But I fancy there is much less of it than is commonly supposed in the reaction from such an ideal.
It does not, like Cairo, offer the exciting experience of twenty guides fighting for one traveller; of young Turks drinking American cocktails as a protest against Christian wine.

The town is quite inconvenient enough to make it a decent place for pilgrims.
Or a stranger might have imagined a place even less Western than Cairo, one of those villages of Palestine described in dusty old books of Biblical research.

He might remember drawings like diagrams representing a well or a wine-press, rather a dry well, so to speak, and a wine-press very difficult to associate with wine.

These hard colourless outlines never did justice to the colour of the East, but even to give it the colour of the East would not do justice to Jerusalem.
If I had anticipated the Bagdad of all our dreams, a maze of bazaars glowing with gorgeous wares, I should have been wrong again.
There is quite enough of this vivid and varied colour in Jerusalem, but it is not the first fact that arrests the attention, and certainly not the first that arrested mine.

I give my own first impression as a fact, for what it is worth and exactly as it came.
I did not expect it, and it was some time before I even understood it.
As soon as I was walking inside the walls of Jerusalem, I had an overwhelming impression that I was walking in the town of Rye, where it looks across the flat sea-meadows towards Winchelsea.
As I tried to explain this eccentric sentiment to myself, I was conscious of another which at once completed and contradicted it.
It was not only like a memory of Rye, it was mixed with a memory of the Mount St.Michael, which stands among the sands of Normandy on the other side of the narrow seas.