secret sympathy.
I was as hungry as he was; and I needed a drink, too, which he
didn't. The little devil hadn't yet included whiskey in his list
of vices.

The side of the street an which the little stone house stood was
the darker, so we sat down with our backs against its wall, and
the boy proceeded to fall asleep at once. The one thing I was
sure I must not do was imitate him. So I began to look about me
in the hope of finding something sufficiently interesting to keep
me awake.

There was nothing in the street except the makings of a bad
smell. There was plenty of that. I searched the opposite wall,
on which the moon shone, but there was nothing there of even
architectural interest. My eyes traveled higher, and rested at
last on something extremely curious.

The wall was not very high at that point. It formed the blind
rear of a house that faced into a court of some sort approached
by an alley from another street. There were no windows. A small
door some distance to my left belonged obviously to the next
house. On top of the wall, almost exactly, but not quite, in the
middle of it, was a figure that looked like a wooden carving--
something like one of those fat, seated Chinamen they used to set
over the tea counter of big grocer's shops.

But the one thing that you never see, and can be sure of not
seeing in Jerusalem outside of a Christian church, is a carved
human figure of any kind. The Moslems are fanatical on that
point. Whatever exterior statues the crusaders for instance
left, the Saracens and Turks destroyed. Besides, why was it not
exactly in the middle?

It was much too big and thick-set to be a sleeping vulture. It
was the wrong shape to be any sort of chimney. It was certainly
not a bale of merchandise put up on the roof to dry. And the
longer you looked at it the less it seemed to resemble anything
recognizable. I had about reached the conclusion that it must be
a bundle of sheepskins up-ended, ready to be spread out in the
morning sun, and was going to cast about for something else to
puzzle over, when it moved. The man who thinks he would not feel
afraid when a thing like that moves in the dark unexpectedly has
got to prove it before I believe him. The goose-flesh broke out
all over me.

A moment later the thing tilted forward, and a man's head emerged
from under a blanket. It chuckled damnably. If there had been a
rock of the right size within reach I would have thro