You would think this a heathen temple. Four enormous, dumpy pillars, of a primitive Byzantine type and exceedingly heavy, sustain the surbased cupola, from which hang ostrich eggs and a thousand uncouth pendants. Remains of painting on the walls indicating saints with nimbuses of gold in naïve and stiff attitudes are being effaced by the dampness and ancient dust. Everything is decaying through neglect with the sweat of water and saltpetre. From the depths of the lower subterranean vaults suddenly ascend some Abyssinian priests, who suggest the ancient Magi-Kings, issuing from the bowels of the earth; black faces under large golden tiaras formed like turbans, long robes of cloth of gold sprinkled with imaginary red and blue flowers. Quickly, quickly, with that kind of excited haste which is universal here, they cross the crypts of Saint-Helena and mount towards the other sanctuaries by the big stairway in ruins,--illuminated at first by the light falling from the loop-holes of the vault, splendidly archaic in their golden robes in the midst of the gnomes squatting against the walls,--then, they suddenly disappear above in the distant shadows. Some distance away, in the sanctuaries at the entrance and near the kiosk of the Sepulchre, the rock of Calvary rises: it supports two chapels to which you ascend by twenty stone steps and which are the veritable place of prostrations and sobs for the crowd. From the peristyle of these chapels, like an elevated balcony the view commands a confused mass of tabernacles, a maze of churches, where the hypnotized crowd moves about. The most splendid of the two is that of the Greeks; under a nimbus of silver, as resplendent as a rainbow, stand out in human grandeur the pale images of the three crucified ones, Christ and the two thieves; the walls are hidden by icons of silver, gold and precious stones. The altar is erected on the very place of the crucifixion; under the retable a silver lattice lets you see in the black rock the hole where the Cross was planted,--and it is there that you walk on your knees, wetting these sombre stones with tears and kisses, whilst a lulling noise of chants and prayers ascends incessantly from the churches below. And, for two thousand years, here it has ever been thus; under divers forms, in the different basilicas, with interruptions of sieges, battles, and massacres, but with renewals still more passionate and universal, here the same concert of prayers, the same great chorus of desperate supplications or triumphant thanksgiving have always resounded.