Jona, as I expected, found the castle, but no relative in Tadmor; nor anyone who had ever heard who built or occupied the Fort-Castle on the rocks overlooking the city. I then questioned him again as to whether there had ever been such a family tradition concerning Mary Magdalene as he had related, to which he stoutly maintained there had been, and that Mary Magdalene, the fair Galilean Goddess whose life was interwoven into the family of Jesus of Nazareth, had once been a bright feature in the traditional tree of the Rechabites, but when or by whom it was introduced he did not know.

With Jona's plat of the ancient ruins, we passed up through the once beautiful city, where the immense granite columns from Egypt still stand single, in groups and in lines, retaining their caps, crowns and arches.

As described by Jona, we found upon the hill which overlooks the city the once elegant rock castle, surrounded by a deep water channel quarried from the solid rock, as before described, but, apparently, no one had lived there for ages.

Then, by following his plat west of the city proper, we found ancient family tombs as he had described, but the receptacles for the dead, four tiers high, were empty, save as a retreat for bats and owls. Still we found no documents concerning Jesus, and Jona's journey to Tadmor with his two wives was, as far as Jesus and the Goddess of Galilee were concerned, a complete failure. Unless his many evenings spent with me, relating the disjointed traditional reminiscences concerning Mary Magdalene, satisfies others as it does me of the heroic, unremitting zeal of woman when clouds of sorrow overshadow the day.

In parting from my Bedouin friends I shook hands with the three, and got one more good squeeze from Jona's disobedient Fatima. Then, according to Oriental custom, Jona hugged and kissed me. Females of the desert who are not Mohammedans are accustomed to kiss at will, the same as the men do. Jona was a kind-hearted, truthful old Arab. His wife's affection for me was pure desire for soul liberty, like a bird confined in a cage while other birds play in the trees.