The Old City is fairly sparsely populated by tourists, but the shop keepers still caw and claw at every passerby. They flog t-shirts that say obscene things in Hebrew, hookahs, synthetic Oriental rugs and 3-D postcards of Jesus on the cross. While I eat a falafel, a local tells me how miserable he and his brethren have become. Just then a fight breaks out in a café when some guy breaks something in the adjoining souvenir stand and, rather than pay, heads into the café for a coffee. Family members swarm in from around the market, fists fly, and then the police arrive.

The tension in the air is unusual. The stalls along the covered streets of the Old City have been selling clobber (all of which my cynical grandfather claims is made in China these days) to pilgrims and tourists for millennia. Obviously they want to keep the atmosphere calm and inviting to maintain their livelihood. But recently principle has out weighed commerce and the Intifada had sealed the shops for long stretches. I have never felt such desperation from the shopkeepers hunkered down amidst their dusty inventory, or felt such a sense of menace in the less populated turns of the labyrinthine quarter.

While I draw this minaret, an old Christian Arab man comes over to tell me that this mosque was a church about a thousand years ago but was seized by the Moslems. He was joined by two thick teenagers who kept asking me in broken English what I was drawing and repeatedly saying "How many?" but I'm not sure to what they referred. Two younger boys showed up, then started smashing and resmashing a mirror. Then they joined the throng and started to insist I draw them, then asked me to give them this drawing, and then tried to snatch the book and run away with it. I glared at them quite firmly and started to leave. One of the boys dogged me for a couple of blocks and I finally lost him, clutching my backpack like a nelly.

I grew tired of the scratchiness of my .25 Rapidoliner nib on the bumpy cold-pressed paper of my journal and took refuge behind my Faber-Castell PITT brush pen. The results are not very pleasing, but foolish consistency is, after all, the hobgoblin of small minds.