Visits to Monasteries in the Levant

by Robert Curzon

In a short time the smoke of the candles obscured everything in the place, and I could see it rolling in great volumes out at the aperture at the top of the dome. The smell was terrible; and three unhappy wretches, overcome by heat and bad air, fell from the upper range of galleries, and were dashed to pieces on the heads of the people below. One poor Armenian lady, seventeen years of age, died where she sat, of heat, thirst, and fatigue.

After a while, when he had seen all that was to be seen, Ibrahim Pasha got up and went away, his numerous guards making a line for him by main force through the dense mass of people which filled the body of the church. As the crowd was so immense, we waited for a little while, and then set out all together to return to our convent. I went first and my friends followed me, the soldiers making way for us across the church. I got as far as the place where the Virgin is said to have stood during the crucifixion, when I saw a number of people lying one on another all about this part of the church, and as far as I could see towards the door. I made my way between them as well as I could, till they were so thick that there was actually a great heap of bodies on which I trod. It then suddenly struck me they were all dead! I had not perceived this at first, for I thought they were only very much fatigued with the ceremonies and had lain down to rest themselves there; but when I came to so great a heap of bodies I looked down at them, and saw that sharp, hard appearance of the face which is never to be mistaken. Many of them were quite black with suffocation, and farther on were others all bloody and covered with the brains and entrails of those who had been trodden to pieces by the crowd.

At this time there was no crowd in this part of the church; but a little farther on, round the corner towards the great door, the people, who were quite panic-struck, continued to press forward, and every one was doing his utmost to escape. The guards outside, frightened at the rush from within, thought that the Christians wished to attack them, and the confusion soon grew into a battle. The soldiers with their bayonets killed numbers of fainting wretches, and the walls were spattered with blood and brains of men who had been felled, like oxen, with the butt-ends of the soldiers' muskets. Every one struggled to defend himself or to get away, and in the mêlée all who fell were immediately trampled to death by the rest. So desperate and savage did the fight become, that even the panic-struck and frightened pilgrims appear at last to have been more intent upon the destruction of each other than desirous to save themselves.

For my part, as soon as I perceived the danger I had cried out to my companions to turn back, which they had done; but I myself was carried on by the press till I came near the door, where all were fighting for their lives. Here, seeing certain destruction before me, I made every endeavour to get back. An officer of the Pasha's, who by his star was a colonel or bin bashee, equally alarmed with myself, was also trying to return: he caught hold of my cloak, or bournouse, and pulled me down on the body of an old man who was breathing out his last sigh. As the officer was pressing me to the ground we wrestled together among the dying and the dead with the energy of despair. I struggled with this man till I pulled him down, and happily got again upon my legs—(I afterwards found that he never rose again)—and scrambling over a pile of corpses, I made my way back into the body of the church, where I found my friends, and we succeeded in reaching the sacristy of the Catholics, and thence the room which had been assigned to us by the monks. The dead were lying in heaps, even upon the stone of unction; and I saw full four hundred wretched people, dead and living, heaped promiscuously one upon another, in some places above five feet high. Ibrahim Pasha had left the church only a few minutes before me, and very narrowly escaped with his life; he was so pressed upon by the crowd on all sides, and it was said attacked by several of them, that it was only by the greatest exertions of his suite, several of whom were killed, that he gained the outer court. He fainted more than once in the struggle, and I was told that some of his attendants at last had to cut a way for him with their swords through the dense ranks of the frantic pilgrims. He remained outside, giving orders for the removal of the corpses, and making his men drag out the bodies of those who appeared to be still alive from the heaps of the dead. He sent word to us to remain in the convent till all the dead bodies had been removed, and that when we could come out in safety he would again send to us.

We stayed in our room two hours before we ventured to make another attempt to escape from this scene of horror; and then walking close together, with all our servants round us, we made a bold push and got out of the door of the church. By this time most of the bodies were removed; but twenty or thirty were still lying in distorted attitudes at the foot of Mount Calvary; and fragments of clothes, turbans, shoes, and handkerchiefs, clotted with blood and dirt, were strewed all over the pavement.

In the court in the front of the church, the sight was pitiable: mothers weeping over their children—the sons bending over the dead bodies of their fathers—and one poor woman was clinging to the hand of her husband, whose body was fearfully mangled. Most of the sufferers were pilgrims and strangers. The Pasha was greatly moved by this scene of woe; and he again and again commanded his officers to give the poor people every assistance in their power, and very many by his humane efforts were rescued from death.

I was much struck by the sight of two old men with white beards, who had been seeking for each other among the dead; they met as I was passing by, and it was affecting to see them kiss and shake hands, and congratulate each other on having escaped from death.

When the bodies were removed many were discovered standing upright, quite dead; and near the church door one of the soldiers was found thus standing, with his musket shouldered, among the bodies which reached nearly as high as his head; this was in a corner near the great door on the right side as you come in. It seems that this door had been shut, so that many who stood near it were suffocated in the crowd; and when it was opened, the rush was so great that numbers were thrown down and never rose again, being trampled to death by the press behind them. The whole court before the entrance of the church was covered with bodies laid in rows, by the Pasha's orders, so that their friends might find them and carry them away. As we walked home we saw numbers of people carried out, some dead, some horribly wounded and in a dying state, for they had fought with their heavy silver inkstands and daggers.

In the evening I was not sorry to retire early to rest in the low vaulted room in the strangers' house attached to the monastery of St. Salvador. I was weary and depressed after the agitating scenes of the morning, and my lodging was not rendered more cheerful by there being a number of corpses laid out in their shrouds in the stone court beneath its window. It is thought by these superstitious people that a shroud washed in the fountain of Siloam and blessed at the tomb of our Saviour forms a complete suit of armour for the body of a sinner deceased in the faith, and that clad in this invulnerable panoply he may defy the devil and all his angels. For this reason every pilgrim when journeying has his shroud with him, with all its different parts and bandages complete; and to many they became useful sooner than they expected. A holy candle also forms part of a pilgrim's accoutrements. It has some sovereign virtue, but I do not exactly know what; and they were all provided with several long thin tapers, and a rosary or two, and sundry rosaries and ornaments made of pearl oyster-shells—all which are defences against the powers of darkness. These pearl oyster-shells are, I imagine, the scallop-shell of romance, for there are no scallops to be found here. My companion was very anxious to obtain some genuine scallop-shells, as they form part of his arms; but they, as well as the palm branches, carried home by all palmers on their return from the Holy Land, are as rare here as they are in England. This is the more remarkable, as the medal struck by Vespasian on the subjection of this country represents a woman in an attitude of mourning seated under a palm-tree with the legend "Judæa capta;" so there may have been palms in those days. I was going to say there must have been: but on second thoughts it does not follow that there should have been palms in Judæa, because the Romans put them on a medal, any more than that there should be unicorns in England because we represent them on our coins. However, all this is a digression: we must return to our dead men. There were sixteen or seventeen of them, all stiff and stark, lying in the court, nicely wrapped up in their shrouds, like parcels ready to be sent off to the other world: but at the end of the row lay one man in a brown dress; he was one of the lower class—a muleteer, perhaps, a strong, well-made man; but he was not in a shroud. He had died fighting, and there he lay with his knees drawn up, his right arm above his head, and in his hand the jacket of another man, which could not now be released from his grasp, so tightly had his strong hand been clenched in the death-struggle. This figure took a strong hold on my imagination; there was something wild and ghastly in its appearance, different from the quiet attitude of the other victims of the fight in which I also had been engaged. It put me in mind of all manner of horrible old stories of ghosts and goblins with which my memory was well stored; and I went to bed with my head so occupied by these traditions of gloom and ignorance that I could not sleep, or if I did for awhile, I woke up again and still went on thinking of the old woman of Berkeley, and the fire-king, and the stories in Scott's 'Discovery of Witchcraft,' and the 'Hierarchy of the Blessed Aungelles,' and Caxton's 'Golden Legende'—all books wherein I delighted to pore, till I could not help getting out of bed again to have another look at the ghastly regiment in the court below.

I leant against the heavy stone mullions of the window, which was barred, but without glass, and gazed I know not how long. There they all were, still and quiet; some in the full moonlight, and some half obscured by the shadow of the buildings. In the morning I had walked with them, living men, such as I was myself, and now how changed they were! Some of them I had spoken to, as they lived in the same court with me, and I had taken an interest in their occupations: now I would not willingly have touched them, and even to look at them was terrible! What little difference there is in appearance between the same men asleep and dead! and yet what a fearful difference in fact, not to themselves only, but to those who still remained alive to look upon them! Whilst I was musing upon these things the wind suddenly arose, the doors and shutters of the half-uninhabited monastery slammed and grated upon their hinges; and as the moon, which had been obscured, again shone clearly on the court below, I saw the dead muleteer with the jacket which he held waving in the air, the grimmest figure I ever looked upon. His face was black from the violence of his death, and he seemed like an evil spirit waving on his ghastly crew; and as the wind increased, the shrouds of some of the dead men fluttered in the night air as if they responded to his call. The clouds, passing rapidly over the moon, east such shadows on the corpses in their shrouds, that I could almost have fancied they were alive again. I returned to bed, and thanked God that I was not also laid out with them in the court below.