Monday 20th August 1945

On Monday morning, after Communion at St. Georges and breakfast, we made our way back to the big modern white stone building of the Palestine Archaeological Museum. The buildings lie round the sides of a central rectangular court. The exhibits are housed in the two big halls which form the longer sides, while the one shorter side is occupied by the domed entrance hall, the other by various offices, students rooms etc.

The entrance hall is used to house a display of objects covering just one line of thought, right down throughout the ages. When we were there, it was the human figure, and a remarkable collection of statuettes, lamps in the form of faces, and so on, it was. Type-written descriptions and running commentary, relating the changes in artistic trends to the history of the period, were literally provided.

The two main halls are arranged chronologically, the first covering exhibits dating from the earliest days to about 500 bc and the second from 500 bc onwards. I am afraid that my knowledge of Archaeology and early History and pre-History is not sufficient to enable me to follow as I should have liked the immense mass of detailed material. The earliest exhibit is the Galilean skull, a few remains of battered bones which look more like something the dog has buried than any human skull. I think the most interesting exhibits were the coins to be found in the second hall – the coins of Tyre of Sidon, Roman coins of each era, great cases of coins. The last exhibit is a model of the building as it will be when completed – it is almost finished now.

We returned to Jerusalem, I returned to the CA canteen to see if they were running any tours, and stayed to write several letters. I got back to pick up Frank for lunch and found Maurice with him. He had a day off, and had been trying to get a lift from Hadera to Beirut when he discovered a jeep bound for Jerusalem and got aboard. We had lunch and then he began to worry about getting back so we went to the car park and studied the formation signs exhibited there. Maurice found several going his way, met some of his unit returning from leave, and finally, about 3, decided to return at 7 and chance his luck.

We then left for Mount Sion, climbed along the road which hugs the base of the City Wall high above the Bethlehem road, at the top of the steep slope down to the Birket es Sultan and the Vale of Hinnom. We turned the corner and passed along a very narrow roadway between the high city wall on the left and the almost equally high wall of the Christian cemeteries on the right. We turned to the right through a gate in this wall past the end of the grave yards, and intimated to the swarm of would-be guides, mainly youthful who followed us, that we neither wished for nor required their services. They told us in Arabic and again in English, in no uncertain manner, what was their opinion of us, and we rang the bells and were admitted by an elderly religious, to the Church of the Dormition.

A modern building it is none the less remarkable for its very fine architecture. We went into the dimly lit crypt and visited the twelve chapels, with their altars round the sides of the circular building, dedicated by the various European countries – quite a good exercise in European languages. In the cloister just outside the church, are shelves displaying a vast collection of tiny lamps, and the inevitable sales dept. for photographs, booklets and maps at high prices. We turned out of the grounds of the Dormition, to a small cluster of Arab buildings, including a Mosque. Hence churchmen were running all over the place and a small baby girl was crying bitterly about something. Here the baksheesh is an organised or a legalised, business. Tickets are sold for admission to the Mosque of Neby Daoud, the Moslem prophet (or Jewish King) David. We climbed the stairway entered a big hall (indoors) where we were told to remove our boots. We continued in stockinged feet across a carpet to another, smaller room. From the side of it we were allowed to look into a third and bigger room, in a corner of which a big stone erection is supposed, on what authority I know not, to cover the mortal remains of the Psalmist. How it comes about that the tomb lies upstairs in a building which, while I believe it could claim to be the earliest building to be built outside the city walls, could hardly claim to be more than 300 years old.

The site however would, if it were allowed by the Muslim owners, be reverenced by Christians as the Holy Cenacle, the site of the Upper Room where Christ ate his Last Supper on earth and instituted the Holy Eucharist. Whether or not it be the true spot, it is typical of Palestine today that what might well have been the most venerated Christian Holy place on earth should be the Mohammedan tomb of an obscure Moslem prophet who was really the greatest Jewish King who ever lived.

We departed through the chickens and the crying children to the outside of Mount Sion, threaded our way past the children who now had apparently lost all hope of obtaining baksheesh, and turned round along the slope of Mount Sion which faces the Brook Kedron to the small Roman Catholic Church, a modern building dedicated to St. Peter in Gallicante. It is said that the High Priest’s house stood near by and that on this spot, St. Peter stood at the moment when he heard the cock crow – but the main feature of the place is a series of caves, one below the other, regarded by some as dungeons of the High Priest’s and hence as a possible prison of Christ. One can descend by stairs to three separate levels of these caves – one below the other. The bottom one has a slanting air shaft from which a current of air is always blowing from an opening lower down the hill, showing if nothing else how steep is the slope of Mount Zion in between the two valleys, Hinnon and Kedron.

We climbed up and out of the church, and began to make our way down the slope. The hillside is thinly dotted with trees the ground rough and rocky. On closer examination however, it appears that most of the rocks are part of ruins of one sort or another, semi-artificial caves, pieces of worked stone, and so on. Maurice told me that we were in the ruins of the oldest city of all to have any ruins left, King David’s, and now the city has moved gradually further up and up the hill until Mount Sion is right outside the modern walls. Comparatively modern. He pointed out to me a rough series of steps supposed to be the original surface of the street running through the city, down to the Pool of Siloam. We followed it to the bottom of the Christian churchyard, but unfortunately we then found ourselves under some trees sitting on a 2 ft. high wall with a 10 ft. drop on the other side, and Maurice not being good at P.T. we unfortunately had to retrace our stops to the top of Mount Sion in order to get out. By this time were too hot and thirsty to be eager to descend to the relatively nearby Pool of Siloam so far below us. We therefore returned to the hostel and had some lemonade before supper. I saw Maurice off on a truck with a suitable formation sign to take him to Hadera, only eight miles from Pardess Hannah, and returned to write and read the rest of the evening.