Drawing her blue head-dress over her face, the woman refused to speak another word.
Spence passed on, wondering. He knew, as all travellers who are not merely tourists know, that no one has ever been quite able to sift the fraud and trickery from the strange power possessed by those Eastern geomancers. It is an undecided question still, but only the shallow dare to say that all is imposture.[2]
And even the London journalist could not be purely materialistic in Jerusalem, the City of Sorrows.
He went on towards his destination. Not far from the missionary establishment was a building which was the headquarters of the Palestine Exploring Society in Jerusalem.
Cyril Hands had always lived up in Akra among the Europeans, but much of his time was necessarily spent in the Mûristan district.
The building was known as the "Research Museum."
Hands and his assistants had gathered a valuable collection of ancient curiosities.
Here were hundreds of drawings and photographs of various excavations. Accurate measurements of tombs, buried houses, ancient churches were entered in great books.
In glass cases were fragments of ancient pottery, old Hebrew seals, scarabs, antique fragments of jewellery—all the varied objects from which high scholarship and expert training was gradually, year by year, providing a luminous and entirely fresh commentary on Holy Writ.
Here, in short, were the tools of what is known as the "Higher Criticism."