A Tramp's Sketches

by Stephen Graham

II

At last we arrived at Jerusalem. The onlookers saw a long, jaded-looking flock of poor people toiling up the hilly road from Jaffa, wearing Russian winter garb under the straight-beating sun of the desert, dusty, road-worn, and beaten. We went along the middle of the roadway like a procession, observed of all observers; in one sense scarcely worth looking at, yet in another the most significant spectacle of the day or of the time. We were—religious Europe just arrived at the Heavenly City.

Certainly it would have been difficult to know the happiness and exaltation of our hearts; perhaps to do that it would have been necessary to step into line and follow us to the Cathedral and the Sepulchre; perhaps even necessary to anticipate our coming, and join us long before, on the way in Russia.

But we went forward unconscious of our own significance, indifferent to the gaze of the curious. There was one thought in our minds: that we had actually attained unto Jerusalem and were walking the last few miles to the Holy of Holies.

We passed in through the gate of the Russian settlement, and in a moment were at the monastery doors. How gladly we threw off our packs on the green grass sward and hurried into church to the Thanksgiving Service, buying sheaves of little candles at the door and pressing in to light them before the sacred ikons. When the priest was given the great Bible to read, it lay on the bare heads of pilgrims; so close did the eager ones press together to share in the bearing that the Holy Book needed no other support. We sang the Mnogia Lieta with a deep harmonious chorus; we prostrated ourselves and prayed and crossed. I stood in the midst and sang or knelt with the rest, timid as a novice, made gentle by the time, and I learned to cross myself in a new way. One by one the peasants advanced and kissed the gold cross in the hands of the priest, and among them I went up and was blessed as they were. And we were all in rapture. Standing at the threshold afterwards, smiling peasants with wet shining eyes confessed to one another their unworthiness and their happiness; and a girl all in laughing tears fell down at our feet, kissing our dusty boots, and asking our forgiveness that she had been permitted to see Jerusalem.

We were taken to the refectory and seated at many tables to a peasant dinner: cabbage soup and porridge, bread and kvass, just as they are served in Russia itself. We passed to the hostelry and were given, at the rate of three farthings a day, beds and benches that we might occupy as long as we wished to stay in Jerusalem. The first night we were all to get as rested as possible, the next we were to spend in the Sepulchre itself. I slept in a room with four hundred peasants, on a wooden shelf covered with old pallets of straw. The shelves were hard and dirty; there was no relaxation of our involuntary asceticism, but we slept well. There was music in our ears. We had attained to Jerusalem, and our dreams were with the angels. Jerusalem the earthly had not forced itself upon our minds; we held the symbolism of the journey lightly, and the mind read a mystery in delicate emotions. The time was to come when some of us would be discontented with Jerusalem, as some of the disciples who fell away were discontented with the poor and humble Jesus; but as yet even to these all the material outward appearance of Jerusalem was a rumour. We knew not what we should see when we stepped out on the morrow; perhaps pearly gates, streets of gold, angels with harps. Jerusalem the earthly was unproved. We had as yet only toiled up the steep Jaffa way, and the road to heaven itself might be not unlike that road. To-morrow … who could say what to-morrow would unfold? For those of us who could see with the eyes of the heart there could be no disappointment. But for all, this night of golden dreams was a respite, and Jerusalem the symbol and Jerusalem the symbolised were one. Happy, happy pilgrims!

Next day we went to the strange and ugly church erected over the Sepulchre of Jesus, the "Church of the Life-giving Grave"; and we kissed the stone of anointing—the stone on which the body of Jesus lay whilst it was being wrapped in fair linen and anointed with oil. We knelt before the ark-like inner temple which is built over the hollow in the rock. We were received into that temple, and one by one crept along the passage-way to the Holy of Holies, the inmost shrine of Christendom. Only music could tell what the peasant realised in that chamber as he knelt where the sacred Body lay, and kissed the hollow in the stone.

Then we spent a whole night in the Sepulchre and entered into the mystery of death—saw our own death as in a picture before us, our abiding in the grave until the resurrection. In the great dark church the solemn service went forward. On the throne of the altar at Golgotha near by, the candles gleamed. Night grew quiet all around, and the Syrian stars looked over us, so that centuries and ages passed away.