I

A CITY THAT IS SET ON A HILL

Out of the medley of our first impressions of Jerusalem one fact emerges
like an island from the sea: it is a city that is lifted up. No river;
no harbour; no encircling groves and gardens; a site so lonely and so
lofty that it breathes the very spirit of isolation and proud
self-reliance.

"Beautiful in elevation, the joy of the whole earth
Is Mount Zion, on the sides of the north
The city of the great King."

Thus sang the Hebrew poet; and his song, like all true poetry, has the
accuracy of the clearest vision. For this is precisely the one beauty
that crowns Jerusalem: the beauty of a high place and all that belongs
to it: clear sky, refreshing air, a fine outlook, and that indefinable
sense of exultation that comes into the heart of man when he climbs a
little nearer to the stars.

Twenty-five hundred feet above the level of the sea is not a great
height; but I can think of no other ancient and world-famous city that
stands as high. Along the mountainous plateau of Judea, between the
sea-coast plain of Philistia and the sunken valley of the Jordan, there
is a line of sacred sites,--Beersheba, Hebron, Bethlehem, Bethel,
Shiloh, Shechem. Each of them marks the place where a town grew up
around an altar. The central link in this chain of shrine-cities is
Jerusalem. Her form and outline, her relation to the landscape and to
the land, are unchanged from the days of her greatest glory. The
splendours of her Temple and her palaces, the glitter of her armies, the
rich colour and glow of her abounding wealth, have vanished. But though
her garments are frayed and weather-worn, though she is an impoverished
and dusty queen, she still keeps her proud position and bearing; and as
you approach her by the ancient road along the ridges of Judea you see
substantially what Sennacherib, and Nebuchadnezzar, and the Roman Titus
must have seen.

"The sides of the north" slope gently down to the huge gray wall of the
city, with its many towers and gates. Within those bulwarks, which are
thirty-eight feet high and two and a half miles in circumference,
"Jerusalem is builded as a city that is compact together," covering with
her huddled houses and crooked, narrow streets, the two or three rounded
hills and shallow depressions in which the northern plateau terminates.
South and east and west, the valley of the Brook Kidron and the Valley
of Himmon surround the city wall with a dry moat thr