ut is
instantly swallowed up"--as exact an untruth as was ever told by
traveller; how the Jordan opens a way for pilgrims "and stands up in a
heap every year at the Epiphany during the baptism of Catechumens, as
David told, 'The sea saw that and fled, Jordan was driven back'"; how at
Jericho there is a Holy Field "sown by the Lord with his own hand." A
report had been spread that the salt pillar of Lot's wife had been
"lessened by licking"; "it was false," said Antoninus, the statue was
just the same as it had always been.

In Jerusalem the pilgrims first went up the Tower of David, "where he
sang the Psalter," and into the Basilica of Sion, where among other
marvels they saw the "Corner-stone that the builders rejected," which
gave out a "sound like the murmuring of a crowd."

We come back again to fact with rather a start when told in the next
section of the Hospitals for 3000 sick folk near the Church of St. Mary,
close to Sion; then with the footprints and relics of Christ, and the
miraculous flight of the Column of Scourging--"carried away by a cloud
to Caesarea," we are taken through a fresh set of "impressions."

The same wild notions of place and time and nature follow the Martyr
through Galilee to Gilboa, "where David slew Goliath and Saul died,
where no dew or rain ever falls, and where devils appear nightly,
whirled about like fleeces of wool or the waves of the sea"--to
Nazareth, where was the "Beam of Christ the Carpenter"--to Elua, where
fifteen consecrated virgins had tamed a lion and trained it to live with
them in a cell--to Egypt, where the Pyramids become for him the
"_twelve_ Barns of Joseph," for the legend had not yet insisted that the
actual number should be made to fit the text of the seven years of
plenty.

But with all this Antoninus now and then gives us glimpses of a larger
world. In Jerusalem he meets AEthiopians "with nostrils slit and rings
about their fingers and their feet." They were so marked, they told him,
by the Emperor Trajan "for a sign."

In the Sinai desert he tells us of "Saracen" beggars and idolaters; in
the Red Sea ports he sees "ships from India" laden with aromatics; he
travels up the Nile to the Cataracts and describes the Nilometer at
Assouan, and the crocodiles in the river; Alexandria he finds "splendid
but frivolous, a lover of pilgrims but swarming with heresies."

But far more wonderful than the practical jumble of Antoninus Martyr is
the systematic nonsense