A child from one of the villages said to me, in broken English, that it was the place where God said his prayers.
I for one could not ask for a finer or more defiant statement of all that separates the Christian from the Moslem or the Jew; _credo quia impossibile_.
Around this terrible spot the Franciscans have done something which will strike many good and thoughtful people as quite fantastically inadequate; and which strikes me as fantastically but precisely right.
They have laid out the garden simply as a garden, in a way that is completely natural because it is completely artificial.
They have made flower-beds in the shape of stars and moons, and coloured them with flowers like those in the backyard of a cottage.
The combination of these bright patterns in the sunshine with the awful shadow in the centre is certainly an incongruity in the sense of a contrast.

But it is a poetical contrast, like that of birds building in a temple or flowers growing on a tomb.
The best way of suggesting what I for one feel about it would be something like this; suppose we imagine a company of children, such as those whom Christ blessed in Jerusalem, afterwards put permanently in charge of a field full of his sorrow; it is probable that, if they could do anything with it, they would do something like this.
They might cut it up into quaint shapes and dot it with red daisies or yellow marigolds.

I really do not know that there is anything better that grown up people could do, since anything that the greatest of them could do must be, must look quite as small.
"Shall I, the gnat that dances in Thy ray, dare to be reverent ?" The Franciscans have not dared to be reverent; they have only dared to be cheerful.

It may be too awful an adventure of the imagination to imagine Christ in that garden.

But there is not the smallest difficulty about imagining St.Francis there; and that is something to say of an institution which is eight hundred years old.
Immediately above this little garden, overshadowing and almost overhanging it, is a gorgeous gilded building with golden domes and minarets glittering in the sun, and filling a splendid situation with almost shameless splendour; the Russian church built over the upper part of the garden, belonging to the Orthodox-Greeks.
Here again many Western travellers will be troubled; and will think that golden building much too like a fairy palace in a pantomime.
But here again I shall differ from them, though perhaps less strongly.
It may be that the pleasure is childish rather than childlike; but I can imagine a child clapping his hands at the mere sight of those great domes like bubbles of gold against the blue sky.
It is a little like Aladdin's Palace, but it has a place in art as Aladdin has a place in literature; especially since it is oriental literature.