eets of the town.
But though the cause is in a sense in the ruinous strength of the rain,
the hues are not the dreary hues of ruin. What earth there is is commonly
a red clay richer than that of Devon; a red clay of which it would
be easy to believe that the giant limbs of the first man were made.
What grass there is is not only an enamel of emerald, but is
literally crowded with those crimson anemones which might well have
called forth the great saying touching Solomon in all his glory.
And even what rock there is is coloured with a thousand secondary
and tertiary tints, as are the walls and streets of the Holy City
which is built from the quarries of these hills. For the old
stones of the old Jerusalem are as precious as the precious stones
of the New Jerusalem; and at certain moments of morning or of sunset,
every pebble might be a pearl.

And all these coloured strata rise so high and roll so far that they might
be skies rather than slopes. It is as if we looked up at a frozen sunset;
or a daybreak fixed for ever with its fleeting bars of cloud.
And indeed the fancy is not without a symbolic suggestiveness.
This is the land of eternal things; but we tend too much to forget
that recurrent things are eternal things. We tend to forget that
subtle tones and delicate hues, whether in the hills or the heavens,
were to the primitive poets and sages as visible as they are to us;
and the strong and simple words in which they describe them
do not prove that they did not realise them. When Wordsworth
speaks of "the clouds that gather round the setting sun,"
we assume that he has seen every shadow of colour and every
curve of form; but when the Hebrew poet says "He hath made
the clouds his chariot"; we do not always realise that he was
full of indescribable emotions aroused by indescribable sights.
We vaguely assume that the very sky was plainer in primitive times.
We feel as if there had been a fashion in sunsets; or as if dawn
was always grey in the Stone Age or brown in the Bronze Age.

But there is another parable written in those long lines of many-coloured
clay and stone. Palestine is in every sense a stratified country.
It is not only true in the natural sense, as here where the clay has
fallen away and left visible the very ribs of the hills. It is true
in the quarries where men dig, in the dead cities where they excavate,
and even in the living cities where they still fight and pray.
The sorrow of all Palesti