O Jerusalem

Writing is the shaping of letters to represent spoken words which, in turn, represent what is in the soul.

—

THE

Muqaddimah

OF IBN KHALDUN

The question rippled through the tent, silencing the men around the fire. I could hear the sounds of sleepy children on the other side of the cloth partition; someone shouted monotonously from the other end of the village. Holmes ran the tip of his tongue along the edge of the thin cigarette paper, sealed it, and reached for the tongs to take a coal from the fire. Men began to speak, in a frustrating jumble of voices.

Some, I thought, protested loyally that Allenby and Feisal had truly driven the Turk to his knees. Heads nodded, and hands reached for the reassurance of narghile and cigarette. Some men, though, did not agree. The men of active fighting age, men whose faces were even more guarded than the average Bedouin’s, quiet men with scars and limps, men who had done more than stand and shoot at a fleeing enemy, those men did not nod their heads and exclaim loudly at the cowardice of the Turk. They glanced at each other from under their eyelids and at Holmes, and they said nothing.

Holmes listened politely to the protestations of freedom, and allowed the subsequent conversation to drift away into a series of bloodthirsty reminiscences of wartime ghazis. I did not think, however, that he had missed the covert glances, and I was not surprised when, a few minutes later, he got to his feet and left the tent, nor that when he returned he settled down not into his former spot, but in the midst of three of the men who had been silent. One of those was Farash, the mukhtar’s son.

Reluctantly I had to agree that the questions he was about to put to the men were best done casually and quietly, so I stayed where I was in the third rank back from the fire. I looked to see what Mahmoud and Ali would do and saw that, despite the sour expression on Ali’s face, they too planned to stay where they were and allow Holmes to continue his sub rosa interrogation. Mahmoud, moreover, tore his eyes from Holmes and turned to the mukhtar.

“Perhaps you have a thing you would like me to read?” he offered.

The eager look on the mukhtar’s old face, and on several others nearby, showed that they had been hoping for the offer. Three or four men scattered, to return with precious, tattered journals in hand. The mukhtar sent a rapid-fire set of instructions at the dividing wall. In an instant, a woman’s hand appeared under the coarse striped fabric, holding out a worn copy of an English journal called Boy’s Own Paper with a dramatic cover showing a troop of khaki-clad lancers riding furiously towards an unseen enemy. The dubious expression on the central horse was echoed by its rider, understandable in my opinion since the men were probably aiming their sharp sticks at an entrenched position of troops backed by machine guns, but logic has never been a major element of patriotism. At any rate, the magazine was obviously treasured by the mukhtar, who put it on top of the half dozen similar literary offerings made by the other men, laid on the carpet in front of the scribe and public reader.

Mahmoud took his time deciding which of the journals and books he would read from, although I knew the instant I saw a familiar cover emerge from a striped abayya which he would pick, and I was right. He passed over the Boy’s Own and a Saturday Evening Post, hesitated over an Arabic translation of an American detecting person named Nick Carter, and finally reached out for the nine-year-old copy of Strand magazine. This he opened with care, checking that all the relevant pages were intact, before he settled back on his mound of bolsters and began to read, not so much translating as paraphrasing and considerably abridging it as he went. The story Mahmoud chose for the night’s public reading was one that Dr Watson’s literary agent, Arthur Conan Doyle, had called “The Devil’s Foot.” It featured a consulting detective by the name of Sherlock Holmes.

Mahmoud might have been reading a news article about the peace talks for all the mischief his face revealed, but I thought Ali would erupt with delight. Holmes, who had remained bent down to hear whatever was being said in the soft private conversation, jerked upright at the sound of his real name, badly startled. Mahmoud read on, stern of visage but with a faint breath of humour in the depths of his voice. Holmes pulled himself together, shot me a glance that dared me to laugh, and returned to his talk, safer from interruption now that the attention of the tent (both sides of it, I thought, hearing the heavy accumulation of breathing bodies pressing against the divider from the women’s side) was on this rousing tale of greed and revenge and induced madness and terrible danger. Long before the end of it, Holmes was having difficulty in keeping his own group’s attention, but eventually he sat back, obviously content with what he had learnt, and allowed them to participate in the climactic experiment Holmes had so rashly conducted on himself and Watson, the results of which were very nearly of a sort to which clean death might have been preferable.

Mahmoud very sensibly cut short the lengthy explanations of motive and method, simplifying both down to a few lines of dialogue and a dramatic conclusion.

It was a shining success. Much discussion followed, on how one might lay hands upon this magnificently lethal substance and the sorts of crime its use might best be suited to punish, and whether or not mere passion for a woman (and an unobtainable woman at that, for a Christian monogamist) was motive enough.

Eventually, when it became apparent that Mahmoud was not about to pick up Nick Carter’s adventures or the story of the Boy’s Own lancers, talk became sporadic and desultory: one man told his neighbours that his young grandson had been taken to hospital in Hebron and was not expected to survive the experience. Another man had a horse gone lame, and asked if anyone had some remedy for a cracked hoof that had yet to be tried on the creature. Ali made a casual enquiry about, I thought, banditry in the area, saying that he was concerned about travelling east of here with such a small group. The responses varied from an automatic and obviously ignorant reassurance to a disgusted agreement that no travel was safe in these troubled times. Then he mentioned the lone corpse found in the Wadi Estemoa, without identifying it by name.

A flurry of speculation sprang up like the last flames of a dying fire, and the presence of bandits in the hills to the south-east was debated. However, the hour was late and interest soon died down. Men began to wrap themselves in their abayyas and turn into cocoons on the floor of the tent. The four of us took our leave of our host and walked the short path to our flea-infested but honourable house.

Fortunately, this night we had outlasted the village children, and we could speak amongst ourselves in low voices without fear of being overheard. Somewhat to my surprise, Holmes did not hesitate to share what he had been told. I half expected him to pretend fatigue or at least surprise when the three of us rounded on him as soon as the door was shut, particularly following Mahmoud’s stunt with the Conan Doyle story, but he did not. He would, of course, have told us what the men had said, even if grudgingly and with gaps, but I thought afterwards that the readiness of his response was by way of recognising the debt he owed Mahmoud for so willingly taking on the lesser role, distracting the others while Holmes questioned the men who might know something. He dropped to his heels, tucked back his kuffiyah, and started talking—in English, to my relief.

“The men I was with were all soldiers for the Turk during the first three years of the war. They deserted when the Arab independence movement began to make real headway.”

“Do not call it desertion,” Ali objected, also using English. “They were slaves reaching for their freedom, not traitors.”

Holmes waved aside the niceties of definition. “That is not important. What matters is that the three conscripts, even as long ago as 1917, were aware that within the Turkish Army, certain men were laying plans for what was to happen in this country if Turkey lost.”

“But in 1917, Turkey was winning,” protested Ali.

“So it appeared, but to a small group of officers, it was far from decided. One of these three was a member of a work party hiding supplies in a remote cave: food, clothing, weapons and ammunition, medical supplies, and detailed maps. Some of the maps, he remembers, were of El Quds. Jerusalem.”

“Wallah,” Ali breathed. Mahmoud smoothed his beard thoughtfully and dug his