And what I am about to tell you I should long since have forgotten had I not heard my father recite it to wondering listeners so many times during my childhood.

I cried out at sight of one of the photographs and looked at it, first with eagerness, and then with disappointment.  It had seemed of a sudden most familiar, in much the same way that my father’s barn would have been in a photograph.  Then it had seemed altogether strange.  But as I continued to look the haunting sense of familiarity came back.

“The Tower of David ,” the missionary said to my mother.

“No!” I cried with great positiveness.

“You mean that isn’t its name?” the missionary asked.

I nodded.

“Then what is its name, my boy?”

“It’s name is . . .” I began, then concluded lamely, “I, forget.”

“It don’t look the same now,” I went on after a pause.  “They’ve ben fixin’ it up awful.”

Here the missionary handed to my mother another photograph he had sought out.

“I was there myself six months ago, Mrs. Standing.”  He pointed with his finger.  “That is the Jaffa Gate where I walked in and right up to the Tower of David in the back of the picture where my finger is now.  The authorities are pretty well agreed on such matters.  El Kul’ah, as it was known by—”

But here I broke in again, pointing to rubbish piles of ruined masonry on the left edge of the photograph.

“Over there somewhere,” I said.  “That name you just spoke was what the Jews called it.  But we called it something else.  We called it . . . I forget.”

“Listen to the youngster,” my father chuckled.  “You’d think he’d ben there.”

I nodded my head, for in that moment I knew I had been there, though all seemed strangely different.  My father laughed the harder, but the missionary thought I was making game of him.  He handed me another photograph.  It was just a bleak waste of a landscape, barren of trees and vegetation, a shallow canyon with easy-sloping walls of rubble.  In the middle distance was a cluster of wretched, flat-roofed hovels.