De Quincey mentions one of them in the blow that half broke the Palladium of Byzantium.
It is said that the Moslems themselves predict the entry of a Christian king of Jerusalem through the Golden Gate.
Perhaps that is why they have blocked up the fatal gate; but in any case they dealt in that fashion with the fatal tree.
They elaborately bound and riveted it with iron, as if accepting the popular prophecy which declared that so long as it stood the Turkish Empire would stand.

It was as if the wicked man of Scripture had daily watered a green bay-tree, to make sure that it should flourish.
In the last chapter I have attempted to suggest a background of the battlemented walls with the low gates and narrow windows which seem to relieve the liveliest of the coloured groups against the neutral tints of the North, and how this was intensified when the neutral tints were touched with the positive hue of snow.
In the same merely impressionist spirit I would here attempt to sketch some of the externals of the actors in such a scene, though it is hard to do justice to such a picture even in the superficial matter of the picturesque.

Indeed it is hard to be sufficiently superficial; for in the East nearly every external is a symbol.
The greater part of it is the gorgeous rag-heap of Arabian humanity, and even about that one could lecture on almost every coloured rag.
We hear much of the gaudy colours of the East; but the most striking thing about them is that they are delicate colours.
It is rare to see a red that is merely like a pillar-box, or a blue that is Reckitt's blue; the red is sure to have the enrichment of tawny wine or blood oranges, and the blue of peacocks or the sea.
In short these people are artistic in the sense that used to be called aesthetic; and it is a nameless instinct that preserves these nameless tints.

Like all such instincts, it can be blunted by a bullying rationalism; like all such children, these people do not know why they prefer the better, and can therefore be persuaded by sophists that they prefer the worst.
But there are other elements emerging from the coloured crowd, which are more significant, and therefore more stubborn.
A stranger entirely ignorant of that world would feel something like a chill to the blood when he first saw the black figures of the veiled Moslem women, sinister figures without faces.
It is as if in that world every woman were a widow.

When he realised that these were not the masked mutes at a very grisly funeral, but merely ladies literally obeying a convention of wearing veils in public, he would probably have a reaction of laughter.
He would be disposed to say flippantly that it must be, a dull life, not only for the women but the men; and that a man might well want five wives if he had to marry them before he could even look at them.
But he will be wise not to be satisfied with such flippancy, for the complete veiling of the Moslem women of Jerusalem, though not a finer thing than the freedom of the Christian woman of Bethlehem, is almost certainly a finer thing than the more coquettish compromise of the other Moslem women of Cairo.
It simply means that the Moslem religion is here more sincerely observed; and this in turn is part of something that a sympathetic person will soon feel in Jerusalem, if he has come from these more commercial cities of the East; a spiritual tone decidedly more delicate and dignified, like the clear air about the mountain city.
Whatever the human vices involved, it is not altogether for nothing that this is the holy town of three great religions.
When all is said, he will feel that there are some tricks that could not be played, some trades that could not be plied, some shops that could not be opened, within a stone's throw of the Sepulchre.
This indefinable seriousness has its own fantasies of fanaticism or formalism; but if these are vices they are not vulgarities.
There is no stronger example of this than the real Jews of Jerusalem, especially those from the ghettoes of eastern Europe.
They can be immediately picked out by the peculiar wisps of hair worn on each side of the face, like something between curls and whiskers.
Sometimes they look strangely effeminate, like some rococo burlesque of the ringlets of an Early Victorian woman.
Sometimes they look considerably more like the horns of a devil; and one need not be an Anti-Semite to say that the face is often made to match.