re are gleams of the extremities of Eastern
fanaticism which are almost ghastly to Western feeling.
They seem to crack the polish of the dignified leaders of the Arab
aristocracy and the Zionist school of culture, and reveal a
volcanic substance of which only oriental creeds have been made.
One day a wild Jewish proclamation is passed from hand to hand,
denouncing disloyal Jews who refuse the teaching Hebrew; telling doctors
to let them die and hospitals to let them rot, ringing with the old
unmistakable and awful accent that bade men dash their children
against the stones. Another day the city would be placarded with
posters printed in Damascus, telling the Jews who looked to Palestine
for a national home that they should find it a national cemetery.
And when these cries clash it is like the clash of those two
crooked Eastern swords, that crossed and recrossed and revolved
like blazing wheels, in the vanguard of the marching mob.

I felt the fullest pressure of the problem when I first walked round
the whole of the Haram enclosure, the courts of the old Temple,
where the high muezzin towers now stand at every corner,
and heard the clear voices of the call to prayer. The sky was
laden with a storm that became the snowstorm; and it was the time
at which the old Jews beat their hands and mourn over what are
believed to be the last stones of the Temple. There was a movement
in my own mind that was attuned to these things, and impressed by
the strait limits and steep sides of that platform of the mountains;
for the sense of crisis is not only in the intensity of the ideals,
but in the very conditions of the reality, the reality with which this
chapter began. And the burden of it is the burden of Palestine;
the narrowness of the boundaries and the stratification of the rock.
A voice not of my reason but rather sounding heavily in my heart,
seemed to be repeating sentences like pessimistic proverbs.
There is no place for the Temple of Solomon but on the ruins of
the Mosque of Omar. There is no place for the nation of the Jews
but in the country of the Arabs. And these whispers came to me
first not as intellectual conclusions upon the conditions of the case,
of which I should have much more to say and to hope; but rather
as hints of something immediate and menacing and yet mysterious.
I felt almost a momentary impulse to flee from the place, like one
who has received an omen. For two voices had met in my ears;
and wit