impressions of the Holy Land

Rocky hills of craggy limestone and sandstone, with churches, walls, houses uniformly built of the same stone, and uniformly creamy off-white; terraces thousands of years old; hilltop villages and cities; an intense concentration of churches and holy sites: Jewish, Moslem, Christian, with every sect and sub-sect represented; dust -- remember, Oh Man, that dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return. For thousands of years people have been building, leveling, building, destroying, building again. Everything here is in layers, the deeper you dig the farther back in time you go, way back, back to the beginning...