llowed the trumpets and the holy hymns, and waited breathlessly
for the moment when every mailed knee should drop in the dust, and every
bearded and sunburned cheek be wet with devotional tears.

But when I climbed the last ridge, and looked ahead with a sort of painful
suspense, Jerusalem did not appear. We were two thousand feet above the
Mediterranean, whose blue we could dimly see far to the west, through
notches in the chain of hills. To the north, the mountains were gray,
desolate, and awful. Not a shrub or a tree relieved their frightful
barrenness. An upland tract, covered with white volcanic rock, lay before
us. We met peasants with asses, who looked (to my eyes) as if they had
just left Jerusalem. Still forward we urged our horses, and reached a
ruined garden, surrounded with hedges of cactus, over which I saw domes
and walls in the distance. I drew a long breath and looked at Francois. He
was jogging along without turning his head; he could not have been so
indifferent if that was really the city. Presently, we reached another
slight rise in the rocky plain. He began to urge his panting horse, and at
the same instant we both lashed the spirit into ours, dashed on at a
break-neck gallop, round the corner of an old wall on the top of the hill,
and lo! the Holy City! Our Greek jerked both pistols from his holsters,
and fired them into the air, as we reined up on the steep.

From the descriptions of travellers, I had expected to see in Jerusalem an
ordinary modern Turkish town; but that before me, with its walls,
fortresses, and domes, was it not still the City of David? I saw the
Jerusalem of the New Testament, as I had imagined it. Long lines of walls
crowned with a notched parapet and strengthened by towers; a few domes and
spires above them; clusters of cypress here and there; this was all that
was visible of the city. On either side the hill sloped down to the two
deep valleys over which it hangs. On the east, the Mount of Olives,
crowned with a chapel and mosque, rose high and steep, but in front, the
eye passed directly over the city, to rest far away upon the lofty
mountains of Moab, beyond the Dead Sea. The scene was grand in its
simplicity. The prominent colors were the purple of those distant
mountains, and the hoary gray of the nearer hills. The walls were of the
dull yellow of weather-stained marble, and the only trees, the dark
cypress and moonlit olive. Now, indeed, for one brief moment, I knew that