Rensselaer Republican, Volume 22, Number 28, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 13 March 1890 — ANCIENT JERUSALEM. [ARTICLE]

ANCIENT JERUSALEM.

. . ■ —i ■ 1 - Interesting Things Concerning the Quaint Old City. Sitting as I am upon the site of King David’s palaee, I see the whole city spread out below me.. What a curious city it is! In my tour of the world I have found no place so full of strange sights, of picturesque characters, and

so different in every particular Ironq every other part of the civilized world, historical associations, Jerusalem today is a city of itself. Forty thousand people are packed within its narrow walls, and it looks more like a great honeycomb than a city. The bouses are piled one upon another in all sorts' of irregularities, and if you would take a half-section of land and scatter over, the whole great piles of gigantic store boxes, just as you find them back of a store, you would getsome idea of Jerusalem as it looks to me from Mount ZiOn. These houses have no chimneys, and their stone roofs are in every ease almost flat Many ot them have little bee-hive domes jutting out ot their, center, and if the town were on a level these domes would look like the haycocks of a great meadow at time of harvest. Yellow limestone is the material of Jerusalem. The wood used in the building of the whole city would not last an American family a winter, and the roofs, walls and floors of these thousands of houses are of cold, yeUowish-white limestone. Even in the bishop’s mansion, which is one of the finest in the city, I get out of my bed onto a stone floor, and I walk to my breakfast thro’ stone halls, down stone steps.

There are no wells in this city of Jerusalem. All of the water comes down in rain, and the trees and gardens of the town can be numbered on your fingers. The hills about the city are almost as barren as those of New England, and the only foliage visible is the dark, silvery green of the olive orchards on the Mount of Olives and along the hills between Jaffa and Bethlehem. The only green to be seen is an acre of common inside the walls of the temple plateau, and here and there a house top which by' age has gathered a coating of dirt from the dust of the city, and on which the green grass has sprouted. Here and there you see ruined arches which are too dangerous to be inhabited by the bees of this human hive, and on these the moss and grass grow. There is one green, bushy, tree at the base of Mount Calvary, and a solitary palm looks out over the city beside the business street named after King David. It is hot an attractive looking town, andits glaring cream white makes sore the eyes under the rays of this tropical sun. F. G. Carpenter.