Photo by American Colony Photographers, Jerusalem 

 "He hath . . . barked my fig tree ; he hath made it clean 

 bare. . . . The branches thereof are made white" (Joel 1:7). 

 This photograph was taken about two weeks after the locusts had 

 destroyed the tree (see text, page 529). 



Thus the moat around ''David's 

 Tower" was so filled that the dry earth 

 seemed to be a living mass. Up and up 

 the city walls and the castle they climbed 

 to their very heights. 



The origin of this tower, as all will 

 infer, has been attributed to King David 

 ever since the Middle Ages, and while it 

 may not be the very "Castle of Zion," 

 the foundations, and especially the site 

 as a natural defense, must have dated 

 back many centuries, if not to the days 

 when Jerusalem was created an Israel- 

 itish city from the older Jebus, wrested 

 from the Jebusites by David. The castle 

 now affords a fine example of the ancient 

 style of fortifications (see page 517). 



Did not Joel then see the already an- 



cient walls of Jerusalem 

 in his day, as we now 

 do, form so slender an 

 obstacle to tiny soldiers 

 composing immense ar- 

 mies, causing him to 

 so graphically exclaim : 

 "They shall run like 

 mighty men; they shall 

 climb the wall like men 

 of war; and they shall 

 march every one on his 

 ways, and they shall not 

 break their ranks" ? 

 (Joel 2:7). What 

 should have impelled 

 them thus, against odds, 

 to make for the old 

 walled town ; for, as all 

 who have been here 

 know, "Jerusalem is 

 built as a city that is 

 compact together" 

 ( Psalm 122:3), afford- 

 ing nothing in the way 

 of forage for them? 

 Seemingly it can only 

 be explained by their 

 instinct leading them in 

 a definite direction. 



After a few days' ef- 

 fort, however, they re- 

 versed their course, and 

 for several days streams 

 of them made for the 

 opposite direction, but 

 only far enough to* es- 

 cape the barrier which 

 the city afforded ; and, 

 this once attained, they swung around 

 into the very direction heretofore pur- 

 sued. 



Again, what could have instructed 

 them thus to escape the difficulty? Solo- 

 mon, the first naturalist, if we may thus 

 call him, says of them : "The locust hath 

 no king, yet go they forth all of them by 

 bands" (Prov. 30:27). ' 



At the consulate the fight was taken 

 up to save the garden. It lay, as we have 

 seen, in the main path of the locusts. 

 The inclosure, about the size of an ordi- 

 nary American city lot, required five men 

 to keep incessantly brushing the locusts 

 down from the walls on the three sides 

 attacked. At the southern end, so per- 

 sistent were they that but a few seconds 



^26 



