pyramids of Egypt;
and whose very words are like winged bulls walking. All this historic or
pre-historic interest may be touched on in its turn; but I am not dealing
here with the historic secrets unearthed by the study of the place,
but with the historic associations aroused by the sight of it.
The traveller is in the position of that famous fantastic who tied
his horse to a wayside cross in the snow, and afterward saw it
dangling from the church-spire of what had been a buried city.
But here the cross does not stand as it does on the top of a spire;
but as it does on the top of an Egyptian obelisk in Rome,--
where the priests have put a cross on the top of the heathen monument;
for fear it should walk. I entirely sympathise with their sentiment;
and I shall try to suggest later why I think that symbol
the logical culmination of heathen as well as Christian things.
The traveller in the traveller's tale looked up at last and saw,
from the streets far below, the spire and cross dominating a Gothic city.
If I looked up in a vision and saw it dominating a Babylonian city,
that blocked the heavens with monstrous palaces and temples,
I should still think it natural that it should dominate.
But the point here is that what I saw above ground was rather the Gothic
town than the Babylonian; and that it reminded me, if not specially
of the cross, at least of the soldiers who took the cross.

Nor do I forget the long centuries that have passed over the place
since these medieval walls were built, any more than the far
more interesting centuries that passed before they were built.
But any one taking exception to the description on that ground
may well realise, on consideration, that it is an exception
that proves the rule. There is something very negative about
Turkish rule; and the best and worst of it is in the word neglect.
Everything that lived under the vague empire of Constantinople
remained in a state of suspended animation like something frozen
rather than decayed, like something sleeping rather than dead.
It was a sort of Arabian spell, like that which turned princes
and princesses into marble statues in the _Arabian Nights_.
All that part of the history of the place is a kind of sleep;
and that of a sleeper who hardly knows if he has slept an hour or a
hundred years. When I first found myself in the Jaffa Gate of Jerusalem,
my eye happened to fall on something that might be seen anywhere,
but which seemed somehow t