Herman Melville · 1876 · road

Melville's last full-length book: eighteen thousand lines in a hundred and fifty cantos, self-published with his uncle's money and read by almost nobody. A student whose faith has failed rides a ten-day loop out of Jerusalem to the Dead Sea and back, arguing with his companions the whole way, and returns to find the one thing he loved is gone.

1. 1
   Jerusalem

   Part One. A young divinity student from New England whose faith has gone walks the sites - Olivet, Golgotha, the Sepulchre - finding stone where he wanted certainty, and falls in love with Ruth, an American girl.

2. 2
   Jericho

   Part Two, The Wilderness. Ruth's father dies and mourning custom shuts Clarel out, so he joins a party riding east - a Druze guide, a banker, a geologist, a Swede eaten by his own conscience - down into the Judaean desert.

3. 3
   The Jordan

   The river where John baptised, reached by a road Melville's own journal called the bones of rocks, mere refuse and rubbish of creation - and the pilgrims dismount and argue about what any of it proves.

4. 4
   The Dead Sea

   The shore reached below Jericho, near where the Jordan runs in - the pilgrims looking out over water in a valley that Melville had seen himself in 1857 and called a bitterness beyond the reach of any consolation.

5. 5
   Mar Saba

   Part Three. Three days at the Greek monastery cut into the Kidron cliff, wine and hospitality among the monks - and Mortmain is found dead at the foot of the sacred palm with an eagle feather at his lips.

6. 6
   Bethlehem

   Part Four. The Church of the Nativity and a village of relic-carvers, and the last of the debating - Ungar the embittered Confederate, Derwent the comfortable Anglican, and Clarel no nearer an answer than he was.

7. 7
   Jerusalem

   Ten days later he rides back in and finds Ruth dead of grief and buried - and the poem ends with him following a Lenten procession up the Via Crucis, unresolved, in the crowd.