When It Was Dark: The Story of a Great Conspiracy

"Come to security!

"Prayer is better than sleep!

"God is most great!

"There is no god but God!

"Arise, make morning, and to God be the praise!"

He had heard the magnificent chant as he passed by, almost kneeling with his Arabs. So short a time ago! Hardly three months – he had kept no count of time lately, but it could hardly be four months.

How utterly unconscious he had been on that radiant morning outside the Damascus Gate! He had seen the men at work, and was sitting under his sun-tent writing on his pad; he was just lighting a cigarette, he remembered, when Ionides, the foreman, had come running up to him, his shrewd, brown face wrinkled with excitement.

And now, even as he sat there on that stormy midnight, far from the world, even now the whole globe was echoing and reverberating with his discovery. He had opened the little rock chambers, and it seemed that the blows of the picks had set free a troop of ruinous spirits, who were devastating mankind.

Pandora's box – that legend fitted what he had done, but with a deadly difference.

He could not find that Hope remained. It would have been better a thousand times if the hot Eastern sun had struck him down that distant morning on his way through the city.

The awful weight, the initial responsibility rested with him.

He alone had been the means by which the world was being shaken with horrors – horrors growing daily, and that seemed as if the end would be unutterable night.

How the wind shrieked and wailed!

Εγω Ιωσηφ ὁ ἀπο Αριμαθειας

The words were written in fire on his mind!

The wind was shrieking louder and louder.

The Atlantic boomed in one continuous burst of sound.

He looked once more at the leading article in the paper.

It was that article which was long afterwards remembered as the "Simple Statement" article.

The writer had spoken the thought that was by this time trembling for utterance on the lips and in the brains of all Englishmen – the thought which had never been so squarely faced, so frankly stated before.

Here and there passages started out more vividly than the rest. The words seemed to start out and stab him.

" – So much for India, where, sprung from the same Cause, the indications are impossible to mistake.

"Let us now turn to the Anglo-Saxon sprung communities other than these Islands.

"In America we find a wave of lawlessness and fierce riot passing over the country, such as it has never known before.

"The Irishmen and Italians, who throng the congested quarters of the great cities, are robbing and murdering Protestants and Jews. The United States Legislature is paralysed between the necessity of keeping order and the impossibility of resolution in the face of this tremendous bouleversement of belief.

"From Australia the foremost prelate of the great country writes of the utter overthrow of a communal moral sense, and concludes his communication with the following pathetic words:

"'Everywhere,' he says, 'I see morals, no less than the religion which inculcates them, falling into neglect, set aside in a spirit of despair by fathers and mothers, treated with contempt by youths and maidens, spat upon and cursed by a degraded populace, assailed with eager sarcasm by the polite and cultured.'

"The terrible seriousness of the situation need hardly be further insisted on here. Its reality cannot be more vividly indicated than by the statement of a single fact.

"consols are down to sixty-five

" – and therefore we demand, in the name of humanity, a far more comprehensive and representative searching into the facts of the alleged 'discovery' at Jerusalem. Society is falling to pieces as we write.

"Who will deny the reason?

"Already, after a few short weeks, we are learning that the world cannot go on without Christianity. That is the Truth which the world is forced to realise. And no essay in sociology, no special pleading on the part of Scientists or Historians, can shake our conviction that a creed which, when sudden doubts are thrown upon it, can be the means of destroying the essential fabric of human society, is not the true and unassailable creed of mankind.

"We foresee an immediate reaction. The consequences of the wave of antichristian belief are now, and will be, so devastating, that sane men will find in Disbelief and its consequences a glorious recrudescence and assurance of Faith."

Hands stared into the dying fire.

A solemn passage from John Bright's great speech on the Crimean War came into his mind. The plangent power and deep earnestness of the words were even more applicable now than then.

"The Angel of Death has been abroad throughout the land: you may almost hear the beating of his wings. There is no one, as when the first-born were slain of old, to sprinkle with blood the lintel and two side-posts of our doors, that he may spare and pass on."

So they were asking for another commission! Well, they might try that as a forlorn hope, but he knew that his discovery was real. Could he be mistaken possibly? Could that congress of the learned be all mistaken and imposed upon? It was not possible. It could not be. Would that it were possible.

There was no hope, despite the newspapers. For centuries the world had been living in a fool's paradise. He had destroyed it. It would be a hundred years before the echoes of his deed had died away.

But the terrible weight of the world's burden was too heavy for him to bear. He knew that. Not for much longer could he endure it.

The life seemed oozing out of him, pressed out by a weight – the sensation was physical.

He wished it was all over. He had no hope for the future, and no fear.

The weight was too heavy. The outside dark came through the walls, and began to close in on him. His heart beat loudly. It seemed to rise up in his throat and choke him.

The pressure grew each moment; mountains were being piled upon him, heavier, more heavy.

The wind was but a distant murmur now, but the weight was crushing him. Only a few more moments and his heart would burst. At last!

The dark thing huddled on the hearth-rug, which the girl found when she came down in the morning, was the scholar's body.

The newspaper he had been reading lay upon his chest.

CHAPTER IV

A LUNCHEON PARTY

Constantine Schuabe's great room at the Hotel Cecil had been entirely refurnished and arranged for the winter months.

The fur of great Arctic beasts lay upon the heavy Teheran carpets, which had replaced the summer matting – furs of enormous value. The dark red curtains which hung by windows and over doors were worked with threads of dull gold.