O Jerusalem

from the brooding hill to hammer tent pegs.

TEN

?

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

For 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 goat’s-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.