secret"
news from Moscow, and skeptical of every one's opinion but their
own, were bolsheviking Marxian Utopia beneath a screen of such
arrogant innocence that even the streetcorner police constables
suspected them. And Mustapha Kemal, in Anatolia, was rumoured to
be preparing a holy war. It was known as a Ghazi in those
days. He had not yet scrapped religion. He was contemplating,
so said rumour, a genuine old-fashioned moslem jihad, with
modern trimmings.

A few enthusiasts astonishingly still laboured for an American
mandate. At the Holy Sepulchre a British soldier stood on guard
with bayonet and bullets to prevent the priests of rival creeds
from murdering one another. The sun shone and so did the stars.
General Bols reopened Pontius Pilate's water-works. The learned
monks in convents argued about facts and theories denied by
archaeologists. Old-fashioned Jews wailed at the Wailing Wall.
Tommy Atkins blasphemously dug corpses of donkeys and dogs from
the Citadel moat.

I arrived in the midst of all that, and spent a couple of months
trying to make head or tail of it, and wondering, if that was
peace, what war is? They say that wherever a man was ever slain
in Palestine a flower grows. So one gets a fair idea of the
country's mass-experience without much difficulty. For three
months of the year, from end to end, the whole landscape is
carpeted with flowers so close together that, except where beasts
and men have trodden winding tracks, one can hardly walk without
crushing an anemone or wild chrysanthemum. There are more
battle-fields in that small land than all Europe can show. There
are streams everywhere that historians assert repeatedly "ran
blood for days."

Five thousand years of bloody terrorism, intermingling of races,
piety, plunder, politics and pilgrims, have produced a self-
consciousness as concentrated as liquid poison-gas. The laughter
is sarcastic, the humour sardonic, and the credulity beyond
analysis. For instance, when I got there, I heard the British
being accused of "imperialistic savagery" because they had
removed the leprous beggars from the streets into a clean place
where they could receive medical treatment.

It was difficult to find one line of observation. Whatever
anybody told you, was reversed entirely by the next man. The
throat-distorting obligation to study Arabic called for rather
intimate association with educated Arabs, whose main obsession
was fear of the