THE GROUPS OF THE CITY Palestine is a striped country; that is the first effect of landscape on the eye.

It runs in great parallel lines wavering into vast hills and valleys, but preserving the parallel pattern; as if drawn boldly but accurately with gigantic chalks of green and grey and red and yellow.
The natural explanation or (to speak less foolishly) the natural process of this is simple enough.

The stripes are the strata of the rock, only they are stripped by the great rains, so that everything has to grow on ledges, repeating yet again that terraced character to be seen in the vineyards and the staircase streets of the town.
But though the cause is in a sense in the ruinous strength of the rain, the hues are not the dreary hues of ruin.

What earth there is is commonly a red clay richer than that of Devon; a red clay of which it would be easy to believe that the giant limbs of the first man were made.
What grass there is is not only an enamel of emerald, but is literally crowded with those crimson anemones which might well have called forth the great saying touching Solomon in all his glory.
And even what rock there is is coloured with a thousand secondary and tertiary tints, as are the walls and streets of the Holy City which is built from the quarries of these hills.

For the old stones of the old Jerusalem are as precious as the precious stones of the New Jerusalem; and at certain moments of morning or of sunset, every pebble might be a pearl.
And all these coloured strata rise so high and roll so far that they might be skies rather than slopes.