News and Miscellany

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jul 21, 1868

News and Miscellany.

Can ye not discern the Signs of the Times? Matt. xvi, 3.

A recent visitor at Jerusalem gives some of his impressions of that city, as follows: It is cavernous, disagreeable, damp, desolate, and very uninteresting. It abounds in caves and cisterns, aqueducts, and tombs. Creeping into a little fox-hole, just outside the Damascus gate, we wandered for hours through spacious and lofty caverns undermining half the city—the ancient quarries discovered by Dr. Barclay. In Warren's recent excavations we groped through arches and covered ways of Herodian time down to the original rock of Solomon's foundations. You are struck with the incongruity of new and costly modern buildings rising from among the rubbish and decay of the old city, and of no use, except for the pilgrims of all Christendom who watch with jealous care their respective rights in the Holy City, and are kept from biting and devouring one another by the sabre of the Turks.

There are great empty places of desolation within the walls. Just inside the Drug gate I saw Jerusalem ploughed as a field, and got lost in the great cactus wilderness of the Typorean valley, just where that magnificent causeway of Dr. Robinson's arch once connected Mount Zion with the Temple. Stumbling over dead dogs and garbage up the steep of Zion, I was run at by a cow who was just about tossing me on her horns when the herdsman came to my defense. And then going out of Zion gate I had to run the gauntlet of the lepers who there do congregate, whining horribly, and stretching out their shapeless stumps.