In Both Worlds.

by William Henry Holcombe.

A STRANGE DISCOVERY IN LIEU OF A PREFACE.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Initial]

Many years ago I was enjoying in the harbor of New York the charming hospitalities of the officers belonging to one of the finest vessels in the British Navy. The company was gay, cultivated and brilliant. Student and recluse as I then was, I was perhaps more delighted than any one present with the conversation of those practical and polished men of the world.

After supper I was attracted to a small group of earnest talkers, of whom the surgeon of the ship seemed to be the centre and oracle. He was speaking of exhumations a long time after death, of mummies and petrifactions and other curious transformations of the human body. He stated that he had examined some of the skeletons which had been dug out of the ruins of Herculaneum. The bones were almost perfect after the lapse of eighteen hundred years. The complete exclusion of air and water seemed to be the only thing necessary to an indefinite preservation.

The chaplain of the vessel endeavored to give the conversation an aesthetic and semi-religious turn by a.n.a.lyzing the feelings of mingled awe, melancholy and curiosity with which most men survey the remains of a human form-feelings always heightened by the antiquity of the relic, and by the dignity of the person who lived and loved and labored in it.

"The fundamental idea," said he, "is a profound respect for the human body itself as the casket which has contained the spiritual jewel, the soul."

"Yes," remarked the surgeon; "nothing but the lapse of a people into cannibalism can obliterate that sentiment. When the Egyptian embalmers were ready for their work, a certain person came forward and made the necessary incisions for taking out the entrails. He immediately fled away, pursued by volleys of stones and curses from all the others. Hence also the dissections of the dead by medical students are conducted with the utmost secrecy and caution."

"Schiller," said I, "makes one of his heroes remark that the first time he plunged his sword into a living man, he felt a shudder creep over him as if he had desecrated the temple of G.o.d."

"Besides the feeling of reverence," continued the clergyman, "we have the awe which death naturally inspires, the melancholy excited by the vain and transitory nature of earthly things; and lastly, a tender and curious interest for the brother-soul which has tasted the sweetness of life and the bitterness of death, and pa.s.sed onward to those hidden but grander experiences which await us all."

"Those shocking Egyptian mummies," said one of the officers, "are so disgusting that a strange horror is mingled with the gentler emotions you describe."

"I experienced that feeling," said another, "on reading an account of the exhumation of the remains, or rather the opening of the coffin, of King Charles I., two hundred years after he had been beheaded. It was increased, doubtless, by the idea of the separated head and body, and the strange and lifelike stare of the king's eyes, which collapsed like soap-bubbles when they were exposed to the air."

"There was something of the picturesque in that finding of a dead body by some little children who were playing in a grotto in France. It was seated on a stone bench and perfectly petrified, retaining, however, a sweet and placid expression of countenance. The man was an old hermit, who frequently retired into the deepest chamber of the grotto for religious contemplation."

"Imagine yourself," said I, "in the silence and shadows of Westminster Abbey, peering through some crevice in an old vault and getting a sight of the shrunken dust of Shakespeare."

"Pa.s.sing from imagination to fact," said solemnly the old surgeon, "I have seen the body of a man lying upon the ground where it had lain undisturbed for eighteen hundred years."

"Eighteen hundred years!" exclaimed several voices at once.

"Yes, eighteen hundred years; and I was the first person who set eyes upon him from the day of his death until I got into the cavern where he perished."

"A romance! a romance!" cried the minister. "Come, doctor, be communicative and tell us all about it."

"It is not a romance," said the doctor, "but the facts were certainly very curious.

"When I was a young a.s.sistant surgeon, attached to the sloop-of-war Agamemnon, we were skirting leisurely the eastern sh.o.r.es of the Mediterranean, and anch.o.r.ed one morning in sight of the ruins of the ancient city of Sidon and opposite the westernmost spurs of Lebanon, the Mont Blanc of Palestine.

"There is only one picture grander than a view of Mount Lebanon from the sea, and that is a view of the sea from Mount Lebanon. I enjoyed the former so keenly that I determined to obtain the latter also. We got up a party of genial and stout fellows to ascend one of the highest peaks, armed with pick-axes, to obtain geological specimens on our way.

"We had advanced but a short distance up one of the cliffs, when we started from the scanty undergrowth some little animal-a wolf or jackal or wild dog, all of which abound on Mount Lebanon. We all joined noisily in the chase, and soon ran the frightened creature into one of the deep crevices or fissures made in the earth by the tempestuous rains of that region. Our picks were immediately brought into play, and in a short time, to our very great astonishment, instead of digging the fugitive out of a little hole in the ground, we opened our way into what was evidently the rear or back part of a cave of considerable dimensions.

"Our party crawled in one after another, myself leading the way. The contents of the place arrested our attention so strongly that we forgot the object of our chase, which had buried itself in some holes or burrows at the side of the cavern. The floor was of a yellowish-white limestone, and all eyes were immediately directed, in the rather dim light, to the figure of a man outstretched upon it.

"Yes, it was a man whose entire body, clothing and all, had dissolved into one blended ma.s.s, and so long ago that it looked rather like a great bas-relief of the human form projecting from the lighter-colored floor.

"The shape of the head and of the long hair and beard was complete. One outstretched arm lay along the floor, and the fingers could be traced by little ridges separate from each other. The protuberances of all the bony parts showed that the skeleton still resisted the disintegrating process of decay.

"What an awful death he must have experienced! For there was not a single other object in the small s.p.a.ce which remained of the cavern; not a stone which might have served for a seat or a table; not an earthen vessel which might have contained a draught of water.

"The fate of this unhappy being was evident. Whether he had lived in the cavern or whether he had taken refuge in it from some great storm, he had clearly rushed to the back part of it to escape some enormous landslide and caving in at the front, which had opened toward the sea. He had been buried alive! Having exhausted the little air that remained to him, stricken down by terror, despair and suffocation, he had rendered up his soul to the great Giver in silence, darkness and solitude.

"These facts were so obvious that we all lifted our hats before speaking a word; thus paying the tribute of human sympathy to a fellow-creature eighteen hundred years after he had ceased to need it."

"How did you fix upon the date of his death?" asked the chaplain.

"You will see. A large cylindrical case of bronze was lying upon the breast of the dead man. He must have valued it highly, for he had clasped it to his bosom in the agonies of death. It was hermetically sealed with such ingenuity that we found considerable difficulty in breaking it open.

It contained a parchment of great length, and rolled tightly around a little bra.s.s rod. The parchment was closely written in beautiful Greek characters. It was perfectly preserved. Two small gold coins fell out of the white dry sand with which the case had been filled. One of them bore the inscription of Tiberius Caesar, and the other was stamped in the ninth year of the reign of the emperor Nero. Thus in the accidental grave of its author had his book been safely preserved amid all the mutations of the world."

The old doctor stroked his gray beard in silence, and I exclaimed:

"Who do you suppose this unfortunate man to have been?"

"That was revealed in the ma.n.u.script, but unfortunately not one of our party could read Greek. I sent the case with its contents to an old uncle of my mother, who had a little curacy near Binghamton. He was a great Greek scholar, and devoted to his cla.s.sical studies the little time he could spare from the game of whist. I had a good deal of curiosity on the subject, and wrote several times to my uncle from different parts of the world before he condescended to reply. His answer was in substance this: that the ma.n.u.script purported to be the autobiography of Eleazor or Lazarus, whom Christ raised from the dead; that it was probably the work of some heretic monk or crazy philosopher of the second or third century; that, interwoven with romantic incidents in this world and the other, it gave expression to many absurd and false doctrines; in fine, that it was not worth my reading, and that I had better devote myself dutifully to killing his Majesty's enemies on the high seas, than to searching old caverns for apocryphal doc.u.ments which impugned the sacred verities of the Apostolic Church.

"And so," concluded the old surgeon, "I have never thought any more about it."

"Your uncle was no doubt right in his conjectures and wise in his advice,"

said the young chaplain. "The number and extent of the apocryphal impositions upon the early Christian Church are almost incredible."

"Were you satisfied," said I, "with your good uncle's opinion?"

"I have always believed," replied the doctor, evasively and with a roguish twinkle of his eye, "that if the ma.n.u.script had contained the Thirty-nine Articles by antic.i.p.ation, my uncle would have p.r.o.nounced it divinely inspired."

"What became of it?" I inquired.

"Oh, it was sealed up again and sent to the nursery as a plaything for the children. It is probably still in the possession of one of my cousins."

The strange story of the old surgeon made a profound impression upon me; for in spite of the incredulity of all the other listeners, I believed from the first that the dust of that cavern was the dust of Lazarus, the brother of Martha and Mary, and that the ma.n.u.script contained something of genuine value to the Church and the world.

The opinion of the old curate and the echo of the young chaplain did not weigh a feather in my estimation. Young as I was, I had acquired that rare faculty of thinking for myself. Besides, I had had learned enough of human nature to know that legal reforms are rarely suggested by lawyers; that doctors always make war on a system of medicine better than their own; and that priests instinctively repudiate anything which demands a re-examination of the fundamental doctrines of their theological systems.

I had an inextinguishable desire to possess that ma.n.u.script, and set myself earnestly about it. I cultivated the acquaintance of the genial old surgeon, and contrived to render myself useful to him on more than one occasion. When he sailed for England I extorted from him a promise that he would send me the ma.n.u.script of Lazarus which his orthodox uncle has so flippantly condemned.

A good many years pa.s.sed away, and I heard nothing from him. At length came a package, and a letter from England couched in very handsome terms, a part of which ran thus:

"My beloved father on his deathbed made up the parcel which I now send you, and requested me to transmit it to you with the following message, which he made me write down as the words fell from his lips:

"'Forgive your old acquaintance for neglecting until death the matters of the dead. Read what Lazarus says, while I go in person to verify or invalidate his story. I have lived pa.s.sably well, and I die comparatively happy. Good-bye!'"

I drew a deep sigh to the memory of the old surgeon, and set immediately to work studying and translating the ma.n.u.script. I found that a difficult task. It was not written in very cla.s.sical Greek, and besides, was full of Hebraisms, which sometimes obscured the sense. There were not only many obscure things, but many things irrelevant, and many which would be regarded as absurd and even childish in the present age.

It soon became clear that a literal translation of the ma.n.u.script would not be of any great interest to the general reader. I determined to take the astounding facts narrated, as a skeleton or framework around which to build up a story of my own. This book is therefore a modern romance founded upon ancient facts. The original might be called a prose poem.