I myself can never overcome the sense of something almost unearthly about grass growing upon human buildings.
There is in it a wild and even horrible fancy, as if houses could grow hair.

When I saw that green hair on the huge stone blocks of the citadel, though I had seen the same thing on any number of ruins, it came to me like an omen or a vision, a curious vision at once of chaos and of sleep.

It is said that the grass will not grow where the Turk sets his foot; but it is the other side of the same truth to say that it would grow anywhere but where it ought to grow.
And though in this case it was but an accident and a symbol, it was a very true symbol.

We talk of the green banner of the Turk having been planted on this or that citadel; and certainly it was so planted with splendid valour and sensational victory.
But this is the green banner that he plants on all his high cities in the end.
Therefore my immediate impression of the walls and gates was not contradicted by my consciousness of what came before and what came after that medieval period.

It remained primarily a thing of walls and gates; a thing which the modern world does not perhaps understand so well as the medieval world.
There is involved in it all that idea of definition which those who do not like it are fond of describing as dogma.