What They Call The Tomb Is Now A
Crumbling Old Mosque; From Which Jew And Christian Are Excluded
Alike.
As I saw it, blazing in the sunshine, with the purple sky
behind it, the glare only served to mark the surrounding desolation
more clearly.
The lonely walls and towers of the city rose hard
by. Dreary mountains, and declivities of naked stones, were round
about: they are burrowed with holes in which Christian hermits
lived and died. You see one green place far down in the valley:
it is called En Rogel. Adonijah feasted there, who was killed by
his brother Solomon, for asking for Abishag for wife. The Valley
of Hinnom skirts the hill: the dismal ravine was a fruitful garden
once. Ahaz, and the idolatrous kings, sacrificed to idols under
the green trees there, and "caused their children to pass through
the fire." On the mountain opposite, Solomon, with the thousand
women of his harem, worshipped the gods of all their nations,
"Ashtoreth," and "Milcom, and Molech, the abomination of the
Ammonites." An enormous charnel-house stands on the hill where the
bodies of dead pilgrims used to be thrown; and common belief has
fixed upon this spot as the Aceldama, which Judas purchased with
the price of his treason. Thus you go on from one gloomy place to
another, each seared with its bloody tradition. Yonder is the
Temple, and you think of Titus's soldiery storming its flaming
porches, and entering the city, in the savage defence of which two
million human souls perished.
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