We thought, but for the haunting fear of storms, that when we reached the boat the arduous part of our journey would have been accomplished.  We should cease our plodding over earth, and should rest on the sea in the sun.  We would sing hymns together.  Hymns are, of course, principally designed for pilgrims, for man as a pilgrim, who needs to console himself with music on the road.  We would talk among ourselves of our life on the way; the days would go past in pleasant converse and the nights in happy slumber.  But that was a mistake.  The sea journey was worse than any of our tramping; it was the very crown of our suffering.

There were 560 of us packed into the holds of that hulk, the Lazarus, on which we sailed, and there were besides, many Turks, Arabs, and Syrians; of cattle, two score cows and a show bull with two mouths; of beasts, a cage of apes; and, as if to complete pandemonium in storm, there lay bound in his bed on the open deck a raving madman.  We were a fortnight on the sea, wandering irrelevantly from port to port of the Levant, discharging a cargo of sugar; and all the while the poor beggar-pilgrims lived on the crusts of which they had sackfuls collected in Russia, crusts of black bread all gone green with mould.  I looked at the piles of them heaped on the deck to air in pleasant weather, and was amazed that men could live simply on decay.  We had two storms, in one of which our masts were broken down and we were told we should go to the bottom.  The peasants rolled over one another in the hold like corpses, and clutched at one another like madmen.  In despair some offered all their money, all that they had, to a priest as a votive offering to St. Nicholas, that the storm might abate.  The state of the ship I should not dare to depict—­the filth, the stench, the vermin.  For nearly a thousand passengers there were three lavatories without bolts!  Fitly was the boat named Lazarus—­Lazarus all sores.  What the poor simple peasant men and women suffered none can tell.  They had not the thought to take care of themselves as I had, and indeed they would have scorned to save themselves.  “It is necessary to suffer,” they said.

It was a hard and terrible way, and yet on the last day of the voyage, in the sight of the Holy Land, our hearts all leapt within us with grateful joy.  We felt it was worth it, every whit.  When I think of this journey as of that of Christian in the Pilgrims Progress, I call this ship and the journey on it the Valley of the Shadow of Death, full of foul pits and hobgoblins; something which must be passed through if Jerusalem is to be attained; the dread gulf which lies between earthly and heavenly life.  It was necessary to pass through it, and what was on the other side was infinitely worth the struggle.  There is a story in Dostoievsky of a Russian free-thinker whose penance beyond this world was to walk a quadrillion versts.  When he finished this walk and saw the Heavenly City at the end of it he fell down and cried out, “It is worth it, every inch; not only would I walk a quadrillion of versts, but a quadrillion of quadrillions raised to the quadrillionth power.”