When It Was Dark: The Story of a Great Conspiracy

When at length he awoke it was with a sensation of mental and bodily vigour, a quickening of all his pulses in hope and expectation, which was in fine contrast to the doubts and hesitations of the Jaffa roads.

A bright sun poured into the room.

He got up and went to the window. There was a deep, unspoken prayer in his heart.

The hotel was in Akra, the European and Christian quarter of Jerusalem, close by the Jaffa Gate, with the Tower of Hippicus frowning down upon it.

The whole extent of the city lay beneath the windows in a glorious panorama, washed as it was in the brilliant morning light. Far beyond, a dark shadow yet, the Olivet range rose in background to the minarets and cupolas below it.

His eye roved over the prospect, marking and recognising the buildings.

There was the purple dome of the great Mosque of Omar, very clear against the amber-primrose lights of dawn.

Where now the muezzin called to Allah, the burnt-offerings had once smoked in the courts of the Temple – it was in that spot the mysterious veil had parted in symbol of God's pain and death. It was in the porches bounding the court of the Gentiles that Christ had taught.

Closer, below the Antonia Tower, rose the dark, lead-covered cupola of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

Great emotion came to him as he gazed at the shrine sacred above all others for so many centuries.

He thought of that holy spot diminished in its ancient glory in the eyes of half the Christian world.

Perhaps no more would the Holy Fire burst forth from the yellow, aged marble of the Tomb at Easter time.

Who could say?

Was not he, Harold Spence, there to try that awful issue?

He wondered, as he gazed, if another Easter would still see the wild messengers bursting away to Nazareth and Bethlehem bearing The Holy Flame.

The sun became suddenly more powerful. It threw a warmer light into the grey dome, and, deep down, the cold, dark waters of Hezekiah's Pool became bright and golden.

The sacred places focussed the light and sprang into a new life.

He made the sign of the Cross, wondering fancifully if this were an omen.

Then with a shudder he looked to the left towards the ogre-grey Turkish battlements of the Damascus Gate.

It was there, over by the Temple Quarries of Bezetha, the New Tomb of Joseph lay.

Yes! straight away to the north lay the rock-hewn sepulchre where the great doctors had sorrowfully pronounced the end of so many Christian hopes.

How difficult to believe that so short a distance away lay the centre of the world's trouble! Surely he could actually distinguish the guard-house in the wall which had been built round the spot.

Over the sad Oriental city – for Jerusalem is always sad, as if the ancient stones were still conscious of Christ's passion – he gazed towards the terrible place, wondering, hoping, fearing.

It was very difficult to know how to begin upon this extraordinary affair.

When he had made the first meal of the day and was confronted with the business, with the actual fact of what he had to do, he was aghast at what seemed his own powerlessness.

He had no plan of action, no method. For an hour he felt absolutely hopeless.

Sir Robert Llwellyn, so his friends believed, had been in Jerusalem prior to the discovery of the New Tomb.

The first duty of the investigator was to find out whether that was true.

How was he to do it?

In his irresolution he decided to go out into the city. He would call upon various people he knew, friends of Cyril Hands, and trust to events for guiding his further movements.

The rooms where Hands had always stayed were close to the schools of the Church Missionary Society; he would go there. Down in the Mûristan area he could also chat with the doctor at the English Ophthalmic Hospice; he would call on his way to the New Tomb.

It was at The Tomb that he might learn something, perhaps, yet how nebulous it all was, how unsatisfying!

He set out, down the roughly paved streets, through the arched and shaded bazaars – places less full of colour and more sombre than the markets of other Oriental cities – to the heart of the city, where the streets were bounded by the vision of the distant hills of Olivet.

The religious riots and unrest were long since over. The pilgrims to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre were less in number, but were mostly Russians of the Greek Church, who still accepted the Church of the Holy Sepulchre as the true goal of their desires.

The Greeks and Armenians hated each other no more than usual. The Turks were held in good control by a strong governor of Jerusalem. Nor was this a time of special festival. The city, never quite at rest, was still in its normal condition.

The Bedouin women with their unveiled faces, tattooed in blue, strode to the bazaars with the butter they had brought in from their desert herds. They wore gaudy head-dresses and high red boots, and they jostled the "pale townsmen" as they passed them; free, untamed creatures of the sun and air.

As Spence passed by the courtyard of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre a crowd of Fellah boys ran up to him with candles ornamented with scenes from the Passion, pressing him to buy.

The sun grew hotter as he walked, though the purple shadows of the narrow streets were cool enough. As he left the European heights of Akra and dived deep into the eastern central city, the well-remembered scenes and smells rose up like a wall before him and the rest of life.

He began to walk more slowly, in harmony with the slow-moving forms around. He had been to Omdurman with the avenging army, knew Constantinople during the Greek war – the East had meaning for him.

And as the veritable East closed round him his doubts and self-ridicule vanished. His strange mission seemed possible here.

As he was passing one of the vast ruined structures once belonging to the mediæval knights of St. John, thinking, indeed, that he himself was a veritable Crusader, a thin, importunate voice came to him from an angle of the stone-work.

He looked down and saw an old Nurié woman sitting there. She belonged to the "Nowar," the unclean pariah class of Palestine, who are said to practise magic arts. A gipsy of the Sussex Downs would be her sister in England.

The woman was tattooed from head to foot. She wore a blue turban, and from squares and angles drawn in the dust before her, Spence knew her for a professional geomancer or fortune-teller.

He threw her a coin in idle speculation and asked her "his lot" for the immediate future.

The woman had a few shells of different shapes in a heap by her side, and she threw them into the figures on the ground.

Then, picking them up, she said, in bastard Arabic interspersed with a hard "K" – like sound, which marks the nomad in Palestine, "Effendi, you have a sorrow and bewilderment just past you, and, like a black star, it has fixed itself on your forehead. A letter is coming to you from over the seas telling you of work to do. And then you will leave this country and cross home in a steamer, with a story to tell many people."

Spence smiled at the glib prophecy. Certainly it might very well outline his future course of action, but it was no more than a shrewd and obvious guess.

He was turning to go away when the woman opened her clothes in front, showing the upper part of her body literally covered with tattoo marks, and drew out a small bag.

"Stay, my lord," she said. "I can tell you much more if you will hear. I have here a very precious stone rubbed with oil, which I brought from Mecca. Now, if you will hold this stone in your hand and give me the price you shall hear what will come to you, O camel of the house!"

The curious sensation of "expectation" that had been coming over Spence, the fatalistic waiting for chance to guide him which, in this wild and dream-like business, had begun to take hold of him, made him give the hag what she asked.