sharper than a chill.
It was as if a door had been opened in the northern corner of the heavens;
letting in something that changed all the face of the earth.
Great grey clouds with haloes of lurid pearl and pale-green were coming
up from the plains or the sea and spreading over the towers of the city.
In the middle of the moving mass of grey vapours was a splash
of paler vapour; a wan white cloud whose white seemed somehow more
ominous than gloom. It went over the high citadel like a white
wild goose flying; and a few white feathers fell.

It was the snow; and it snowed day and night until that Eastern
city was sealed up like a village in Norway or Northern Scotland.
It rose in the streets till men might almost have been drowned
in it like a sea of solid foam. And the people of the place told
me there had been no such thing seen in it in all recent records,
or perhaps in the records of all its four thousand years.

All this came later; but for me at the moment, looking at the scene
in so dreamy a fashion, it seemed merely like a dramatic conclusion
to my dream. It was but an accident confirming what was but an aspect.
But it confirmed it with a strange and almost supernatural completeness.
The white light out of the window in the north lay on all the roofs
and turrets of the mountain town; for there is an aspect in which
snow looks less like frozen water than like solidified light.
As the snow accumulated there accumulated also everywhere
those fantastic effects of frost which seem to fit in with
the fantastic qualities of medieval architecture; and which
make an icicle seem like the mere extension of a gargoyle.
It was the atmosphere that has led so many romancers to make
medieval Paris a mere black and white study of night and snow.
Something had redrawn in silver all things from the rude ornament
on the old gateways to the wrinkles on the ancient hills of Moab.
Fields of white still spotted with green swept down into the valleys
between us and the hills; and high above them the Holy City lifted
her head into the thunder-clouded heavens, wearing a white head-dress
like a daughter of the Crusaders.

CHAPTER IV

THE PHILOSOPHY OF SIGHT-SEEING

Various cultivated critics told me that I should find
Jerusalem disappointing; and I fear it will disappoint them that I
am not disappointed. Of the city as a city I shall try to say
something elsewhere; but the things which these critics have
especially in mind a