Part 3

I walked round the building on the outside, in a sort of dream, and yet with the delightful sense of having awakened from it, of which the light, down in the vaults, had given me the assurance. The immense thickness and giddy height of the walls, the enormous strength of the massive towers, the great extent of the building, its gigantic proportions, frowning aspect, and barbarous irregularity, awaken awe and wonder. The recollection of its opposite old uses; an impregnable fortress, a luxurious palace, a horrible prison, a place of torture, the court of the Inquisition: at one and the same time, a house of feasting, fighting, religion, and blood: gives to every stone in its huge form a fearful interest, and imparts new meaning to its incongruities. I could think of little, however, then, or long afterwards, but the sun in the dungeons. The palace coming down to be the lounging-place of noisy soldiers, and being forced to echo their rough talk and common oaths, and to have their garments fluttering from its dirty windows, was some reduction of its state, and something to rejoice at; but the day in its cells, and the sky for the roof of its chambers of cruelty--that was its desolation and defeat! If I had seen it in a blaze from ditch to rampart, I should have felt that not that light, nor all the light in all the fire that burns, could waste it, like the sunbeams in its secret council-chamber, and its prisons.

Before I quit this Palace of the Popes, let me translate from the little history I mentioned just now a short anecdote, quite appropriate to itself, connected with its adventures.

“An ancient tradition relates, that in 1441, a nephew of Pierre de Lude, the Pope’s legate, seriously insulted some distinguished ladies of Avignon, whose relations, in revenge, seized the young man and horribly mutilated him. For several years the legate kept _his_ revenge within his own breast, but he was not the less resolved upon its gratification at last. He even made, in the fullness of time, advances towards a complete reconciliation; and when their apparent sincerity had prevailed, he invited to a splendid banquet, in this palace, certain families, whom he sought to exterminate. The utmost gayety animated the repast; but the measures of the legate were well taken. When the dessert was on the board, a Swiss presented himself, with the announcement that a strange embassador solicited an extraordinary audience. The legate, excusing himself for the moment to his guests, retired, followed by his officers. Within a few moments afterwards, five hundred persons were reduced to ashes; the whole of that wing of the building having been blown into the air with a terrible explosion!”

After seeing the churches (I will not trouble you with churches just now), we left Avignon that afternoon. The heat being very great, the roads outside the walls were strewn with people fast asleep in every little slip of shade, and with lazy groups, half asleep and half awake, who were waiting until the sun should be low enough to admit of their playing bowls among the burnt-up trees, and on the dusty road. The harvest here was already gathered in, and mules and horses were treading out the corn in the fields. We came, at dusk, upon a wild and hilly country, once famous for brigands; and travelled slowly up a steep ascent. So we went on until eleven at night, when we halted at the town of Aix (within two stages of Marseilles) to sleep.

[Illustration: THE CHURCH OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE. PALESTINE.]

THE CHURCH OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE

PIERRE LOTI

The rain is nearly over. The sky is drying sadly and shows the first blue spaces. It is damp and cold, and water runs all along the base of the old walls.

On foot, with an Arab for a guide, I escape alone from the hôtel to hurry at last to the Holy Sepulchre. It is in the opposite direction to that of the Dominicans, almost in the heart of Jerusalem through narrow winding streets between walls as old as the Crusades, without windows and without roofs. On the wet pavements and beneath a still dark sky, circulate Oriental costumes,--Turks, Bedouins, or Jews, and women draped like phantoms, Musulmans beneath dark veils and Christians beneath white veils.

The city has remained Saracen. Vaguely I notice that we pass an Oriental bazaar, where the stalls are occupied by merchants in turbans; in the shadow of the roofed streets there slowly passes a string of enormous camels, that obliges us to enter one of the doors. Now, we must get out of the way for a peculiar and long defile of Russian women, all sexagenarians at least, who walk rapidly leaning on walking-sticks; old faded dresses, old parasols, old _touloupes_ of fur, with faces of fatigue and suffering framed in black handkerchiefs; a black and sorrowful _ensemble_ in the midst of this Orient of colour. They walk rapidly with a movement at once excited and exhausted, all hustling along without seeing anything, like somnambulists, with anæstheticized eyes wide open in a celestial dream. And hundreds of moujiks, having the same look of ecstasy follow them; all of them old, sordid, with long grey beards and long grey hair escaping from their felt hats; on their breasts many medals, indicating that they are old soldiers. Having entered the holy city yesterday, they are returning from their first visit to that sacred spot where I am going in my turn; poor pilgrims who come here by the thousand, on foot, sleeping out of doors in the rain or the snow, suffering with hunger and dying on the way.

In proportion as you approach, the Oriental objects in the stalls give place to objects of an obscure Christian piety: thousands of chaplets, crosses, religious lamps, and images or icons. And the crowd is denser, and other pilgrims, old moujiks and old matouchkas plant themselves to buy cheap little wooden rosaries and cheap little crucifixes for two sous, which they will carry from here as relics to be considered as sacred for ever.

Finally, in an old and defaced wall resembling a rock, there opens a rude door, very low and narrow, and, by a series of descending steps, you arrive before a place jutting out from the high sombre walls, in front of the basilica of the Holy Sepulchre.

At this spot, it is customary to take off your hat, the very moment the Holy Sepulchre appears; every one passes bareheaded even if he is only going by on his way about Jerusalem. It is thronged with poor people who beg by singing; pilgrims who pray; sellers of crosses and chaplets who have their little booths on the ground upon the old and venerable flag-stones. Upon the pavement and among the steps there rise the still uprooted socles of columns that formally supported the basilicas, and that were razed, like those of St. Stephen, from far back and doubtful periods; everything is a collection of rubbish in this city which has been subjected to twenty sieges and which every kind of fanaticism has sacked.

The high walls, of reddish brown stone, forming the sides of this place, are convents or chapels--and it is said fortresses also. In the background, higher and more sombre than anything else rises that worn out and broken mass, which is the façade of the Holy Sepulchre and which has assumed the appearance and irregularities of a large rock; it has two enormous doors of the Twelfth Century framed with singularly archaic ornaments; one of them is walled up; the other is wide open permitting you to see thousands of little flames in the shadowy interior. Songs, cries and discordant lamentations, lugubrious to hear, escape through it with the perfume of incense.

Passing through the door, you find yourself in the venerable shadow of a kind of vestibule that reveals magnificent depths beyond, where innumerable lamps are burning. Some Turkish guards, armed as if for a massacre, occupy this entrance in a military fashion; seated like sovereigns on a large divan, they watch the devotees passing this place, which is always, from their point of view, the opprobrium of Musulman Jerusalem and which the most savage of them have never ceased to call El Komamah (ordure).

Oh! the unexpected and imperishable impression when you enter here for the first time. A maze of sombre sanctuaries, of all periods and of all aspects connected by openings, doors and superb columns,--and also by little gloomy doors, air-holes and cavernous hollowings. Some of these are elevated like high tribunals, where you perceive, in the remote distance, groups of women in long veils; others are subterranean, where you are jostled by shadows, between walls of rock that have remained intact, dripping and black.--All this, in a twilight where a few rays of light fall and accentuate the surrounding darkness; all this, starry with an infinite number of little flames in lamps of silver and gold, hanging from the vaults by the thousand.--And everywhere a crowd moving about confusedly as if at Babel, or quite stationary, seeming to be grouped by nationalities around the golden tabernacles where somebody is officiating.

Psalmody, lamentations and joyful songs fill the high vaults, or echo in the sepulchral depths below; the nasal melopœia of the Greeks cut through by the howlings of the Copts. And, in all these voices, an exaltation of tears and prayers which produce dissonance and which unite them; the whole effect becoming I know not what strange thing that makes this place like a great wail from mankind and the supreme cry of distress before death.

The rotunda with a very high cupola, which you enter first and which allows you to divine between its columns the obscure chaos of the other sanctuaries, is occupied in the centre by the great marble kiosk, of a luxury that is half barbaric and overcharged with silver lamps, that encloses the stone of the sepulchre. All around this very sacred kiosk, the crowd surges or stands still: on the one side hundreds of moujiks and matouchkas are kneeling on the flag-stones; on the other, the women of Jerusalem, standing up, in long white veils--groups of ancient virgins, one would, say, in the dreamlike shadow; elsewhere Abyssinians and turbaned Arabs prostrated with foreheads to the earth; Turks with sabre in hand; people of all communions and all languages.

You do not stay long in this habitation of the Holy Sepulchre, which is really the very heart of this mass of basilicas and chapels, people pass by one by one; lowering your head you enter it by a very little door of marble carved and festooned; the sepulchre is within, encased in marble and surrounded by gold icons and gold lamps. There entered at the same time as I did a Russian soldier, a poor old woman in rags, an Oriental woman in rich brocade; all kissed the cover of the tomb and wept. And others followed, and others eternally follow, to touch, embrace and wet with tears these same stones.

There is no plan of unity in this collection of churches and chapels which crowd close around this very holy kiosk; there are some large ones that are marvellously sumptuous and some little ones that are humble and primitive, crumbling away with age in these sinister nooks dug out of the natural rock and dark as night. And, here and there, the rock of Calvary, left bare, appears in the midst of richness and archaic gold work. The contrast is strange between so many collected treasures,--icons of gold, crosses of gold and lamps of gold,--and the rags of the pilgrims and the decay of the walls and the pillars, worn, corroded, shapeless and greasy from the rubbing of so many human bodies.

All the altars and all the different confessionals are so mingled here that it results in a continual displacing of priests and processions; they cleave through the crowds, carrying remonstrances and preceded by armed Janizaries who knock upon the resonant flag-stones with the hilts of their halberds. Make room! here are some Latins who pass in golden chasubles. Make room again! here is the Syrian bishop with a long white beard under a black _cagoule_, who issues from his little subterranean chapel. Then here are some Greeks still Byzantine in adornment, and Abyssinians with black faces. Quickly, quickly they walk by in their sumptuous vestments whilst before them the silver censers swung by children knock against the crowd which is thrown into confusion and separates. In this human sea there is a continuous rumbling and an incessant noise of psalmody and sacred bells. Almost everywhere it is so dark that in order to walk about, it is necessary to have a candle in your hand, and, beneath the high columns and in the dark corridors thousands of little flames follow or cross each other. Men praying in a loud voice, weeping and sobbing, run from one chapel to another, here to kiss the rock where the Cross was planted, there to prostrate themselves where Mary and Magdalen wept; some priests, crouching in the shadows, beckon to you to lead you through the funereal little doors in the holes of the tombs; old women with wild eyes and tears running down their cheeks come up from the subterranean blackness to kiss the stones of the sepulchres.

In black darkness, you descend to the chapel of Saint-Helena, by a wide stairway of about thirty steps, worn, broken, dangerous as falling into ruin and bordered with squatting spectres. In passing, our candles illumined the vague motionless creatures, of the same colour as the side of the rock, who are afflicted beggars, lunatics covered with ulcers, sinister all of them, with their chins in their hands and long hair falling over their faces.--Among these ghastly creatures, there is a blind young man, with magnificent blonde curls enveloping him like a mantle, who is as beautiful as the Christ whom he resembles.

Down below, the chapel of Saint-Helena, after that night, with its two rows of phantoms that you have passed through, is illumined by daylight, whose rays arrive pale and bluish through the loop-holes of the vault. Assuredly this is one of the strangest places in all that medley that calls itself the Holy Sepulchre; it is there that one experiences in the most distressing manner, the sentiment of the terrible Past.

It is silent when I arrive and it is empty, beneath the half dead gaze of those phantoms that guard the stairway at the entrance; you hear with difficulty the indistinct noise of bells and chants from above. Behind the altar, still another stairway, bordered with the same long-haired individuals, descends lower into a still darker night.

You would think this a heathen temple. Four enormous, dumpy pillars, of a primitive Byzantine type and exceedingly heavy, sustain the surbased cupola, from which hang ostrich eggs and a thousand uncouth pendants. Remains of painting on the walls indicating saints with nimbuses of gold in naïve and stiff attitudes are being effaced by the dampness and ancient dust. Everything is decaying through neglect with the sweat of water and saltpetre.

From the depths of the lower subterranean vaults suddenly ascend some Abyssinian priests, who suggest the ancient Magi-Kings, issuing from the bowels of the earth; black faces under large golden tiaras formed like turbans, long robes of cloth of gold sprinkled with imaginary red and blue flowers. Quickly, quickly, with that kind of excited haste which is universal here, they cross the crypts of Saint-Helena and mount towards the other sanctuaries by the big stairway in ruins,--illuminated at first by the light falling from the loop-holes of the vault, splendidly archaic in their golden robes in the midst of the gnomes squatting against the walls,--then, they suddenly disappear above in the distant shadows.

Some distance away, in the sanctuaries at the entrance and near the kiosk of the Sepulchre, the rock of Calvary rises: it supports two chapels to which you ascend by twenty stone steps and which are the veritable place of prostrations and sobs for the crowd.

From the peristyle of these chapels, like an elevated balcony the view commands a confused mass of tabernacles, a maze of churches, where the hypnotized crowd moves about. The most splendid of the two is that of the Greeks; under a nimbus of silver, as resplendent as a rainbow, stand out in human grandeur the pale images of the three crucified ones, Christ and the two thieves; the walls are hidden by icons of silver, gold and precious stones. The altar is erected on the very place of the crucifixion; under the retable a silver lattice lets you see in the black rock the hole where the Cross was planted,--and it is there that you walk on your knees, wetting these sombre stones with tears and kisses, whilst a lulling noise of chants and prayers ascends incessantly from the churches below.

And, for two thousand years, here it has ever been thus; under divers forms, in the different basilicas, with interruptions of sieges, battles, and massacres, but with renewals still more passionate and universal, here the same concert of prayers, the same great chorus of desperate supplications or triumphant thanksgiving have always resounded.

They are somewhat idolatrous, these adorations, for those who say: “God is a Spirit and those who adore Him should adore Him in spirit and in truth.” But they are so human, they respond so well to our instincts and our misery. Surely, the first Christians in the purely spiritual flight of their faith, and when the teaching of the master was still fresh in their souls, did not encumber themselves with magnificence, symbols and images. Above all it was not terrestrial memories--the place of a martyr and an empty sepulchre--that preoccupied them; their Redeemer, they did not dream of seeking Him here, as they had seen Him detached forever from transitory things and hovering above in the serene light. But we--all of us, people of the West and North--are some centuries nearer to simple barbarism than the ancient society out of which the early Christians arose; in the Middle Ages, when the new faith penetrated our forests, it overshadowed a thousand primitive beliefs; let us acknowledge it is a small minority that is freed from those accumulated traditions to come again to an evangelical cult in spirit and in truth. And, moreover, when faith is extinguished in our modern souls it is still by that so human veneration for places and memories, that unbelievers like myself are affected with the touching regret for the lost Saviour.

Oh! Christ, for whom all these crowds gather and weep; Christ, for whom this poor old woman, prostrated near me, licks the pavement, leaning against the flags her miserable heart whilst weeping delicious tears of hope; Christ, who holds me, me also, in this place, like her, in a vague, yet very sweet meditation. Oh if He was merely one of our brothers in suffering, now vanished in death, may His memory be adored, even so, for His long illusion of love, meeting again, and eternity. And may this place be also blessed, this unique and strange place which is called the Holy Sepulchre--even contestable, even fictitious if you please--but whither, for fifteen centuries afflicted multitudes have run, where hardened hearts have melted like the snows, and where now my eyes are ready to veil themselves in a last rapture of prayer--very illogical I know--but ineffable and infinite.

In the evening, at nightfall, after I have wandered for a long while in the melancholy little streets, through the Saracen city, where the crowns of fire of the Ramadan begin to flame around the minarets of the mosques,--an attraction draws me slowly towards the Holy Sepulchre.

There reigns here a different darkness to that of the daytime; the rays of white light have ceased to descend by the loop-holes of the vaults; but the lamps that are lighted are more numerous, lamps of silver and lamps of gold, and coloured lamps studding the darkness with little flames of blue, red, or white. A kind of calm rests in this labyrinth of high vaults, like a rest after the exhausting ardour of the day. The noises are nothing more than the buzzing of prayers uttered very low and upon the knee, only the murmurings in the sonorous caves, where dominate the poor raucous voices of the moujiks, and, every now and then their deep coughs. It is nearly time to close the doors and the crowd has melted away; but some groups of people, prostrated in the shadows with faces to the ground, are still kissing the holy flag-stones.

LA GRANDE CHARTREUSE

WILLIAM BECKFORD

I rested a moment, and looking against the stout oaken gate, which closed up the entrance to this unknown region, felt at my heart a certain awe, that brought to my mind the sacred terror of those in ancient days going to be admitted into the Eleusinian mysteries.

My guide gave two knocks; after a solemn pause, the gate was slowly opened, and all our horses having passed through it, was again carefully closed.

I now found myself in a narrow dell, surrounded on every side by peaks of the mountains, rising almost beyond my sight, and shelving downwards till their bases were hidden by the foam and spray of the water, over which hung a thousand withered and distorted trees. The rocks seemed crowding upon me, and, by their particular situation, threatened to obstruct every ray of light; but, notwithstanding the menacing appearance of the prospect, I still kept following my guide up a craggy ascent, partly hewn through a rock, and bordered by the trunks of ancient fir-trees, which formed a fantastic barrier, till we came to a dreary and exposed promontory, impending directly over the dell.

The woods are here clothed with darkness, and the torrents rushing with additional violence are lost in the gloom of the caverns below; every object, as I looked downwards from my path, that hung midway between the base and the summit of the cliff, was horrid and woeful. The channel of the torrent sunk deep amidst frightful crags, and the pale willows and wreathed roots spreading over it, answered my ideas of those dismal abodes, where, according to the Druidical mythology, the ghosts of conquered warriors were bound. I shivered whilst I was regarding these regions of desolation, and, quickly lifting up my eyes to vary the scene, I perceived a range of whitish cliffs glistening with the light of the sun, to emerge from these melancholy forests.

On a fragment that projected over the chasm, and concealed for a moment its terrors, I saw a cross, on which was written _Via coeli_. The cliffs being the heaven to which I now aspired, we deserted the edge of the precipice, and, ascending, came to a retired nook of the rocks, in which several copious rills had worn irregular grottoes. Here we reposed an instant, and were enlivened with a few sunbeams, piercing the thickets and gilding the waters that bubbled from the rock, over which hung another cross, inscribed with this short sentence, which the situation rendered wonderfully pathetic, _O Spes unica!_ the fervent exclamation of some wretch disgusted with the world whose only consolation was found in this retirement.