The rotunda with a very high cupola, which you enter first and which allows you to divine between its columns the obscure chaos of the other sanctuaries, is occupied in the centre by the great marble kiosk, of a luxury that is half barbaric and overcharged with silver lamps, that encloses the stone of the sepulchre. All around this very sacred kiosk, the crowd surges or stands still: on the one side hundreds of moujiks and matouchkas are kneeling on the flag-stones; on the other, the women of Jerusalem, standing up, in long white veils--groups of ancient virgins, one would, say, in the dreamlike shadow; elsewhere Abyssinians and turbaned Arabs prostrated with foreheads to the earth; Turks with sabre in hand; people of all communions and all languages. You do not stay long in this habitation of the Holy Sepulchre, which is really the very heart of this mass of basilicas and chapels, people pass by one by one; lowering your head you enter it by a very little door of marble carved and festooned; the sepulchre is within, encased in marble and surrounded by gold icons and gold lamps. There entered at the same time as I did a Russian soldier, a poor old woman in rags, an Oriental woman in rich brocade; all kissed the cover of the tomb and wept. And others followed, and others eternally follow, to touch, embrace and wet with tears these same stones. There is no plan of unity in this collection of churches and chapels which crowd close around this very holy kiosk; there are some large ones that are marvellously sumptuous and some little ones that are humble and primitive, crumbling away with age in these sinister nooks dug out of the natural rock and dark as night. And, here and there, the rock of Calvary, left bare, appears in the midst of richness and archaic gold work. The contrast is strange between so many collected treasures,--icons of gold, crosses of gold and lamps of gold,--and the rags of the pilgrims and the decay of the walls and the pillars, worn, corroded, shapeless and greasy from the rubbing of so many human bodies.