Lily said as they kept working, “He called you tanib. What was that about?”
Gideon cleaned sand from the hem of the worn white thobe, the long Bedouin shirt that covered the body. “When I started doing surveys of Trans-Jordan a few years ago, I would go from Bedouin camp to Bedouin camp asking where to find ancient remains.” He continued brushing, slower now. “They saw I needed their help. A tanib is someone who pitches a tent near the encampment and is under the protection of neighboring tents.”
They worked silently, wielding trowels and brushes, taking an occasional sip of water. The body wore a coarse brown cloak over the thobe.
Lily’s hand began to quiver as she realized that the clothes looked familiar. A frisson of apprehension ran through her.
“We haven’t seen Qasim since he made coffee this morning,” she said.
Gideon glanced at her, said nothing, and continued brushing, more carefully now.
Lily thought of Qasim’s elaborate gesture as he would pour the coffee into the little porcelain cups, how he always polished the blackened coffee pot with desert sand and would tell her when he rubbed the lid that if it didn’t have the figure of a chicken on the top, it wasn’t a Bedouin pot.
“Qasim said he had a message for you,” Lily said.
“He didn’t tell me. What was it?”
She kept brushing. Slowly, carefully.
“I’m not sure, something about the Rashidi. I didn’t get all of it. He spoke in a low voice, and was talking into the wind.”
They had cleared the sand away from the rope that was used as a belt, and came to the hands, slightly raised, clenched in a grotesque empty grip that clutched nothing but air.
“This is beginning of rigor.” Gideon paused and sat back on his heels. “When the fingers curl like that. He’s been dead at least three hours.” He stopped, seemed to think about it, then nodded. “In this heat, about three hours.”
Lily shuddered with a flicker of dread. “Since this morning.”
He glanced at Lily, his eyes dark with worry, and patted her arm in reassurance.
They cleaned the stiffened hands gently, using a camel’s hair brush between the fingers, and continued along the arms and across the chest, up to the shoulders, and beyond the neck to reach the face.
They brushed away the sand to reveal a mouth distorted into the grimace-like rictus of rigor mortis. The eyes had already begun to sink. A dollop of blood at his nose had dried into a brown crust.
Lily felt the blood drain from her face. She murmured, “Qasim,” and put down her brush.
Gently, Gideon cleared the sand from the open eyes as well as he could.
Lily glanced away. She could just make out a Bedouin seated on a camel watching them from the top of the ridge. His brown kafiya was done up as a turban and his dark cloak fluttered in the wind. She rose and stood beside of the Jeep, leaning her head against the doorpost. Even though the Jeep was hot to the touch, a chill ran through Lily and she began to tremble.
And what was the message Qasim had for Gideon, she wondered? Maybe Klaus heard some of it. I’ll ask him.
Dimly, Lily heard the sound of a lorry coming down the wadi toward them and looked up.
She glanced toward the top of the ridge again. The Bedouin with the brown kafiya was gone. Maybe she imagined him. Gideon hadn’t seen him. Who was he, and why was he watching them, she wondered?
The lorry came closer. Jalil was driving. He turned the lorry and backed it until it almost touched the front bumper of the Jeep. He reached behind him for a chain, gave a quick glance to Qasim’s body with a sharp intake of breath. He looped the chain over the bumper of the Jeep and fixed it to the tow bar of the lorry before he walked over to Qasim and stood over him.
“To bury a man is to honor him,” he said, and strolled to the back of the Jeep. Without a word, he signaled to Gideon and waited for him to bring out shovels and trenching spades.
He watched silently as Lily and Gideon measured out a rectangle with a north-south axis large enough for a grave and marked the area with nails and a string.
All three of them began to dig. Out of habit, Lily reached for the trowel and began to scrape the sides of the rectangle to make a plumb surface.
Jalil gave her a disapproving glance and told her to wait in the lorry.
She sat in the front seat, next to the open door, watching as the heat of the day lightened, thinking, with a touch of resentment, he sent me away because I am a woman.
By the time Gideon and Jalil finished digging, the sun was lower on the western horizon, and a gentle afternoon wind hinted of the cool desert night to come. Gideon cleared the string surrounding the pit and wound it around the nails, while Jalil prepared to remove Qasim’s clothes to leave on top of the grave for other needy Bedouin, in Qasim’s last act of generosity.
Jalil rolled the body over and spoke for the first time. “Knife wounds. More than one. He’s been stabbed repeatedly in the back.” He rotated it back again and left the bloodstained clothing in place.
Qasim stared with blank, sand encrusted eyes at the open sky. Both Gideon and Jalil carried him, now stiff with rigor, to his grave and lowered him into it with his head facing south toward Mecca.
Jalil wrapped the cloak tighter around Qasim before they refilled the cavity with sand heaped over the body. He piled stones over the small mound and, with his arms crossed over his chest, mumbled a prayer, first at the foot of the mound, then at its head.
Jalil turned, cleared his throat, said, “Gideon Weil, I regret that, for now, I must arrest you for the murder of Qasim ibn Achmad,” and moved Gideon to the lorry.
Chapter Three
Trans-Jordan lies east of the Jordan River, east of the Dead Sea, east of the deep declivity of the Wadi Arava. Four fifths of it is desert. East of the deep valleys of the Jordan River, the Dead Sea, and the Wadi Arava, the land rises to 4000 feet, studded with villages and green with small farms, vineyards, and fig orchards cut into the terraced hillsides. Beyond that, in the rain shadow of the mountains, the hills descend almost imperceptibly into a scrub desert some twenty to twenty-five miles east of the ridge. The Hejaz railroad runs along this boundary between the desert and the sown.
This is the land of the Bedouin.
The lorry whined its way up the Wadi Rum, disturbing the elegant silence of the desert. Behind them, the Jeep wobbled against the tow-chain and stirred a cloud of dust in their wake.
For a while, none of them spoke.
As they bumped along toward the Outpost at Rum, Lily wondered how Jalil knew that the body was Qasim’s. Did Klaus tell him? And what made Jalil think that Gideon had killed Qasim? Did Klaus say that too?
“Why did you arrest Gideon?” Lily asked from the back seat.
Jalil swerved to avoid a boulder in their path and the Jeep rattled behind them. “To keep the peace. An unsolved death like Qasim’s could start a round of feuds among the Bedouin unless someone is held responsible.”
“But why Gideon?”
“He had the opportunity.”
“We didn’t see Qasim all day. I was with Gideon the whole time. Why not accuse me too?”
Jalil turned his head slightly to glance at her. “You’re a woman. A woman couldn’t attack a man powerfully enough to kill.”
Lily bristled. “Yes I could,” she said, defending her right to be accused of murder, before she realized how foolish it sounded.
All this time, Gideon, his eyes wide, his mouth open in astonishment, had been staring at Jalil. “It makes no sense. Why would I kill him? I had no motive. He was our guide.”
“You can argue that it was accidental.”
In the distance, Jebel Rum loomed ahead of them.
“It won’t be so bad,” Jalil said after a while. “You’ll just pay a fine to Qasim’s khamsa for the loss of one of their members.”
“But why Gideon?” Lily asked again.
“All Americans are rich.” H
e banged on the steering wheel, sending drifts of dust into the air. “Howeitat are poor.”
The rest of the way, they rode in silence.
As they came closer to Jebel Rum, the sheer red cliff of the mountain seemed to climb into the sky and beyond. Lily caught a glimpse of the Outpost of the Desert Patrol at the base, tucked up against the mountain so closely that it seemed that the mountain might fall and bury it.
From this far away, the building looked small and derelict, like the forgotten toy of a careless child.
On their right, the first signs of darkness appeared in the eastern sky.
As they drew closer, the scrub vegetation that surrounded the Outpost emitted the sharp aroma of broom and tamarisk and thorn bushes. Lily made out a squat building of large cinderblocks with turrets at the corners and a round cistern on the roof. The yard outside had a pump house, a well surrounded by mint, and a trough for watering animals. A bucket and a washbasin sat next to the well. An old, faded blue Buick was parked a short distance away. Jalil’s camel was nowhere in sight.
“Where’s your camel?” Lily asked.
Jalil grinned. “The desert is a haunted place. Don’t you know that at night, djinn leap out of the chasms and caves to steal away with our camels?”
Gideon turned toward Jalil. “It isn’t night yet. Where’s Klaus?”
“He said he had business, an appointment, and rode out on the camel. Like a djinn.”
“Did the djinn who rode the camel take anything with him?”
“His camera and some water.”
“He say where he was going?”
“Just left. Down the wadi and over the hill.”
Jalil led them inside to the back of the building and escorted Gideon to a room on the far side of an office. Lily could see the bare cinder block walls through the half-open door. The room had a high window, a sleeping palette, and two buckets near a water spigot.
Jalil escorted Gideon inside, then locked the door.
He showed Lily to the front of the building. Her room had a bed with a straw mattress, whitewashed walls, a real sink with a bucket next to it, and a drain in the center of the cement floor.
“You can wash,” Jalil said. “The cistern on the roof holds a day’s supply of water. Don’t drink it. I keep boiled water in the kitchen for drinking.” He started to leave and then turned back. “There’s an outhouse behind the building. Be sure to use plenty of lime.”
Jalil left, with the promise of a meal in perhaps an hour.
Lily went outside to retrieve the washbasin, brought it back to her room and filled the basin with water, still hot from the day’s sun that beat on the flat roof.
She rummaged in her duffel bag for a soap dish and sponge, and laid out a towel and clean clothes on the mattress: jodhpurs, a shirt and a change of underwear.
She stepped out of the sand-heavy clothes she wore and into the basin, squeezing water from the sponge over her hair and neck, down her shoulders and back, along her legs, feeling the delightful bite of the hot water, and wondered about Klaus.
Where did he really go when he took off, the way he did today from the Outpost? He had done it before, left them for the day, and returned, with no explanation other than a shrug.
She and Gideon joked about it sometimes, speculating that he went out to meet a lady in the desert wilderness, where they made wild love all night long without ruffling his moustache.
Evenings, when they sat around the campfire, Klaus would tell them how he had escaped from Germany, how he had to leave his wife and son behind, how the Hagganah, the Jewish secret defense force, smuggled him out and landed him in Palestine on the beach at Nahariya on a moonless night. He had gone to Jaffa, he said, and gotten a job as a photographer’s assistant at Balian Studios, learned Arabic by dealing with the customers, and learned Hebrew by writing down each new word he heard on a pad he always carried and looking up the word in a dictionary.
Then he would show them a picture of his wife and his son, running his fingers lovingly over their image in the flickering firelight. “They’ll be all right,” he would say. “They live in the country with my wife’s family. They’re not Jewish, you know.” And then he would sigh, put the picture back in his wallet, and take it out again the next night.
Lily soaped herself and released more water from the sponge, soaped and washed again and again until the water in the basin was clouded with sand. Finally, she stepped out of the basin, dried herself, and dressed.
***
She was surprised to find Gideon in the kitchen, helping Jalil with dinner.
Jalil lined a large platter with flat Bedouin bread piled it high with mutton, eggs, and rice and set it in the center of the table. He put a warmed, damp towel at each place.
They ate with their hands, folding a piece of the bread around the rice and mutton, their hands greasy with mutton fat, laughing as it ran down their chins with each portion, reaching for the damp towels between mouthfuls.
When they finished, Jalil brought out cups of sticky-sweet tea that left Lily thirstier for drinking it, and they leaned back and talked.
“Where does the water come from?” Lily asked. “You truck it in to the cistern every day?”
“There’s a high water table here,” Gideon told her, “with springs and wells. Ain esh-Shallaleh, the Spring of the Waterfall. It’s called Lawrence’s Well by some. He used Rum as headquarters for a time during the last war.” He tilted his chair back precariously, then leaned forward. The chair legs landed on the floor with a bang. “There’s a Nabatean temple here dedicated to the Lady Allat, and some Thamudic inscriptions.”
“The Lady Allat?” asked Lily.
“The Lady Allat, the daughter of God, Goddess of the Moon, the maiden, the mother, the wise woman. She’s all these things. She’s even mentioned in the Koran. Herodotus called her the Arabian Aphrodite.”
“You’ve been here before?”
Gideon nodded. “At the Nabatean Temple.”
Lily thought about it, and about Gideon helping Jalil in the kitchen instead of being locked in the room on the other side of the outpost.
“You’ll show me the temple tomorrow?”
“No,” he said. “Tomorrow, you will go to Petra.”
“Petra?”
“A wonderful place,” Jalil said. “Al-medina al-wardah, the legendary rose-red city.”
“But why?” she asked him.
“Glubb Pasha says you must learn to shoot a gun.”
Chapter Four
Lily turned the key in the old Buick and pulled out the choke. It whined and coughed and finally caught.
Jalil leaned into the car and smiled. “Be careful.” He gestured toward the road. “A ghula, a witch, dwells hidden in the caves, lying in wait, ready to jump out and devour whoever passes by.” And then he laughed. “If you enter the cave of a witch you will not leave alive.” He threw out his arms in a helpless gesture and laughed again. “Maybe.”
After a quick breakfast of eggs and what was left of last night’s bread, Jalil had told her about the car that was parked in the yard of the Outpost early this morning. It was an old Buick, he said, that belonged to Glubb Pasha.
Jalil had made a pot of Bedouin coffee, boiled up three times and laced with sugar and cardamom. He gave the first cup with the foam to Lily, making a show of pouring it from a height to create the froth.
She suspected that the offering was a bribe of some sort, that she was going to be asked to do something difficult. Gideon confirmed the suspicion when he spread out a British Ordinance Map on the table.
“Jalil has already filled the canvas bag and your canteen with water,” Gideon told her. “And boiled you some extra eggs for the trip.”
“What trip?”
“Abu Huniak radioed me,” Jalil said. “You’re borrowing his old Buick. I filled it with petrol.”
“Abu Huniak?”
“Glubb Pasha. We call him Abu Huniak, litt
le jaw. Part of his jaw was shot off in the Great War.” Jalil ran his fingers along the thick stubble on the right side of his chin to demonstrate. “He doesn’t mind if we call him that. We do it with love.”
Glubb Pasha was Colonel John Glubb, British officer and commander of the Arab Legion, who had trained Bedouin to form the Desert Patrol.
“You’re going to meet him in Petra,” Gideon told her. “He’s waiting for us.”
“For us?” She felt less apprehensive about the trip. “You’re coming with me?”
Gideon threw up his arms in a helpless gesture, raised his eyebrows in question and smiled at Jalil.
Jalil smiled back at him. “El Tanib is under arrest,” he said to Lily. “You must go alone.” He leaned back and sipped his coffee. “You’re going to Petra! The glory of the Nabateans, the ancient masters of the desert”. He leaned forward again, his face animated. “The red-rose city, half as old as time,” he added, quoting a Victorian poet, much to Lily’s surprise.
“Actually,” Gideon said, “the first signs of occupation were in the sixth century B.C.E., probably Edomite. The Nabateans probably showed up sometime in the fourth century B.C.E.”
Gideon had excavated Nabatean sites, written a book and numerous articles about them.
“Some say the Nabateans came out of Saudi Arabia, predatory camel-nomads who raided and traded frankincense and myrrh from Arabia Felix. Others say they are descendants of the Edomites. And some say they are mentioned in the Bible, as the Nebaioth, one of the sons of Ishmael.”
In Roman times, the Nabateans controlled the desert trade of Imperial Rome. They built watchtowers to monitor caravans that crossed the desert tracks, stopping them for tribute. The Nabateans grew wealthy exacting payment for access to water from springs and wells, and for stops at caravanserai. They extorted tolls for perfumes brought from Arabia, for spices and silks that had traveled from India and China along the Silk Route as they crossed the desert on the way to Mediterranean ports.
Petra was the Nabatean capital.
Jalil turned back to the map. “There’s a track out of here leading north. Follow it until you reach a large wadi, where the track turns left.” He traced the route on the map with his finger. “Keep going.”
The Scorpion’s Bite Page 2