These were peasants, men and women, for the most part old, with faces gnarled and knotted like the trunks of ancient olives, and pale eyes which had a patient, rapt expression as if they saw Heaven opened, but a long way off. They took no notice of Iskender there beside them, though his adherence was conspicuous as a flower among grey rocks, but trudged onward, singing hymns in a strange tongue.
The general rate of advance was very slow, so many aged, feeble folk were of the company; but some three hours after noon of the third day, having toiled long through a wilderness of stony hills, they saw the city. Men and women kissed the ground, weeping and crying aloud. The priests in charge of the pilgrims struck up a psalm of thanksgiving.
Iskender left them at these devotions, passing on into the city. There he lost all purpose and the count of time in rapture with the colours of the motley throng, which budded in the night of long, dark tunnels and blossomed in the open alleys, full of shade. The sense of an infinitude of burning light, resting above, gave to the shadow and its bedded splendours something magical, reminding Iskender of his childish fancies of what it must be like to live at the bottom of the sea. He had stood for a long while glued to the pavement of a certain entry, outside the jostling crowd, gazing entranced at the shop of a coppersmith across the way—where, in the darkness of a kind of cave, the burnished wares gave forth a bluish gleam like negro faces—when some one smote his chest.
There was Yuhanna the dragoman, his old enemy, grinning down at him, for once quite friendly.
"Shrink not, O my son, fear nothing," he said, laughing, when Iskender half retreated. "Thou didst not perjure thyself, it seems, that time thou knowest, so I have no grudge against thee. And now thou hast joined the Church, thou art my brother. I heard the blessed news from one I met upon the road. Art thou not happy to be now a child of light, delivered from the prospect of everlasting damnation? Wallah, it is bad to be Brûtestânt."
He gave Iskender's arm a cunning twist, just enough to suggest the torture in reserve for heretics; and then, detaining his hand inquired the nature of his business in the city. Thus reminded of his errand which had quite escaped him, Iskender confessed that he was in search of the shop of one Ibrahîm abu Yûsuf, a painter of religious pictures. Yuhanna told him it was close at hand, and, having treated him to a cup of coffee and some sticky sweet-stuff, showed him the way, which could hardly have been found without direction. Through a deserted alley, down first one dark, stinking passage, then another, Iskender reached a crazy door and, knocking on it twice, was told to enter.
The room within was small and very dark. It had only one window, high up in the wall, and even that looked out upon a covered way. When Iskender entered, the artist was in the act of rising from his knees, having been on the floor at work upon a picture. He was a wizened elder with a fine white beard, clad in a soiled kaftan, black turban and big black-rimmed spectacles. Lighting a candle-end he read the letter of the priest Mîtri, and, having read, embraced his new disciple. He took off his spectacles, brushed them, wiped his eyes repeatedly, and then knelt again to his painting, bidding Iskender watch the way of it. When the youth suggested that more light was needed, Ibrahîm abu Yûsuf shook his head decidedly. This room, he explained, had been chosen precisely on account of its obscurity, which meant seclusion. Were he to ply his trade in the light of day, the Muslim zealots of the city would speedily tear him in pieces as an idol-maker. "Though some of them make pictures also," he explained, "not here but in Esh-Shâm and other places. They quote in excuse some fetwah of the learned. I have no appeal; for did I quote their fetwah they would call it blasphemy." The room, he said, possessed advantages for health as well as privacy. Its window gave upon the market of the shoemakers, and, when it stood open, admitted the smell of leather, than which nothing in the world is more wholesome and invigorating. Iskender was glad to learn that he was not required to sleep there, but in the private house of his master, whither he was conducted at the end of the day's work. The old man and his wife seemed pleased to have him in the room of their only son, an adventurous youth who had gone with merchandise to America to seek his fortune.
The Sheykh Ibrahîm took great pains with his pupil's instruction, and taught him divers little tricks which saved much trouble.
"But times are bad!" he would suspire in moments of depression. "Once it was a profitable trade; all the pictures required used to be wrought and purchased in the land. But now the majority of the clergy buy them ready-made from Europe. That the Franks have a pretty, life-like trick is undeniable; yet I think our ancient style, stiff and conventional as they call it, is far more reverent. There is no one left to practise it, nowadays, except myself, and here and there a religious in the monasteries."
Yet, for all the old man's moan, there seemed no lack of business; and Iskender wished that he had half the money which he saw paid into his master's hand. Monks and nuns and priests, and even prelates, found their way to the cell of the painter; and Iskender's work was highly thought of by such visitors. The old man was laughingly told to look to his laurels, for the young one at his side had almost Frankish talent.