Was I right?

by Mrs. O. F. Walton

"Oh no," she said, "not at all; it is quite a short ride, we shall be back long before sunset. Shall we go at once?"

"Yes, I think, perhaps, we had better go," said Sir William, with some hesitation.

"You can talk Arabic, I suppose, Miss Schwarz, in case we need an interpreter?"

"Oh yes," she said, laughing, "as well as an Arab. I could talk Arabic before I could talk German."

So we set off for the tomb. But we were none of us in very good spirits. Sir William was complaining all the way of Mr. Stanley's bad behaviour to us, and Evelyn was defending him to the best of her power, and assuring her father that there was certain to be a letter from Jaffa.

I am afraid that Miss Schwarz must have thought us very dull and uninteresting people. She was an exceedingly nice girl, just my own age, and, at any other time, I should so much have enjoyed my ride with her. But that afternoon I could not tell what was the matter with me, but it was an effort to talk. I roused myself, once or twice, to take an interest in the places and the people that we were passing on the green Bethlehem plain; but I found it very difficult, my thoughts seemed to be far away. I was ashamed of myself, and struggled against it, and asked Miss Schwarz many questions about the place to which we were going, and she took great pains to explain everything to us, and to make our ride pleasant and interesting to us. I hope she did not think us ungrateful.

We went for some distance along the road to Bethlehem, and then we turned up amongst the mountains. It was a very wild, rough road, indeed after a time we had no road at all, but had to cross over ploughed fields and the shingle-covered hillsides. The view was splendid; a valley was beneath us, quite surrounded by hills, on the sides of which we could see the remains of many of the ancient terraces. It must, indeed, have been a lovely place when it was planted with trees; but the bare, sandy heights were very tiring to the eye, and had it not been for a few patches of green, and the scarlet anemones and yellow Bethlehem stars which were peeping up between the stones, the hillsides would have been very uninteresting and monotonous. In the distance we could see the blue waters of the Dead Sea, and the white limestone mountains of Quarantania.

At last we reached a place where there were many ruins, the remains of an ancient village; there were several old wells, and stones with crosses carved upon them, which showed that they dated back to the times of the Crusaders. We passed through these ruins, and Miss Schwarz took us to the side of the hill, where the newly-discovered tomb was to be found.

It seems that the Arabs, living in a village near, were ploughing on the hillside, and one of them moved a large stone out of the way of his plough. To his astonishment he saw that the stone had covered a deep, dark hole; he went down into this hole and found himself in a stone chamber, the masonry of which was quite perfect. Another entrance had been afterwards made into the tomb, and through this Miss Schwarz led us. She told us that her father thinks it was a burying-place for Christians in the fifth or sixth century, so it is not very old compared with most of the places in Jerusalem, but it is most curious and interesting. There are five stone steps leading down to the door of the tomb, and the door itself is made of one block of stone, and is still on its hinges, and moves backwards and forwards most easily.

All round the chamber were places cut out of the stone for the coffins to lie in—there were twelve of these in the principal room, but two other smaller chambers, leading out of the first one, contained more graves; these, however, had not been fully opened out when we were there. A large stone was at the mouth of each grave when it was discovered, and the Arabs had torn these away with the greatest haste, hoping to find some treasure buried with the dead. But though they opened every grave, they found inside nothing but dust.