The secretary glanced at the papers and duly enrolled the new arrival as an American citizen, with all the immunities and privileges thereunto appertaining.
A moment later I was admitted to the inner office. The kindly, white-haired consul asked for a detailed account of my journey in Palestine.
“I am often much exercised,” he said, when I had finished; “I am often much incensed that, with all the hospices for every other brand of Christian, there are no accommodations in Jerusalem for American pilgrims. It seems like cruel discrimination—”
“But I am scarcely a pilgrim,” I suggested.
“Yes, you are! Yes, you are!” cried the consul; “But never mind. I shall give you a note to the Jewish hotel across the way and you may pay the bill when you earn the money. For ‘the Americans’ will find you work, you may be sure. See me again before you leave the city.”
I mounted an outdoor stairway on the opposite side of David street to a very passable hostelry. The window of the room assigned me offered a far-reaching view. Directly below, walled by the backs of adjoining shops, stenched the ancient pool of Hezekiah. To the north, east, and south spread a jumble of small buildings, their dome-shaped roofs of mud or stone thrown into contrast by a few houses covered with red tiles, the general level broken by several minarets and the architectural hotch-potch of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. At the further edge of the city, yet so near as to be as plainly visible from base to dome as in the compound itself, stood the beautiful mosque of Omar. From the valley of Jehoshaphat beneath rose the Mount of Olives; the stone-terraced Garden of Gethsemane of the lower slope backed by a forest of olive trees; the summit crowned by the three-storied tower on the “Russian Calvary.” Beyond, a desolation of rolling hills stretched away to the massive wall of the mountains of Moab.
Descending to the street after dinner, I came upon the Pennsylvanian. With him was an English resident who wished some documents turned into French. I began on them at once and worked late into the night. In the three days following, I interspersed my sightseeing with similar tasks. The bazaars were half-deserted during this period; for on Friday the Mohammedans held festival, Saturday and Sunday were respectively the Jewish and Christian Sabbath, and the influence of each of the sects on the other two was so marked that the entire population lost energy soon after the middle of the week. On Saturday, the hotel guests subsisted on the usual meals of meat, meat, meat; this time served cold, for what orthodox Jew could bid his servants build a fire on the Sabbath? The day grew wintry cold, however. The proprietor summoned a domestic, and, speaking a Yiddish that closely resembled German, issued several orders, ending with the wholly irrelevant remark, “I believe this is one of the coldest days we have had in many a year.”
The servant scratched his moth-eaten poll, shuffled off, and returned with a bundle of fagots that were soon crackling in the tiny sheet-iron stove.
Sunday found me unoccupied, and, pushing through the howling chaos at the Jaffa gate, I strolled southward along a highway, which afforded, here and there, a glimpse of the Dead Sea. Turning off at the tomb of Rachel, I climbed into the wind-swept village of Bethlehem.
From a cobblestone square in the center of the town, a low doorway, flanked by blocks of unhewn stone so blackened by the none too cleanly hands of centuries of pilgrims as to give it the appearance of a huge rat hole, offered admittance to the Church of the Nativity. A score of worshiping Christians gave me welcome in the grotto of the manger by tramping on my lightly-shod toes and I quickly retreated to the cedar-groined church above. At their altar in one section of the transept a group of bejeweled dignitaries of the Greek church were celebrating mass. Plainly, it was a solemn and holy occasion to the patriarchs and their assistants. A small army of acolytes hovered round the priests like blackbirds over an ear of corn, advancing and retreating with great robes and surplices of rich design, each of which served only for a kow-tow to some object of religious veneration. In the center of the transept, a few feet away from the worshiping priests, just where the Greek territory meets that of some other sect, stood the Sultan’s guard. He was a typical soldier of the Porte, his uniform of patches stretched and bagged out of all semblance to modern clothing, his head covered with a moth-eaten fez, its tassel long since departed and its lower edge turned from its original red to a greasy brown through long contact with the oily scalp of its wearer. Lazily he leaned on the muzzle of the musket under his armpit, one dusty foot resting on the other, and gazed with an unshaven grimace, half of scorn, half of pity, at those gullible beings who performed their amusing antics to a false god. His relief arrived soon after. The scoffer stalked out of the church, cast his musket on the cobblestones, and turning an ultra-solemn face towards Mecca, stepped out of his shoes and bowed down in afternoon prayer.