Oh, the sunset this evening! Never have we seen so much gold poured out for us alone around our lonely camp. Our camels, wandering beyond our tents, and strangely enlarged against the vacant horizon, have gold on their heads, on their legs, on their long necks; they are all edged with gold.
And then night comes, the limpid night with its stillness. If at this moment one goes away from the camp and loses sight of it, or even separates oneself from the little handful of living creatures strayed in the midst of dead space, in order to feel more absolutely alone in the nocturnal vacancy, one has an impression of terror in which there is something religious. Less distant, less inaccessible than elsewhere, the stars blaze in the depths of the cosmic abysses; and in this desert, unchangeable and untouched by time, from which one looks at them, one feels oneself nearer to conceiving their inconceivable infinity; one has almost the illusion of sharing in their starry duration, their starry impassibility.
II.—The Habitation of Solitude
March 1. After climbing two days in snow, thunder, and tempest, we see at last, amid the dim, cloudy peaks of granite, the tall ramparts and the cypress trees of the convent of Sinai. Alas! how silent, sinister, and chill appears the holy mountain, whose name alone still flames for us in the distance. It is as empty as the sky above our heads.
Trembling with the cold in our thin, wet burnous, we alight from our camels, that suffer and complain, disquieted by the white obscurity, the lashing wind, the strange, wild altitude. For twenty minutes we clamber by lantern light among blocks and falls of granite, with bare feet that slip at every step on the snow. Then we reach a gigantic wall, the summit of which is lost in darkness, and a little low door, covered with iron, opens. We pass in. Two more doors of a smaller kind lead through a vaulted tunnel in the rampart. They close behind us with the clang of armour, and we creep up some flights of rough, broken stairs, hewed out of the rock, to a hostel for pilgrims at the top of the great fortress.
Some hospitable monks in black robes, and with long hair like women, hasten to cheer us with a little hot coffee and a little lighted charcoal, carried in a copper vase. Everything has an air of nonchalant wretchedness and Oriental dilapidation in this convent built by the Emperor Justinian fourteen centuries ago. Our bare, whitewashed bedrooms are like the humblest of Turkish dwellings, save for the modest icon above the divan, with a night-light burning before it. The little chamber is covered with the names of pilgrims gathered from the ends of the earth; Russian, Arabian, and Greek inscriptions predominate.
Aroused by a jet of clear sunlight, and surprised by the strangeness of the place, I ran to the balcony; there I still marvelled to find the fantastic things seen by glimpses last night, standing real and curiously distinct in the implacable white light, but arranged in an unreal way, as if inset into each other without perspective, so pure is the atmosphere—and all silent, silent as if they were dead of their extreme old age. A Byzantine church, a mosque, cots, cloisters, an entanglement of stairways, galleries, and arches falling to the precipices below: all this in miniature; built up in a tiny space; all this encompassed with formidable ramparts, and hooked on to the flanks of gigantic Sinai! From the sharpness and thinness of the air, we know that we are at an excessive height, and yet we seem to be at the bottom of a well. On every side the extreme peaks of Sinai enclose us, as they mount and scale the sky; their titanic walls, all of blood-red granite without stain or shadow, are so vertical and so high that they dizzy and appal. Only a fragment of the sky is visible, but its blueness is of a profound transparency, and the sun is magnificent. And still the same eerie silence envelops the phantom-like monastery, whose antiquity is accentuated under the cold, dazzling sunlight and the sparkling snow. One feels that it is verily "the habitation of solitude," encompassed by the great wildernesses.
Its situation has preserved it from the revolutions, the wars, and the changing fashions of the world. Almost everything remains just as it was built in 550 by Justinian. And when one of the long-haired monks shows us the marvellous treasures of the basilica—a dim, richly barbaric structure, filled with priceless offerings from the ancient kings of the earth—we no longer wonder at the enormous height and thickness of the ramparts which protect the convent from the Bedouins.
Behind the tabernacle of the basilica is the holy place of Sinai—the crypt of the "Burning Bush." It is a sombre cavern lined with antique tiles of a dim blue-green, which are hidden under the icons of gold and precious stone attached to the walls, and under the profusion of gold and silver lamps hanging from the low roof. Rigid saints in vermilion robes, whose faces are concealed in the dark shadow of their barbaric glistening crowns, looked at us as we entered. We stepped in reverently, on bare feet, and never, in any place, did we have so entire an impression of a recoil into the long past ages of the world.
Peoples and empires have passed away, while these precious things slowly tarnished in this dim crypt. Even the monk who accompanies us resembles, with his long red hair falling over his shoulders, and the pale beauty of his ascetic face, the mystics of the early ages; and his thoughts are infinitely removed from ours. And the vague reflection of sunlight which arrives through a single, little window in the thick wall, and falls in a circle of ghostly radiance on the icons and mosaics, seems to be some gleam from an ancient day, some gleam from an age far different from the sordid, impious century in which we live.