cess.
An attack may be made on political corruption, and it may be a failure;
but never again can we believe that our politics are not corrupt.
And so Zionism may be attempted and may be a failure;
but never again can we ourselves be at ease in Zion.
Or rather, I should say, if the Jew cannot be at ease in Zion we
can never again persuade ourselves that he is at ease out of Zion.
We can only salute as it passes that restless and mysterious figure,
knowing at last that there must be in him something mystical as well
as mysterious; that whether in the sense of the sorrows of Christ
or of the sorrows of Cain, he must pass by, for he belongs to God.

CONCLUSION

To have worn a large scallop shell in my hat in the streets of London
might have been deemed ostentatious, to say nothing of carrying a staff
like a long pole; and wearing sandals might have proclaimed rather
that I had not come from Jerusalem but from Letchworth, which some
identify with the New Jerusalem descending out of heaven from God.
Lacking such attributes, I passed through South England as one
who might have come from Ramsgate or from anywhere; and the only
symbol left to me of my pilgrimage was a cheap ring of metal
coloured like copper and brass. For on it was written in Greek
characters the word "Jerusalem," and though it may be less valuable
than a brass nail, I do not think you can buy it in the Strand.
All those enormous and everlasting things, all those gates of bronze
and mosaics of purple and peacock colouring, all those chapels of gold
and columns of crimson marble, had all shrivelled up and dwindled
down to that one small thread of red metal round my finger.
I could not help having a feeling, like Aladdin, that if I
rubbed the ring perhaps all those towers would rise again.
And there was a sort of feeling of truth in the fancy after all.
We talk of the changeless East; but in one sense the impression
of it is really rather changing, with its wandering tribes and its
shifting sands, in which the genii of the East might well build
the palace or the paradise of a day. As I saw the low and solid
English cottages rising around me amid damp delightful thickets
under rainy skies, I felt that in a deeper sense it is rather
we who build for permanence or at least for a sort of peace.
It is something more than comfort; a relative and reasonable contentment.
And there came back on me like a boomerang a rather indescribable
thought which had circle