the trunks of ancient olives, and pale eyes
which had a patient, rapt expression as if they saw Heaven opened, but
a long way off. They took no notice of Iskender there beside them,
though his adherence was conspicuous as a flower among grey rocks, but
trudged onward, singing hymns in a strange tongue.

The general rate of advance was very slow, so many aged, feeble folk
were of the company; but some three hours after noon of the third day,
having toiled long through a wilderness of stony hills, they saw the
city. Men and women kissed the ground, weeping and crying aloud. The
priests in charge of the pilgrims struck up a psalm of thanksgiving.

Iskender left them at these devotions, passing on into the city. There
he lost all purpose and the count of time in rapture with the colours
of the motley throng, which budded in the night of long, dark tunnels
and blossomed in the open alleys, full of shade. The sense of an
infinitude of burning light, resting above, gave to the shadow and its
bedded splendours something magical, reminding Iskender of his childish
fancies of what it must be like to live at the bottom of the sea. He
had stood for a long while glued to the pavement of a certain entry,
outside the jostling crowd, gazing entranced at the shop of a
coppersmith across the way--where, in the darkness of a kind of cave,
the burnished wares gave forth a bluish gleam like negro faces--when
some one smote his chest.

There was Yuhanna the dragoman, his old enemy, grinning down at him,
for once quite friendly.

"Shrink not, O my son, fear nothing," he said, laughing, when Iskender
half retreated. "Thou didst not perjure thyself, it seems, that time
thou knowest, so I have no grudge against thee. And now thou hast
joined the Church, thou art my brother. I heard the blessed news from
one I met upon the road. Art thou not happy to be now a child of
light, delivered from the prospect of everlasting damnation? Wallah,
it is bad to be Brutestant."

He gave Iskender's arm a cunning twist, just enough to suggest the
torture in reserve for heretics; and then, detaining his hand inquired
the nature of his business in the city. Thus reminded of his errand
which had quite escaped him, Iskender confessed that he was in search
of the shop of one Ibrahim abu Yusuf, a painter of religious pictures.
Yuhanna told him it was close at hand, and, having treated him to a cup
of coffee and some sticky sweet-stuff, showed him the