Bearer will accompany you to a place where the escort will be in readiness.  God give your honour a good journey.  Mustapha Ben Nasir.

I went to the Governorate and phoned for the car to come and pick me up outside the Jaffa Gate.  The Arab followed me, and he and I were both searched at the gate for weapons, by a Sikh who knew nothing and cared less about Near East politics.  His orders were to search thoroughly.  He did it.  The man whose turn was next ahead of mine was a Russian priest, whose long black cloak did not save him from painstaking suspicion.  He was still indignantly refusing to take down his pants and prove that the hard lump on his thigh was really an amulet against sciatica, when the car came for me.

It was an ordinary Ford car, and the driver was not in uniform.  He, too, had only one eye in full commission, for the other was bruised and father swollen.  I got in beside him and let the Arab have the rear seat to himself, reflecting that I would be able to smell all the Arab sweat I cared to in the days to come.

We are governed much more by our noses than we are often aware of, and I believe that many people—­in the East especially—­use scent because intuition warns them that their true smell would arouse unconscious antagonism.  Dogs, as well as most wild animals, fight at the suggestion of a smell.  Humans only differ from the animals, much, when they are being self-consciously human.  Then they forget what they really know and tumble headlong into trouble.

The driver seemed to know which road to take, and to be in no particular hurry, perhaps on account of his injured eye.  He was an ex-soldier, of course:  one of those under-sized Cockneys with the Whitechapel pallor overlying a pugnacious instinct, who make such astonishing fighting-men in the intervals between sulking and a sort of half-affectionate abuse of everything in sight.  Being impatient to begin the adventure, I suggested more speed.

“Oh!” he answered.  “So you’re another o’ these people in an ’urry to get to Jericho!  It’s strynge.  The last one was a Harab.  Tyke it from me, gov’nor, I’ve driven the very last Harab as gets more than twenty-five miles an hour out o’ me, so ’elp me—­”

He tooled the car out on to the road toward Bethany, and down the steep hill that passes under the Garden of Gethsemane, before vouchsafing another word.  Then, as we started to climb the hill ahead, he jerked his chin in the direction of the sharp turn we had just passed in the bottom of the valley.  “Took that corner las’ time on one wheel!”

“For the Arab?”

“Aye.  Taught me a lesson.  Never agayn!  I ain’t no Arabian Night.  Nor yet no self-immolatin’ ‘Indoo invitin’ no juggernauts to make no pancykes out o’ me.  ’Enceforth, I drives reasonable.  All Harabs may go to ‘ell for all o’ me.”

He was itching to tell his story.  He was likely to tell it quicker for not being questioned; your Cockney dislikes anything he can construe into inquisition.  I remarked that the road didn’t seem made for speed—­too narrow and too rough—­and let it go at that.