I fear, profane)
directions; we are swept along on the tops of the waves, between the
foaming rocks, drenched by spray and flying showers: at last we bump
alongside the little quay, and climb out on the wet, gliddery stones.

The kinematograph pictures are ended, for I am in Palestine, on the
first of April, just fifteen days from home.

III

RENDEZVOUS

Will my friends be here to meet me, I wonder? This is the question which
presses upon me more closely than anything else, I must confess, as I
set foot for the first time upon the sacred soil of Palestine. I know
that this is not as it should be. All the conventions of travel require
the pilgrim to experience a strange curiosity and excitement, a profound
emotion, "a supreme anguish," as an Italian writer describes it, "in
approaching this land long dreamed about, long waited for, and almost
despaired of."

But the conventions of travel do not always correspond to the realities
of the heart. Your first sight of a place may not be your first
perception of it: that may come afterward, in some quiet, unexpected
moment. Emotions do not follow a time-table; and I propose to tell no
lies in this book. My strongest feeling as I enter Jaffa is the desire
to know whether my chosen comrades have come to the rendezvous at the
appointed time, to begin our long ride together.

It is a remote and uncertain combination, I grant you. The Patriarch, a
tall, slender youth of seventy years, whose home is beside the Golden
Gate of California, was wandering among the ruins of Sicily when I last
heard from him. The Pastor and his wife, the Lady of Walla Walla, who
live on the shores of Puget Sound, were riding camels across the
peninsula of Sinai and steamboating up the Nile. Have the letters, the
cablegrams that were sent to them been safely delivered? Have the
hundreds of unknown elements upon which our combination depended been
working secretly together for its success? Has our proposal been
according to the supreme disposal, and have all the roads been kept
clear by which we were hastening from three continents to meet on the
first day of April at the _Hotel du Parc_ in Jaffa?

Yes, here are my three friends, in the quaint little garden of the
hotel, with its purple-flowering vines of Bougainvillea, fragrant
orange-trees, drooping palms, and long-tailed cockatoos drowsing on
their perches. When people really know each other an unfamiliar
meeting-place lends a singular intimac