326
CAIRO TO DAMASCUS
to death of its temples, holy places, holy books, holy memories. I watched the carnage and it nauseated me. I turned to
go downstairs just as another red flare—a call for help—shot
out from somewhere in the ghetto.
The school suddenly shook with renewed violence. Bren
and Hotchkiss guns from the armored cars concentrated their
fire upon a point just above where I was standing unprotected. Just as I raced inside I met Arab Legionnaires rushing
up to the roof with machine-guns. I stepped aside quickly.
A Jewish plane had been sighted, trying to locate the ghetto
and drop supplies. It was a tiny plane, possibly one of the
Piper Cub couriers used between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. The
whirr of its single engine sounded lone, distant, low, like the
magnified purring of a cat.
A red flare shot into the dark from the ghetto. "Here we
are," it said to the plane. The Arabs answered with a magnesium flare that lit up the area with an uncanny light. The
firing doubled in intensity. The Arabs were determined to
bring down the plane. But it flew imperturbably back and
forth, its drone just audible between bursts of machine-guns.
Then it faded into the distance. No one knew whether it
dropped anything. Like a mysterious bird it came, and left
just as suddenly.
The bombardment continued for another hour, then halted
at midnight. The flesh had tired of firing and destroying. The
Legion had done a good day's work, and even worked overtime. Now it was time to quit. My bedroom was the auditorium of the school which had been used as a dormitory for
children just before the Arabs took over. It was clean—by
Arab standards; and it was reserved for the English deserters
who were already snoring on the spring beds of the Armenians. In an adjoining bed slept Dan de Luce, the only one
among the newshounds who got down to the soldier level and
got a smell of it all.
On the wall facing my cot was a painting of Christ, with a
gaping hole through His left shoulder, at the spot where a