I'm going to call on Scharnhoff." "You suspect him of double treachery ?" "I suspect him of being a one-track-minded, damned old visionary." I had met Hugo Scharnhoff.

Long before the War he had been a professor of orientology at Vienna University.

At the moment he was technically an "enemy alien." But he had lived so many years in Jerusalem, and was reputed so studious and harmless, that the British let him stay there after Allenby captured the city.

A man of moderate private means, he owned a stone house in the German Colony with its back to the Valley of Hinnom.
"Care to come ?" Grim asked me.
"Yes." "Know your Bible ?" He proceeded to quote from it: "And the rest of the acts of Ahaziah which he did are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the Kings of Israel ?"' "What of it ?" "That was set down in Aramaic, nowadays called Hebrew, something like three thousand years ago," said Grim.

"It's Aramaic magic.
Let's take a look at it." We trudged together down the dusty Bethlehem Road, turned to the east just short of the Pool of the Sultan (where they now had a delousing station for British soldiers) and went nearly to the end of the colony of neat stone villas that the Germans built before the War, and called Rephaim.