on me another accident which I was content to count for a third.
For when the train stopped at last in the rain, and there was no other
vehicle for the last lap of the journey, a very courteous officer,
an army surgeon, gave me a seat in an ambulance wagon; and it was
under the shield of the red cross that I entered Jerusalem.

For suddenly, between a post of the wagon and a wrack of rainy cloud
I saw it, uplifted and withdrawn under all the arching heavens
of its history, alone with its benediction and its blasphemy,
the city that is set upon a hill, and cannot be hid.



CHAPTER III

THE GATES OF THE CITY

The men I met coming from Jerusalem reported all sorts of
contradictory impressions; and yet my own impression contradicted
them all. Their impressions were doubtless as true as mine;
but I describe my own because it is true, and because I think it
points to a neglected truth about the real Jerusalem. I need not say
I did not expect the real Jerusalem to be the New Jerusalem; a city
of charity and peace, any more than a city of chrysolite and pearl.
I might more reasonably have expected an austere and ascetic place,
oppressed with the weight of its destiny, with no inns except monasteries,
and these sealed with the terrible silence of the Trappists;
an awful city where men speak by signs in the street.
I did not need the numberless jokes about Jerusalem to-day,
to warn me against expecting this; anyhow I did not expect it,