He began to walk more slowly, in harmony with the slow-moving forms around. He had been to Omdurman with the avenging army, knew Constantinople during the Greek war--the East had meaning for him.
And as the veritable East closed round him his doubts and self-ridicule vanished. His strange mission seemed possible here.
As he was passing one of the vast ruined structures once belonging to the mediæval knights of St. John, thinking, indeed, that he himself was a veritable Crusader, a thin, importunate voice came to him from an angle of the stone-work.
He looked down and saw an old Nurié woman sitting there. She belonged to the "Nowar," the unclean pariah class of Palestine, who are said to practise magic arts. A gipsy of the Sussex Downs would be her sister in England.
The woman was tattooed from head to foot. She wore a blue turban, and from squares and angles drawn in the dust before her, Spence knew her for a professional geomancer or fortune-teller.
He threw her a coin in idle speculation and asked her "his lot" for the immediate future.
The woman had a few shells of different shapes in a heap by her side, and she threw them into the figures on the ground.
Then, picking them up, she said, in bastard Arabic interspersed with a hard "K"-like sound, which marks the nomad in Palestine, "Effendi, you have a sorrow and bewilderment just past you, and, like a black star, it has fixed itself on your forehead. A letter is coming to you from over the seas telling you of work to do. And then you will leave this country and cross home in a steamer, with a story to tell many people."
Spence smiled at the glib prophecy. Certainly it might very well outline his future course of action, but it was no more than a shrewd and obvious guess.
He was turning to go away when the woman opened her clothes in front, showing the upper part of her body literally covered with tattoo marks, and drew out a small bag.
"Stay, my lord," she said. "I can tell you much more if you will hear. I have here a very precious stone rubbed with oil, which I brought from Mecca. Now, if you will hold this stone in your hand and give me the price you shall hear what will come to you, O camel of the house!"
The curious sensation of "expectation" that had been coming over Spence, the fatalistic waiting for chance to guide him which, in this wild and dream-like business, had begun to take hold of him, made him give the hag what she asked.