VI
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!"
VII
So thought the Scribe, as from the comparative safety of an upper monastery where no Jewish foot had ever trod, he looked down upon the glowing, heaving mass. The right emotion did not come to him. He was irritated; the thought of entering so historic and so Jewish a shrine only at peril of his life, recalled the long intolerance of mediæval Christendom, the Dark Ages of the Ghettos. His imagination conjured up an ironic vision of himself as the sport of that seething mob, saw himself seeking a last refuge in the Sepulchre, and falling dead across the holy tomb. And then the close air charged with all those breaths and candles and censers, the jewelled pageantry flaunted in that city of squalor and starvation, the military line of contemptuous Mussulmen complicating the mutual contempt of the Christian sects, and reminding him of the obligation on a new Jewish State, if it ever came, to safeguard these divine curios; the grotesque incongruity of all this around the tomb of the Prince of Peace, the tomb itself of very dubious authenticity, to say nothing of the thirty-six parasitical sanctities!...
He thought of the even more tumultuous scene about to be enacted here on the day of the Greek fire: when in the awful darkness of extinguished lamps, through a rift in the Holy Sepulchre within which the Patriarch prayed in solitude and darkness, a tongue of heavenly flame would shoot, God's annual witness to the exclusive rightness of the Greek Church, and the poor foot-sore pilgrims, mad with ecstasy, would leap over one another to kindle their candles and torches at it, while a vessel now riding at anchor would haste with its freight of sacred flame to kindle the church-lamps of Holy Russia.
And then the long historic tragi-comedy of warring sects swept before him, the Greek Church regarding the Roman as astray in the sacraments of Baptism and the Lord's Supper; at one with the Protestant only in not praying to the Virgin; every new misreading of human texts sufficing to start a new heresy.