From the cistern we descended twelve steps into a large roughly-shaped grotto, carved wholly out of the living rock.  Helena blasted it out when she was searching for the true Cross.  She had a laborious piece of work, here, but it was richly rewarded.  Out of this place she got the crown of thorns, the nails of the cross, the true Cross itself, and the cross of the penitent thief.  When she thought she had found every thing and was about to stop, she was told in a dream to continue a day longer.  It was very fortunate.  She did so, and found the cross of the other thief.

The walls and roof of this grotto still weep bitter tears in memory of the event that transpired on Calvary, and devout pilgrims groan and sob when these sad tears fall upon them from the dripping rock.  The monks call this apartment the “Chapel of the Invention of the Cross”—­a name which is unfortunate, because it leads the ignorant to imagine that a tacit acknowledgment is thus made that the tradition that Helena found the true Cross here is a fiction—­an invention.  It is a happiness to know, however, that intelligent people do not doubt the story in any of its particulars.

Priests of any of the chapels and denominations in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre can visit this sacred grotto to weep and pray and worship the gentle Redeemer.  Two different congregations are not allowed to enter at the same time, however, because they always fight.

Still marching through the venerable Church of the Holy Sepulchre, among chanting priests in coarse long robes and sandals; pilgrims of all colors and many nationalities, in all sorts of strange costumes; under dusky arches and by dingy piers and columns; through a sombre cathedral gloom freighted with smoke and incense, and faintly starred with scores of candles that appeared suddenly and as suddenly disappeared, or drifted mysteriously hither and thither about the distant aisles like ghostly jack-o’-lanterns—­we came at last to a small chapel which is called the “Chapel of the Mocking.”  Under the altar was a fragment of a marble column; this was the seat Christ sat on when he was reviled, and mockingly made King, crowned with a crown of thorns and sceptred with a reed.  It was here that they blindfolded him and struck him, and said in derision, “Prophesy who it is that smote thee.”  The tradition that this is the identical spot of the mocking is a very ancient one.  The guide said that Saewulf was the first to mention it.  I do not know Saewulf, but still, I cannot well refuse to receive his evidence—­none of us can.

They showed us where the great Godfrey and his brother Baldwin, the first Christian Kings of Jerusalem, once lay buried by that sacred sepulchre they had fought so long and so valiantly to wrest from the hands of the infidel.  But the niches that had contained the ashes of these renowned crusaders were empty.  Even the coverings of their tombs were gone —­destroyed by devout members of the Greek Church, because Godfrey and Baldwin were Latin princes, and had been reared in a Christian faith whose creed differed in some unimportant respects from theirs.