The Last Exodus
329
Would the Jews accept the terms? No one knew. Newsmen were told to be on the alert. We waited an hour, two
hours, nearly three hours, and still no word from the Jews.
Why were they stalling? Was the Haganah planning to smash
through Zion Gate again to liberate them? Mahmoud Bey
ordered the resumption of firing. The soldiers began trouping
back to the fighting front.
A cry rose from the direction of Armenian quarter. "Ejou!
Ejou! Here they come!" The Arabs around me began to
shout. I rushed to get a ringside view. The party was shunted
to a low stone building behind a thick, inaccessibly high
stone wall opposite the School of the Holy Translators. Entrance was through a tomblike passageway surrounded by ancient masonry and guarded by a thick iron door. Once inside,
I found myself in a quaint old-world courtyard surrounded
by stone buildings. On my right was the Armenian Church of
the Holy Archangel. Its bell tower was bent with age, and the
cross above it was also bent. A grapevine with roots somewhere in the earth reached almost the height of the belfry.
A gust of wind sometimes moved the bells and one heard a
lone, mournful gong; otherwise no bell had tolled since the
Mandate's end.
The squat stone edifice on my left—inside which the Jewish delegation was deliberating with Major Abdullah el Tel
himself—was a holy shrine, the site of the House of Annas.
After Christ was betrayed at Gethsemane He was dragged by
the mob, which had come with "lanterns and torches and
weapons," up Via Dolorosa and the Street of the Chain for a
preliminary examination by Annas the Priest, after which He
was taken to the House of Caiaphas on Mount Zion—a site
commemorated now by the Church of the Holy Savior—where
He was tried and condemned. On the following day, He appeared before Pilate. I wondered how many of those about
me knew of the hallowed ground on which they stood, smoking, joking, and waiting impatiently for the surrender?
At last a heavily armed officer of the Legion, a curved dag-