Adventure, February 20, 1922 — page 38: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

rau gig, ¥ Wi ; : 26 } ie Cee a rT?eé ie oR he ia 4 Nig hh Pa wae 4 4) id ‘ 4A a \ ay > om ou'd better nes Netkiog more till sunrise.’ _ So I did. It was pretty chilly up there ____without a blanket three thousand feet above ___ sea-level, but some of the old lady’s damp ae laundry helped to temper it and the balance went under me to soften contact with the roof. For a few minutes I lay listening to Grim’s mellow voice chanting familiar lines, _- staring upward drowsily and growing almost dizzy with a sense of vastness. “When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained——”’ es daa & ral oy i a oy ad eo) ‘ } éi% be ey ey sh eae ee ae ' im end ! But when he changed to Hebrew and za boomed out the psalm as it was written by. aman who may have wondered at the same _ sky from the very hill on which we were, = I dozed off. Nothing can send you to sleep quicker than a monolog in Hebrew, and I ie recommend it to the nurse-maids. see When I awoke Grim was still keeping ___-watch, but the stars were paling in the =e mauve and gold of coming dawn. The _ policeman had come up. I suppose Grim _.__ had been below to fetch him without waking _. me and an annoying sense of having been _.___. babied by both of them helped dissipate the pe. stiff discomfort and the civilized yearning _ for a tooth-brush and hot coffee. . Besides, _ IT might have missed something. 2 _. I came and stood between them where ____ they leaned over the parapet staring down- hill past the convent in the direction of the clump of pines and the iron-fenced oak. = The great tree developed slowly out of ____ pearl-colored mist as the sun rose, looking __-weary and decrepit now that the cloak of a night was off, its gnarled, gray lower limbs ___ propped up on-wooden beams and the huge trunk split under the weight of centuries. 2a But Grim had seen that tree a hundred Es times. It needed more than another view Pas | : { . of it at dawn to make him and an Arab _ policeman, born within a mile of it, hang ~ *) Pye ____ like mast-headed seamen in an Atlantic fog. Vig “Dahrak! Shufl” said the policeman sud- = denly, and both men ducked until their heads were almost level with the masonry. A slight puff of wind rolled the mist apart, ae producing the effect of turning on more light, and through the iron railings above the wall surrounding the oak I could make out the figures of men squatted in a circle. They might have been gambling, for they _ faced inward and their heads were close ave one < fiir a ' vt NS) ‘ce - Wee ahs iy Xo eS v A 4, 4 ’ ’ 2 : by the waist over that parapet and stare. “~ 7 , : : - - — ~~. ” “ . . —_ Adventure together. Secretive and at least a bit ex- cited they were certainly. “Now watch ’em!” said Grim. “For ’s sake watch ’em!” [I think he mis- trusted his own eyes after the long vigil. When the comet-tail ‘of the mist had vanished along the valley in front of a wind that shook down the dew in jeweled showers, the men who sat under-the tree rose in a hurry as if they had let time steal a march - on them and helped one another over the fence in something of a panic. Then, in single file, they started across country toward the opposite hillside. I counted éighteen of them and the man who led was some one J had never seen before—a man who walked with a limp and wore a tarboosh wrapped in calico. The others were unmistakable even at that distance—old Ali Baba and — his sons. “Tf we lose sight of them we’re done for! Tell you what,” said Grim, “you and the policeman stay up here. I'll follow them. We ought to manage it between us that way. If it seems to you I’m off the trail, give one long shout; they’ll think it’s a herdsman rounding up stray cattle, I'll understand and cast again, or wait for you. If you see I’m surely on their heels, you two follow and catch up as fast as you can.” HE REPEATED the instructions to the policeman in Arabic and vanished. While we watched him run. down-hill the old woman came up panting, to abuse me in voluble Russian about her crumpled cotton underclothes; but Russian is one of several things I don’ t know, so we didn’t grow intimate. The policeman bundled all her laundry up and threw if off the roof, which seemed to me hardly tactful in the circumstances; so I gave her a coin and she blessed me and we let it go at that. Thereafter I could hardly watch Grim and the swiftly retreating eighteen for won- dering at the view. You could see clear across the whole of Palestine—the Moab Hills beyond the Dead Sea to the eastward, and over to the west the blue of the Medi- terranean and thirty miles of white surf pounding on golden sand. A little, little country, that had managed to make more impression on the world than many a big one! . Grim followed as far as the road we had come by in the night without troubling to mM <S lEboo (E@) (G@) ;