saw an ancient monastery, and a statue of the Virgin which would heal their sickness if they had any, and numerous caves in which hermits and saints had dwelt, also robbers and fugitives from the tax collector and the impressment officer through centuries beyond counting. Here the gazelles and wild jackals still roamed; but the modern subdivider had his eye on it, and once peace had returned, the slopes of the mountain would be covered with villas and summer hotels with all modern conveniences. The rich Jews would put up the money and the poor Jews would do the work—and the Arabs too could have jobs if they were willing.

  There were even large groups of Socialist Jews, who were building co-operative stores and setting up land colonies all over Palestine. Even in the midst of war and civil strife people were planning the New Jerusalem and striving to reconcile ancient texts with modern techniques. It wasn’t at all difficult, for most of those old prophets had been red-hot radicals; Amos on the rich sounded exactly like any modern soap-boxer, and Isaiah like a single-taxer or English land reformer. “And they shall build houses, and inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards, and eat the fruit of them. They shall not build, and another inhabit; they shall not plant, and another eat: for as the
days of a tree are the days of my people, and mine elect shall long enjoy the work of their hands.”

  V

  The travelers went back to Jerusalem, paid off their guide, and settled down to their secret task. The first step was to establish themselves as art experts, and to this end they presented letters they had brought and began inquiries as to what there was in the ancient city which might be purchasable and worth purchasing. Mostly it was the Jews with whom they would deal, for the Prophet of Islam had forbidden his followers to make images—this in order to save them from idol worship. Apparently he had been right—if you had art you would have idols. The innumerable statues and paintings of madonnas and saints which the Catholics had in their shrines were idols in every sense except a quibble. The Mohammedans, forbidden to have paintings and statues, worshiped shrines and tombs and two hairs from the beard of their Prophet—they were here in the Mosque of Omar, kept in a golden box and exhibited to true-believers on special occasions. Here, also, was the stone from which Mohammed had ascended into heaven.

  The dealers had things to sell and were prepared, in oriental fashion, to spend a long time bargaining. Lanny, who had purchased carved doorways and fountains for ablutions in Algeria and Morocco, understood this game. He knew that as soon as he made his wants known, the word would spread all the way from Dan to Beersheba, and his door would be besieged by those who possessed treasures, ancient or modern. He would be polite to them all, inspect what they had and hear their stories—mostly untrue. He would ask the price and hint that it was somewhat high; he would promise to think the matter over, and then in the most tactful way would lead the conversation to what they had observed of conditions in this historic land. The time was so tense, the feeling so high, that no man, regardless of his race, religion, and occupation, could help having ideas and explaining them to an important lady and gentleman from the richest and most powerful of nations. Lanny and his wife would listen, and after the visitor had gone they would compare impressions and make notes.