and certainly I did not find it. But neither did I find what I
was much more inclined to expect; something at the other extreme.
Many reports had led me to look for a truly cosmopolitan town,
that is a truly conquered town. I looked for a place like Cairo,
containing indeed old and interesting things, but open on every side
to new and vulgar things; full of the touts who seem only created
for the tourists and the tourists who seem only created for the touts.
There may be more of this in the place than pleases those
who would idealise it. But I fancy there is much less of it
than is commonly supposed in the reaction from such an ideal.
It does not, like Cairo, offer the exciting experience of twenty
guides fighting for one traveller; of young Turks drinking American
cocktails as a protest against Christian wine. The town is quite
inconvenient enough to make it a decent place for pilgrims.
Or a stranger might have imagined a place even less Western than Cairo,
one of those villages of Palestine described in dusty old books
of Biblical research. He might remember drawings like diagrams
representing a well or a wine-press, rather a dry well, so to speak,
and a wine-press very difficult to associate with wine. These hard
colourless outlines never did justice to the colour of the East, but even
to give it the colour of the East would not do justice to Jerusalem.
If I had anticipated the Bagdad of all our dreams, a maze of bazaars
glowing with gorgeous wares, I should have been wrong again.
There is quite enough of this vivid and varied colour in Jerusalem,
but it is not the first fact that arrests the attention,
and certainly not the first that arrested mine. I give my own first
impression as a fact, for what it is worth and exactly as it came.
I did not expect it, and it was some time before I even understood it.
As soon as I was walking inside the walls of Jerusalem, I had
an overwhelming impression that I was walking in the town of Rye,