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By  Dmitri Mérejkowski

The Arian basilica of St. Maurice was built almost entirely of blocks taken from the ruined temple of Apollo. The sacred court, the atrium, was surrounded by colonnades. In the middle of this court murmured a fountain, placed there for the ablutions of the faithful. Under one of the side porticoes lay an ancient oaken tomb darkened with age; and in this tomb were the wonder-working bones of St. Mamas, for which Eutropius had obliged Julian and Gallus themselves to build a stone-work shrine. The task of Gallus, who took to it as to a game, went rapidly forward, while the wall of Julian frequently crumbled and proved oddly unsatisfactory; a phenomenon which Eutropius explained by remarking that St. Mamas refused the offering of children possessed by the demon of pride. 

The halt, the maimed, the sick, and the blind, expectant of miracle, thronged near the tomb. Julian understood why they stationed themselves here. One of the monks used to hold a pair of balances; the pilgrims—some of them come from hamlets many leagues away—weighed with scrupulous care pieces of linen, woollen stuff, or silk; and having laid them on the tomb of St. Mamas, would fall to praying all night. At daylight the stuff was weighed over again, and the weight compared with the weight on the previous day. If the texture proved heavier, it was declared that the prayer had been answered, that the divine mercy, like 32 dew, had soaked into the stuff and rendered it capable of producing all manner of marvellous cures. 

But frequently the prayer was in vain. The stuff weighed just what it did before; and pilgrims would pass whole days, weeks, even months, waiting at the sepulchre. Among the latter there was an old woman named Theodula. Some called her demented; others counted her a saint. For years she had not quitted the tomb of St. Mamas. The daughter for whose restoration she had come to pray had now been a long while dead. But Theodula continued kneeling ceaselessly before her faded and ravelled fragment of cloth. 

From the outer court three doors led into the basilica—one for women, one for men, and the third, in the centre, for monks and the lower clergy. With Eutropius and Gallus, Julian went in through this last door, being anagnost or reader of the lessons for the day. Clothed in a long black robe with white sleeves, his hair anointed, and bound back by a fillet that it might not fall into his eyes while reading aloud, Julian passed through the midst of the faithful, his eyes fixed humbly on the ground. His pale face assumed almost involuntarily the inevitable and hypocritical expression of submissiveness. He ascended the high rood-loft. The frescoes of the wall to the right depicted the martyrdom of St. Euthymus, in which one executioner seized the sufferer's head, while another, wrenching open his mouth with pincers, brought the cup of molten lead to his lips. In another scene the executioner with an instrument of torture was flaying the childish and bleeding limbs of St. Euthymus, hanging from a tree by his hands. Beneath these frescoes ran the inscription, "With the blood of the martyrs, O Lord, Thy church is arrayed as in purple and fine linen." 33 

On the opposite wall sinners were burning in the fire of the pit, and above them rose Paradise and the saints. One of the saints was plucking the fruits of the tree of Eden; another playing the psaltery; and a third, couched on a cloud, contemplated with a beatific smile the tortures of the damned. Beneath were written the words, "Behold! there shall be tears and gnashing of teeth!" The adorers of St. Mamas entered the church like a procession of all human maladies. The bandy-legged, the blind, the armless, the anæmic, children tottering along like old men, epileptics, idiots with pale faces and inflamed eyelids—all bore the mark of a dull and desperate submission. When the choir ceased, there could be heard the contrite sighings of the "widows of the church," black-robed nuns of the order of St. Basil, and the jingling of the chains of old Pamphilus, who for many a long year had addressed no word to the living, muttering only, "Lord, Lord, give me tears!—grant me mercy!—give me an end to remembrance!" 

The atmosphere was that of a warm sepulchral chamber, thick, loaded with incense and the smell of melting wax, hot oil, and the breath of all these sick persons. Now it was Julian's lot on that day to read aloud part of the Apocalypse. 

The terrifying pictures of the Revelation were unfolded, the white horse of Death soared through space above the peoples of the earth, as they knelt weeping at the nearness of the world's end. 

"The sun becomes dark as pitch, and the moon red as blood. Men say to the mountains, Fall on us and hide us from the throne of God and from the wrath of the Lamb, for the great day of His anger is come, and who can resist it?" 34 

Over and over again came the prophecy: "Men shall seek death and shall not find it; they shall desire death and it shall flee from them." 

Lamentation arose: "Thrice happy are the dead!" and "Then came the bloody destruction of all peoples, and the angel cast his sickle into the earth and gathered the vintage of the earth and cast it into the great wine-press of the wrath of God, and the wine-press was trodden without the city; and there came out blood from the wine-press even unto the bridles of the horses, as far as a thousand and six hundred furlongs," and men cursed the God of heaven for their plagues, and they did not repent them of their sins; and the angel sang: "He Who worships the Beast and his image shall drink of the wine of the wrath of God, prepared in the cup of His anger, and shall be tormented in fire and sulphur before the holy angels and the Lamb, and the smoke of his torture shall rise in the night of ages. For he who shall adore the Beast and his image shall rest no more." 

Julian ended. A profound hush succeeded in the church. Painful sighs rose from the terrified crowd; and the noise of foreheads struck against the earth and the clank of the fetters of Pamphilus, accompanying his perpetual murmur: "Lord, Lord, give me tears!—grant me mercy!—give me an end of remembrance!" 

The child raised his eyes towards the spandril of mosaic between the columns of the arcade, representing the Arian image of Christ; a sombre, terrible figure, its wasted face aureoled in gold, and diademed in the fashion of the Byzantine emperors. It was the face of an old man, with a long thin nose and lips severely shut. With his right hand he was blessing the world; in the left he held a book in which was written, "Peace be with you; I am the Light of the World." 35 He was seated on a splendid throne, and a Roman emperor (Julian imagined that it must be Constantius) was in the act of kissing his feet. 

In the penumbral shadow below this image, lighted by a single lamp, could be discerned a bas-relief on a sarcophagus, dating from the earliest Christian times. It displayed sea-nymphs, leopards, gay tritons blowing their horns, and among them Moses, Jonah and his whale, Orpheus charming the beasts with his lyre, an olive-branch, and a dove; the whole sculpture a symbol of pure and childlike faith. In the midst stood the Good Shepherd bearing on his shoulder the sheep that had gone astray, the soul of the sinner. This barefooted youthful figure, with beardless face, had the joyous and simple bearing of a poor peasant, and his smile something of a heavenly sweetness. 

Julian imagined that nobody nowadays knew or saw that Good Shepherd; and this little picture of old times was somehow connected in his mind with a dream of his childhood which he tried in vain to recover. 

And, gazing at this youth, who seemed as if mysteriously reproaching him, he murmured the name picked up from Mardonius, "Galilean!" At that moment slanting rays of the sun through the windows trembled, above, in a cloud of incense, which, aflame with reflections from the gilded aureole, seemed to upheave the sombre and terrible image of the Arian Christ. The choir chanted, "Let all human flesh be dumb and bow down, fearful and trembling, thinking no more of the things of the earth; for the Emperor of emperors, the Lord of lords, has given Himself afresh as a pledge and a food to His faithful; even He who is surrounded by the hosts of angels, by all powers and dominions, by cherubim with innumerable eyes, and by the 36 six-winged seraphim, veiling their faces and singing, 'Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!'" 

Like a tempest the psalm swept over the bowed heads of the pilgrims. The figure of the Good Shepherd faded into the distance; but its youthful gaze remained steadily fixed upon Julian, a gaze full of reproach. The heart of the child was moved, not by a sense of worship, but by an intolerable fear; a fear before that mystery which was for him to remain for ever insoluble. 

Translated by Herbert Trench