Here Crowds Are Waiting In The Sun,
Until It Shall Please The Turkish Guardians Of The Church-Door To
Open.
A swarm of beggars sit here permanently:
Old tattered hags
with long veils, ragged children, blind old bearded beggars, who
raise up a chorus of prayers for money, holding out their wooden
bowls, or clattering with their sticks on the stones, or pulling
your coat-skirts and moaning and whining; yonder sit a group of
coal-black Coptish pilgrims, with robes and turbans of dark blue,
fumbling their perpetual beads. A party of Arab Christians have
come up from their tents or villages: the men half-naked, looking
as if they were beggars, or banditti, upon occasion; the women have
flung their head-cloths back, and are looking at the strangers
under their tattooed eyebrows. As for the strangers, there is no
need to describe THEM: that figure of the Englishman, with his
hands in his pockets, has been seen all the world over: staring
down the crater of Vesuvius, or into a Hottentot kraal - or at a
pyramid, or a Parisian coffee-house, or an Esquimaux hut - with the
same insolent calmness of demeanour. When the gates of the church
are open, he elbows in among the first, and flings a few scornful
piastres to the Turkish door-keeper; and gazes round easily at the
place, in which people of every other nation in the world are in
tears, or in rapture, or wonder. He has never seen the place until
now, and looks as indifferent as the Turkish guardian who sits in
the doorway, and swears at the people as they pour in.
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