"When we were about five miles from the city, a young man, mounted upon a beautiful Arab steed, brought us to a halt, with a courteous wave of his hand, and, in broken English, presented us with the card of the Mediterranean Hotel. We learned that the proprietor was a convert of Dr. Barclay, and decided to make his house our home during our stay. In a little while we entered the Joppa gate amid cries of squalid beggars, and, a few yards from that entrance, dismounted before our hotel. It stands on Mt. Zion, in the shadow of the Tower of David, and here we received that cordial welcome accorded to those willing to pay $3 a day.
"Standing on the heights of Mt. Zion with your face to the east, you have before you the Tyropeon Valley, now so full of debris as scarcely to appear as a valley. Looking a little to the north you behold Mt. Moriah where now stand the Dome of the Rock and the Mosque of El Akra. Beyond these to the east, is the deep Valley of Jehosaphat with the brook Kedron and the supposed Garden of Gethsemane, and beyond rises the beautiful summit of the Mount of Olives. Northward is Akra, and east of it Bezetha, two of the hills on which the city originally stood, and a part of which it still covers.
"We have lingered at Bethesda, whence the angel has departed; at Siloam's fountain; at the Wailing Place where the Jews, every Friday afternoon, lament in the language of their poets, the misfortunes of their people; at the Dome of the Rock with its marvelous Moslem wonders; at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, that centre of enslaving superstition, whose annual triumphs cast a ray of hope adown the narrow halls of the Vatican. Through a hole in the wall of the Chapel of Angelo, a torch is annually passed out, supposedly lighted by fire from heaven. The pilgrims wait in the darkness with wax tapers, to be lighted from celestial fire. The devotees bathe their hands in the flame, to secure a special blessing; and the extinguished tapers are carried to 20,000 distant homes, to be as devoutly reverenced as the pilgrims who carry them.
"There is nothing in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre that is not saddening to the heart of the enlightened. Through our visit to this building we had the honor of making the acquaintance of the Bishop of Jerusalem, and receiving from him diplomas testifying to our Oriental travel. I fear I should forfeit mine could he know my unorthodox opinions of the 'sacred spots' of the Church.
Woman of Bethlehem
"I loved to walk along the Via Dolorosa, to visit the home of Mary and Martha. I wept under the shade of Gethsemane's gnarled olive trees; I climbed to the summit of Olivet, and listened to the French prattle of the Countess de Bouillon; I took a donkey ride over the hills of Judea; I lunched in the shadow of the rock where the man who went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, fell among thieves; I tented in the valley of the Jordan with the Stars and Stripes and the Crescent and the Star waving above; I stood on the whitened shores of the Salt Sea, and gathered dead sea apples along the shady banks of the Sacred River; I had a cooling draught from Elisha's Fountain at the foot of the Mount of Temptation; and in the shadow of Mount Tabor, I thought I heard the angel of death calling me to another Canaan. The flowered slopes of cedared Lebanon, the snowy top of Hermon, the clear waters of Abana, the ivy of old Damascus, Tyre and Sidon, Mt. Carmel and Nazareth—in short, from Dan to Beersheba, we saw all.
"And for all the Holy Land, the most accurate guide-book the traveler can have, even to this day, is the Old Testament. So perfect is the agreement of the land and the Book, that frequently when standing upon some elevated spot in Palestine one could read the story of Joshua, Judges and Samuel, and follow accurately with the eye the movements from place to place, as readily as on a modern map.
