in wonder at this strange-looking personage, asked him what was his will. The hermit led his guest into an oratory, removed a stone from the wall, and brought out a wooden cross “of a cubit’s length” which he reverently handed to the king, telling him it was made from the sacred Tree of Calvary. He added a prediction that the king would not at this time succeed in winning the land, however hard he might strive for it; and to demonstrate the reality of his own prophetic gift, he further foretold his own death on that day week. Richard took him back to the camp to prove whether his words would come true. Seven days afterwards the prophet died.[961] Sixty years later, there was a tradition in Palestine that on one occasion when the men of the Third Crusade, on the point of marching upon the Holy City, were by the jealousies among their leaders compelled to turn back, a knight in Richard’s service “cried out to him, ‘Sire, sire, come here and I will shew you Jerusalem.’ And when he heard that, he cast his surcoat before his eyes all weeping, and said to our Lord: ‘Fair Lord God, I pray Thee that Thou suffer me not to behold Thy Holy City, since I cannot deliver it from the hands of Thine enemies.’”[962] This incident, in itself quite possible, is in Joinville’s report of the story placed in a setting of which the details are certainly not historically accurate. If it really occurred, its true place is most probably at the close of Richard’s nocturnal visit to the Mount of S. Samuel, as the sunrise on July 4 lighted up the lower slopes of the mountain-range of which that eminence was the crown, and revealed the city on its coign of vantage at the south-eastern angle of [Sidenote: _July 4_] the plateau. A few hours later the whole host was back at Ramlah.[963]