Frauds such as these force upon every visitor the question how far the Mohammedans themselves believe them. The utter want of earnestness, or anything that to a Western mind bears the resemblance of reality, is painfully evident in the attendants who guide you through the mosque. You are forced to respect its sacredness by purchasing the loan of slippers to cover your boots, and you feel rather like one entering a circus than a place of worship, when you have been transformed into an illuminated caricature by means of one yellow and another red slipper. Your guide, who wears the appearance of a convict in clericals, greatly enjoys your picturesqueness, and makes haste to conduct you to a certain jasper slab into which Mohammed drove nineteen nails of gold (which look, however, indistinguishable from iron). A nail comes out at the end of every epoch, and when all are gone the end of the world will come. One day the devil destroyed all but three and a half of them, when the Angel Gabriel, caught napping for once, stopped the mischief just in time. Here you are invited to lay any coins you may chance to have about you, and assured that if the coin be silver you will save your soul by giving it. As the coins are tabled, the whole body of assistant clergy assembles to count the collection. All this, and much else, is but the inevitable outcome of a worship that gathers round a stone. It is a petrified worship, hard and dead as its sacred rock. Nothing could be more pathetic than a window in El Aksa almost darkened with little rags of clothing hung there by poor folk who come to pray for their sick friends. If Syrian Christianity is corrupt, it is at least not so pitiless as Syrian Mohammedanism. The very aspect and situation of the rival shrines is symbolic. The mosque does not really love men, whether it really believes in God or not. It sits apart in its wide enclosure, while the Church of the Sepulchre is huddled indistinguishably into the thickest pressure of the life of men and women in the city. The church seems, by its rugged and broken outline, to sympathise with the shattered fortunes of the life around it; it is grey and ruinous-looking, as if it had borne man’s sorrows and carried them. The mosque, with all its beauty, seems to sit there like some great sleek sphinx, watching everything, but sharing little and loving none of the misery around it. In this city of ruins there is something repellent about its smooth and self-complacent finish. No, the mosque does not really love men; whether it really believes in itself and its miracles or not is another of the many Mohammedan things which God only knows. CHAPTER V CRUSADER