ns everybody that
escaped hanging; and there was a tree growing outside the Jaffa Gate
at which men might still shudder as they pass it in the sunlight.
It was what a modern revolutionary poet has called bitterly the Tree
of Man's Making; and what a medieval revolutionary poet called
the fruit tree in the orchard of the king. It was the gibbet;
and lives have dropped from it like leaves from a tree in autumn.
Yet even on the sterner side, we can trace the truth about
the Moslem fatalism which seems so alien to political actuality.
There was a popular legend or proverb that this terrible tree
was in some way bound up with the power of the Turk, and perhaps
the Moslem over a great part of the earth. There is nothing
more strange about that Moslem fatalism than a certain gloomy
magnanimity which can invoke omens and oracles against itself.
It is astonishing how often the Turks seem to have accepted a legend
or prophecy about their own ultimate failure. De Quincey mentions
one of them in the blow that half broke the Palladium of Byzantium.
It is said that the Moslems themselves predict the entry
of a Christian king of Jerusalem through the Golden Gate.
Perhaps that is why they have blocked up the fatal gate;
but in any case they dealt in that fashion with the fatal tree.
They elaborately bound and riveted it with iron, as if accepting
the popular prophecy which declared that so long as it stood
the Turkish Empire would stand. It was as if the wicked man
of Scripture had daily watered a green bay-tree, to make sure
that it should flourish.

In the last chapter I have attempted to suggest a background
of the battlemented walls with the low gates and narrow windows
which seem to relieve the liveliest of the coloured groups against
the neutral tints of the North, and how this was intensified
when the neutral tints were touched with the positive hue of snow.
In the same merely impressionist spirit I would here attempt to sketch
some of the externals of the actors in such a scene, though it is
hard to do justice to such a picture even in the superficial matter
of the picturesque. Indeed it is hard to be sufficiently superficial;
for in the East nearly every external is a symbol.
The greater part of it is the gorgeous rag-heap of Arabian humanity,
and even about that one could lecture on almost every coloured rag.
We hear much of the gaudy colours of the East; but the most
striking thing about them is that they are delicat