ible?" He proceeded to quote from it: "And the rest
of the acts of Ahaziah which he did are they not written in the
book of the chronicles of the Kings of Israel?"'

"What of it?"

"That was set down in Aramaic, nowadays called Hebrew, something
like three thousand years ago," said Grim. "It's Aramaic magic.
Let's take a look at it."

We trudged together down the dusty Bethlehem Road, turned to the
east just short of the Pool of the Sultan (where they now had a
delousing station for British soldiers) and went nearly to the
end of the colony of neat stone villas that the Germans built
before the War, and called Rephaim. It was a prosperous colony
until the Kaiser, putting two and two, made five of them and had
to guess again.

The house we sought stood back from the narrow road, at a corner,
surrounded by a low stone wall and a mass of rather dense shrubs
that obscured the view from the windows. The front door was a
thing of solid olive-wood. We had to hammer on it for several
minutes. There was no bell.

A woman opened it at last--an Arab in native costume, gazelle-
eyed, as they all are, and quite good looking, although hardly in
her first youth. Her face struck me as haunted. She was either
ashamed when her eyes met Grim's or else afraid of him. But she
smiled pleasantly enough and without asking our business led the
way at once to a room at the other end of a long hall that was
crowded with all sorts of curios. They were mostly stone bric-a-
brac-fragments of Moabite pottery and that kind of thing, with a
pretty liberal covering of ordinary house dust. In fact, the
house had the depressing "feel" of a rarely visited museum.

The room she showed us into was the library--three walls lined
with books, mostly with German titles--a big cupboard in one
corner, reaching from floor to ceiling--a big desk by the
window--three armchairs and a stool. There were no pictures,
and the only thing that smacked of ornament was the Persian rug
on the floor.

We waited five minutes before Scharnhoff came in, looking as if
we had disturbed his nap. He was an untidy stout man with green
goggles and a grayish beard, probably not yet sixty years of age,
and well preserved. He kept his pants up with a belt, and his
shirt bulged untidily over the top. When he sat down you could
see the ends of thick combinations stuffed into his socks. He
gave you the impression of not fitting into western clothes at
all and of b