In the morning I awoke at a late hour and looked out into the court; the muleteer and most of the other bodies were removed, and people were going about their business as if nothing had occurred, excepting that every now and then I heard the wail of women lamenting for the dead. Three hundred was the number reported to have been carried out of the gates to their burial-places that morning; two hundred more were badly wounded, many of whom probably died, for there were no physicians or surgeons to attend them, and it was supposed that others were buried in the courts and gardens of the city by their surviving friends; so that the precise number of those who perished was not known.
When we reflect in what place and to commemorate what event the great multitude of Christian pilgrims had thus assembled from all parts of the world, the fearful visitation which came upon them appears more dreadful than if it had occurred under other circumstances. They had entered the sacred walls to celebrate the most joyful event which is recorded in the Scriptures. By the resurrection of our Saviour was proved not only his triumph over the grave, but the truth of the religion which He taught; and the anniversary of that event has been kept in all succeeding ages as the great festival of the Church. On the morning of this hallowed day throughout the Christian world the bells rang merrily, the altars were decked with flowers, and all men gave way to feelings of exultation and joy; in an hour everything was turned to mourning, lamentation, and woe!
There was a time when Jerusalem was the most prosperous and favoured city of the world; then "all her ways were pleasantness, and all her paths were peace;" "plenteousness was in her palaces;" and "Jerusalem was the joy of the whole earth."
But since the awful crime which was committed there, the Lord has poured out the vials of his wrath upon the once chosen city; dire and fearful have been the calamities which have befallen her in terrible succession for eighteen hundred years. Fury and desolation, hand in hand, have stalked round the precincts of the guilty spot; and Jerusalem has been given up to the spoiler and the oppressor.
The day following the occurrences which have been related, I had a long interview with Ibrahim Pasha, and the conversation turned naturally on the blasphemous impositions of the Greek and Armenian patriarchs, who, for the purposes of worldly gain, had deluded their ignorant followers with the performance of a trick in relighting the candles which had been extinguished on Good Friday with fire which they affirmed to have been sent down from heaven in answer to their prayers. The Pasha was quite aware of the evident absurdity which I brought to his notice, of the performance of a Christian miracle being put off for some time, and being kept in waiting for the convenience of a Mahometan prince. It was debated what punishment was to be awarded to the Greek patriarch for the misfortunes which had been the consequence of his jugglery, and a number of the purses which he had received from the unlucky pilgrims passed into the coffers of the Pasha's treasury. I was sorry that the falsity of this imposture was not publicly exposed, as it was a good opportunity of so doing. It seems wonderful that so barefaced a trick should continue to be practised every year in these enlightened times; but it has its parallel in the blood of St. Januarius, which is still liquefied whenever anything is to be gained by the exhibition of that astonishing act of priestly impertinence. If Ibrahim Pasha had been a Christian, probably this would have been the last Easter of the lighting of the holy fire; but from the fact of his religion being opposed to that of the monks, he could not follow the example of Louis XIV., who having put a stop to some clumsy imposition which was at that time bringing scandal on the Church, a paper was found nailed upon the door of the sacred edifice the day afterwards, on which the words were read—
"De part du roi, défense à Dieu
De faire miracle en ce lieu."
The interference of a Mahometan in such a case as this would only have been held as another persecution of the Christians; and the miracle of the holy fire has continued to be exhibited every year with great applause, and luckily without the unfortunate results which accompanied it on this occasion.
Ibrahim Pasha, though by no means the equal of Mehemet Ali in talents or attainments, was an enlightened man for a Turk. Though bold in battle, he was kind to those who were about him; and the cruelties practised by his troops in the Greek and Syrian wars are to be ascribed more to the system of Eastern warfare than to the savage disposition of their commander.
He was born at Cavalla, in Roumelia, in the year 1789, and died at Alexandria on the 10th of November, 1848. He was the son, according to some, of Mehemet Ali, but, according to others, of the wife of the great Viceroy of Egypt by a former husband. At the age of seventeen he joined his father's army, and in 1816 he commanded the expedition against the Wahabees—a sect who maintained that nothing but the Koran was to be held in any estimation by Mahometans, to the exclusion of all notes, explanations, and commentaries, which have in many cases usurped the authority of the text. They called themselves reformers, and, like King Henry VIII., took possession of the golden water-spouts and other ornaments of the Kaaba, burned the books and destroyed the colleges of the Arabian theologians, and carried off everything they could lay hold of, on religious principles. An eye-witness told me that some of the followers of Abd el Wahab had found a good-sized looking-glass in a house at Sanaa, which they were carrying away with great difficulty through the desert, the porters being guarded by a multitude of half-naked warriors, who had neglected all other plunder in the supposition that they had got hold of the diamond of Jemshid, a pre-Adamite monarch famous in the annals of Arabian history. Some more of these wild people found several bags of doubloons at Mocha, which they conceived to be dollars that had been spoiled somehow, and had turned yellow, for they had never seen any before. A "smart" captain of an American vessel at Jedda, who was consulted on the occasion, kindly gave them one real white dollar for four yellow ones—an arrangement which perfectly satisfied both parties. After three years' campaign, Ibrahim Pasha retook the holy cities of Mecca and Medina; and in December, 1819, he made his triumphant entry into Cairo, when he was invested with the title of Vizir and made Pasha of the Hedjaz by the Sultan—a dignity more exalted than that of the Pasha of Egypt.
In 1824 he commanded the armies of the Sultan, which were sent to put down the rebellion of the Greeks: he sailed from Alexandria with a fleet of 163 vessels, 16,000 infantry, 700 cavalry, and four regiments of artillery. Numerous captives were made in the Morea, and the slave-markets were stocked with Greek women and children who had been captured by the soldiers of the Turkish army. The battle of Navarino, in 1827, ended in the destruction of the Mahometan fleets; and thousands of slaves, who were forced to fight against their intended deliverers, being chained to their guns, sunk with the ships which were destroyed by the cannon of the allied forces of England, France, and Russia.
In 1831 Mehemet Ali undertook to wrest Syria from the Sultan his master. Ibrahim Pasha commanded his army of about 30,000 men, under the tuition, however, of a Frenchman, Colonel Sève, who had denied the Christian faith on Christmas-day, and was afterwards known as Suleiman Pasha. The Egyptian troops soon became masters of the Holy Land; Gaza, Jaffa, Jerusalem, and Acre fell before their victorious arms; and on the 22nd of December, 1832, Ibrahim Pasha, with an army of 30,000 men, defeated 60,000 Turks at Koniah, who had been sent against him by Sultan Mahmoud, under the command of Reschid Pasha.