The sun shone and so did the stars.
General Bols reopened Pontius Pilate's water-works.

The learned monks in convents argued about facts and theories denied by archaeologists.

Old-fashioned Jews wailed at the Wailing Wall.
Tommy Atkins blasphemously dug corpses of donkeys and dogs from the Citadel moat.
I arrived in the midst of all that, and spent a couple of months trying to make head or tail of it, and wondering, if that was peace, what war is?
They say that wherever a man was ever slain in Palestine a flower grows.

So one gets a fair idea of the country's mass-experience without much difficulty.

For three months of the year, from end to end, the whole landscape is carpeted with flowers so close together that, except where beasts and men have trodden winding tracks, one can hardly walk without crushing an anemone or wild chrysanthemum.