He phoned to some place or other for a staff automobile, and the man was there with it within three minutes.  We piled in and drove at totally unholy speed down narrow streets between walls, around blind right-angle turns where Arab policemen stood waving unintelligible signals, and up the Mount of Olives, past the British military grave-yard, to the place they call OETA.* The Kaiser had it built to command every view of the countryside and be seen from everywhere, as a monument to his own greatness—­the biggest, lordliest, most expensive hospice that his architects could fashion, with pictures in mosaic on the walls and ceilings of the Kaiser and his ancestors in league with the Almighty.  But the British had adopted it as Administration Headquarters. [Headquarters:  Occupied Enemy Territory Administration.]

All the way up, behind and in front and on either hand, there were views that millions* would give years of their lives to see; and they would get good value for their bargain.  Behind us, the sky-line was a panorama of the Holy City, domes, minarets and curved stone roofs rising irregularly above gray battlemented walls.  Down on the right was the ghastly valley of Jehoshaphat, treeless, dry, and crowded with white tombs—­“dry bones in the valley of death.”  To the left were everlasting limestone hills, one of them topped by the ruined reputed tomb of Samuel—­all trenched, cross-trenched and war-scarred, but covered now in a Joseph’s coat of flowers, blue, blood-red, yellow and white. [* This is no exaggeration.  There are actually millions, and on more than one continent, whose dearest wish, could they have it, would be to see Jerusalem before they die.]

There were lines of camels sauntering majestically along three hill-tops, making time, and the speed of the car we rode in, seem utterly unreal.  And as we topped the hill the Dead Sea lay below us, like a polished turquoise set in the yellow gold of the barren Moab Mountains.  That view made you gasp.  Even Grim, who was used to it, could not turn his eyes away.

We whirled past saluting Sikhs at the pompous Kaiserish entrance gate, and got out on to front steps that brought to mind one of those glittering hotels at German cure-resorts—­bad art, bad taste, bad amusements and a big bill.

But inside, in the echoing stone corridors that opened through Gothic windows on a courtyard, in which statues of German super-people stared with blind eyes, there was nothing now but bald military neatness and economy.  Hurrying up an uncarpeted stone stairway (Grim seemed to be a speed-demon once his mind was set) we followed a corridor around two sides of the square, past dozens of closed doors bearing department names, to the Administrator’s quarters at the far end.  There, on a bare bench in a barren ante-room, Grim left me to cool my heels.  He knocked, and entered a door marked “private.”