I did not understand his Arabic observations; but I know when a man is calming a mob, and the mob did become calmer.  It was as if a storm swelled in the night and gradually died away in a grey morning; but there are perpetual mutterings of that storm.  My point for the moment is that the exasperations come chiefly from the two extremes of the two great Semitic traditions of monotheism; and certainly not primarily from those poor Eastern Christians of whose fanaticism we have been taught to make fun.  From time to time there are gleams of the extremities of Eastern fanaticism which are almost ghastly to Western feeling.  They seem to crack the polish of the dignified leaders of the Arab aristocracy and the Zionist school of culture, and reveal a volcanic substance of which only oriental creeds have been made.  One day a wild Jewish proclamation is passed from hand to hand, denouncing disloyal Jews who refuse the teaching Hebrew; telling doctors to let them die and hospitals to let them rot, ringing with the old unmistakable and awful accent that bade men dash their children against the stones.  Another day the city would be placarded with posters printed in Damascus, telling the Jews who looked to Palestine for a national home that they should find it a national cemetery.  And when these cries clash it is like the clash of those two crooked Eastern swords, that crossed and recrossed and revolved like blazing wheels, in the vanguard of the marching mob.

I felt the fullest pressure of the problem when I first walked round the whole of the Haram enclosure, the courts of the old Temple, where the high muezzin towers now stand at every corner, and heard the clear voices of the call to prayer.  The sky was laden with a storm that became the snowstorm; and it was the time at which the old Jews beat their hands and mourn over what are believed to be the last stones of the Temple.  There was a movement in my own mind that was attuned to these things, and impressed by the strait limits and steep sides of that platform of the mountains; for the sense of crisis is not only in the intensity of the ideals, but in the very conditions of the reality, the reality with which this chapter began.  And the burden of it is the burden of Palestine; the narrowness of the boundaries and the stratification of the rock.  A voice not of my reason but rather sounding heavily in my heart, seemed to be repeating sentences like pessimistic proverbs.  There is no place for the Temple of Solomon but on the ruins of the Mosque of Omar.  There is no place for the nation of the Jews but in the country of the Arabs.  And these whispers came to me first not as intellectual conclusions upon the conditions of the case, of which I should have much more to say and to hope; but rather as hints of something immediate and menacing and yet mysterious.  I felt almost a momentary impulse to flee from the place, like one who has received an omen.  For two voices had met in my ears; and within the same narrow space and in the same dark hour, electric and yet eclipsed with cloud, I had heard Islam crying from the turret and Israel wailing at the wall.