In his own way, with his chosen, unchaste instrument Fred is a musician of parts.  He can pick out the spirit of old songs, even when, as then, he hears them for the first time, and make his concertina interpret them to wood and wind and sky.  Indoors he is a mere accompanist, and in polite society his muse is dumb.  But in the open, given fair excuse and the opportunity, he can make such music as compels men’s ears and binds their hearts with his in common understanding.

Because of Fred’s concertina, quite without knowing it, those Armenians opened their hearts to us that night, so that when a day of testing came they regarded us unconsciously as friends.  Taught by the atrocity of cruel centuries to mistrust even one another, they would surely have doubted us otherwise, when crisis came.  Nobody knows better than the Turk how to corrupt morality and friendship, and Armenia is honeycombed with the rust of mutual suspicion.  But real music is magic stuff.  No Turk knows any magic.

At dawn, twisting and zigzagging in among the ribs of rock-bound hills, we sighted the summit of Beirut Dagh all wreathed in jeweled mist.  Then the only life in sight except ourselves was eagles, nervously obsessed with goings-on on the horizon.  I counted as many as a dozen at one time, wheeling swiftly, and circling higher for a wider view, but not one swooped to strike.

Once, as we turned into a track that they told us led to El Oghlu, we saw on a hill to our left a small square building, gutted by fire.  Twenty yards away from it, on top of the same round hill, strange fruit was hanging from a larger oak than any we had seen thereabouts —­fruit that swung unseemly in the tainted wind.

“Turks!” announced one of Kagig’s men, riding up to brag to us.  “That square building is the guard-house for the zaptieh, put there by the government to keep check on robbers.  They are the worst robbers!”

The man spoke English with the usual mission-school air suggestive of underdone pie.  As a rule they go to school at such great sacrifice, and then so limited for funds, that they have to get by heart three times the amount an ordinary, undriven youth can learn in the allotted time.  But by heart they have it.  And like the pie they call to mind, only the surface of their talk is pale.  Because their heart is in the thing, they under-stand.

“By hanging Turkish police,” said Fred, “you only give the Turks a good excuse for murdering your friends.”

“Come!” said the man of Zeitoon.  “See.”

He led the way down a path between young trees to a clearing where a swift stream gamboled in the sun.  Down at the end of it, where the grass sloped gently upward toward the flanks of a great rock was a little row of graves with a cross made of sticks at the head of each—­clearly not Turkish graves.

“Three men—­eleven women,” our guide said simply.

“You mean that the Turkish police—­”