Eothen; Or, Traces of Travel Brought Home from the East

by Alexander William Kinglake

I crossed the plain of Esdraelon and entered amongst the hills of beautiful Galilee. It was at sunset that my path brought me sharply round into the gorge of a little valley, and close upon a grey mass of dwellings that lay happily nestled in the lap of the mountain. There was one only shining point still touched with the light of the sun, who had set for all besides; a brave sign this to “holy” Shereef and the rest of my Moslem men, for the one glittering summit was the head of a minaret, and the rest of the seeming village that had veiled itself so meekly under the shades of evening was Christian Nazareth!

Within the precincts of the Latin convent in which I was quartered there stands the great Catholic church which encloses the sanctuary, the dwelling of the blessed Virgin. [23] This is a grotto of about ten feet either way, forming a little chapel or recess, to which you descend by steps. It is decorated with splendour. On the left hand a column of granite hangs from the top of the grotto to within a few feet of the ground; immediately beneath it is another column of the same size, which rises from the ground as if to meet the one above; but between this and the suspended pillar there is an interval of more than a foot; these fragments once formed a single column, against which the angel leant when he spoke and told to Mary the mystery of her awful blessedness. Hard by, near the altar, the holy Virgin was kneeling.

I had been journeying (cheerily indeed, for the voices of my followers were ever within my hearing, but yet), as it were, in solitude, for I had no comrade to whet the edge of my reason, or wake me from my noonday dreams. I was left all alone to be taught and swayed by the beautiful circumstances of Palestine travelling—by the clime, and the land, and the name of the land, with all its mighty import; by the glittering freshness of the sward, and the abounding masses of flowers that furnished my sumptuous pathway; by the bracing and fragrant air that seemed to poise me in my saddle, and to lift me along as a planet appointed to glide through space.

And the end of my journey was Nazareth, the home of the blessed Virgin! In the first dawn of my manhood the old painters of Italy had taught me their dangerous worship of the beauty that is more than mortal, but those images all seemed shadowy now, and floated before me so dimly, the one overcasting the other, that they left me no one sweet idol on which I could look and look again and say, “Maria mia!” Yet they left me more than an idol; they left me (for to them I am wont to trace it) a faint apprehension of beauty not compassed with lines and shadows; they touched me (forgive, proud Marie of Anjou!)—they touched me with a faith in loveliness transcending mortal shapes.

I came to Nazareth, and was led from the convent to the sanctuary. Long fasting will sometimes heat my brain and draw me away out of the world—will disturb my judgment, confuse my notions of right and wrong, and weaken my power of choosing the right: I had fasted perhaps too long, for I was fevered with the zeal of an insane devotion to the heavenly queen of Christendom. But I knew the feebleness of this gentle malady, and knew how easily my watchful reason, if ever so slightly provoked, would drag me back to life. Let there but come one chilling breath of the outer world, and all this loving piety would cower and fly before the sound of my own bitter laugh. And so as I went I trod tenderly, not looking to the right nor to the left, but bending my eyes to the ground.

The attending friar served me well; he led me down quietly and all but silently to the Virgin’s home. The mystic air was so burnt with the consuming flames of the altar, and so laden with incense, that my chest laboured strongly, and heaved with luscious pain. There—there with beating heart the Virgin knelt and listened. I strived to grasp and hold with my riveted eyes some one of the feigned Madonnas, but of all the heaven-lit faces imagined by men there was none that would abide with me in this the very sanctuary. Impatient of vacancy, I grew madly strong against Nature, and if by some awful spell, some impious rite, I could—Oh most sweet Religion, that bid me fear God, and be pious, and yet not cease from loving! Religion and gracious custom commanded me that I fall down loyally and kiss the rock that blessed Mary pressed. With a half consciousness, with the semblance of a thrilling hope that I was plunging deep, deep into my first knowledge of some most holy mystery, or of some new rapturous and daring sin, I knelt, and bowed down my face till I met the smooth rock with my lips. One moment—one moment my heart, or some old pagan demon within me, woke up, and fiercely bounded; my bosom was lifted, and swung, as though I had touched her warm robe. One moment, one more, and then the fever had left me. I rose from my knees. I felt hopelessly sane. The mere world reappeared. My good old monk was there, dangling his key with listless patience, and as he guided me from the church, and talked of the refectory and the coming repast, I listened to his words with some attention and pleasure.

CHAPTER X—THE MONKS OF PALESTINE

Whenever you come back to me from Palestine we will find some “golden wine” [24] of Lebanon, that we may celebrate with apt libations the monks of the Holy Land, and though the poor fellows be theoretically “dead to the world,” we will drink to every man of them a good long life, and a merry one! Graceless is the traveller who forgets his obligations to these saints upon earth; little love has he for merry Christendom if he has not rejoiced with great joy to find in the very midst of water-drinking infidels those lowly monasteries, in which the blessed juice of the grape is quaffed in peace. Ay! ay! we will fill our glasses till they look like cups of amber, and drink profoundly to our gracious hosts in Palestine.

Christianity permits, and sanctions, the drinking of wine, and of all the holy brethren in Palestine there are none who hold fast to this gladsome rite so strenuously as the monks of Damascus; not that they are more zealous Christians than the rest of their fellows in the Holy Land, but that they have better wine. Whilst I was at Damascus I had my quarters at the Franciscan convent there, and very soon after my arrival I asked one of the monks to let me know something of the spots that deserved to be seen. I made my inquiry in reference to the associations with which the city had been hallowed by the sojourn and adventures of St. Paul. “There is nothing in all Damascus,” said the good man, “half so well worth seeing as our cellars”; and forthwith he invited me to go, see, and admire the long range of liquid treasure that he and his brethren had laid up for themselves on earth. And these I soon found were not as the treasures of the miser, that lie in unprofitable disuse, for day by day, and hour by hour, the golden juice ascended from the dark recesses of the cellar to the uppermost brains of the friars. Dear old fellows! in the midst of that solemn land their Christian laughter rang loudly and merrily, their eyes kept flashing with joyous bonfires, and their heavy woollen petticoats could no more weigh down the springiness of their paces, than the filmy gauze of a danseuse can clog her bounding step.

You would be likely enough to fancy that these monastics are men who have retired to the sacred sites of Palestine from an enthusiastic longing to devote themselves to the exercise of religion in the midst of the very land on which its first seeds were cast; and this is partially, at least, the case with the monks of the Greek Church, but it is not with enthusiasts that the Catholic establishments are filled. The monks of the Latin convents are chiefly persons of the peasant class from Italy and Spain, who have been handed over to these remote asylums by order of their ecclesiastical superiors, and can no more account for their being in the Holy Land, than men of marching regiments can explain why they are in “stupid quarters.” I believe that these monks are for the most part well conducted men, punctual in their ceremonial duties, and altogether humble-minded Christians. Their humility is not at all misplaced, for you see at a glance (poor fellows!) that they belong to the lag remove of the human race. If the taking of the cowl does not imply a complete renouncement of the world, it is at least (in these days) a thorough farewell to every kind of useful and entertaining knowledge, and accordingly the low bestial brow and the animal caste of those almost Bourbon features show plainly enough that all the intellectual vanities of life have been really and truly abandoned. But it is hard to quench altogether the spirit of inquiry that stirs in the human breast, and accordingly these monks inquire—they are always inquiring inquiring for “news”! Poor fellows! they could scarcely have yielded themselves to the sway of any passion more difficult of gratification, for they have no means of communicating with the busy world except through European travellers; and these, in consequence I suppose of that restlessness and irritability that generally haunt their wanderings, seem to have always avoided the bore of giving any information to their hosts. As for me, I am more patient and good-natured, and when I found that the kind monks who gathered round me at Nazareth were longing to know the real truth about the General Bonaparte who had recoiled from the siege of Acre, I softened my heart down to the good humour of Herodotus, and calmly began to “sing history,” telling my eager hearers of the French Empire and the greatness of its glory, and of Waterloo and the fall of Napoleon! Now my story of this marvellous ignorance on the part of the poor monks is one upon which (though depending on my own testimony) I look “with considerable suspicion.” It is quite true (how silly it would be to invent anything so witless!), and yet I think I could satisfy the mind of a “reasonable man” that it is false. Many of the older monks must have been in Europe at the time when the Italy and the Spain from which they came were in act of taking their French lessons, or had parted so lately with their teachers, that not to know of “the Emperor” was impossible, and these men could scarcely, therefore, have failed to bring with them some tidings of Napoleon’s career. Yet I say that that which I have written is true—the one who believes because I have said it will be right (she always is), whilst poor Mr. “reasonable man,” who is convinced by the weight of my argument, will be completely deceived.