you are in tow of eight-year-old iniquity that
regards you as a lump of baggage to be pushed this and that way.
Suliman plainly considered me a rank outsider, only admitted into
the game on sufferance. Having said I was "magnoon" he lived up
to the assertion, and warned people to make way for me if they
did not want to be bitten and go mad, too; so as a general rule
I received a pretty wide berth. But it was fun, in spite of
Suliman. It was like seeing the world through a peep-hole. Men
and women you knew went by without suspecting they were
recognized, and in a puzzling sort of way the world, that had
been your world yesterday, seemed now to belong wholly to other
people, while you lived in a new sphere of your own.

We had to go slowly as we approached the Jaffa Gate, for the
crowd was dense there, and a line of Sikhs was drawn across the
gap where the street passes through the city wall. It was the
gap the Turks once made by tearing down the wall to let the
Kaiser through, when he made that famous meek and humble
pilgrimage of his. The Sikhs were searching all comers for
weapons, and we had to wait our turn.

Outside the gate, on the left-hand as you faced it, was the usual
line of boot-blacks--the only cheap thing left in Jerusalem--a
motley two dozen of ex-Turkish soldiers, recently fighting the
British gamely in the last ditch, and now blacking their boots
with equal gusto, for rather higher pay. Some of them still wore
Turkish uniforms. Two or three were redheaded and blue-eyed, and
almost certainly descended from Scotch crusaders. (The whole
wide world bears witness that when the Scots went soldiering they
were efficient in more ways than one.)

The rest of the crowd were mainly peasantry with basket-loads of
stuff for market; but there was a liberal sprinkling among them
of all the odds and ends of the Levant, with a Jew here and
there, the inevitable Russian priest, and a dozen odd lots,
of as many nationalities, whom it would have been difficult
to classify.

And there was Police Constable Bedreddin Shah. You could not
have missed noticing him, although I did not learn his name until
afterwards. He came swaggering down the Jaffa Road with all the
bullying arrogance of the newly enlisted Arab policeman. He
shoved me aside, calling me a name that a drunken donkey-driver
would hesitate to apply to a dog in the gutter. He was on his
way to the lock-up that stands just inside the gate, and I