As I was about to leave the obelisk a party of American tourists drove up. Among them was a smart twelve-year-old boy who put his hands in his pockets and gazed up at the stone as though he were ready to buy it. As he did so I said to him:
“Hello, my little man, aren’t you an American?”
“You bet I am,” he promptly replied. “I came from Chicago in the state of Illinois. You are English, aren’t you?”
“No, I am an American, and my home is in Washington.”
“Oh, yes,” said the urchin. “I know all about that place. The President lives there. Say, what is the name of your ball team?”
That was the interesting thing to him. Out here under the shadow of an obelisk four thousand years old, on the spot where Joseph was married to Asenath; where Plato philosophized and where Moses played; within plain sight of the Pyramids and near enough almost to hear the whisper of the Sphinx, he cared nothing for them. He was a live boy, and he wanted live things. Therefore the pitchers, catchers, and shortstops of the great American diamond were worth more to him than all the stories of history and all the mummies of the museums.
CHAPTER III
THE CITY OF JONAH
I have come up out of the land of Egypt, out of the Israelitish “house of bondage,” and am to-day on the edge of the Promised Land. I am at Jaffa, the ancient Joppa, and the port for the Holy City. When Jacob went down from the highlands of Samaria to the Land of Goshen to meet Joseph, his journey took several weeks. I made the trip in the opposite direction by land and sea in less than a day.
I took the express train at Cairo and in four hours was landed at Port Said, at the mouth of the Suez Canal, where I got a steamer which brought me to Jaffa. The whole way was through the lands of the Bible. We struck the canal at Ismailia, about midway of the Isthmus of Suez, and thence rode northward along its banks to Port Said.