Part 47 (2/2)

In his irresolution he decided to go out into the city. He would call upon various people he knew, friends of Cyril Hands, and trust to events for guiding his further movements.

The rooms where Hands had always stayed were close to the schools of the Church Missionary Society; he would go there. Down in the Muristan area he could also chat with the doctor at the English Ophthalmic Hospice; he would call on his way to the New Tomb.

It was at The Tomb that he might learn something, perhaps, yet how nebulous it all was, how unsatisfying!

He set out, down the roughly paved streets, through the arched and shaded bazaars--places less full of colour and more sombre than the markets of other Oriental cities--to the heart of the city, where the streets were bounded by the vision of the distant hills of Olivet.

The religious riots and unrest were long since over. The pilgrims to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre were less in number, but were mostly Russians of the Greek Church, who still accepted the Church of the Holy Sepulchre as the true goal of their desires.

The Greeks and Armenians hated each other no more than usual. The Turks were held in good control by a strong governor of Jerusalem. Nor was this a time of special festival. The city, never quite at rest, was still in its normal condition.

The Bedouin women with their unveiled faces, tattooed in blue, strode to the bazaars with the b.u.t.ter they had brought in from their desert herds.

They wore gaudy head-dresses and high red boots, and they jostled the ”pale townsmen” as they pa.s.sed them; free, untamed creatures of the sun and air.

As Spence pa.s.sed by the courtyard of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre a crowd of Fellah boys ran up to him with candles ornamented with scenes from the Pa.s.sion, pressing him to buy.

The sun grew hotter as he walked, though the purple shadows of the narrow streets were cool enough. As he left the European heights of Akra and dived deep into the eastern central city, the well-remembered scenes and smells rose up like a wall before him and the rest of life.

He began to walk more slowly, in harmony with the slow-moving forms around. He had been to Omdurman with the avenging army, knew Constantinople during the Greek war--the East had meaning for him.

And as the veritable East closed round him his doubts and self-ridicule vanished. His strange mission seemed possible here.

As he was pa.s.sing one of the vast ruined structures once belonging to the mediaeval knights of St. John, thinking, indeed, that he himself was a veritable Crusader, a thin, importunate voice came to him from an angle of the stone-work.

He looked down and saw an old Nurie woman sitting there. She belonged to the ”Nowar,” the unclean pariah cla.s.s of Palestine, who are said to practise magic arts. A gipsy of the Suss.e.x Downs would be her sister in England.

The woman was tattooed from head to foot. She wore a blue turban, and from squares and angles drawn in the dust before her, Spence knew her for a professional geomancer or fortune-teller.

He threw her a coin in idle speculation and asked her ”his lot” for the immediate future.

The woman had a few sh.e.l.ls of different shapes in a heap by her side, and she threw them into the figures on the ground.

Then, picking them up, she said, in b.a.s.t.a.r.d Arabic interspersed with a hard ”K”-like sound, which marks the nomad in Palestine, ”Effendi, you have a sorrow and bewilderment just past you, and, like a black star, it has fixed itself on your forehead. A letter is coming to you from over the seas telling you of work to do. And then you will leave this country and cross home in a steamer, with a story to tell many people.”

Spence smiled at the glib prophecy. Certainly it might very well outline his future course of action, but it was no more than a shrewd and obvious guess.

He was turning to go away when the woman opened her clothes in front, showing the upper part of her body literally covered with tattoo marks, and drew out a small bag.

”Stay, my lord,” she said. ”I can tell you much more if you will hear. I have here a very precious stone rubbed with oil, which I brought from Mecca. Now, if you will hold this stone in your hand and give me the price you shall hear what will come to you, O camel of the house!”

The curious sensation of ”expectation” that had been coming over Spence, the fatalistic waiting for chance to guide him which, in this wild and dream-like business, had begun to take hold of him, made him give the hag what she asked.

There was something in clairvoyance perhaps; at any rate he would hear what the Nurie woman had to say.

She took a dark and greasy pebble from the bag and put it in his hand, gazing at his fingers for a minute or two in a fixed stare without speaking.

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