At once their footsteps quickened with new life; and when at length they found themselves in the courtyard of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, their pent-up emotions burst forth, into tears and groans, sweet wailings and deep sighs.  Some lay powerless on the ground, forsaken by their strength and to all appearances dead.  Others drifted from one corner to another, beating their breasts, as though urged by an evil spirit.  Some knelt bare-kneed; as they prayed, stretching out their arms like a rood.  Others were shaken with such violent sobs that they could only sit down and hold their heads in their hands.  Some lost all command of themselves, and, forgetting how to behave, sought to please God with strange and childish gestures.  On the other hand, Fabri noted some who stood quite unmoved, and merely mocked at the strange display:  dull, unprofitable souls he calls them, brute beasts, not having the spirit of God.  Their self-contained temperament misliked him, especially as thereafter they held aloof from those who had given way to such enthusiasm or, as they felt it, weakness.

We cannot company with the party to all the numerous sites that piety bade them visit.  It was prodigiously fatiguing for them under the July sun, and the ranks grew thin as the weaker spirits fell out dead tired, to rest awhile in hospitable cloister or by cooling well.  Fabri found it very toilsome to struggle after mental abstraction, to rise to such heights as he desired of devotion and comprehension of all the holy influences around him, to seize every opportunity of contemplation and lose nothing; being soon thoroughly exhausted with his bodily exertions.  Some alleviation there was:  when holy women—­nuns of his own Order, who had a house in Jerusalem—­washed his scapular and tunic for him, and wrought other works of charity for which he was very grateful.

The pilgrims had been warned not to wander away from their party.  One day as they went to the Dead Sea, they halted at a monastery; and Fabri was tempted to ramble off alone to inspect a cliff which had been hollowed out by hermits into innumerable caves.  It was a precipitous place; and at one point, where the path was narrow and the cliff fell sheer below, he encountered an Eastern Christian.  Seeing that Fabri was afraid, the fellow began to trifle with him and demanded money; and in the end Fabri was obliged to open his slender purse.  ‘Ever since then’, he says, ’I have abhorred the company of Christians of that sort more than that of Saracens and Arabs, and have trusted them less.  Though perhaps he would not have thrown me down the precipice, even had I given him nothing, yet it was wicked of him to play with me in a place of such danger.  If an Arab had done so, I should have been pleased at his play, and should have held him to be a good pagan; but I believe no good of that Christian.’  When he rejoined his party, the patron told him that the Eastern Christians were least to be trusted of any men.