who come here may feel the happiness that I do.
In a very dark niche in the rocks close to where the white star shone out in the floor I perceived the figure of a Turkish sentry, breech-loading rifle and all, standing on his little wooden stool, motionless. Well, do you know, though my eyes saw him my mind was not thereby disturbed any more than it was by the Turkish guard at the door of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. I could not bring my thoughts down to that figure and the reason of its being there.
We visited St. Jerome’s Cave, close by, where he worked, near the scene of his Redeemer’s birth, giving to the world the translation into the Vulgate of the Holy Scriptures. Then we walked down to the field of Boaz, full of waving green wheat, in the midst of which stands the sheepfold surrounded by a stone wall. You must imagine the shepherds looking up to Bethlehem from there on that Christmas eve. The little city is seen from the sheepfold high up against the sky to the west about two miles off. I had only time for a pencil outline of this view, hoping to colour it on a future occasion. All the country round was very pastoral, and just such a one as one would expect. Wildflowers in great quantities, and larks—little tame things with crests on their heads—enjoying the sun and the breeze, quite unmolested; lovely sweeps of corn in the valleys, olive-clad or quite grassless hills bounding the horizon all round—can you see it? How many figures of Our Lady we saw about the fields and lanes with babes in their arms! Surely the old masters got their facts about the drapery of their Madonnas from here, where all the women wear blue and red robes, exactly as the Italian painters have them.
Sunday, 12th April.
We went to seven o’clock mass at the Latin Altar on Calvary. We were in a dense knot of people, who were kneeling on the floor in that dark, low-roofed chapel, lit by the soft light of lamps hanging before each shrine. How often we say in our prayers, “Here, at the foot of Thy Cross.” We were literally there. After breakfast with the prior at the Casa Nova Monastery, which used to be the hostelry for travellers before the hotel was in existence, we drove with Frère Benoît to the reputed birthplace of John the Baptist, Ain Kareem in the Judean Hills. I believe there is considerable doubt as to this site, but there is the possibility. It was a very poetical landscape that we passed through, and there were many flowering apricot, pear, and almond trees as we neared St. Elizabeth’s mountain home. We first visited the site of the Baptist’s birth high up in the north end of the village, now covered by a church, and then we crossed over to the south side of the valley to St. Elizabeth’s country house, also now a chapel, where her cousin visited her. There is a deep well of most cool crystal water at the side of the altar in this “Chapel of the Visitation,” which belongs to the Spanish monks. From the roof of the convent over this chapel I made a sketch of the little town on its hillside planted with cypress trees. The heat here in this enclosed valley was very great.