It was a bright Saturday afternoon that a young divinity student and I, taking the volatile Demetrius with us for interpreter, rode out of St. Stephen's gate, into Jehoshaphat, past the gray field of Jewish graves, down through Tophet and the wild ravine of the Kidron.
It is unpleasant to interrupt the prosperous start of a pilgrimage by a trifling incident, but at our first descent and the slightest tension on the bridle-reins of my horse, they parted from the bit. This accident, which might be serious in other lands, is of the sort that is anticipated here, and I may say assured, by the forethought of the owners of saddle-horses. Upon dismounting with as much haste as dignity, I discovered that the reins had been fastened to the bit by a single rotten string of cotton. Luckily the horse I rode was not an animal to take advantage of the weakness of his toggery. He was a Syrian horse, a light sorrel, and had no one of the good points of a horse except the name and general shape. His walk was slow and reluctant, his trot a high and non-progressive jolt, his gallop a large up-and-down agitation. To his bridle of strings and shreds no martingale was attached; no horse in Syria is subject to that restraint. When I pull the bit he sticks up his nose; when I switch him he kicks. When I hold him in, he won't go; when I let him loose, he goes on his nose. I dismount and look at him with curiosity; I wonder all the journey what his forte is, but I never discover. I conclude that he is like the emperor Honorius, whom Gibbon stigmatizes as “without passions, and consequently without talents.”
Yet he was not so bad as the roads, and perhaps no horse would do much better on these stony and broken foot-paths. This horse is not a model (for anything but a clothes-horse), but from my observation I think that great injustice has been done to Syrian horses by travellers, who have only themselves to blame for accidents which bring the horses into disrepute. Travellers are thrown from these steeds; it is a daily occurrence; we heard continually that somebody had a fall from his horse on his way to the Jordan, or to Mar Saba, or to Nablous, and was laid up, and it was always in consequence of a vicious brute. The fact is that excellent ministers of the gospel and doctors of divinity and students of the same, who have never in their lives been on the back of a horse in any other land, seem to think when they come here that the holy air of Palestine will transform them into accomplished horsemen; or perhaps they are emulous of Elisha, that they may go to heaven by means of a fiery steed.