In The Levant

Down there, somewhere in that wilderness of ravines, David, the great-grandson of Ruth, kept his father’s sheep before he went to the combat with Goliath. It was there—the grotto is shown a little more than a mile from this convent—that the shepherds watched their flocks by night when the angel appeared and announced the birth of the Messiah, the Son of David. We have here within the grasp of the eye almost the beginning and the end of the old dispensation, from the burial of Rachel to the birth of our Lord, from the passing of the wandering sheykh, Jacob, with his family, to the end put to the exclusive pretensions of his descendants by the coming of a Saviour to all the world.

The cave called the Grotto of the Nativity has great antiquity. The hand-book says it had this repute as early as the second century. In the year 327 the mother of Constantine built a church over it, and this basilica still stands, and is the oldest specimen of Christian architecture in existence, except perhaps the lower church of St. Clement at Rome. It is the oldest basilica above ground retaining its perfect ancient form. The main part of the church consists of a nave and four aisles, separated by four rows of Corinthian marble columns, tradition says, taken from the temple of Solomon. The walls were once adorned with mosaics, but only fragments of them remain; the roof is decayed and leaky, the pavement is broken. This part of the church is wholly neglected, because it belongs to the several sects in common, and is merely the arena for an occasional fight. The choir is separated from the nave by a wall, and is divided into two chapels, one of the Greeks, the other of the Armenians. The Grotto of the Nativity is underneath these chapels, and each sect has a separate staircase of descent to it. The Latin chapel is on the north side of this choir, and it also has a stairway to the subterranean apartments.

Making an effort to believe that the stable of the inn in which Christ was born was a small subterranean cave cut in the solid rock, we descended a winding flight of stairs from the Latin chapel, with a monk for our guide, and entered a labyrinth from which we did not emerge until we reached the place of the nativity, and ascended into the Greek chapel above it. We walked between glistening walls of rock, illuminated by oil-lamps here and there, and in our exploration of the gloomy passages and chambers, encountered shrines, pictures, and tombs of the sainted. We saw, or were told that we saw, the spot to which St. Joseph retired at the moment of the nativity, and also the place where the twenty thousand children who were murdered by the order of Herod—a ghastly subject so well improved by the painters of the Renaissance—are buried. But there was one chamber, or rather vault, that we entered with genuine emotion. This was the cell of Jerome, hermit and scholar, whose writings have gained him the title of Father of the Church.

At the close of the fourth century Bethlehem was chiefly famous as the retreat of this holy student, and the fame of his learning and sanctity drew to it from distant lands many faithful women, who renounced the world and its pleasures, and were content to sit at his feet and learn the way of life. Among those who resigned, and, for his sake and the cross, despised, the allurements and honors of the Roman world, was the devout Paula, a Roman matron who traced her origin from Agamemnon, and numbered the Scipios and Gracchi among her ancestors, while her husband, Joxotius, deduced a no less royal lineage from Æneas. Her wealth was sufficient to support the dignity of such a descent; among her possessions, an item in her rent-roll, was the city of Nicopolis, which Augustus built as a monument of the victory of Actium. By the advice and in the company of Jerome, her spiritual guide, she abandoned Rome and all her vast estates, and even her infant son, and retired to the holy village of Bethlehem. The great Jerome, who wrote her biography, and transmitted the story of her virtues to the most distant ages, bestowed upon her the singular title of the Mother-in-law of God! She was buried here, and we look upon her tomb with scarcely less interest than that of Jerome himself, who also rests in this thrice holy ground. At the beginning of the fifth century, when the Goths sacked Rome, a crowd of the noble and the rich, escaping with nothing saved from the wreck but life and honor, attracted also by the reputation of Jerome, appeared as beggars in the streets of this humble village. No doubt they thronged to the cell of the venerable father.

There is, I suppose, no doubt that this is the study in which he composed many of his more important treatises. It is a vaulted chamber, about twenty feet square by nine feet high. There is in Venice a picture of the study of Jerome, painted by Carpaccio, which represents a delightful apartment; the saint is seen in his study, in a rich négligé robe; at the side of his desk are musical instruments, music-stands, and sheets of music, as if he were accustomed to give soirées; on the chimney-piece are Greek vases and other objects of virtu, and in the middle of the room is a poodle-dog of the most worldly and useless of the canine breed. The artist should have seen the real study of the hermit,—a grim, unornamented vault, in which he passed his days in mortifications of the body, hearing always ringing in his ears, in his disordered mental and physical condition, the last trump of judgment.

We passed, groping our way along in this religious cellar, through a winding, narrow passage in the rock, some twenty-five feet long, and came into the place of places, the very Chapel of the Nativity. In this low vault, thirty-eight feet long and eleven feet wide, hewn in the rock, is an altar at one end. Before this altar—and we can see everything with distinctness, for sixteen silver lamps are burning about it—there is a marble slab in the pavement into which is let a silver star, with this sentence round it: Hic de Virgine Maria Jesus Christus natus est. The guardian of this sacred spot was a Turkish soldier, who stood there with his gun and fixed bayonet, an attitude which experience has taught him is necessary to keep the peace among the Christians who meet here. The altar is without furniture, and is draped by each sect which uses it in turn. Near by is the chapel of the “manger,” but the manger in which Christ was laid is in the church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome.

There is in Bethlehem another ancient cave which is almost as famous as that of the Nativity; it is called the Milk Grotto, and during all ages of the Church a most marvellous virtue has attached to it; fragments of the stone have been, and still continue to be, broken off and sent into all Christian countries; women also make pilgrimages to it in faith. The grotto is on the edge of the town overlooking the eastern ravines, and is arranged as a show-place. In our walk thither a stately Bedawee, as by accident, fell into our company, and acted as our cicerone. He was desirous that we should know that he also was a man of the world and of travel, and rated at its proper value this little corner of the earth. He had served in the French army and taken part in many battles, and had been in Paris and seen the tomb of the great emperor,—ah, there was a man! As to this grotto, they say that the Virgin used to send to it for milk,—many think so. As for him, he was a soldier, and did not much give his mind to such things.

This grotto is an excavation in the chalky rock, and might be a very good place to store milk, but for the popular prejudice in cities against chalk and water. We entered it through the court of a private house, and the damsel who admitted us also assured us that the Virgin procured milk from it. The tradition is that the Virgin and Child were concealed here for a time before the flight into Egypt; and ever since then its stone has the miraculous power of increasing the flow of the maternal breast. The early fathers encouraged this and the like superstitions in the docile minds of their fair converts, and themselves testified to the efficacy of this remarkable stone. These superstitions belong rather to the Orient than to any form of religion. There is a famous spring at Assiout in Egypt which was for centuries much resorted to by ladies who desired offspring; and the Arabs on the Upper Nile to-day, who wish for an heir male, resort to a plant which grows in the remote desert, rare and difficult to find, the leaves of which are “good for boys.” This grotto scarcely repays the visit, except for the view one obtains of the wild country below it. When we bade good by to the courtly Arab, we had too much delicacy to offer money to such a gentleman and a soldier of the empire; a delicacy not shared by him, however, for he let no false modesty hinder a request for a little backsheesh for tobacco.

On our return, and at some distance from the gate, we diverged into a lane, and sought, in a rocky field, the traditional well whose waters David longed for when he was in the Cave of Adullam,—“O that one would give me drink of the water of the well of Bethlehem, which is by the gate!” Howbeit, when the three mighty men had broken through the Philistine guards and procured him the water, David would not drink that which was brought at such a sacrifice. Two very comely Bethlehem girls hastened at our approach to draw water from the well and gave us to drink, with all the freedom of Oriental hospitality, in which there is always an expectation of backsheesh. The water is at any rate very good, and there is no reason why these pretty girls should not turn an honest penny upon the strength of David’s thirst, whether this be the well whose water he desired or not. We were only too thankful that no miraculous property is attributed to its waters. As we returned, we had the evening light upon the gray walls and towers of the city, and were able to invest it with something of its historical dignity.

The next excursion that we made from Jerusalem was so different from the one to Bethlehem, that by way of contrast I put them together. It was to the convent of Mar Saba, which lies in the wilderness towards the Dead Sea, about two hours and a half from the city.

In those good old days, when piety was measured by frugality in the use of the bath, when the holy fathers praised most those hermits who washed least, when it might perhaps be the boast of more than one virgin, devoted to the ascetic life, that she had lived fifty-eight years during which water had touched neither her hands, her face, her feet, nor any part of her body, Palestine was, after Egypt, the favorite resort of the fanatical, the unfortunate, and the lazy, who, gathered into communities, or dwelling in solitary caves, offered to the barbarian world a spectacle of superstition and abasement under the name of Christianity. But of the swarm of hermits and monks who begged in the cities and burrowed in the caves of the Holy Land in the fifth century, no one may perhaps be spoken of with more respect than St. Sabas, who, besides a reputation for sanctity, has left that of manliness and a virile ability, which his self-mortifications did not extirpate. And of all the monasteries of that period, that of Mar Saba is the only one in Judæa which has preserved almost unbroken the type of that time. St. Sabas was a Cappadocian who came to Palestine in search of a permanent retreat, savage enough to satisfy his austere soul. He found it in a cave in one of the wildest gorges in this most desolate of lands, a ravine which opens into the mountains from the brook Kidron. The fame of his zeal and piety attracted thousands to his neighborhood, so that at one time there were almost as many hermits roosting about in the rocks near him as there are inhabitants in the city of Jerusalem now. He was once enabled to lead an army of monks to that city and chastise the Monophysite heretics. His cave in the steep side of a rocky precipice became the nucleus of his convent, which grew around it and attached itself to the face of the rock as best it could. For the convent of Mar Saba is not a building, nor a collection of buildings, so much as it is a group of nests attached to the side of a precipice.

It was a bright Saturday afternoon that a young divinity student and I, taking the volatile Demetrius with us for interpreter, rode out of St. Stephen’s gate, into Jehoshaphat, past the gray field of Jewish graves, down through Tophet and the wild ravine of the Kidron.

It is unpleasant to interrupt the prosperous start of a pilgrimage by a trifling incident, but at our first descent and the slightest tension on the bridle-reins of my horse, they parted from the bit. This accident, which might be serious in other lands, is of the sort that is anticipated here, and I may say assured, by the forethought of the owners of saddle-horses. Upon dismounting with as much haste as dignity, I discovered that the reins had been fastened to the bit by a single rotten string of cotton. Luckily the horse I rode was not an animal to take advantage of the weakness of his toggery. He was a Syrian horse, a light sorrel, and had no one of the good points of a horse except the name and general shape. His walk was slow and reluctant, his trot a high and non-progressive jolt, his gallop a large up-and-down agitation. To his bridle of strings and shreds no martingale was attached; no horse in Syria is subject to that restraint. When I pull the bit he sticks up his nose; when I switch him he kicks. When I hold him in, he won’t go; when I let him loose, he goes on his nose. I dismount and look at him with curiosity; I wonder all the journey what his forte is, but I never discover. I conclude that he is like the emperor Honorius, whom Gibbon stigmatizes as “without passions, and consequently without talents.”

Yet he was not so bad as the roads, and perhaps no horse would do much better on these stony and broken foot-paths. This horse is not a model (for anything but a clothes-horse), but from my observation I think that great injustice has been done to Syrian horses by travellers, who have only themselves to blame for accidents which bring the horses into disrepute. Travellers are thrown from these steeds; it is a daily occurrence; we heard continually that somebody had a fall from his horse on his way to the Jordan, or to Mar Saba, or to Nablous, and was laid up, and it was always in consequence of a vicious brute. The fact is that excellent ministers of the gospel and doctors of divinity and students of the same, who have never in their lives been on the back of a horse in any other land, seem to think when they come here that the holy air of Palestine will transform them into accomplished horsemen; or perhaps they are emulous of Elisha, that they may go to heaven by means of a fiery steed.

For a while we had the company of the singing brook Kidron, flowing clear over the stones; then we left the ravine and wound over rocky steeps, which afforded us fine views of broken hills and interlacing ridges, and when we again reached the valley the brook had disappeared in the thirsty ground. The road is strewn, not paved, with stones, and in many places hardly practicable for horses. Occasionally we encountered flocks of goats and of long-wooled sheep feeding on the scant grass of the hills, and tended by boys in the coarse brown and striped garments of the country, which give a state-prison aspect to most of the inhabitants,—but there was no other life, and no trees offer relief to the hard landscape. But the way was now and then bright with flowers, thickly carpeted with scarlet anemones, the Star of Bethlehem, and tiny dandelions. Two hours from the city we passed several camps of Bedaween, their brown low camel’s-hair tents pitched among the rocks and scarcely distinguishable in the sombre landscape. About the tents were grouped camels and donkeys, and from them issued and pursued us begging boys and girls. A lazy Bedawee appeared here and there with a long gun, and we could imagine that this gloomy region might be unsafe after nightfall; but no danger ever seems possible in such bright sunshine and under a sky so blue and friendly.

When a half-hour from the convent, we turned to the right from the road to the Dead Sea, and ascending a steep hill found ourselves riding along the edge of a deep winding gorge; a brook flows at the bottom, and its sides are sheer precipices of rock, generally parallel, but occasionally widening into amphitheatres of the most fantastic rocky formation. It is on one side of this narrow ravine that the convent is built, partly excavated in the rock, partly resting on jutting ledges, and partly hung out in the form of balconies,—buildings clinging to the steep side like a comb of wild bees or wasps to a rock.

Our first note of approach to it was the sight of a square tower and of the roofs of buildings below us. Descending from the road by several short turns, and finally by two steep paved inclines, we came to a lofty wall in which is a small iron door. As we could go no farther without aid from within, Demetrius shouted, and soon we had a response from a slit in the wall fifty feet above us to the left. We could see no one, but the voice demanded who we were, and whether we had a pass. Above the slit from which the angelic voice proceeded a stone projected, and in this was an opening for letting down or drawing up articles. This habit of caution in regard to who or what shall come into the convent is of course a relic of the gone ages of tumult, but it is still necessary as a safeguard against the wandering Bedaween, who would no doubt find means to plunder the convent of its great wealth of gold, silver, and jewels if they were not at all times rigorously excluded. The convent with its walls and towers is still a fortress strong enough to resist any irregular attempts of the wandering tribes. It is also necessary to strictly guard the convent against women, who in these days of speculation, if not scientific curiosity, often knock impatiently and angrily at its gates, and who, if admitted, would in one gay and chatty hour destroy the spell of holy seclusion which has been unbroken for one thousand three hundred and ninety-two years. I know that sometimes it seems an unjust ordination of Providence that a woman cannot be a man, but I cannot join those who upbraid the monks of Mar Saba for inhospitality because they refuse to admit women under any circumstances into the precincts of the convent; if I do not sympathize with the brothers, I can understand their adhesion to the last shred of man’s independence, which is only to be maintained by absolute exclusion of the other sex. It is not necessary to revive the defamation of the early Christian ages, that the devil appeared oftener to the hermit in the form of a beautiful woman than in any other; but we may not regret that there is still one spot on the face of the earth, if it is no bigger than the sod upon which Noah’s pioneer dove alighted, in which weak men may be safe from the temptation, the criticism, and the curiosity of the superior being. There is an airy tower on the rocks outside the walls which women may occupy if they cannot restrain their desire to lodge in this neighborhood, or if night overtakes them here on their way from the Dead Sea; there Madame Pfeiffer, Miss Martineau, and other famous travellers of their sex have found refuge, and I am sorry to say abused their proximity to this retreat of shuddering man by estimating the piety of its inmates according to their hospitality to women. So far as I can learn, this convent of Mar Saba is now the only retreat left on this broad earth for Man; and it seems to me only reasonable that it should be respected by his generous and gentle, though inquisitive foe.

After further parley with Demetrius and a considerable interval, we heard a bell ring, and in a few moments the iron door opened, and we entered, stepping our horses carefully over the stone threshold, and showing our pass from the Jerusalem Patriarch to an attendant, and came into a sort of stable hewn in the rock. Here we abandoned our horses, and were taken in charge by a monk whom the bell had summoned from below. He conducted us down several long flights of zigzag stairs in the rock, amid hanging buildings and cells, until we came to what appears to be a broad ledge in the precipice, and found ourselves in the central part of this singular hive, that is, in a small court, with cells and rocks on one side and the convent church, which overhangs the precipice, on the other. Beside the church and also at another side of the court are buildings in which pilgrims are lodged, and in the centre of the court is the tomb of St. Sabas himself. Here our passports were examined, and we were assigned a cheerful and airy room looking upon the court and tomb.

One of the brothers soon brought us coffee, and the promptness of this hospitality augured well for the remainder of our fare; relying upon the reputation of the convent for good cheer, we had brought nothing with us, not so much as a biscuit. Judge of our disgust, then, at hearing the following dialogue between Demetrius and the Greek monk.

“What time can the gentlemen dine?”

“Any time they like.”

“What have you for dinner?”

“Nothing.”

“You can give us no dinner?”

“To be sure not. It is fast.”

“But we have n’t a morsel, we shall starve.”

“Perhaps I can find a little bread.”

“Nothing else?”

“We have very good raisins.”

“Well,” we interposed, “kill us a chicken, give us a few oysters, stewed or broiled, we are not particular.” This levity, which was born of desperation, for the jolting ride from Jerusalem had indisposed us to keep a fast, especially a fast established by a church the orthodoxy of whose creed we had strong reasons to doubt, did not affect the monk. He replied, “Chicken! it is impossible.” We shrunk our requisition to eggs.

“If I can find an egg, I will see.” And the brother departed, with carte blanche from us to squeeze his entire establishment.

Alas, fasting is not in Mar Saba what it is in New England, where an appointed fast-day is hailed as an opportunity to forego lunch in order to have an extraordinary appetite for a better dinner than usual!

The tomb of St. Sabas, the central worship of this hive, is a little plastered hut in the middle of the court; the interior is decorated with pictures in the Byzantine style, and a lamp is always burning there. As we stood at the tomb we heard voices chanting, and, turning towards the rock, we saw a door from which the sound came. Pushing it open, we were admitted into a large chapel, excavated in the rock. The service of vespers was in progress, and a band of Russian pilgrims were chanting in rich bass voices, producing more melody than I had ever heard in a Greek church. The excavation extends some distance into the hill; we were shown the cells of St. John of Damascus and other hermits, and at the end a charnel-house piled full of the bones of men. In the dim light their skulls grinned at us in a horrid familiarity; in that ghastly jocularity which a skull always puts on, with a kind of mocking commentary upon the strong chant of the pilgrims, which reverberated in all the recesses of the gloomy cave,—fresh, hearty voices, such as these skulls have heard (if they can hear) for many centuries. The pilgrims come, and chant, and depart, generation after generation; the bones and skulls of the fourteen thousand martyrs in this charnel-bin enjoy a sort of repulsive immortality. The monk, who was our guide, appeared to care no more for the remains of the martyrs than for the presence of the pilgrims. In visiting such storehouses one cannot but be struck by the light familiarity with the relics and insignia of death which the monks have acquired.

This St. John of Damascus, whose remains repose here, was a fiery character in his day, and favored by a special miracle before he became a saint. He so distinguished himself by his invectives against Leo and Constantine and other iconoclast emperors at Constantinople who, in the eighth century, attempted to extirpate image-worship from the Catholic church, that he was sentenced to lose his right hand. The story is that it was instantly restored by the Virgin Mary. It is worthy of note that the superstitious Orient more readily gave up idolatry or image-worship under the Moslems than under the Christians.

As the sun was setting we left the pilgrims chanting to the martyrs, and hastened to explore the premises a little, before the light should fade. We followed our guide up stairs and down stairs, sometimes cut in the stone, sometimes wooden stairways, along hanging galleries, through corridors hewn in the rock, amid cells and little chapels,—a most intricate labyrinth, in which the uninitiated would soon lose his way. Here and there we came suddenly upon a little garden spot as big as a bed-blanket, a ledge upon which soil had been deposited. We walked also under grape-trellises, we saw orange-trees, and the single palm-tree that the convent boasts, said to have been planted by St. Sabas himself. The plan of this establishment gradually developed itself to us. It differs from an ordinary convent chiefly in this,—the latter is spread out flat on the earth, Mar Saba is set up edgewise. Put Mar Saba on a plain, and these little garden spots and graperies would be courts and squares amid buildings, these galleries would be bridges, these cells or horizontal caves would be perpendicular tombs and reservoirs.

When we arrived, we supposed that we were almost the only guests. But we found that the place was full of Greek and Russian pilgrims; we encountered them on the terraces, on the flat roofs, in the caves, and in all out-of-the-way nooks. Yet these were not the most pleasing nor the most animated tenants of the place; wherever we went the old rookery was made cheerful by the twittering notes of black birds with yellow wings, a species of grakle, which the monks have domesticated, and which breed in great numbers. Steeled as these good brothers are against the other sex, we were glad to discover this streak of softness in their nature. High up on the precipice there is a bell-tower attached to a little chapel, and in it hang twenty small bells, which are rung to call the inmates to prayer. Even at this height, and indeed wherever we penetrated, we were followed by the monotonous chant which issued from the charnel-house.

We passed by a long row of cells occupied by the monks, but were not permitted to look into them; nor were we allowed to see the library, which is said to be rich in illuminated manuscripts. The convent belongs to the Greek church; its monks take the usual vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, and fortify themselves in their holiness by opposing walls of adamant to all womankind. There are about fifty monks here at present, and uncommonly fine-looking fellows,—not at all the gross and greasy sort of monk that is sometimes met. Their outward dress is very neat, consisting of a simple black gown and a round, high, flat-topped black cap.

Our dinner, when it was brought into our apartment, answered very well one’s idea of a dessert, but it was a very good Oriental dinner. The chief articles were a piece of hard black bread, and two boiled eggs, cold, and probably brought by some pilgrim from Jerusalem; but besides, there were raisins, cheese, figs, oranges, a bottle of golden wine, and tea. The wine was worthy to be celebrated in classic verse; none so good is, I am sure, made elsewhere in Syria; it was liquid sunshine; and as it was manufactured by the monks, it gave us a new respect for their fastidious taste.

The vaulted chamber which we occupied was furnished on three sides with a low divan, which answered the double purpose of chairs and couch. On one side, however, and elevated in the wall, was a long niche, exactly like the recessed tombs in cathedrals, upon which, toes turned up, lie the bronze or wooden figures of the occupants. This was the bed of honor. It was furnished with a mattress and a thick counterpane having one sheet sewed to it. With reluctance I accepted the distinction of climbing into it, and there I slept, laid out, for all the world, like my own effigy. From the ceiling hung a dim oil-lamp, which cast a gloom rather than a light upon our sepulchral place of repose. Our windows looked out towards the west, upon the court, upon the stairs, upon the terraces, roofs, holes, caves, grottos, wooden balconies, bird-cages, steps entering the rock and leading to cells; and, towards the south, along the jagged precipice. The convent occupies the precipice from the top nearly to the bottom of the ravine; the precipice opposite is nearly perpendicular, close at hand, and permits no view in that direction. Heaven is the only object in sight from this retreat.

Before the twilight fell the chanting was still going on in the cavern, monks and pilgrims were gliding about the court, and numbers of the latter were clustered in the vestibule of the church, in which they were settling down to lodge for the night; and high above us I saw three gaudily attired Bedaween, who had accompanied some travellers from the Dead Sea, leaning over the balustrade of the stairs, and regarding the scene with Moslem complacency. The hive settled slowly to rest.

But the place was by no means still at night. There was in the court an old pilgrim who had brought a cough from the heart of Russia, who seemed to be trying to cough himself inside out. There were other noises that could not be explained. There was a good deal of clattering about in wooden shoes. Every sound was multiplied and reduplicated from the echoing rocks. The strangeness of the situation did not conduce to sleep, not even to an effigy-like repose; but after looking from the window upon the march of the quiet stars, after watching the new moon disappear between the roofs, and after seeing that the door of St. Sabas’s tomb was closed, although his light was still burning, I turned in; and after a time, during which I was conscious that not even vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience are respected by fleas, I fell into a light sleep.

From this I was aroused by a noise that seemed like the call to judgment, by the most clamorous jangle of discordant bells,—all the twenty were ringing at once, and each in a different key. It was not simply a din, it was an earthquake of sound. The peals were echoed from the opposite ledges, and reverberated among the rocks and caves and sharp angles of the convent, until the crash was intolerable. It was worse than the slam, bang, shriek, clang, clash, roar, dissonance, thunder, and hurricane with which all musicians think it absolutely necessary to close any overture, symphony, or musical composition whatever, however decent and quiet it may be. It was enough to rouse the deafest pilgrim, to wake the dead martyrs and set the fourteen thousand skulls hunting for their bones, to call even St. Sabas himself from his tomb. I arose. I saw in the starlight figures moving about the court, monks in their simple black gowns. It was, I comprehended then, the call to midnight prayer in the chapel, and, resolved not to be disturbed further by it, I climbed back into my tomb.

But the clamor continued; I heard such a clatter of hobnailed shoes on the pavement, besides, that I could bear it no longer, got up, slipped into some of my clothes, opened the door, and descended by our winding private stairway into the court.

The door of St. Sabas’s tomb was wide open!

Were the graves opening, and the dead taking the air? Did this tomb open of its own accord? Out of its illuminated interior would the saint stalk forth and join this great procession, the reveille of the quick and the slow?

From above and from below, up stairs and down stairs, out of caves and grottos and all odd roosting-places, the monks and pilgrims were pouring and streaming into the court; and the bells incessantly called more and more importunately as the loiterers delayed.

The church was open, and lighted at the altar end. I glided in with the other ghostly, hastily clad, and yawning pilgrims. The screen at the apse before the holy place, a mass of silver and gilding, sparkled in the candlelight; the cross above it gleamed like a revelation out of the gloom; but half of the church was in heavy shadow. From the penetralia came the sound of priestly chanting; in the wooden stalls along each side of the church stood, facing the altar, the black and motionless figures of the brothers. The pilgrims were crowding and jostling in at the door. A brother gave me a stall near the door, and I stood in it, as statue-like as I could, and became a brother for the time being.

At the left of the door stood a monk with impassive face; before him on a table were piles of wax tapers and a solitary lighted candle. Every pilgrim who entered bought a taper and paid two coppers for it. If he had not the change the monk gave him change, and the pilgrim carefully counted what he received and objected to any piece he thought not current. You may wake these people up any time of night, and find their perceptions about money unobscured. The seller never looked at the buyer, nor at anything except the tapers and the money.

The pilgrims were of all ages and grades; very old men, stout, middle-aged men, and young athletic fellows; there were Russians from all the provinces; Greeks from the isles, with long black locks and dark eyes, in fancy embroidered jackets and leggins, swarthy bandits and midnight pirates in appearance. But it tends to make anybody look like a pirate to wake him up at twelve o’clock at night, and haul him into the light with no time to comb his hair. I dare say that I may have appeared to these honest people like a Western land-pirate. And yet I should rather meet some of those Greeks in a lighted church than outside the walls at midnight.

Each pilgrim knelt and bowed himself, then lighted his taper and placed it on one of the tripods before the screen. In time the church was very fairly illuminated, and nearly filled with standing worshippers, bowing, crossing themselves, and responding to the reading and chanting in low murmurs. The chanting was a very nasal intoning, usually slow, but now and then breaking into a lively gallop. The assemblage, quiet and respectful, but clad in all the vagaries of Oriental colors and rags, contained some faces that appeared very wild in the half-light. When the service had gone on half an hour, a priest came out with a tinkling censer and incensed carefully every nook and corner and person (even the vestibule, where some of the pilgrims slept, which needed it), until the church was filled with smoke and perfume. The performance went on for an hour or more, but I crept back to bed long before it was over, and fell to sleep on the drone of the intoning.