O Jerusalem

SEVEN

خ

Victories often have hidden causes. Muhammad said, “War is trickery.” A proverb says, “A trick is worth more than a tribe.”

—

THE

Muqaddimah

OF IBN KHALDÛN

North of Beersheva lies a strip of true agricultural land where the soil is more than a thin scum of dust on the surface of rock and there is water enough to encourage the crops. The small fields of green wheat and barley looked strange at first to eyes accustomed to the stony places, but when we entered a brief hollow where the green stretched out on either side and the trees along the edges of the track had miraculously escaped the Turkish axe, I was hit again by a flash of déjà vu, back to the previous summer as gipsies. Here we had mules clanking behind us instead of the creak and tinkle of a gaudy horse-drawn caravan, and the sky over our heads was brilliant and clear instead of grey, but the feel of being on the road incognito was very similar.

“This reminds me of Wales,” I said to Holmes.

“In Arabic!” he growled, in that language. This also was like our time in Wales, when I was required to maintain the disguise even when unobserved. Obediently, I re-worded the sentence into something resembling Arabic.

Holmes corrected my vocabulary and pronunciation, and waited until I had repeated it, before he answered that yes, he remembered Wales, and then launched off on a completely unrelated tale of a Bedouin raid he had participated in while a guest of the Howeitat tribe, of which I understood every second word. My Arabic was improving, but it was a strain to have to think in a foreign tongue.

We lapsed into silence. A mile or so passed, the only sounds our laden mules, the occasional lorry, the tinkling of various goat bells, and from time to time the drift of conversation from the two men ahead of us. Ali seemed in high spirits; I wondered idly what he had come upon during his trip to retrieve the guns that cheered him so.

Mostly, however, my thoughts were on the previous night’s curious encounter with the spymaster Joshua. His stubborn determination to present an unruffled, unworried façade in the face of what to me seemed some fairly serious problems had struck me as odd then, and seemed even more peculiar at a distance. And he certainly was no judge of men, if he thought Holmes would be deflected by pretty words and stern instructions. Indeed, had he wanted Holmes’ interest to be piqued, he could not have chosen a better approach.

I stirred myself and trotted forward to join Holmes, who had drawn ahead of me while I was deep in thought.

“Tell me, Holmes,” I began, only to have him hiss at me in disapproval. I laboriously constructed a sentence in Arabic, which came out something like “Consider Joshua want help you—your, or no?”

Holmes put the sentence right for me, waited until I repeated it with the correct inflection, and then said merely, “I think you’d find that our friend Joshua is a very clever man indeed.”

Which was all well and good, but I personally would not trust the little man one inch further than was absolutely necessary.

By the time we made camp that night, having walked eighteen or twenty very uneven miles and heard nothing but Arabic since leaving Beersheva, I was exhausted. I did my chores and ate Ali’s tasteless food mechanically, and sat slumped against a bundle in front of the fire in the black tent, dimly aware of Mahmoud pounding the coffee mortar and Holmes talking again, telling another story. Without making an effort of concentration, it was just a flow of Arabic, sweetly guttural noises that ebbed and flowed against my eardrums, until my attention was snagged by the sound of my own name. I bent my ears to his words and decided after a minute that he was telling Ali and Mahmoud the tale of our Welsh adventure; as I listened, an odd thing happened. Despite, or perhaps because of, my combined lack of sleep, physical tiredness, and psychic revulsion for the ubiquitous foreign language, I suddenly realised that I was able to understand virtually everything that was being said. It was as if some internal mechanism had clicked on and the strange and laborious patterns fell neatly into place, so that even individual words that I did not actually know were clear in their context. For half an hour I sat by the fire, drinking minute cups of thick, bitter coffee and listening to Holmes build an epic out of the case in Wales.

Holmes had always been a good speaker, but this performance was, I realised later, extraordinary, particularly coming from a man long critical of his biographer’s habit of making romance out of what the detective viewed as an intellectual exercise. In the general run of things he scorned Watson’s vivid adjectives, yet that night in front of the cook fire Holmes produced a narrative decorated with embroidery and detail that even Watson might have hesitated to include. It was an exciting story, and only when it had rung to a close did I become aware of the glances that our two companions had been throwing my way. When the air was still again but for the whisper of the fire and the distant bray of a fellahin donkey, Ali turned to me with a glare. “Mouhal,” he said: Impossible.

“El haq,” I replied: The truth.

He continued in Arabic automatically. “You climbed up a tree, entered the house of an enemy, and rescued this child of the American senator? Alone? A woman—a girl?”

“It is true,” I repeated, pushing away the irritation his naked doubt caused.

“I do not believe this story,” Ali declared fiercely. A female who could not only heave him across the room and throw a knife with potentially deadly accuracy but perform heroic rescues on top of it was obviously more than he could bear.

“You would accuse me of falsehood?” Holmes asked in a quiet voice.

Ali looked from one of us to the other, no doubt seeing hot anger on my face, cold threat on Holmes’, and scorn in both. He even glanced at Mahmoud, but found no help in that blank visage.

“Exaggeration,” he said resentfully, in English.

“Very little,” said Holmes, accepting the word as if it had been an apology. He did not allow the subject to pass, however, but continued to study Ali as if the younger man were a schoolboy in danger of failing his course of study. This made Ali understandably uneasy. Holmes finally spoke, in a voice with cold steel in it.

“I can see we are going to have problems if you continue to think of Russell as a woman, and English. It could be highly dangerous. I recommend strongly that you stop, now. Think of Russell as Amir, a boy from out of the district who does not speak the local dialect very well. Refer to him using the masculine pronoun, picture him as a beardless youth, and you just might succeed in not giving us away.”

In the course of this speech Ali’s expression had gone from a smirk to disbelief to fury. He rose, his fists clenched, Holmes’ bland face infuriating him even further. He took a step forward. Mahmoud said his name, and he stopped, but turned to his partner and flung his hand out at Holmes in protest. Mahmoud spoke again, a phrase too terse for me to take its meaning, but it cut Ali off as with a blade. The angry man stared furiously at the calm seated one, then turned his back without a word and stormed into the night.

We all turned in shortly thereafter, but the night’s silence was broken by the lengthy murmur of conversation, rising and falling, from the direction of the black tent. I could hear no words, but it sounded to me as if Mahmoud did most of the talking.

In the morning Ali seemed filled with brittle cheerfulness, Mahmoud was more taciturn than ever, and Holmes was distracted and anxious to be away. We broke camp while Mahmoud made tea, then stood and sipped the hot, sweet drink in the chill dawn before entering the wadi, the shadows still stretched long against the ground.

Here at the lower end of the watercourse the wadi bottom was damp with pools of clear water, but the going was firm, with only the occasional patch of mud. Holmes walked in front, ignoring the tracks in the sandy soil, tracks left by those retrieving Mikhail’s dead body. His eyes were on the boulders above the wet line of the recent flood, and he stopped often to crane his neck at the top of the cliff above us.

The sun was overhead when we came around a bend to find Holmes standing on top of a group of three large boulders with a young tamarisk tree growing from the hill above them. We stopped. Ali gathered together a circle of stones and set about building a fire in the wadi bottom. Mahmoud retrieved his coffee kit. Soon the aroma of roasting beans filled the cold, damp canyon, but Holmes, oblivious, continued to quarter the hillside, stopping from time to time to finger a broken twig or bend close over a disturbed stone. Eventually I climbed up the rocks and joined him.

“There were at least two men,” he began without preamble as soon as my ears were within range. “And it was not a revolver but a rifle, three bullets, from there.” He jabbed a finger briefly at the top of the opposite cliff before returning to his task of gently prising pieces of stone free from the crumbling face of the cliff with the knife from his belt. “A first-rate marksman, too. He hit Mikhail’s turban with his first shot, fifty feet above here, and wounded Mikhail with this, his second.” His long fingers came out from the crack in the rock at which they had been worrying, holding a misshapen wad of grey metal between them. He displayed it to me, slipped it into his robe, and scrambled down a few feet to trace a faint smear of red-brown on the face of the rock and a small spatter farther on. “When the third one struck, he fell onto the boulder, as Joshua said.” On the boulder below, despite the intervening rainstorm, the stain was still clear.

We sat for several minutes, Holmes contemplating the sequence of events and I regretting the death of this man I had never met, until eventually the aroma of bread joined that of coffee, and we descended to take our midday meal.

When we had finished eating, the men lit their cigarettes and Holmes narrated the last scant minute of the life of Mikhail the Druse. “He was coming down into the wadi. He must have known someone was after him, because he was moving quickly, at a greater speed than is wise on this terrain, which caused him to skid and slide. He may not have known that the man with the rifle was there on the other side until the first bullet went through his turban…” He paused to lay a tuft of white threads on a flat stone. “He did wear the usual white Druse turban, I take it? I thought so. When the bullet went through it, he panicked, jumped and fell, caught himself on that rock with the black vein in it”—Ali and Mahmoud turned to look at the hillside—“and the second shot hit him, a flesh wound that bled quickly. It was on the left arm; there’s a partial hand-print farther along. This was the second round.” He took the flattened bullet from his robe and put it beside the scrap of fabric. “You can see the track of his flight down, even from here. Across the slide area, jumping to the boulder, he fell, rolled, and caught himself briefly on the dead tree, pulling it from the ground. He lost his bag then, turned to reach for it, and as soon as he stopped moving the third shot came, and he died. A short time later, the pursuer whom Mikhail was fleeing came down the same hill in Mikhail’s tracks, at a considerably slower pace. He checked to see that the Druse was dead, then went through his possessions. I would suggest that he removed something that had been written with that recently sharpened pencil we found in the pack.”

“How can you know that?” shouted Ali. “You were not there watching! Or were you?” he demanded, his eyes narrowing with sudden suspicion.

“Don’t be a fool,” Holmes replied in an even voice. “I read it on the stones. Ali, I know that Mikhail was your friend. I am sorry, but this is how he died, with thirty seconds of fear and a clean bullet.”

“And the knowledge of failure,” said Mahmoud bitterly.

“Perhaps we can change that failure.”

“But how do you know this thing?” Ali insisted. “You found the bullet and the threads, but how do you know of the second man?”

“It could not have been the man with the rifle who went through the Druse’s pack because the marksman was on the other side of the wadi, and by the time he reached this place the blood would have been dried. It was another man, already on this side, who reached Mikhail’s body and stepped in a patch of wet blood. He tracked it over to where the bag had fallen, paused there, shifting his position three or four times, and then went down to the floor of the wadi, where marks of his passing have been erased by the rising water. He wore boots,” Holmes added. “Stout ones. If you wish, I will show you the marks left by the bullets and Mikhail’s passing.”

“That will not be necessary,” Mahmoud said. “We have spent too much time here already. For all of us to examine the hillside risks attracting attention. Let us pack up and go.”

Ali was too troubled to argue. He merely rinsed out the coffee cups in one of the rain pools and stowed them away on one mule, tied the broad iron saj on another, and set off with Mahmoud up the wadi.

We followed them with the mules rattling along behind. After a while I asked Holmes, in cautious Arabic, if he knew where we were going.

“Mahmoud certainly knows,” he replied helpfully, and then ordered me to recount the history of my wide-spread family members. In Arabic, of course.

I stumbled over kinship terms and the stony ground for a long time as we continued our way up the wadi, rising always towards the tops of the cliffs. In the late afternoon the wadi’s youthful beginnings, bereft now of easy sand, forced the four of us to scramble and crawl, tugging and pushing at the outraged mules, until finally we emerged onto a high plain, a vast and empty highland lit by the low sun of evening. ?

There was not a soul in sight.

To my astonishment, Ali’s reaction to the emptiness was to tuck his skirts up a bit, settle his knife more firmly into his belt, and without a word of explanation set off towards the north in an easy jog-trot. He was soon out of sight. We followed at the speed of the walking mules, pausing to eat cold bread and let the mules rest when the last rays of the sun had completely disappeared, then resumed our march when the faint light from the new moon gave outline to the objects around us. As the moon drooped towards the horizon, bobbing lights appeared on a distant hill, and shortly after that Ali’s shout came through the night along with at least half a dozen other voices.

The men greeted Mahmoud as a long-lost brother, kissing his hand and bestowing compliments with such exuberance that I wondered if perhaps, despite their appearance and manner of speech, they were Christians—or else Moslems who had overlooked their religion’s injunction against alcohol. It appeared, however, that this group comprised a large percentage of the population of an isolated village, and visitors, particularly those not only known and useful but trustworthy as well, were cause enough for an intoxication of spirits.

Moreover, I thought that, unlike similar demonstrations of enthusiastic greeting we had seen in the previous days, this one was actually based on true friendship and long acquaintance. The vigorous middle-aged man walking at Ali’s side met Mahmoud with a hard, back-slapping embrace and loud, easy laughter. What is more, Mahmoud responded, giving the man a grin of unfeigned pleasure and slapping his shoulders in return. The expression looked quite unnatural on his face, but it lasted while the other men crowded around and took his hands in greeting.

After we were introduced all around and the initial drawn-out welcome was giving way to a redistribution of burdens to the newcomers’ backs, I witnessed an odd little episode. The headman, whose name had been given as Farash, held up the lantern he was carrying and peered at Mahmoud’s face. He even reached out and touched the ugly scar with one finger.

“It is well?” he asked quietly.

“Praise be to God.”

“And now Ali.” Farash shook his head. “You and your brother, you always come to us hurt.”

Mahmoud laughed—actually laughed. “When Ali has a sore, he fears an amputation. His head is fine.” Then, so quietly that I could barely hear, he said to the man, “Mikhail the Druse is dead.”

“Ah!” It was a sound of pain Farash made, and then he asked, “Killed?”

“Shot.”

Farash shook his head again, mournfully this time. “Another good man is lost,” he murmured. After a moment he stirred, and with a deliberate effort pulled himself back into good humour. “But you and Ali are with us again, and we shall feast.”

The festive air of the villagers carried us across the uneven ground and through a couple of minor wadis until without warning we were parading into a tiny village, through a sparse collection of mud huts with lean-tos holding them upright, past a well and some bare trees and up to the grandest villa in town, a windowless box twelve feet square and so low that even Mahmoud, the shortest among the four of us, had to stoop. There were clear signs that chickens and at least one goat had recently vacated the premises, and the fleas were appalling, but the honour was great.

Every man in the village was soon in the hut with us, with the women crowded outside of the door. Cigarettes were taken and glasses of cool water given while coffee was made and distributed by the ancient village mukhtar, whose house this obviously was. After the coffee had been drunk, four men staggered in carrying a vast platter heaped high with rice that glistened with grease in the lamp-light, topped with a mound of hastily cooked and venerable mutton. The combination of hasty cooking and the age of the animal did not make for an easy meal, at least for those of us who tried actually to chew the meat, but we filled our bellies on rice and bread and the less gristly bits, drank more coffee, and then sat listening to the fireside tales of wartime valour and pre-war derring-do until the wee hours, when the mukhtar abruptly stood up, shook our greasy hands with his, and departed, taking his village with him, all but a few shy and giggling children who lurked around our door until the morning.

The next day a bank holiday was declared, and all day long people from neighbouring tents and houses drifted in for the fun. Mahmoud was kept busy writing letters and contracts, Ali sat beneath a tree with needle and thread, repairing the mule packs and pads while talking easily to acquaintances, and Holmes squatted in the shade of our fine villa and absorbed the local colour and gossip. I, however, beat the dust and the wildlife from one of our rugs and took it out to a distant grove of bare fruit trees beside an irrigation ditch, trading fleas for flies and dozing to the rhythmic creaking of the mule that worked the dulab, drawing water from a deep well. I slept the sleep of the just and the profoundly weary, unconcerned about potential threats and undisturbed by the occasional passer-by checking on my well-being, until the noise of thundering hoofs made me bolt to my feet, certain that I was in the path of a cavalry charge or at the least a stampede. It was only a horse race, and it was won by a remarkably unfit-looking beast with a gloating, exuberant Ali on its back. Mahmoud, I gathered, won a great deal on his wager.

In the late afternoon the cook fires started. Following the afternoon prayers, I led the mules down to the nearest rain pool to scrub their dusty hides, accompanied by what seemed to me a number of children disproportionate to the population as a whole, who were soon wetter than the mules, if not as clean. The youngsters found me greatly amusing, a mute but comprehending boy who wore strange glass circles on his face and laughed at their antics, and I returned to the village in the midst of a noisy, wet entourage.

While I was restoring the animals to their hobbles, I heard someone call my name. To my surprise, when I looked around I saw Mahmoud, surrounded by a knot of men. He was tucking something that looked like money away into the breast of his robes with one hand, and gesturing to me with the other.

I brushed some of the mud off my garments, straightened my turban, and went to see what he wanted. To my even greater amazement, when I approached he flung his heavy arm around my shoulders and turned to his companions.

“Amir is a very clever boy with the knife,” he said, enunciating carefully enough for me to follow his words. “I will wager his throwing arm against anyone.”

The juxtaposition of my grandiose name with my unprepossessing appearance had its usual effect, reducing the villagers to helpless laughter. Mahmoud grinned like a shark and kept his arm firmly across my shoulders while I stood and wondered what was going on in that devious mind of his, and what he had in store for me.

When the villagers realised that he was seriously proposing to bet on the knife skills of the youth with the ridiculous name, they made haste to accept before this madman had second thoughts. If he wished to give back all the money he had won from them during the day, who were they to object? A couple of the men scurried off to devise a suitable target, the remaining dozen began to sharpen their knives, and Mahmoud, giving my shoulders a final hard embrace, turned his head and whispered in my ear in clear English, “Do not be too good at first, understand?”

I had a sudden coughing fit to conceal my astonishment, and turned away to watch the men bringing up a length of tree trunk and some stones to prop it upright. Mahmoud proposed to run a con game on these villagers, absorbing what remained of their hard-earned cash after Ali’s unlikely victory at the horse race. Oh, I had done the same myself in English pubs armed with darts, but I had only done my opponents out of a few drinks, and they had always been people who could afford the small loss. This was something else, and I disliked the taste in my mouth.

I pulled myself up. Mahmoud knew what he was doing; these were his people, after all. Maalesh, I said myself—as no doubt the villagers would say before too long. I only wished I could feel so easy.

Under the tutelage of Holmes and a number of others, over the last four years I had accumulated a variety of odd abilities. I could pick a lock laboriously, drive a horse or a motorcar without coming to grief, dress up in a costume as a sort of amateur-dramatics-in-earnest, and fling a fully grown man (an unprepared and untrained man) to the ground. My only two real gifts, gifts I was born with, were an ear for languages and a hand for throwing. Be it a rock or a pointed object, my left hand had a skill for accuracy that I could in all honesty take no credit for, although I had on occasion found it tremendously useful. As I was about to again.

The men giggled at the sight of my thin and obviously inadequate little throwing knife, and they slapped their knees whenever my first throws went wide of the mark. Mahmoud began to look worried— well, not worried, but he took on a degree more stoniness and his right hand crept up once to rub at the scar—when three largish wagers were swiftly lost. The villagers were ecstatic. I tossed my knife in my hand and gave Mahmoud an even look, trying to get across a mental message.

Either he received it or he well knew how the game ought to be played. In either case he trusted me. He reached into his inner pocket and drew out a considerable stash of money, which he proceeded to count out, milking the drama. He laid it on the ground in front of his feet, and looked back at me.

We took those villagers for a lot of money that afternoon, with the rest of the village, men and women, looking on. I did try to lose a bit when the less prosperous men had their bets in, but it was not always possible. My losses ceased to concern Mahmoud when he saw what a good investment they were, both in the short-term cash returns when over-confidence blossomed and in the long-term benefit of goodwill. It is never a good idea to alienate your host by making him feel completely swindled.

But we did take the money of poor men. And I did not care at all for the way Mahmoud had manoeuvred me into taking it.

Eventually, enough cash had changed hands to lower the interest in the contest. My last challenger stood down, jovial to the end, if rueful. Mahmoud folded away a thick wad of filthy paper money, tucked two heavy handfuls of coin into the purse at his belt, and gave me a look under his eyebrows that was very nearly a complacent smile. As the crowd thinned, I looked over their heads and saw our companions, standing and watching with all the others. Ali gave me a sour look, Holmes an amused one. I squatted down to sharpen the tip of my blade on a stone, slipped it back into my boot, and joined them. Feeling, truth to tell, a bit cocky but more than a little ashamed.

A long Bedouin tent had made an appearance on the hillside behind the village, and the smell of coffee was heavy in the air. The children who had followed me when I washed our mules and had been kept at bay during the contest now swarmed back to claim me, but I gratefully escaped my enthusiastic admirers by insinuating myself far enough back in the tent to be among the adult coffee drinkers, perched between the mukhtars rather messy falcon and his equally ill-tempered saluki dog.

The evening followed the standard programme for a semi-formal soirée: coffee, food, coffee, sweetmeats, tobacco, coffee, and talk. An immense brass dish was carried in by six men, laden with four whole roasted sheep that had been stuffed with rice and golden fried pine nuts. Tonight the meat was delicious and actually tender. The rice was flavoured with a small, tangy red berry called sumac and the bitter, refreshing coffee that followed was fragrant with cardamom. Narghiles and regular pipes came out, the rhythmic drum of the coffee mortars fell silent for a while, the irritating “music” of the one-stringed violin and the wailing song of its player ceased, and the stories began. To my surprise and pleasure, I found that I had no great trouble in following the thread of talk. Under the pressure of continuous use, my Arabic was improving faster than I had thought possible.

The mukhtar opened. He was a once-large man now reduced to bone, stringy muscles, and bright colours: blue robe, green turban (a claim to descent from the Prophet), and a beard reddened with henna (sign of a devout pilgrimage to Mecca somewhere in his past). His teeth were worn to a few brown stumps on his gums, but his eyes were clear, his hands steady on the narghile as he smoked and talked of his part in the recent war, shooting from the high ground at the retreating Turks.

Then his son—Farash, who had spoken so intimately to Mahmoud the night before and been told of the death of Mikhail the Druse—told a complicated story about some relative who had married a woman from another tribe and ignited a feud that had lasted for sixty-two years, although I may have misunderstood this. Holmes contributed a blood-curdling narrative concerning a Howeitat clan feud begun by a marriage ceremony which greatly amused the men, although I couldn’t see quite why. Ali made a brief remark that seemed to link women and donkeys, but again, I did not understand the jest. He then told a lengthy and energetic tale about two men and five scorpions, and at some point it dawned on me that the two men he was talking about were none other than Davy and Charlie, the abusive British guards on the Beersheva road, and that the sly revenge Ali was describing explained his high spirits when he had rejoined us with the armaments on the road north of town. I laughed loudly with the others, earning myself an uncertain glance from the narrator.

Next came an ancient villager, speaking in a high and monotonous voice, who launched off on a story that wandered through people and places, touching down on the occasional battle, that nearly put me to sleep and made a number of the others restless. After half an hour or so the mukhtar reached decisively for his leather canister of coffee and the roasting pan, and the continuity of that story was soon broken by the serving of coffee.

When we had all drunk our compulsory three thimblefuls, Mahmoud handed over his tiny cup and began to speak.

Silence fell throughout the length of the tent as the children were hushed in the women’s side, and all listened to the strong voice speaking of the outside world. Mahmoud was a good speaker with a compelling, even dramatic, manner, surprising for so normally reticent a person. The story he told the village concerned the final conquest of the Turkish Army three and a half months before.

The people obviously knew of the war’s conclusion, but not in detail, and it was detail he gave them. His audience sighed at the first mention of the name of Allenby, the conquering hero whose very name transliterated into Arabic reads “to the Prophet.” Mahmoud told of the fulfilling of prophecy, when the ancient tradition declaring that the Holy Land would be free of the infidel only when the waters of the Nile flowed into Jerusalem was realised, transformed from a declaration of hopelessness into actual truth when the British Army supplied water to the city, carried on the backs of a regiment of camels from its source in the Nile. He went on to tell of heroic fighting, of small groups holding off armies, of a single man who crept across a hill, invisible as a rock, to destroy the huge gun flinging shells across the miles at the distant British troops.

Each of his episodes drew admiring remarks and much sucking in of breath from the audience, murmurs and exclamations of “Wa!” during the telling, and wagging of heads coupled with laughter at each conclusion.

The greatest applause came, however, with the story of Allenby’s deception of the Turks and their German advisers. With his hands in the air Mahmoud sketched the land north of Jerusalem, his left hand describing the sea and Haifa while his right hand drew the Ghor, or Jordan Valley, that hot, miserable, malarial lowlands that separates Palestine from the vast deep desert to the east. Here Allenby had laid out his greatest trick: He would convince the enemy that he was about to strike out on his right, directly across the Jordan, whereas in reality he planned to attack on his left, circling down on them from their western flank through the Valley of Jezreel, that is known as Megiddo, or Armageddon.

Mahmoud built his story with growing drama, beginning in Jerusalem, when the Fast Hotel near the Jaffa Gate was confiscated for army use and advisers in high-ranking uniforms openly filled the town, sure signs to the Turkish spies that Allied headquarters was moving to be near the river Jordan. He then described the stealthy moving in of troops on the left flank, always at night, only into tents that had already been in position for months. When he described the false messages given to spies, his audience began to nod in appreciation, guile being a truer sign of wit than mere cleverness was.

When he launched into a detailed description of the ostensible troop movements on the Jordan itself, however, the villagers began to grin in gap-toothed appreciation at a commander who would cause lorries to drag logs up and down, raising the dust of great activity, and who would direct whole regiments to march conspicuously into the eastern lines during the heat of the day, only to have them travel quietly west again under cover of darkness to. their starting point. Out and back went the decoy soldiers, openly out to and secretly back from the Jordan Valley, a relatively few men giving the impression of a massive build-up of strength. Tent cities were planted and five pontoon bridges thrown across the Jordan while “El Aurens”—Colonel T. E. Lawrence—and his camel Bedu staged spectacular raids nearby.

But it was the fake horse lines that had Mahmoud’s listeners rolling on the carpets with tears in their eyes: twenty thousand old blankets shipped up from Egypt and draped over shrubs, some of them propped up on wooden legs, from a dusty distance taking on the appearance of a massive accumulation of tethered cavalry horses.

The Turks fell for the entire ruse, supported by their German advisers, who believed the reports of their misled spies. The Turkish empire lined up the strength of its men and guns at the eastern borders of Palestine, ready to counter the attack out of Jerusalem; when Allenby threw his true forces instead onto their unprepared western flank, the Turks had not a chance. He swept them up, took ninety thousand prisoners, and broke the back of the Turkish Army in the most decisive victory of the entire world war, pushing the remnants in rapid and growing disorder all the way to Damascus and surrender.

Mahmoud’s story was obviously the high point of the evening; anything else would be an anti-climax. With the typically abrupt leave-taking of the Arab, the party began to break up. Limp children were carried off to their beds, older boys clattered off into the four directions on scrofulous donkeys, and adults pressed the mukhtar’s hand and that of Mahmoud before walking off into the night, reciting segments of Mahmoud’s story to one another at the tops of their voices, laughing and calling and fading away.

Not everyone left. The close friends and family of the mukhtar, twenty-five or thirty men, stayed on, chatting and smoking a last pipe and conducting small business. I thought we were perhaps finished for the evening, and began to think with actual anticipation of my hard bed where at least I could stretch out my leg muscles without causing offence, when Holmes dropped a question into a brief silence.

“My brothers,” he asked, frowning in concentration as he rolled up a cigarette. “Do you think the Turk is truly gone from the land?”