_The Adventure into the Desert_
Two pack-horses were stamping their hoofs impatiently outside a house
in Jerusalem in the early morning a week or two before Christmas.[65]
Inside the house a man was saying good-bye to his wife and his three
children. He was dressed as an Arab, with a long scarf wrapped about
his head and on the top the black rope of twisted goats' hair that the
Arab puts on when he becomes a man.
"Will you be long, Father?" asked his little four-year-old boy.
The father could not answer, for he was going out from Jerusalem for
hundreds of miles into the sun and the thirst of the desert, to the
land of the fiercest Arabs--Moslems whose religion tells them that
they must kill the infidel Christians. It was difficult to tear
himself from his wife and his children and go out to face death in
the desert. But he had come out here to carry to the Arab the story of
Jesus Christ, who Himself had died on a Cross outside this very city.
So he kissed his little boy "good-bye," wrenched himself away, climbed
on top of the load on one of the pack horses and rode out through the
gate into the unknown. He thought as his horses picked their way down
the road from Jerusalem toward Jericho of how Jesus Christ had been
put to death in this very land.
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