In the glow of colour streaming through the windows all the splendours of Oriental tales seem to be revealed, vibrating through the twilight and silence of this sanctuary which is always open and surrounded by the spacious courtyard in which we stroll alone. Little birds, quite at home in the mosque, fly in and out of the open, bronze doors, and alight on the porphyry cornices and on the pearl and gold, and are benevolently regarded by the two or three venerable and white-bearded officials who are praying in the shadowy recesses. On the marble pavement are spread several antique Persian and Turkish rugs of the most delicate, faded hues.
On entering this circular mosque its vast centre is invisible, as it is surrounded by a double screen. The first is of wood, finely carved in the style of the Mozarabians; the second, of Gothic iron-work, placed there by the Crusaders when they used it temporarily as a Christian fane. Mounting some marble steps, our eyes at last rest upon this jealously-guarded interior.
Considering all the surrounding splendour, we now expect even more marvellous riches to be revealed, but we are awed by an apparition of quite a different nature,—a vague and gloomy shape seems to have its abode amid the shadows of this gorgeous precinct; a mass, as yet undefined, seems to surge through the semi-darkness like a great, black, solidified wave.
This is the summit of Mount Moriah, sacred alike to the Israelites, Mussulmans, and Christians; this is the threshing-floor of Ornan the Jebusite, where King David saw the Destroying Angel holding in his hand the destroying sword stretched out over Jerusalem (2 Samuel xxiv. 16; 1 Chronicles xxi. 15).
Here David built an altar of burnt-offering and here his son Solomon raised the Temple, levelling the surroundings at great cost, but preserving the irregularities of this peak because the foot of the angel had touched it. “Then Solomon began to build the house of the Lord at Jerusalem in Mount Moriah, where the Lord appeared unto David his father, in the place that David had prepared in the threshing-floor of Ornan the Jebusite” (2 Chronicles iii. 1).
We know through what scenes of inconceivable magnificence and desolating fury this mountain of Moriah passed during the ages. The Temple that crowned it, razed by Nebuchadnezzar, rebuilt on the return from the captivity in Babylon, and again destroyed under Antonius IV., was again rebuilt by Herod: it saw Jesus pass by; His voice was heard upon its summit.
Therefore, each of those mighty edifices which cost the ransom of an empire, and whose almost superhuman foundations are still found buried in the earth, confound the imagination of us moderns. After the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus, a Temple of Jupiter was erected under Hadrian’s reign, replacing the Temple of the Saviour. Later, the early Christians, to spite the Jews, kept this sacred peak covered with débris and dirt, and it was the Caliph Omar who piously caused it to be cleared as soon as he had conquered Palestine; and finally, his successor, the Caliph Abd-el-Melek, about the year 690, enclosed it with the lovely Mosque that is still standing.
With the exception of the dome, restored during the Twelfth and Fourteenth Centuries, the Crusaders found it in its present condition, already ancient and bearing the same relation to them that the Gothic cathedrals do to us, for it was clothed with the same fadeless embroideries of gold and marble and with its glistening brocades which are almost imperishable. Converting it into a church, they placed their marble altar in the centre on David’s rock. On the fall of the Franks, Saladin, after long purifications by sprinklings of rose-water, restored it to the Faith of Allah.
Inscriptions of gold in old Cufic characters above the friezes speak of Christ after the Koran, and their deep wisdom is such as to sow disquietude in Christian souls: “O ye who have received the scriptures, exceed not the just bounds of your religion. Verily Christ Jesus is the son of Mary, the apostle of God, and his Word which he conveyed unto Mary. Believe then in God and in his Apostle, but say not there is a Trinity, forbear this, it will be better for you. God is but one. It is not meet that God should have a son. When He decreeth a thing He only saith unto it: ‘Be’; and it is.” (Sura iv. 19.)
A dread Past, crushing to our modern puerility, is evoked by this black rock, this dead and mummified mountain peak, on which the dew of Heaven never falls, which never produces a plant, nor a spray of moss, but which lies like the Pharaohs in their sarcophagi, and which, after two thousand years of troubles, has now been sheltered for thirteen centuries beneath the brooding of this golden dome and these marvellous walls raised for it alone.