Chapter XXV (2)

Between the two ordinary rails of the towing-track, neatly embedded in the concrete top of the lock-wall, was a third rail, broad and strong and indented for the teeth of a mighty cog-wheel. With isthmian thoroughness, these depressions are made self-draining, lest rain-water accumulate and breed fever-carrying mosquitos. There is a tragedy connected with the third, or return-track, of the towing-railroad, which runs down the middle of the center wall. It had to be there, and so did the range-light that will guide ships across the lake into the upper forebay of the locks. So they stuck that dignified lighthouse up on four bandy legs, like a mangrove on its roots; and when the Art Commission come down from Washington and see it, they will say unkind things of the engineers.

They are building the control-house, the nerve center of all the delicate, ponderous machinery at Gatun, at the lower end of the uppermost lock, where half a dozen operators can oversee and control everything. The control-board will be like a flat-topped table desk, with a model of the locks in low relief, the gates, large valves, and all important machinery shown in miniature, and moving in unison with the main machines. The switches which control the different units will be interlocked in such a manner that the operator cannot move the wrong machine. This switch will stretch a chain across the path of a runaway ship; that will open or close a valve in one of the three great culverts (each as large as the Pennsylvania Railroad tunnels under the Hudson River), and so empty or fill a lock; a third will swing round and drop into place the emergency dam that would hold the water in the lake were every gate and guard-gate swept away. If the control-house itself were destroyed, the machines could be operated in detail.

One man has succeeded in making a true picture of the gates of the Gatun Locks--Mr. Pennell.[8] I shall only ask you to imagine the blind walls of two six-story office-buildings swinging open on hinges, like the front of a doll’s house. This miracle is accomplished by a device called the “Bullwheel,” the invention of an employee of the Isthmian Canal Commission, Mr. Edward Schildhauer. A ponderous wheel, revolving horizontally, thrusts out through the side of the lock-wall a long steel arm that opens and closes one of the massive gates as easily as one could a bedroom door. These gates are of what is known as the “mitering-pattern,” making, when closed, a blunt wedge pointing up-stream, like a beaver dam. Mr. Schildhauer is also the inventor of a “miter-locking machine,” which bears a strong family resemblance to the large purple land-crab of the isthmus. One of these machines squats on the top of every gate, and, grasping a pin on the opposite leaf, holds both tightly together.

The fact that the three locks of the Atlantic division of the Panama Canal are together in one place has attracted the attention of the world to Gatun, to the disadvantage of the equally good work done at Miraflores and Pedro Miguel, and the quiet, efficient civil engineer under whom it has been done. Mr. S. B. Williamson, C.E. Of him they tell a story, one of the few that deal with the pre-isthmian days of Colonel Goethals.

Mr. Williamson was working under the colonel on some irrigation-project in the southwest. One morning his chief discovered him shoveling away a gravel-bank with his own hands among a gang of common laborers. The colonel took his subordinate roundly to task. Mr. Williamson blushed, stammered, and finally admitted:

“There was a bit of a slide, sir, and the men were afraid to go back into the pit until I showed them there was no danger.”

The colonel apologized, and has kept Mr. Williamson by him ever since. It is a good illustration of the spirit of Colonel Goethals and his men--the men who have put through the big job.

[7] “Panama Roughneck Ballads.”

[8] See “Building the Panama Canal,”--a group of eight lithographs
made by Mr. Pennell for this magazine,--in ~The Century~ for
August, 1912.

“HE OPENED HIS EYES IN SOME FAINT DISTRESS ... AND BLINKED THROUGH HIS GOGGLES” (SEE PAGE 284)]

THE SIREN OF THE AIR

BY ALLAN UPDEGRAFF

When his barograph marked twelve thousand feet, Reese pushed the yoke of his warping-wheel forward a few inches, and gave a slight inclination to the foot-bar of the rudder. The monoplane, which had been climbing up into the wind so sharply as to remain almost motionless as far as horizontal progress was concerned, settled to a level keel and began to describe a wide circle, gracefully lifting its outside and lowering its inside wing like a bird when it turns. From behind the trailing edge of the lowered wing, its driver looked down on the creeping expanse of earth two miles below.

The hangars and pylons and crowded stands of the aviation-field were pressed together, made small, blurred, as though seen through the wrong end of a misted telescope. The broad field itself seemed not larger than a lady’s handkerchief; it was almost lost in the blur of villages, boulevards, railroad-tracks, and tree-clumps of the level Long Island country. To north and south, as the great bird swept steadily on its arc, appeared expanses, smooth and polished like metal--the Atlantic and the Sound. Shapes like beetles represented ships.

“It might be Lilliput,” said Reese, aloud, bending his helmeted head over the inch-wide rim of aluminium that separated him from space. The strangeness of sheer height and aloofness had written awe on his face. He lifted his eyes from the Atlantic to the curved walls of sky, dark blue with the thinness of the air, dazzling like steel with the resplendence of untempered sunshine, which curved downward all around him. He was as though suspended in the monstrous metal reflector of a monstrous electric light; dizzying, blazing distance was all around him. “God!” he muttered; “isn’t this--” There was a catch of awe and rapture in his voice--“isn’t this tremendous! And lonely! A man on a mountain-peak wouldn’t be half so much alone.”

Behind the glass of his goggles his wide, hazel-colored eyes shone with a dull excitement, like that following the first exhilaration of champagne. His rapid ascent, the thin, icy air, the powerful hum of the muffled motor, the blazing sunshine, the voice and fingers of the wind, the sweep of his winged machine obeying the circular blur that showed the tractor’s power at its head, the invisible supporting strength that thrilled along the steel nerves of the great bird into his hands--all these new and strong forces registered themselves on the brain of the man, doubled the time of his heart-beats, made him quiver more with excitement than with the cold that suggested itself despite his furs. There was no fear on his keen face; rather exultation, triumph, delight in the presence of danger. A strong swimmer might have struck out toward sirens on their rocks with such an expression of eager, abandoned joy.

“‘They shall mount up with wings as eagles!’” he chanted somewhat wildly, glad of the sound of his voice in the strange emptiness and silence of the place. His eyes wandered along the dazzling, blue-black horizon to a blazing mass of snow-like mist that was forming on the seaward side. “I wish I could go to sleep--like a frigate-bird on the wing,” he finished inconsequently.

He had got little sleep the night before, the nearness of his first real flight, his first unattended trip toward the sun, had been too poignant. From his first lesson in “grass-cutting,” with an instructor in the seat behind him, he had dreamed of this; height and distance allured him as by some affinity with his nature, with the very blood in his veins. His privateer ancestors of 1812, his balloonist great-uncle, his grandfather who had been a naval officer, had bequeathed him their love of free spaces and adventure. The care of his father, a well-to-do professor in a technical school, to bring the boy up to the teaching profession had not survived young Reese’s first sight of an aëroplane. The professor bowed to the inevitable; John Faraday Reese gave up higher mathematics to adventure on the highways of the sky.

As the machine completed its three-mile circle and came once more up into the wind, Reese straightened it out again, and pulled back a little on the yoke that worked the big double elevator in the tail. The great wings turned upward again, soaring. Playing the controls as instinctively as though the machine had been a part of him, the driver kept his eyes on the lethargic needle of the barograph. From beneath drooping eyelids he watched it crawl upward over the lined paper strip. Twelve thousand five hundred, twelve thousand seven hundred fifty, thirteen thousand, thirteen thousand two hundred feet.

Despite the sharp angle at which the big bird poised, the ascent was growing more gradual; the thinned air offered less grip for the tractor, less support for the wings. To increase the power of the motor, Reese cut out the muffler. The rapid musketry of the exhaust broke out, strangely sharpened and clamorous in the attenuated air. With something like a shudder, he threw over the lever that muffled the engine. His nerves were on edge; the strange sound hurt. The barograph marked thirteen thousand six hundred feet.

Still they climbed, enveloped in a blaze of sunshine that was to the tempered sunlight of the earth’s surface as diamonds to glass. Despite the zero air, Reese’s temples inside his padded leather helmet were bathed in sweat. He was panting, and fine, red lines appeared on the smarting surface of his eyeballs. Below the mask of his goggles his face was drawn into deep, straining lines of exultant determination.

“Up we go!” he shouted. His voice seemed smothered in a vacuum, but he disregarded the strangeness. “Sixteen thousand and a world’s record, or bust!”

He glanced again over the quivering rim of the car. A fine white mist, a mist that gave back the blazing sunshine like cloth of spun-glass, had shut out the earth. It was as though a cover had been put over the mouth of the tremendous reflector inside of which he was buzzing upward, smaller than a midge in the globe of an arclight. The very air seemed to turn to flames and ice. A great wave of melancholy gathered, rose, and broke over him; he was alone in an inhuman world that blazed and swayed, that burned and froze, that had no stability, that allowed him air only in searing little gasps.

“Nevertheless,” he muttered, biting at his hardened nether-lip--“nevertheless, up we go!”

He closed his eyes for a moment to get rid of a slight vertigo caused directly by the glare of the aluminium hood that covered the engine. Colored blotches of light danced before his eyeballs, and the rushing of the icy wind rang on his brain like faint voices. He could hear the feverish whispering of the blood in the tympans of his ears, like a magnified replica of the sound that sometimes comes just before sleep. He felt sleepy.

“Sixteen thousand!” he muttered to himself, crushing down his dizziness and languor. “Sixteen thousand! Sixteen thousand feet!”

“No, twenty thousand!” The voice was singularly musical, thin, and clear.

“Yes, twenty thousand!” In the thrill of determination that the voice gave him, he momentarily overlooked the queerness of its presence. “Twenty thousand feet high!”

“Higher than even the condor dares!”

He opened his eyes in some faint distress and perplexity of mind, and blinked through his goggles. In the forward seat, turned three quarters toward him, was a woman, a girl. He could hardly make her out at first, for the dazzle of the aluminium hood was just beyond her, and she was dressed all in white--white, knitted wool and some close, white fur that was almost as dazzling as the aluminium itself. A white, knitted cap was pulled down over her head; a few strands of hair, blazing with the sun’s own color, lay along the snow-white oval of her face.

“I didn’t know--I had the two-seater,” he remarked dazedly. His voice was thin and whistling; he raised it to make himself heard above the hum of the motor and screw. “I thought I took out the one-place machine; I’m out for altitude, you know.”

Her eyes, blue-black and flashing like the sky, regarded him with a little look of questioning; her mouth’s faint scarlet line turned down a trifle at the ends, suggesting polite surprise.

“I don’t mean to intimate that I’m not delighted to have you along,” he assured her warmly. “I merely forgot; it’s the first time I’ve been anywhere near as high as this, and it makes me feel slightly dippy, not bad enough to make me be afraid of losing control, of course, but still--not just right.”

“You look--magnificent.” Her voice left a ringing echo in his ears.

“Oh, I feel all right, aside from the fact that I can’t remember engaging a passenger for this trip.”

“That’s not worth worrying about now,” she assured him, smiling in a dim, dangerous way into his eyes. “What does the barograph read?”

He had to bend down close to read the dial. “Fifteen thousand three hundred,” he said with a stray air, and lifted his head to stare at her. “I’ll not cut out the muffler until we stop rising; the exhaust makes a ghastly clatter up here. It jabbers like the ghost of itself.”

“I love it; it sounds--high,” she said, and again he was thrilled by the weird music of her voice. It allured, it inspired like a bugle-note, and yet there was a chilling something in it. It reminded him of the “ice-crackle,” that peculiar trilling reverberation from the expanding of thin, new ice on the skating lakes of his boyhood. One glided along over the thin, glass-clear surface, one saw the steel-blue water just beneath, one heard the sudden silvery “_Kr-r-r-ring!_” of the ice-crackle, and one put his whole soul into speed.

He stared at her, racking his benumbed wits to remember her place on his passenger-list. Like most of the new pilots, he was accustomed to earn an honest penny now and then by taking up persons with the desire and the necessary fifty dollars. She frankly yielded herself to his inspection; she turned farther around in her seat and smiled at him.

“You don’t remember me?”

“No; that’s astounding, but true.”

She was exquisite, perfect in every line, beautiful with the abstract beauty of an idealist painter’s work. An artist might have called her a “pure type”; there was no little trick of outline or coloring to give personality, character, to the flawless symmetry of her face. She seemed less a real woman than some ideal created to embody an idea: she might have stood for “Purity,” or, perhaps better, “Danger.” Her beauty lost nothing by its impersonality; to Reese’s sun-dazzled eyes, at least it was all the more poignant. The faint scarlet of her lips, the scintillating blue-black of her eyes, the flashing gold of her hair, and the sheer radiant white of all the rest of her allured, intoxicated, astounded. He breathed quickly for reasons other than the thinness of the air. She was unhuman, almost superhuman, for sheer perfection of line and color.

“Well, you have been staring at me for some time,” she said without the slightest show of self-consciousness. “Do you like me?”

“Yes, wonderfully,” he declared, as calmly frank as she herself was.

“And you don’t remember ever meeting me before?”

He shook his head.

“If you’d recall the circumstances. The lessened atmospheric pressure up here makes my head feel as big and empty as a balloon.”

“Oh, it makes no difference; acquaintances begin only when they get interesting, anyway. How you stare! What are you thinking about me now?”

He had been casting about for words, a metaphor, to describe her; in his youth he had made metaphors, boy’s way, to put into verses.

“I was thinking that you are like this height,” he cried, bending toward her over the yoke of the warping-wheel. The great bird lurched drunkenly, and he threw over the wheel to bring it back into equilibrium. He laughed, made reckless by the answering light in her eyes, and let it lurch in the other direction like a swooping eagle. “Yes, you are like height. You are beautiful, you allure, you call to all a man’s manhood and daring; and yet there is something in your look that makes me tremble, as though you were a blade pointing at my heart. Come, we’re three miles above conventions; you won’t mind if I worship you a little? For you are wonderful and beautiful--beyond belief.”

“Why, and so are you. Or is it only this dizzy loneliness that makes us think so?”

“Who are you?” he demanded. “I knew I’d engaged to take up several women this week, but no one like you. Who are you? Give me a name to call you by. Tell me who you are.”

“Why, only your poor feminine passenger,” she laughed, bending toward him. One lithe arm and hand, gantleted nearly to the elbow in close, white, glistening fur, lay along the aluminium edge of the car. “As for my name, how do you like Alta?”

“Good! I remember just enough Latin to appreciate it. Alta--High! Well--” He threw back his head recklessly--“I’m out for altitude!”

“Perhaps you’ll attain it. Only keep your elevator-flaps well lifted!”

He threw back the yoke with a laugh. In bending toward her he had permitted the machine to gain the level once more. The great bird slanted upward at an abrupt angle, and poised, quivering.

“You are brave!” she cried. Her level eyes dared him, her lips provoked and promised. He closed his eyes for a moment, made giddy by her radiance and by the blaze of the untempered sun on the aluminium hood just beyond her. The reflection surrounded her with an aura like white flames.

Instinctively he eased off the dangerous lift of the wings; he had no need to look at the needle of the level-indicator to know that the machine was threatening to slide backward into the abyss.

“Why do you shut your eyes, height-seeker?” she demanded. “Are you afraid? What does the barograph read now?”

“Sixteen thousand three hundred,” he said shortly. “A record, I believe; but what of it? No, I’m not afraid,” he added, stiffening his neck and fixing his bloodshot gaze on her untroubled eyes and dangerous lips; “I’m not even afraid of you. It’s you who’d better be afraid of me. Do you know we were ready to drop backward a minute ago?”

“I felt it. It was superb. We must have gained two hundred feet in that one tremendous lift. And yet I think--you were afraid.”

The blood rushed into his face; flames leaped up in his eyes.

“Perhaps I can prove I wasn’t by letting go the controls and coming over there to you. We’d be together for as long as it took us to drop three miles, anyway. Shall I?”

“Oh, brave words--and true! I believe you would. Now you are a demigod by the look on your mouth and eyes; you are man no longer! So, Spirit, send us upward once more till we poise over the abyss! Height and the spirit of adventure! Throw back the yoke with a laugh, as you did before.”

“Yes. And if I do?”

“What! A price?”

“Yes!”

“It is right. Well--when the barograph marks twenty thousand feet, I will come and sit at your knees!”

“It is what I had on the tip of my tongue to ask,” he shouted, wild with exaltation. “Good; and block the rudder-bar! We will go down on the warp alone--a proper finish. Down twenty thousand feet, with the rudder blocked!”

“Yes. Is it a bargain?”

“A bargain!” he shouted, and turned his face up into the candent dome of sky and laughed aloud. His arms jerked the yoke of the elevator back until the wheel touched his breast; the machine leaped upward like a diver, soared, poised trembling. He threw back the lever that cut out the muffler. The exhaust broke out in a weird salvo like sharpened rifle-shots. He eased off the precipitate angle until they had gained way once more, and again threw the elevator up to its highest limit. They bounded upward, swaying, clattering, whistling through the knife-edged wind. And all the while she smiled into his face.

He no longer noticed the barograph; he saw only her untroubled gaze of inspiration and allurement. A thin trickle of scarlet started from both his nostrils; his blackened lips gaped for breath; his bulging, bloodshot eyes left her only to glare over the powers at his command. He was all resolve and eagerness; he was determination incarnate. He shot one hand forward, ungloved, to adjust the carbureter, which was beginning to fail for lack of air. He threw back and forth the lever that put extra pressure on the gasolene tank. With demoniacal abandon he worked the hand-pump that jetted oil on the flying bearings of the engine.

“Do-er! Accomplisher!” He started at her voice. The reflection of his own exaltation was on her; her face quivered, yearned toward him. With a steady, sinuous movement she drew herself backward over the low back-rest of her seat, and crept back under the curved yoke that held the warping-wheel. She sat up, sidewise, near him, lifted her face slowly until it curved backward like a flower on the fair, white stem of her throat, and offered him the curved, scarlet miracle of her lips.

As he bent toward her the sky became black. As from the depths of a dream he heard her voice chanting:

“The ages dreamed of this that you have done.”

Her voice was like a softened, hundred-toned ice-crackle. He trembled in his coma, and then relaxed as for a long fall in sleep. The voice went on:

“The Chaldeans sculptured wings on their man-gods and on their sacred bulls.

“The Greeks made their dream articulate in the myth of Dædalus and Icarus.

“Leonardo da Vinci laid aside the brush that made the Mona Lisa to grope for the realization of this dream that we have made real.

“To fly, to spread wings on the impalpable air, and soar, to follow the way of an eagle in the air.

“To skim the invisible columns of the sky--are not men become as gods now in very truth?

“You have dreamed true, Spirit--Spirit of Dreams and High Emprise; you are all men who aspire.

“How beautiful you are in the torture of accomplishment! The very chords on your throat are lute-strings to sing of victory.

“The blood from your nostrils is a libation to the jealous powers that you have trampled underfoot.

“Beautiful, wonderful, holy--my lover, whom I love!”

He was suddenly aware of a great rush of wind and of the delirious, gripping sensation of falling. Drunk with her voice and beauty, he had forgotten warping-wheel, rudder-bar, elevator-yoke, everything. The cutting air roused him; frantically he threw the elevator down, drawing her head backward before the yoke to his breast. The great bird shuddered, and swung dizzily to one side. He remembered that she was blocking the rudder-bar; painfully, ineffectually, as in a dream, he warped down the lower wing, biting his lips in an agony of helplessness.

“Why struggle further? You have attained--you have attained!” he heard her siren’s voice chanting in his ears; her lithe arms sprang to meet each other about his neck. “Kiss me--kiss me, Spirit!” she cried, with her icy cheek pressed to his. “I am height!”

He threw her off.

“No,” he shouted, struggling to keep his eyes open and his hands on the wheel, “you are mad--we are both mad! Don’t you understand? This is death!”

“Kiss me!” she repeated in her voice of ice and silver. “How wonderful is this death! Where are your arms, Spirit? Am I not beautiful? Look at me!”

Her breath enveloped him, numbing him, filling him with a Lethean languor; but still, with all the strength of his instinct and training, he struggled to bring the machine back under his command. Despite her presence, he managed to get his feet on the rudder-bar. They whirled downward, listing so far that he felt the grip of the straps that bound him to his seat. He worked the controls, holding her away from him with elbows and knees. They dashed into a blinding mist, beginning to circle at last, and he threw all his remaining power into a desperate attempt to warp the wings back into equilibrium. At the same time he forced the rudder-bar over to turn the machine in the direction away from the lowered side.

The great bird righted, and began to swoop as lightly as a descending gull. He cut out the engine. “There!” he bellowed, crazy with triumph and with the sudden increase of oxygen in his starved lungs. “I’ve saved you despite yourself! Your idea was all very romantic--” His head whirled again as she lifted herself in his arms.

“You were afraid,” she whispered, catching his face to her breast--“afraid! Your fear was greater than your love--of me!”

“You don’t understand; you don’t--this is how--I am afraid!” he concluded in a sudden deathlike abandon; and lifted his arms from the wheel to hold her to him. He felt the ineffable, keen sweetness of her lips on his. Then consciousness went like a blown-out candle. The perfectly balanced monoplane continued its slow, even swoop toward the earth.

Some one shook him by the arm. He was sitting in the cockpit of the machine, his hands dangling limp over the sides. A corn-field was about him; his dazed eyes made out the low, green month-old stalks all about. Several men were standing beside him, and others, a great crowd it seemed, were hurrying toward him.

“Asleep! By the great horn spoon, he was asleep!” said a man at his right hand. “Came down too fast, youngster. How high’d you get, anyway?”

Slowly he made out the features of one of the officials of the aviation-field, one of the men who had verified his barograph before he started out for altitude. The man raised himself up by the little iron step on the side of the car, leaned over to look at the barograph, and began to bellow wildly at the crowd. “Twenty thousand! It must be wrong. But even if it’s a few hundred out, even if it’s a few thousand--whoop-la! He’s done it! The kid’s done it! A record!”

“But where--where--” stammered Reese, stupidly. He sat and stared before him like a man just awakened from a dream.

The aluminium hood came close up against the steering-yoke; there was no forward seat, not even room enough for a cat: it _was_ the one-place machine.

GLORY SHALL FOLLOW GLORY

BY CHARLES HANSON TOWNE

I

Keats died--who knows?--in the wild bloom of youth,
And learned all truth,
That “Adonais” might be sadly sung;
That through the halls of heaven, from Shelley’s tongue,
That royal dirge
Might thrill and surge
Deathlessly young.
Perhaps a poet passed
That one might tell at last
In this immortal song his beauty and glory,
Chant his lament,
For shining days soon spent,
In a great glowing story.

II

Does Love thus go
(Whither we do not know),
That one may sing the grandeur of Love’s name?
That one who felt his fire and his flame
May stand in adoration at his pall,
And in a song supreme, majestical,
Voice the eternal wonder of the dead?
Ere Love has fled,
Silent are we before his face divine;
But when the lamps are wasted,
And the last cup is tasted,
And strong Death sets her crown upon his head,
There is a singer who must sing Love’s praise,
Record his dreams and days,
And keep the light forever before his shrine.

LORDS SPIRITUAL IN JERUSALEM

BY THOMAS E. GREEN

Author of “The Green Flag of the Prophet,” etc.

WITH PHOTOGRAPHS, COPYRIGHT, BY THE AUTHOR

They were changing the guard at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, the sacred place for which the Crusaders marched and fought, the shrine toward which the feet of pious pilgrims have turned for nearly twenty centuries. It was done quietly, and with no feature to attract attention, or emphasize the shame that made a guard necessary. In a moment the old guard of six soldiers and the young Turkish officer had gone, and on a raised platform, just within the door, the new guard were making themselves comfortable, lighting their cigarettes, and chatting in low, soft voices.

I had asked the officer before the relief arrived if the guard was actually needed. “Not often,” he replied. “But one can never tell. In the last disturbance a monk was killed. I tell you true! I saw him lying there at the foot of the steps.”

He flicked the ash from his cigarette, and shrugged a very square pair of shoulders significantly.

“Killed!” I said, “why and how?”

“Monsieur wonders, but he does not know these people. Observe, Monsieur, that the stair beyond the door has eighteen steps. All but the lowest one belong to the Latins; the bottom one and the pavement belong to the Greeks. Each morning the steps must be swept. The Latins sweep down to the last one, and there they must leave the dirt, until the Greeks sweep it off and bear it away. Generally the two come together, and so the work is done. But on that fatal day, when the Latin had swept the dirt upon the lowest step, no Greek was there. So lest the dirt should blow back again where he had cleaned, he, little thinking, swept it off, and was bearing it away. Then came the Greek, and, seeing him, snatched both broom and basket from him, with upbraiding words. Their loud voices soon reached their fellows, and in a moment a score or more were pushing and wrestling across the pavement. Nor were good solid blows lacking. Somehow in the tumult a Greek monk was pushed over, and, falling against the edge of a stone step, broke his neck, and so died, while they all knelt and prayed for his soul. Since then there has been no actual trouble, but we keep a constant guard posted here at the door. I am of Islam, effendi--the faith of my fathers. We garrison the Tower of David.”

Multitudes of people were passing in and out of the venerable portal, singly and in groups, sometimes in companies. They surely must have come from the ends of the earth, young and old, rich and poor, pilgrim and tourist, to stand or kneel beside the holiest tomb in Christendom.

Just within the entrance is the Stone of Anointing, the ancient one covered by a more modern stone, worn smooth with the touch of countless lips. Above it hangs a row of lamps, of various shapes and colors, but always burning. These lamps offer a key to the strange conditions within this ancient fane, for part of them belong to the Armenians, part to the Latins, the rest to the Greeks and the Copts.

Wherever you go, you find the same confusing conflict over jealously guarded rights, for every sect of Oriental Christendom is represented and claims some part in the ownership of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Not the church alone, but the whole city, and its environs, including Bethlehem, Bethany, Gethsemane, and every real or fabled spot of sanctity, are in the guardianship of one or the other of the many creeds.

Jerusalem is the “City of Peace,” but no city on earth has such a tumult of devotion, such a confusion of worship. In many ways it is essential that there should be all of the great substantial hospices, capable of sheltering and caring for the multitude of pilgrims who still, as in the ancient days, come from afar to worship in Jerusalem. They come from every nation in Europe, mostly in comparative poverty, making their toilsome way by personal exertion and sacrifice. The roads leading from seaports are thronged with pilgrims, trudging their dusty way, sleeping beside the highway or in rude shelters erected for them, all with their faces set steadfastly toward Jerusalem. For these there must be rest and shelter and food, for which reason in the Holy City, and at neighboring shrines huge caravansaries are sustained by the various national churches. More elaborate buildings, like modern hotels, exist for those who come upon a pious pilgrimage with ample means.

Schools exist for the young, taught by monks and nuns. There are communities of pious widows, whose wealth has erected for them pleasant homes in the Holy City. There are colonies--Protestant, Jewish, Catholic--actuated by some idea, often chimerical, sometimes simple and tinged with pure devotion. The members live as a religious family, each doing some share of labor, and enjoying some share of the result. There are also modern churches, magnificent ones, built within a decade or two, either as memorials, or for some missionary purpose. The Jewish community is constantly increasing, many of them looking for the speedy coming of their Messiah, and most of them brought hither by benevolent schemes for the colonization of Palestine by its ancient people. Over all this jumble of things ancient and modern floats the crescent flag; and above, on the height of Mt. Moriah, stands the marvelous mosque, where the Moslem, bows himself toward Mecca, and worships his God.

During my stay in Jerusalem it occurred to me that it would be interesting to seek out the various heads of all these various creeds. Fortune was kind, for sooner or later I found them all, and bore away photographs showing the faces of a unique set of Lords Spiritual, probably the most varied in belief and personality to be found in the world. Together they stand for the Christian history of twenty centuries; and in a city of probably sixty thousand souls, they all have a following, and play a part in its life.

Eldest in occupancy, and claiming priority from the fact that they are the descendants of those who listened to the teaching of the Apostles themselves, are the Syrians, the ancient stock of Palestine. They are few in number, but possess the ancient Convent of St. Mark, and the tombs of Nicodemus and of Joseph of Arimathea. They are ruled by His Beatitude Abighatios II, the Syrian Patriarch of Jerusalem.

The Greek Church rests its claim to authority upon the fact that Constantine, the first Christian emperor, gave Rome the go-by when his victory over Licinius made him master of the empire, and built his capital on the Bosphorus, calling it Constantinople. The later Greek (in which the New Testament was written) was the language of the Eastern Empire. During the early centuries the language and the learning of the Christian Church was Greek, and the great fathers and teachers of the early centuries were theirs. St. Helena, Constantine’s mother, discovered, so tradition says, the true cross, and the cavity from which it was taken is reverently shown to-day, hard by the sepulcher. Most of the sacred places owe their preservation and their defense to the Greeks, who are far in advance of all other Christian sects in their Holy Land possessions and influence.

The Greek Patriarch, His Beatitude Damianos, is a grave, dignified man of great learning. Fourteen bishops are subject to him, and they control twenty-one monasteries within and about Jerusalem. The superior of the Holy Sepulcher, Monseigneur Optimus Patlafeki, ranks next to the Patriarch. He is Lord Chancellor to the Greek Patriarch, and administrator of the vast wealth (both that which daily comes from gifts and fees, and the collection of rentals), invested in real estate and buildings. A shrewd and careful diplomat, he stands close to the powers that be in the rule of the Holy City. He and the venerable Patriarch alone know what treasure the Greek Church possesses.

It is a peculiar fact that the Greeks form but a small part of the Greek Church, or, more properly, of the Holy Orthodox Church. Counting all the Slavonic peoples who belong to the orthodox, still a full four fifths are Russian. The conversion of the mighty empire of the north came as late as ~A.D.~ 989, when Vladimir married the sister of the Emperor Basil, and chose the Greek in preference to the Roman form of religion. The people were baptized almost as a nation, and no other nation has remained more loyal to the faith. To-day more pilgrims come to Jerusalem from the land of the Czar than from any other nation. Literally by shiploads, in caravans of hundreds, they come to worship at the holy places. There are many large and spacious establishments where the pilgrims are sheltered, and their management and operations require the oversight of a capable man. The Holy Synod therefore maintains an Archimandrite, who, without interfering in the least with the Patriarch, looks after the detail of things Russian, and a capable man is His Excellency Monseigneur Leonidouff.

The Latins, whose Hospice is one of the most imposing, and who have built churches, monasteries, convents, schools, and a magnificent modern hospital, number about three thousand, and have for their patriarch, His Excellency Monseigneur Philippe Camassei, one of the most learned of all the throng of dignitaries. The Latins are the natural opponents of the Greeks, and since the anathemas exchanged in the year 1054, each sect has claimed independent authority and priority. Nowhere else is the great schism between the East and the West so evident as in Jerusalem.

The woes and persecutions of the Armenians at the hands of their Moslem rulers have been makers of history for centuries. Armenia has great prestige as a Christian nation. A little before Rome was converted to the faith, Armenia, under the teaching of Gregory “the Illuminator,” had become the first Christian kingdom. Next to the Greek Church, it is to-day the most important in the East. In Jerusalem they have a great church and monastery on Mt. Zion. Their permanent following is not large--not more than eight hundred--but thousands of pilgrims come yearly to tarry awhile in the sacred places.

Their patriarch is His Beatitude Izimerlian, and they keep the shrine and tomb of St. James, whom Herod slew with the sword.

The Copts are an echo of far-away Egypt, where in the early centuries they were the dominant Christian force. Alexandria was one of the first great Christian capitals, and her patriarch and bishops were potent forces in the early church councils. Chief among them was St. Athanasius, who at the first General Council battled against the “iota,” the single letter that made or unmade the definition of the divinity of Christ. In Egypt to-day the Copts are looked upon as by far the most intellectual and capable of the mixed and tangled population. The Copts have no colony in Jerusalem, except for a few men engaged in banking or other commercial pursuits. However, multitudes of Copts come from Egypt at the times of the great festivals, and shelter and oversight are necessary for their protection. They have three monasteries, one being close beside the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Here lives their bishop, His Eminence Thimethos, and from his household are furnished daily two priests whose high and singular dignity it is to be shut up in the great church each night, to keep watch beside the Holy Sepulcher.

Away to the south, beyond the cataracts of the Nile, preserved through long ages by its desert sands, lies the remains of one of the oldest relics of civilization, Abyssinia (wrongly associated with the ancient Sheba, now known to have been located in southwest Arabia, and whose queen came to Jerusalem to see King Solomon’s splendor and glory). In ~A.D.~ 338, St. Athanasius appointed a bishop for the Abyssinians, who had received Christianity, so the legends say, from two sailors cast upon their coasts. Through the march of fifteen centuries Christianity has endured there, though in a debased form, contaminated by ancient heresies, and absorbing much from Judaism. Their patriarch is always a Coptic monk appointed and consecrated by the Patriarch of Egypt. In Jerusalem they maintain a large monastery and convent, where devout men and women spend their lives. They have recently built a new chapel, which is the seat of their abbot, Monseigneur Mahsanto.

To the northward in Palestine, near the border of Turkey in Asia, under the shadow of the mountains of Lebanon, from whose sides Hiram, King of Tyre, cut cedar-trees to send to King Solomon for his temple in Jerusalem, lives a religious and political community known as Maronites. The name is merely a patronymic and perpetuates the name of their founder, John Maron, who in the seventh century set up a civil and spiritual rule. So sturdy and independent were these mountain people that they withstood the victorious onslaughts of the Mohammedans, and to this day never have been subject to them. When the First Crusade had been fought and the Templar Kingdom was established in Jerusalem, the Maronites joined themselves to Rome, which accepted them as they were. To-day they are the only church in communion with Rome not governed by Rome. They maintain a small convent in Jerusalem, presided over by their superior, Monseigneur Jiryes Domat. They hold their own synods, elect their own patriarch, and manage their own affairs.

For many years the Church of England has maintained an establishment in Jerusalem. Originally it was a missionary enterprise, professedly setting out to convert all men to anglicanism. Now, however, a new philosophy is dominant. The Rt. Rev. Popham Blythe, Bishop in Jerusalem, cares for the English folk who may be resident or transient, and directs missionary effort, chiefly toward Mohammedans and Jews.

After all, Moslems and Israelites are the original stock, the descendants of Jacob and Esau. They form by far the largest factor in the population of highly diversified Jerusalem. Nor may the various Christian sects imagine for a moment that they have a monopoly of dignity and learning. Measuring certainly up to any standard, however discriminating, are the leaders of these antagonistic faiths. Chief of the Moslems is His Honor Musa Effendi Shabik, Grand Cadi of Jerusalem; and at the head of the constantly increasing multitude of Jews is His Eminence Zacharias Ben-Abbas, Grand Rabbin of the City of David.

So dwell in as much peace as possible, yet mixed with many mocking words, and much biting of thumbs, the varied sects and sorts of the population of this ancient and unique metropolis. Each sect, of course, believes itself a trifle nearer the original pattern of faith and practice than its neighbor. That this belief might at times take the form of extremely vigorous missionary endeavor, is certain, were it not firmly, but tactfully, restrained. To supply that tact and firmness requires a peculiar personality, in which patience plays an important part.

Amid all this procession of titles, regalia, rank, pomp, and ceremony, he whose position has most of care and least of comfort, is His Excellency Djoudat Bey, Governor of Jerusalem. When returning from beyond the Jordan, we found ourselves face to face with an outbreak of cholera in Jaffa, the port of Jerusalem, and observed the quick official action of this official in flinging a protecting barrier of quarantine about the city, and providing the military and civil espionage which was necessary to the crisis. Not a single case crossed the barrier, or gained a footing in Jerusalem.

Despite all the confusion and jumble of faith and creeds, Jerusalem is still a city to be desired. Much of its sanctity is merely legendary. Many, indeed most, of its holy places are incapable of identification. Still it is Jerusalem. Here are the ancient hilltops, where stood in far-gone years the sacred shrines of earth’s most wondrous nation. Here are still the hoary moss-grown stones, beside which there still resound the wailings that are the minor strains of the Iliad of a broken-hearted people. Here Abraham sacrificed, here David ruled, here Solomon spoke the wisdom of the proverbs. And, holiest of all, here are the rugged pathways trodden by the saintliest feet that ever pressed our sorrowful earth. And above us, glowing in their splendor, arch the soft and radiant skies that smiled on him.

City of tumult and confusion, to the heart of faith thou art still Jerusalem, the City of Peace!

THE TRADE OF RUSSIA

(“THE TRADE OF THE WORLD” PAPERS)

BY JAMES DAVENPORT WHELPLEY

Author of “The Commercial Strength of Great Britain,” “Germany’s Foreign Trade,” etc.

If they knewe their strength, no man were able to make match with
them: nor they that dwel neere them should have any rest of them.
But I thinke it is not God’s will: For I may compare them to a young
horse that knoweth not his strength, whome a little childe ruleth and
guideth with a bridle, for all his great strength; for if hee did,
neither childe nor man could rule him.--From “The Voyage of Richard
Chancellor, Pilote Major, the First Discoverer by Sea of the Kingdome
of Moscovia, Anno 1553.” (_Hakluyt’s “Voyages.”_)

The day of the awakening has come, and nearly four hundred years after these Northern voyagers discovered “the Kingdome of Moscovia” the world is witness to the greatest economic evolution in history. A nation of 165,000,000 people, increasing in numbers at the rate of nearly 3,000,000 a year despite famines, wars, and the rigors of terrible winters, occupying an area of 8,650,000 square miles, or two and a half times that of the United States, and with a proportionate wealth of natural resources, is finding itself.

The results are not problematical. The same laws of progress and development now govern Russia as have governed other countries in the past, and brought them to their present position of wealth and continuing prosperity. In all times some one nation has led the rest as the most powerful of all. It is equally true that no one nation has held this position for more than the allotted time. In the past the ascendancy of one people over another has been largely due to a greater spirit of aggressiveness or warlike tendency. In the future one nation will lead another through greater economic wealth and sturdiness of national character. In a broad sense the world is becoming commercialized, though in its best meaning this does not imply that the trader is the leader and the exponent of the nation’s life; he is merely the means to an end. Through him the world becomes more of a kin; he opens the road to civilization with all its equalizing and protective features, and, having served as the pioneer, is then regulated through the influences which follow in the wake of his adventures. Despoiling the weak is no longer the unrebuked spirit of strong nations, and international neutralization is gradually spreading its protecting influence over a large part of the earth’s surface. It is from the point of national wealth and national character, therefore, that the near future of every country must now be judged. The prophet of to-day talks not of wars and plagues; he foresees the true value of what lies in the ground and the strength or weakness of a people in realizing wisely or wastefully upon their entail.

The most powerful country of the future will be Russia, and her elements of greatness are writ fair across her thousands of miles of territory and in the character of her sturdy, peaceful, industrious, and phlegmatic people. The wealth of Russia lies in the ground, and centuries of industry will not exhaust the possibilities of expansion. From her 900,000,000 acres of forest, as compared with the 88,000,000 in the United States, will come the world’s supply of timber. There are now 250,000,000 acres of land under the plow, whereas there is nearly double that amount in the United States; but Russia can expand her cultivated area twenty-fold and still leave virgin land for coming generations. From this vast farm will come the grain demanded by bread-hungry people in other lands. Oils, minerals, and fuel abound. The advance in development and transportation achieved each year will be the only measure of increasing national and individual wealth. Within the empire itself tremendous and complicated problems face the people.

Political, social, and economic conditions are as in no other land. It is only since 1861 that 22,000,000 peasants ceased to be slaves under the law, and it was some years after that before the law came into practical effect throughout any wide area. It was not until 1864, with the establishment of the zemstvos, or district assemblies, that any measure of local government fell to the lot of the people. It was not until 1890 and the years following that appreciable effort was made in the direction of general education. To-day twenty-seven per cent. of the people above nine years of age can read and write, this being an average for the whole empire, which includes the seventy per cent. of illiterates in Poland and the ninety-five per cent. of illiterates in central Asia. In 1912 the imperial budget provided for an expenditure of $55,000,000 for educational purposes, and the local governments contribute nearly as much more. This is an increase of fifteen per cent. over 1911, and is over three per cent. of the total revenue of the Government. There are now 90,000 primary schools, employing 155,000 teachers, attended by over 4,000,000 pupils.

The change that this one feature of national life will bring about among the people of Russia in the next few years can be appreciated only when the conditions of twenty years ago are fully understood--conditions which gave rise to the stigma of “Darkest Russia.” The light is being let in, and with it are coming perforce changes in administrative methods and in political life which are replete with promise of a new and better era. It requires no effort of the imagination to picture the state of a great nation buried in ignorance and at the mercy of an educated and more or less unscrupulous bureaucracy, but it needs a heroic readjustment of preconceived ideas, a sweeping away of prejudices, and a wide comprehension, to grasp the potentialities of a land and a people like these when latent natural wealth is made accessible and education and comparative freedom of thought and action are given to all. The process must be gradual; limitations upon material development are always severe, and the pace a disappointment to the enthusiastic. Mental and political development is even slower, for it is the new generation and not the old which goes to school, learns to think, and then acts upon the thought. Too rapid growth is dangerous, and unproductive of permanently good results. Some of the greatest and wisest men of Russia, men who have the interests of the country and its people unselfishly at heart, are among those who have been denounced in other countries as well as in their own as “reactionaries.” The closer this really unknown land is studied, the more tremendous and overwhelming in their complexities appear the problems with which its rulers and the people are faced. They can be solved only through the coöperation of all classes.

So far this is a long way from being achieved, but progress has been made, and when all conditions and circumstances are taken into consideration, this progress can be regarded as comparatively rapid; for the work of modernizing Russia dates back no further than the birth of the German Empire or that of modern Italy; in point of fact, less than thirty years. In the last ten years the foreign trade of Russia has doubled, exports and imports keeping pace one with the other in their increasing volume and value. Ten years ago this trade amounted to about $700,000,000; in 1912 it is about $1,400,000,000, of which fifty-six per cent. is exports and forty-four per cent. imports. This total foreign commerce, large as it appears, is considerably less than half that of the United States, though it is worth noting that in no ten-year period in its history did the foreign commerce of the United States ever increase by one hundred per cent., as did that of Russia in the last ten years, and there is every reason to believe that the present rate of increase will continue, barring such hindrances as great droughts or serious political or military disturbances.

The real growth and development of Russia are within. Her increasing foreign trade is only a sign of what is taking place in a gigantic and largely unexploited empire. Education is spreading slowly but effectively among the people; millions of acres of virgin land yield annually to the plow; railroads are steadily pushing into new territory; population is being transferred from the densely settled areas to the open spaces of Siberia at the rate of a quarter of a million every year. The land and the forests are being held by Russia for Russians, and settlement is a requisite of purchase. Manufacturing plants are increasing apace, and factories of all descriptions, ranging from the mills of Moscow, one of which, a cotton mill, employs nearly 20,000 people, to the smaller establishments of the eastern-frontier cities, are all sharing in the benefits of the increasing purchasing power of the Russian unit.