o them like limpets to a rock in the sea.

It was quite a strain on the Holy City to take care of such a crowd, but
all was well managed and we were comfortably stowed away somewhere (many
in convents), and only the most confirmed "kickers" could offer any fair
objection to the arrangements.

JERUSALEM

Very few writers and hardly any lecturers and speakers who have visited
Jerusalem have told the truth about it, or if some of them have, they
told only the pleasant part of it. In fact, it has usually been given a
treble coat of whitewash, entirely misleading to those who are to follow
them. When the writer holds Jerusalem to be the greatest of historical
cities with all the reverence due to it, and yet finds it in the hands of
the Turkish government--which does not know the meaning of truth nor of
honesty; which by its example prostitutes every decent feeling in the
minds of the people to its own base ends, and permits the barefaced
robbery and oppression, not only of the visitor but of its own
citizens--then I say the modern writer has a delicate task to perform in
describing it, for in relating the facts he might seem to be railing and
scoffing at religion and biblical history, whereas nothing is farther
from his mind or his intention. Everything is so interwoven that it is
hard to separate the serious and truthful from the ridiculous and
fraudulent. This deceit is not alone of to-day; it goes back to the
times when landmarks and historic evidences were obliterated by wars,
earthquakes and revolutions, and when all traces of locations during
these upheavals of centuries were lost and covered with _debris_
sometimes one hundred and fifty feet deep, the city of Jerusalem itself
not having a single inhabitant for over fifty years in one period of its
history. Then the "holy men" of those old days saw at once their
opportunity to make religion both popular and paying, as well as the
necessity for doing so, and they therefore invented a system of "pious
frauds" by selecting bogus sites on particular spots for this, that, and
the other incident which occurred in the great religious dramas in the
Holy Land. These selections gave the ignorant, to whom they wholly
appealed, some material, practical object on which to lay hold--something
to worship which they could see and feel; and this was where the profit
lay. Thus we find that there are crowded in the rooms of the Church of
the Holy Sepulchre over thirty "sacred