Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  Suddenly Grim began to call aloud in Hebrew, sending the mellow, rounded vowels booming along between the walls, but getting no response except the echo of his own voice. Three times he repeated what sounded like the same words and then turned back.

  “Quick! Out of this! An Arab isn’t safe here!”

  By comparison the gloom of the street looked like daylight. We made for it like small boys afraid of graveyard ghosts.

  “What did you say to them?” I asked and Cohen snickered.

  “A verse from the Psalms in the original— ‘Come, behold the works of the Lord. He maketh wars to cease unto the end of the earth; he breaketh the bow, and cutteth the spear in sunder; he burneth the chariot in the fire. Be still, and know that I am God…. The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge.’”

  “Now who’s kiddin’ himself?” asked Cohen. “You think they wouldn’t sooner know the Sikhs were coming?”

  “D’you know the history of your own people?” Grim answered. “There isn’t a man in that ghetto who hasn’t a sharp weapon of some kind. If they thought the Sikhs were on the way they’d very likely start something for the Sikhs to finish. That’s crowd psychology. Get a number of people all in one place, hating one thing or afraid of one thing and any fool can stampede them into violence. Jews are fighters; don’t forget it; if they weren’t they’d have been exterminated long ago. If the Jews start anything tonight we’re done for. That voice in the dark may make them think. Come on.”

  “Where are we going now?”

  “To the Haram.”

  “Gee!”

  There was no need to explain to Cohen what that meant and the deadly danger of it. Beneath the mosque in the Haram is the cave of Machpelah in which Abraham’s bones are said to lie. The Arabs claim descent from Abraham in the line of Ishmael and Esau, and dwell lingeringly on the story of how both men lost their birthright, as they hold, unfairly; so now that they have the tables turned and own the tomb of the common ancestor, they take delight in keeping out the descendants of Jacob, and the death of a Jew caught in that place would be swift. Jews and other “infidels” with rare exceptions are allowed as far as the seventh step leading upward from the street, but not one inch nearer.

  “Are we going inside?” asked Cohen.

  “May as well.”

  “You’ve got your nerve!”

  “We’ll be safe if you’ve got yours.”

  Cohen did not answer and I would have given a lot to know just what was going on in his mind. If the prospect of entering that mosque thrilled me it must have meant vastly more to him, however broad his disrespect and loose his faith might be; for not a Jew had stood within stone-throw of the tomb of Abraham for nearly two thousand years, and all the Jews of the world, Orthodox or not, look back through the mists of time to Abraham at least as thoughtfully as does New England to the Pilgrim Fathers.

  If he regarded Abraham as myth it was none the less an adventure to tread where no Jew had dared show himself for nineteen centuries; but I don’t think he did, for you need not scratch the most free-thinking Jew particularly deep before you find a pride of ancestry as stiff as any man’s. Cohen was not one of those “international” fire-brands that offend by denying race as well as creed, but a mighty decent fellow as the sequel showed.

  Grim knew the way through the dark streets as a fox knows the rabbit- runs, and led without a moment’s hesitation. His point of view was not so puzzling as Cohen’s; he was like a knife that goes straight to the heart of things, as unconscious of resistance as a blade that is fine enough to slip between what heavier tools must press against and break.

  Making our way continually southward, we threaded the quarter of the glass-blowers and the quarter of the water-skin makers, past endless shuttered stalls where lamp-light filtered dimly through the cracks in proof that the city was not asleep.

  There was very little sound, but an atmosphere of tense expectancy. A few men were abroad, but they avoided us, slinking into shadows; for it is not wise to be recognized before the looting starts, lest an enemy denounce you afterwards.

  The wise — and all Hebron prides itself on wisdom in affairs of lawlessness — were indoors, waiting. You felt as if the city held its breath.

  When we drew near the Haram at last there was more life in evidence. It began with the street dogs that always leave their miserable offal-hunting to slink and be curious around the circle of men’s doings. We had to kick them out of the way and were well saluted for our pains so that our arrival on the scene was hardly surreptitious.

  Over the south entrance of the Haram a great iron lantern burned, and we could see the wall beyond it, of enormous, drafted, smooth-hewn blocks as old as history. Men were leaning against it and standing in groups, some of them holding lanterns and every one armed.

  The men of Hebron, who pride themselves on fierceness, are at pains to look fierce when violence is cooking and the Arab costume lends itself to that. I think Cohen shuddered and I know I did.

  Grim led straight on, as if he owed no explanation to the guardians of the place and did not expect to be called upon to give any.

  But they stopped us at the entrance, an arch no wider than to admit two men abreast, and, because Grim was leading, hands that were neither too respectful nor over-gentle thrust him back, and fierce, excited faces were thrust close to his.

  “Allah! Where are you coming? Who are you?”

  “Heaven preserve you, brothers! Mahommed Hadad and two friends,” Grim answered.

  “What do you want?”

  “To see the fire-gift.”

  “Whence do you come?”

  “From Beersheba, where all men tell of the great happenings in El- Kalil.”

  “Ye come to spy on us!”

  “Allah forbid!”

  “Then to steal! Beersheba is a rain-washed bone; ye come to help loot El-Kalil and afterwards leave us to bear the blame for it!”

  “Shu halalk? [What talk is this?] We be honest men. In the name of the Merciful, my brothers, we seek admittance.”

  “Are there Jews with you?”

  “That is a strange jest! Who would bring a Jew to this place?”

  “Nevertheless, let us see the others.”

  There were long, keen knives in their girdles. As Cohen and I raised our faces to be looked at we offered our throats temptingly and the goose-flesh rose all down my arms and thighs. Only a Jew can guess what Cohen felt; but a Jew looks exactly like an Arab when his face is framed in the kufiyi. Neither of us spoke. I stepped forward after Grim, trying to look as if I knew my rights in the matter, and Cohen followed me. In another second we were past the guard and mounting steps up which sudden death is the penalty for trespass.

  CHAPTER V. “The mummery they call the fire-gift.”

  WHAT with darkness and the crowd and the fact that everyone was busy with his own excitement we were safe enough until we reached the mosque door. The Haram is a big place with all manner of buildings opening off it — dwellings for dervishes for instance, a place for people known as saints, and a home for the guardians, who live separate from the saints and are said to have a different sort of morals altogether. The court was packed with men among whom we had to thread our way, and the steps leading up to the mosque were like a grandstand at a horse-race with barely foot-room left for one man at a time up the middle.

  Directness seemed to be Grim’s key. That as a fact is oftenest the one safe means of doing the forbidden thing. Your deferent, too cautious man is stopped and questioned, while the impudent fellow gets by and is gone before suspicion lights on him. But at the top of the steps we were met by the Sheikh of the mosque, who had eyes that could cut through the dark and a nose begotten out of criticism by mistrust; a lean, long-bearded man so steeped in sanctity and so alert for the least suspicion of a challenge to it that I don’t believe a mouse could have got by uninvestigated. You could guess what he was the moment his eye fell on you and even by the dim light cast by an iron lanter
n on a chain above him his cold stare gave me the creeps.

  It was baleful and made more so because he wore a turban in place of the usual Arab head-dress that frames and in that way modifies the harshness of a man’s face. His beard accentuated rather than softened the pugnacious angle of his jaw, and if I am any judge of a man’s temper his was like nitroglycerine, swift to get off the mark and to destroy.

  But explosives, too, are forbidden things. If you mean to handle them the simplest way is best. Grim walked straight up to him.

  “Allah ybarik fik! [God preserve you!] I bring news,” he announced.

  “Every alley-thief brings tales tonight!” the other answered. “Who are you? And who are these?”

  “I bring word from Seyyid Omar, the Sheikh of the Dome of the Rock of El-Kudz [Jerusalem].”

  “Allah! At this time?”

  “What does necessity know of time? How many ears have you?”

  It was pretty obvious that there were thirty pairs of ears straining to catch the conversation.

  “You may follow me alone then.”

  But Grim knew better than to leave us two on the steps at the mercy of questioners. At the outer gate he had said we were from Beersheba in order to avoid the honor of an escort to the Sheikh. Now he claimed herald’s honors for all three of us, for the same purpose of avoiding close attention.

  “Three bore the news, not one,” he answered.

  “One is enough to tell it. I have not three sets of ears,” snapped the Sheikh.

  “Then you wish me to leave these two outside to gossip with the crowd?”

  “Allah! What sort of discreet ones has Seyyid Omar chosen! Let them follow then.”

  So we fell in line behind him and passed through the curtains hung to shield from infidel eyes an interior that in the judgment of many Moslems is nearly as sacred as the shrine at Mecca.

  Like so many of the Moslem sacred places it was once a church, built by the crusaders on the site of earlier splendor that the Romans wrecked — a lordly building, the lower courses of whose walls are all of ten-ton stones — a place laid out with true eye for proportion by men who had no doubt of what they did. For that has always been known as the veritable tomb of Abraham; no one has ever doubted it until these latter days of too much unbelief.

  The higher critics will deny one of these days that Grant’s body was ever buried in Grant’s Tomb; but the lower critics, who are not amused by proof that twice two isn’t four, will read of Grant and go and see and be convinced.

  And Abraham hearkened unto Ephron: and Abraham weighed unto Ephron the silver, which he had named in the audience of the sons of Heth, four hundred shekels of silver, current money with the merchant. And the field of Ephron, which was in Machpelah, which was before Mamre, the field, and the cave which was therein, and all the trees which were in the field, that were in all the borders round about, were made sure unto Abraham for a possession in the presence of the children of Heth, before all that went in at the gate of the city.

  And after this Abraham buried Sarah his wife in the cave of the field of Machpelah before Mamre: the same is Hebron in the land of Canaan…. Then Abraham died in a good old age and his sons Isaac and Ishmael buried him in the cave of Machpelah, in the field of Ephron the son of Zohar the Hittite, which is before Mamre; the field which Abraham purchased of the sons of Heth: there was Abraham buried, and Sarah his wife.

  You don’t have to believe that straight-forward account, of course, if you don’t want to. And if you care to imagine that the Jews and Arabs, who set so much store by Abraham, would ever have forgotten the exact site of his burial-place, so that later arrivals on the scene could not identify it, imagination, even of that sort, does not have to be assessed for income tax. Go to it.

  But you can’t pass through those curtains into the mosque and not believe. Not more than twenty non-Moslems in a thousand years have been in there, and each has told the same tale of calm conviction afterward. I heard Cohen catch his breath.

  The whole place was full of men, who squatted on the priceless rugs that cover every inch of a floor larger than some cathedrals boast. We passed among them down the center aisle between two cenotaphs that mark the graves of Isaac and Rebecca; for they and Jacob and his wife as well, are buried in the same cave under the mosque floor. But the Sheikh did not pause there; there were too many who might listen, and the dim light from lamps that hung on chains shone in their eyes as they watched us, and on the hilts of swords, so that we seemed to be trespassing where ghouls brewed wrath.

  At the north end the Sheikh led into an octagonal-shaped chapel, with the cenotaphs of Abraham and Sarah draped with green and crimson in the midst; and why that place was deserted just at that time was a mystery, for there was no barrier to exclude any one. Not a soul moved in there; none whispered in the shadows. The Sheikh and we three squatted down on a Turkoman rug above Abraham’s bones and faced one another unlistened to, unseen.

  “What now?” said the Sheikh. “Be quick with your message. This is no time for gossip. I have my responsibilities.”

  As Cohen had remarked, Grim had his nerve with him. Face to face with that explosive-minded Sheikh he came straight to the point. I have seen lion- tamers act the same way; they don’t pretty-pussy the beast through the bars, but go right in and seize the upper hand.

  “Seyyid Omar of El-Kudz [Jerusalem], Sheikh of the Dome of the Rock, demands to know why you dare permit this place to be polluted by the mummery they call the fire-gift! All the City is talking of it.”

  “Allah! Am I dreaming? Who are you that dare speak such insolence to me?”

  “Seyyid Omar’s messenger.”

  “Show me a writing from him.”

  Grim shook his head and sneered.

  “It is from you that there must be a writing. I come with two witnesses to hear me ask the question and to prove that I report your answer truly. Shall I ask a second time?”

  The Sheikh glared back and bit his beard, tortured I thought, between indignation and fear. I guessed Grim was on pretty safe ground now, for he knew Sheikh Seyyid Omar of El-Kudz intimately, and to my knowledge had done him a greater service than could ever be lightly overlooked; he was truly delivering a message from him for aught I knew; more improbable things have happened. True message or not, he waited with the air of a man who represents high authority.

  “What business is it of Seyyid Omar’s? Let him mind his own mosque!”

  “It is his judgment,” Grim answered, “that this place is lapsing into disrepute. If that is true it is his duty to accuse you. If the fault is not yours, although the charge is true, it is his purpose to help you remedy the matter.”

  “It is not my fault.”

  “But the charge is true?”

  “Allah pity us, it is true! But how can Seyyid Omar help — a fat man with both hands full of troubles of his own?”

  “He has sent us three.”

  “If you were three angels with the trumpet of Gabriel I fail to see how you could set matters straight. There are seventeen thieves of El-Kalil who have tricked me and won the upper hand. May the curse of the Most High break their bones forever!”

  “Who are they?”

  “Ali Baba ben Hamza and his brood of rascals.”

  “I have heard of them. Such ignorant men can surely never get the better of us.”

  “They have it! Listen. That old dog Ali Baba ben Hamza came to me and said: ‘I am old and my sins weigh heavy on me. I saw a vision in the night. A spirit appeared to me and said I must pray all night at the tomb of Abraham, I and my sixteen sons, together with none watching. So I may obtain mercy and my sons shall have new hearts.’ That was fair speaking, was it not? Who am I that I should stand between a man and Allah’s mercy? But they are thieves, those seventeen, and the charge of this mosque is mine; so I would not lock them in the place alone, as they desired. I and another entered with them on a certain night and locked the door.”

  “Leaving no guard outside?” as
ked Grim.

  “Leaving seven men outside, whose orders were to stay awake. But they slept. When the door was locked those seventeen devils took me and the man who was with me, and laid cloths over our faces, having first saturated the cloths with a drug they had stolen from the hospital. I know that, because the foreign doctor made complaint afterwards that his drugs had been stolen. So I and the man who was with me also slept, I do not know how long. When we awoke we were deathly sick and vomited.”

  “Where were the seventeen thieves by that time?” Grim asked him, for the Sheikh seemed too disturbed by the memory to go on with the tale.

  “They were here, where we sit now. But I did not go in to them at once. They had laid me and the man who was with me in the northern porch not far from the cenotaphs of Jacob and his wife, and to reach them I had to pass by the entrance to the cave that has been sealed up these eight hundred years. Then I made a terrible discovery. Allah! But my eyes popped out of my head with unbelief! Yet it was so. The masonry had been broken through! They had been down into the tomb of Abraham!”

  “Did you go and see what they had done down there?” Grim asked.

  “Shi biwakkif! [Who could think of such a thing!] Allah! I did not dare! Eight hundred years ago a Turkish prince defied the guardians of the mosque and entered the tomb alone. He came groping his way out with eyesight gone, and could never tell what befell him, for his speech was also taken. After that the opening was sealed. Nay, I did not dare go. Who knows what spirits dwell in that great cave? But when my fear was a little overcome and wrath succeeded it I came in here to see what manner of curse had fallen on those seventeen men. They were breathing fire! As I sit here and Allah is my witness, they were breathing flame! It shot forth from their mouths as I stood and watched them!”

  “And the man who was with you? What did he do all this time?”

  “He came and stood beside me and saw all that I saw and bore witness. I took courage then, having another with me, and together we approached Ali Baba, who sat where you sit, and I demanded what it all might mean. The old thief — the old trespasser — the old damned rake answered that while he and his sons prayed there came an angel, who touched with his fingers the masonry that closed the entrance to the cave, so that it fell.”