We had a slight rain yesterday and more is expected. The people evidently think their prayers will be answered. As I walked through David Street I heard two Mohammedans talking. Their language was Arabic, but my dragomans told me that one had just said to the other:
“How good God is, after all. We have prayed for the rain and, lo, it has come.”
When the first shower began to fall I was standing in a doorway. A little girl, perhaps eight years old, passed by with a platter of bread on her head. The rain was pouring down upon it and she was wet to the skin, but nevertheless she was singing. I asked my guide the words of her song. He replied: “She cries: ‘Praise God for the rain! Praise God for the rain! Praise God for the rain!’”
CHAPTER VI
JERUSALEM IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
I write these words on the housetop of a bishop’s residence on the summit of Mount Zion and in the centre of the Holy City. My typewriter stands within thirty feet of the great square Tower of David the base of which was undoubtedly built before the time of Christ. At my left, surrounded by the yellow stone walls of the houses, is the dark green pool Hezekiah made to supply Jerusalem with water in case of siege, and beyond it, out of the jumble of buildings, shines the huge bronze dome erected over the spot where Christ was crucified. Not half a mile away on a plateau covering thirty-five acres is a big octagonal tower with a bulbous bronze dome. That is the Mosque of Omar which rises on the very site of Solomon’s temple. At its left is the church built over the Roman mosaic floor of the house of Pontius Pilate.
Jerusalem lies in a nest of mountains. It is built on an irregular plateau with valleys all about it and steep hills rising straight up from these to the city and to the higher hills on the opposite sides. The site of the city runs over height and hollow, and was probably chosen for the capital of Judea on account of the great gorges about it, by which it could be the more easily defended against attack.
Jerusalem lies in a nest of hills which seem flattened out when viewed from an airplane. It is on a plateau twenty-five hundred feet above sea-level, and the city is divided into four quarters, each on its own hill
