my arms and thighs. Only a Jew can guess what Cohen felt; but a Jew looks exactly like an Arab when his face is framed in the kufiyi. Neither of us spoke. I stepped forward after Grim, trying to look as if I knew my rights in the matter, and Cohen followed me. In another second we were past the guard and mounting steps up which sudden death is the penalty for trespass.
CHAPTER V.
“The mummery they call the fire-gift.”
What with darkness and the crowd and the fact that everyone was busy with his own excitement we were safe enough until we reached the mosque door. The Haram is a big place with all manner of buildings opening off it— dwellings for dervishes for instance, a place for people known as saints, and a home for the guardians, who live separate from the saints and are said to have a different sort of morals altogether. The court was packed with men among whom we had to thread our way, and the steps leading up to the mosque were like a grandstand at a horse-race with barely foot-room left for one man at a time up the middle.
Directness seemed to be Grim’s key. That as a fact is oftenest the one safe means of doing the forbidden thing. Your deferent, too cautious man is stopped and questioned, while the impudent fellow gets by and is gone before suspicion lights on him. But at the top of the steps we were met by the Sheikh of the mosque, who had eyes that could cut through the dark and a nose begotten out of criticism by mistrust; a lean, long-bearded man so steeped in sanctity and so alert for the least suspicion of a challenge to it that I don’t believe a mouse could have got by uninvestigated. You could guess what he was the moment his eye fell on you and even by the dim light cast by an iron lantern on a chain above him his cold stare gave me the creeps.
It was baleful and made more so because he wore a turban in place of the usual Arab head-dress that frames and in that way modifies the harshness of a man’s face. His beard accentuated rather than softened the pugnacious angle of his jaw, and if I am any judge of a man’s temper his was like nitroglycerine, swift to get off the mark and to destroy.
But explosives, too, are forbidden things. If you mean to handle them the simplest way is best. Grim walked straight up to him.
”Allah ybarik fik! (God preserve you!) I bring news,” he announced.
“Every alley-thief brings tales tonight!” the other answered. “Who are you? And who are these?”
“I bring word from Seyyid Omar, the Sheikh of the Dome of the Rock of El-Kudz (Jerusalem).”
“Allah! At this time?”
“What does necessity know of time? How many ears have you?”
It was pretty obvious that there were thirty pairs of ears straining to catch the conversation.
“You may follow me alone then.”
But Grim knew better than to leave us two on the steps at the mercy of questioners. At the outer gate he had said we were from Beersheba in order to avoid the honor of an escort to the Sheikh. Now he claimed herald’s honors for all three of us, for the same purpose of avoiding close attention.
“Three bore the news, not one,” he answered.
“One is enough to tell it. I have not three sets of ears,” snapped the Sheikh.
“Then you wish me to leave these two outside to gossip with the crowd?”
“Allah! What sort of discreet ones has Seyyid Omar chosen! Let them follow then.”
So we fell in line behind him and passed through the curtains hung to shield from infidel eyes an interior that in the judgment of many Moslems is nearly as sacred as the shrine at Mecca.
Like so many of the Moslem sacred places it was once a church, built by the crusaders on the site of earlier splendor that the Romans wrecked—a lordly building, the lower courses of whose walls are all of ten-ton stones —a place laid out with true eye for proportion by men who had no doubt of what they did. For that has always been known as the veritable tomb of Abraham; no one has ever doubted it until these latter days of too much unbelief.
The higher critics will deny one of these days that Grant’s body was ever buried in Grant’s Tomb; but the lower critics, who are not amused by proof that twice two isn’t four, will read of Grant and go and see and be convinced.
And Abraham hearkened unto Ephron: and Abraham weighed unto Ephron the silver, which he had named in the audience of the sons of Heth, four hundred shekels of silver, current money with the merchant. And the field of Ephron, which was in Machpelah, which was before Mamre, the field, and the cave which was therein, and all the trees which were in the field, that were in all the borders round about, were made sure unto Abraham for a possession in the presence of the children of Heth, before all that went in at the gate of the city.
And after this Abraham buried Sarah his wife in the cave of the field of Machpelah before Mamre: the same is Hebron in the land of Canaan…. Then Abraham died in a good old age and his sons Isaac and Ishmael buried him in the cave of Machpelah, in the field of Ephron the son of Zohar the Hittite, which is before Mamre; the field which Abraham purchased of the sons of Heth: there was Abraham buried, and Sarah his wife.
You don’t have to believe that straight-forward account, of course, if you don’t want to. And if you care to imagine that the Jews and Arabs, who set so much store by Abraham, would ever have forgotten the exact site of his burial-place, so that later arrivals on the scene could not identify it, imagination, even of that sort, does not have to be assessed for income tax. Go to it.
But you can’t pass through those curtains into the mosque and not believe. Not more than twenty non-Moslems in a thousand years have been in there, and each has told the same tale of calm conviction afterward. I heard Cohen catch his breath.
The whole place was full of men, who squatted on the priceless rugs that cover every inch of a floor larger than some cathedrals boast. We passed among them down the center aisle between two cenotaphs that mark the graves of Isaac and Rebecca; for they and Jacob and his wife as well, are buried in the same cave under the mosque floor. But the Sheikh did not pause there; there were too many who might listen, and the dim light from lamps that hung on chains shone in their eyes as they watched us, and on the hilts of swords, so that we seemed to be trespassing where ghouls brewed wrath.
At the north end the Sheikh led into an octagonal-shaped chapel, with the cenotaphs of Abraham and Sarah draped with green and crimson in the midst; and why that place was deserted just at that time was a mystery, for there was no barrier to exclude any one. Not a soul moved in there; none whispered in the shadows. The Sheikh and we three squatted down on a Turkoman rug above Abraham’s bones and faced one another unlistened to, unseen.
“What now?” said the Sheikh. “Be quick with your message. This is no time for gossip. I have my responsibilities.”
As Cohen had remarked, Grim had his nerve with him. Face to face with that explosive-minded Sheikh he came straight to the point. I have seen lion- tamers act the same way; they don’t pretty-pussy the beast through the bars, but go right in and seize the upper hand.
“Seyyid Omar of El-Kudz (Jerusalem), Sheikh of the Dome of the Rock, demands to know why you dare permit this place to be polluted by the mummery they call the fire-gift! All the City is talking of it.”
“Allah!
