LII. NEIGHBORHOOD OF JERUSALEM. JERUSALEM, March 8, 1868. FROM the summit of Olivet (as indeed from Jerusalem it self) the great level wall of the mountains of Moab bounds the eastern prospect with its tender blue. The Dead Sea shows itself, seemingly not five miles distant (it is about fifteen), with the Jordan, now swollen and overflowing in marshes, at the northern end of the Lake of Asphaltum. The tremendous gash of the Jordan valley is very impressive from this point, and deepens the conviction that this region is unlike any other in the world in its geological structure. But of this I shall have occasion to speak more definitely after a visit to the Dead Sea and the Jordan valley. A ride down the valley of Hinnom to its juncture with the valley of Jehoshaphat, and then up the valley of the Kedron, gave me an excellent idea of the different feelings with which these two ravines were regarded by the Jews. Hinnom is narrower, darker and more rugged than Jehoshaphat. Moreover, you can neither see it from the city, nor the city from Hinnom. Doubtless David's wall, and perhaps Herod's, extended to its brink, according to the notions of fortification which prevailed in those days, and then Hinnom and Jehoshaphat must have furnished inexpugnable defenses on the east and south. But even when the wall came up to the brink of Hinnom it could hardly have been penetrated by the eye, on account of its peculiar angles, even from the city wall. Pools of Siloam and Bethesda. 281 Jehoshaphat, deep as it is, always lay open to the view, bright with the light of the sun, which lies in it much of the day. Even the tombs do not give it a sad look. Hinnom was a most suitable place to build the fires in that consumed the offal and waste of the city. Even to-day I found what seemed rag-pickers and ashmen at work in its secluded depths. No wonder that it was called Gehenna, and that Aceldama should have been situated at its extreme point. Following up Jehoshaphat, we came opposite to the little village of Siloam, which is high on the hill-side, southeast from the temple corner of the city wall. It has a bad name, and is avoided as a haunt of robbers and reprobates. Beneath it, but on the other side of the valley, is the pool of Siloam, a rectangular cistern of about eighteen feet long, and seven broad, and seven deep, which is apparently supplied from a canal coming from a reservoir still higher up, and known as the fountain of the Virgin. These two pools are often confounded. The last is reached by a deep staircase of stone cut in the natural rock, and only after going down some twenty steps into a place almost too dark to see the water, I found two native girls filling their skin bottles there. Robinson thinks this is the pool of Bethesda. The pool is intermittent at various hours of the day, like many other fountains affected by the principle of the syphon. It is supposed to be supplied from a native spring under the Mosque of Omar, toward which a subterraneous aqueduct, it is said, has been traced to the city wall, about six hundred yards distant. This intermission might explain the popular idea that the water was troubled by an angel at certain times; and the difficulty of reaching the pool, thirty feet below the surface, and dark at that, would sufficiently account for the difficulty the impotent man found in getting to the water before others had crowded the narrow space it occupies. The pool of Siloam shares the intermis sions of the pool of the Virgin. The lily still grows in profusion near it. "By cool Siloam's shady rill, how fair the lily grows!" In regard to the history of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, I may state that Constantine erected a church on this assumed site of Christ's tomb about 335 A.D. That church was destroyed by the Persian King, Chosroes II., in 614. A monk, through the intercession of this monarch's wife, who was a Christian, was permitted to rebuild, from Christian of ferings, Constantine's church, or, at any rate, to cover with four different edifices the four holy places then specially honored. The Caliph Omar respected these monuments when he took Jerusalem in 637, but they were overthrown by the Caliph Hakem, the pitiless bigot, who has made his name equally hateful to Moslem and Christian, in 1010 A.D. The ruins were patched up and restored by the Emperor Monomacus in 1048, and the four buildings were afterward united in one by the Crusaders in 1130 A.D., in the style which, without essential modification, remains to our day, excepting the injuries done in a terrible fire which destroyed some portions of the church in 1808. TRADITIONS OF CHRIST'S TOMB. It is useless to discuss within my narrow limits the question of the genuineness of the traditions connected with the situation of Christ's tomb and of Golgotha. Suffice it to say, there is no testimony whatsoever which is earlier than that of Eusebius in 335 A.D. in favor of the assumed sites, and his testimony only shows that Constantine had selected these places without giving the grounds of his choice. Meanwhile there is abundance of proof that in the first two centuries there existed no sentimental interest among Chris Much Smoke-Some Fire. 283 tians in respect to the precise places and times of the events connected with the origin of their faith. They felt its spiritual power too much to have occasion for the artificial stimulus which comes from observing times and seasons, and honoring places, and they were too much despised, persecuted, and driven about, to have time to think about such matters. The tides of war which swept over Jerusalem obliterated whatever recollections existed at the downfall of the city, of special localities, about which, indeed, no special interest was felt. One might almost say with certainty that the site of the ruling tradition is not the real one. It neither is without the city, now that the walls have shrunk so much, much less was so at the time of the crucifixion. Those who have had occasion to investigate historical sites not a hundred years old, must have discovered how soon they become involved in doubt. Even many of the scenes connected with the American Revolution are already blurred and illegible. There is scarcely a considerable town that does not claim to have a house which was once the head-quarters of Washington, who certainly never slept in a tenth part of them, but they are none the less believed in for that. It is not surprising that in nearly nineteen centuries almost every definite trace of Christ's footsteps should have been trodden out of the fine dust of seventeen times besieged, rebuilt, and re-ruined Jerusalem. But his great presence none the less fills the place. It is because he lived and labored here, died and rose and ascended here, that Jerusalem has been the object of such bitter assaults, and that three different faiths, the Jews, the Christians, and the Moslems, have united in making it their Holy of Holies, and have torn it in pieces in contending for supremacy over it. Jerusalem, wrapped in its enormous cloud of tradition, is itself a vast monument to the reality of the faith which has heaped up such a mountain of ashes in its burning. Like Vesuvius burying cities beneath the scoriæ of its eruptions, the inexhaustible fire of the Gospel has desolated the places near its source and made the lines of its early action untraceable. But no one can any more doubt that events of world-wide and wholly exceptional character, such events as the Christian records attest, have occurred here, than one could question the existence of volcanic fire in Vesuvius long before Pompeii, because its successive eruptions keep obliterating and covering up their own anterior traces. But I must hurry on to some brief account of the Mosque of Omar, on the site of the old Temple. King Solomon, about a thousand years before the birth of Christ, built the first temple on Mount Moriah, which his father David had bought of Araunah for six hundred shekels of gold. This temple lasted 423 years, and was destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar. The second temple was built about 524 years B.C., on the return from the captivity, but fell into decay during the two centuries before Christ, and was rebuilt by Herod in forty-six years in great magnificence. Josephus gives us a vivid description of the Temple, which must have surpassed in splendor any thing now existing in architecture. It was standing in Christ's time, and was wholly destroyed by Titus about 70. A.D. With this prelude we may look at the present ground. In an enclosure-a parallelogram-of about thirty acres, two sides of which are the walls of the city, starting at the south-east corner, we find ourselves ascending by one of several flights of steps on its four sides, a green terrace which is nearly level, and considerable parts of which are the surface of the native rock of Moriah. The borders of this park, which, like every thing Turkish, is much neglected, are occupied by the governor's house and by officers of the government, by schools and by a blind asylum, all |