At Alexandria, where some of the cargo and his Jewish fellow-passengers were to be landed, Aaron was tantalized for days by the quarantine, so that he must needs fret amid the musty odors long after he had thought to tread the sacred streets of Jerusalem. But at last he found himself making straight for the Holy Land; and one magic day, the pilgrim, pallid and emaciated, gazed in pious joy upon the gray line of rocks that changed gradually into terraces of red sloping roofs overbrooded by a palm-tree. Jaffa! But a cruel, white sea still rolled and roared betwixt him and these holy shores, guarded by the rock of Andromeda and tumbling and leaping billows; and the ship lay to outside the ancient harbor, while heavy boats rowed by stalwart Arabs and Syrians, in red fez and girdle, clamored for the passengers. Aaron was thrown unceremoniously over the ship's side at the favorable moment when the boat leapt up to meet him; he fell into it, soused with spray, but glowing at heart. As his boat pitched and tossed along, a delicious smell of orange-blossom wafted from the orange-groves, and seemed to the worn pilgrim a symbol of the marriage betwixt him and Zion. The land of his fathers—there it lay at last, and in a transport of happiness the wanderer had, for the first time in his life, a sense of the restful dignity of an ancestral home. But as the boat labored without apparent progress towards the channel betwixt the black rocks, over which the spray flew skywards, a foreboding tortured him that some ironic destiny would drown him in sight of his goal. He prayed silently with shut eyes and his petition changed to praise as the boat bumped the landing-stage and he opened them on a motley Eastern crowd and the heaped barrels of a wharf. Shouldering his portmenteau, which, despite his debilitated condition, felt as light as the feathers at the poulterer's, he scrambled ecstatically up some slippery steps on to the stone platform, and had one foot on the soil of the Holy Land, when a Turkish official in a shabby black uniform stopped him.
"Your passport," he said, in Arabic. Aaron could not understand. Somebody interpreted.
"I have no passport," he answered, with a premonitory pang.
"Where are you going?"
"To live in Palestine."
"Where do you come from?"
"England," he replied triumphantly, feeling this was a mighty password throughout the world.
"You are not an Englishman?"
"No-o," he faltered. "I have lived in England some—many years."
"Naturalized?"