And all these coloured strata rise so high and roll so far that they might be skies rather than slopes.  It is as if we looked up at a frozen sunset; or a daybreak fixed for ever with its fleeting bars of cloud.  And indeed the fancy is not without a symbolic suggestiveness.  This is the land of eternal things; but we tend too much to forget that recurrent things are eternal things.  We tend to forget that subtle tones and delicate hues, whether in the hills or the heavens, were to the primitive poets and sages as visible as they are to us; and the strong and simple words in which they describe them do not prove that they did not realise them.  When Wordsworth speaks of “the clouds that gather round the setting sun,” we assume that he has seen every shadow of colour and every curve of form; but when the Hebrew poet says “He hath made the clouds his chariot”; we do not always realise that he was full of indescribable emotions aroused by indescribable sights.  We vaguely assume that the very sky was plainer in primitive times.  We feel as if there had been a fashion in sunsets; or as if dawn was always grey in the Stone Age or brown in the Bronze Age.

But there is another parable written in those long lines of many-coloured clay and stone.  Palestine is in every sense a stratified country.  It is not only true in the natural sense, as here where the clay has fallen away and left visible the very ribs of the hills.  It is true in the quarries where men dig, in the dead cities where they excavate, and even in the living cities where they still fight and pray.  The sorrow of all Palestine is that its divisions in culture, politics and theology are like its divisions in geology.  The dividing line is horizontal instead of vertical.  The frontier does not run between states but between stratified layers.  The Jew did not appear beside the Canaanite but on top of the Canaanite; the Greek not beside the Jew but on top of the Jew; the Moslem not beside the Christian but on top of the Christian.  It is not merely a house divided against itself, but one divided across itself.  It is a house in which the first floor is fighting the second floor, in which the basement is oppressed from above and attics are besieged from below.  There is a great deal of gunpowder in the cellars; and people are by no means comfortable even on the roof.  In days of what some call Bolshevism, it may be said that most states are houses in which the kitchen has declared war on the drawing-room.  But this will give no notion of the toppling pagoda of political and religious and racial differences, of which the name is Palestine.  To explain that it is necessary to give the traveller’s first impressions more particularly in their order, and before I return to this view of the society as stratified, I must state the problem more practically as it presents itself while the society still seems fragmentary.