In The Levant 9

In The Levant 9

The Wailing Place of the Jews is on the west side of the Temple

enclosure, a little to the north of this arch; it is in a long, narrow

court formed by the walls of modern houses and the huge blocks of stone

of this part of the original wall. These stones are no doubt as old

as Solomon's Temple, and the Jews can here touch the very walls of the

platform of that sacred edifice.

 

Every Friday a remnant of the children of Israel comes here to weep and

wail. They bring their scriptures, and leaning against the honey-combed

stone, facing it, read the Lamentations and the Psalms, in a wailing

voice, and occasionally cry aloud in a chorus of lamentation, weeping,

blowing their long noses with blue cotton handkerchiefs, and kissing

the stones. We were told that the smoothness of the stones in spots was

owing to centuries of osculation. The men stand together at one part of

the wall and the women at another. There were not more than twenty Jews

present as actors in the solemn ceremony the day we visited the spot,

and they did not wail much, merely reading the scriptures in a mumbling

voice and swaying their bodies backward and forward. Still they formed

picturesque and even pathetic groups: venerable old men with long white

beards and hooked noses, clad in rags and shreds and patches in all

degrees of decadence; lank creatures of the tribe of Benjamin with the

corkscrew curls; and skinny old women shaking with weeping, real or

assumed.

 

Very likely these wailers were as poor and wretched as they appeared

to be, and their tears were the natural outcome of their grief over the

ruin of the Temple nearly two thousand years ago. I should be the last

one to doubt their enjoyment of this weekly bitter misery. But the

demonstration had somewhat the appearance of a set and show performance;

while it was going on, a shrewd Israelite went about with a box to

collect mites from the spectators. There were many more travellers.

there to see the wailing than there were Jews to wail. This also lent

an unfavorable aspect to the scene. I myself felt that if this were

genuine, I had no business to be there with my undisguised curiosity,

and if it were not genuine, it was the poorest spectacle that Jerusalem

offers to the tourist. Cook's party was there in force, this being one

of the things promised in the contract; and I soon found myself more

interested in Cook's pilgrims than in the others.

 

The scripture read and wailed this day was the fifty-first Psalm of

David. If you turn to it (you may have already discovered that the

covert purpose of these desultory notes is to compel you to read your

Bible), you will see that it expresses David's penitence in the matter

of Bathsheba.

 

 

 

 

III.--HOLY PLACES OP THE HOLY CITY.

 

|THE sojourner in Jerusalem falls into the habit of dropping in at the

Church of the Holy Sepulchre nearly every afternoon. It is the centre

of attraction. There the pilgrims all resort; there one sees, in a day,

many races, and the costumes of strange and distant peoples; there one

sees the various worship of the many Christian sects. There are always

processions making the round of the holy places, sect following

sect, with swinging censers, each fumigating away the effect of its

predecessor.

 

The central body of the church, answering to the nave, as the rotunda,

which contains the Holy Sepulchre, answers to choir and apse, is the

Greek chapel, and the most magnificent in the building. The portion of

the church set apart to the Latins, opening also out of the rotunda,

is merely a small chapel. The Armenians have still more contracted

accommodations, and the poor Copts enjoy a mere closet, but it is in a

sacred spot, being attached to the west end of the sepulchre itself.

 

On the western side of the rotunda we passed through the bare and

apparently uncared-for chapel of the Syrians, and entered, through a low

door, into a small grotto hewn in the rock. Lighted candles revealed to

us some tombs, little pits cut in the rock, two in the side-wall and two

in the floor. We had a guide who knew every sacred spot in the city,

a man who never failed to satisfy the curiosity of the most credulous

tourist.

 

"Whose tombs are these?" we asked.

 

"That is the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, and that beside it is the tomb

of Nicodemus."

 

"How do you know?"

 

"How do I know? You ask me how I know. Have n't I always lived in

Jerusalem? I was born here."

 

"Then perhaps you can tell us, if this tomb belonged to Joseph of

Arimathea and this to Nicodemus, whose is this third one?"

 

"O yes, that other," replied the guide, with only a moment's paralysis

of his invention, "that is the tomb of Arimathea himself."

 

One afternoon at four, service was going on in the Greek chapel, which

shone with silver and blazed with tapers, and was crowded with pilgrims,

principally Russians of both sexes, many of whom had made a painful

pilgrimage of more than two thousand miles on foot merely to prostrate

themselves in this revered place. A Russian bishop and a priest, in

the resplendent robes of their office, were intoning the service

responsively. In the very centre of this chapel is a round hole covered

with a grating, and tapers are generally burning about it. All the

pilgrims kneeled there, and kissed the grating and adored the hole. I

had the curiosity to push my way through the throng in order to see the

object of devotion, but I could discover nothing. It is, however, an

important spot: it is the centre of the earth; though why Christians

should worship the centre of the earth I do not know. The Armenians have

in their chapel also a spot that they say is the real centre; that makes

three that we know of, for everybody understands that there is one in

the Kaaba at Mecca.

 

We sat down upon a stone bench near the entrance of the chapel, where we

could observe the passing streams of people, and were greatly diverted

by a blithe and comical beggar who had stationed himself on the pavement

there to intercept the Greek charity of the worshippers when they passed

into the rotunda. He was a diminutive man with distorted limbs; he

wore a peaked red cap, and dragged himself over the pavement, or rather

skipped and flopped about on it like a devil-fish on land. Never was

seen in a beggar such vivacity and imperturbable good-humor, with so

much deviltry in his dancing eyes.

 

As we appeared to him to occupy a neutral position as to him and his

victims, he soon took us into his confidence and let us see his mode of

operations. He said (to our guide) that he was a Greek from Damascus,--O

yes, a Christian, a pilgrim, who always came down here at this season,

which was his harvest-time. He hoped (with a wicked wink) that his

devotion would be rewarded.

 

It was very entertaining to see him watch the people coming out, and

select his victims, whom he would indicate to us by a motion of his head

as he hopped towards them. He appeared to rely more upon the poor and

simple than upon the rich, and he was more successful with the former.

But he rarely, such was his insight, made a mistake. Whoever gave him

anything he thanked with the utmost _empressement_ of manner; then he

crossed himself, and turned around and winked at us, his confederates.

When an elegantly dressed lady dropped the smallest of copper coins into

his cap, he let us know his opinion of her by a significant gesture

and a shrug of his shoulders. But no matter from whom he received it,

whenever he added a penny to his store the rascal chirped and laughed

and caressed himself. He was in the way of being trodden under foot by

the crowd; but his agility was extraordinary, and I should not have been

surprised at any moment if he had vaulted over the heads of the throng

and disappeared. If he failed to attract the attention of an eligible

pilgrim, he did not hesitate to give the skirt of his elect a jerk, for

which rudeness he would at once apologize with an indescribable grimace

and a joke.

 

When the crowd had passed, he slid himself into a corner, by a motion

such as that with which a fish suddenly darts to one side, and set

himself to empty his pocket into his cap and count his plunder, tossing

the pieces into the air and catching them with a chuckle, crossing

himself and hugging himself by turns. He had four francs and a half.

When he had finished counting his money he put it in a bag, and for a

moment his face assumed a grave and business-like __EXPRESSION__. We thought

he would depart without demanding anything of us. But we were mistaken;

he had something in view that he no doubt felt would insure him a

liberal backsheesh. Wriggling near to us, he set his face into an

__EXPRESSION__ of demure humility, held out his cap, and said, in English,

each word falling from his lips as distinctly and unnaturally as if he

had been a wooden articulating machine,--

 

"Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and _I_ will give

you rest."

 

The rascal's impiety lessened the charity which our intimacy with him

had intended, but he appeared entirely content, chirped, saluted with

gravity, and, with a flop, was gone from our sight.

 

At the moment, a procession of Franciscan monks swept by, chanting in

rich bass voices, and followed, as usual, by Latin pilgrims, making

the daily round of the holy places; after they had disappeared we could

still hear their voices and catch now and again the glimmer of their

tapers in the vast dark spaces.

 

Opposite the place where we were sitting is the Chapel of the

Apparition, a room not much more than twenty feet square; it is the

Latin chapel, and besides its contiguity to the sepulchre has some

specialties of its own. The chapel is probably eight hundred years old.

In the centre of the pavement is the spot upon which our Lord stood when

he appeared to the Virgin after the resurrection; near it a slab marks

the place where the three crosses were laid after they were dug up by

Helena, and where the one on which our Lord was crucified was identified

by the miracle that it worked in healing a sick man. South of the altar

is a niche in the wall, now covered over, but a round hole is left

in the covering. I saw pilgrims thrust a long stick into this hole,

withdraw it, and kiss the end. The stick had touched a fragment of the

porphyry column to which the Saviour was bound when he was scourged.

 

In the semicircle at the east end of the nave are several interesting

places: the prison where Christ was confined before his execution, a

chapel dedicated to the centurion who pierced the side of our Lord, and

the spot on which the vestments were divided. From thence we descend,

by a long flight of steps partly hewn in the rock, to a rude, crypt-like