CHAPTER VII.

WITHIN THE WALLS.

WITHIN the walls, Jerusalem is among the most picturesque of cities. It is very small. You can walk quite round it in less than an hour. There are only some seventeen thousand inhabitants, of whom nearly half are Jews. The material of the city is a cheerful stone, and so massively are the lofty, blind house walls laid, that, in pacing the more solitary streets, you seem to be threading the mazes of a huge fortress. Often the houses extend over the street, which winds under them in dark archways, and where there are no overhanging buildings, there are often supports of masonry thrown across from house to house. There are no windows upon the street, except a few picturesque, projecting lattices.

Jerusalem is an utter ruin. The houses, so fair in seeming, are often all crumbled away upon the

The

interior. The arches are shattered, and vines and flowers wave and bloom down all the vistas. streets are never straight for fifty rods; but climb and wind with broken steps, and the bold buildings thrust out buttressed corners, graced with luxuriant growths, and arched with niches for statue and fountain. It is a mass of "beautiful bits," as artists say. And you will see no fairer sight in the world than the groups of brilliantly-draped Orientals emerging into the sun, from the vine-fringed darkness of the arched ways.

Follow them as they silently pass, accompanied by the slave who bears the chibouque. Follow, if it is noon, for soon you will hear the cry to prayer, and they are going to the mosque of Omar.

There are minarets in Egypt so beautiful, that, when completed, the Sultan ordered the right-hand of the architect to be struck off, that he might not repeat the work for any one else. They are, indeed, beautiful; yet, if their grace cost but a hand, the beauty of this mosque were worth a head.

The mosque of Omar occupies the site of Solomon's temple, about an eighth of the area of the whole city. It is the most beautiful object in Jerusalem, and the most graceful building in the East. It is not massive or magnificent; but the dome, bulbous, like all oriental domes, is so aerial

and elegant, that the eye lingers to see it float away or dissolve in the ardent noon.

The mosque of Omar is octagonal in form, and built of bluish-white marble; over the sacred stone on which Jacob dreamed, and whence Mohammad ascended to heaven. It is one of the two temples of the Muslim faith, that of Mecca being the other. These temples are consecrated by the peculiar presence of the Prophet, and are only accessible to true believers. Ordinary mosques are merely places of worship, and are accessible to unbelievers, subject only to the stupid intolerance of the faithful.

The beautiful building stands within a spacious inclosure of green lawn and arcades. Olive, orange and cypress trees grow around the court, which, in good sooth, is "a little heaven below," for the Muslim, who lie dreaming in the soft shade, from morning to night. It is a foretaste of Paradise, in kind, excepting the houris. For, although the mosques are not forbidden to women, Mohammad said it would be better for them to have prayers read by eunuchs in their own apartments.

In the picturesque gloom and brightness of the city, the mosque is a dream of heaven also, even to the unbelievers.

There are many entrances, and as you saunter under the dark archways of the streets, and look

suddenly up a long, dim arcade, upon the side, you perceive, closing the vista, the sunny green of the mosque grounds, and feel the warm air stealing outward from its silence, and see the men and women and children praying under the trees.

Or at sunset, groups of reverend Muslim pass down the narrow street, returning from prayer, looking like those Jewish Doctors, who, in the old pictures, haunt the temple on this very site.

It is an "amiable Tabernacle" that you behold. You feel how kindly, how cognate to the affections of piety are the silence and freedom of this temple, its unaffected sobriety, the sunny spaces upon marble terraces, and the rich gloom of orange darkness in which the young children play and the fountains sing, so that no place on earth is so lovely to those children, and so much desired.

The sagacity of the Roman Church aimed at gratifying this instinctive requirement in religious associations, of an atmosphere of beauty, by its patronage of Art. In place of this cypress darkness, it has the dimness of coloured glass; for these blowing roses, it spreads muslin flowers upon its altars; for these bars of sunshine, it parades gold. Thus its churches have the aspect of eternal summer and twilight; and thus flowers, the symbol of the perfection of external nature, serve but

as ornaments in the worship of the Creator, while the twilight hushes and subdues the mind into religious reverie.

You know not how long you thus stand, in pleasant thought, looking down the dim arcade, to that golden green. But if your steps obey your wish and lead you toward the gate, some grisly and grim old negro steps athwart the sun, and brandishes his club about your head, heaping such scornful curses upon it, that you remember with savage satisfaction the Crusaders riding breast deep in Muslim gore within those very precincts : but, for the same reason, you do not much wonder at the surliness, and clubs, and curses of the old negro.

One day as I stood looking in with great longing, and wondering whether the green, jasper door of Paradise, which is in the mosque, was indeed so beautiful as the poets tell those sitters in the sun, I wished that I had been Sir John Mandeville, Knight, or eke one of his "Companye." For he says:

"I came in there and in othere places where I wolde ; for I hadde lettres of the Soudan, with his grete seel; and commonly other men have but his signett. In the whiche lettres he commanded of his specyalle grace to all his subgettes, to