Serpent's Mark

I was walking around the wall in Jerusalem with my friend, Liam. Around the high traffic areas, the path around the Old Jerusalem Wall is paved with stones like the old city areas in other West Bank urban centers. We came to a place where the pavement ended, though, and the path became dirt. I thought this was strange but indulged in the opportunity to get a more authentic feel for the old wall. The real problem was not the lack of stones but the predominance of trash. You know, rubbish. Refuse. Garbage strewn around the Old Jerusalem Wall. It did not make any sense to me at first, even in “Israel”: how had the powers involved managed to overlook this? I thought that the “Israelis” would spare no expense to ensure that “their” cultural heritage would be kept in impeccable shape, immaculate. There were IDF soldiers with guns stationed all over the city, guarding ‘antiquities’. Was that just a show? With a sigh, I turned to Liam but something over his shoulder caught my eyes. There on the crest of a distant hill was the answer: millions of shekels in concrete and labor crawling across the horizon like a gray snake out of hell. How appropriate, indeed, that a nation trying to play God would create something that from kilometers away looks like a great, ugly serpent crawling over what should be the Holy Land.