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Haifa, Mount Carmel, Wollstein House
Palestine
21. i. 34
Dear Father Freud,
In the centre of Haifa, smoking my last French cigar, at last I can settle down to write to you. I just cannot tell you how many mornings I have longed to get in touch with you by means of pen and paper, but every time some irritation of the daily round has prevented me. At one moment the central heating did not function, at another the oil stove was smelling, at another the rain was coming in through the door and I had to stop it up. Then the wind changed, the rain came in through the window, and it took a lot of patience, time, cunning and newspaper before one could hold a match near the closed window without its being blown out. At the moment Carmel is an impressive, desolate landscape, almost Scottish; situated between the bay and the open sea, it is full of pines, stones and puddles of rain, and above it the grey, wind-swept sky is occasionally broken by sunshine. We are living, not in barracks, as you might perhaps imagine, but in the most modern hotel up here; central heating means that it is Order of the Eagle, first class, black, with oak leaves and swords.1 But the engineer who installed the central heating left the builder out of his reckoning and he forgot the chimney. When this was added later it was too narrow, and