Come with me to an oil mill which is kept in a cave just off David Street, not more than a stone’s throw from the Pool of Hezekiah. At the side of the door there is a stone ledge. In the centre of this is a hole as big around as a flour barrel in which, with his clothes tied up about his waist, with bare legs and bare feet, stands a sweating Ethiopian treading the oil out of the ground olives. Peeping over into the well in which he is standing, we see that he has a linen cloth laid on the top of the mushy mixture. He tramps this cloth into the olives with his feet and taking it up wet, wrings out the oil into a red clay basin from whence it is poured into pots to be strained for the market.
Farther back stand a camel and a very small, knotty little donkey munching away while the mill is not going. These animals grind up the olives, and in another cave opening into this we can see the mill itself. It is much like a horsepower grist mill, or the bark mill of a country tannery, and the camel and donkey walk round and round in a circle hitched to a bar which turns the mill. Their food is a brown cake made from what is left of the olives after the oil has been pressed out of them.
In the Turkish restaurants food is cooked over holes in a limestone slab, while below the charcoal fire is fed through other openings which also make the draught
During the day the low cavelike shop of the Jerusalem shoemaker opens directly upon the street. At night it is closed by two swinging doors on rude hinges
Christ’s happiest hours were spent with his friends at Bethany, the village where He lived when He was teaching in Jerusalem near by. Here the “tomb of Lazarus” and the “house of Martha and Mary” are pointed out to the traveller
But let us go to market at the Jaffa Gate and see what the people have brought in from the country for sale. There are scores of women with baskets of vegetables before them. They have lettuce and eggplants and beautiful cauliflowers with heads as white as snow. They have lemons and oranges from Jaffa and apples and pears from the highlands of Judea. Many of the sellers are Bethlehem girls. Here are people selling beads, although most of the bead sellers are about the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Many of the beads are of glass and come from Hebron, not far from the cave which is Abraham’s tomb. Hebron is the chief town of south Palestine and is a manufacturing centre. It makes lamps and bottles as well as glass trinkets and glass beads, which are sold all over the Holy Land.
The cock which reminded St. Peter of his denial of his Master has many descendants. You may see some of them in this market, tied by the legs and lying on the stones. The Holy City has no ordinance against crowing cocks, and nearly every family here keeps its own rooster. There are so many that the city resounds with their music, and about daybreak they start up a concert which murders sleep. I am living in the heart of Jerusalem—I might as well be in a barnyard. The rooster symphony begins with sunrise and keeps on until evening, and then the donkeys and camels take up the strain. The donkeys bray louder than did Balaam’s ass, and the camels whine and grumble all night. In addition to these noises, there are others which trouble the tourists. The people rise with the chickens and the stone streets reëcho their steps. The birds sing and the pedlars shout. At the same time the bells begin ringing to show that it is day, and the trumpets of the soldiers in David’s Tower add to the din. One can easily sleep in a railroad depot or near a boiler factory, for the noises there are of one or two kinds and the ear comes to know them. Here there is a new sound every minute.