Gardens surrounded many of them and trees were being planted everywhere.
The children were well nourished, well clothed, and well trained. It
helped us to have more confidence in the dreams with the fulfilment of
which all Christendom is in sympathy. If only patience and unselfishness
can be set as watchmen over against the door of enthusiasm! We were told
that the Hebrew High Commissioner of Jerusalem looks to Ramallah as a
prophecy.

We sat for a while on the journey from Kantara to Cairo with a British
officer and a nurse who had seen hard service during the war and is now
in charge of a number of stations where the native nurses meet her to
report progress and receive further instructions. She helps them to
understand the care of mothers and young babies and trains them to fight
the terrible diseases of the eye that result in a staggering percentage
of blindness. The native girls are taking up their work with enthusiasm,
even the little children are sharing in the campaign against flies.
“That is a far harder campaign than any we have ever waged when you
consider the people you have to train to fight,” said the officer. And
remembering the flies on our days at Suez and Port Said, we could agree
with him. It was nearly midnight when she left the train at a little
station in the sand. Her man-servant was waiting with her horse and we
watched her ride off to her hospital out there somewhere in the
blackness. “No finer women on God’s earth than those who wear that
uniform,” said the officer.

A half hour or more and he left us. He was a lover of the desert and
almost made us forget how pitiless, how cruel, how destitute of all that
makes life for most of us, it is. He knew the names of all the stars and
when they would appear in the velvet sky over his great stretch of
camps. He loved the cold of the night and was not afraid of the heat of
midday, he loved the sunrise and sunsets and “the desert-folk worth many
times the puny men of cities.” He, too, rode off into the darkness.

At last—Cairo—and we left the train through the long station, bright as
day. A car was waiting. The luxury of our room made us feel that we had
entered fairyland. It had been so long since we had seen the things for
rest, comfort and cleanliness that had in our past been common
necessities, that now after these months of journeying about the world
they seemed extravagances indeed!

The next morning we looked through the open French windows with their
rose hangings, out upon the Pyramids and the Nile. The river lay almost
at our feet. The beauty of it was intoxicating in the soft light of the
rising sun. When my friend broke the silence she said, “It is indeed
beautiful,” then smiling she added “but,—

             If I forget thee, O Jerusalem,
             Let my right hand forget her skill.
             Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth,
             If I remember thee not,
             If I prefer not Jerusalem
             Above my chief joy....

  Awake, awake, put on thy strength; put on thy beautiful garments, O
  Jerusalem, the holy city.... Shake thyself from the dust; arise, sit
  on thy throne, O Jerusalem.—Peace be unto thee, O Zion.”

Transcriber’s note:

 1. Silently corrected typographical errors and variations in spelling.

 2. Retained anachronistic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings as
      printed.