II

At last we arrived at Jerusalem.  The onlookers saw a long, jaded-looking flock of poor people toiling up the hilly road from Jaffa, wearing Russian winter garb under the straight-beating sun of the desert, dusty, road-worn, and beaten.  We went along the middle of the roadway like a procession, observed of all observers; in one sense scarcely worth looking at, yet in another the most significant spectacle of the day or of the time.  We were—­religious Europe just arrived at the Heavenly City.

Certainly it would have been difficult to know the happiness and exaltation of our hearts; perhaps to do that it would have been necessary to step into line and follow us to the Cathedral and the Sepulchre; perhaps even necessary to anticipate our coming, and join us long before, on the way in Russia.

But we went forward unconscious of our own significance, indifferent to the gaze of the curious.  There was one thought in our minds:  that we had actually attained unto Jerusalem and were walking the last few miles to the Holy of Holies.

We passed in through the gate of the Russian settlement, and in a moment were at the monastery doors.  How gladly we threw off our packs on the green grass sward and hurried into church to the Thanksgiving Service, buying sheaves of little candles at the door and pressing in to light them before the sacred ikons.  When the priest was given the great Bible to read, it lay on the bare heads of pilgrims; so close did the eager ones press together to share in the bearing that the Holy Book needed no other support.  We sang the Mnogia Lieta with a deep harmonious chorus; we prostrated ourselves and prayed and crossed.  I stood in the midst and sang or knelt with the rest, timid as a novice, made gentle by the time, and I learned to cross myself in a new way.  One by one the peasants advanced and kissed the gold cross in the hands of the priest, and among them I went up and was blessed as they were.  And we were all in rapture.  Standing at the threshold afterwards, smiling peasants with wet shining eyes confessed to one another their unworthiness and their happiness; and a girl all in laughing tears fell down at our feet, kissing our dusty boots, and asking our forgiveness that she had been permitted to see Jerusalem.

We were taken to the refectory and seated at many tables to a peasant dinner:  cabbage soup and porridge, bread and kvass, just as they are served in Russia itself.  We passed to the hostelry and were given, at the rate of three farthings a day, beds and benches that we might occupy as long as we wished to stay in Jerusalem.  The first night we were all to get as rested as possible, the next we were to spend in the Sepulchre itself.  I slept in a room with four hundred peasants, on a wooden shelf covered with old pallets of straw.  The shelves were hard and dirty; there was no relaxation of our