458
CAIRO TO DAMASCUS
nian for Hebrew characters in the alphabet. I saw an Armenian democracy; I read Armenian newspapers. I saw
Armenians creatively at work, consumed with the energy of
a liberated people. I saw Armenia being rebuilt. Yes, I
dreamed. And I yearned with all my heart that I might be
among my kinsmen. But then, we, too, are a patient people.
We, too, can wait. We, too, can pray. We, too, can dream
and hope and live in the eternal faith of a resurrected homeland. . . .
TO MY BIRTHPLACE
ON A clear, cool November day, I boarded a plane for Alexandropolis. The plane rose high into white, fleecy cloudsall dazzling white about me. My thoughts went to the palm
branch in my suitcase which I had carried with me everywhere as a symbol of peace and good will. It had brought me
neither, for the Moslem Middle East was like a doomed giant
who in his wrath would generate even more trouble—to the
West and to itself—more hate, more sin, and perpetrate more
of his feudal rot upon his own people before he became a
corpse cast upon the scrap heap of history. I felt that nothing
short of revolution for liberty, such as the American revolution of 1776, could save the Arab people. And nothing short
of such a democratic revolution could save the Arab world
from Communism.
Now I was carrying the palm branch to Greece, the land
of my birth; to Alexandropolis, the place of my birth in the
hinterland of Greece.
Presently I felt the plane losing altitude, and in a few minutes the AEgean Sea and the Greek archipelago with its myriad
islands and inlets spread three thousand feet below me. I was
in Athens, capital of Greece. I was in the West. The East