Past Perfect: Desolation in Cesarea
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J. (John) Ross Browne was born outside Dublin, Ireland, in 1821. After publishing an article opposing repressive British rule, Browne’s father was exiled to America and settled in Louisville, Kentucky, with his family in 1833. This event may have influenced J. Ross Browne’s yen for adventure and writing. In 1838 he worked as a flatboat hand on the Mississippi. His international adventures began in 1842 with a stint as a deckhand on a whaling ship, which led to the publication of Etchings of a Whaling Cruise. In 1844 he married Lucy Mitchell, who proved to be tolerant of his many absences and who nurtured his desire to write. Browne worked for the United States government as revenue, customs and Indian agents, as a postal inspector and as ambassador to China in 1868–1869.
Browne is said to have influenced the writings of authors Mark Twain and Herman Melville. His humorous style is lighthearted and often amusing, even in not-so-funny situations. That is not the case in the following serious-toned excerpt from Yusef, or the Journey of the Frangi: A Crusade in the East (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1853) in his description of desolate “Cesarea”:
Our road lay along the coast of Phoenicia … I stopped awhile to sketch the ruins, while my comrades passed through and went their way toward Tantura. When I had finished, I entered through a crumbling archway, and wandered about, lost in wonder at the utter desolation of the place. Not a living soul was there; not a living thing that I could see; not a sigh, or whisper, or sound of life came from out of the ruins. The silence of death was every where; not even the low wail of the surf now reached me through the masses of shattered walls; and I thought how terrible was the wrath that had thus smitten the abodes of men with destruction; how “the Lord maketh the earth empty, and maketh it waste, and turneth it upside down, and scattereth abroad the inhabitants thereof.”
There was nothing but ruin every where; high walls rent in gaping fissures; towers shivered asunder to their bases; great archways cast down in rugged masses; streets choked and filled with shattered columns or covered over with blasted earth, all waste and sodless. Not a bird of good or evil omen sat upon the fragments; not a beast haunted the ruins; it was all still, all silent and without life.
Ruined cities there are, scattered broadcast throughout this land of desolation; yet all that I had seen had some remnant of vitality within their walls. Dark and squalid men and masked women haunted them; dogs and wild beasts of prey and birds of evil omen fed upon the dead things that were cast out from the doors; but here there was nothing of the present; all was silent, all dead. No foul odors from dark and narrow streets; no bearded men with downcast faces, stalking sadly through the fallen city; no dark-eyed women to steal a flashing look at the stranger; no human voice to utter a word of welcome, or say, Depart in peace; no moody follower of the Prophet to scowl his hatred, or stalk unheeding by; all was of the past.
I sat upon a broken column, and looking with a saddened heart upon this scene of desolation, wondered what had become of all that had lived here; the good, the wicked—the brave, the beautiful, and the gay; how lived they; how died they; were all the records of their deeds for centuries past buried with them, and nothing left; was there happiness within these walls; did they feel as we who looked upon these ruins felt; did they look back over the past and forward to the future, and in their ambition encircle the wide world, and turn to dust at last to feed the worms of the earth and nourish the weeds; and was this mass of ruins all they had left to mark the spot?
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There was not a breath to answer; not a leaf to whisper of the past; all gone, never to be seen upon earth again: not a soul but myself was there—a stranger from a distant land the only inhabitant now.
In the grave-yard there is only the gloom of death; silence is all we look for there; but here, in the abiding-place of men, where once there was the din of life, there was the silence of death and more than its gloom; for these walls were built for the living. I had wandered through ruins in another clime, where two thousand years ago a city was buried, and all were buried within it in the midst of life; yet I saw their homes unchanged; the frescoes upon the walls; the marks idly made by the soldiers; the bedrooms, the wine-cellars, the signs upon the doors, the tracks of the carriage-wheels in the streets, as they were buried two thousand years ago; so fresh, so life-like, that one would scarcely be startled to see the dead arise and resume their avocations. But here nothing but the bare and ruined walls was left to tell of the past; there was no connecting link to unite it with the present; nothing within the shattered gateways, or abroad over the desert around, but fragments of columns and massive stones—a waste of ruins; all dreary and voiceless—all wrapt in desolation.
The silence of a ship upon the sea at night, when all are buried in sleep, and the waters have ceased their dirge, is without gloom; for the stars in the heavens are worlds where thought may wander; where the soul may drink in the beauties of the firmament; and if the darkness be upon the deep, then its mysteries are eloquent; in its unfathomable caves lie wonders that can never cease to inspire glowing thoughts of the greatness of the Omnipotent.
Not such is the Desolate City; the city of the silent dead. Here is nothing to tell of them that dwelt there. The land is laid waste, and the earth mourneth and fadeth away. “The Lord hath done that which he had devised, he hath fulfilled his word that he had commanded in the days of old, he hath thrown down and hath not pitied.”
Such is Kaisariyeh—once a proud city of the Phoenicians—now all that remains of Cesarea Palestina.
J. (John) Ross Browne was born outside Dublin, Ireland, in 1821. After publishing an article opposing repressive British rule, Browne’s father was exiled to America and settled in Louisville, Kentucky, with his family in 1833. This event may have influenced J. Ross Browne’s yen for adventure and writing. In 1838 he worked as a flatboat hand on the Mississippi. His international adventures began in 1842 with a stint as a deckhand on a whaling ship, which led to the publication of Etchings of a Whaling Cruise. In 1844 he married Lucy Mitchell, who proved to be tolerant of his […]
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