How difficult to believe that so short a distance away lay the centre of the world's trouble! Surely he could actually distinguish the guard-house in the wall which had been built round the spot. Over the sad Oriental city--for Jerusalem is always sad, as if the ancient stones were still conscious of Christ's passion--he gazed towards the terrible place, wondering, hoping, fearing. * * * * * It was very difficult to know how to begin upon this extraordinary affair. When he had made the first meal of the day and was confronted with the business, with the actual fact of what he had to do, he was aghast at what seemed his own powerlessness. He had no plan of action, no method. For an hour he felt absolutely hopeless. Sir Robert Llwellyn, so his friends believed, had been in Jerusalem prior to the discovery of the New Tomb. The first duty of the investigator was to find out whether that was true. How was he to do it? In his irresolution he decided to go out into the city. He would call upon various people he knew, friends of Cyril Hands, and trust to events for guiding his further movements. The rooms where Hands had always stayed were close to the schools of the Church Missionary Society; he would go there. Down in the Mûristan area he could also chat with the doctor at the English Ophthalmic Hospice; he would call on his way to the New Tomb. It was at The Tomb that he might learn something, perhaps, yet how nebulous it all was, how unsatisfying! He set out, down the roughly paved streets, through the arched and shaded bazaars--places less full of colour and more sombre than the markets of other Oriental cities--to the heart of the city, where the streets were bounded by the vision of the distant hills of Olivet. The religious riots and unrest were long since over. The pilgrims to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre were less in number, but were mostly Russians of the Greek Church, who still accepted the Church of the Holy Sepulchre as the true goal of their desires. The Greeks and Armenians hated each other no more than usual. The Turks were held in good control by a strong governor of Jerusalem. Nor was this a time of special festival. The city, never quite at rest, was still in its normal condition. The Bedouin women with their unveiled faces, tattooed in blue, strode to the bazaars with the butter they had brought in from their desert herds. They wore gaudy head-dresses and high red boots, and they jostled the "pale townsmen" as they passed them; free, untamed creatures of the sun and air. As Spence passed by the courtyard of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre a crowd of Fellah boys ran up to him with candles ornamented with scenes from the Passion, pressing him to buy.