I do not forget, of course, that all these visible walls and towers are but the battlements and pinnacles of a buried city, or of many buried cities.  I do not forget that such buildings have foundations that are to us almost like fossils; the gigantic fossils of some other geological epoch.  Something may be said later of those lost empires whose very masterpieces are to us like petrified monsters.  From this height, after long histories unrecorded, fell the forgotten idol of the Jebusites, on that day when David’s javelin-men scaled the citadel and carried through it, in darkness behind his coloured curtains, the god whose image had never been made by man.  Here was waged that endless war between the graven gods of the plain and the invisible god of the mountain; from here the hosts carrying the sacred fish of the Philistines were driven back to the sea from which their worship came.  Those who worshipped on this hill had come out of bondage in Egypt and went into bondage in Babylon; small as was their country, there passed before them almost the whole pageant of the old pagan world.  All its strange shapes and strong almost cruel colours remain in the records of their prophets; whose lightest phrase seems heavier than the pyramids of Egypt; and whose very words are like winged bulls walking.  All this historic or pre-historic interest may be touched on in its turn; but I am not dealing here with the historic secrets unearthed by the study of the place, but with the historic associations aroused by the sight of it.  The traveller is in the position of that famous fantastic who tied his horse to a wayside cross in the snow, and afterward saw it dangling from the church-spire of what had been a buried city.  But here the cross does not stand as it does on the top of a spire; but as it does on the top of an Egyptian obelisk in Rome,—­ where the priests have put a cross on the top of the heathen monument; for fear it should walk.  I entirely sympathise with their sentiment; and I shall try to suggest later why I think that symbol the logical culmination of heathen as well as Christian things.  The traveller in the traveller’s tale looked up at last and saw, from the streets far below, the spire and cross dominating a Gothic city.  If I looked up in a vision and saw it dominating a Babylonian city, that blocked the heavens with monstrous palaces and temples, I should still think it natural that it should dominate.  But the point here is that what I saw above ground was rather the Gothic town than the Babylonian; and that it reminded me, if not specially of the cross, at least of the soldiers who took the cross.