CHAPTER VIII.
THE OTHER SIDE OF THE DESERT There was a story in Jerusalem so true or so well told that I can see the actors in it like figures in coloured costumes on a lighted stage.
It occurred during the last days of Turkish occupation, while the English advance was still halted before Gaza, and heroically enduring the slow death of desert warfare.

There were German and Austrian elements present in the garrison with the Turks, though the three allies seem to have held strangely aloof from each other.
In the Austrian group there was an Austrian lady, "who had some dignity or other," like Lord Lundy's grandmother.

She was very beautiful, very fashionable, somewhat frivolous, but with fits of Catholic devotion.
She had some very valuable Christian virtues, such as indiscriminate charity for the poor and indiscriminate loathing for the Prussians.
She was a nurse; she was also a nuisance.

One day she was driving just outside the Jaffa Gate, when she saw one of those figures which make the Holy City seem like the eternal crisis of an epic.
Such a man will enter the gate in the most ghastly rags as if he were going to be crowned king in the city; with his head lifted as if he saw apocalyptic stars in heaven, and a gesture at which the towers might fall.

This man was ragged beyond all that moving rag-heap; he was as gaunt as a gallows tree, and the thing he was uttering with arms held up to heaven was evidently a curse.
The lady sent an inquiry by her German servant, whom also I can see in a vision, with his face of wood and his air of still trailing all the heraldic trappings of the Holy Roman Empire.