The high walls, of reddish brown stone, forming the sides of this place, are convents or chapels--and it is said fortresses also. In the background, higher and more sombre than anything else rises that worn out and broken mass, which is the façade of the Holy Sepulchre and which has assumed the appearance and irregularities of a large rock; it has two enormous doors of the Twelfth Century framed with singularly archaic ornaments; one of them is walled up; the other is wide open permitting you to see thousands of little flames in the shadowy interior. Songs, cries and discordant lamentations, lugubrious to hear, escape through it with the perfume of incense. Passing through the door, you find yourself in the venerable shadow of a kind of vestibule that reveals magnificent depths beyond, where innumerable lamps are burning. Some Turkish guards, armed as if for a massacre, occupy this entrance in a military fashion; seated like sovereigns on a large divan, they watch the devotees passing this place, which is always, from their point of view, the opprobrium of Musulman Jerusalem and which the most savage of them have never ceased to call El Komamah (ordure). Oh! the unexpected and imperishable impression when you enter here for the first time. A maze of sombre sanctuaries, of all periods and of all aspects connected by openings, doors and superb columns,--and also by little gloomy doors, air-holes and cavernous hollowings. Some of these are elevated like high tribunals, where you perceive, in the remote distance, groups of women in long veils; others are subterranean, where you are jostled by shadows, between walls of rock that have remained intact, dripping and black.--All this, in a twilight where a few rays of light fall and accentuate the surrounding darkness; all this, starry with an infinite number of little flames in lamps of silver and gold, hanging from the vaults by the thousand.--And everywhere a crowd moving about confusedly as if at Babel, or quite stationary, seeming to be grouped by nationalities around the golden tabernacles where somebody is officiating. Psalmody, lamentations and joyful songs fill the high vaults, or echo in the sepulchral depths below; the nasal melopœia of the Greeks cut through by the howlings of the Copts. And, in all these voices, an exaltation of tears and prayers which produce dissonance and which unite them; the whole effect becoming I know not what strange thing that makes this place like a great wail from mankind and the supreme cry of distress before death.