Finally he again directly addressed the aviation party.
“What is your will?” he asked, the soul of hospitality in his eyes. “Food? More than a plenty you shall have. Shelter? It is yours for the word, but in these divinely beautiful days, no four walls for me. Heard ye ever the cry of the desert, and ‘the house not made with hands’?”
“So far, so good, kind sir, but have you in the town any of the stuff generally called ‘petrol’?”
The patriarch hesitated at the term of general classification of fuel oils. “Maybe it is there,” he replied uncertainly.
Henri jumped into the breach by setting forth that what they wanted was “just oil to burn.”
The face of the graybeard flashed a look of comprehension.
“It is not the impossible that you request; in the manufactures there is use for the mineral fluid, and for you it shall be found.”
“We haven’t the price of it about us,” confessed Billy.
The patriarch shrugged his shoulders. “I am making no measure of shekels for the stranger at my door. In my groves take your ease until the morrow, and all these things I have promised will be delivered unto you.”
With these words, spoken like a benediction, the old man departed in the direction of the splendid terraces of level roofs.