The Literary Echo

Jerusalem.

The country immediately around Jerusalem, especially in the west and north, is the most dreary, barren waste that I ever beheld. It seems overlaid with immense masses of rocks and stones, with scarcely soil enough to allow anything to take root and grow. The city itself, once beyond a doubt, the most magnificent and splendid on earth, now presents only a melancholy contrast to its former greatness and glory. You cannot walk about Zion, and go around about her, as of old, and tell the towers thereof, mark her bulwarks, and consider her palaces. The city sits solitary and forlorn; forsaken of God, and evidently lying under his curse. All who have been in Jerusalem must have felt this. The inhabitants few, and with the exception of the Turks—if, indeed, they are an exception—poor, oppressed, and extremely miserable. No suburbs, no surrounding busy population, none of the stir and activity of enterprising life is to be witnessed, but only one rude scene of melancholy waste, in the midst of which the ancient glory of Judea bows her widowed head in desolation. A few goats and sheep, straggling about the rocks which overhang the shattered remains of the village of Siloam; a few swarthy shepherds, plying their listless occupation; with here and there a fierce, armed Bedouin from the surrounding deserts and mountain fastnesses, and now and then a cowled monk or wandering pilgrim steals in upon the picture; and except it be the sound of the muezzin from the minarets, proclaiming the hour of prayer to the followers of the false prophet, you may sit on the hill slopes, on either side, for an hour together, and not hear the vibration of a human voice from the spot, which once echoed to the strains of sacred song, and royal triumph, and national glory, and the busy din and tumult of 2,000,000 of people.

—Journeys in Palestine.