nd especially by its wall with gates
like a house with windows. A gate, like a window, is primarily
a picture-frame. The pictures that are found within the frame are
indeed very various and sometimes very alien. Within this frame-work
are indeed to be found things entirely Asiatic, or entirely Moslem,
or even entirely nomadic. But Jerusalem itself is not nomadic.
Nothing could be less like a mere camp of tents pitched by Arabs.
Nothing could be less like the mere chaos of colour in a temporary
and tawdry bazaar. The Arabs are there and the colours are there,
and they make a glorious picture; but the picture is in a Gothic frame,
and is seen so to speak through a Gothic window. And the meaning of all
this is the meaning of all windows, and especially of Gothic windows.
It is that even light itself is most divine within limits;
and that even the shining one is most shining, when he takes upon
himself a shape.

Such a system of walls and gates, like many other things thought rude
and primitive, is really very rationalistic. It turns the town,
as it were, into a plan of itself, and even into a guide to itself.
This is especially true, as may be suggested in a moment,
regarding the direction of the roads leading out of it.
But anyhow, a man must decide which way he will leave the city;
he cannot merely drift out of the city as he drifts out of the modern
cities through a litter of slums. And there is no better way to get
a preliminary plan of the city than to follow the wall and fix the gates
in the memory. Suppose, for instance, that a man begins in the south
with the Zion Gate, which bears the ancient name of Jerusalem.
This, to begin with, will sharpen the medieval and even the Western
impression first because it is here that he has the strongest
sentiment of threading the narrow passages of a great castle;
but also because the very name of the gate was given to this south-western
hill by Godfrey and Tancred during the period of the Latin kingdom.
I believe it is one of the problems of the scholars why the Latin
conquerors called this hill the Zion Hill, when the other is obviously
the sacred hill. Jerusalem is traditionally divided into four hills,
but for practical purposes into two; the lower eastern hill where
stood the Temple, and now stands the great Mosque, and the western
where is the citadel and the Zion Gate to the south of it.
I know nothing of such questions; and I attach no importance to
the notion