Charles Warner - In The Levant

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.

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.