Malaish, we are in the will of God!"

The hand that David laid in Ebn Ezra's was hot and nervous, the eyes
that drank in the friendship of the face which had seen two Claridges
emptying out their lives in the East were burning and famished by long
fasting of the spirit, forced abstinence from the pleasures of success
and fruition-haunting, desiring eyes, where flamed a spirit which
consumed the body and the indomitable mind. The lips, however, had their
old trick of smiling, though the smile which greeted Ebn Ezra Bey had a
melancholy which touched the desert-worn, life-spent old Arab as he had
not been touched since a smile, just like this, flashed up at him from
the weather-stained, dying face of quaint Benn Claridge in a street of
Damascus. The natural duplicity of the Oriental had been abashed and
inactive before the simple and astounding honesty of these two Quaker
folk.

He saw crisis written on every feature of the face before him. Yet the
scanty meal they ate with the monks in the ancient room was enlivened
by the eager yet quiet questioning of David, to whom the monks responded
with more spirit than had been often seen in this arid retreat. The
single torch which spluttered from the wall as they drank their coffee
lighted up faces as strange, withdrawn, and unconsciously secretive
as ever gathered to greet a guest. Dim tales had reached them of this
Christian reformer and administrator, scraps of legend from stray
camel-drivers, a letter from the Patriarch commanding them to pray
blessings on his labours--who could tell what advantage might not come
to the Coptic Church through him, a Christian! On the dull, torpid
faces, light seemed struggling to live for a moment, as David talked.
It was as though something in their meagre lives, which belonged to
undeveloped feelings, was fighting for existence--a light struggling to
break through murky veils of inexperience.

Later, in the still night, however--still, though air vibrated
everywhere, as though the desert breathed an ether which was to fill
men's veins with that which quieted the fret and fever of life's
disillusions and forgeries and failures--David's speech with Ebn Ezra
Bey was of a different sort. If, as it seems ever in the desert, an
invisible host of beings, once mortal, now immortal, but suspensive and
understanding, listened to the tale he unfolded, some glow of pity must
have possessed them; for it was an Iliad of herculean struggle against
abs