The curtains swept back to reveal the Nile awash in artificial moonlight that faintly illuminated distant painted pyramids. For the next two and a half hours, Mr. Thomas took us to places in Arabia that no Christian among us had previously seen, and he did so with the world’s first aerial motion photography. Gasping, we viewed the pyramids—from above! We felt vertigo when “our aeroplane” banked and flew along the very roads upon which had marched the armies of Godfrey de Bouillon and Richard Coeur de Lion, eight centuries before. Hands at our lips, we felt we witnessed with our own eyes a thrilling charge by the massed cavalry of the Australian Light Horse and Imperial Camel Corps.

Lillie loosed a tiny excited squeal at the first image of the slim young Englishman she’d known in Jebail. She held my hand while Mr. Thomas related his own first glimpse of “Shareef Aurens,” the boy my sister knew as Neddy.

“My attention,” Mr. Thomas recalled sonorously, “was drawn to a group of Arabs walking in the direction of the Damascus Gate. My curiosity was excited by a single Bedouin who stood in sharp relief from his companions. He was wearing an agal, kuffieh, and aba such as are worn in the Middle East only by native rulers. In his belt was fastened the short, curved, golden dagger of a prince of Mecca.”

It was not this person’s marvelous costume that interested Mr. Thomas. “The striking fact was that this mysterious prince looked no more like a son of Ishmael than an Abyssinian looks like one of Stefansson’s Esquimaux. Why, this chap was as blond as a Scandinavian in whom flows cool Viking blood! My first thought,” Mr. Thomas assured us, “was that this might be one of the youngest apostles, come to life. His expression was serene, almost saintly in its selflessness and repose.”