rch tower, which spreads a cockney commerce
but not a Christian culture, has given many men a vague feeling
that the influence of modern civilisation will surround these ragged
but coloured groups with something as dreary and discoloured,
as unnatural and as desolate as the unfamiliar snow in which they
were shivering as I watched them. There seemed a sort of sinister
omen in this strange visitation that the north had sent them;
in the fact that when the north wind blew at last, it had only
scattered on them this silver dust of death.

It may be that this more melancholy mood was intensified by that
pale landscape and those impassable ways. I do not dislike snow;
on the contrary I delight in it; and if it had drifted as deep in my
own country against my own door I should have thought it the triumph
of Christmas, and a thing as comic as my own dog and donkey.
But the people in the coloured rags did dislike it; and the effects of it
were not comic but tragic. The news that came in seemed in that little
lonely town like the news of a great war, or even of a great defeat.
Men fell to regarding it, as they have fallen too much to regarding
the war, merely as an unmixed misery, and here the misery was
really unmixed. As the snow began to melt corpses were found in it,
homes were hopelessly buried, and even the gradual clearing of the roads
only brought him stories of the lonely hamlets lost in the hills.
It seemed as if a breath of the aimless destruction that wanders
in the world had drifted across us; and no task remained for men
but the weary rebuilding of ruins and the numbering of the dead.

Only as I went out of the Jaffa Gate, a man told me that the tree
of the hundred deaths, that was the type of the eternal Caliphate
of the Crescent, was cast down and lying broken in the snow.

CHAPTER VI

THE GROUPS OF THE CITY

Palestine is a striped country; that is the first effect of landscape
on the eye. It runs in great parallel lines wavering into vast hills
and valleys, but preserving the parallel pattern; as if drawn boldly
but accurately with gigantic chalks of green and grey and red and yellow.
The natural explanation or (to speak less foolishly) the natural process
of this is simple enough. The stripes are the strata of the rock,
only they are stripped by the great rains, so that everything has
to grow on ledges, repeating yet again that terraced character
to be seen in the vineyards and the staircase str