The footsteps faded around a corner, and we were caught up by our guides as rapidly as we had been pushed down in the first place, and swept off again down the road.
This was the land my people had clung to for more than three thousand years, I thought with irony: a squalid, stinking village whose inhabitants were kept inside their crumbling walls by the occupying British Expeditionary Forces. The streets of the Promised Land flowed not with milk and honey but with ordure, and the glories of Askalon and Asdod were faded indeed.
The third time we were pushed bodily into a corner and covered with the garlic- and sweat-impregnated robes of our companions (neither of them women, as close proximity had quickly made apparent, despite the cheap scent one of them wore). I thought I should suffocate with the combined stench of perfume and the nauseous weeks-old fish entrails and sweetly acrid decaying oranges that we knelt in. We were there a long, long time before the two men removed their hands from our shoulders and let us up. I staggered a few steps away and gagged, gulping huge cleansing lungfuls of sea air and scrubbing at my nose in a vain attempt to remove the lingering smell. Holmes laid a hand on my back, and I pulled myself together and followed the men.
We covered perhaps six miles that night, though barely three if measured in a direct line. We froze, we doubled back, we went in circles. Once we lost one of the dark robed figures, only to have him rejoin us, equally silently, some twenty minutes and one large circuit later. With his reappearance we changed direction and started a straight run, inland and slightly north, which ended when I came up short against the back of one of them and he, or his companion, seized my shoulders, spun me around, tipped my head down with a hand like a paw, and shoved me through a short, narrow doorway into what felt like a small cave, clammy with cold and holding a variety of odd (though for a change not unpleasant) smells.
I was completely blind, and stood still while at least two people moved around me, closing doors and what sounded like window shutters, rustling gently (their feet, I suddenly realised, had always been nearly noiseless) until the man behind me spoke a brief guttural phrase in a language I did not know, and in front of me a match scraped and flared, outlining a shape as broad as a monolith. The bright match dimmed, and when he stood upright to shake it out the light that remained was gentle and warm, like a candle—or, I saw as he turned towards us, a small oil-fed wick burning from a pinched clay bowl.
I spared no attention for the light source, however; my eyes were on the two men as they moved across to a corner of the room, shrugged their outer garments on. a rough table, and turned to face us.
I was prepared, of course, for the two men to be Arabs, given their names, clothing, and the Moslem greeting back on the beach, but when I saw the reality of my companions in this tiny space it was a good thing I had Holmes with me, because I might otherwise have bolted for freedom: we had been dropped into the hands of a pair of Arab cutthroats. Their dark eyes and swarthy faces were nearly hidden between their beards and the loose headcloths they wore. The younger man was dressed as a dandy, if one can picture an Oriental dandy with curling moustaches, long bead-tipped plaits around his face, kohl encircling his eyes, and smelling of flowery scent, with an ornate curved scabbard stuck through the left side of his belt and a pearl-handled revolver on the right. A heavy gold watch on his wrist showed the wrong time but echoed the gold thread of the thick cords that held his headcloth in place, and the crimson colour of his boots matched the red in the flamboyant embroidery that ran up the front of his long waistcoat. The other man was older and more conservatively dressed—or rather, the colours of his garments were quieter, the embroidery more subtle. He wore the usual long-skirted Arab robe, although he too had both knife and gun (a long-barrelled Colt revolver). His face was bisected by a scar that tugged at his left eye and continued down into his beard; the younger man was missing two of his front teeth, which when he spoke revealed a slight and oddly sinister lisp.
I had lost a cousin two years before in the town north of here, cut down along with one of his children when the Arab inhabitants had risen against their Jewish neighbours, massacred a number of them, and driven the remainder from their homes. I did not want to be in the same room with these menacing individuals, much less dependent on them for food, drink, and instruction for the next six weeks.
Holmes seemed quite oblivious. He studied his surroundings as he unbuttoned his damp woollen jacket, peeling it off stiffly along with his haversack and dropping them both onto the rough bench that slumped against one wall. He turned to the men. “I do hope you are satisfied,” he said in a low drawl. “I imagine we shall have sufficient demands on our energies in the next few days without your continuing with these little games.” The two Arabs did not react, although their gazes seemed to sharpen somewhat. “Which of you is Ali Hazr?”
The younger, more colourful man tipped his head briefly to one side. “And you are Mahmoud Hazr?” Holmes asked the other. The stocky older man with the scar lowered his eyelids briefly in confirmation. “I am Sherlock Holmes, this is Mary Russell. Gentlemen, we are at your service.”
His generous offer did not seem overly to impress the two Arabs. The brothers looked at each other for a moment of wordless communication, then Ali turned his back on us and went to the back corner of the tiny room, where he dropped to his heels and began to assemble a handful of twigs and sticks into a small fire. Holmes opened his mouth, and then I could see him make the decision to shut it: Mycroft had chosen these men, and we had to trust that they knew what they were about. They had worked hard enough to get us here undetected; they would not light a fire if it was not safe.
I glanced over at Mahmoud, and found his black eyes studying Holmes with a mingled look of amusement, approval, and speculation. When he felt my gaze, his face closed and his eyebrows went down, but as he turned away I decided that, Arab cutthroat or no, the man was not unaware of subtle undercurrents.
“What is wrong with you?” he asked Holmes. His English was clear, though heavily accented.
It was Holmes’ turn to assume a stony expression. “There is nothing the matter with me.”
Ali gave a brief bark of what must have been laughter. “Some movements pain you,” he said, “and you flinched when I pushed on your shoulder. Are you injured or just old?”
It was, I had to admit, a valid question under the circumstances. Evidently Holmes too decided that the men had a right to know with what they were being saddled.
“I was injured, two weeks ago. It is merely the remnants of sensitivity.”
Ali sighed deeply and returned to his fire, but the answer seemed to satisfy Mahmoud. He walked over to the makeshift table leaning against the wall and bent to a heap of bundles that lay beneath it, coming up with a fringed leather pouch about the size of two fists. This he shook once, to attract Ali’s attention. The younger man looked up, and the two shared another brief wordless conversation before Ali shrugged and reached around the fire for an object like a giant’s spoon, a shallow pan with a long handle, which he placed on top of the burning sticks before standing and moving away from the fire corner. Mahmoud took his brother’s place at the fire, dropping to his heels and pulling open the drawstring of the leather pouch. He plunged his hand in, came up with a handful of pale grey-green beans, thumbed a few of them back into the bag, and then poured the rest into the skillet. It appeared that we had earned the right to a cup of coffee.
Holmes had already warned me that in Arab countries, coffee-making was a long, drawn-out affair. We sat in silence watching Mahmoud’s utterly unhurried motions, swirling the beans across the pan. The small green dots changed colour, grew dark, and finally began to sweat their fragrant oil. When they were shiny and slick and nearly burnt, Mahmoud picked up a large wooden mortar and with a flick of the wrist tipped the contents of the coffee skillet into it, spilling not a single bean. He set aside the skillet and took up a pestle, and began to pound the beans. At first the coffee crackled crisply under the pestle and tumbled
back into the bottom of the mortar, but gradually the sound grew soft, and a rhythm grew up, the pounding alternating every few strokes with a swipe at the sides, where the coffee clung. The resulting sound was like a cross between a drum and a bell, quite musical and curiously soothing.
Eventually the coffee was reduced to a powder, and Mahmoud set the mortar and pestle to one side and reached for the incongruously homely English saucepan of steaming water that Ali had set to boil, filled from a skin hanging off the rafters. Picking up the tallest of three long, thin brass coffee-pots, he poured the ground coffee into it, followed by the steaming water. After a minute he skimmed off the foam and allowed the coffee to subside, then poured the mixture into a smaller pot with the same shape. He added a pinch of spice, stirred and skimmed it again, and finally poured the tar-like coffee into four tiny porcelain cups without handles that nested in the palm of his hand. It was unlike any Turkish coffee I had ever tasted, fragrant with cardamom and thick enough to spoon from the cup.
After the ceremonial three cups, we ate, tearing pieces of a flat bread, cold and tasting of raw flour despite being flecked with burnt bits, using the pieces to scoop, spoon-like, into a communal pot of some sort of spiced and mashed pulse or bean, also cold. It was a makeshift meal, but it served to fill our stomachs, and its completion seemed to mark a degree of acceptance on the part of our hosts. They wiped their fingers on their robes, cleared the cups and empty bowl to one side, and proceeded to pull out a couple of beautifully embroidered tobacco pouches and roll themselves cigarettes. Holmes accepted Mahmoud’s offer of the pouch, papers, and a glass of cold water; they were not offered to me, but I declined as if they had been, and waited impatiently for the male tobacco ritual to reach a point where speech was acceptable. Eventually, the silent Mahmoud looked at Ali, who seemed to feel the glance and take it as a signal because he immediately reached into the front of his robe with his left hand and took out a thumb-sized knob of soft wood. His right hand went to his chest and drew the heavy, razor-honed knife from its decorated scabbard, and to my surprise he proceeded to use the unlikely blade to whittle delicately at the bit of wood. After a few moments, his cigarette bobbing dangerously close to his black beard, he paused in his carving and raised his eyes to Holmes.
“So,” he said. “Do you mind telling us what you are doing here?”
TWO
ب
Geometry enlightens the mind and sets one’s mind straight … The mind that turns regularly to geometry is unlikely to fall into error.
—
THE
Muqaddimah
OF IBN KHALDÛN
I was beginning to wonder the same thing myself, and in fact, the question was to run like a refrain through all the activities of the next few days. What was I doing here?
“My brother, Mycroft, suggested that you had a problem we might help you with,” Holmes replied. “That is all I know.”
“A ‘problem’,” Ali repeated.
“His word.”
“So you come all the way from England to help us with a problem you know nothing about.”
“I am regarded as something by way of an expert on problems,” Holmes said modestly.
“Or is it that your brother, Mycroft, wants you to check up on us?”
“I should think if that’s what he wanted, he would have indicated we might not trust you, but it’s difficult to say. Mycroft is something by way of an expert on keeping things to himself.”
Ali made a growling noise in the back of his throat and fingered his knife impatiently. “Why did you come? What brings you here?”
Holmes made no further effort to dodge the question, although the answer was a thing of unvarnished humiliation. “We were in danger of losing our lives in London, and needed to get away for some weeks in order to gain the upper hand on our return. Mycroft thought we could as well make ourselves useful as hide in a cave somewhere.”
“So we are to be your nursemaids?” Ali said with incredulity.
“Absolutely not,” Holmes snapped, his voice suddenly cold.
“You are an old man and she is a girl,” Ali retorted. “You may have dyed your faces, but you can’t even speak Arabic.”
“I speak the tongue as one who was born to the black tents of the Howeitat Bedu,” said Holmes in an Arabic that was apparently as flawless as he imagined it, for Ali looked at him in surprise and even Mahmoud cocked an eyebrow. “Russell speaks Hebrew, as well as French, German, and a number of fairly useless dead languages; her Arabic is progressing rapidly.”
It was an exaggeration, but I promptly dragged up a sentence I had laboriously constructed during our boat trip here (ten days spent primarily on intensive lessons in Arabic and intense games of chess) and I parroted it to the room. “My Arabic lacks beauty, but the bones are strong and it grows in the manner of a young horse.”
I was afraid they would ask me a question, at which my ignorance would be laid bare, but Ali picked up where he had left off.
“Very well,” he said, still in English. “You speak with a beautiful accent, but there is more to life here than language. We do not have time to set our steps by yours.”
“If we lag behind, leave us. An hour in the bazaar to supply the portions of our costume the boat could not provide, and we are ready.”
“Dressed as you are, everyone in the market would know your business.”
“Then you will have to spend the hour for us,” Holmes said, as if in agreement to a proposal. Mahmoud made some slight noise, but when I glanced at him, his face was without expression.
“But you look wrong,” Ali objected. “You have strange eyes. The girl even wears spectacles.”
“The spectacles are an oddity, but not an insurmountable one. As for the eyes, Circassians often have blue eyes. So do Berbers, who often have yellow hair as well. Berbers are also known for being strong-headed, which is even more appropriate.”
“We have no beds,” Ali cried in desperation.
“Maalesh,” Holmes said. “But as an ‘old man’ I suppose I am meant to need my sleep, so I will wish you a good night.” And so saying, he kicked off his boots, wrapped himself up in his greatcoat, and turned his face to the wall. I followed his example; eventually the others did as well. They could, after all, scarcely lie in comfort on the carpets and bedclothes they no doubt had in their possession when their two soft Western guests slept on the packed-earth floor.
Between the discomfort, the nocturnal activities of a variety of four-, six-, and eight-legged residents, and the gradual mid-night suspicion that our hosts were more than unusually troubled by our visit (“They could have landed at a more convenient time,” Ali had said to Steven), I did not actually fall asleep until I had heard the pre-dawn wail of a distant muezzin calling the faithful to prayer. I woke when the door opened and shut at first light, but by then I was numb enough to call it comfortable, and dropped back to sleep until Ali and Mahmoud swept back in, their arms filled with bundles.
Their shopping expedition had not changed their temper. Mahmoud went silently to the corner to build a fire for coffee while Ali came perilously close to throwing his purchases at us and kicking us awake. (In truth, the room was so small that dropping the things and pacing up and down amounted to the same thing.) I blearily pushed my stiff bones upright, put on my spectacles, shifted back out of his way, and reached for the nearest twine-bound parcel.
My heart sank when I saw what it contained, and I sat rubbing my face and wondering where to begin. Ali’s idea of a suitable garment amounted to a rough, black, head-to-toe sack with a hole for my eyes combined with too-small, thin-soled, decorative sandals with narrow straps that hurt just to look at them.
“Holmes,” I said. He looked up from his gear, which was similar to Mahmoud’s, only plainer. His mouth twitched and he looked down at the wide belt in his hand, and then he relented.
“This will be fine,” he said, and stood up to begin the change of identity. “Russell’s, however, will not do.
She will need the clothing of a young man.”
“That is not possible,” Ali said flatly. “It is haram.” Forbidden.
“It is necessary, and no one will know.”
“She could be stoned for dressing as a man.”
“It is highly unlikely any judge would approve the punishment, although a mob might use it as an excuse to throw some rocks. If you are afraid of being placed in danger, then we shall leave you.”
Ali’s hand gripped the shaft of his knife so hard I thought the ivory would bulge out between his fingers, but the blade remained in the sheath.
“You will not accuse me of cowardice, and she will wear those clothes.”
“Actually, no,” Holmes said, completely ignoring the man’s fury and sounding merely bored—an old and effective technique of his. “She will not wear those clothes, or anything like them. No burkah, no bangles, no veil. She will not walk behind us, she will not cook our food, she will not carry water on her head. This is not, you understand, my choice; I should be perfectly happy to have her clothed head to foot and in a subservient position—the novelty would be most entertaining. However, she will simply not do that, so we must either live with it or separate. The choice, gentlemen, is yours.”
His state of undress had reached the point at which I had to turn my back, so I missed the non-verbal portions of the discussion that followed, and many of the words they used passed me by. Still, I did not need a translation for their emotional content, nor did I need to have Holmes tell me why Ali had left so precipitately, since all the women’s garments left with him. I turned back to find Holmes transformed into a Palestinian Arab.
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