I expected the three non-Moslems would take advantage of the
opportunity to ask me a string of questions. But they took
exactly the opposite view of the situation. They avoided me,
withdrawing into a corner by themselves. I suppose they
thought that to be seen talking to me was more risky than the
amusement merited.

So I went up to the ramparts, too, to watch the folk at prayer,
minded to keep out of sight, for they don't like being regarded
as a curious spectacle; and on the way up I did something that
may have had a lot to do with our getting away alive, although I
did not give much thought to it and could hardly have explained
my motive at the time.

The door at the foot of the stairs opened inward. It was almost
exactly the same width as the stairway, so that when it stood
wide open you could not have put your hand between its edge and
the stairway wall. Lying on the floor of the hall within a few
feet of the nearest corner was a length of good sound olive-wood,
about three inches in thickness, roughly squared and not
particularly squared. Having stepped on it accidentally, I
picked it up, and discovered more by accident than intention that
it was longer than the width of the stairway. Then I noticed a
notch in the stairway wall. Behind the opened door there was a
deeper notch in the opposite wall. There was no lock on the
door, no bolt. That length of wood had been cut to fit
horizontally from notch to notch across the passage. Once that
beam was fitted in its place, whoever wished to reach the roof
would have to burn or batter down the door. I moved the door and
placed the length of olive-wood on end behind it.

I found the view from the ramparts much more interesting than the
soul-saving formalities of eighty or so potential cut-throats.
While they prayed I stood watching the shadows deepen in the
Jordan Valley, as no doubt Joshua once watched them from
somewhere near that same spot before he marshalled his invading
host. You could understand why people who had wandered forty
years in a stark and howling wilderness should yearn for those
coloured, fertile acres between the Jordan and the sea: why they
should be willing to fight for them, die for them, do anything
rather than turn back.

By the time we had filed down--Anazeh last again--the servants
had nearly finished spreading a banquet. What looked like bed-
sheets had been laid along the strip of carpet, and, the whole
length of them