THE GATES OF THE CITY
The men I met coming from Jerusalem reported all sorts of
contradictory impressions; and yet my own impression contradicted
them all. Their impressions were doubtless as true as mine;
but I describe my own because it is true, and because I think it
points to a neglected truth about the real Jerusalem. I need not say
I did not expect the real Jerusalem to be the New Jerusalem; a city
of charity and peace, any more than a city of chrysolite and pearl.
I might more reasonably have expected an austere and ascetic place,
oppressed with the weight of its destiny, with no inns except monasteries,
and these sealed with the terrible silence of the Trappists;
an awful city where men speak by signs in the street.
I did not need the numberless jokes about Jerusalem to-day,
to warn me against expecting this; anyhow I did not expect it,
and certainly I did not find it. But neither did I find what I
was much more inclined to expect; something at the other extreme.
Many reports had led me to look for a truly cosmopolitan town,
that is a truly conquered town. I looked for a place like Cairo,
containing indeed old and interesting things, but open on every side
to new and vulgar things; full of the touts who seem only created
for the tourists and the tourists who seem only created for the touts.
There may be more of this in the place than pleases those
who would idealise it. But I fancy there is much less of it
than is commonly supposed in the reaction from such an ideal.
It does not, like Cairo, offer the exciting experience of twenty
guides fighting for one traveller; of young Turks drinking American
cocktails as a protest against Christian wine. The town is quite
inconvenient enough to make it a decent place for pilgrims.
Or a stranger might have imagined a place even less Western than Cairo,
one of those villages of Palestine described in dusty old books
of Biblical research. He might remember drawings like diagrams
representing a well or a wine-press, rather a dry well, so to speak,
and a wine-press very difficult to associate with wine. These hard
colourless outlines never did justice to the colour of the East, but even
to give it the colour of the East would not do justice to Jerusalem.
If I had anticipated the Bagdad of all our dreams, a maze of bazaars
glowing with gorgeous wares, I 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 like 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 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 to have a curious significance there.
Most people are conscious of some common object which still
strikes them as uncommon; as if it were the first fantastic sketch
in the sketch-book of nature. I myself can never overcome the sense
of something almost unearthly about grass growing upon human buildings.
There is in it a wild and even horrible fancy, as if houses could
grow hair. When I saw that green hair on the huge stone blocks of
the citadel, though I had seen the same thing on any number of ruins,
it came to me like an omen or a vision, a curious vision at once
of chaos and of sleep. It is said that the grass will not grow
where the Turk sets his foot; but it is the other side of the same
truth to say that it would grow anywhere but where it ought to grow.
And though in this case it was but an accident and a symbol,
it was a very true symbol. We talk of the green banner of the Turk
having been planted on this or that citadel; and certainly it
was so planted with splendid valour and sensational victory.
But this is the green banner that he plants on all his high cities
in the end.
Therefore my immediate impression of the walls and gates was
not contradicted by my consciousness of what came before and
what came after that medieval period. It remained primarily
a thing of walls and gates; a thing which the modern world
does not perhaps understand so well as the medieval world.
There is involved in it all that idea of definition which those who do
not like it are fond of describing as dogma. A wall is like rule;
and the gates are like the exceptions that prove the rule.
The man making it has to decide where his rule will run
and where his exception shall stand. He cannot have a city
that is all gates any more than a house that is all windows;
nor is it possible to have a law that consists entirely of liberties.
The ancient races and religions that contended for this city agreed
with each other in this, when they differed about everything else.
It was true of practically all of them that when they built a city they
built a citadel. That is, whatever strange thing they may have made,
they regarded it as something to be defined and to be defended.
And from this standpoint the holy city was a happy city;
it had no suburbs. That is to say, there are all sorts
of buildings outside the wall; but they are outside the wall.
Everybody is conscious of being inside or outside a boundary; but it
is the whole character of the true suburbs which grow round our great
industrial towns that they grow, as it were, unconsciously and blindly,
like grass that covers up a boundary line traced on the earth.
This indefinite expansion is controlled neither by the soul of the city
from within, nor by the resistance of the lands round about. It destroys
at once the dignity of a town and the freedom of a countryside.
The citizens are too new and numerous for citizenship; yet they
never learn what there is to be learned of the ancient traditions
of agriculture. The first sight of the sharp outline of Jerusalem
is like a memory of the older types of limitation and liberty.
Happy is the city that has a wall; and happier still if it
is a precipice.
Again, Jerusalem might be called a city of staircases.
Many streets are steep and most actually cut into steps.
It is, I believe, an element in the controversy about the cave
at Bethlehem traditionally connected with the Nativity
that the sceptics doubt whether any beasts of burden could
have entered a stable that has to be reached by such steps.
And indeed to any one in a modern city like London or Liverpool
it may well appear odd, like a cab-horse climbing a ladder.
But as a matter of fact, if the asses and goats of Jerusalem
could not go up and downstairs, they could not go anywhere.
However this may be, I mention the matter here merely as adding another
touch to that angular profile which is the impression involved here.
Strangely enough, there is something that leads up to this impression
even in the labyrinth of mountains through which the road winds
its way to the city. The hills round Jerusalem are themselves
often hewn out in terraces, like a huge stairway. This is mostly
for the practical and indeed profitable purpose of vineyards;
and serves for a reminder that this ancient seat of civilisation
has not lost the tradition of the mercy and the glory of the vine.
But in outline such a mountain looks much like the mountain
of Purgatory that Dante saw in his vision, lifted in terraces,
like titanic steps up to God. And indeed this shape also is symbolic;
as symbolic as the pointed profile of the Holy City.
For a creed is like a ladder, while an evolution is only like a slope.
A spiritual and social evolution is generally a pretty slippery slope;
a miry slope where it is very easy to slide down again.
Such is something like the sharp and even abrupt impression produced
by this mountain city; and especially by its wall with gates
like a house with windows. A gate, like a window, is primarily
a picture-frame. The pictures that are found within the frame are
indeed very various and sometimes very alien. Within this frame-work
are indeed to be found things entirely Asiatic, or entirely Moslem,
or even entirely nomadic. But Jerusalem itself is not nomadic.
Nothing could be less like a mere camp of tents pitched by Arabs.
Nothing could be less like the mere chaos of colour in a temporary
and tawdry bazaar. The Arabs are there and the colours are there,
and they make a glorious picture; but the picture is in a Gothic frame,
and is seen so to speak through a Gothic window. And the meaning of all
this is the meaning of all windows, and especially of Gothic windows.
It is that even light itself is most divine within limits;
and that even the shining one is most shining, when he takes upon
himself a shape.
Such a system of walls and gates, like many other things thought rude
and primitive, is really very rationalistic. It turns the town,
as it were, into a plan of itself, and even into a guide to itself.
This is especially true, as may be suggested in a moment,
regarding the direction of the roads leading out of it.
But anyhow, a man must decide which way he will leave the city;
he cannot merely drift out of the city as he drifts out of the modern
cities through a litter of slums. And there is no better way to get
a preliminary plan of the city than to follow the wall and fix the gates
in the memory. Suppose, for instance, that a man begins in the south
with the Zion Gate, which bears the ancient name of Jerusalem.
This, to begin with, will sharpen the medieval and even the Western
impression first because it is here that he has the strongest
sentiment of threading the narrow passages of a great castle;
but also because the very name of the gate was given to this south-western
hill by Godfrey and Tancred during the period of the Latin kingdom.
I believe it is one of the problems of the scholars why the Latin
conquerors called this hill the Zion Hill, when the other is obviously
the sacred hill. Jerusalem is traditionally divided into four hills,
but for practical purposes into two; the lower eastern hill where
stood the Temple, and now stands the great Mosque, and the western
where is the citadel and the Zion Gate to the south of it.
I know nothing of such questions; and I attach no importance to
the notion that has crossed my own mind, and which I only mention
in passing, for I have no doubt there are a hundred objections to it.
But it is known that Zion or Sion was the old name of the place
before it was stormed by David; and even afterwards the Jebusites
remained on this western hill, and some compromise seems to have
been made with them. Is it conceivable, I wonder, that even in
the twelfth century there lingered some local memory of what had
once been a way of distinguishing Sion of the Jebusites from Salem
of the Jews? The Zion Gate, however, is only a starting-point here;
if we go south-eastward from it we descend a steep and rocky path,
from which can be caught the first and finest vision of what stands
on the other hill to the east. The great Mosque of Omar stands
up like a peacock, lustrous with mosaics that are like plumes
of blue and green.
Scholars, I may say here, object to calling it the Mosque of Omar;
on the petty and pedantic ground that it is not a mosque and was
not built by Omar. But it is my fixed intention to call it
the Mosque of Omar, and with ever renewed pertinacity to continue
calling it the Mosque of Omar. I possess a special permit from
the Grand Mufti to call it the Mosque of Omar. He is the head
of the whole Moslem religion, and if he does not know, who does?
He told me, in the beautiful French which matches his beautiful manners,
that it really is not so ridiculous after all to call the place
the Mosque of Omar, since the great Caliph desired and even designed
such a building, though he did not build it. I suppose it is
rather as if Solomon's Temple had been called David's Temple.
Omar was a great man and the Mosque was a great work, and the two were
telescoped together by the excellent common sense of vulgar tradition.
There could not be a better example of that great truth for
all travellers; that popular tradition is never so right as when it
is wrong; and that pedantry is never so wrong as when it is right.
And as for the other objection, that the Dome of the Rock
(to give it its other name) is not actually used as a Mosque, I
answer that Westminster Abbey is not used as an Abbey.
But modern Englishmen would be much surprised if I were to refer to it
as Westminster Church; to say nothing of the many modern Englishmen
for whom it would be more suitable to call it Westminster Museum.
And for whatever purposes the Moslems may actually use their
great and glorious sanctuary, at least they have not allowed
it to become the private house of a particular rich man.
And that is what we have suffered to happen, if not to Westminster Abbey,
at least to Welbeck Abbey.
The Mosque of Omar (I repeat firmly) stands on the great eastern
plateau in place of the Temple; and the wall that runs round
to it on the south side of the city contains only the Dung Gate,
on which the fancy need not linger. All along outside this
wall the ground falls away into the southern valley; and upon
the dreary and stony steep opposite is the place called Acaldama.
Wall and valley turn together round the corner of the great
temple platform, and confronting the eastern wall, across the ravine,
is the mighty wall of the Mount of Olives. On this side there
are several gates now blocked up, of which the most famous,
the Golden Gate, carries in its very uselessness a testimony
to the fallen warriors of the cross. For there is a strange
Moslem legend that through this gate, so solemnly sealed up,
shall ride the Christian King who shall again rule in Jerusalem.
In the middle of the square enclosure rises the great dark Dome
of the Rock; and standing near it, a man may see for the first time
in the distance, another dome. It lies away to the west, but a little
to the north; and it is surmounted, not by a crescent but a cross.
Many heroes and holy kings have desired to see this thing,
and have not seen it.
It is very characteristic of the city, with its medieval medley and huddle
of houses, that a man may first see the Church of the Holy Sepulchre
which is in the west, by going as far as possible to the east.
All the sights are glimpses; and things far can be visible and things
near invisible. The traveller comes on the Moslem dome round a corner;
and he finds the Christian dome, as it were, behind his own back.
But if he goes on round the wall to the north-east corner of the Court
of the Temple, he will find the next entrance; the Gate of St. Stephen.
On the slope outside, by a strange and suitable coincidence,
the loose stones which lie on every side of the mountain city
seemed to be heaped higher; and across the valley on the skirts
of the Mount of Olives is the great grey olive of Gethsemane.
On the northern side the valley turns to an artificial trench,
for the ground here is higher; and the next or northern gate bears
the name of Herod; though it might well bear the name either
of Godfrey or Saladin. For just outside it stands a pine-tree,
and beside it a rude bulk of stone; where stood these great
captains in turn, before they took Jerusalem. Then the wall runs
on till it comes to the great Damascus Gate, graven I know not
why with great roses in a style wholly heraldic and occidental,
and in no way likely to remind us of the rich roses of Damascus;
though their name has passed into our own English tongue and tradition,
along with another word for the delicate decoration of the sword.
But at the first glance, at any rate, it is hard to believe that
the roses on the walls are not the Western roses of York or Lancaster,
or that the swords which guarded them were not the straight swords
of England or of France. Doubtless a deeper and more solemn memory
ought to return immediately to the mind where that gate looks down
the great highway; as if one could see, hung over it in the sky for ever,
the cloud concealing the sunburst that broods upon the road to Damascus.
But I am here only confessing the facts or fancies of my first impression;
and again the fancy that came to me first was not of any such
alien or awful things. I did not think of damask or damascene
or the great Arabian city or even the conversion of St. Paul.
I thought of my own little house in Buckinghamshire, and how the edge
of the country town where it stands is called Aylesbury End,
merely because it is the corner nearest to Aylesbury.
That is what I mean by saying that these ancient customs are more
rational and even utilitarian than the fashions of modernity.
When a street in a new suburb is called Pretoria Avenue, the clerk
living there does not set out from his villa with the cheerful hope
of finding the road lead him to Pretoria. But the man leaving
Aylesbury End does know it would lead him to Aylesbury; and the man
going out at the Damascus Gate did know it would lead him to Damascus.
And the same is true of the next and last of the old entrances,
the Jaffa Gate in the east; but when I saw that I saw something
else as well.
I have heard that there is a low doorway at the entrance to a famous
shrine which is called the Gate of Humility; but indeed in this sense
all gates are gates of humility, and especially gates of this kind.
Any one who has ever looked at a landscape under an archway
will know what I mean, when I say that it sharpens a pleasure
with a strange sentiment of privilege. It adds to the grace
of distance something that makes it not only a grace but a gift.
Such are the visions of remote places that appear in the low gateways
of a Gothic town; as if each gateway led into a separate world;
and almost as if each dome of sky were a different chamber.
But he who walks round the walls of this city in this spirit will come
suddenly upon an exception which will surprise him like an earthquake.
It looks indeed rather like something done by an earthquake;
an earthquake with a half-witted sense of humour. Immediately at
the side of one of these humble and human gateways there is a great gap
in the wall, with a wide road running through it. There is something
of unreason in the sight which affects the eye as well as the reason.
It recalls some crazy tale about the great works of the Wise Men
of Gotham. It suggests the old joke about the man who made
a small hole for the kitten as well as a large hole for the cat.
Everybody has read about it by this time; but the immediate impression
of it is not merely an effect of reading or even of reasoning.
It looks lop-sided; like something done by a one-eyed giant.
But it was done by the last prince of the great Prussian imperial system,
in what was probably the proudest moment in all his life of pride.
What is true has a way of sounding trite; and what is trite has
a way of sounding false. We shall now probably weary the world
with calling the Germans barbaric, just as we very recently wearied
the world with calling them cultured and progressive and scientific.
But the thing is true though we say it a thousand times. And any one who
wishes to understand the sense in which it is true has only to contemplate
that fantasy and fallacy in stone; a gate with an open road beside it.
The quality I mean, however, is not merely in that particular contrast;
as of a front door standing by itself in an open field.
It is also in the origin, the occasion and the whole story of the thing.
There is above all this supreme stamp of the barbarian; the sacrifice
of the permanent to the temporary. When the walls of the Holy City
were overthrown for the glory of the German Emperor, it was hardly
even for that everlasting glory which has been the vision and
the temptation of great men. It was for the glory of a single day.
It was something rather in the nature of a holiday than anything
that could be even in the most vainglorious sense a heritage.
It did not in the ordinary sense make a monument, or even a trophy.
It destroyed a monument to make a procession. We might almost say
that it destroyed a trophy to make a triumph. There is the true
barbaric touch in this oblivion of what Jerusalem would look like a
century after, or a year after, or even the day after. It is this
which distinguishes the savage tribe on the march after a victory from
the civilised army establishing a government, even if it be a tyranny.
Hence the very effect of it, like the effect of the whole Prussian
adventure in history, remains something negative and even nihilistic.
The Christians made the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Moslems
made the Mosque of Omar; but this is what the most scientific
culture made at the end of the great century of science.
It made an enormous hole. The only positive contribution of
the nineteenth century to the spot is an unnaturally ugly clock,
at the top of an ornamental tower, or a tower that was meant to
be ornamental. It was erected, I believe, to commemorate the reign
of Abdul Hamid; and it seems perfectly adapted to its purpose,
like one of Sir William Watson's sonnets on the same subject.
But this object only adds a touch of triviality to the much more
tremendous negative effect of the gap by the gate. That remains a parable
as well as a puzzle, under all the changing skies of day and night;
with the shadows that gather tinder the narrow Gate of Humility;
and beside it, blank as daybreak and abrupt as an abyss, the broad
road that has led already to destruction.
The gap remains like a gash, a sort of wound in the walls; but it
only strengthens by contrast the general sense of their continuity.
Save this one angle where the nineteenth century has entered,
the vague impression of the thirteenth or fourteenth century rather
deepens than dies away. It is supported more than many would suppose
even by the figures that appear in the gateways or pass in procession
under the walls. The brown Franciscans and the white Dominicans
would alone give some colour to a memory of the Latin kingdom
of Jerusalem; and there are other examples and effects which are
less easily imagined in the West. Thus as I look down the street,
I see coming out from under an archway a woman wearing a high white
head-dress very like those we have all seen in a hundred pictures
of tournaments or hunting parties, or the Canterbury Pilgrimage
or the Court of Louis XI. She is as white as a woman of the North;
and it is not, I think, entirely fanciful to trace a certain
freedom and dignity in her movement, which is quite different
at least from the shuffling walk of the shrouded Moslem women.
She is a woman of Bethlehem, where a tradition, it is said, still claims
as a heroic heritage the blood of the Latin knights of the cross.
This is, of course, but one aspect of the city; but it is one
which may be early noted, yet one which is generally neglected.
As I have said, I had expected many things of Jerusalem,
but I had not expected this. I had expected to be disappointed
with it as a place utterly profaned and fallen below its mission.
I had expected to be awed by it; indeed I had expected to be frightened
of it, as a place dedicated and even doomed by its mission.
But I had never fancied that it would be possible to be fond of it;
as one might be fond of a little walled town among the orchards
of Normandy or the hop-fields of Kent.
And just then there happened a coincidence that was also something
like a catastrophe. I was idly watching, as it moved down
the narrow street to one of the dark doorways, the head-dress,
like a tower of white drapery, belonging to the Christian woman
from the place where Christ was born. After she had disappeared
into the darkness of the porch I continued to look vaguely
at the porch, and thought how easily it might have been a small
Gothic gate in some old corner of Rouen, or even Canterbury.
In twenty such places in the town one may see the details that
appeal to the same associations, so different and so distant.
One may see that angular dogtooth ornament that makes the round
Norman gateways look like the gaping mouths of sharks.
One may see the pointed niches in the walls, shaped like windows
and serving somewhat the purpose of brackets, on which were
to stand sacred images possibly removed by the Moslems.
One may come upon a small court planted with ornamental trees
with some monument in the centre, which makes the precise impression
of something in a small French town. There are no Gothic spires,
but there are numberless Gothic doors and windows; and he who
first strikes the place at this angle, as it were, may well feel
the Northern element as native and the Eastern element as intrusive.
While I was thinking all these things, something happened which in
that place was almost a portent.
It was very cold; and there were curious colours in the sky.
There had been chilly rains from time to time; and the whole
air seemed to have taken on something sharper than a chill.
It was as if a door had been opened in the northern corner of the heavens;
letting in something that changed all the face of the earth.
Great grey clouds with haloes of lurid pearl and pale-green were coming
up from the plains or the sea and spreading over the towers of the city.
In the middle of the moving mass of grey vapours was a splash
of paler vapour; a wan white cloud whose white seemed somehow more
ominous than gloom. It went over the high citadel like a white
wild goose flying; and a few white feathers fell.
It was the snow; and it snowed day and night until that Eastern
city was sealed up like a village in Norway or Northern Scotland.
It rose in the streets till men might almost have been drowned
in it like a sea of solid foam. And the people of the place told
me there had been no such thing seen in it in all recent records,
or perhaps in the records of all its four thousand years.
All this came later; but for me at the moment, looking at the scene
in so dreamy a fashion, it seemed merely like a dramatic conclusion
to my dream. It was but an accident confirming what was but an aspect.
But it confirmed it with a strange and almost supernatural completeness.
The white light out of the window in the north lay on all the roofs
and turrets of the mountain town; for there is an aspect in which
snow looks less like frozen water than like solidified light.
As the snow accumulated there accumulated also everywhere
those fantastic effects of frost which seem to fit in with
the fantastic qualities of medieval architecture; and which
make an icicle seem like the mere extension of a gargoyle.
It was the atmosphere that has led so many romancers to make
medieval Paris a mere black and white study of night and snow.
Something had redrawn in silver all things from the rude ornament
on the old gateways to the wrinkles on the ancient hills of Moab.
Fields of white still spotted with green swept down into the valleys
between us and the hills; and high above them the Holy City lifted
her head into the thunder-clouded heavens, wearing a white head-dress
like a daughter of the Crusaders.