In the Levant / Twenty Fifth Impression

by Charles Dudley Warner

“Perhaps I can find a little bread.”

“Nothing else?”

“We have very good raisins.”

“Well,” we interposed, “kill us a chicken, give us a few oysters, stewed or broiled, we are not particular.” This levity, which was born of desperation, for the jolting ride from Jerusalem had indisposed us to keep a fast, especially a fast established by a church the orthodoxy of whose creed we had strong reasons to doubt, did not affect the monk. He replied, “Chicken! it is impossible.” We shrunk our requisition to eggs.

“If I can find an egg, I will see.” And the brother departed, with carte blanche from us to squeeze his entire establishment.

Alas, fasting is not in Mar Saba what it is in New England, where an appointed fast-day is hailed as an opportunity to forego lunch in order to have an extraordinary appetite for a better dinner than usual!

The tomb of St. Sabas, the central worship of this hive, is a little plastered hut in the middle of the court; the interior is decorated with pictures in the Byzantine style, and a lamp is always burning there. As we stood at the tomb we heard voices chanting, and, turning towards the rock, we saw a door from which the sound came. Pushing it open, we were admitted into a large chapel, excavated in the rock. The service of vespers was in progress, and a band of Russian pilgrims were chanting in rich bass voices, producing more melody than I had ever heard in a Greek church. The excavation extends some distance into the hill; we were shown the cells of St. John of Damascus and other hermits, and at the end a charnel-house piled full of the bones of men. In the dim light their skulls grinned at us in a horrid familiarity; in that ghastly jocularity which a skull always puts on, with a kind of mocking commentary upon the strong chant of the pilgrims, which reverberated in all the recesses of the gloomy cave,—fresh, hearty voices, such as these skulls have heard (if they can hear) for many centuries. The pilgrims come, and chant, and depart, generation after generation; the bones and skulls of the fourteen thousand martyrs in this charnel-bin enjoy a sort of repulsive immortality. The monk, who was our guide, appeared to care no more for the remains of the martyrs than for the presence of the pilgrims. In visiting such storehouses one cannot but be struck by the light familiarity with the relics and insignia of death which the monks have acquired.

This St. John of Damascus, whose remains repose here, was a fiery character in his day, and favored by a special miracle before he became a saint. He so distinguished himself by his invectives against Leo and Constantine and other iconoclast emperors at Constantinople who, in the eighth century, attempted to extirpate image-worship from the Catholic church, that he was sentenced to lose his right hand. The story is that it was instantly restored by the Virgin Mary. It is worthy of note that the superstitious Orient more readily gave up idolatry or image-worship under the Moslems than under the Christians.

As the sun was setting we left the pilgrims chanting to the martyrs, and hastened to explore the premises a little, before the light should fade. We followed our guide up stairs and down stairs, sometimes cut in the stone, sometimes wooden stairways, along hanging galleries, through corridors hewn in the rock, amid cells and little chapels,—a most intricate labyrinth, in which the uninitiated would soon lose his way. Here and there we came suddenly upon a little garden spot as big as a bed-blanket, a ledge upon which soil had been deposited. We walked also under grape-trellises, we saw orange-trees, and the single palm-tree that the convent boasts, said to have been planted by St. Sabas himself. The plan of this establishment gradually developed itself to us. It differs from an ordinary convent chiefly in this,—the latter is spread out flat on the earth, Mar Saba is set up edgewise. Put Mar Saba on a plain, and these little garden spots and graperies would be courts and squares amid buildings, these galleries would be bridges, these cells or horizontal caves would be perpendicular tombs and reservoirs.

When we arrived, we supposed that we were almost the only guests. But we found that the place was full of Greek and Russian pilgrims; we encountered them on the terraces, on the flat roofs, in the caves, and in all out-of-the-way nooks. Yet these were not the most pleasing nor the most animated tenants of the place; wherever we went the old rookery was made cheerful by the twittering notes of black birds with yellow wings, a species of grakle, which the monks have domesticated, and which breed in great numbers. Steeled as these good brothers are against the other sex, we were glad to discover this streak of softness in their nature. High up on the precipice there is a bell-tower attached to a little chapel, and in it hang twenty small bells, which are rung to call the inmates to prayer. Even at this height, and indeed wherever we penetrated, we were followed by the monotonous chant which issued from the charnel-house.