One of the biggest blots upon the Turkish government of the City was the total failure to provide an adequate water supply.  What they could not, or would not, do in their rule of four hundred years His Majesty’s Royal Engineers accomplished in a little more than two months, and now for the first time in history every civilian in Jerusalem can obtain as much pure mountain spring water as he wishes, and for this water, as fresh and bright as any bubbling out of Welsh hills, not a penny is charged.  The picturesque, though usually unclean, water carrier is passing into the limbo of forgotten things, and his energies are being diverted into other channels.  The germs that swarmed in his leathern water bags will no longer endanger the lives of the citizens, and the deadly perils of stagnant cistern water have been to a large extent removed.

For its water Jerusalem used to rely mainly upon the winter rainfall to fill its cisterns.  Practically every house has its underground reservoir, and it is estimated that if all were full they would contain about 360,000,000 gallons.  But many had fallen into disrepair and most, if not the whole of them, required thorough cleansing.  One which was inspected by our sanitary department had not been emptied for nineteen years.  To supplement the cistern supply the Mosque of Omar reservoir halved with Bethlehem the water which flowed from near Solomon’s Pools down an aqueduct constructed by Roman engineers under Herod before the Saviour was born.  This was not nearly sufficient, nor was it so constant a supply as that provided by our Army engineers.  They went farther afield.  They found a group of spring-heads in an absolutely clean gathering ground on the hills yielding some 14,000 gallons an hour, and this water which was running to waste is lifted to the top of a hill from which it flows by gravity through a long pipe-line to Jerusalem, where a reservoir has been built on a high point on the outskirts of the city.  Supplies of this beautiful water run direct to the hospitals, and at standpipes all over the city the inhabitants take as much as they desire.  The water consumption of the people became ten times what it was in the previous year, and this fact alone told how the boon was appreciated.

The scheme did not stop at putting up standpipes for those who fetched the water.  A portion of the contents of the cisterns was taken for watering troop horses in the spring—­troops were not allowed to drink it.  The water level of these cisterns became very low, and as they got emptied the authorities arranged for refilling them on the one condition that they were first thoroughly cleansed and put in order.  The British administration would not be parties to the perpetuation of a system which permitted the fouling of good crystal water.  A householder had merely to apply to the Military Governor for water, and a sanitary officer inspected the cistern, ordered it to be cleansed, and saw that this was done; then the Department of Public Health gave its certificate, and the engineers ran a pipe to the cistern and filled it, no matter what its capacity.  Two cisterns were replenished with between 60,000 and 70,000 gallons of sparkling water from the hills in place of water heavily charged with the accumulation of summer dust on roofs, and the dust of Jerusalem roads, as we had sampled it, is not as clean as desert sand.