He was amazed how intense colors were becoming, how bright everything looked, how strange. The walls of the ancient houses seemed furry and were undulating slightly. The voices of those about him dwindled and swelled, dwindled and swelled, as though some amplifier were being turned up and down. Marching beside him was Ben-Horin, implausibly wearing a friar’s cassock. He leaned close and in his crisp, cutting way whispered into Hornkastle’s ear, “So you study the ceremony after all. Perhaps at last you learn a thing or two.” Out of a doorway came Geula Ben-Horin with some sort of Halloween costume on, stripes and splotches of green and scarlet and brilliant yellow. A succubus, perhaps. She winked at Hornkastle and shimmied her hips. “Put this in your thesis,” she murmured, throaty voiced, a kosher Mae West. The two Israelis danced around him, melted and flowed, and were gone. Hornkastle pawed at his eyes. He would have fallen, for his legs were growing swollen and rubbery, but the press of the crowd was too tight. “This is the Seventh Station, where Jesus fell the second time,” said the cool clear voice behind him, and the tones echoed and reverberated until they were tolling like gongs. Just ahead a dozen Arabs in dark blue suits were singing some ominous hymn as they hauled their cross along; he perceived the words of the song as individual gleaming blades that severed each instant from the next. “And here,” said the woman, “Jesus spoke to the compassionate daughters of Jerusalem. This is where He fell the third time. We are nearly at the end of the Via Dolorosa. The last five stations are within the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.”
Hornkastle felt the ancient paving stones squirming and sliding beneath his feet. He stumbled and would have pitched headlong but the blue-suited Arabs caught him, laughing and cheering now, and passed him from hand to hand, tossed him about like a sack of old clothes, moved him uphill. He saw a woman in an upper window making the sign of the cross at him and throwing kisses. The hymn was unbearably loud.
His back was pressed up against the Arabs’ enormous wooden cross. He saw clearly, as though he were at a movie, how a dozen men with the same triangular face and fierce swollen eyes were holding him in place and driving in the nails. It was not the nails that bothered him but the sound of the hammer blows, which rang in his head with clamorous frenzy. Hornkastle went limp and let it happen to him. A voice as mighty as that of Zeus cried, “Help him, he’s having a fit!” But Hornkastle simply smiled and shook his head. All was well. Push me, kick me, do whatever you want to me. I am yours. God is in me, he thought. God is everywhere, but especially He is within me. He could taste the fiery presence of the Godhead on his lips, his tongue, deep in his belly. They had the cross upright now. “Make room! Get him out of here before he’s trampled!” No. No. There are still five more Stations of the Cross, are there not? We have not reached the end of the Via Dolorosa. Hornkastle felt utterly tranquil. This is the true ekstasis, the parting of the soul from the body. He closed his eyes.
When he returned to consciousness, he found himself lying in a hospital bed with a placid sweet-faced nun watching him. His arms were rigidly outstretched, his fingers were tightly coiled, the palms of his hands seemed to be on fire, and wave upon wave of nausea swept across his middle. From far away came the sound of wild bells ringing and the roar of mad voices crying a rhythmic slogan over and over.
To the nun he said faintly, “What are they shouting? I can’t make it out.” She touched his blazing forehead lightly and replied, “Christos, anesti, Christos anesti, Christ is risen!”