Jerusalem is a city of contrasts, and differs widely from Damascus, not merely because it is a stone town in mountains, whilst the latter is a mud city in a plain, but because, while in Damascus Moslem religion and Oriental custom are unmixed with any foreign element, in Jerusalem every form of religion, every nationality of East and West, is represented at one time.
Jerusalem is quite a small town, the circumference of its walls being only two miles and three-quarters; yet within this space it contains a population of 20,000 souls. Ten sects or religions are established in it, and, if their various sub-divisions are counted, they amount to a total of twenty-four, more than half of which are Christian. Prophets and visionaries of no particular sect are also not wanting at any time in the Holy City.
Jerusalem is a very ugly city. It is badly built of mean stone houses perched on the slope of the watershed, and seems in constant danger of sliding into the Kedron Valley. Beautiful bits of architecture are to be admired in its interior--the Gothic façade of the Holy Sepulchre, the grand walls of the Temple, the glowing interior of the mosque; the view towards the east is also very fine, a long wall of far-off mountains, with a foreground of embattled parapets and slender minarets standing out against the distance. Yet, with all this, the city as a whole is not beautiful; its flat-roofed houses and dirty lanes are neither pleasing nor healthy, and the surrounding chalk hills are barren and shapeless. Shechem is a fine well-watered city. Damascus is bedded in gardens, and bristles with minarets, but there is nothing in the site or architecture of Jerusalem, as a whole, which can save it from the imputation of ugliness.
Going down David Street and through the fruit bazaar, with its background of arches, wooden balconies, marble portals brown with age, and fragments of Crusading architecture, you come at length through a bye-lane to the Jews' wailing-place--a narrow street with the high Temple rampart rising on the east. All along the narrow court the Jews are crowded on Friday. The scene is striking from the great size and strength of the mighty stones, which rise without door or window up to the domes and cypresses above, suggesting how utterly the original worshippers are cast out, by men of alien race and faith, as they here congregate to bewail "our people that are wanderers, our priests that are defiled, our Temple that is cast down.â