In the sepulchral incense-laden dusk of the uncouth Church, in the
religious gloom punctuated by the pervasive twinkle of a thousand
hanging lamps of silver, was wedged and blent a suffocating mass of
palm-bearing humanity of all nations and races, the sumptuously
clothed and the ragged, the hale and the unsightly; the rainbow
colors of the East relieved by the white of the shrouded females,
toned down by the sombre shabbiness of the Russian _moujiks_ and
peasant-women, and pierced by a vivid circular line of red fezzes on
the unbared, unreverential heads of the Turkish regiment keeping
order among the jostling jealousies of Christendom, whose rival
churches swarm around the strange, glittering, candle-illumined
Rotunda that covers the tomb of Christ. Not an inch of free space
anywhere under this shadow of Golgotha: a perpetual sway to and fro
of the human tides, seething with sobs and quarrels; flowing into the
planless maze of chapels and churches of all ages and architectures,
that, perched on rocks or hewn into their mouldy darkness,
magnificent with untold church-treasure--Armenian, Syrian, Coptic,
Latin, Greek, Abyssinian--add the resonance of their special
sanctities and the oppression of their individual glories of vestment
and ceremonial to the surcharged atmosphere palpitant with exaltation
and prayer and mystic bell-tinklings; overspreading the thirty-seven
sacred spots, and oozing into the holy of holies itself, towards that
impassive marble stone, goal of the world's desire in the blaze of
the ever burning lamps; and overflowing into the screaming courtyard,
amid the flagstone stalls of chaplets and crosses and carven-shells,
and the rapacious rabble of cripples and vendors.
And amid the frenzied squeezing and squabbling, way was miraculously
made for a dazzling procession of the Only Orthodox Church, moving
statelily round and round, to the melting strains of unseen singing
boys and preceded by an upborne olive-tree; seventy priests in
flowering damask, carrying palms or swinging censers, boys in green,
uplifting silken banners richly broidered with sacred scenes,
archimandrites attended by deacons, and bearing symbolic trinitarian
candlesticks, bishops with mitres, and last and most gorgeous of all,
the sceptred Patriarch bowing to the tiny Coptic Church in the corner,
as his priests wheel and swing their censers towards it--all the
elaborately jewelled ritual evolved by alien races from the simple
life and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth.
"O Jesus, brother in Israel, perhaps only those excluded from this
sanctuary of thine can understand thee!"