^ H. Rix, Tent and Testament, p. 184.
ISAIAH 177
An unnoticed crack in a waterskin, or the jar spilt by a stumbling beast, is all that is needed to bring some poor mortal to his end. We passed one band of pilgrims returning, many of them on foot, from Mecca, and one of them, an old man, reached the Well of Ain el Beda with his tongue hanging from his mouth, cracked and bleeding. While we were resting by another well, a man staggered in from the plain, hardly able to walk, crying, " Water, water ; I am dead ! " When, on the return journey, we again visited Ain el Beda, a crowd of the Mecca pilgrims had camped beside the well in a confusion of tents new and old, among which camels knelt in supercilious nonchalance. But at the well-mouth tied skins were lying, filled to their utmost capacity with the precious thing, and tangled skeins of rope were everywhere about, while a dense crowd of swarthy men cursed and fought like wild beasts for the next skinful, though by that time they were draw- ing little else than liquid mud. It would be difficult to find in any one sentence so terrible a combination of tragedy and pathos as in the words we have all heard so often without a thought, " When the poor and needy seek water and there is none." ^
There are dry, hard places in human life. A dry heart is perhaps the saddest and the most appalling thing in human life, and it is more common than many suppose ; but wher- ever it is found, the true man will be to that dry heart like a river of plenteous water. How do hearts become hard ? How do they become dry ? Sorrow can do it, bereavement can do it, loneliness can do it, pain can do it. Have you not known a man go into a great sorrow and come out with a hard heart ? Have you not known men go into sorrow fairly compassionate, with flowing sympathy, fertile as the plains, and interested in others, but they have emerged into active life again with the moisture of their compassion all dried up ? Their friends have spoken of them in this wise : " He takes no interest in anything now." Compassion has shrunk like the ebbing tide. I think we must all know such, and that is what the prophet refers to when he speaks about " dry places."
4. Heat. We had spent the day in the glare of a Syrian sun, by the salt mountain of Usdum, in the hot blast of the sirocco, and were now bivouacked under the calcined cliffs of
^ J. Kelman, From Damascus to Palmyra, p. 193.
12
178 THE GREAT TEXTS OF THE BIB.E
Moab. When the water was exhausted, all too weary to g for more, even if there were no danger of a surprise, we tirew ourselves upon the ground — eyes smarting, skin burning, lips, and tongue, and throat parched and dry ; and wrapped the first garment we could find around our heads to keep off the stfling blast ; and, in our brief and broken slumbers, drank from ideal fountains.^
0 ! the weariness felt by us all, of plod, plod, plcdding across the sand ! That fatal monotony into which every nan's life stiffens, as far as outward circumstances, outward joy; and pleasures go ! the depressing infiuence of custom which takes the edge off all gladness and adds a burden to every duty the weariness of all that tugging up the hill, of all that collar-work which we have to do ! Who is there that has not his mocds — and that by no means the least worthy and man-like of his moods — wherein he feels — not, perhaps, all is vanity, but * how infinitely weary it all is."
IT I was reading, a day or two ago, one of our last books of travels in the wilderness of the Exodus, in which the writer told how, after toiling for hours under a scorching sun, over the hot white marly flat, seeing nothing but a beetle or two on the way, and finding no shelter anywhere from the pitiless beating of the sunshine, the three travellers came at last to a little Eetem bush only a few feet high, and flung themselves down and tried to hide, at least their heads, from those " sunbeams like swords," even beneath its ragged shade. And my text tells of a great rock, with blue dimness in its shadow, with haply a fern or two in the moist places of its crevices, where there is rest and a man can lie down and be cool, while all outside is burning sun, and burning sand, and dancing mirage.^
1[ Along the roadsides in India the traveller finds at intervals great slabs of stone resting on two broad pillars. The native name for these erections is " Madam." They are used in this way. Travellers roll their burdens on the top of the slab, and rest themselves under it from the heat of the sun. A poor Hindu woman was asked what Christ was to her. " He is my Madam," she replied.^
^ In the East the following phenomenon is often observed: — Where the desert touches a river- valley, or oasis, the sand is in a con-