O Jerusalem

THREE

ت

Common folk have no great need for the services of religious officials.

—

THE

Muqaddimah

OF IBN KHALDÛN

Three nights later, the refrain that had run so steadily through my mind at the beginning was back again: What on earth did I imagine that I was doing here? I ought to be home, in bed this night, in England. I ought to be in Oxford, worried about nothing more uncomfortable than the next day’s tutorial. Instead we had tumbled into this foreign land under the authority of two Arabs who told us the least they could about our goal and our setting. After delivering his report on Jaffa, Mahmoud had drawn back into his taciturn mode and Ali seemed positively to enjoy our discomfiture. It was, all in all, not an easy partnership, and if something was not done to change matters, the relationship between the four of us looked to descend from its current state of mistrust into open animosity. I had thought, for a brief moment earlier that evening, that the restraints were about to drop, but Holmes had inexplicably refrained from reacting at Mahmoud’s terse orders, and the shaky truce stood.

The Arab’s orders had been obeyed, and here we lay, draped on our bellies atop the precarious and crumbling remains of a stone wall, keeping very still despite the discomfort because our slightest movement sent small stones tumbling down the sheer rock face at my right hand onto the roof far below. It was five days after our arrival in the country, closer to dawn now than midnight, and we were supposedly burglarising the mullah’s villa. I say “supposedly” because in fact Ali and Mahmoud were inside while Holmes and I were given the task of keeping an undetected watch lest we be discovered—although again, why we were next to each other, abandoning the majority of the house’s perimeter to the unguarded night, had not been explained. We had been there some ninety minutes, although it seemed like nine hundred. The rock beneath me had drilled itself into my softer organs and permanently rearranged the bones of my rib cage and pelvis, while the cold had penetrated even the heavy sheepskin coat I wore. I turned my head where it lay on my forearms and murmured to my companion, whom I could touch if I wished, but could scarcely see now that the day-old moon had gone down.

“Holmes, will you tell me please what we are meant to be doing here?”

It was the first time I had voiced the question aloud. After all, I was the one to blame for our presence here, and if it had not exactly turned out the way I had imagined, this ungentle sojourn among the sites and sights of the Holy Land, I was not about to give Ali and Mahmoud the satisfaction of seeing us turn back.

Not that I hadn’t been tempted to walk away from them, beginning with the first day on the road. We covered barely twelve miles that day, although most of it was spent far from actual roads, picking our way around cactuses and over endless stones, and I was dropping with exhaustion when we halted in the late afternoon among some pomegranate trees near a dirty, nearly deserted pile of slumping mud huts that Ali called Yebna. He came over to where I had collapsed against a boulder and all but kicked me in the ribs to get me up and helping to make camp. My fingers fumbled with the well ropes and the water-skin seemed to weigh more than I did, but I did as I was told, ate without tasting the mess of brown pottage that was dinner, and slept like a dead thing for ten hours.

I woke early the next morning, the first day of 1919, when the faint light of dawn was giving substance to the canvas over my head. The air was cold but I heard the pleasing crackle of burning tinder from the direction of the fire pit in the black tent. Holmes was gone from his side of our tent, his bed-roll in a heap against the far wall, and I thought it was the sound of him going out the flaps that had awakened me.

Oddly enough, Holmes and I had embarked on a similar quest the previous summer, taking to the roads of rural Wales in the guise of a pair of gipsies, father and daughter, to rescue a kidnapped child. Of course, that was August in Wales, and therefore wet and relatively warm, and in a green countryside populated with settled folk. Plus that, the goal of our time there had been clear from the beginning—nothing at all like this, come to think of it, although the sense of the companionship was much the same.

My gentle musing from the warm cocoon of my bed-roll was rudely broken by Ali’s harsh voice commanding me to rise, punctuated by a boot against the side of the tent that nearly collapsed it on top of me. Stifling a groan, I unwrapped myself and started the day.

Only late in the afternoon and far to the south did it dawn on me what Yebna had been: I had slept the night, all unknowing, in Javneh, the birthplace of rabbinical Judaism. The Mishnah, that remarkable, convoluted, cumbersome, and life-affirming document that laid the foundation of modern Judaism, was begun in Javneh, at the rabbinical academy that had come into being following the destruction of Jerusalem in the year 70. I had been walking among the very tombs, in the self-same dust where Rabbi Johanan ben Zakkai had taught, where Gamaliel and Akiva and—

Mahmoud refused to turn back. Ali just laughed at me. Holmes shrugged and said, “Maalesh. ” I mourned, and fumed.

South we had continued, moving towards Gaza but keeping away from the relatively fertile and more populous coastal plain. We entered the fringes of desert, the hardscrabble lands where rains brought short-lived carpets of wildflowers for a few days and bald drought the other eleven months, where the nomadic peoples coaxed tiny patches of wheat and barley to grow in odd corners, yielding a few handfuls of grain in a good year, and the slightly more settled peoples gathered around wells and deep, age-old cisterns, using buckets and primitive well mechanisms to water their melons and their olive trees. This was the desert of Palestine: not the brutal deep desert of sand dunes and camels but a thorny, rocky, dry, inhospitable place where one could carve a living if one was stubborn and smart and did not expect too much. A hard land and a hard people, with occasional flashes of great beauty and tenderness. My respect for them grew along with the blisters on my feet.

The following night we stopped short of Gaza, in a flat place within sight of a well but outside a small village. The two tents went up, the traditional black Bedouin tent shared by Ali and Mahmoud in front of our smaller canvas structure, and before the first flames of Ali’s cook fire had subsided into coal, two men appeared before it, carrying letters for Mahmoud to read. One of them had an answer he needed written, and for the first time I saw Mahmoud’s brass inkwell, stuffed with cotton wool to keep spillage at a minimum, and watched him act as scribe to the man in the dust-coloured clothing. Ali went off and returned with a large and muscular haunch of goat, and after we had eaten, six men from the village showed up to drink coffee and say the evening prayers and then have the contents of a two-week-old newspaper read to them. A long discussion followed, for the most part incomprehensible to the odd, bespectacled, beardless youth in the background, who was nine parts asleep in the warm smoky fug that gathered within the low walls of woven goat’s hair, lulled by the gurgle of the narghiles, or water pipes, and the easy rhythm of the speech of a race of storytellers. Strange as it seemed, with the blood of an orange grower named Yitzak barely dry on Mahmoud’s hem and without the faintest idea of our goal, I began to relax, safe in a desert place three thousand miles from the seemingly all-knowing foe who had dogged our footsteps in England. This was a simple place, as simple as heat and cold, pain and relief, life and death. At the moment, I was alive and comfortable, and the world was a good place to be.

The interval when Mahmoud might have prepared more coffee came and passed, and eventually the narghiles ceased their burbling and the men took their leave, their loud voices fading slowly into the night. I followed them out of the tent, and stood, staring at the bright sliver of moon in the black sky, surrounded and celebrated by a million sharp stars and the splash of the Milky Way. I was bewitched by the magnificence, enthralled by the utterly alien sky, and would have stood there frozen (and freezing) had Ali not grasped me unexpectedly by the arm and whispered harshly, “Get your coat and come. Silently.”

I got my coat and I came, and I followed Holmes and the two others through the dark night until we came to this villa, and the wall, and finally to my petulant question to Holmes.

“Holmes, will you tell me please what we are doing here?”

His dry voice came back in a breath, inaudible two paces off. “We are waiting to be relieved of duty.”

I lay for a few more minutes, watching the outline of the dark villa and its uninhabited grounds, and spoke again.

“What were they talking about, all the men tonight around the fire?”

“The usual topics of farmers. The lack of rain. The price of wheat. A ghazi —raid—one group of Bedouin carried off against another, that meant trampling two fields and killing a milch cow. And of course the manifold wickednesses of the government. Mahmoud,” he added, “seemed most interested in the last, although equally careful that the others would not see his interest in politics.”

“I see,” I said, not altogether certain that I did. “Is he after evidence about the murder of Yitzak and his two hired men, or something more general?”

“Both, I should say.”

I was rather relieved to hear him say that; for the past two days neither Arab had given the faintest indication that they were anything but itinerant scribes. I was even beginning to think that the two of them were no longer actively involved in Mycroft’s affairs, and that we had been parked with them by mistake. “Then why do I get the feeling that they’re giving us meaningless tasks like mapping that site just to see what we’re going to do?”

“Probably because that is precisely what they are doing,” he replied, sounding sardonic.

“It is becoming very tedious.”

“Mmm.”

Silence again, but for the inevitable night noises of a Palestinian village. Jackals cried in the distance, a donkey brayed below us, and the cockerel that had been crowing with monotonous regularity paused for twice its normal thirty seconds, then resumed. Someone in the house at the foot of the cliff treated us to another round of his tubercular cough, then quieted. My legs were now numb except for the sharp hot points of blisters on the soles of my feet and between the first two toes where the rough strap of the sandals had rubbed the skin raw. It was becoming difficult to breathe, I noticed. It was also extremely cold.

I thought about the two Arabs in the house and about the odd current of humour that had permeated Holmes’ reply to my query— and, now that I stopped to think of it, one I had thought I detected at times over the past days as well. It was not like Holmes merely to follow directions patiently, especially when they were unreasonable directions such as guarding the villa from a single place in the rear. The country and the way of life were foreign to me, but not completely so to Holmes; the distractions that kept me from looking too closely at just what it was Ali and Mahmoud were doing with us would not apply to him. It was as if two people were blindfolded and led around in circles, one of them a stranger who did not know what was happening, the other a person who knew exactly where he was and yet allowed himself to be led about as well, thinking it a great joke. I could not understand it, and I was too cold and uncomfortable to try.

“You’re certain you’d recognise Ali’s jackal noise?” I asked after a while.

“He has not made the signal,” Holmes said firmly. “They are still in the house.”

“Raiding the pantry and having a kip in the soft beds, I don’t doubt.”

“Don’t be peevish, Russell.”

I fell silent. Another twenty minutes passed. In the two hours we had lain there, nothing had changed except that the rooster in the village had been joined by another perhaps a mile off. At two hours and a quarter Holmes breathed again in my ear.

“Something is moving near the house.”

Before I could react I felt more than saw a dark shape moving across the ground towards us.

“Ya walud,” came the now-familiar voice, pitched low.

“Here, Ali,” said Holmes.

The man had the eyes of a cat, and picked his way by starlight over the uneven ground to where we lay.

“There is a problem with the safe. Mahmoud cannot persuade it to yield, and the dog and the guard will awaken soon.”

“Does he wish me to try?”

“You said you knew modern safes.” It is difficult to express nuances of doubt and disapproval in a whisper, but Ali managed.

“I will come,” said Holmes, and rolled cautiously off the wall, sending a minor shower of stones off the cliff and rousing the dog of the house below, but not, fortunately, the human inhabitants. Holmes made to follow Ali into the blackness, then paused. “By the way, Russell, I meant to wish you many happy returns. Although I suppose by now I am a day late.” He vanished before I could respond, but in truth I had quite forgot that it was my nineteenth birthday. For which I had received a sunburnt nose, a matching set of blisters, a bone-deep bruise on my right heel, a stomach clenched tight with hunger, and whatever bruises my current wall-top position might leave me with. All in all, one of the more interesting collections of birthday presents I had ever received.

Much cheered, I resigned myself for another lengthy wait. To my surprise, less than half an hour later there was another motion of a shadow approaching, and Ali reappeared, much agitated.

“The safe is open, but that foolish man insists on looking at everything it contains. You must tell him to close it so we can leave. There is no more chloroform.”

I followed Holmes’ example and allowed myself to roll off the wall, only to be knocked breathless by a large stone in the belly. Gasping as silently as I could, I got to my feet and staggered after Ali and into the house.

From the outside it had seemed a large building, and moving through the dark rooms—over smooth marble floors and thick carpets, through air scented with cooking spices and sandalwood— confirmed my impression that this was indeed one holy man who did not embrace poverty.

We turned into a corridor towards a dimly lit rectangle and entered the room, Ali closing the door silently behind us. I looked at the two unshaven men in dirty headgear and robes, bent over the papers, then at the man in garish dress beside me, and could only hope that the guard Ali had chloroformed did not wake, because if he had a whit of sense he would shoot before asking any questions.

Holmes sat on a low stool in front of the wall safe, rapidly but methodically sorting through the stack of papers on his knees. As we came in I saw him pause over a letter, open it, glance at it, and slip it with its envelope into the front of his robe. Mahmoud was looking more animated than I had ever seen him, standing over Holmes and clasping his hands together as if to keep from wringing them, or applying them to Holmes’ throat. Ali held out one hand to me, gesturing with the other to the two men.

“Tell him,” he insisted. “Tell him we must go.”

I studied Holmes for a minute, and thought I recognised the disapproving set to his features. I turned to Ali. “What is he looking for?”

“We only wish to retrieve one letter. We have found it. We must be gone.”

“Is it possible that this mullah could be a blackmailer?” I asked. Ali’s eyes slid to one side and Mahmoud growled something about the man in truth not being a mullah, both of which I read as affirmatives. “Holmes doesn’t much care for blackmailers,” I commented, but added to the man himself, “It will be getting light out in another half hour.”

The only sign Holmes gave that he had heard me was a slight increase in the speed of his examination. There was no budging him, until twelve long minutes later he had reached the end of the stack, having removed several more papers, and stood to put the remainder back into the safe. In a flurry of activity Ali and Mahmoud returned the furniture to its place, closed and reset the safe, straightened the lithograph of Jerusalem that covered it, and hurried us out the door.

The sky was beginning to lighten. Mahmoud locked the villa’s door and we slipped among the shadowy shapes of fragrant trees towards the front wall (this one high, well maintained, and topped by broken glass) that protected the grounds from the road. Again Mahmoud took out his picklocks and applied them to the gate, unlocking it and relocking it after us. A groggy bark came from the back of the house, but we were away, down the hill, across two switchbacks in the road and the terraces of olive trees they wove through. We retrieved the possessions that we had left there, harmless bundles of provisions and armloads of firewood bound with twine, and finally rejoined the road some distance from the house. When dawn came we were just another quartet of stolid Arab peasants about our business. Half an hour later a lorry of British soldiers passed us without slowing, its dust cloud applying another layer of grime to our clothes and skin.

When we neared our camp site we could see two figures, squatting like gargoyles just outside the front edge of the black goat’s-hair tent belonging to Mahmoud and Ali. One was a young man, swathed in many layers of dust-coloured fabric; as we approached he stood up to thrust his wide, callused feet into a pair of once-black shoes that lacked laces and were far too big for him, but were the necessary recognition of an Occasion. The woman at his side remained hunched on the ground, a small heap of faded black with the married woman’s red strip of embroidery travelling up the front of her dress. Her head and upper body were wrapped in the loose shawl called a burkah, which she had raised across her face immediately she saw us coming, to supplement the red-and-blue veil decorated with gold coins that she already wore. I wondered, not for the first time, why the women in this country did not suffocate come the heat of summer. Her coal black eyes, the only part of her visible other than an inch of indigo-tattooed forehead and the work-rough fingers of her right hand, were trained on the ground, although when she thought no one was looking, she shot hungry, curious glances at us.

The man greeted Mahmoud as a long-lost brother, hanging on to his hand and talking effusively. We had been through this before, however, and I had read the sign of the borrowed shoes correctly, for rather than removing his guest to the more leisurely depths of the rug-strewn tent, Mahmoud merely dropped to his heels on the ground outside, away from the camel-dung fire that Ali was beginning to rekindle. This was business, then, not friendship.

The rest of us continued as before, ignored completely by the two engaged in their transaction and ignoring the quick glances of the woman (whom of course the man had not bothered to introduce, and who therefore did not quite exist). I took great care not to stare at her, despite my natural curiosity, since I was, after all, to all appearances a male. I had to be content with the occasional furtive glance as I dropped my bundle of twigs and sticks next to the fire and waited for Ali to empty the last of the water from the skin so I could take it half a mile to the well and fill it. Twice my looks caught hers, and on the second occasion she came as close to blushing as a dark-skinned woman can. It was a peculiar feeling, to be thought flirting with a woman, but I decided that if the poor thing took some scrap of pleasure in the idea that a travelling stranger, one who not only had exotic light eyes but flaunted a pair of mysterious and undoubtedly expensive spectacles over them as well, found her a source of secret desire, it could only do her good.

I slung the flaccid water-skin over my shoulder and walked off. It was the third time I had made this particular trip, and the track grew no less rocky, nor did the filled goatskin get any lighter. Similarly, the two camels belonging to the group camped nearer the well were just as surly as they had been before, although the dog did not follow me as far as usual, and the camp children seemed to have accepted the fact that I would not respond to their chatter, merely running out and watching me from under their child-sized kuffiyahs. When the woman before me at the well had filled her Standard Oil tin with water, balancing it easily on her head before swaying off without deigning to glance at this apparent male condemned to perform a woman’s tasks, I found that not only did the track grow no shorter, but the blisters which this and previous well ropes had raised on my palms were as painful as ever. I filled the skin, arranged on my back the obscene, gurgling object (which, even after days of seeing it hanging near the cook fire, still looked to me like an animal putrefied to the point of bursting), and plodded back to the encampment, past the sounds of the invisible women grinding the day’s flour and the visible men in the shade of their tents, talking and smoking and watching me pass.

When I returned, Ali had made tea and was busy whittling—a donkey, it was, small but lively. Holmes was not to be seen, and Mahmoud had his writing table set up and was busy composing a document of some sort for his client, who was still talking, telling Mahmoud something about his brother and a camel, although his speech was far too rapid for me to follow. Twice the young man consulted the woman, who was either a sister or his wife, waiting impatiently for her to answer in her low, intelligent-sounding voice, before resuming his monologue. Mahmoud wrote placidly, the dip of his pen into the brass inkwell a constant rhythm broken only when he paused to trim the quill with his penknife, until finally the page was filled with a beautiful, clean, precise calligraphic script. He signed it with a flourish, the man put his mark on it, and Ali was called over to sign for good measure. Mahmoud sprinkled the document with sand to dry the ink, tapped it clean, folded it in on itself, sealed it with wax, and wrote an address on the front. The man accepted it with effusive thanks and a payment of small coins, and then he and our resident scribe each smoked a black cigarette and drank a glass of water to bring out the full flavour of the powerful tobacco. Eventually Mahmoud’s clients departed, the man still talking, to the woman now, who as she stood up was revealed to be greatly pregnant. She shot me a glance both shy and ardent before following at his heels.

Immediately they had disappeared down the track, Ali jabbed his vicious blade back into its scabbard (causing me to wonder fleetingly if Arabs ever disembowelled themselves when putting their knives away in a hurry) and then whipped out the flats of bread that he had cooked the previous evening, and we moved into the tent to break our fast around the fire. I was already very tired of this diet of damp unleavened bread, burnt in spots, which even when hot had no more taste than blotting paper. That morning, however, I was ravenous, and would have eaten the stuff gladly plain, but as recognition of the successful night’s work Ali uncorked a jug of honey and placed it on the carpet between us. He then gave us each a handful of dates and another of almonds, and poured out four tin mugs of the sour goat’s milk called laban that he had bought the day before from our neighbours. Holmes and Mahmoud, I noticed, had their food placed directly before them, whereas my portions were deposited very nearly at arms reach. Ali did not like eating with a woman, and although he submitted to the necessity, he did all he could to demonstrate his dislike. Even Mahmoud put my coffee down on the carpet in front of me, instead of allowing me to take it directly from his fingers as he did with any male. I sighed to myself and stretched forward to retrieve my breakfast, and sat back on my heels to enjoy it.

When we had feasted, Mahmoud reached for the coffee-making accoutrements. Wordlessly, the rest of us settled back into our carpets, Ali with his carving and Holmes taking out pipe and tobacco from the breast of his robe, tucking the ends of his kuffiyah up into the thick black loops of the agahl that held it on his head, and proceeding to fill the pipe and light it with a coal lifted from the fire with the tongs. He had, over the last days, taken to smoking the black leaf of the natives, but this morning’s pipe gave off the familiar smell of his usual blend, a small quantity of which he had brought with him off the ship. The homely smell was a jolt in this foreign and uncomfortable setting, and for the first time I was washed by a wave of homesickness.

He waited until Mahmoud had the coffee beans in the long-handled pan and the luscious burnt-toast smell was beginning to mingle with the pipe smoke before he put the tongs down next to the fire and reached again into his robe. He drew out the letters that he had taken from the villa’s safe. There were five in all, four of which he tossed onto the carpet at Mahmoud’s feet. The fifth he held out to me. Mahmoud’s face went stony and Ali sat upright abruptly, his great knife held out dangerously in his right hand, the carving forgotten in his left.

“That is not for you,” he objected angrily.

“You two may be accustomed to acting blindly under orders,” said Holmes, concentrating on his pipe, “but neither Russell nor I have accepted any such commissions. Speaking for myself, I do not care to put my hand into any crevice I have not examined first. The other papers,” he told me, “are the usual—two incautious love letters from a lady in Cairo, a landowner in Nablus referring to the purchase of illegally seized land, and a police report about—well, never mind that one. And there is this.”

I satisfied myself that Ali was not about to use the knife on us, then took the sheet of paper out of its envelope and unfolded it. Seeing that it was in German, and there was a great deal of it, I lowered my backside to the ground to stretch my legs and give my thigh muscles a rest—and immediately had all three men hissing at me.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” I objected. “I can only sit for so many hours with my knees in my armpits. My muscles cramp.”

“It’s your feet,” explained Holmes. “It is extremely bad manners to point the soles of your feet at someone. Almost as bad as eating with your left hand.”

“Sorry,” I muttered, and folded my painful extremities beneath me.

With the coffee halfway to roasted, Mahmoud could not very well put it back into the pouch, but it was with ill grace that he continued the ritual. I had finished the letter and was rereading it when the tiny porcelain cup was brusquely set down in front of me. I sipped it absently.

“Interesting,” I said. Holmes did not answer. I looked at him and found that he was sitting with one knee drawn up and the other leg tucked under his robe. He was studying his cup with exaggerated concentration, one eyebrow slightly raised.

I had known Holmes for nearly four of my nineteen years, during which time he, along with his housekeeper, Mrs Hudson, and his old companion-at-arms and biographer, Dr Watson, had become my only family. I had studied with him, spent thousands of hours in his often abrasive but never dull company, and worked with him on several cases, including the intense and dangerous kidnapping the previous summer; by now I knew him better than I knew myself, and read instantly what his posture was telling me.

“Hum,” I grunted, a considering sound, and read slowly through the German document a third time with his unverbalised but clearly expressed scepticism in mind. After consideration I began to see what he objected to. “You may be right,” I admitted, and only after I said the words did I notice the consternation on the two swarthy faces across from us. With the sweet flavour of revenge on my tongue I nodded my head deliberately, then folded the letter back into its envelope and returned it to Holmes.

“I should say the flourishes on the final e’s and the angle of the dots clinch it,” I said nonchalantly, and held out my cup to Mahmoud. “Is there more coffee?”

That gentleman gave me a long, expressionless look before reaching for the brass coffee beaker, but Ali could not control himself.

“Is this a secret language?” he burst out. “The hand signs are invisible.”

“Merely the communication of true minds,” said Holmes. Turning his gaze on Mahmoud, he continued, “What Miss Russell has noticed is that one of the letters we so laboriously stole from the mullah’s safe is a fake.”

“A fake!” exclaimed Ali dramatically without looking at Mahmoud. “What do you—”

“Planted by you.” Ali made a strangling noise. “Written by you.”

Ali began to protest in an increasingly theatrical manner, but Mahmoud began a very small and quiet smile deep in his eyes, and eventually Ali sputtered to a halt. Holmes’ voice went hard. “The night we landed, you had your fun, trailing us about and pushing us into heaps of rotting fish and mounds of refuse. I protested at the time, yet since we left the town you have continued to lead us a song and dance through the Judean hills. I have said nothing, and if you do not think Russell has been remarkably patient, you do not know her. I understand that you found it necessary to test our mettle; in your position, I might have done the same. However, this has gone quite far enough.” He waggled the letter, then leant forward and dropped it onto the embers. That neither of our companions rushed to snatch it to safety was all the confirmation needed. Mahmoud’s forged letter from a purported German spy in Tiberius smoked for a moment on the coals, puffed into flame, and curled blackly. Holmes looked up from the fire. “Five days of keeping us in the dark is about three days more than I should have thought necessary, particularly considering the way it began. Make your decision: Trust us, or let us go our way.”

It was Mahmoud, still giving his impression of an amused stone, who broke the gaze, flicking a glance at me before he bent forward to dash the dregs from his coffee onto the letter’s crisp, trembling curl of ash, and continued the motion into standing upright. He handed his cup to Ali.

“We will go to Joshua now,” he said, and turned towards the depths of the tent.

“Ah,” said Holmes with a nod of satisfaction. “Joshua.”

Mahmoud paused with his hand on the tent’s central post. “You know Joshua?”

“I know of him.”

Mahmoud studied Holmes for a moment, and then went on into the tent.

“Who is Joshua?” I asked. Holmes looked at Ali with an eyebrow raised, inviting an explanation, but the man merely dusted his robes free of wood shavings and moved off to begin breaking camp. “Holmes?” I persisted.

“You know your Bible, Russell. Surely you don’t need me to explain his nom de guerre.”

“Joshua is a code name? For one of the military officers?”

“This Joshua prefers to remain in a more, shall we say, unrecognised position than at the head of his troops.”

I thought about it, then suggested, “The Book of Joshua; ‘He sent out two men to spy out the land?”

“Precisely so,” Holmes agreed, and, knocking his pipe out on the stones of the cook fire, went to empty his possessions from our tent.