by Harold Lamb
"Northeast."
"Toward China? To Siberia? You don't even know what to look for"
Jacob smiled. "You've given me three hints. A mountain perhaps called Araman. A man named Mr. Bigsby. And your"—he guessed at this—"grandfather's family. If all three are near together——"
Apparently he had made a close guess, because Daoud fell silent, his face a mask.
"I'll be going on my own," the American put in. "Not on your responsibility."
With a nod Daoud acknowledged that, still pondering. "That, yes. But are you quite sure, now, you really want to go?"
"Quite sure."
Before dawn on the second night Jacob had waked because the train was quiet. The ancient carriage in which he lay on a hard board bed no longer creaked. Pushing up the window blind, he felt a cool breath of air. Overhead he picked out the four bright stars of the Square of Pegasus, with Andromeda pointing ahead.
The line of the horizon had moved higher and had broken up into summits against the pattern of the stars. He blinked drowsily at this new blackness, and realized that mountain ridges had risen in the east. At their base, far ahead, he picked out two red eyes of light that flickered as he watched. They were not two eyes, he knew, but the perpetual flames of the Kirkuk oil fields.
Through those everlasting flames ages before, Shadrach, Meshach,, and Abednego had passed unharmed, in the time of Nebuchadnezzar, before Babylon, with its mighty walls, fell to the onset of the horsemen from the mountains. He breathed deep of the clean air of the desert, his mind half-asleep. The ruins of Babylon, the Tower of Babel lay near him, in this land, where stone bullmen guarded the gate of dead Nineveh.
In that moment of quiet the distant gas flames shone like signal beacons. Men passed his carriage window, moving silently with long steps, their heads wrapped in cloth—hillmen on the way to their hills. A voice called at them, "Khabar-dar [Take care]!" And a single coated figure came to stand beneath the window, a sentry on whose bayonet the star gleam fell. A watcher, a policeman at his window.
On the Kirkuk platform the early morning sun struck with a furnace blast. The images of the night fled into dust and noise and confusion as the few other foreigners on the train climbed into waiting cars of the Iraq Petroleum Company and were whirled off to breakfast. When Jacob asked how he could hire a car, the station attendants, busied with luggage tags, only shrugged and told him to inquire at the company office. Left alone, Jacob carried his own bag under the gray, dust-coated trees to the rest bungalow where he might get tea and eggs.
He was waiting at an empty table, wondering how to conjure up a wheeled vehicle, when Squadron Leader Leicester approached briskly with the air of a man who has many worries and little time. Again Jacob thought of himself in uniform.
"I'm sorry," exclaimed the officer, "but did you have permission from our embassy to travel to Kirkuk?"
Jacob considered and shook his head. "Why, no. No, Squadron Leader, I'm only passing through. Sit down and have some tea." He was wishing that his travel orders had included Baghdad.
"Sorry. I'm rather rushed. Captain Ide"—so they knew his name—"I wish you had rung up the embassy before coming. Are you on duty? Of course, in that case——"
"I'm not."
"Might I see your identification?"
Because he gave no more than a glance at Jacob's identity card of Cairo Headquarters he must have known what it had to tell him. "Yes, but if you are on leave, Captain Ide, you must have travel orders. This area has been closed to ordinary travel."
"I've no orders of any kind. I'm only fossicking for bronzes, Squadron Leader."
"For bronzes?"
"For a mate to my horse."
"Your—— Can you show me what you are talking about?" The squadron leader was a decent man trying to be courteous, but with the burden of officialdom on him. When Jacob produced his small Pegasus, the officer stared at it. "Most unusual. You came all the way up here to look in the bazaar for a mate to this?"
An orderly appeared, hot under the weight of a rolled-up kit and bedding sack. The squadron leader looked up, exasperated. "Take it back to the station, you idiot. Wait for me; don't follow me.
"Not in the bazaar," said Jacob; "up in the hills."
"Where, exactly? Please be more precise."
"I don't know where exactly. You see——"
"I'm afraid it's impossible at present." All at once the squadron leader became concise, issuing his instructions. Jacob should have understood why it was impossible. The mountain area was disaffected. The Kurds were on the prowl again with rifles. Troops stationed in the Kirkuk liwa were going through maneuvers along the foothills, The Mullah who held tribal leadership in the mountains had refused to come in to Baghdad to agree to a peace. Under the circumstances, no stranger could be permitted to enter the mountain region.
"Yes, Squadron Leader," said Jacob patiently, "but that's where I want to go. And if I go against your warning, you won't be responsible in any way. So that's all right."
"I can't agree." The officer was firm in his decision. "There's a train to Baghdad in a few hours. I'll have a lorry take you over to the IPC compound until then. That is, if you are certain you do not intend to visit the bazaar."
"I'm certain. You seem to be putting me under escort."
"Yes." Leicester looked at his watch. "Sorry. Higher authority, you know. Your unauthorized visit to the mountains cannot be allowed." For an instant he contemplated Jacob dubiously. "Baghdad's not such a bad place, really."
When he had departed, Jacob drank the strong breakfast tea without relish, weighing his chances of slipping away from higher authority in Kirkuk. At the moment the chances seemed to be nil. He was under observation if not actually under guard. All good motor vehicles would be in use by the oil company or the military. Thoughtfully he pocketed the bronze horse and went out to see if his bag was still where he had left it at the bungalow door. It was, but now a sentry eyed it from a discreet distance.
Then the black car whirled up. It stopped in a cloud of dust, as if belated. Glancing into Jacob's eyes, the driver jumped from the front seat to catch the American's hand and press it to his forehead.
"Marhaba," the man muttered, and snatched up the bag, thrusting it into the back seat and holding the door open for Jacob. This unexpected individual, slender and active, wore a European suit but not as if he felt at home in it.
Jacob's glance took in the sentry fleetingly. Apparently the soldier was not disturbed by the sight of the civilian car calling for Ide, and Jacob had no least desire to disturb him. In three seconds he was in the back seat. Immediately the strange driver was at the wheel, turning into the drifting dust.
The advent of this old-fashioned car, unmistakably American, with nickel fittings carefully polished and a fine rug woven in a rose design on the seat, and fresh poppies in a vase, was as unexpected as the appearance of a taxi in the desert. Leaning back, Jacob reflected that poppies did not grow in the August heat of Baghdad or Kirkuk.
They shot past the station where the squadron leader's orderly waited obediently; they twisted with resounding horn through the alleys of Kirkuk, circled the ancient cemetery height, and roared out along the gray highway eastward. Jacob leaned forward to tell the driver to go toward the hills, and then realized they were going that way at eighty kilometers an hour. Not until they passed the soldiers an hour later did Jacob discover that his driver could not or would not speak to him.
Instead of slowing down when they neared the marching column, Jacob's jehu merely pushed on the horn. The soldiers—khaki-clad Irakis escorting a train of mule-drawn mountain guns—divided hastily to make way for the car. They flashed past the vehicles, obsolescent Bren carriers and canvas-topped lorries, and bore down on the military car at the head of the column. Heads projected from it, and the uniformed driver waved his arm down for the black car to pull up.
"Stop!" Jacob exclaimed. There were officers, apparently British, in the lead car. "Shway—shwayl Here—ahsti
!'
Without slowing down, Jacob's driver swung out from the gravel road, past the officers' machine and back to the road again, leaving a screen of rolling dust behind him. Jacob half-expected to hear a shot, but none came.
The swarthy driver did not seem at all disturbed as he raced on. Jacob tried to get a word out of him in English, French, and broken Arabic, and had only a reassuring nod for an answer. Jacob had no desire to pull up with an angry military convoy trailing him.
Presently his jehu did slow down, only to swing sharply off the road to the left. The car lurched in drifting dust, then sped on again into the open plain.
A dust whorl, driven by a vagrant wind, danced beside them. Peering out, Jacob saw no sign of a kilometer stone or house. Ahead of him stretched tawny foothills upon which sheep moved imperceptibly without a shepherd.
The black car was dwarfed by the vast plain, and for a second Jacob had the sensation of being driven forward, like the dust whorl, by a force he could not perceive.
Then he noticed that the car was following faint wheel marks that wandered among the hillocks but kept on purposefully, up toward a ridge of yellow sandstone. In this stone, gashed as if by a sword, the dark gut of a gorge showed.
Toward this the car sped. When it entered the shadow of the ravine, slowing down over a bed of rocks, Jacob decided to call a halt to get his bearings. This time he resorted to a universal sign language, touching the driver's shoulder and thrusting his arm forward, palm down. Immediately his jehu stopped.
The man then would take orders if he understood them. But why? And why had he picked up Jacob, of all the foreigners in Kirkuk, at the station resthouse? Probably, Jacob reflected, the simplest answer was the right one. The man had been sent to fetch someone, and Jacob had been the only person waiting there at the moment. It had been a coincidence of timing, no more than that. Yet he wanted very much to know where they were headed. Drawing his map from his bag, he got out to see what bearings were visible.
As he had expected, the military cars came into view on the plain below him, crawling along the gray ribbon of the road he had not taken. Satisfied that they were going on past the point where he had turned off, he tried to guess at the direction in which he was now headed. Overhead heat haze obscured the sun. Without a sight of any familiar landmark—he could no longer make out the brilliant flares of the oil fields far below on the Tigris plain—he could only guess that the trail led north and east.
His small-contour map of the Middle East showed a pink line that was the highway below him but no trace of the trail on which he stood. A glance at the ravine revealed that the trail edged along the dry bed of a watercourse that had cut this cleft in the rock foundation of the slopes.
Laying the map on the ground, Jacob turned it to approximate roughly the bearing of the road below. A wind breath in the ravine pulled at the outspread paper, and Jacob took out his bronze Pegasus to weight down one flapping corner.
As he did so the driver who had been filling up the gas tank with tins taken from the back came over to watch him. Jacob beckoned him closer, and he squatted down, his thin face intent, his gray eyes questioning. Jehu, Jacob told himself, if you don't speak my languages you should know a map when you see one. And he put a finger on the road upon the map, waving an interrogatory hand at the hills. His chauffeur looked blank. A map, it seemed, meant no more to him than any colored picture.
Then he noticed the bronze horse. Picking it up, he examined it and said explosively, "Araman!"
Araman. It was the last word Jacob had expected this man to utter. Something in the winged horse had been familiar to him. This jehu of the black car had known intimately what the scientists of Baghdad were searching for with their tabulated knowledge. Smiling, the man pointed toward the ravine; Jacob folded up the map and nodded. "Wherever it is," he said, "we'll go." It seemed that their way led now not toward a designation on his map but toward something embodied in a piece of bronze.
Leaning out as the car started, he scanned the rock wall of the ravine. The smoothness of water erosion ran far up. In other ages melting snow to the northward must have fed the river that poured through this gut into the arm of the sea that had become the valley of the Tigris. Now the ravine formed a natural gateway to the northern hills.
The uneasiness he had felt in the plain had left him. The air had grown cooler; for the first time in weeks he was not wet with perspiration. Idly he watched the trail ahead, noticing that it showed more hoofmarks of animals than tire tracks. Through the afternoon he dozed at times.
Toward sunset the car stopped and Jacob roused, to find himself beside a noisy running stream. Above him on a rock pinnacle two men with rifles were outlined against the glow in the sky. Jacob heard a high-pitched shout. As if waiting for this, his driver started on, edging his way through a flock of sheep.
They were climbing into the dusk of another ravine with stone huts crowding the slopes on either side of the road. The dwellings sank deep into the slopes, and cattle stood tethered on the roofs. When the driver sounded his horn, women appeared unveiled in the doorways, wrapped in loose homespun garments. The black car edged past staring children into the open gate of a courtyard wall. Circling through a growth of poplars with a final blast of the horn, it drew up at a door where a brown boy stood watch with a lantern. Here, apparently, was the end of the road. Jehu disappeared inside with his bag, and the boy led the American up creaking wooden stairs to a balcony.
Here Jacob found that he was being scrutinized by a mild and sad-looking individual Wearing horn-rimmed glasses, over piled-up account books. He also became aware of a scent so strong that it blotted out other odors, a scent warmly sweet that he could not identify. The individual of the books seemed to be transfixed.
"Good evening," Jacob said, hoping that English was spoken here.
"Good evening, sah." The small brown man blinked, as if remembering his manners.
Jacob would have liked to ask where he was and why the car had brought him here; but it would have been foolish to ask, and he much preferred to be told. "It smells good." He smiled, sniffing.
The little man nodded without surprise. With a shy bow he held out a printed card bearing the legend Parabat Ltd. Perfumes, essences, concentrated fruit flavors. Riyat and Calcutta.
"My name is Ide," explained Jacob, who did not care to exhibit any card. "Mr. Parabat."
The proprietor bowed. "I regret my ailing English," he apologized. "But Miss Michal will entertain. You, of course, will stay, Mr. Ide?"
Jacob thought: this must be Riyat, and by the looks of the village this joint is the best to be had. "Yes," he admitted.
"It is a pleszhar." Again Mr. Parabat bowed, all the while clutching a fountain pen. "Miss Michal waits still."
Jacob took this as a signal for him to leave. The owllike regard of Mr. Parabat followed him to the door. "Please, you are not British, sah?"
"No. American."
Down the stairway the overpowering sweetness hung in the air. The servant boy led him through a hall lined with demijohns in wicker cases out into a garden of twilight coolness and the fresher scent of flowers in bloom. Through these the path approached a lighted bungalow hung with lattices.
"Dak bungalow," said the boy. "Meimun khaneh—guesthouse." Gaining courage, he pointed to a door by the entrance steps where a servant in white linen rose at their approach. "Hamam" said the young linguist.
"Bath," nodded Jacob, who wanted one very much. With a sigh of relief he took off his coat. The veranda looked both cool and inviting, and he felt very grateful to Mr. Parabat.
"Hot water, Jemail," a woman's voice called.
She was curled up in a chair, over a book, and she untangled herself lazily. "You are late for tea——" She stopped abruptly."What, in heaven's name, have you been doing to yourself, Aurel?"
Somewhere Jacob had seen that fragile body and the small head under disordered chestnut hair. On Shepheard's veranda she had laughed at the Americans, and he had remembe
red.
"Sorry," he grunted. "I'm Jacob Ide." And he added thoughtfully, "You were looking for the squadron leader, Aurel Leicester."
"I thought I was looking at him."
Yes, she had laughed just like that, quietly amused. It made Jacob feel both resentful and clumsy. He didn't feel like explaining about the car to this woman who did not seem to be thirty years old—who was too lovely to be anything but a hanger-on of the top Britishers. But he found himself saying, "I'm sorry. I think the driver picked the wrong person."
"He did indeed, Mr. Ide. He brought you alone, without any quinine?" She chuckled suddenly. "He went all the way down for Aurel."
When the servants appeared with the hot-water kettle and trays, she exclaimed, "Guava cakes and gingered fruits. This place has everything. Do you like strong tea or weak tea, Mr. Ide?"
Jacob stared at the array of sweets without enthusiasm. "Don't you wait for Mr. Parabat?"
"Oh, he's so polite he never comes to the guesthouse. He'll be waiting to walk with me. Do you mind having tea with me, Mr. Ide ? I'm Michal Thorne among other names, of which I have many. I think you want brandy, and we have some."
Michal Thorne. Miss Michal. Occupying the guesthouse in advance of him, where Squadron Leader Leicester would presumably show up in no amiable mood. She acted as if he had merely dropped in late at her home. . .
"You can call me anything you like," she confided, "except Miss Thorne. I'm trying to escape from Miss Thorne. It's very amusing, isn't it—except for the quinine—that Badr should pick you up by mistake. Were you going anywhere in particular, Mr. Ide, or mustn't I ask?"
"No. Nowhere in particular. I was only shopping around for bronze horses." He thought she chattered on mockingly like a Victorian hostess. But the bronze horses gave her pause.
"Then I won't ask. But you're American, aren't you? I can't help asking that."