the profession of the new faith and doctrine was
settled in this venerable meeting of the disciples.

The sanctuary of the Eucharist was a convent
of Franciscans until the middle of the sixteenth
century. At that epoch, a Mussulman dervish
learnt in a vision that the tomb of King David
was in the foundation of the building; and the
Christian monks were obliged to yield the place
to Mussulman dervishes. A dream is an easy
mode of transfer. The dervishes have religiously
kept possession of it to the present day,
jealous of a treasure which is not less precious to
their pious souls than useful to their interests
by the rich gifts and bountiful alms it attracts.
It is only by special favour that you are allowed
to enter a chamber on the ground floor in which
stands the venerated tomb. This tomb, a simple
cenotaph covered with green satin drapery, is
placed, according to the keepers, exactly over
the veritable tomb, which is invisible except to
the eyes of faith; for any pilgrim who caught a
glimpse of it would lose his eyesight
immediately. The old sheik who introduces you to
the sanctuary, touched with your pious curiosity
or sensible to your offering, will confidentially
assure you that beneath the floor of the chamber
there passes a staircase cut in the rock and
terminating with a closed door, which will not open
till the Day of Judgment.

Returning to the interior of the city by the
gate of Nebi-Daoud or of Sion, you traverse
heaps of rubbish and offal, which, at certain
spots, rise higher than the ramparts, and on
which vigorous tufts of cactus flourish. On
this unclean irregular soil there lives a
miserable colony, completely separated from the rest
of the population. It is the allotment of the
lepers. Here they await—men, women, and
children—the arrival of death to release them
from their terrible malady. Leprosy is still very
frequent throughout the whole of the East; it
is not the white or mealy leprosy mentioned in
the Bible, but that still more fearful affection
which is called elephantiasis. The epidermis
assumes violet and reddish-grey tints; pimples
forming in the substance of the skin give
birth to abscesses frightful to behold. Little
by little the extremities of the limbs fall to
pieces, leaving nothing but shapeless stumps.
The roof of the palate comes away in splinters,
which gives to these unhappy wretches a
peculiarly hoarse and nasal tone of voice. This
terrible infirmity, which is the despair of medical
science, is not contagious, but is propagated by
hereditary transmission. And the lepers
continue to marry among themselves, in and in,
increasing, multiplying, and swarming on their
overgrown dunghill, without the slightest
interference or attention from any quarter, in
company with the mangy dogs which you meet
around their huts, more numerous, lean, and
bald than anywhere else. The wretched dog
still remains the faithful friend of the wretched
human sufferer.

To escape from these habitations of mourning,
you descend the steep flank of Mount Sion,
which faces the east. You can scarcely believe
yourself in the interior of a city; the deep-sunk
road has nothing to offer, to the right or the
left, but heaps of rubbish, sweepings, and
vegetable offal; it is only on reaching the bottom of
the slope that you get sight of the town with
its edifices, the mosque of Omar and its
handsome leaden cupola. Reascending Mount Sion
through filthy and miserable streets, you reach
the entrance of a small convent, the convent
of the olive-tree (Deir-Zeitoum); it owes its
name to an old olive-tree, to which, it is said,
the Saviour was bound while the high-priest
Anna and his accomplices were contriving the
means of destroying him on the following day.
This tree grew in the court-yard of the high-
priest's house, which was situated on the very
spot where the convent is built. It is not here
that the Armenians have displayed their wealth,
but in the residence of their patriarch, the
magnificent monastery of Saint James, which is the
admiration of all visitors.

Leaving the Armenian patriarchate, you
perceive, in a narrow lane to the right, the remnant
of an old wall, which M. Saintine baptises with
the name of St. Peter's prison. In fact, with
the Acts of the apostles in your hands, it is easy
to prove that the prison was within the fortress
of Mount Sion; since the apostle, conducted by
the angel, "came unto the iron gate that leadeth
unto the city; which opened to them of his own
accord: and they went, and passed through one
street." The place of imprisonment was, therefore,
not in the country, as those maintain who
fix it in the Church of the Resurrection. This
is the one street through which St. Peter passed
till he came to the house of Mary, the mother
of John, whose surname was Mark. This holy
woman's house stood on the site which you now
see occupied by that small Syrian convent with
its massive gateway. But, throughout the whole
interior of the Holy City, it is very difficult to
reconcile all the opinions and all the evidence of
historians and travellers. Every stone is an
enigma; every ruin assumes the form of a note
of interrogation.

The tomb of Jesus is in the centre of the
Church of the Resurrection. "For the Christian
and the philosopher," says M. Lamartine, "for
the moralist or the historian, this tomb is the
boundary stone which separates two worlds, the
old world and the new world. It is the starting-
point of an idea which has renewed the universe,
of a civilisation which has transformed everything,
of a word which has resounded throughout
the globe. This tomb is the sepulchre of
the old world and the cradle of the new world.
The history of the Holy Sepulchre is the history
of Jerusalem itself. Ever since its construction
by Constantine, the church has followed the
vicissitudes of the unfortunate city. The desire
of comprising within its interior the greatest
possible number of sanctuaries has been fatal to
the regularity of the building, which is covered
by two Byzantine domes and a steeple in ruins,
doubtless added by the Crusaders. The
agglomeration of houses and convents grouped around
it, deprives it now of any architectural character.