The May Flower, and Miscellaneous WritingsStowe, Harriet Beecher
General
The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings
Stowe, Harriet Beecher
United States -- Social life and customs -- 19th century -- Fiction
A SCENE IN JERUSALEM.
It is now nearly noon, the busiest and most bustling hour of the day;
yet the streets of the Holy City seem deserted and silent as the grave.
The artisan has left his bench, the merchant his merchandise; the
throngs of returned wanderers which this great national festival has
brought up from every land of the earth, and which have been for the
last week carrying life and motion through every street, seem suddenly
to have disappeared. Here and there solitary footfalls, like the last
pattering rain drops after a shower, awaken the echoes of the streets;
and here and there some lonely woman looks from the housetop with
anxious and agitated face, as if she would discern something in the far
distance.
Alone, or almost alone, the few remaining priests move like
white-winged, solitary birds over the gorgeous pavements of the temple,
and as they mechanically conduct the ministrations of the day, cast
significant glances on each other, and pause here and there to converse
in anxious whispers.
Ah there is one voice which they have often heard beneath those
arches--a voice which ever bore in it a mysterious and thrilling
charm--which they know will be hushed to-day. Chief priest, scribe, and
doctor have all gone out in the death procession after him; and these
few remaining ones, far from the excitement of the crowd, and busied in
calm and sacred duties, find voices of anxious questioning rising from
the depths of their own souls, "What if this indeed were the Christ?"
But pass we on out of the city, and what a surging tide of life and
motion meets the eye, as if all nations under heaven had dashed their
waves of population on this Judean shore! A noisy, wrathful, tempestuous
mob, billow on billow, waver and rally round some central object, which
it conceals from view. Parthians, Medes, Elamites, dwellers in
Mesopotamia and Egypt, strangers of Rome, Cretes and Arabians, Jew and
Proselyte, convoked from the ends of the earth, throng in agitated
concourse one on another; one theme in every face, on every tongue, one
name in every variety of accent and dialect passing from lip to lip:
"Jesus of Nazareth!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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