Stephens, John Lloyd: Incidents of travel in Egypt, Arabia Petraea, and the Holy Land: with a map and angravings (Band 2) (1837)

THE GRAVE OF A FRIEND.

293

walled in, and, as the Arab doorkeeper told me,
even the eyes of the pacha are not permitted to
look within the holy place. Here, too, is the coe-
naculum, or chamber where our Saviour ate his
last supper with his disciples ; in the Armenian
chapel is the real stone that was rolled from the
door of the sepulchre ; and here also is the house
of Caiphas the high-priest, with a tree marking the
spot where the cock crew when Peter denied his
master.

But there was one spot on Mount Zion far more
interesting to me than all these, or even than any
thing in Jerusalem. It was the grave of my early
friend, whom I had tracked in his wanderings
from the Cataracts of the Nile, through the wil-
derness of Sinai, to his last resting-place in Jeru-
salem. Years had rolled away since I bade him
farewell in the streets of our native city. I had
heard of him in the gay circles of Paris as about
to wed with one of the proudest names in France ;
again, as a wanderer in the East, and then as
dead in Palestine. But a few short years had
passed away, and what changes ! My old school-
mates, the companions of my youth and opening
manhood, where were they? Gone, scattered,
dispersed, and dead—one of them was sleeping in
the cold earth under my feet. He had left his
home, and become a wanderer in strange lands,
and had come to the Holy Land to die, and I
was now bending over his grave. Where were
the friends that should have gathered around him