should have been wrong again.
There is quite enough of this vivid and varied colour in Jerusalem,
but it is not the first fact that arrests the attention,
and certainly not the first that arrested mine. I give my own first
impression as a fact, for what it is worth and exactly as it came.
I did not expect it, and it was some time before I even understood it.
As soon as I was walking inside the walls of Jerusalem, I had
an overwhelming impression that I was walking in the town of Rye,
where it looks across the flat sea-meadows towards Winchelsea.

As I tried to explain this eccentric sentiment to myself, I was
conscious of another which at once completed and contradicted it.
It was not only like a memory of Rye, it was mixed with a memory
of the Mount St. Michael, which stands among the sands of
Normandy on the other side of the narrow seas. The first part
of the sensation is that the traveller, as he walks the stony
streets between the walls, feels that he is inside a fortress.
But it is the paradox of such a place that, while he feels in a sense
that he is in a prison, he also feels that he is on a precipice.
The sense of being uplifted, and set on a high place, comes to him
through the smallest cranny, or most accidental crack in rock
or stone; it comes to him especially through those long narrow
windows in the walls of the old fortifications; those slits
in the stone through which the medieval archers used their bows
and the medieval artists used their eyes, with even greater success.
Those green glimpses of fields far below or of flats far away,
which delight us and yet make us dizzy (by being both near and far)
when seen through the windows of Memling, can often be seen from
the walls of Jerusalem. Then I remembered that in the same strips
of medieval landscape could be seen always, here and there, a steep
hill crowned with a city of towers. And I knew I had the mystical
and double pleasure of seeing such a hill and standing on it.
A city that is set upon a hill cannot be hid; but it is more
strange when the hill cannot anywhere be hid, even from the citizen
in the city.

Then indeed I knew that what I saw was Jerusalem of the Crusaders;
or at least Jerusalem of the Crusades. It was a medieval town, with walls
and gates and a citadel, and built upon a hill to be defended by bowmen.
The greater part of the actual walls now standing were built by Moslems
late in the Middle Ages; but they are almost exactly l