THE RUSSIAN AS A PILGRIM.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LI, Issue 15730, 3 October 1914, Page 1 (Supplement)

THE RUSSIAN AS A PILGRIM.

BY CRITIC.

Eon us the days of pilgrimage are in the shadowy past; their grave is somewhere back in the centuries which enshrine Richard Coeur de Lion who fought! with many a valiant Britisher that the unspeakable Turk should not too much profane the Holy Sepulchre ; and that all good Christians should endure without interference from unbelievers the trials incident to religious faith. Since those days change has come over the spirit of our. worship: and we forget that • many Western Europeans counted it honour to walk, staff in hand, to visit shrines in a far country. We read and wonder now at Mahommedans and Thibetans who still suffer hardship and untold weariness that their spiritual needs.maybe satisfied; but instruction awaits us. ■' *

In Europe itself, a certain line of British cargo-carriers conveys throughout every year of peace, thousands of Asiatic pilgrims to Yedda en route to sacred Mecca; and back again—too easy a way, one may think, until one hears details of their carriage; and year by year simple Russian peasants observe the medieval rites of some of our own forefathers. They crowd into vessels, after walking in some instances, hundreds of miles, that they may be transported to Jerusalem. In a unique contribution to our literature .Mr. Stephen Graham describes his voyage "With the Russian Pilgrims to Jerusalem" (Macmillan, London) ; and by so doing throws us back into the centuries, tears down the veil of disuse which had fallen before our eyes. For if, in every year of peace, simple Russian mouzhiks are modestly saving their crusts to make the journey, be you sure that now, while Cossacks are marching and Jews are garnering new hopes to come from this ordeal of blood and fire, even now, the simple, pious many are waiting even more anxiously than usual to start on the great pilgrimage. Some may even have ventured, during these war-torn weeks, to leave their peasant homes and to cross the neutral water that stretches between Constantinople and Palestinian shores.

| For it was at Constantinople that Stephen Graham found the pilgrim boat with five hundred and sixty Russian peasants on board for Jaffa, an ugly ship, black as a collier, flying the yellow quarantine flag and the Russian tricolour. A Turkish boatman rowed him to the vessel over the glimmering green water of the port, and as he clambered up the gangway fifty or sixty Russians in bright blouses and old sheepskins looked down at him smiling, for they thought they recognised a fellow-countryman and a fellowpilgrim. " For I myself was in an ancient blue blouse looking like the discarded wear of an engine-driver, and on my backwas all my luggage-a burden like that under which Christian is seen labouring in illustrated copies of the "Pilgrim's Progress." Later, in his narrative, ho tells of a self-constituted professor of physiology touring in Jerusalem who being asked by the lady accompanying him as to the nationality of Graham, then marching with the crowd to the sacred waters of Jordan, answered, "Oh, some sort of a Russian, only taller."

" All the year round, in twenties and fifties, the pilgrims trickle to Jerusalem, and every year at Christmas and in Lent they come in great numbers. Every year this chorus of Russia goes up to God, and it will be repeated year after year into the centuries or until the peasantry is no more. But why does "the peasant make the pilgrimage? The Russian clergy have no passion towards the see oi Jerusalem r it is not an infection. Great numbers do not go from one district : they arrive all together at Jerusalem because the boats are not many, and they meet at the ports of embarkation. For the rest they come singly, and at most in twos and threes, and often from the most forlorn and distant parts of the Tsar's unfrequented empire. Many were asked why they came: not one pilgrim gave an answer that covereo. their action. The Russians are volcanoes, either extinct, quiescent, cr in eruption. Below the surface of the quietest and stupidest lies a vein of racial energy. The incurable drunkard of the village picks himself up from the mire one afternoons renounces drinking, and starts off for Jerusalem, the avaricious old mouzhik, who has been hoarding for half a century, wakes one morning, gives all his money to someone, and sets off begging his way, to a far-off shrine. the reserved and silent peasant, who has hidden his thoughts from those who loved him all his life, meets an utter stranger one afternoon and with tears reveals to .him the secret of his heart : he also perchance starts off on pilgrimage." ,

I It is not that conditions are made attractive, '-on that little boat, the | Lazarus, having accommodation for j twenty-one first class passengers, twentyseven second and sixty third? there were, beyond the usual swarm of Turks, Arabs and bynans, n\e hundred and sixty peasant pilgrims. Four hundred of them slept in the dark and filthy recesses of the ships hold, and tho remainder on the open deck The vessel took fifteen days to make tho voyage. The peasants were | mostly in sheepskins, and nearly all the I time the sun blazed down upon them. We j had two sharp storms; and the peasants, I most of whom had never seen the sea before, were-terribly unwell. In on© storm, when the masts were broken, the hold j where they rolled over one another like j corpses, or grasped at one another like madmen, was worse than any imagined pit, the stench there worse than any fire. For 560 pilgrims there were three lavatories with Qoors without bolts. Fitly was the boat named the Lazarus. Yet a I dear old dyadya (uncle) whispered to me jon the morning before our arrival in Jaffa, 'We must not complain.' After all that we went through I heard not a murmur, but 'Glory be to thee, U God, Glory to Thee!' When port was reached with eyes all wet the uiouzhiks crowded into the monastery for the thanksgiving service: and the great Bible rested on the heads of the closepressed throng! And with what eagerness we pressed in, to kiss in turn the cross in the abbot's hand! Not only had the pilgrims lived that terrible vovage but many of them had walked a thousand miles and more in Russia before reaching a port of embarkation.

It is not usually through lack of means that they rough it. It is only the degenerate, who pays to have himself conveyed to Jordan, to Nazareth, to Bethlehem. "Oh, what good is it to come," I heard one say in the Dead Sea wilderness, " if we take no trouble over it?" " He was trudging in birch-bark plaited boots which he had made in the far North and kept new for his landing at Jaffa. A simple patriarchial figure he was, white from head to foot with the dust of the desert, even his hair was caked white, and he walked forward, step by step, slowly equably, passively. It was at the well of Guerassira he uttered these words, a mysterious little oasis, a warm saltish spring, and over it a loving bush heavy with rhododendron blossoms.

Thus the peasant pilgrimages, whilst the great caravan is on the road to Nazareth, in the third and fourth weeks of Lent many fall down dead in the dust. They just go on and on, all white from the dust of the road, and at a turn throw up their arms and fall dead. There is never a complaint.

Food, is evidently one of the last considerations. "A strange sight," Mr. Graham tell us, " were the piles of black bread gone mouldy, exposed in the sunshine to air. Almost every pilgrim brought with him ten to twenty pounds; not in a block or in loaves, but in waste ends and crusts saved through past months from the cottage table, in some cases, through past years. When a man begs his way from village to village, he gathers more" crusts than coppers. Not only were these husks eaten; they actually formed the staple article of diet."

Hot water and salt added to these green crusts was called cabbage soap (borzh)! When wood-oil and black olives were added and the cook allowed the pilgrim's pot to simmer on his stove, it was already a festival diet (prazditchny). J have seen peasants struggling to eat the bread unsoftened, a spring-onion in one hand, a great crust in the other, but as the bread was hard as brick, this was ■ a difficult matter. Commonly if was necessary to make tea and let the sukharee- soak in. .the tumbler for five minutes or so. ;

During Lent even for richer pilgrims, not a drop of fat was. allowed into the food. Bread was'eaten' without' butter; without even dripping, nothing j could be cooked for us in butter or fat, cheese was not permitted, neither were curds, cakes or biscuits. When I think of the miles we tramped in the Holy Land, and the heat of the sun that beat down upon us I wonder that anything of our bodies beyond skin and bone remained to take back to Russia.

Of the rites m the Holy City, of the bathing at Jordan, of the carrying back to. Russia of the Holy Fire, Mr. Graham discourses most attractively. Some of his pen-pictures almost allure one to make a similar voyage. He has an • interesting story too, of old Abraham, the eternal pilgrim, who for thirty years has been a holy beggar and yet has not begged. "Abraham stops outside the door, knocks three times with* his brass-bound "staff, and calls out in deep bass:—"ln the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost!"

How mysterious and wonderful the greeting heard from within, when the family is round the humming, samovar; and outside is the dark night, and the unknown standing in it. There is always a feeling it may be one of the ancient' saints still wandering the earth. There is a pause, the family cross themselves, then the good man of the house says "Amen." Abraham enters, the eternal pilgrim with wrinkled brow, grey ancient locks, opaque purple spectacles, on his back the pack of sorrows, in his hand his antique brass-bound'staff. He comes in with stories and with blessing. His presence under your roof is itself a blessing. In the morning, he does not ask of you, ho only receives. You give him money, bread, fruit; perhaps you give him a home-spun shroud to dip in the water of Jordan for you; you send him to Nazareth, and the Grave—and the old pilgrim goes on his way once more. The incidents of the Russian pilgrimage are of rare and exceeding interest; but apart from this aspect they raise ; in one this question. If such conditions can be endured not only without complaint but with actual gratitude by these simple mouzhiks when their cause is religious zeal or sheer fanaticism, what an enemy must they bo. living contentedly on their crusts, green and yellow with mould, and in their hearts conviction, to match against an army of meat and beer fed men ? And again, if such faithful souls, for some visionary reward, will tramp and suffer in ordinary limes of peace, what will be the pilgrimage when Russia is delivered from her present war ?