We piled in and drove at totally unholy speed down narrow streets between walls, around blind right-angle turns where Arab policemen stood waving unintelligible signals, and up the Mount of Olives, past the British military grave-yard, to the place they call OETA.* The Kaiser had it built to command every view of the countryside and be seen from everywhere, as a monument to his own greatness--the biggest, lordliest, most expensive hospice that his architects could fashion, with pictures in mosaic on the walls and ceilings of the Kaiser and his ancestors in league with the Almighty.

But the British had adopted it as Administration Headquarters.
[*Headquarters: Occupied Enemy Territory Administration.] All the way up, behind and in front and on either hand, there were views that millions* would give years of their lives to see; and they would get good value for their bargain.

Behind us, the sky-line was a panorama of the Holy City, domes, minarets and curved stone roofs rising irregularly above gray battlemented walls.

Down on the right was the ghastly valley of Jehoshaphat, treeless, dry, and crowded with white tombs--"dry bones in the valley of death." To the left were everlasting limestone hills, one of them topped by the ruined reputed tomb of Samuel--all trenched, cross-trenched and war-scarred, but covered now in a Joseph's coat of flowers, blue, blood-red, yellow and white.

[* This is no exaggeration.