— 2? 



mologists who have previously sent valuable informa- 

 tion concerning the distribution, etc., of the various 

 forms of A. betularia in their own particular districts 

 in compliance with a former request. 



57 (.56.9) 



The Old Inhabitants 

 of a Jerusalem Garden. 



by A. H. Swinton. 



It was the fifth of May of the year 1906 when I 

 arrived with a portmanteau at the lodging house kept 

 by Mrs. Eeardon in the suburbs of Jerusalem, and the 

 Paschal Butterflies, Thais cerisyi, whose notched, red 

 bedropped wings keep in memory a crown of thorns, had 

 ceased to wander adown the rough slope of Olivet among 

 a glow of ensanguined cyclamen and the fading glory of 

 scarlet anemones. The pension in which I found myself 

 located, consisted in a central diningroom on which dor- 

 mitories opened on either hand; behind was a kitchen 

 and overhead on the flat roof an open cistern to collect 

 the former and latter rain of winter. No doves or pigeons 

 racooed to greet the returning year; they are not now 

 much kept in Judea, and the last lion that came up from 

 the swelling of the Jordan they say was killed by the 

 crusaders, the wild ass does not snuff the air on Olivet 

 and the gazelle of the dawn is not seen there. Adown 

 the lanes of Bethlehem a large white sow wanders at its 

 at its own sweet will, for the pale-faced inhabitants are 

 christians; and still a carob tree, Ceratonia siliqua, whose 

 flowers have no corolla, lingers beside an arab village, 

 where it dropped its fattening husks for the Roman swine. 

 How centuries had flown! On entering my dormitory I 

 noticed a whitey-brown, long-legged arachnide, called by 

 the Arabs Ankaboot, on the window pane ; and imagining 

 this to be the Accabish, or handy spider alluded to by King 

 Solomon, when at leisure I sat down and made a sketch 

 of it which I sent to Mr. Pickard Cambridge who being 

 unable to identify this with the Pholcus phelangioides 

 that was an eyesore in his Dorsetshire church, desired 

 a specimen in alcohol. The Pholcus abounds some years 

 in the west of England and on the western seaboard of 

 France, and it is wonderful to see it wait for the blue- 

 bottle flies at sundown and hang them up like legs of 

 mutton, screaming in a winding sheet. 



Having rested, I strolled out in the cloudless sunshine 

 with my missionary acquaintance, Mr. JosejDh, to the 

 Jaffa Gate where are hotels and tourist agencies, and 

 here amid the concourse of copper-coloured men and 

 dromedaries resembling shoe leather with a white one 

 among them, flies, the minions of Baalzebub, arose with 

 surging hum from the comestibles exposed for sale by 

 bronzed arab traders, who sat crosslegged and motionless 

 like idol gods. No doubt but what these were the flies 

 that cause opthalmia and which in the days of King 

 Soloman contaminated the drugs of the apothecary; 

 those I found congregated on Mrs Reardon's refuse 

 heap on my return, Mr. Wingate, author of the Durham 

 Diptera, informed me were the English House Fly, Musca 

 domestica, known to the Arabs as Dubban Balady, the 

 kitchen Blue Bottle with the Red Cheeks, Calliphora 

 erythrocephala. the Green Fly, Lucilia caesar, and the 

 grey-checkered, carrion loving, Sarcophaga carnaria: 

 around the shade of the trees, Homalomyia sealaris, 

 that whiles the summer hour in Europe and North 

 America, went on its circling dance and invited to a 

 garden chair to meditate on Olivet that rose in prospect 

 thinly dotted over with olives and crowned with an arb 

 village and lean Russian belfry. 



The lodging house repast was patriarchal, the herds 

 of black cows that wander among "the pheasant's ey es 

 and red poppies, or Shaarari, on the Plain of Sharon, 

 where we had seen a Blue Jay, we were told were unwell, 

 the mutton proved to be tough like leather and the veal 

 hard and black, scarcely eatable save when made the 

 second day into a stew; and to drink, there was soft 

 water flavoured with grape syrup, or dibs; Those large 

 cauliflowers that provoked the wonderment of Horatius 

 Bonar were only in season when the bright bands of 

 Orion had set, and shivering mortals awaited the sweet 

 influence of the Pleiads and returning horn of the Bull. 

 During the conversation that followed no one mentioned 

 Babylon or Rome, but how were Edom and Moab and 

 Gilead, once the seat of war, become with young women 

 the land of romance, there were no grapes comparable 

 to those ofEs-Salt, no bridle paths like those of Kerak, 

 no harum-scarum gallop in the moonlight more full of 

 sentiment than a ride to the rock-hewn temples of Petra. 

 At the conclusion of the sociable repast a sleek cat, long- 

 legged, lean and mouse coloured, was seen with wistful 

 eyes and a paw on the table. 



There were a pair of foxy dogs, cousins, I should 

 imagine, of the jackals, one brown and the other black, 

 that came of their own accord to guard the lodging 

 house at night with their Barabbas barkings, and I was 

 aroused betimes the following morning by the voice of the 

 black Sophie, who had descended from Olivet with sour 

 milk or leben, and the customary intimation that she 

 would be paid Bad Bukrah, the day after tomorrow. 

 Breakfast over, 1 sauntered out in the garden on which 

 the diningroom opened. What the tree mustard and 

 gigantic rue of Macherus were no one knew any more 

 than Mathew, Luke and Mark; but in front of the house 

 a so called Pepper Tree, Schimas molle, murmured in 

 the wanton air, and on it stood a green, flj^-licking 

 chameleon, Chameleo vulgaris, which when seized col- 

 lapsed with the squeal of a crushed cabbage, recalling 

 its Hebrew name of Coach, and became black with 

 terror; its relatives the geckoes, my old companions in 

 the Mauritius, I had missed from the window pane; but 

 presently a manservant arrived from Miss Fitzjohn, the 

 then superintendent of the school for few girls, on whom 

 I had paid a call, with a dessicated specimen; there are 

 those who consider the gecko is the spider of the Scrip- 

 tures. Behind the Pepper Tree lay a waste of single 

 roses, wild beneath the snows of Lebanon these, I imagine, 

 had been planted here by the catholic proprietor in 

 honour of the Virgin: when summer arrived their leaves 

 became corroded by an orange fungus, which, according 

 to Jerome, who died at Bethlehem, A. D. 420, is the 

 Chasil of the prophet Joel, provided the same prove 

 not to beithe blight or a leaf-rolling caterpillar. In Isaiah 

 we read : And your spoil shall be gathered like the, gathe- 

 ring of the Chasil, and as the locusts leap shall he leap 

 upon them' : and Asaph, the Psalmist, adds respecting 

 the plagues of Egypt : „He destroyed their vines with 

 hail and their sycamore trees with frost", details not 

 found elsewhere. No sycamore tree grew in the garden 

 and I do not known where it exists on the tree-less hills 

 around Jerusalem, the Ficus sycomorus is at home 

 among the scorpions beside the dusty waj'-side at Jericho,, 

 where Zaccheus climbed up it : Baal Hanan, the Gederite, 

 in the days of King David, was intrusted with the charge 

 of the olives and sycamores in the low plains. 



{to be continued). 



Eigentum von Fritz Rulil's Erben, Zürich. — Redaktion: M. Riihl, Zurich V. — Fritz Lehmanns Verlag 



Druck der Sc h ell' sehen Buchdruckerei, V. Kraemer, Heilbronn. 



G. m. b. H., Stuttgart. 



