or the great Arabian city or even the conversion of St. Paul.
I thought of my own little house in Buckinghamshire, and how the edge
of the country town where it stands is called Aylesbury End,
merely because it is the corner nearest to Aylesbury.
That is what I mean by saying that these ancient customs are more
rational and even utilitarian than the fashions of modernity.
When a street in a new suburb is called Pretoria Avenue, the clerk
living there does not set out from his villa with the cheerful hope
of finding the road lead him to Pretoria. But the man leaving
Aylesbury End does know it would lead him to Aylesbury; and the man
going out at the Damascus Gate did know it would lead him to Damascus.
And the same is true of the next and last of the old entrances,
the Jaffa Gate in the east; but when I saw that I saw something
else as well.

I have heard that there is a low doorway at the entrance to a famous
shrine which is called the Gate of Humility; but indeed in this sense
all gates are gates of humility, and especially gates of this kind.
Any one who has ever looked at a landscape under an archway
will know what I mean, when I say that it sharpens a pleasure
with a strange sentiment of privilege. It adds to the grace
of distance something that makes it not only a grace but a gift.
Such are the visions of remote places that appear in the low gateways
of a Gothic town; as if each gateway led into a separate world;
and almost as if each dome of sky were a different chamber.
But he who walks round the walls of this city in this spirit will come
suddenly upon an exception which will surprise him like an earthquake.
It looks indeed rather like something done by an earthquake;
an earthquake with a half-witted sense of humour. Immediately at
the side of one of these humble and human gateways there is a great gap