O Jerusalem

FOUR

ث

Weapons are unnecessary on the main routes… but advisable on the others, as fire-arms, conspicuously carried, add a great deal to the importance with which the “Frank” is regarded by the natives.

—

BAEDEKER’S

Palestine and Syria

,

1912 EDITION

Now” being a relative thing when burdened by tents, water-skins, cooking pots, and mules, we did not get away until the middle of the morning. I packed up our meagre possessions and helped fold away the bell tent Holmes and I had shared since leaving Jaffa.

Once on the road, we headed slightly north of due east, in the direction of Jerusalem, although Ali admitted that we were only going as far as Beersheva. We followed the pattern that had been established our first day on the road: Ali and Mahmoud went in front, holding to a steady pace and never looking back except for Ali to shout the occasional command over his shoulder, telling us not to lag or stumble or let the mules stray. The two men led by as little as ten paces or as much as half a mile, and spent the whole time talking—or rather, Ali talked, with voice and hands, while Mahmoud listened and occasionally made response. Then came Holmes and myself, either in silence with my nose in the Koran or with him drilling me on Arabic grammar and vocabulary or lecturing me on customs and history. Behind us trailed the three mules, clattering and banging with the pots draped about them, obediently treading on our heels and breathing down our necks until we entered a village, when we had to take up their ropes lest the dogs spook them, or if we heard the rare sound of an approaching motorcar in the distance, which usually turned out to be an ancient Ford Tin Lizzie.

I had come to realise that Ali and Mahmoud were well known in this land. Mahmoud, despite his rough appearance, was a respected scribe and public reader. I found that they moved up and down the countryside in a more or less regular cycle, stopping for an hour or a week to draw up letters to distant relatives, contracts between neighbours, and pleas to the government, and to read letters received, or old newspapers, or even stories. The florid Arabic pleas to the Turkish rulers might recently have given way to more concise English documents, and the payment he accepted was now in Egyptian piastres and even the occasional English coin, but little else had changed. As we went along I began to appreciate the freedom the two brothers had, for they were familiar figures, and therefore accepted, but it was also accepted that they were different: nomads without livestock; lacking womenfolk but apparently no threat to the wives and daughters they came near; possessing a valuable skill that yet set them apart and gave them a touch of mystery and power; from no particular place, so the oddities in accent and vocabulary among us—Holmes’ proper kuffiyah and my own loosely wrapped turban, Ali’s Egyptian boots of shiny red leather and his long colourful jacket, our troop’s use of mules in a country that classified people either by the plebeian donkey-and-goat or the aristocratic camel-and-horse of the true Bedouin, our blue Berber eyes with the brown of our two Bedu companions, and even my spectacles—were not so much forgiven as expected, as if we formed a distinct and idiosyncratic tribe of our own. Ali and Mahmoud had lived this life for at least ten years, an ideal arrangement for a neighbouring (now occupying) government needing to keep watch on the activities of the countryside.

I wondered if now, with the war at an end, the brothers’ way of life was about to change. Would the government want spies in the land during a time of peace?

“Holmes, what do you make of them?” I nodded at the road ahead, where the two figures, in the Arab fashion that strikes the Western eye so strangely, were holding hands while Ali’s free arm waved in the air, illustrating a point. In Arab countries men hold hands in public; a man and a woman emphatically do not.

“You find them intriguing?” he asked.

“I don’t know what I find them. I don’t know this country, there may be an entire populace like them, as far as I know.”

“No, I believe you could assume that Ali and Mahmoud are very nearly unique here. Even T. E. Lawrence and Gertrude Bell draw the line considerably closer to home than these two.”

It took a moment for his meaning to sink in, and when it did, I demanded, “What do you mean? Are you suggesting they aren’t Arabs?”

“Most assuredly not. Can’t you hear the London in their diphthongs?”

“I assumed that Ali had been to an English-speaking school, his English is so good, but his accent is Arabic, not Cockney. And I don’t think I’ve heard Mahmoud say more than two dozen words in English.”

“Not Cockney, more like Clapham, and the Arab accent is an accretion. You really must work on your accents, Russell.”

“What would two brothers from Clapham be doing here?” I demanded incredulously.

“Russell, Russell. They aren’t brothers, surely you can see that? Aside from the complete lack of any physical resemblance, their accents and their acquired habits—table manners (if one can refer to such when there is no table), gestures, attitudes—are quite different. At the most they might be cousins, but personally I should not care to put money even on that.”

“Friends?” I asked suspiciously; this had to be one of his peculiar jests.

“Companions, who appreciate Arab dress and culture and enjoy the freedom of their gipsy life.”

“And do some work for the British government on the side.”

“For their king, yes. They are Mycroft’s, after all.”

Ah, yes, Mycroft, the older Holmes brother, everything the younger was not: corpulent, physically indolent, a life-long cog in the machinery of government. But like the Holmes whose apprentice I had become, Mycroft was brilliant, gifted with a far-sighted ability to discern patterns, and able to grasp instantly the central issue in a tangle. Too, Mycroft, like Sherlock, was unbendingly moral, a fortunate thing for the British people and for international politics, because Mycroft’s power within the government was, as far as I could see, nearly limitless. Had he chosen to do so he could very probably have brought the government to its knees. Instead, he gently nudged, and watched, and murmured the occasional suggestion, then sat back to watch some more. If anyone was capable of shaping a pair of Englishmen into Bedouin spies, Mycroft was the man (although I was far from certain that Holmes had not been pulling my leg). I had assumed that whatever task Mycroft needed done here would be as subtle as he was; I had begun to believe that it was so subtle as to be nonexistent. However, by the sounds of things, clarification would finally be given us in Beersheva, no doubt by the mysterious spymaster Joshua.

We stopped at one o’clock to water the mules and make tea, and when I had finished my tasks and came to sit by the small fire, I eased off the fiendish sandals and tucked my bleeding feet carefully under the hem of my dusty abayya. The sweet tea was supplemented by a handful of almonds and some rather nasty dried figs, and in less than half an hour Ali was putting things away. With a sigh I reached for the sandals, but was stayed by Holmes’ hand on my arm.

“Wait,” he said. He scooped a handful of almond shells from the lap of his robe and brushed them onto the dying embers, then rose and walked swiftly over to where the mules stood. Pausing a moment to study Ali’s complicated knotwork, he laid hands on the ropes and in a minute had one lumpy canvas bag both free and open. He dug inside, pulled out a familiar pair of boots that I had thought gone forever, closed the bag, and retied the ropes. When he came back to the fire he dropped the boots in front of me, then in one brisk motion he bent to catch up the flimsy sandals and tossed them on top of the burning almond shells.

The pair of stockings that I had stuffed inside the boots five days before were still damp with seawater and the shoe leather smelt musty, but I did not hesitate. I slid them on, did up the bootlaces, and returned the slim throwing knife that had been lodged awkwardly in my belt to its customary boot-top sheath. When I stood up in my old friends, neither Ali nor Mahmoud had said a thing, but my feet were shouting with relief, and I felt that I could walk to Damascus if necessary.

We travelled on through the desert place, seeing only the low black tents of other nomads like ourselves and a few hovels, until late in the afternoon we began to come upon débris from the battle of Beersheva fourteen months before: snarls of rusting barbed wire, the broken frame of a heavy gun, the bare and scattered skeleton of a horse, and strange tufts of rabbit wire reaching up to trip us—a mystery until Holmes explained that this was a means of laying a quick and temporary road for motorcars across stretches of soft sand. When the sun had completely left the sky, we stopped, ate a cold meal, and then pressed on in the almost complete darkness under a heavy layer of clouds.

In the daylight, thanks to my improved footgear, I had not found it difficult to keep up with our guides, but in the booby-trapped dark I fell behind again, and twice was trodden upon by the lead mule.

After about an hour of this the wind came up. An already cold night turned bitter, with the added pleasure of sand driven into our faces. I took off my spectacles, which were in danger of being sandblasted into opacity if not actually blown off my nose, wrapped my abayya more firmly around my body, and followed the dim form ahead of me.

It then commenced to rain. Ali and Mahmoud appeared, waiting for us to catch them up so they could help control the mules. Soon the drops were pelting down; lightning and thunder moved in on us until the storm was directly over our heads as we pressed on, clinging to the halters of the skittish animals for fear our tents and pans would gallop off into the night. The track, never a road, turned slick, and then sticky, until even those of us who had four feet were having a hard time of it.

When the hail began I stopped dead. “Damn it all!” I shouted at full voice, necessary against the rush of wind and the fast-increasing crescendo of pings of the hailstones on the big convex iron saj. “Why is it so almighty important that we reach Beersheva tonight?”

Neither of our guides chose to explain. However, my protest seemed to trigger their own recognition of futility, because they did not insist on pressing on. We fumbled about in the maelstrom for a while until the wind seemed to lose a few degrees of strength and I realised we were against an outcrop of rock. There we hobbled the mules closely and removed their burdens. Ali retrieved the big tent, but rather than attempting to put it up in the gale and the rocky ground, we simply crawled under it and wrapped ourselves up in its folds, huddling together in a mound while the hail smacked at the goat’s hair above our heads. It eventually died off into the silent whisper of snowfall; finally, towards morning, there was stillness and a deep, creeping chill.

I had drifted into something resembling sleep when the half-frozen tent shifted and crackled, and someone left our communal warmth—Ali, I decided, hearing his footsteps retreat. He returned a few minutes later, rustling strangely, and stopped near where we had tied the mules. After a couple of minutes he left the mules and came back towards where the three of us lay, and then stopped again. Up to now I had refrained from moving, theorising that if I continued to lie there numbly I might not awaken to the full force of the cold, but now I worked my hand up to where the rough tent lay across my face, and I pulled it away just in time to see Ali, crouched down on snow-covered ground and with his hands stretched well away from his body, strike at the flint he held. The spark set off a great whump of petrol-triggered flame: instantly the wet bushes he had dragged up burst merrily alight, and we had a fire.

This morning, unusually enough, Mahmoud cooked. He began with a porridge of some odd grain, hot and sweet and laced with cinnamon, eaten with wooden spoons from the common pot. This was followed by the inevitable flat bread, except that for him the big curving saj behaved itself and produced a bread that was light and unburnt and cooked through, tasting deliciously of wheat and eaten by tearing it into pieces and dipping it into a tin of melted butter. Then Mahmoud sent Ali back to the mules—it was now light enough to see what he was doing—and he came back with a dented tin that lacked a label. Hacking it open, he handed it to Mahmoud, who upended it over a pan. To my astonishment, it landed with a spurt of fat sizzling, and the smell of bacon shot up into the frigid air.

Mahmoud cooked the bacon crisp, and then set the pan on the ground between us. He did not eat any himself, but took out his prayer beads and watched with his inscrutable look as the three of us polished off the meat and even ate a good part of the grease, dipping bread into it until we were near to bursting. Jewish (and I had thought Moslem) dietary laws prohibit the eating of pork, of course, and I normally avoid it, but that morning I swear it was a gift straight from the hand of God, and it saved my life. When we repacked the pots, the morning was just cold, not deadly, and my sheepskin coat, though damp, was nearly adequate.

It is a superstition among the Bedouin, Holmes had mentioned to me during one of his little lectures, not to begin a day’s journey until the dew is off the ground, lest the spirits take the traveller. The custom reflects good common sense, as hair tents packed wet will not survive for long. That morning, however, had we waited for dry tents we should have still been sitting there at sunset, so we beat the snow and ice out of the black tent as best we could, redistributed the remaining load between two of the mules, and heaved the unwieldy thing onto the back of the third grumbling animal.

The desert sparkled in the fresh morning, washed clean and without a cloud in the vast sky. Patches of snow lay on the highest hills, melting quickly when the sun hit them. Water pooled and ran down the wadi below us, and a bright haze of green lay over the rocky waste, with here or there a wildflower, to all appearances brought up miraculously overnight. The mules lipped up tender blades of young green grass as we went, their packs steaming gently as the sun gained warmth, and the world was a very contented place.

Except for our guides. Ali was silent as he walked, and Mahmoud seemed even more glum than usual. When I asked Holmes if he had any idea why they might be downhearted, he shook his head, and I shrugged my shoulders.

Meantime, the Promised Land was unfolding in beauty around us, my stomach was full, and my feet did not hurt for the first morning in what seemed like many. It is an amazing thing, the difference to one’s powers of concentration a pair of comfortable shoes can make. I seemed to be seeing my surroundings anew, including my companion.

“Your beard is coming along nicely, Holmes,” I commented after a while. “Does it itch?”

“It begins to be tolerable. The first ten days are always the worst.”

“And are you wearing kohl around your eyes?” We had all taken extra care with our toilette that morning, both as a necessity, having spent the night in close proximity to a filthy, goaty, smoke-impregnated tent, and because we were going into a small city filled with curious eyes. Ali had curled his moustaches with care; Mahmoud had beaten the dust from his abayya; my boots were brushed off against a corner of the tent, and my hair was securely knotted into its shapeless turban.

“Every well-dressed Bedouin wears kohl.”

“It’s quite dashing. Actually, you’re beginning to look remarkably ferocious.”

“Thank you. Now repeat the conversation we have just had, in Arabic.”

We struggled through another lesson in my new tongue. I had now reached a state of fluency roughly equal to that of a braindamaged three-year-old, and had yet to say a word in the language to anyone but my companions, but I had begun to catch whole phrases in conversations without having consciously to pick over the words looking for meaning, rather like Ali picking over the lentils for stones. In another week, perhaps, I might find myself actually thinking in scraps of the tongue. Until that time it would be exhausting work, this language with five different gutturals, six dentals, eight pronouns, and thirty-six means of forming the plural.

In halting Arabic I informed Holmes that the rocks were red and the small flower was white, that flies were a plague from Allah and that the mules stank. He in turn described the holy city of Mecca (forbidden to infidels such as he) and told me about the true Bedu, complete nomads who survived on camel’s milk and goat’s meat in the deep desert, who lived for horses and for raiding and who looked with scorn on any who tilled the earth. I took the thin opening and slipped with relief into English for a while.

“Your accent is Bedouin, is it not? It seems smoother than Ali’s,” I noted.

“I learnt the language in Arabia proper, not among the fringe peoples. Mahmoud’s accent is quite good.”

“But you still say they’re English?” It would, I reflected, explain the bacon.

“Without a doubt. However, I should not mention it in their hearing, if I were you.”

Holmes dropped his voice at this last remark, since our two companions had halted to wait for us. When we were before them, Mahmoud spoke, to my surprise, and in English.

“Because the wadis are now full we must go into the city by the road. Amir must remain absolutely silent. He must not speak, no matter the provocation.”

“You are expecting provocation?” I asked. He ignored me.

“The one thing we must avoid is a full-body search of Amir. Even among the English, there would be consequences were a woman to be found dressed as a man. Remember: Silence.”

He was curiously impressive, was Mahmoud, not unlike Holmes in his intensity and his complete self-control. I followed behind, subdued and not terribly interested in Arabic lessons; After half an hour or so we dipped down into a small wadi, and there we paused while Ali took a wrapped parcel from inside his robe, added to it his pearl-handled revolver and another, smaller parcel from Mahmoud, pulled the rifle from deep in one of the packs, and held his hand out for the revolver Holmes carried. Last of all he unstrapped his gold wrist-watch (the hands of which had not moved in six days), and he wrapped it all in a sheet of oiled cloth from one of the saddle-bags and secreted the whole bundle in a niche, arranging some rocks in front to keep it in place and hidden, but making certain that we saw where he was putting the armory. Natives such as ourselves were not encouraged to bear arms.

The area in back of us was a network of wadis and hills, including the (now flowing) watercourse of the Wadi el Saba, up which the British Army had made its decisive push for Beersheva in October of 1917. To our right were the remnants of the Turkish trenches, dug into the flat plain and lined by barbed wire, lengths of which remained, rusted and lethal. We gave the defences wide berth, and soon came to the rutted track to the coast that passed for a road, built originally by the Turks, used now to link the Beersheva garrison with the coastal railway up out of Egypt at Rafa. A year earlier, when Beersheva and Gaza were the front-line cities of British occupation, the road would have been an ant’s trail of military activity. Now the town was rapidly slumping back towards its usual somnolent state, and if the lorries still came and went all day and half the night, they did so with less urgency.

Unfortunately, this state of affairs meant that the soldiers stationed there, already disgruntled at having to wait for demobilisation as the weeks after Armistice crawled into months, felt both left out and itching for something to do, and at the check-point into Beersheva it quickly became apparent why Ali and Mahmoud were so apprehensive, and why they had rid themselves of their weapons.

Half a mile from the check-point, Ali guided the mules to the side of the road and inexplicably set about making tea. Lorries rumbled up and down, laden camels plodded softly along, and we sat a stone’s throw from the road, sipping our tea. It was not a very leisurely tea break, however; both of our Arabs were wound tight, and sat on their heels smoking and drinking and never taking their eyes off the point where the road dwindled into the western horizon.

Without warning Mahmoud rose, tossed the contents of his just-filled glass of tea into the fire, and snatched mine from my lips to do the same. Ali, moving easily but wasting no time, gathered up all the equipment, shovelled it unceremoniously into a saddle-bag, and cinched it shut. Within minutes we were on the way east into the city, and because at Mahmoud’s insistence I had removed my attention-getting spectacles, I had absolutely no idea what they had seen to spark such movement.

The bored soldiers at the check-point were pleased to see us, and obviously recognised our guides.

“Why, if it ain’t our old pals Tweedledee and Tweedledum. And look, Davy, they got some friends today. Ain’t that nice?”

“Even wogs have friends, Charlie.”

“Too true, Davy, especially when they’re pretty as the skinny one.”

It was fortunate that the dye on my skin obscured any blood that rose on my cheeks, because their comments soon escalated, becoming remarkably graphic. Nonetheless, all four of us stood with our eyes on the ground until the two soldiers tired of talk, and one of them strolled over and slipped the point of his bayonet under the pack ropes. The mules skittered backwards to the full extent of their leads as our possessions rained down about their hoofs. In two minutes everything we owned was spread on the ground for the inspection of His Majesty’s troops, who trod up and down and kicked the coffee-pots and tent pegs across the mud. They seemed most disappointed to find nothing more lethal than a paring knife, and I shuddered to think what would have happened to us had we retained our guns.

They were just tiring of this when I became aware of the approach of what Ali and Mahmoud had seen earlier: an entire caravan of Bedouin—men, women, and children, camels, dogs, horses, goats, and sheep. There was even a lone chicken, squawking in agitation from a rough cage tied atop one of the camels. The front of the caravan stopped dead at the check-point but the tail continued to move forward, spreading out until it blocked the roadway in both directions. Lorries ground to a halt, drivers leant out of their windows and shouted curses, and an armoured car, horn blaring, pushed its way through the crowd on the verge, trying to leave the town. The two British soldiers, forced to abandon us before they had finished their fun, contented themselves with loud remarks about the filthy thieving habits of the bloody wogs, then turned away.

Ali bent to retrieve a fragile porcelain cup. As the soldier named Davy walked up the line, before any of us could react, he slipped his rifle from his shoulder and casually swung it around to swat Ali a tremendous crack on the head with the gun’s heavy butt. Ali collapsed amongst the kitchenware. I took one furious step forward, and felt Holmes’ hand freeze like a vice on my upper arm.

Fortunately neither soldier had noticed our movements, and they continued on their way to harass the camel caravan, but Mahmoud had seen my instinctive move and frowned at me thoughtfully for an instant before he bent to help Ali, who was already sitting up, holding his head and moaning loudly.

It seemed to take forever to bundle everything back onto the mules and slip away before the soldiers could return to us, but we made our escape into the streets of the town. Near the Turkish railway station we stopped to tuck a few loose bits back into the tenuous hold of Mahmoud’s knots. The precarious load would not have lasted an hour on the road, but apparently we were not going far. Holmes and I helped Mahmoud by bodily lifting the bulge of one pack while he looped a few more lengths of rope about the whole thing, mule and all. When the knot was tied he paused to look over the mule’s back at me.

“When the soldier hit Ali,” he said in a low voice and with perfect English diction, “it looked as if you meant to attack the man.”

“Yes, I’m sorry. I didn’t think.”

“But you would have gone to All’s defence? Physically?”

“Under different circumstances, certainly.”

He did not seem angry at my disobedience, just puzzled. Finally he said, “But women do not fight.”

“This one does,” I answered. He held my gaze, then looked sideways at Holmes.

“This one does,” my mentor confirmed.

“Wallah!” Mahmoud muttered with a shake of his head, recited something in Arabic, and went to help Ali to his feet. I looked at Holmes with a raised eyebrow.

“From the Koran, I believe,” he supplied. “He used the same passage the other day; it seems to be weighing heavily on his mind, for some reason. Loosely translated his words meant, ‘Would Allah make a woman to be covered in ornaments and powerless in a fight?’ A rhetorical question, of course.”

Of course.