Twain’s Palestine account lacks the geographical precision of his account of Europe. When a batch of his original letters on Palestine were reported lost, he was forced to write new ones aboard the Quaker City on his return trip across the Atlantic under a looming deadline, and once back home, had to rewrite and expand them to more than double their length in only six months. He confined himself to a room with his journals, his guidebooks, and his King James, and wrote in a white heat. The resulting narrative, circles vaguely but obsessively around the Sea of Galilee until finally coming to rest at its shores. There Twain delivers a hymn to the majestic solitude of Lake Tahoe, a caustic rebuke to the repellent solitude of the Galilee, and a lamentation on the sepulchral desolation of Palestine.
In deflating the enthusiasms of his fellow tourists, Twain remarks (384) that he knows “what they will say when they see Tabor, Nazareth, Jericho, and Jerusalem—because I have the books they will ‘smooch’ their ideas from. These authors write pictures and frame rhapsodies, and see with the author’s ideas instead of their own and speak with his tongue.” The authors were Presbyterians “who came to find a Presbyterian Palestine” and Baptists, Catholics, Methodists, or Episcopalians coming to find a Palestine in line with their creeds, and they “entered the country with the verdicts already prepared.”
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In California, Diggers polluted the name of the noble sea and betrayed the majesty of its environs. In Palestine they embodied a land cursed by the Deity to be wretched, according to Twain’s reading of the Bible. Like his contemporaries, Twain arrived with verdict in hand and found the Palestine he knew beforehand. “Palestine is no more of the work-day world,” he wrote in concluding his account (463). “It is sacred to poetry and tradition—it is a dream land.”
A later Mark Twain would confront an ingrained reading of the Bible as well as some of the racist stereotypes that he evoked with profusion. In Huckleberry Finn, he would allow Nigger Jim to become Jim and to speak and would allow Huck and the reader to hear what Jim said and to change; a transformative moment in American literature.
As for the Digger denizens of Palestine, if they had a story to tell, the protagonist wasn’t listening, the narrator wasn’t recording, and the reader can’t hear. Twain was not yet there.
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