A river of people flooded the narrow street in front of my hotel. Filipinos carrying wooden crosses marched through singing a hymn in Tagalog, some in tears. A troupe of Germans in red baseball caps walked by carrying palm fronds. Muslim shopkeepers shouted the praises of their goods, kids screamed, men shoving hand-carts yelled in Arabic: "Make way! Make way!" Shoulder to shoulder, they streamed through Jerusalem's Old City doing business, running errands, looking for redemption. Every time I stepped into the daily fray, I had a moment like this. Going from the quietness of the Hashimi Hotel -- with its rooftop terrace and polite Muslim clerks -- into the hectic flow of the ancient city was like going from one element to another. It was the feeling of standing on the shore, solid and known, and then jumping into the water, something unknowable and liquid.

In Jerusalem, every square inch of the stony ground is covered in blood and history, hopes and prayers, perdition and redemption. For each traveler and every resident, the history is different, the map is different, the truth is different. Those truths often collide, putting Jerusalem at the center of dozens of wars during the past 3,000 years.

In the face of every heart-rending dispute, the idea of this city's holiness endures. It doesn't matter how arduous the journey, how daunting the violence, or how hot the anger -- the pilgrims come. For as long as there has been a Jerusalem, there have been people intent on getting there.

The Old City is a maze: Three- and four-story buildings line the narrow streets, which seldom run straight for more than a few hundred yards. There are no cars; there is no room for them. About 35,000 people live inside the stone walls, completely intact and about a half-mile long on a side. Seventy percent of the people inside the Old City are Muslim, 20 percent are Christian and 10 percent are Jewish. All of them rely on pilgrims, tourists and travelers to keep the neighborhood's economy buzzing.

I walked about 10 minutes from my hotel to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. It was Palm Sunday, and the small courtyard in front of the church was packed.

I could hardly tell I'd arrived at one of the most important shrines in Christianity. There is no grand vista, not even a clearly defined structure. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is an amalgamation of buildings and additions from different eras and sects that merges with the stone walls of the buildings around it.

I followed the crowd into the rotunda of the church. A column of light from the opening in the dome pierced the haze of incense floating above Christ's tomb, a stone structure as big as a small house that sits where the original grotto is thought to have been. A pounding noise rang out, metal on stone -- crack, crack, crack -- and the Muslim keepers of the church keys strode into the rotunda, dividing the crowd as they hammered their metal-tipped canes on the hallowed rock.

Behind them came Franciscan monks in brown robes, and behind them, Catholic pilgrims. A group of Greek Orthodox worshippers gathered at the tomb, blocking its entrance.

The lead Muslim key keeper in a red fez banged his cane again, and the Greek priest emerged. The keeper raised his eyebrow and opened his hand; the gesture said: "Your time is up."Give me two minutes!" the Greek priest said in English, and ducked back into the tomb to hurry along his supplicants.

It was reassuring to know that in some respects, Jerusalem's spiritual factions can get along; several generations of the same Muslim family have been keeping order at the Church -- and peace between Christian sects -- since an 1852 agreement known as the Status Quo. The Greeks made way for the Roman Catholics, and soon voices rose in song.

Near the entry, a flight of steps leads to the top of what many Christians believe is the exact spot of Golgotha, the Place of the Skull, where Christ was crucified. Pilgrims knelt to touch a tiny patch of exposed stone under an ornate altar. One after another, they walked away with tears in their eyes.

In my imagination, Jerusalem was a vast city; the reality was quite the opposite. It only took 15 minutes to walk from the most important church in Christianity to the most revered site in Judaism, the Western Wall.

It was a sunny Tuesday afternoon, and I was in the company of guide Gil Daleski, a native of Jerusalem. Before we could see the Wall, we had to pass through a metal detector and a pat down. Two guards made a careful inventory of my camera bag.

"The security is heavy here," Daleski said. "... That's because if anything happens here, it can make the whole world burn."

We passed onto a blindingly white stone plaza, facing the towering wall, where Jews have worshipped on and off for more than 1,000 years. At least 20 Israeli soldiers armed with machine guns paced slowly through the knots of people gathered on the plaza, watching everything from behind dark sunglasses.

Daleski, a tall, soft spoken man with curly gray hair, did his best to squeeze 3,000 years of Jewish history into a few hours. The cycle he described was one of exile and return, repeated many times over the centuries.

The mount is not a mountain: it's a structure of massive stones built around a small hill. In the Jewish tradition, that hill is Mount Moriah, where Abraham was prepared to sacrifice his son Isaac, Daleski said. On top of that box of stones was the site of the original Temple, the most revered landmark of the Jewish faith. For some Jews, the Temple marked the very place where the world began and the very place where it will end.

The Temple was demolished by invaders more than once; The Second Temple, built by King Herod, was destroyed by the Roman Emperor Titus, who replaced it with a temple to Jupiter. Eventually, that temple was torn down, too. Now the top of the Temple Mount is occupied by the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, significant Islamic holy sites.