CHAPTER XVI.

Church of the Holy Sepulchre--Processions of the Copts--The Syrian Maronites and the Greeks--Riotous Behaviour of the Pilgrims--Their immense numbers--The Chant of the Latin Monks--Ibrahim Pasha--The Exhibition of the Sacred Fire--Excitement of the Pilgrims--The Patriarch obtains the Sacred Fire from the Holy Sepulchre--Contest for the Holy Light--Immense sum paid for the privilege of receiving it first--Fatal Effects of the Heat and Smoke--Departure of Ibrahim Pasha--Horrible Catastrophe--Dreadful Loss of Life among the Pilgrims in their endeavours to leave the Church--Battle with the Soldiers--Our Narrow Escape--Shocking Scene in the Court of the Church--Humane Conduct of Ibrahim Pasha--Superstition of the Pilgrims regarding Shrouds--Scallop Shells and Palm Branches--The Dead Muleteer--Moonlight View of the Dead Bodies--The Curse on Jerusalem--Departure from the Holy City.

It was on Friday, the 3rd of May, that my companions and myself went, about five o'clock in the evening, to the church of the Holy Sepulchre, where we had places assigned us in the gallery of the Latin monks, as well as a good bed-room in their convent. The church was very full, and the numbers kept increasing every moment. We first saw a small procession of the Copts go round the sepulchre, and after them one of the Syrian Maronites. I then went to bed, and at midnight was awakened to see the procession of the Greeks, which was rather grand. By the rules of their Church they are not permitted to carry any images, and therefore to make up for this they bore aloft a piece of brocade, upon which was embroidered a representation of the body of our Saviour. This was placed in the tomb, and, after some short time, brought out again and carried into the chapel of the Greeks, when the ceremonies of the night ended; for there was no procession of the Armenians, as the Armenian Patriarch had made an address to his congregation, and had, it was said, explained the falsity of the miracle of the holy fire; to the excessive astonishment of his hearers, who for centuries have considered an unshakable belief in this yearly wonder as one of the leading articles of their faith. After the Greek procession I went quietly to bed again, and slept soundly till next morning.

The behaviour of the pilgrims was riotous in the extreme; the crowd was so great that many persons actually crawled over the heads of others, and some made pyramids of men by standing on each others' shoulders, as I have seen them do at Astley's. At one time, before the church was so full, they made a race-course round the sepulchre; and some, almost in a state of nudity, danced about with frantic gestures, yelling and screaming as if they were possessed.

Altogether it was a scene of disorder and profanation which it is impossible to describe. In consequence of the multitude of people and the quantities of lamps, the heat was excessive, and a steam arose which prevented your seeing clearly across the church. But every window and cornice, and every place where a man's foot could rest, excepting the gallery--which was reserved for Ibrahim Pasha and ourselves--appeared to be crammed with people; for 17,000 pilgrims were said to be in Jerusalem, almost the whole of whom had come to the Holy City for no other reason than to see the sacred fire.

After the noise, heat, and uproar which I had witnessed from the gallery that overlooked the Holy Sepulchre, the contrast of the calmness and quiet of my room in the Franciscan convent was very pleasing. The room had a small window which opened upon the Latin choir, where, in the evening, the monks chanted the litany of the Virgin: their fine voices and the beautiful simplicity of the ancient chant made a strong impression upon my mind; the orderly solemnity of the Roman Catholic vespers showing to great advantage when compared with the screams and tumult of the fanatic Greeks.

There is a round hole in one part of the chapel over the sepulchre, out of which the holy fire is given, and up to this the man who had agreed to pay the highest sum for this honour was conducted by a strong guard of soldiers. There was silence for a minute; and then a light appeared out of the tomb, and the happy pilgrim received the holy fire from the Patriarch within. It consisted of a bundle of thin wax-candles, lit, and enclosed in an iron frame to prevent their being torn asunder and put out in the crowd: for a furious battle commenced immediately; every one being so eager to obtain the holy light, that one man put out the candle of his neighbour in trying to light his own. It is said that as much as ten thousand piasters has been paid for the privilege of first receiving the holy fire, which is believed to ensure eternal salvation. The Copts got eight purses this year for the first candle they gave to a pilgrim of their own persuasion.

This was the whole of the ceremony; there was no sermon or prayers, except a little chanting during the processions, and nothing that could tend to remind you of the awful event which this feast was designed to commemorate.

Soon you saw the lights increasing in all directions, every one having lit his candle from the holy flame: the chapels, the galleries, and every corner where a candle could possibly be displayed, immediately appeared to be in a blaze. The people, in their frenzy, put the bunches of lighted tapers to their faces, hands, and breasts, to purify themselves from their sins. The Patriarch was carried out of the sepulchre in triumph, on the shoulders of the people he had deceived, amid the cries and exclamations of joy which resounded from every nook of the immense pile of buildings. As he appeared in a fainting state, I supposed that he was ill; but I found that it is the uniform custom on these occasions to feign insensibility, that the pilgrims may imagine he is overcome with the glory of the Almighty, from whose immediate presence they believe him to have returned.

In a short time the smoke of the candles obscured everything in the place, and I could see it rolling in great volumes out at the aperture at the top of the dome. The smell was terrible; and three unhappy wretches, overcome by heat and bad air, fell from the upper range of galleries, and were dashed to pieces on the heads of the people below. One poor Armenian lady, seventeen years of age, died where she sat, of heat, thirst, and fatigue.

After a while, when he had seen all that was to be seen, Ibrahim Pasha got up and went away, his numerous guards making a line for him by main force through the dense mass of people which filled the body of the church. As the crowd was so immense, we waited for a little while, and then set out all together to return to our convent. I went first and my friends followed me, the soldiers making way for us across the church. I got as far as the place where the Virgin is said to have stood during the crucifixion, when I saw a number of people lying one on another all about this part of the church, and as far as I could see towards the door. I made my way between them as well as I could, till they were so thick that there was actually a great heap of bodies on which I trod. It then suddenly struck me they were all dead! I had not perceived this at first, for I thought they were only very much fatigued with the ceremonies and had lain down to rest themselves there; but when I came to so great a heap of bodies I looked down at them, and saw that sharp, hard appearance of the face which is never to be mistaken. Many of them were quite black with suffocation, and farther on were others all bloody and covered with the brains and entrails of those who had been trodden to pieces by the crowd.

At this time there was no crowd in this part of the church; but a little farther on, round the corner towards the great door, the people, who were quite panic-struck, continued to press forward, and every one was doing his utmost to escape. The guards outside, frightened at the rush from within, thought that the Christians wished to attack them, and the confusion soon grew into a battle. The soldiers with their bayonets killed numbers of fainting wretches, and the walls were spattered with blood and brains of men who had been felled, like oxen, with the butt-ends of the soldiers' muskets. Every one struggled to defend himself or to get away, and in the mêlée all who fell were immediately trampled to death by the rest. So desperate and savage did the fight become, that even the panic-struck and frightened pilgrims appear at last to have been more intent upon the destruction of each other than desirous to save themselves.

For my part, as soon as I perceived the danger I had cried out to my companions to turn back, which they had done; but I myself was carried on by the press till I came near the door, where all were fighting for their lives. Here, seeing certain destruction before me, I made every endeavour to get back. An officer of the Pasha's, who by his star was a colonel or bin bashee, equally alarmed with myself, was also trying to return: he caught hold of my cloak, or bournouse, and pulled me down on the body of an old man who was breathing out his last sigh. As the officer was pressing me to the ground we wrestled together among the dying and the dead with the energy of despair. I struggled with this man till I pulled him down, and happily got again upon my legs--(I afterwards found that he never rose again)--and scrambling over a pile of corpses, I made my way back into the body of the church, where I found my friends, and we succeeded in reaching the sacristy of the Catholics, and thence the room which had been assigned to us by the monks. The dead were lying in heaps, even upon the stone of unction; and I saw full four hundred wretched people, dead and living, heaped promiscuously one upon another, in some places above five feet high. Ibrahim Pasha had left the church only a few minutes before me, and very narrowly escaped with his life; he was so pressed upon by the crowd on all sides, and it was said attacked by several of them, that it was only by the greatest exertions of his suite, several of whom were killed, that he gained the outer court. He fainted more than once in the struggle, and I was told that some of his attendants at last had to cut a way for him with their swords through the dense ranks of the frantic pilgrims. He remained outside, giving orders for the removal of the corpses, and making his men drag out the bodies of those who appeared to be still alive from the heaps of the dead. He sent word to us to remain in the convent till all the dead bodies had been removed, and that when we could come out in safety he would again send to us.

We stayed in our room two hours before we ventured to make another attempt to escape from this scene of horror; and then walking close together, with all our servants round us, we made a bold push and got out of the door of the church. By this time most of the bodies were removed; but twenty or thirty were still lying in distorted attitudes at the foot of Mount Calvary; and fragments of clothes, turbans, shoes, and handkerchiefs, clotted with blood and dirt, were strewed all over the pavement.

In the court in the front of the church, the sight was pitiable: mothers weeping over their children--the sons bending over the dead bodies of their fathers--and one poor woman was clinging to the hand of her husband, whose body was fearfully mangled. Most of the sufferers were pilgrims and strangers. The Pasha was greatly moved by this scene of woe; and he again and again commanded his officers to give the poor people every assistance in their power, and very many by his humane efforts were rescued from death.

I was much struck by the sight of two old men with white beards, who had been seeking for each other among the dead; they met as I was passing by, and it was affecting to see them kiss and shake hands, and congratulate each other on having escaped from death.

When the bodies were removed many were discovered standing upright, quite dead; and near the church door one of the soldiers was found thus standing, with his musket shouldered, among the bodies which reached nearly as high as his head; this was in a corner near the great door on the right side as you come in. It seems that this door had been shut, so that many who stood near it were suffocated in the crowd; and when it was opened, the rush was so great that numbers were thrown down and never rose again, being trampled to death by the press behind them. The whole court before the entrance of the church was covered with bodies laid in rows, by the Pasha's orders, so that their friends might find them and carry them away. As we walked home we saw numbers of people carried out, some dead, some horribly wounded and in a dying state, for they had fought with their heavy silver inkstands and daggers.

In the evening I was not sorry to retire early to rest in the low vaulted room in the strangers' house attached to the monastery of St. Salvador. I was weary and depressed after the agitating scenes of the morning, and my lodging was not rendered more cheerful by there being a number of corpses laid out in their shrouds in the stone court beneath its window. It is thought by these superstitious people that a shroud washed in the fountain of Siloam and blessed at the tomb of our Saviour forms a complete suit of armour for the body of a sinner deceased in the faith, and that clad in this invulnerable panoply he may defy the devil and all his angels. For this reason every pilgrim when journeying has his shroud with him, with all its different parts and bandages complete; and to many they became useful sooner than they expected. A holy candle also forms part of a pilgrim's accoutrements. It has some sovereign virtue, but I do not exactly know what; and they were all provided with several long thin tapers, and a rosary or two, and sundry rosaries and ornaments made of pearl oyster-shells--all which are defences against the powers of darkness. These pearl oyster-shells are, I imagine, the scallop-shell of romance, for there are no scallops to be found here. My companion was very anxious to obtain some genuine scallop-shells, as they form part of his arms; but they, as well as the palm branches, carried home by all palmers on their return from the Holy Land, are as rare here as they are in England. This is the more remarkable, as the medal struck by Vespasian on the subjection of this country represents a woman in an attitude of mourning seated under a palm-tree with the legend "Judæa capta;" so there may have been palms in those days. I was going to say there _must_ have been: but on second thoughts it does not follow that there should have been palms in Judæa, because the Romans put them on a medal, any more than that there should be unicorns in England because we represent them on our coins. However, all this is a digression: we must return to our dead men. There were sixteen or seventeen of them, all stiff and stark, lying in the court, nicely wrapped up in their shrouds, like parcels ready to be sent off to the other world: but at the end of the row lay one man in a brown dress; he was one of the lower class--a muleteer, perhaps, a strong, well-made man; but he was not in a shroud. He had died fighting, and there he lay with his knees drawn up, his right arm above his head, and in his hand the jacket of another man, which could not now be released from his grasp, so tightly had his strong hand been clenched in the death-struggle. This figure took a strong hold on my imagination; there was something wild and ghastly in its appearance, different from the quiet attitude of the other victims of the fight in which I also had been engaged. It put me in mind of all manner of horrible old stories of ghosts and goblins with which my memory was well stored; and I went to bed with my head so occupied by these traditions of gloom and ignorance that I could not sleep, or if I did for awhile, I woke up again and still went on thinking of the old woman of Berkeley, and the fire-king, and the stories in Scott's 'Discovery of Witchcraft,' and the 'Hierarchy of the Blessed Aungelles,' and Caxton's 'Golden Legende'--all books wherein I delighted to pore, till I could not help getting out of bed again to have another look at the ghastly regiment in the court below.

I leant against the heavy stone mullions of the window, which was barred, but without glass, and gazed I know not how long. There they all were, still and quiet; some in the full moonlight, and some half obscured by the shadow of the buildings. In the morning I had walked with them, living men, such as I was myself, and now how changed they were! Some of them I had spoken to, as they lived in the same court with me, and I had taken an interest in their occupations: now I would not willingly have touched them, and even to look at them was terrible! What little difference there is in appearance between the same men asleep and dead! and yet what a fearful difference in fact, not to themselves only, but to those who still remained alive to look upon them! Whilst I was musing upon these things the wind suddenly arose, the doors and shutters of the half-uninhabited monastery slammed and grated upon their hinges; and as the moon, which had been obscured, again shone clearly on the court below, I saw the dead muleteer with the jacket which he held waving in the air, the grimmest figure I ever looked upon. His face was black from the violence of his death, and he seemed like an evil spirit waving on his ghastly crew; and as the wind increased, the shrouds of some of the dead men fluttered in the night air as if they responded to his call. The clouds, passing rapidly over the moon, east such shadows on the corpses in their shrouds, that I could almost have fancied they were alive again. I returned to bed, and thanked God that I was not also laid out with them in the court below.

In the morning I awoke at a late hour and looked out into the court; the muleteer and most of the other bodies were removed, and people were going about their business as if nothing had occurred, excepting that every now and then I heard the wail of women lamenting for the dead. Three hundred was the number reported to have been carried out of the gates to their burial-places that morning; two hundred more were badly wounded, many of whom probably died, for there were no physicians or surgeons to attend them, and it was supposed that others were buried in the courts and gardens of the city by their surviving friends; so that the precise number of those who perished was not known.

When we reflect in what place and to commemorate what event the great multitude of Christian pilgrims had thus assembled from all parts of the world, the fearful visitation which came upon them appears more dreadful than if it had occurred under other circumstances. They had entered the sacred walls to celebrate the most joyful event which is recorded in the Scriptures. By the resurrection of our Saviour was proved not only his triumph over the grave, but the truth of the religion which He taught; and the anniversary of that event has been kept in all succeeding ages as the great festival of the Church. On the morning of this hallowed day throughout the Christian world the bells rang merrily, the altars were decked with flowers, and all men gave way to feelings of exultation and joy; in an hour everything was turned to mourning, lamentation, and woe!

There was a time when Jerusalem was the most prosperous and favoured city of the world; then "all her ways were pleasantness, and all her paths were peace;" "plenteousness was in her palaces;" and "Jerusalem was the joy of the whole earth."

But since the awful crime which was committed there, the Lord has poured out the vials of his wrath upon the once chosen city; dire and fearful have been the calamities which have befallen her in terrible succession for eighteen hundred years. Fury and desolation, hand in hand, have stalked round the precincts of the guilty spot; and Jerusalem has been given up to the spoiler and the oppressor.

The day following the occurrences which have been related, I had a long interview with Ibrahim Pasha, and the conversation turned naturally on the blasphemous impositions of the Greek and Armenian patriarchs, who, for the purposes of worldly gain, had deluded their ignorant followers with the performance of a trick in relighting the candles which had been extinguished on Good Friday with fire which they affirmed to have been sent down from heaven in answer to their prayers. The Pasha was quite aware of the evident absurdity which I brought to his notice, of the performance of a Christian miracle being put off for some time, and being kept in waiting for the convenience of a Mahometan prince. It was debated what punishment was to be awarded to the Greek patriarch for the misfortunes which had been the consequence of his jugglery, and a number of the purses which he had received from the unlucky pilgrims passed into the coffers of the Pasha's treasury. I was sorry that the falsity of this imposture was not publicly exposed, as it was a good opportunity of so doing. It seems wonderful that so barefaced a trick should continue to be practised every year in these enlightened times; but it has its parallel in the blood of St. Januarius, which is still liquefied whenever anything is to be gained by the exhibition of that astonishing act of priestly impertinence. If Ibrahim Pasha had been a Christian, probably this would have been the last Easter of the lighting of the holy fire; but from the fact of his religion being opposed to that of the monks, he could not follow the example of Louis XIV., who having put a stop to some clumsy imposition which was at that time bringing scandal on the Church, a paper was found nailed upon the door of the sacred edifice the day afterwards, on which the words were read--

"De part du roi, défense à Dieu De faire miracle en ce lieu."

The interference of a Mahometan in such a case as this would only have been held as another persecution of the Christians; and the miracle of the holy fire has continued to be exhibited every year with great applause, and luckily without the unfortunate results which accompanied it on this occasion.

Ibrahim Pasha, though by no means the equal of Mehemet Ali in talents or attainments, was an enlightened man for a Turk. Though bold in battle, he was kind to those who were about him; and the cruelties practised by his troops in the Greek and Syrian wars are to be ascribed more to the system of Eastern warfare than to the savage disposition of their commander.

He was born at Cavalla, in Roumelia, in the year 1789, and died at Alexandria on the 10th of November, 1848. He was the son, according to some, of Mehemet Ali, but, according to others, of the wife of the great Viceroy of Egypt by a former husband. At the age of seventeen he joined his father's army, and in 1816 he commanded the expedition against the Wahabees--a sect who maintained that nothing but the Koran was to be held in any estimation by Mahometans, to the exclusion of all notes, explanations, and commentaries, which have in many cases usurped the authority of the text. They called themselves reformers, and, like King Henry VIII., took possession of the golden water-spouts and other ornaments of the Kaaba, burned the books and destroyed the colleges of the Arabian theologians, and carried off everything they could lay hold of, on religious principles. An eye-witness told me that some of the followers of Abd el Wahab had found a good-sized looking-glass in a house at Sanaa, which they were carrying away with great difficulty through the desert, the porters being guarded by a multitude of half-naked warriors, who had neglected all other plunder in the supposition that they had got hold of the diamond of Jemshid, a pre-Adamite monarch famous in the annals of Arabian history. Some more of these wild people found several bags of doubloons at Mocha, which they conceived to be dollars that had been spoiled somehow, and had turned yellow, for they had never seen any before. A "smart" captain of an American vessel at Jedda, who was consulted on the occasion, kindly gave them one real white dollar for four yellow ones--an arrangement which perfectly satisfied both parties. After three years' campaign, Ibrahim Pasha retook the holy cities of Mecca and Medina; and in December, 1819, he made his triumphant entry into Cairo, when he was invested with the title of Vizir and made Pasha of the Hedjaz by the Sultan--a dignity more exalted than that of the Pasha of Egypt.

In 1824 he commanded the armies of the Sultan, which were sent to put down the rebellion of the Greeks: he sailed from Alexandria with a fleet of 163 vessels, 16,000 infantry, 700 cavalry, and four regiments of artillery. Numerous captives were made in the Morea, and the slave-markets were stocked with Greek women and children who had been captured by the soldiers of the Turkish army. The battle of Navarino, in 1827, ended in the destruction of the Mahometan fleets; and thousands of slaves, who were forced to fight against their intended deliverers, being chained to their guns, sunk with the ships which were destroyed by the cannon of the allied forces of England, France, and Russia.

In 1831 Mehemet Ali undertook to wrest Syria from the Sultan his master. Ibrahim Pasha commanded his army of about 30,000 men, under the tuition, however, of a Frenchman, Colonel Sève, who had denied the Christian faith on Christmas-day, and was afterwards known as Suleiman Pasha. The Egyptian troops soon became masters of the Holy Land; Gaza, Jaffa, Jerusalem, and Acre fell before their victorious arms; and on the 22nd of December, 1832, Ibrahim Pasha, with an army of 30,000 men, defeated 60,000 Turks at Koniah, who had been sent against him by Sultan Mahmoud, under the command of Reschid Pasha.

Ibrahim had advanced as far as Kutayeh, on his way to Constantinople, when his march was stopped by the interference of European diplomacy. The Sultan, having made another effort to recover his dominions in Syria, sent an army against Ibrahim, which was utterly routed at the battle of Negib, on the 24th of June, 1839.

This defeat was principally owing to the Seraskier (the Turkish general) refusing to follow the counsels of Jochmus Pasha, a German officer, who, in distinguished contrast to the unhappy Suleiman, retained the religion of his fathers and the esteem of honest men.

His career was again checked by European policy, which, if it had any right to interfere at all, would have benefited the cause of humanity more by doing so before Egypt was drained of nearly all its able-bodied men, and Syria given up to the horrors of a long and cruel war.

The great powers of England, Austria, Russia, and Prussia now combined to restore the wasted provinces of Syria to the Porte; a fleet menaced the shores of the Holy Land; Acre was attacked, and taken in four hours by the accidental explosion of a powder-magazine, which almost destroyed what remained from former sieges of the habitable portion of the town. Ibrahim Pasha evacuated Syria, and retired to Egypt, where he amused himself with agriculture, and planting trees, always his favourite pursuit: the trees which he had planted near Cairo have already reduced the temperature in their vicinity several degrees.

In 1846 he went to Europe for the benefit of his health, and extended his tour to England, where he was much struck with the industry that pervaded all classes, and its superiority in railways and works of utility to the other countries of Europe. "Yes," said he to me at Mivart's Hotel; "in France there is more fantasia; in England there is more roast beef." I observed that he was surprised at the wealth displayed at one or two parties in some great houses in London at which he was present. Whether he had lost his memory in any degree at that time, I do not know; but on my recalling to him the great danger he had been in at Jerusalem, of which he entertained a very lively recollection, he could not remember the name of the Bey who was killed there, although he was the only person of any rank in his suite, with the exception of Selim Bey Selicdar, his swordbearer, with whom I afterwards became acquainted in Egypt.

In consequence of the infirmities of Mehemet Ali, whose great mind had become unsettled in his old age, Ibrahim was promoted by the present Sultan to the Vice-royalty of Egypt, on the 1st of September, 1848. His constitution, which had long been undermined by hardship, excess, and want of care, gave way at length, and on the 10th of November of the same year his body was carried to the tomb which his father had prepared for his family near Cairo, little thinking at the time that he should live to survive his sons Toussoun, Ismail, and Ibrahim, who have all descended before him to their last abode.

In personal appearance Ibrahim Pasha was a short, broad-shouldered man, with a red face, small eyes, and a heavy though cunning expression of countenance. He was as brave as a lion; his habits and ideas were rough and coarse; he had but little refinement in his composition; but, although I have often seen him abused for his cruelty in European newspapers, I never heard any well-authenticated anecdote of his cruelty, and do not believe that he was by any means of a savage disposition, nor that his troops rivalled in any way the horrors committed in Algeria by the civilized and fraternising French. He was a bold, determined soldier. He had that reverence and respect for his father which is so much to be admired in the patriarchal customs of the East; and it is not every one who has lived for years in the enjoyment of absolute power uncontrolled by the admonitions of a Christian's conscience that could get out of the scrape so well, or leave a better name upon the page of history than that of Ibrahim Pasha.

After the fearful catastrophe in the church of the Holy Sepulchre, the whole host of pilgrims seem to have become panic struck, and every one was anxious to escape from the city. There was a report, too, that the plague had broken out, and we with the rest made instant preparation for our departure. In consequence of the numbers who had perished, there was no difficulty in hiring baggage-horses; and we immediately procured as many as we wanted: tents were loaded on some; beds and packages of all sorts and sizes were tied on others, with but slight regard to balance and compactness; and on the afternoon of the 6th of May we rejoiced to find ourselves once more out of the walls of Jerusalem, and riding at our leisure along the pleasant fields fresh with the flowers of spring, a season charming in all countries, but especially delightful in the sultry climate of the Holy Land.

MONASTERIES OF THE LEVANT.