The innocents abroad; . ppointment always followed :—morestupid hills beyond—more unsightly landscape—no Holy City. 556 JERUSALEM, At last, away in the middle of the day, ancient bits of walland crumbling ardies began to line the way—we toiled up onemore hill, and every pilgrim and every sinner swung his haton high ! Jerusalem ! Perched on its eternal hills, white and domed and solid,massed together and hooped with high gray walls, the vener-able city gleamed in the sun. So small! Why, it was nolarger than an American village of four thousand inhabitants,and no larger than an ordinary Syrian c
The innocents abroad; . ppointment always followed :—morestupid hills beyond—more unsightly landscape—no Holy City. 556 JERUSALEM, At last, away in the middle of the day, ancient bits of walland crumbling ardies began to line the way—we toiled up onemore hill, and every pilgrim and every sinner swung his haton high ! Jerusalem ! Perched on its eternal hills, white and domed and solid,massed together and hooped with high gray walls, the vener-able city gleamed in the sun. So small! Why, it was nolarger than an American village of four thousand inhabitants,and no larger than an ordinary Syrian city of thirty numbers only fourteen thousand people. We dismounted and looked, without speaking a dozen sen-tences, across the wide intervening valley for an hour or more;and noted those prominent features of the city that picturesmake familiar to all men from their school days till theirdeath. We could recognize the Tower of Hippicus, theMosque of Omar, the Damascus Gate, the Mount of Olives,. GATE OP JERUSALEM. the Yalley of Jehoshaphat, the Tower of David, and the Gar-den of Gethsemane—and dating from these landmarks couldtell very nearly the localities of many others we were not ableto distinguish. JEEUSALEM. 557 I record it here as a notable but not discreditable fact thatnot even our pilgrims wept. I think there was no individualin the party whose brain was not teeming with thoughts andimages and memories invoked by the grand history of the ven-erable city that lay before us, but still among them all was no^ voice of them that wept, There was no call for tears. Tears would have been out ofplace. The thoughts Jerusalem suggests are full of poetry,sublimity, and more than all, dignity. Such thoughts do notfind their appropriate expression in the emotions of thenursery. Just after noon we entered these narrow, crooked streets,by the ancient and the famed Damascus Gate, and now forseveral hours I have been trying to comprehend that I amactually in
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Keywords: ., bo, bookcentury1800, bookdecade1890, booksubjectvoyagesandtravels
