ABSTRACT

A vertiginous trip up the mountain that commands, astoundingly, stage by stage, a more and more immense view of Palestine. This, in the Biblical sense, is a High Place of worship indeed. At the top, we get out of the car and are struck by a prodigious wind that did not reach us in the valley below but that now seems about to sweep us off. A crowd of Arab children, who have come for the show, follow the foreign visitors and laugh noisily as we struggle against the gale and stumble among the rocks. There is nothing to be seen on this summit but a small Mohammedan shrine and the buried foundations of a Byzantine church that makes, in the grass, an octagon.