On foot, with an Arab for a guide, I escape alone from the hôtel to hurry at last to the Holy Sepulchre. It is in the opposite direction to that of the Dominicans, almost in the heart of Jerusalem through narrow winding streets between walls as old as the Crusades, without windows and without roofs. On the wet pavements and beneath a still dark sky, circulate Oriental costumes,—Turks, Bedouins, or Jews, and women draped like phantoms, Musulmans beneath dark veils and Christians beneath white veils.
The city has remained Saracen. Vaguely I notice that we pass an Oriental bazaar, where the stalls are occupied by merchants in turbans; in the shadow of the roofed streets there slowly passes a string of enormous camels, that obliges us to enter one of the doors. Now, we must get out of the way for a peculiar and long defile of Russian women, all sexagenarians at least, who walk rapidly leaning on walking-sticks; old faded dresses, old parasols, old touloupes of fur, with faces of fatigue and suffering framed in black handkerchiefs; a black and sorrowful ensemble in the midst of this Orient of colour. They walk rapidly with a movement at once excited and exhausted, all hustling along without seeing anything, like somnambulists, with anæstheticized eyes wide open in a celestial dream. And hundreds of moujiks, having the same look of ecstasy follow them; all of them old, sordid, with long grey beards and long grey hair escaping from their felt hats; on their breasts many medals, indicating that they are old soldiers. Having entered the holy city yesterday, they are returning from their first visit to that sacred spot where I am going in my turn; poor pilgrims who come here by the thousand, on foot, sleeping out of doors in the rain or the snow, suffering with hunger and dying on the way.
In proportion as you approach, the Oriental objects in the stalls give place to objects of an obscure Christian piety: thousands of chaplets, crosses, religious lamps, and images or icons. And the crowd is denser, and other pilgrims, old moujiks and old matouchkas plant themselves to buy cheap little wooden rosaries and cheap little crucifixes for two sous, which they will carry from here as relics to be considered as sacred for ever.
Finally, in an old and defaced wall resembling a rock, there opens a rude door, very low and narrow, and, by a series of descending steps, you arrive before a place jutting out from the high sombre walls, in front of the basilica of the Holy Sepulchre.
At this spot, it is customary to take off your hat, the very moment the Holy Sepulchre appears; every one passes bareheaded even if he is only going by on his way about Jerusalem. It is thronged with poor people who beg by singing; pilgrims who pray; sellers of crosses and chaplets who have their little booths on the ground upon the old and venerable flag-stones. Upon the pavement and among the steps there rise the still uprooted socles of columns that formally supported the basilicas, and that were razed, like those of St. Stephen, from far back and doubtful periods; everything is a collection of rubbish in this city which has been subjected to twenty sieges and which every kind of fanaticism has sacked.
The high walls, of reddish brown stone, forming the sides of this place, are convents or chapels—and it is said fortresses also. In the background, higher and more sombre than anything else rises that worn out and broken mass, which is the façade of the Holy Sepulchre and which has assumed the appearance and irregularities of a large rock; it has two enormous doors of the Twelfth Century framed with singularly archaic ornaments; one of them is walled up; the other is wide open permitting you to see thousands of little flames in the shadowy interior. Songs, cries and discordant lamentations, lugubrious to hear, escape through it with the perfume of incense.
Passing through the door, you find yourself in the venerable shadow of a kind of vestibule that reveals magnificent depths beyond, where innumerable lamps are burning. Some Turkish guards, armed as if for a massacre, occupy this entrance in a military fashion; seated like sovereigns on a large divan, they watch the devotees passing this place, which is always, from their point of view, the opprobrium of Musulman Jerusalem and which the most savage of them have never ceased to call El Komamah (ordure).
Oh! the unexpected and imperishable impression when you enter here for the first time. A maze of sombre sanctuaries, of all periods and of all aspects connected by openings, doors and superb columns,—and also by little gloomy doors, air-holes and cavernous hollowings. Some of these are elevated like high tribunals, where you perceive, in the remote distance, groups of women in long veils; others are subterranean, where you are jostled by shadows, between walls of rock that have remained intact, dripping and black.—All this, in a twilight where a few rays of light fall and accentuate the surrounding darkness; all this, starry with an infinite number of little flames in lamps of silver and gold, hanging from the vaults by the thousand.—And everywhere a crowd moving about confusedly as if at Babel, or quite stationary, seeming to be grouped by nationalities around the golden tabernacles where somebody is officiating.
Psalmody, lamentations and joyful songs fill the high vaults, or echo in the sepulchral depths below; the nasal melopœia of the Greeks cut through by the howlings of the Copts. And, in all these voices, an exaltation of tears and prayers which produce dissonance and which unite them; the whole effect becoming I know not what strange thing that makes this place like a great wail from mankind and the supreme cry of distress before death.
The rotunda with a very high cupola, which you enter first and which allows you to divine between its columns the obscure chaos of the other sanctuaries, is occupied in the centre by the great marble kiosk, of a luxury that is half barbaric and overcharged with silver lamps, that encloses the stone of the sepulchre. All around this very sacred kiosk, the crowd surges or stands still: on the one side hundreds of moujiks and matouchkas are kneeling on the flag-stones; on the other, the women of Jerusalem, standing up, in long white veils—groups of ancient virgins, one would, say, in the dreamlike shadow; elsewhere Abyssinians and turbaned Arabs prostrated with foreheads to the earth; Turks with sabre in hand; people of all communions and all languages.