Evening Republican, Volume 22, Number 102, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 May 1919 — TO THE HOLY CITY [ARTICLE]

TO THE HOLY CITY

Sacred Road Filled With Crowds of Refugees. .'I, - - - Scenes Brought About by Modern Warfare in Sharp Comparison With Those Which Met the Eyes of the Magi. Beyond Bethlehem the once narrow camel road over which the Magi had come broadened into a Musty highway land began tn fill with a throng of people going to and from the Holy City, writes John H. Finley In “From Beersheba,” in Scribner’s. The refugees from Jericho, encamped in the field opposite the. tomb of Rachel, were rising frowzled from their nomad beds. Lorries and ambulances were starting from camps at the roadside for the hellish places- from which, these refugees had fled, down where the British forces were holding their trenches awaiting the day of advance. A battalion of Anzac cavalry was passing in the opposite direction for its period of rest after the night’s riding. Indian lancers and Indian infantrymen, picturesque even in khaki, looked and knelt toward the dawn and their own Himalayas.. Trains of camels from somewhere bore their compact loads that might be myrrh or the daily manna for the troops. Hundreds of donkeys. “Allenby’s wtiite mice,” went pattering along. Airplanes were mounting and circling with their hum, to scout or perhaps to bomb the hills toward Shechem. Barefoot women with vari-colorcd burdens on their heads walked with all the stateliness of queens toward the city of peace—the city of peace amid shepherds 1 fields, now become munition magazines, which were daily augmented by what the trains brought up from Egypt, and daily diminished by what the trains toward the front were carrying northward for the redemption of Samaria and Galilee, the ancient land of the tribes of Benjamin hnd Ephraim and Manasseh and. Issachar and Zebulon land Asher and Naphtali and Dan —Dan, which I would yet reach — but ,that is another story. \ For the day I’was content to stop at thq mount within the walls of Jerusalem, where Abraham, ended his sacrificial journey, fire and knife in hand; the mount whose topmost rock was regarded as the center of the world, the “stone of foundation,” on which the ark of the covenant once rested ; the mount from w’hich Mohammed is said to have ascended on his miraculous steed; the mount over whose edges the orthodox Jew does not dare to venture lest he tread upon the “Holy of Holies.” but walls at the wall of lamentation without; the mount at whose verge the Christ was crucified and buried, and from whose rock-hewn tomb he rose. It seems indeed the “center of the world,” and over it all, as I saw it that morning, the tower of ascension stood on the Mount of Olives against the sunrise.