He had heard the magnificent chant as he passed by, almost kneeling with his Arabs. So short a time ago! Hardly three months—he had kept no count of time lately, but it could hardly be four months.
How utterly unconscious he had been on that radiant morning outside the Damascus Gate! He had seen the men at work, and was sitting under his sun-tent writing on his pad; he was just lighting a cigarette, he remembered, when Ionides, the foreman, had come running up to him, his shrewd, brown face wrinkled with excitement.
And now, even as he sat there on that stormy midnight, far from the world, even now the whole globe was echoing and reverberating with his discovery. He had opened the little rock chambers, and it seemed that the blows of the picks had set free a troop of ruinous spirits, who were devastating mankind.
Pandora's box—that legend fitted what he had done, but with a deadly difference.
He could not find that Hope remained. It would have been better a thousand times if the hot Eastern sun had struck him down that distant morning on his way through the city.
The awful weight, the initial responsibility rested with him.
He alone had been the means by which the world was being shaken with horrors—horrors growing daily, and that seemed as if the end would be unutterable night.
How the wind shrieked and wailed!
Εγω Ιωσηφ ὁ ἀπο Αριμαθειας.
The words were written in fire on his mind!