Via Dolorosa... The Way of the Cross.
Left, then right again, and now, on the turn, the band of pilgrims beside whom he walked mingled with another group in front, and yet a second and third dovetailed into them. Babcock, turning for one backward glance, could see no sign of Robin or Bob Smith, no sign of any of his flock. His pilgrim partners were now, immediately in front of him, a company of nuns, and behind him, bearded and black-robed, a group of Greek Orthodox priests. To move either to right or left was out of the question. He hoped he was not too conspicuous as the one lone figure bunched between them, the singing nuns ahead, the chanting priests in the rear.
The nuns were saying the Hail Mary in Dutch. At least, he thought it was Dutch, but it could have been German. They went down on their knees when they came to the Fifth and Sixth Stations, and Babcock, fumbling for his little pilgrim's handbook, reminded himself that the Fifth was the spot where the Cross had been laid upon Simon of Cyrene, and the Sixth where the face of Our Lord had been wiped by Veronica. He wondered whether he should kneel with the nuns, or stand with the Greek Orthodox priests. He decided to kneel with the nuns. It showed greater reverence, greater humility.
On, on, ever upwards, ever climbing, the dome of the church of the Holy Sepulchre rearing above him, and now a final pause because they had arrived in the paved court before the great basilica itself, and in a moment the nuns, he himself and the priests would be passing through the imposing door to the final Stations, within the church itself.
It was then that Babcock became aware, though not for the first time--he had known a momentary queasiness within the Ecce Homo Convent--that all was far from well with his own inside. A sharp pain gripped him, passed, then gripped him again. He began to sweat. He looked to right and left, but there was no means of extricating himself from the pilgrims who surrounded him. The chanting continued, the door of the church was before him, and despite his efforts to turn and go back the priests barred his way. He must go on and into the church, there was no other way.
The church of the Holy Sepulchre enveloped him. He was aware of darkness, scaffolding, steps, the smell of many bodies and much incense. What can I do, he asked himself in agony, where can I go, the lingering taste of last night's chicken ragout rising from his belly to confound him, and as he stumbled up the steps to the Chapel of Golgotha in the wake of the nuns, with altars to right and left of him, candles, lights, crosses, votive offerings in profusion all about him, he saw nothing, heard nothing, he could only feel the pressure within his body, the compelling summons of his bowels, which no prayer, no willpower, no Divine Mercy from on high could overcome.
Bob Smith, bunched in behind the Greek Orthodox priests some distance in the rear, with Robin at his side, had been the first to observe the signs of distress on Babcock's face. He had noticed that when Babcock knelt for the final time, before being swept through the door of the church, he was looking very white, and was wiping his forehead with his handkerchief.
"I wonder," he thought, "if he's feeling ill. Faint, or something." He turned to Robin. "Look," he said, "I'm a bit worried about the parson. I don't think we ought to let him out of our sight."
"All right," said Robin. "Why don't you follow him? Perhaps he feels awkward walking with all those nuns."
"I don't think it's that," replied Bob. "I think he may be feeling ill."
"Perhaps," said Robin, "he wants to go to the toilet. I wouldn't mind going myself, as a matter of fact."
He looked about him for a practical solution. Bob Smith hesitated.
"Why don't you stay here," he suggested, "and wait for us to come out? That is, unless you're terribly keen to see inside the Holy Sepulchre."
"I'm not at all keen," said Robin. "I don't believe it's the correct site anyway."
"Right, then. I'll see if I can find him inside."
Bob pushed through the door, and like Babcock before him was met with darkness, scaffolding, chanting pilgrims, priests, a flight of steps and chapels on either side. Most of the pilgrims were descending, the nuns among them, closely followed by the priests. The figure of Babcock, so conspicuous in their midst winding his way up the Via Dolorosa, was no longer to be seen.
Then Bob Smith spied him, huddled against the base of the wall in the second chapel, his face buried in his hands, a sacristan--Greek, Coptic, Armenian, Bob didn't know which--crouching by his side. The sacristan raised his head as Bob approached.
"An English pilgrim," he whispered, "taken very unwell. I will go to find help."
"That's O.K.," said Bob. "I know him. He belongs to our party. I'll manage." He bent down and touched Babcock on the arm. "Don't worry," he said. "I'm here."
Babcock motioned with his hand. "Ask him to go away," he whispered. "The most frightful thing has happened."
"Yes," said Bob, "it's all right. I understand."
He gestured to the sacristan, who nodded, and crossed the chapel to prevent the incoming batch of pilgrims from approaching, and Bob helped Babcock to his feet.
"It could happen to any one of us," he said. "It must be happening all the time. I remember once at the Cup Final..."
He didn't finish his sentence. His unfortunate companion was too distressed, too doubled up with weakness, with shame. Bob took his elbow and helped him down the steps, and out of the church to the court beyond.
"You'll be better in a moment," he said, "in the fresh air."
Babcock clung to him. "It was the chicken," he said, "that chicken I had last night for dinner. I particularly didn't touch any fruit or salad, Miss Dean warned me against them. I thought chicken would be safe."
"Don't worry," said Bob. "You just couldn't help it. Do you think... do you think the worst is over?"
"Yes, yes, it's over."
Bob looked about him, but there was no sign of Robin. He must have gone into the church after all. What the hell should he do? The child ought not to be left to himself, but then no more should Babcock. He might be taken ill again. Bob should escort him back to the bus at St. Stephen's Gate. He would return for Robin.
"Look," he said, "I feel you should get back to the hotel as soon as possible, to change and lie down. I'll come with you as far as the bus."
"I'm so grateful," murmured his companion, "so terribly grateful."
He no longer cared if he had become conspicuous. It no longer mattered whether people turned and stared. As they retraced their steps downhill, back along the Via Dolorosa, past more chanting pilgrims, more tourists, more crying vendors of vegetables, onions, and the carcasses of lambs, he knew that he had indeed descended to the depths of humiliation, that by his final act of human weakness he had suffered a shame that only a man could suffer, and to which perhaps his Master had also succumbed, in his loneliness, in his fear, before being nailed to his criminal's cross.
When they came to St. Stephen's Gate the first thing they saw was an ambulance drawn up alongside their bus, and a crowd of people, strangers, grouped round it. An official, white in the face, was directing them to move away. Bob's first thought was for Jill. Something had happened to Jill... Then Jim Foster, limping, his hair disheveled, appeared from the midst of them.
"There's been an accident," he said.
"Are you hurt?" asked Bob.
"No... no, nothing wrong with me, I got caught up in some sort of demonstration and managed to get away... It's Miss Dean. She fell into that drain they call the Pool of Bethesda."
"Oh, God in heaven...," exclaimed Babcock, and he looked despairingly from Jim Foster back to Bob. "This is all my fault, I should have been taking care of her. I didn't know. I thought she was with the rest of you." He moved forward to the ambulance, then remembered his own plight and spread out his hands in a gesture of despair. "I don't think I can go to her," he said. "I'm not in a fit state to see anyone..."
Jim Foster was staring at him, then glanced enquiringly at Bob Smith.
"He's not in good shape," murmured Bob. "He was taken ill a short while ago, up at the church. A b
ad tummy upset. He ought to get back to the hotel as soon as possible."
"Poor devil," replied Jim Foster under his breath, "what an awful thing. Look..." he turned to Babcock, "get up into the bus right away. I'll tell the driver to take you straight to the hotel. I'll go with Miss Dean in the ambulance."
"How bad is she?" asked Babcock.
"They don't seem to know," said Jim Foster. "It's shock chiefly, I imagine. She was practically unconscious when the guide fellow pulled her out of the water. Luckily he was only at the top of the steps. Meanwhile, I can't think what has happened to either Bob's wife or mine. They're somewhere back in that infernal city."
He took hold of Babcock by the arm and steered him towards the bus. Funny thing how other people's misfortunes made you forget your own. The panic he himself had experienced had vanished at his first sight of the ambulance as he stumbled down through St. Stephen's Gate, giving way to a deeper anxiety that Kate might be the victim the stretcher-bearers were carrying to it. But it was only Miss Dean. Poor wretched Miss Dean. Thank heaven, not Kate.
The bus rumbled off with the pale, unhappy Babcock staring at them from one of the windows.
"Well, he's on his way, that's one thing," said Jim Foster. "What a calamity, what a situation. I wish the Colonel was here to handle it."
"I'm worried now about Robin," said Bob Smith. "I told him to wait for us outside the church of the Holy Sepulchre, and he was missing when we came out."
"Missing? In that mob?" Jim Foster stared, aghast.
Then, with unspeakable relief, he saw his wife, with Jill beside her, coming through St. Stephen's Gate. He ran across to her.
"Thank heaven you've come," he said. "We've got to get Miss Dean to hospital. She's in the ambulance already. I'll explain everything on the way. There's been a series of mishaps all round. Babcock ill, Robin missing, it's been a disastrous day."
Kate seized his arm. "But you?" she said. "Are you all right?"
"Yes, yes... Of course I'm all right."
He dragged her towards the ambulance. He did not even look at Jill. Bob hesitated, wondering what he ought to do. Then he turned, and saw Jill standing beside him.
"Where have you been?" he asked.
"I don't know," she said wearily. "In a sort of garden. I was looking for you but I couldn't find you. Kate was with me. She was worried about her husband. He can't stand crowds."
"Nor can any of us," he said, "but we'll have to face them again. Young Robin is lost, and I must go and find him. There's nobody else left."
"I'll come with you."
"Are you sure? You look absolutely done in."
The Fosters were climbing into the ambulance. The siren wailed, and the spectators moved away. Jill thought of that endless winding street they called the Via Dolorosa, the chanting pilgrims, the chattering vendors, the repetition of a scene she never wanted to see again, the clatter, the noise.
"I can face it," she sighed. "It won't seem so long if we're together."
Robin was enjoying himself. Being on his own always gave him a sense of freedom, of power. And he had become very bored trailing along in the path of the pilgrims, with people going down on their knees every other moment. It wasn't even as if they were walking the right way. The city had been pulled down and rebuilt so many times that it was altogether different from what it had been two thousand years ago. The only way to reconstruct it would be to pull it down again, and then dig and dig and reveal all the foundations. He might well become an archaeologist when he grew up, if he didn't become a scientist like his father. The two professions were rather similar, he decided. He certainly would not become a clergyman like Mr. Babcock. Not in this day and age.
He wondered how long they would stay inside the church. Hours, probably. It was full to the brim with priests and pilgrims wanting to pray, and they would all bump into each other. This made him laugh, and laughing made him want to go to the toilet--his grandmother hated the word toilet, but everyone used it at school--and so, as there wasn't a real one handy, he went and relieved himself against the wall of the church. Nobody saw. Then he sat down on a step, opened his two maps and spread them across his knees. The thing was, Jesus had either been held in the Antonia Fortress or in the Citadel. Probably both. But which one had he been held in last, before he had to carry his Cross with the two other prisoners, and set out for Golgotha? The description in the Gospels did not make it clear. He was brought before Pilate, but Pilate could just as well have been in the one place as in the other. Pilate delivered Jesus to the high priests to be crucified, but where were the high priests waiting for him? That was the point. It could have been at Herod's Palace, where the Citadel stood now, and in that case Jesus and the two thieves would all have left the city by the Genath Gate. He looked from one map to the other: the Genath Gate was now called Jaffa Gate, or in Hebrew Yafo--it depended which language you spoke.
Robin looked at the church door. They would be ages yet. He decided to walk to the Jaffa Gate and see how it was for himself. It wasn't very far, and with the help of the modern map he wouldn't lose the way. It took him less than ten minutes to reach the gate, and here he paused to take stock of his surroundings. People were passing in and out, and there were cars drawn up outside, as there had been by St. Stephen's Gate at the opposite end of the walled city. The trouble was, of course, that instead of the bare hillside and gardens, which was how it would have been two thousand years ago, there was now a main road, and the modern city spreading itself everywhere. He consulted his old map once again. There used to be a fortress tower called Psephinus, standing proud and mighty by the northwest corner of the city, and this was the tower that the Emperor Titus rode to inspect, when he camped with his Roman legions before capturing and sacking Jerusalem in A.D. 70. There was something built on the present site called the College des Freres. Wait a moment, though. Was it the College des Freres or a hotel called the Knight's Palace? Either way it was still inside the walls of the city, and somehow that was not right, even with the walls having been rebuilt.
"I'll imagine," he told himself, "that I'm Jesus, and I've just come out of the Genath Gate, and all this is bare hillside and sloping gardens, and they don't crucify a person in a garden, but a decent distance away, especially before the Feast of the Passover, otherwise the people would make a disturbance, and there had been enough riots already. So Jesus and the two other condemned prisoners were made to walk a fair way, that's why they made Simon the farm laborer--and Cyrene means farm laborer in Aramaic, the headmaster told me so--carry the cross. He was just coming in from work in the fields. Jesus couldn't manage it, being weak from all that scourging. And they took him and the others out to some rough scrubby ground overlooked by the Psephinus tower, where the soldiers would have had a guard posted, so that if there should have been an attempt at rescue the attempt would fail."
Pleased with his deduction, Robin turned to the right out of the Jaffa Gate and walked along the main road until he judged that he was the right distance from the long-vanished tower of Psephinus. He found that he had reached a junction, with main roads going in all directions and traffic roaring by, and the great building across the other side of the central square was the town hall, according to his modern map.
"So this is it," he thought. "This is scrubby ground, with fields where the town hall stands, and the farm laborer is sweating, and so are Jesus and the others. And the sun is overhead in a blazing sky, as it is now, and when the crosses are set up the men nailed on them won't see the fields behind them, they'll be looking at the city."
He shut his eyes a moment, and turned, and looked back at the city and the walls, and they were a golden color, very fine and splendid. For Jesus, who had spent most of his life wandering about the hills and lakes and villages, it would have seemed the finest and most splendid city in the world. But after staring at it for three hours, in pain, it would not seem so splendid--in fact, it would be a relief to die.
A horn blared, and he stepped out of the way
of the incoming traffic. If he didn't watch out he would die too, and there wouldn't be much sense in that.
He decided to walk back to the city through the New Gate, which was just along to the right. Some men were repairing a place in the road, and they looked up as Robin approached. They shouted, pointing to the traffic, and although Robin got the message, and skipped to safety beside them, he couldn't understand what they were saying. It could be Yiddish, or possibly Hebrew, but he wished it could have been Aramaic. He waited until the man with the drill ceased his earsplitting probe, and then he called to them.
"Does anyone speak English?" he asked.
The man with the drill smiled and shook his head, then called out to one of his companions, who was bending over a piece of piping. The man looked up. He was young, like the rest, and had very white teeth and black curly hair.
"I speak English, yes," he said.
Robin peered down into the pit beneath. "Can you tell me, then," he asked, "if you have found anything interesting down there?"
The young man laughed, and picked up a small animal by its tail. It looked like a dead rat.
"Tourist souvenir?" he suggested.
"No skulls? No bones?" Robin asked hopefully.
"No," smiled the laborer. "For that we have to drill very deep, below the rock. Here, you can catch?" He threw a small piece of rock up to Robin from the pit in which he stood. "Keep it," he said. "The rock of Jerusalem. It will bring you luck."
"Thank you very much," said Robin.
He wondered whether he should tell them that they were standing within a hundred yards or so, perhaps, of a place where three men had been crucified two thousand years ago, and then he decided they would not believe him; or, if they did, it would not impress them very much. For Jesus was not important to them, not like Abraham or David, and, anyway, so many men had been tortured and killed around Jerusalem since then that the young man might very well say, with justice, so what? It would be more tactful to wish them a happy holiday instead. It was the 14th day of Nisan, and at sundown all work would cease. He put the small piece of rock in his pocket.