But the point here is that what I saw above ground was rather the Gothic
town than the Babylonian; and that it reminded me, if not specially
of the cross, at least of the soldiers who took the cross.

Nor do I forget the long centuries that have passed over the place
since these medieval walls were built, any more than the far
more interesting centuries that passed before they were built.
But any one taking exception to the description on that ground
may well realise, on consideration, that it is an exception
that proves the rule. There is something very negative about
Turkish rule; and the best and worst of it is in the word neglect.
Everything that lived under the vague empire of Constantinople
remained in a state of suspended animation like something frozen
rather than decayed, like something sleeping rather than dead.
It was a sort of Arabian spell, like that which turned princes
and princesses into marble statues in the _Arabian Nights_.
All that part of the history of the place is a kind of sleep;
and that of a sleeper who hardly knows if he has slept an hour or a
hundred years. When I first found myself in the Jaffa Gate of Jerusalem,
my eye happened to fall on something that might be seen anywhere,
but which seemed somehow to have a curious significance there.
Most people are conscious of some common object which still
strikes them as uncommon; as if it were the first fantastic sketch
in the sketch-book of nature. I myself can never overcome the sense
of something almost unearthly about grass growing upon human buildings.
There is in it a wild and even horrible fancy, as if houses could
grow hair. When I saw that green hair on the huge stone blocks of
the citadel, though I had seen the same thing on any number of ruins,
it came to me like an omen or a vision, a curious vision at once
of chaos and of sleep. It is said that the grass will not grow