In The Levant 6

In The Levant 6

Happily also the exhaustive discussion of the question of the true site

of the sepulchre, conducted by the most devout and accomplished biblical

scholars and the keenest antiquarians of the age, relieves the ordinary

tourist from any obligation to enter upon an investigation that would

interest none but those who have been upon the spot. No doubt the larger

portion of the Christian world accepts this site as the true one.

 

I make with diffidence a suggestion that struck me, although it may not

be new. The Pool of Hezekiah is not over four hundred feet, measured

on the map, from the dome of the sepulchre. Under the church itself

are several large excavations in the rocks, which were once cisterns.

Ancient Jerusalem depended for its water upon these cisterns, which

took the drainage from the roofs, and upon a few pools, like that of

Hezekiah, which were fed from other reservoirs, such as Solomon's Pool,

at a considerable distance from the city. These cisterns under the

church may not date back to the time of our Lord, but if they do, they

were doubtless at that time within the walls. And of course the Pool of

Hezekiah, so near to this alleged site, cannot be supposed to have been

beyond the walls.

 

Within the door of the church, upon a raised divan at one side, as if

this were a bazaar and he were the merchant, sat a fat Turk, in official

dress, the sneering warden of this Christian edifice, and the perhaps

necessary guardian of peace within. His presence there, however, is

at first a disagreeable surprise to all those who rebel at owing an

approach to the holy place to the toleration of a Moslem; but I was

quite relieved of any sense of obligation when, upon coming out, the

Turk asked me for backsheesh!

 

Whatever one may think as to the site of Calvary, no one can approach

a spot which even claims to be it, and which has been for centuries the

object of worship of millions, and is constantly thronged by believing

pilgrims, without profound emotion. It was late in the afternoon when

I entered the church, and already the shades of evening increased the

artificial gloom of the interior. At the very entrance lies an object

that arrests one. It is a long marble slab resting upon the pavement,

about which candles are burning. Every devout pilgrim who comes in

kneels and kisses it, and it is sometimes difficult to see it for the

crowds who press about it. Underneath it is supposed to be the Stone

of Unction upon which the Lord's body was laid, according to the Jewish

fashion, for anointing, after he was taken from the cross.

 

I turned directly into the rotunda, under the dome of which is the stone

building enclosing the Holy Sepulchre, a ruder structure than that which

covers the hut and tomb of St. Francis in the church at Assisi. I met

in the way a procession of Latin monks, bearing candles, and chanting

as they walked. They were making the round of the holy places in the

church, this being their hour for the tour. The sects have agreed upon

certain hours for these little daily pilgrimages, so that there shall

be no collision. A rabble of pilgrims followed the monks. They had just

come from incensing and adoring the sepulchre, and the crowd of other

pilgrims who had been waiting their turn were now pressing in at the

narrow door. As many times as I have been there, I have always seen

pilgrims struggling to get in and struggling to get out. The proud and

the humble crowd there together; the greasy boor from beyond the Volga

jostles my lady from Naples, and the dainty pilgrim from America pushes

her way through a throng of stout Armenian peasants. But I have never

seen any disorder there, nor any rudeness, except the thoughtless

eagerness of zeal.

 

Taking my chance in the line, I passed into the first apartment, called

the Chapel of the Angel, a narrow and gloomy antechamber, which takes

its name from the fragment of stone in the centre, the stone upon which

the angel sat after it had been rolled away from the sepulchre. A stream

of light came through the low and narrow door of the tomb. Through the

passage to this vault only one person can enter at a time, and the tomb

will hold no more than three or four. Stooping along the passage, which

is cased with marble like the tomb, and may cover natural rock, I came

into the sacred place, and into a blaze of silver lamps, and candles.

The vault is not more than six feet by seven, and is covered by a low

dome. The sepulchral stone occupies all the right side, and is the

object of devotion. It is of marble, supposed to cover natural stone,

and is cracked and worn smooth on the edge by the kisses of millions of

people. The attendant who stood at one end opened a little trap-door,

in which lamp-cloths were kept, and let me see the naked rock, which is

said to be that of the tomb. While I stood there in that very centre of

the faith and longing of so many souls, which seemed almost to palpitate

with a consciousness of its awful position, pilgrim after pilgrim,

on bended knees, entered the narrow way, kissed with fervor or with

coldness the unresponsive marble, and withdrew in the same attitude.

Some approached it with streaming eyes and kissed it with trembling

rapture; some ladies threw themselves upon the cold stone and sobbed

aloud. Indeed, I did not of my own will intrude upon these acts of

devotion, which have the right of secrecy, but it was some time before

I could escape, so completely was the entrance blocked up. When I had

struggled out, I heard chanting from the hill of Golgotha, and saw the

gleaming of a hundred lights from chapel and tomb and remote recesses,

but I cared to see no more of the temple itself that day.

 

The next morning (it was the 7th of April) was very cold, and the

day continued so. Without, the air was keen, and within it was nearly

impossible to get warm or keep so, in the thick-walled houses, which

had gathered the damp and chill of dungeons. You might suppose that

the dirtiest and most beggarly city in the world could not be much

deteriorated by the weather, but it is. In a cheerful, sunny day

you find that the desolation of Jerusalem has a certain charm and

attraction: even a tattered Jew leaning against a ruined wall, or a

beggar on a dunghill, is picturesque in the sunshine; but if you put a

day of chill rain and frosty wind into the city, none of the elements of

complete misery are wanting. There is nothing to be done, day or night;

indeed, there is nothing ever to be done in the evening, except to read

your guide-book--that is, the Bible--and go to bed. You are obliged to

act like a Christian here, whatever you are.

 

Speaking of the weather, a word about the time for visiting Syria may

not be amiss. In the last part of March the snow was a foot deep in the

streets; parties who had started on their tour northward were snowed in

and forced to hide in their tents three days from the howling winter.

There is pleasure for you! We found friends in the city who had been

waiting two weeks after they had exhausted its sights, for settled

weather that would permit them to travel northward. To be sure, the

inhabitants say that this last storm ought to have been rain instead of

snow, according to the habit of the seasons; and it no doubt would have

been if this region were not twenty-five hundred feet above the sea. The

hardships of the Syrian tour are enough in the best weather, and I am

convinced that our dragoman is right in saying that most travellers

begin it too early in the spring.

 

Jerusalem is not a formidable city to the explorer who is content to

remain above ground, and is not too curious about its substructions and

buried walls, and has no taste, as some have, for crawling through its

drains. I suppose it would elucidate the history of the Jews if we

could dig all this hill away and lay bare all the old foundations, and

ascertain exactly how the city was watered. I, for one, am grateful to

the excellent man and great scholar who crawled on his hands and knees

through a subterranean conduit, and established the fact of a connection

between the Fountain of the Virgin and the Pool of Siloam. But I would

rather contribute money to establish a school for girls in the Holy

City, than to aid in laying bare all the aqueducts from Ophel to the

Tower of David. But this is probably because I do not enough appreciate

the importance of such researches among Jewish remains to the progress

of Christian truth and morality in the world. The discoveries hitherto

made have done much to clear up the topography of ancient Jerusalem;

I do not know that they have yielded anything valuable to art or to

philology, any treasures illustrating the habits, the social life, the

culture, or the religion of the past, such as are revealed beneath

the soil of Rome or in the ashes of Pompeii; it is, however, true that

almost every tourist in Jerusalem becomes speedily involved in all these

questions of ancient sites,--the identification of valleys that once

existed, of walls that are now sunk under the accumulated rubbish of two

thousand years, from thirty feet to ninety feet deep, and of foundations

that are rough enough and massive enough to have been laid by David and

cemented by Solomon. And the fascination of the pursuit would soon send

one underground, with a pickaxe and a shovel. But of all the diggings I

saw in the Holy City, that which interested me most was the excavation

of the church and hospital of the chivalric Knights of St. John;

concerning which I shall say a word further on.

 

The present walls were built by Sultan Suleiman in the middle of the

sixteenth century, upon foundations much older, and here and there, as

you can see, upon big blocks of Jewish workmanship. The wall is high

enough and very picturesque in its zigzag course and re-entering angles,

and, I suppose, strong enough to hitch a horse to; but cannon-balls

would make short work of it.

 

Having said thus much of the topography, gratuitously and probably

unnecessarily, for every one is supposed to know Jerusalem as well as he

knows his native town, we are free to look at anything that may chance

to interest us. I do not expect, however, that any words of mine can

convey to the reader a just conception of the sterile and blasted

character of this promontory and the country round about it, or of the

squalor, shabbiness, and unpicturesqueness of the city, always excepting

a few of its buildings and some fragments of antiquity built into modern

structures here and there. And it is difficult to feel that this spot

was ever the splendid capital of a powerful state, that this arid and

stricken country could ever have supplied the necessities of such a

capital, and, above all, that so many Jews could ever have been crowded

within this cramped space as Josephus says perished in the siege by

Titus, when ninety-seven thousand were carried into captivity and eleven

hundred thousand died by famine and the sword. Almost the entire Jewish

nation must have been packed within this small area.

 

Our first walk through the city was in the Via Dolorosa, as gloomy a

thoroughfare as its name implies. Its historical portion is that steep

and often angled part between the Holy Sepulchre and the house of

Pilate, but we traversed the whole length of it to make our exit from

St. Stephen's Gate toward the Mount of Olives. It is only about

four hundred years ago that this street obtained the name of the Via

Dolorosa, and that the sacred "stations" on it were marked out for the

benefit of the pilgrim. It is a narrow lane, steep in places, having

frequent sharp angles, running under arches, and passing between gloomy

buildings, enlivened by few shops. Along this way Christ passed from

the Judgment Hall of Pilate to Calvary. I do not know how many times