This time instead of turning toward the city we went almost to the opposite direction, between orchard walls, by a path so stony that you tripped at every second step. The policeman’s steel-capped boots struck sparks behind us and the noise we made set little foxes scampering, then brought them back again to leap on the wall and look. Surely all nature wonders at the clumsiness of man.
* * * * *
We were in open country at the end of half a mile, but that brought us small advantage, for the tilled hillsides to left and right of us were so much blackness, and how in the world Grim proposed to find any given cave, or the man who hid in it, was more than I could guess. You could see dim ghosts that were thousand-year-old olive-trees and goblins that were limestone rocks. Little owls screamed mockery from almost arm’s length and one or two hyenas dogged our steps snickering obscenity. The rest was black, unfathomable night.
But we came at last to a lane that led due northward by the pole-star and Grim led the way up that, following a cart-wheel track beside a wall. And presently we emerged into a clump of pine-trees that were startling because so unexpected in that land, where men have cut for fuel whatever bears no fruit that men can eat and the goats have seen to it that nothing grows again. There were thirty or forty pines with grass beneath them, clean and well-kept.
“Care to see Abraham’s Oak?” asked Grim—showman again; he could not rest until you had seen everything. “I think Ali Baba and his gang will come here before dawn; they always used to. We’ll have to beat it soon, but you’ve time to see the tree. There’ll be no time afterward.”
It stood within two hundred feet of us, surrounded by a stone wall and an iron railing—a veritable oak, so huge and ancient that a man’s life seemed an absurd thing as we stood beneath. Under the stars, with shadows all about, it looked vaster than by daylight, its dignity unmarred by signs of decay and only its age and hugeness to be wondered at—those and the silence that it seemed to breathe.
“They had to fence it to keep thieves away,” said Grim. “No, not only souvenir-sharps. The thieves of Hebron used to meet under the pines and set their fires against this oak. Abraham is supposed to have pitched his tent under this identical tree, so it must have been big then, and that’s three thousand years ago. It has been a rendezvous ever since. Ali Baba loves the spot. Come on.”
We passed through a gate and up-hill to where big buildings and a tower loomed lonely against the sky, I too busy wondering about Abraham and that old tree to take any interest in modern convents. The patriarch came from Ur of the Chaldees, wherever that was. What sort of tents did he have, and how many? According to Genesis he must have had a small tribe with him; what did they look like camped around that tree and how were his slaves and retainers armed?
Modern happenings amuse me more when I can follow their roots back into the subsoil of time; but that leads to brown study and hurt shins. I barked mine against a modern American plow, as Grim turned aside along the hilltop and picked up a big stone, to thunder with it on the wooden door of a high square tower.
It stood apart from the convent buildings, modern and unlovely— might have been a belfry, for all you could tell in the dark—perhaps one of those vainglorious beginnings the religious congregations make with thousands of yet-to-be-solicited contributors in mind. The door was opened presently by an old Russian female in a night-cap, who screamed at sight of us.
She knew no Arabic—no English. Grim beckoned the policeman, and his rifle turned out to be a theme she comprehended, for she crossed herself in a quick-fire flurry and stood aside. Grim gave her a coin, for which she blessed him profusely—or so I suppose; the words were Russian— and we entered a square room dimly lighted by a night-light that burned before an ikon in a corner. It formed the whole ground-story of the tower, bedroom and living-room in one, and was chock-a-block with rubbishy furniture, but clean.
In the corner opposite the ikon was an iron stair with a hand-rail, like one of those that stokers use to emerge by from the boiling bowels of a ship. Grim started up it, but told the policeman to stay below and keep the door shut, presumably to prevent the old lady from communicating with her friends outside—for you never know in Palestine what innocents are earning money on the side by acting as thieves’ telegraph. I followed Grim.
Story after story the iron ladder twisted on itself in pitchy blackness, until we came out at last on a flat roof with a waist-high parapet, crossed by two ropes on which the beldame’s washing hung—not edifying as a spectacle, nor pleasant when the wind drove it in your face. There was nothing else to see there except the stars that looked almost within reach. Grim leaned his back against the parapet and proceeded to admire them.
“What next?” I asked, for since the only ones I can ever identify are the dipper and the pole-star I soon grow inattentive to astronomy.
“You’d better sleep. Nothing 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 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…”
But when he changed to Hebrew and boomed out the psalm as it was written by a man 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 recommend it to the nurse-maids.
When I awoke Grim was still keeping watch, but the stars were paling in the 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 stiff discomfort and the civilized yearning for a tooth-brush and hot coffee. Besides, I might have missed something.
I came and stood between them where they leaned over the parapet staring downhill 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 night was off, its gnarled, gray lower limbs propped up on wooden beams and the huge trunk split under the weight of centuries.
But Grim had seen that tree a hundred times. It needed more than another view of it at dawn to make him and an Arab policeman, born within a mile of it, hang by the waist over that parapet and stare like mast-headed seamen in an Atlantic fog.
”Dahrak! Shuf!“ said the policeman suddenly, and both men ducked until their heads were almost level with the masonry. A slight puff of wind rolled the mist apart, 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 together. Secretive and at least a bit excited they were certainly.
“Now watch ‘em!” said Grim. “For God’s sake watch ‘em!” I think he mistrusted 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 eighteen of them and the man who led was someone I 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.
“If 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