A high battlemented wall encompasses the modern city. It runs for half a mile along the brow of the Kidron valley, facing Olivet, then turns at right angles and zigzags across Moriah, the Tyropean, and Zion, to the brow of Hinnom. The whole circuit is two miles and a half. The city was always fortified, and the walls and towers formed its most prominent features. Hence the language of the exulting Psalmist: "Walk about Zion, and go round about her: tell the towers thereof, mark ye well her bulwarks."

Jerusalem has no suburbs. There is no shading off of the city into the country—no long streets radiating from a centre, then straggling houses, and villas, and gardens, such as we are accustomed to see in English towns. The moment you pass the gates of Jerusalem you are in the country, —a country open, bare, without a single house, and almost desolate. Not a green spot is visible, and not a tree, save here and there a little clump of gnarled, dusky olives. Rounded hill-tops, and long reaches of plain, strown with heaps of gray limestone, extend from the walls far away to the north and to the south. There is no grandeur, beauty, or richness in the scenery. It is bleak and featureless.

Hence the sad disappointment felt by most travellers on approaching Jerusalem from the west and the south. They can only see the serrated line of gray Saracenic walls extending across a section of a bleak, rocky plateau. But when I stood that morning on the brow of Olivet, and looked down on the city, crowning those battlemented heights, encircled by those deep and dark ravines, and when the rising sun bathed in a flood of ruddy light the terraced roofs of the city, I involuntarily exclaimed, —"Beautiful for situation, the joy of the whole earth, is Mount Zion, the city of the great King!"