“That cannot well be.  Occasionally others go to pray in that place.  Also, there is a Moslem who has made the pilgrimage from Trichinopoli.  I myself have promised to show him the mosque tonight, because he leaves Jerusalem at dawn, and only I speak a language he can understand.  There will be others with him, and I cannot refuse to take them down below the Rock.”

“That is nothing,” Grim answered.  “They will think nothing of a deaf-and-dumb man praying or sleeping in a a corner.”

“Is that all he wishes to do?  He will remain still in one place?  Then come.”

“One other thing.  That fellow who went and fetched you—­he sits over there by the north door now—­he will ask you questions about me presently.  Tell him I’m leaving for Damascus in the morning.  If he asks what we have been speaking about so long, tell him I brought you the compliments of Mustapha Kemal.”

“I will tell him to go to jahannam!”

“Better be civil to him.  His hour comes tomorrow.”

The sheikh led the way along one side of the inner of three concentric parts into which the mosque is divided by rows of marble columns, until we came to a cavernous opening in the floor, where steps hewn in the naked rock led downward into a cave that underlies the spot on which tradition says Abraham made ready to sacrifice his son.

It was very dark below.  Only one little oil lamp was burning, on a rock shaped like an altar in one corner.  It cast leaping shadows that looked like ghosts on the smooth, uneven walls.  The whole place was hardly more than twenty feet wide each way.  There was no furniture, not even the usual mats—­nothing but naked rock to lie or sit on, polished smooth as glass by centuries of naked feet.

I was going to sit in a corner, but Grim seized my arm and pointed to the centre of the floor, stamping with his foot to show the exact place I should take.  It rang vaguely hollow under the impact, and Suliman, already frightened by the shadows, seized my hand in a paroxysm of terror.

“You’ve got to prove you’re a man tonight and stick it out!” Grim said to him in English; and with that, rather than argue the point and risk a scene, he followed the sheikh up the steps and disappeared.  Grim’s methods with Suliman were a strange mixture of understanding sympathy and downright indifference to sentiment that got him severely criticized by the know-it-all party, who always, everywhere condemn.  But he certainly got results.

A legion of biblical and Koranic devils owned Suliman.  They were the child’s religion.  When he dared, he spat at the name of Christianity.  Whenever Grim whipped him, which he had to do now and again, for theft or for filthy language, he used to curse Grim’s religion, although Grim’s religion was a well-kept secret, known to none but himself.  But the kid was loyal to Grim with a courage and persistence past belief, and Grim knew how to worm the truth out of him and make him keep his word, which is more than some of the professional reformers know how to do with their proteges.  I believe that Suliman would rather have earned Grim’s curt praise than all the fabulous delights of even a Moslem paradise.