388 
A CRUSADE IN THE EAST. 
tries ; and it was not without difficulty that we obtained a 
room in the convent, which was already overflowing with 
visitors. 
In that old convent I passed the most memorable Christmas 
of my life; and I sincerely hope it was the last of the kind 
that I am destined ever to spend. To give the remotest idea 
of the ceremonies would he utterly impossible ; and if I 
thought that a single reasonable being in any civilized coun¬ 
try, no matter of what persuasion, could look upon them with 
other feelings than those of disapproval and humiliation, I 
would not even acknowledge that I was there. 
Long before midnight the crowd was dense and crushing. 
Hundreds of monks, bearing candles, w 7 ere assembled around 
the main altar. There was a waxen image there ; a strange 
disgusting thing, with staring eyes of glass, tawny skin, and 
wrinkled neck; its cheeks puffed out, and its mouth slightly 
open, as if it had been suffocated with thick incenses. A 
string of beads was coiled up on its breast. It was dressed in 
white, and glared strangely with silver spangles and tawdry 
lace. 
They laid it on its back on the altar; and they talked to 
it, and chanted, and prostrated themselves in its presence; 
and the wild glare of many lamps glistened upon their pale 
greasy faces and shaven heads ; and anon they turned to the 
pictures on the walls, of bleeding and mutilated saints, and 
bowed down again with closed eyes, and chanted their hea¬ 
thenish rites, and moaned for the wickedness of the unbe¬ 
lieving. 
In jostling crowds they put aside the staring and affrighted 
Arabs, and went from alcove to alcove in a scorching halo 
of light; and hour after hour, as the incense and foul air 
rose thicker and thicker over the heads of the swaying mass, 
they fell prostrate before the ugly wax image, and chanted 
the glory of the new-born. 
On the floor, surging around the many feet, was a sea of 
human heads, bald and blue with recent shaving, and the 
grizzled beards of the old were frothy as the foam wrought 
by a fierce tempest. 
