ike the walls
that were being built by the Christians at or before that time.
The Crusader Edward, afterwards Edward the First, reared such
battlements far away among the rainy hills of Wales. I do not know
what elements were originally Gothic or what originally Saracenic.
The Crusaders and the Saracens constantly copied each other while
they combated each other; indeed it is a fact always to be found
in such combats. It is one of the arguments against war that are
really human, and therefore are never used by humanitarians.
The curse of war is that it does lead to more international imitation;
while in peace and freedom men can afford to have national variety.
But some things in this country were certainly copied from
the Christian invaders, and even if they are not Christian they
are in many ways strangely European. The wall and gates which
now stand, whatever stood before them and whatever comes after them,
carry a memory of those men from the West who came here upon
that wild adventure, who climbed this rock and clung to it so
perilously from the victory of Godfrey to the victory of Saladin;
and that is why this momentary Eastern exile reminded me so strangely
of the hill of Rye and of home.

I do not forget, of course, that all these visible walls and towers
are but the battlements and pinnacles of a buried city, or of many
buried cities. I do not forget that such buildings have foundations
that are to us almost like fossils; the gigantic fossils of some
other geological epoch. Something may be said later of those lost
empires whose very masterpieces are to us like petrified monsters.
From this height, after long histories unrecorded, fell the forgotten
idol of the Jebusites, on that day when David's javelin-men
scaled the citadel and carried through it, in darkness behind his
coloured curtains, the god whose image had never been made by man.
Here was waged that endless war between the graven gods of the plain
and the invisible god of the mountain; from here the hosts carrying
the sacred fish of the Philistines were driven back to the sea
from which their worship came. Those who worshipped on this hill
had come out of bondage in Egypt and went into bondage in Babylon;
small as was their country, there passed before them almost the whole
pageant of the old pagan world. All its strange shapes and strong
almost cruel colours remain in the records of their prophets;
whose lightest phrase seems heavier than the