hin the same narrow space and in the same dark hour,
electric and yet eclipsed with cloud, I had heard Islam crying
from the turret and Israel wailing at the wall.

CHAPTER VII

THE SHADOW OF THE PROBLEM

A traveller sees the hundred branches of a tree long before he is
near enough to see its single and simple root; he generally sees
the scattered or sprawling suburbs of a town long before he has looked
upon the temple or the market-place. So far I have given impressions
of the most motley things merely as they came, in chronological
and not in logical order; the first flying vision of Islam as a sort
of sea, with something both of the equality and the emptiness and
the grandeur of its purple seas of sand; the first sharp silhouette
of Jerusalem, like Mount St. Michael, lifting above that merely
Moslem flood a crag still crowned with the towers of the Crusaders;
the mere kaleidoscope of the streets, with little more than a hint
of the heraldic meaning of the colours; a merely personal impression
of a few of the leading figures whom I happened to meet first,
and only the faintest suggestion of the groups for which they stood.
So far I have not even tidied up my own first impressions of the place;
far less advanced a plan for tidying up the place itself.

In any case, to begin with, it is easy to be in far too much
of a hurry about tidying up. This has already been noted in
the more obvious case, of all that religious art that bewildered
the tourist with its churches full of flat and gilded ikons.
Many a man has had the sensation of something as full as a picture
gallery and as futile as a lumber-room, merely by not happening to know
what is really of value, or especially in what way it is really valued.
An Armenian or a Syrian might write a report on his visit
to England, saying that our national and especially our naval
heroes were neglected, and left to the lowest dregs of the rabble;
since the portraits of Benbow and Nelson, when exhibited to the public,
were painted on wood by the crudest and most incompetent artists.
He would not perhaps fully appreciate the fine shade of
social status and utility implied in a public-house sign.
He might not realise that the sign of Nelson could be hung on
high everywhere, because the reputation of Nelson was high everywhere,
not because it was low anywhere; that his bad portrait was really
a proof of his good name. Yet the too rapid reformer may easily
miss even the sim