At last the two mountains more and the two go-downs were performed, and George was informed that the wall he saw rising sharp from the rocky ground was Jerusalem. There is something very peculiar in the first appearance of a walled city that has no suburbs or extramural adjuncts. It is like that of a fortress of cards built craftily on a table. With us in England it is always difficult to say where the country ends and where the town begins; and even with the walled towns of the Continent, one rarely comes upon them so as to see the sharp angles of a gray stone wall shining in the sun, as they do in the old pictures of the cities in "Pilgrim's Progress." But so it is with Jerusalem. One rides up to the gate feeling that one is still in the desert; and yet a moment more, with the permission of those very dirty-looking Turkish soldiers at the gate, will place one in the city. One rides up to the gate, and as every one now has a matured opinion as to the taking of casemated batteries and the inefficiency of granite bastions, one's first idea is how delightfully easy it would be to take Jerusalem. It is at any rate easy enough to enter it, for the dirty Turkish soldiers do not even look at you, and you soon become pleasantly aware that you are beyond the region of passports. George Bertram had promised himself that the moment in which he first saw Jerusalem should be one of intense mental interest; and when, riding away from the orange gardens at Jaffa, he had endeavoured to urge his Arab steed into that enduring gallop which was to carry him up to the city of the sepulchre, his heart was ready to melt into ecstatic pathos as soon as that gallop should have been achieved. But the time for ecstatic pathos had altogether passed away before he rode in at that portal. He was then swearing vehemently at his floundering jade, and giving up to all the fiends of Tartarus the accursed saddle which had been specially contrived with the view of lacerating the nether Christian man. "Where on earth is this d---- hotel?" said he, when he and his dragoman and portmanteau had been floundering for about five minutes down a steep, narrow, ill-paved lane, with a half-formed gully in the middle, very slippery with orange-peel and old vegetables, and crowded with the turbans of all the Eastern races. "Do you call this a street?" After all his sentiment, all his emotions, all his pious resolves, it was thus that our hero entered Jerusalem! But what piety can withstand the wear and tear of twelve hours in a Turkish saddle?