THE CITY OF JERUSALEM.

Evening Post, Volume L, Issue 42, 17 August 1895, Page 1 (Supplement)

THE CITY OF JERUSALEM.

Jerusalem is a city of surprises. It is, apart from its sacred associations, an intensely interesting spot, even to travellers who are already satiated with the hitherto unfamiliar and surprising charms of Cairo, Athens, and Constantinople. Its size can best be expressed by the statement that the journey round about its walls may be made by an ordinarily rapid walker in the space of an hour. Its houses are small, irregular in shape, squalid, and mean. Its streets, if streets they can be called, are not named or numbered ; they are steep, crooked, narrow, roughly paved, never cleaned, and, in many instances, they are vaulted over by the buildings on each side of them. Never a pair of wheels traverse them, and rarely is a horse or donkey seen within the walls. The haft, the maimed, and the blind, the leprouß, and the wretchedly poor, form the great bulk of the people of Jerusalem, and, with the single exception of the Hebrews, they are porsistent and clamorous beggars. Trade and commerce seem to be confined to the bare necessities of life, and to dealers in beads and crucifixes. There is but one hotel, and that not a good hotel, within its walls; and one Turkish merchant, who displays in his little windowless, doorless shop a small assortment of silver charms, trinkets, and bric-d-brac to the gaze of the passer-by, is almost the only vendor of anything like luxuries in the place. His customers, of course, are the pilgrims who come to see, and not to worship. — Harper's Magazine.