ittle terrace with the iron railing, looking at the motley
crowd which fills the place in front of the citadel. Groups of
blue-robed peasant women sit on the curbstone, selling firewood and
grass and vegetables. Their faces are bare and brown, wrinkled with the
sun and the wind. Turkish soldiers in dark-green uniform, Greek priests
in black robes and stove-pipe hats, Bedouins in flowing cloaks of brown
and white, pale-faced Jews with velvet gabardines and curly ear-locks,
Moslem women in many-coloured silken garments and half-transparent
veils, British tourists with cork helmets and white umbrellas, camels,
donkeys, goats, and sheep, jostle together in picturesque confusion.
There is a water-carrier with his shiny, dripping, bulbous goat-skin
on his shoulders. There is an Arab of the wilderness with a young
gazelle in his arms.

Now let us go down the greasy, gliddery steps of David Street, between
the diminutive dusky shops with open fronts where all kinds of queer
things to eat and to wear are sold, and all sorts of craftsmen are at
work making shoes, and tin pans, and copper pots, and wooden seats, and
little tables, and clothes of strange pattern. A turn to the left brings
us into Christian Street and the New Bazaar of the Greeks, with its
modern stores.

A turn to the right and a long descent under dark archways and through
dirty, shadowy alleys brings us to the Place of Lamentations, beside the
ancient foundation wall of the Temple, where the Jews come in the
afternoon of Fridays and festival-days to lean their heads against the
huge stones and murmur forth their wailings over the downfall of
Jerusalem. "For the majesty that is departed," cries the leader, and the
others answer: "We sit in solitude and mourn." "We pray Thee have mercy
on Zion," cries the leader, and the others answer: "Gather the children
of Jerusalem." With most of them it seems a perfunctory mourning; but
there are two or three old men with the tears running down their faces
as they kiss the smooth-worn stones.

We enter convents and churches, mosques and tombs. We trace the course
of the traditional _Via Dolorosa_, and try to reconstruct in our
imagination the probable path of that grievous journey from the
judgment-hall of injustice to the Calvary of cruelty--a path which now
lies buried far below the present level of the city.

One impression deepens in my mind with every hour: this was never
Christ's city. The confusion, the shallow curi