e lay bound in his bed on the open deck a raving madman.
We were a fortnight on the sea, wandering irrelevantly from port to
port of the Levant, discharging a cargo of sugar; and all the while
the poor beggar-pilgrims lived on the crusts of which they had
sackfuls collected in Russia, crusts of black bread all gone green
with mould. I looked at the piles of them heaped on the deck to air in
pleasant weather, and was amazed that men could live simply on decay.
We had two storms, in one of which our masts were broken down and we
were told we should go to the bottom. The peasants rolled over one
another in the hold like corpses, and clutched at one another like
madmen. In despair some offered all their money, all that they had, to
a priest as a votive offering to St. Nicholas, that the storm might
abate. The state of the ship I should not dare to depict--the filth,
the stench, the vermin. For nearly a thousand passengers there
were three lavatories without bolts! Fitly was the boat named
_Lazarus_--Lazarus all sores. What the poor simple peasant men and
women suffered none can tell. They had not the thought to take care
of themselves as I had, and indeed they would have scorned to save
themselves. "It is necessary to suffer," they said.

It was a hard and terrible way, and yet on the last day of the voyage,
in the sight of the Holy Land, our hearts all leapt within us with
grateful joy. We felt it was worth it, every whit. When I think of
this journey as of that of Christian in the _Pilgrims Progress_, I
call this ship and the journey on it the Valley of the Shadow of
Death, full of foul pits and hobgoblins; something which must be
passed through if Jerusalem is to be attained; the dread gulf which
lies between earthly and heavenly life. It was necessary to pass
through it, and what was on the other side was infinitely worth the
struggle. There is a story in Dostoievsky of a Russian free-thinker
whose penance beyond this world was to walk a quadrillion versts. When
he finished this walk and saw the Heavenly City at the end of it he
fell down and cried out, "It is worth it, every inch; not only would I
walk a quadrillion of versts, but a quadrillion of quadrillions raised
to the quadrillionth power."

II

At last we arrived at Jerusalem. The onlookers saw a long,
jaded-looking flock of poor people toiling up the hilly road from
Jaffa, wearing Russian winter garb under the straight-beating sun of
the desert, dusty, roa