I DID think that one chapter would be all that could be given to Jerusalem, but it is full, and not half is said. This is the most interesting city in the world, and we must not hurry away. For several days longer we wandered about the narrow streets, loitered in the bazaars, bought souvenirs and curiosities for the friends at home, talked with the people, and studied their ways of living. We went to a Jewish synagogue on Saturday, their Sabbath, walked over the supposed spot of Pilate's prætorium where Jesus was put on trial before him, followed the Via Dolorosa, the way that our Lord is thought to have been led to the place of crucifixion, visited on the Lord's day the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, gazed on he place where Catholic and Greek Christians believe that the Savior of men died, was buried, and rose again, and afterwards made our way out to the Damascus Gate, and walked northward to the rounded hill, which almost all Protestant scholars believe to be the hill of Calvary, and stood on the spot where it seemed to us that the cross of Jesus was probably raised. We walked around Jerusalem, [307] visiting its environs, and also descended below its modern streets and stood upon ancient pavements. Every moment of our time was busily employed, and was delightfully spent. The boys took so great an interest in all these things that I have thought that another chapter upon our observations in the Holy City would interest Our Young Folks in America who have longed to see for themselves, but have never been there. I have to pass much by, but will select some experiences which I hope will be read with pleasure.

      It was Sunday morning that we started out to visit and attend service at this most famous of the churches of Jerusalem. Mr. Crunden guided us and first led us through the narrow, dark, crooked streets of the Christian quarter into the Turkish quarter in the northeast of the city. He wished to lead us to Pilate's judgment sea, and to go with us from thence along the road which so many think was traversed by Jesus as he carried his cross. Near this place we came to a convent school of the Catholic "Sisters of Zion," where many native girls are educated. We were welcomed by the sisters and show some of the work of their pupils, which much interested us. We were so delighted with the pressed flowers of Palestine which they exhibited that we all secured supplies to bring home. Mr. Crunden thought it [308] probable that Pilate's headquarters were near here at the time when Jesus was sentenced to death. The Tower of Antonia, the place of the Roman garrison, was here just north of the temple, and Pilate would be likely to reside in it on his visits to Jerusalem. The faces of the boys grew very serious as they thought of being at the spot where Jesus was scourged and sentenced to be crucified. From here we start on the Via Dolorosa, to follow it to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.

      It is a narrow, crooked street, and is spanned here at the convent of the Sisters of Zion by an arch, which extends across, and is surmounted by a ruinous chamber.

      "This," said Joseph, who was along with us as usual, "is the Ecce Homo."

      "The Ecce Homo!" exclaimed Will, "what is that?"

      "Then came Jesus forth," was the reply, "wearing a crown of thorns and a purple robe. And Pilate saith unto them, Behold the man! (John 19:5). This arch is said to have been a part of Pilate's judgment hall, and to mark the place where Pilate showed Jesus thus to the people."

      We examined the arch closely. A part of it had been built at a much later day than the times of Pilate; still the stones at its foundations might reach back to the ancient Jerusalem. A few steps from it Joseph pointed to a Latin inscription [309]

ARCH OF ECCE HOMO. [310]

on the stone wall, and exclaimed, "The first halting place!"

      "What do you mean by that?" said I.

      "This is the first place on the way to Calvary where Jesus stopped to rest under the weight of the cross. If you will count you will find that there are fourteen of them, all marked by Latin inscriptions like this one."

      "Do you believe," said Will, "that Jesus really followed this Via Dolorosa to the cross?"

      Mr. Crunden replied: "No man can tell. This part of Jerusalem was the scene of terrible fighting when the Romans took the city in A.D. 70, and the buildings must have been totally destroyed. No one can tell now where the ancient streets ran, for there is not a building standing that goes back to the first century, and indeed the pavements of the old streets are many feet below us."

      We had already seen enough to know that, except upon the hill tops, the old streets of Jerusalem were far below the present surface. At one place we had been taken to look at the old pavements thirty feet below the modern streets. At another place Captain Warren sunk a shaft 125 feet before he reached the natural soil. So many cities have been destroyed in succession, that the ruins have filled up the valleys and depressions, until over much of the site we walk many feet above the Jerusalem of the time of Christ. [311]

      We hurry along the "Sorrowful Way," past the "fourteen Halting Places," and are soon led to the wall of an immense structure which we are told is the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. We cannot enter here, but work our way round through the narrow streets to its front, and pause before entering, to contemplate one of the most famous structures in the world. A church was built on this spot in the reign of Constantine, the first Christian emperor of Rome, under the direction of his mother, the Empress Helena, and ever since that time there have been millions who have believed that this was the most sacred spot in the world. When that mighty movement called the Crusades began, nearly nine hundred years ago, which caused all Western Europe to throw itself on Asia, the great object was to rescue the Holy Sepulcher from the Mohammedans. When the Crusaders took Jerusalem, as soon as the carnage ended, they rushed at once to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, to weep, to rejoice and to pray where they believed the Lord had lain and risen. Ever since the Empress Helena built the church, fifteen hundred years ago, pilgrims have been wont to come by thousands to pray at the tomb of Christ.

      Do you see the railing around the great dome? It was a dispute whether the French, representing [312] the Catholic Church, or the Russians, representing the Greek Church, should repair it, that led to the Crimean war in 1856, and cost thousands of lives. In early times this building belonged to the Greek Church, but when the Crusaders took Jerusalem,

CHURCH OF THE HOLY SEPULCHER.

they took possession of the church for the Catholics. When the Mohammedans got control again, both of the sects claimed the church, and have disputed about it ever since. It is now divided between them, though the Greeks have the greater part, and Turkish soldiers are quartered inside to keep the peace between them.

      Let us enter. We pass through the arched gateway. We are shown, first, the "Stone of the [313] Unction," on which it is said that the body of Jesus was prepared for burial. It is worn by the kisses of tens of thousands of pilgrims, yet the knowing ones tell us that it has not been here for a hundred years, and that the real stone of the unction is buried beneath. Then we pass into a spacious room, the rotunda under the great dome, and are pointed to a white marble structure in its center, twenty-six feet long by eighteen feet wide. "This," said Joseph in a low voice, "is the chapel of the Tomb of Christ." We are allowed to pass within it and find two small rooms. The first is called "the Chapel of the Angels." It contains "the stone that was rolled away" on the morning of the resurrection. A door leads from it to another small room, which is the Chapel of the Sepulcher. It is very small, only about six by seven feet, and nearly half its floor is covered by the marble slab which is said to cover the tomb of our Lord. The whole room is cased with marble and is lighted by forty-three lamps of silver and gold belonging to the various sects that keep up worship here, which are kept forever burning.

      We spent several hours visiting various notable places in this immense pile of buildings, which is really a series of churches under one roof, for the Greeks, the Latins (Catholics), the Armenians, the Syrians and the Copts all have chapels. That of the Greeks alone is a great church. We were shown where the three crosses stood, where the [314] women stood, where Jesus saw Mary Magdalene after he was risen, where they cast lots for his vesture, where Helena found the True Cross, and a score more places which would have more interest for us if we could see reason to believe that they were genuine; but I will not pause to describe these, and will hurry on to one or two incidents which had a great interest for the boys. In a small room in the Latin quarter, a great sword and a pair of spurs were passed to each one of us to examine and to handle, with the words, "The sword and spurs of Godfrey, the King of Jerusalem." There was no one of us who needed to be told about Godfrey of Bouillion, the first Christian King of Jerusalem. The boys had read Tasso's "Jerusalem Delivered," and had learned to admire the great Crusader, who seemed not only to be a mighty hero, but a noble-spirited warrior. His great deeds on a hundred battle-fields had caused the hearts of all the Crusaders to turn to him, and when Jerusalem was taken, every voice saluted him as king. Said he, "I will never wear a crown, where my Savior wore a crown of thorns. I am willing to take the title of Defender of the Holy Sepulcher, and that alone." This great sword was swung by him on scores of battle-fields and often dyed in blood. He must have been a man of mighty arm, for it is so heavy that we are compelled to handle it with both hands. The sword is still used in the ceremony of making [315] Knights of St. John, a body of knights who vow to defend the Holy Sepulcher. Godfrey died in Jerusalem, and was buried under this room.

      We next descended a flight of twenty-nine steps into a spacious room called the Chapel of St. Helena, where the original church is said to have been erected in her times. From here we were led into a cavern by another flight of stairs, and reach a dark chamber which is kept lighted by ever-burning lamps. Here it is said that the workmen of Helena found the three crosses, one of which was the cross of Christ. We will not quarrel with those who put faith in this story, and listen quietly while our guide relates all the marvels of the discovery of the True Cross. While we were standing in the lamplight, we noticed a man in rich but strange attire, regular and rather pleasing features, with a skin almost as dark as that of a negro, but in other respects more like a European. Mr. Crunden, never at a loss to converse with strangers in any language, engaged in conversation with him, during which we saw the face of the stranger light up with a pleased expression, and at the same time he glanced towards us with a smile. Mr. Crunden then turned to us and said:

      "This gentleman is a Christian priest of Abyssinia, in the heart of Africa, more than fifteen hundred miles from the Mediterranean Sea, and he has come this long distance through many dangers in order to worship at the sepulcher of Christ. I have [316] told him that you are Christian priests also, who have come from America, across the ocean, eight thousand miles away, to visit the Holy Places. He says that you are his brothers and he would like to shake you by the hand."

      We were glad to give a fraternal greeting to this dark-skinned lover of the Lord from far-off Abyssinia, and he shook us each warmly by the hand, smilingly bestowing upon each one of us a benediction in some unknown language. We greatly enjoyed this meeting. It gave us a vivid idea of the universal reign of Christ, and of the bond by which he makes into one kindred those who come from the ends of the earth.

      After we had gone out into the open air I asked Mr. Crunden if he believed that the Church of the Holy Sepulcher covered the spot where the Lord was crucified and buried. He said:

      "For fifteen hundred years after the supposed discovery of the site by the Empress Helena in A.D. 326, there was no dispute. But the explorations at Jerusalem within the last fifty years have satisfied almost all students that this could not have been the place. We know that Christ was crucified without the walls of the city, and this place in the time of Christ was far within the walls. I will now take you to a site which meets all the conditions, and which is now believed by most scholars to be the place of the crucifixion." [317]

      We soon reached the street leading north to the Damascus Gate and passed outside of the walls. An incident happened here which made the blood of the boys boil and came near involving them in trouble. Just after we passed the gate we saw a native boy all covered with blood flowing from a frightful wound upon his head, who was lying stretched in the dust of the road. He was not over sixteen years old, and a heartless-looking man of middle age was shouting at the threatening him, while trying to make him rise to the feet. We asked Ezra, one of our Arab camp attendants, to find out the cause of the trouble, and after a few words in Arabic he told us that they were father and son, that the father had knocked the boy down with a club, inflicting the terrible wound on the skull, that the boy said that he was too sick to rise to his feet and walk on, and that the old man was threatening to beat him unless he did. His cruelty so stirred the blood of Bayard and Will that they approached him with a threatening aspect, when the old Arab raised a loud shout. In a moment a Turkish soldier in uniform came rushing to the spot, a word or two passed between him and the Arab, and the soldier commenced pounding the bleeding boy with a strap, until at last he staggered to his feet and his father led him off. [318]

      "That is the difference between America and Turkey," said Bayard. "In our country a policeman, instead of beating the boy, would have taken to jail such a brutal father."

      Some twenty or thirty rods north of the wall and a short distance east of the great road, we ascended a peculiarly-shaped hill. "Look at it," said Mr. Crunden, "and see if its shape reminds you of anything." After an attentive examination we concluded that it rose from the earth in a shape much like a section of the human skull.

      "Yes," said he, "this is probably Golgotha, the place of the skull. Very ancient Jewish writings, going back almost to the time of Christ, say that this was the place of execution of malefactors, and hence would be the place where the Romans would take the victims. The sides of this hill still contain the ancient tombs cut in the rock. You can still see the olive trees in the garden that have always been in the level ground at the foot of the hill. The place is outside of the gates (Heb. 13:12) and is near the road which has always run north from the city (Mark 15:29). This place meets every condition, and is the only place about Jerusalem that does."

      These proofs seemed convincing. It seemed likely that we were standing on the very spot where had stood the cross of the Savior. We stood in silence, and how the scene seemed to rise before our eyes! the cruel priests, the brutal soldiers, [319] the unfeeling throng, the weeping women, the disciples afar off, and Christ the Lord, bruised, bloody, nailed to the cross between thieves! Oh, shameful spot! O glorious spot! Here man did his foulest deed of sin. Here heaven's supremest

GOLGOTHA.

act of love was wrought. Here from one of those rock-hewn tombs "Life and Immortality were brought to light" when the Lord came forth. It is the Lord's day! The day of the Risen Lord! At the very hour in which we stand here, millions of Christians are partaking of the emblems that lift their thoughts to this place, and to the sufferings of the Lord. How real those sufferings seem to [320] us as we worship on Calvary on the day made glorious by the Resurrection!

      We extend our walk northward to the Tombs of the Kings, some ancient sepulchers hewn out of the rocks and made interesting by the fact that one of them still has a great stone at its mouth which was used to close its door. As we examine its great size, so heavy that several men would be required to move it, we no longer wonder that those good women, who came to embalm the body of Jesus on Sunday morning over eighteen hundred and fifty years ago, inquired, "Who shall roll the stone away from us?" Then we walked among the olive orchards and gardens, past the great Russian buildings on the northwest of the city. These are almost a city of themselves, are very massive, and indicate the deep interest Russia feels in Palestine. Indeed, there is little doubt that Russia expects, when the Turkish empire goes to pieces, to lay claim to Palestine. Next after Constantinople, Russia wishes to rescue from the Turk and to control the countries where once Christ and his apostles lived and labored. Our way back led through a Mohammedan graveyard, near a large artificial basin or pool, now called the Birket el Mamilla by the Arabs, in which a number of men and boys were swimming. It covers one and a half acres of ground, has a bottom of natural rock, sides of masonry cemented, and is about twenty feet deep. It is filled by surface water during the rainy [321]

RUSSIAN BUILDINGS NEAR JERUSALEM. [322]

season, and this is carried by an underground aqueduct into the city to another large pool, called the pool of Hezekiah. It is thought to be the "upper pool" named in Isaiah 7:3, and is still in good state of preservation. I describe it the more particularly to give an idea of the great artificial pools which are so curious a feature of the city of Jerusalem.

      In the evening after dinner, when we had gathered in the court of the hotel as usual, Will remarked:

      "I notice that all the drinking water that we have had since we have been here has been cistern water. Why is that the case?"

      "Because," was the reply, "there is no other water supply for Jerusalem now than the rain-water gathered in cisterns, or in pools. Every decent house in Jerusalem has great cisterns under it which are filled with water during the rainy season, and this is the reliance of their occupants for the year."

      "Are there no springs here, such as we have found at so many other places?"

      "The rocks of Jerusalem are limestone, and a limestone formation is not favorable for springs, because it lets the water pass through to the depths of the earth. The only spring that furnishes any supply is the one that breaks out down [323] deep in the valley into the pool of Siloam. No one knows where its fountain-head lies, but it is known to be conducted many hundred feet under the hills by an artificial channel cut in the rock."

      "What was the object of the great pools that we have seen?"

      "They were built as reservoirs to preserve a supply of water through the dry seasons. You saw the Upper Gihon pool to-day. The lower pool of Gihon, now ruined, is much larger. There are pools all around the city, and also a number inside of the walls. Of these latter the pools of Hezekiah and Bethesda are named in the Scriptures."

      "I saw men drawing water with ropes and skin buckets from openings that looked like wells in the Haram Esh Sheriff. Are there reservoirs under its pavement?"

      "There are great cisterns, some of them of immense size. Captain Warren, the explorer, says that there are over thirty cisterns beneath the pavement, some of them large enough to hold several hundred thousand gallons each. They are now supplied by surface water during the rainy season, but were probably once filled by an aqueduct. They must have been built by Solomon when the temple was constructed, to supply the vast amount of water which the temple service would require."

      "Was the city ever supplied by an aqueduct?"

      "There are still remains of two aqueducts which [324]

POOL OF HEZEKIAH. [325]

in old times conducted an abundant supply of water from the Pools of Solomon, which are ten or twelve miles to the south. These aqueducts can be traced into the city, and even to the temple site. Solomon's pools are about a hundred feet higher."

      "Why are not these aqueducts restored?"

      "One of them is still well preserved as far as to Bethlehem, and was at one time within this generation put in repair to the city, but the use was soon discontinued. The people of Bethlehem raised objections, and the authorities in charge of the Haram Esh Sheriff complained that it cut off the revenue which they were wont to receive from selling water from their great cisterns. There is talk of restoring them again, and it will no doubt be done before long. No doubt, once, the great pools were filled with water by the aqueducts, making them pure, delightful lakes. It will be a great improvement to get a water supply again."

      The next day I took a ramble with the boys through the streets without any guide, and dropped into many of the bazaars in order to buy souvenirs to carry home. Everywhere we found small shops, open in front, only lighted from the street, with the living rooms for the family back and above. All the houses are of stone and are so closely crowded together that one could travel over a great part of the city on the house tops. [326] Even the roofs were constructed of stone, but were not usually flat, as we had seen in some places, but arched. The reason for this is that wood for house building has all to be brought a great distance, and is very costly. An arched roof can be built entirely of stone, but a flat roof must have beams across for a support.

      In one bazaar where we sat down and remained for some time, the conversation turned on the prospects of Jerusalem. We found that these tradesmen believed almost as strongly in the future of this four thousand year old city, as the founders of a new western metropolis do in theirs. They thought the railroad was a sure thing; that the city had already made a grand start; they said that real estate was booming, and that investments in suburban property were sure to pay! How strange such conversation sounded in an Oriental bazaar! *

      Presently we found our way to the walls and ascended them. The walk on the walls is a pleasant one, and gives a good opportunity to look over the city. The present walls enclose about four hundred acres, were restored over three hundred years ago by the Sultan Solyman the Magnificent, vary from thirty to sixty feet in height according to the locality, and present a very formidable appearance. Jerusalem would be a stronghold [327] against ancient methods of warfare, but modern artillery would soon demolish the walls. Besides, an enemy with a battery on the Mount of Olives would have the city at his mercy.

      * Yet these Jerusalemites were not mistaken in their calculations. The fall of 1892 has witnessed the completion of a railroad line from Joppa to Jerusalem.

[YFBL 307-328]