I laughed aloud in pleasure at the analysis, and at the delicious complications to be found in human intercourse; Ali turned his head and laughed with me.
We did not bother with the tents that night, merely wrapping ourselves in abayyas and rugs for a few brief and very cold hours. The night was still inky overhead, spangled with the intricate spray of a million pure, bright stars, when Ali’s tea-making sounds began. Wrapped tightly inside my rug, I sat more or less upright and huddled near the small fire, my breath coming out in clouds before my face. When we started off I retained my rug, only returning it to the mule’s pack when the sun had come up in our faces.
Over breakfast, which as usual was eaten in the late morning, I asked Holmes for the map I knew he had secreted somewhere in the folds of his robe. I ignored Ali’s ostentatious display of checking the countryside for onlookers, as we had seen perhaps three human beings all morning (and those miles away) and I took the small folded paper Holmes handed me, spreading it out on my knees.
With some effort (the map was both small and highly detailed) I traced our path out of Beersheva, through the Wadi Estemoa, up to a nameless square indicating the village, down into the other wadi where we had been set upon by a thief, and then straight east to where we now sat. I saw that in a short time we should come to Masada, or Sebbeh as the map had it, Herod’s hilltop fortress that was the last stronghold of Jewish resistance to fall to the Romans in the year 74.
Masada was a natural hill fort on a cliff overlooking the Dead Sea. Directly opposite lay the wide peninsula called El Lisan—the Tongue—with the town of Mazra in its eastern crook and its northernmost tip given the unlikely name of Cape Costigan. The gap between our bank and the peninsula, however, was as I remembered: a bit far for mules to swim and, according to the depth lines sketched onto the water, too deep to wade.
“Will we go around the south to get to Mazra?” I asked.
“Too slow,” grunted Mahmoud.
“We swim, then?” I asked brightly, and added in English, “What jolly fun.”
The facetious remark was too much for Mahmoud. “That will not be necessary,” he growled repressively, and sent me to unhobble the mules.
It was a bare twenty map miles from the previous night’s comfortless camp, but it was late afternoon when we reached the vicinity of Masada. The climb down the cliffs was too precarious to risk the legs of the mules in the dark. Ali again pulled his vanishing act, hurling himself down the precipitous path to the sea, leaving the tents and cook fire to us.
I briskly followed Ali’s example. Before I could be handed a water-skin or a handful of tent pegs, I made my own escape, in the opposite direction.
I approached Masada from the high ground and made my way up the remains of the ramp that the Romans had used in their final assault on the fortress of rebels. Once inside the walls, I crossed the deserted plateau to stand with the last rays of the sun on my back, gazing down at the Roman camp and the sea behind it. Two years after Jerusalem fell, the inexorable might of Rome had thrown a circle around the hill and then, one basket of rubble at a time—carried by Jewish prisoners who, in painful irony, were safe from the arrows of their brothers overhead—built a ramp for their siege machines. The ramp was completed; the next morning the siege machines were brought up, the defences were breached, and the invaders stormed the walls to find: nothing. Nothing but death, an entire community—men, women, and children—that chose suicide over captivity. I wondered what thoughts went through Flavius Silva’s mind as the Roman victor stepped onto the charnel-house of a mountain-top that morning. I wondered too what thoughts went through the mind of the man writing the account, a man who had actually commanded Jewish forces in that same revolt, who had been one of two survivors of another suicide pact that followed a defeat, who had turned his back on his people to wield a propagandistic pen for his new masters. Josephus the turncoat, I thought, was not a person to appreciate the grim irony of Masada.
The silence still lay here, a peculiar blend of triumph and devastation, the symbol of a stubborn people. The only sign of life below was the familiar dark shapes of a Bedouin encampment on the opposite shore. A hyrax came out and eyed me suspiciously; a vulture rode the air along the edge of the sea. The water was a dark bowl filled with the approaching night, but the air was warm and moist and slightly hazy. El Lisan lay before me; I wondered what arrangement Ali was making. With that thought I was called back to responsibility, and I took myself down from the brooding hill to hammer tent pegs.
The human body floats without exertion on the surface, and can be submerged only with difficulty; but swimming is unpleasant, as the feet have too great a tendency to rise to the surface.
—BAEDEKER’S Palestine and Syria,
1912 EDITION
or a smuggler, I thought, the man seemed quite ordinary looking. I had met smugglers before, retired ones for the most part; on the coast of Sussex where I lived it was once a common enough profession. Salt smuggling, however, had struck me by its very prosaic nature as a vocation requiring a compensatorily flamboyant personality, but such was not the case here. He looked like a small shopkeeper, pleasant and settled and mildly hopeful that we might purchase something. Perhaps smuggling was an everyday occupation here, requiring not a modicum of derring-do. Ali and Mahmoud appeared immensely more criminal. Heavens, I looked more criminal than he did.
“We are interested in salt,” Ali had begun, some time ago, and Mr Bashir the smuggler took him at his word. He told us about salt. He told us about government salt and the taxes thereon, about the differences between the salt from the ponds obtained up near Jericho and those down farther in the Dead Sea and the hills near Sedom, about the misunderstanding that arose with the new officials and their English laws when the governments changed, strange foreign officials who were bafflingly immune, if not actually opposed, to bakshish, condemning that ages-old oil for all the machinery of the East as bribery, or begging. It was all so much easier under the Turks, he explained sadly. He talked about the subsequent difficulties faced by an honest tradesman such as himself, the uncertainty as to whether salt would even remain a government monopoly or be opened to free trade, which would certainly threaten his business, about the balance between purity and savour and price, the costs involved in mining it as opposed to the risks involved in illicit salt ponds. He talked with professional expertise about the Biblical story of Lot’s wife, turned into a pillar of salt when she looked back on the destruction of her city, and ventured a humble opinion as to which of the pillars just south of here she might be. A wealth of information, our Mr Bashir.
Yes, he knew Mikhail the Druse. Not much of a customer in himself, but an amusing fellow, and as a reference there was none better. Very much to be trusted, was Mikhail. “Which is why I am drinking your coffee now, gentlemen, truth be told. A friend of Mikhail’s, you know?” Yes, he had heard the poor fellow was dead, truly a loss. How? Oh, news travels. And speaking of news, had Mahmoud heard of the affair of Sheikh Abu-Tayyan’s second son? No? Well, it appeared that he saw this woman one day, out walking to her well, and he decided that he had to have her. Unfortunately, she was already married. So, when he was down in Akaba one week—
The story, like most Arab camp-fire stories, went on forever and depended on an intimate knowledge of the people and customs and a peculiarly brutal sense of humour. Rather like the tales one overhears in a beery working-class pub, come to think of it, only more picturesque when told in the sober poetry of guttural Arabic beneath a black goats-hair tent.
At any rate, this story, with the one Ali told afterwards (about a she-camel which was stolen and disguised, with another camel dyed to look like her, which second camel was then stolen back by the first camel’s original owner—who, to crown the story, did not discover his mistake until the dye wore off), took the better part of an hour. Mahmoud then mentioned a mare Mikhail had owned, that possessed a strange ability to—
We were off again. Twenty minutes later that mare was
put to rest, and a dainty feeler went out from Mahmoud. Did Mr Bashir perhaps know where Mikhail had gone this last week? Perhaps Mr Bashir had even seen Mikhail? Because there was a horse—not the mare with the strange trick, but another one—that Mahmoud was interested in, and Mikhail had been going to see the owner to make enquiries—
Mr Bashir was not fooled. Mr Bashir had been waiting ever since he had dropped from the saddle of his demure little mare onto the salty shore to hear what it was we truly wanted; furthermore, Mahmoud knew full well that the salt smuggler was not fooled, but it was all part of the way of doing business in the East, and neither of the adversaries was disappointed. Mahmoud nattered on about the miraculous if non-existent horse, and Mr Bashir smiled widely and drank coffee and laughed at the correct places and shook his head in amazement and distress, while my knees went numb and Ali picked a design with his vicious knife down the back of a thumb-sized wooden snake and Holmes watched it all under lowered eyelids, looking half-asleep.
After a long, long time, the normally taciturn Mahmoud paused to draw breath, and Holmes spoke up for the first time.
“There is another horse,” he said. Mr Bashir looked at him politely, and Mahmoud subsided. “It is a family matter, you understand?” Mr Bashir began to look distinctly interested. “There is a man, not from this area, but he comes to this place from time to time. There was a horse, a stallion, that once belonged to my father, and it was stolen, and the thief sold it to this man. This man then sold the horse himself, up into the north.” This put rather a different slant on the matter, I saw. Horse stealing was one thing, an honest sport, but theft for mere profit, without allowing the owner a chance to steal it back—this was not cricket. Mr Bashir might be a trader, but he knew honour. Holmes continued. “Mikhail was the brother of a brother. I heard he knew this man, that he could find where the horse is now. If I found that place, my brothers and I could go there and bring back the horse of my father. You understand?”
Mr Bashir’s eyes shone at the thought, both of the chance to earn a profit at little effort, and moreover at being given a role in the sort of story that might be told over fires from here to Aleppo. Holmes, holding the drama, reached into his robe and pulled out a small leather purse. He jiggled it on the palm of his hand a couple of times. It clinked heavily.
“I might be interested in buying salt, as well,” he said.
“I have much salt,” said Mr Bashir. “I also may know the man you seek.” Holmes pulled open the top of the money purse and took out three silver coins. These he laid casually in a row on the carpet in front of him. He reached back into the purse, took out some more coins, and worked them back and forth between his long fingers while Mr Bashir continued to speak.
“I do not know where the stranger came from, but I agree, not from here. Damascus, or farther north, I do not know. He contacted me a month or more ago. He too was interested in salt. He did not mention horses,” he added, and his eyes crinkled at the subtlety of his joke.
Holmes took one of the coins he held and placed it on the middle coin in the row of three. This one was gold, and it would be difficult to say which gleamed the brighter, the coin or Mr Bashir’s eyes. Holmes said casually, “He was not interested in the salt from the ponds, I think.”
“No,” agreed the smuggler. He was enjoying this.
“He was interested in the other salt, that you take from the ground near Sedom.”
“Yes …”
“Or, shall I say, not the salt itself, but the means of extracting it.”
Mr Bashir did not even look at the pile of coins; this was a pleasure beyond business.
“That is true.” I glanced at my companions to see what they were making of this, and saw a tiny smile cross Mahmoud’s lips. Ali looked stunned.
“Are they perhaps items left over from the war? Perhaps having to do with the work El Aurens did on the Turkish railroads?” I knew instantly what he was working around: Colonel Lawrence was already a legend, famous for his guerrilla raids on the railways of the desert, laying explosives under the tracks and setting them off beneath a passing supply train to tip it neatly into the sand.
The smuggler slapped his thigh in delight. “Do you wish some as well, my friend? I have a plentiful supply, and truth to tell the stuff is no good for mining salt. It is much too dangerous, can be heard halfway to Jaffa, and furthermore it blows the salt all over the countryside.”
“I do not wish any today, but perhaps in the future. Tell me, this firengi, this foreigner, has he already bought from you? Taken his purchases away with him?” Delicately Holmes placed another gold coin on top of the other, tapping it into alignment with his fingernail.
“I regret to say that he has. A week or more ago.”
“Which day might that have been?”
The smuggler hesitated, and Holmes’ fingers hovered over the last coin.
“The night of the new moon.”
“Which way did he go when he left you?”
“In the direction of Hebron. He and two other men, with three horses and five donkeys.”
A third gold round joined the pile. “How much did he buy from you?”
“He wanted everything I had, but I only sold him twenty-five.”
“Twenty-five? These are the one-pound sticks?” Holmes asked, sounding disappointed.
“These were bundles. Ten one-pound sticks bound together. And three detonators, of course.”
“Of course. Two hundred fifty pounds of dynamite,” said Holmes in a light voice. “With that, a man could surely remove a great deal of salt. I thank you, my friend. Would you please receive this, as a payment towards the salt I shall ask you to send me? There will be no hurry about it.”
Mr Bashir hesitated briefly, then took the coins and swiftly tucked them away. More coffee, a couple of rather subdued stories, and he stood up to leave. Ali rose to walk with the smuggler to his horse, but Holmes waved him back, and accompanied the portly little trader.
They stood talking for several minutes on the far side of the horse, then Mr Bashir mounted and rode away, but not before I saw Holmes press another golden coin into the man’s hand. He came back to the fire smiling to himself.
“What did he not wish to tell us all?” I asked him.
“Ah,” said Holmes, dropping to the carpet and beginning to fill his pipe. “It appears that while this stranger, this firengi from the north, was concluding his business with the good Mr Bashir, one of Mr Bashir’s colleagues —I assume a son, as he was so embarrassed about the breach of hospitality—took the opportunity to glance through the man’s bags, and happened to see, among other things, a revolver, a sniper’s rifle with an enviable sight, and a monk’s habit.”
He reached for a coal with the tongs, enjoying the effect of his dropped remark. Ali was much absorbed by the presence of a rifle, although frankly I had assumed the man would have had one. But a monk’s habit?
“Was he certain? About the habit?” I asked.
“Mr Bashir’s people are Christian Arabs. I am satisfied that his son knows what a monk looks like. Mahmoud,” Holmes said, interrupting Ali’s muttered exclamations of revenge, “where would you go, if you wished to find a monk in a habit?”
“There are many monks in the land. Many monasteries.”
“Not as many as there were in times past,” I commented.
“This may be true. Still, there are monasteries in the Sinai, St Catherine’s being the most famous. There are the monasteries of St Gerasimo and St John and St George near Jericho, Mar Elyas and Mar Sabas and St Theodosius; Latrun, St Elijah, and in Jerusalem itself another St Elyas. Also St Mark’s, the Monastery of the Cross, the Abyssinian monastery, the Armenian monastery, the—”
“Enough,” said Holmes. “We are looking for a monastery within one or two days’ journey from here on horse, in a lonely place, preferably in or west of the Ghor. A place a stranger could visit for a day or two without causing comment or disruption. A place …” He paused, tapping his pipe s
tem against his lower teeth and staring vacantly at the edge of the water a stone’s throw away. “A place with beehives.”
Ali looked at him dubiously, but Mahmoud simply recited, “Mar Sabas, St George, St Gerasimo, St John, the Mount of Temptation, and Mar Elyas.”
Holmes took his map from his robe and spread it on the ground. “Show me.”
Mar Sabas was to the north-west of us, in the hills between the Dead Sea and Jerusalem. The monastery of St Gerasimo was in the land between Jericho and the northern tip of the sea, with St John on the path worn by pilgrims between Jericho and the river Jordan to the east. St George was in a wadi to the west of Jericho, near the old road leading up to Jerusalem, the Mount of Temptation was to the north of Jericho, and Mar Elyas lay south of Jerusalem, off the Bethlehem road.
“There are of course many others, in the towns or else hermitages that do not permit visitors. These six meet your description. Although,” Mahmoud added with a faint air of apology, “I will say I am not certain that the Mount of Temptation has bees, and none of them would be an easy matter to reach in a day.”
“These will do as a start.” Holmes folded up the map and returned it to his robe. “We start for Mar Sabas tomorrow, then, and after that we shall see.”
“It is yet early,” suggested Ali. “If we start now we will be at the monastery by nightfall tomorrow.”
“No,” said Holmes, settling back onto the warm, salt-rimed sand. “We are comfortable here, and besides, Russell has yet to swim in the Dead Sea. One cannot come all this way and fail to float in the waters.” With all the appearance of a holiday maker he lay back on the beach, dug his shoulders back and forth in the sand to shape a hollow, and tipped his bearded features to the sun. Ali and Mahmoud looked at him sourly, obviously wondering what hidden purpose the man had in staying on here. Holmes opened one eye.
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