accident, like a wind from without,
as first love will come to the woman-hater. He was already, both by
fate and choice, something more than he had meant to be. The
mathematician, we might almost say the calculating boy, was already
gambling in the highest lottery which led to the highest and most
historic loss. The engineer devoted to discipline was already a free
lance, because already a knight-errant.

He returned to England to continue his comparatively humdrum order of
advancement; and the next call that came to him was of a strangely
different and yet also of a strangely significant kind. The Palestine
Exploration Fund sent him with another officer to conduct
topographical and antiquarian investigations in a country where
practical exertions are always relieved against a curiously
incongruous background--as if they were setting up telegraph-posts
through the Garden of Eden or opening a railway station at the New
Jerusalem. But the contrast between antiquity and modernity was not
the only one; there was still the sort of contrast that can be a
collision. Kitchener was almost immediately to come in contact with
what was to be, in various aspects, the problem of his life--the
modern fanaticisms of the Near East. There is an English proverb which
asks whether the mountain goes to Mahomet or he to the mountain, and
it may be a question whether his religion be the cause or the effect
of a certain spirit, vivid and yet strangely negative, which dwells in
such deserts. Walking among the olives of Gaza or looking on the
Philistine plain, such travellers may well feel that they are treading
on cold volcanoes, as empty as the mountains of the moon. But the
mountain of Mahomet is not yet an extinct volcano.

Kitchener, in these first days of seemingly mild and minute duties,
was early aware of it. At Safed, in the Galilean hills, his small
party had found itself surrounded by an Arab mob, stricken suddenly
mad with emotions unintelligible to the political mobs of the West. He
was himself wounded, but, defending himself as best he could with a
walking-stick, not only saved his own life but that of his
fellow-officer, Lieutenant Conder, who had been beaten to the earth
with an Arab club. He continued his work indeed with prosaic
pertinacity, and developed in the survey of the Holy Land all that
almost secretive enthusiasm for detail which lasted all his life. Of
the most famous English guide-book he made the characteristic r