O Jerusalem

attention to the contents of their baskets, and instead of simply upending them into the panniers, they were taking the time to tilt and shake them attentively, watching the soil pour down. Even without my spectacles I could easily see the change in their attitudes; then, near the donkey, the woman ahead of me snatched something from her emptying load and hastily thrust it inside her robe. Something flat the size of a thumbnail; I thought it was a coin, and then I knew how this soil was different: It was old, and these canny diggers knew it.

I nearly missed the bit of treasure buried in my own load, would have missed it had my colleagues not decided I was little better than a half-wit. One woman, a thin, hard-faced little grandmother, paused after emptying her basket to watch me tip mine into the donkey’s containers. Her hand moved, but mine was there before hers, and I had the object stashed away before she could even curse. Later I paused in a doorway to examine it more closely. Scraping the caked soil of the ages from it with a thumbnail, I found a tiny glass phial, no more than two inches tall. I felt eyes on me, slipped it away into my pocket handkerchief, and took up my basket again.

When we broke for lunch I rapidly shovelled the remainder of the picnic down my throat, then sat with the basket on my knees, dabbing up the crumbs with a damp finger while I racked my brain to think of a way to return the conversation to the subject of the woman’s comment about the reappearing soil. Unfortunately, the women were at one end of the alley, while I was with the men twenty feet away at the other. The men’s conversation was infinitely less interesting than the chatter I could hear coming from the other end, being all about injustices done and relatives wronged by the new government, until one old man began dramatically to recite a positive epic: One of his goats had gone missing the week before! The very next day, his neighbours threw a feast! Roast goat figured prominently on the menu! The old man’s grandsons attempted a course of rough justice! The military police arrived! They put a halt to the fracas!

His long and emphatic recitation finally came to an end, and before any of the others could draw a breath I made a loud remark, putting my tongue in the front of my mouth to supply a ready mechanical explanation for any linguistic failures.

“My mother lost a chicken the other week, but whoever took it left a silver bangle in its place.” The smattering of tales sparked by this pale story were neither enthusiastic nor particularly apt, and when they started to drift off on another track I made another loud comment. “We think it is an afreet.” As I had hoped, the entire alley fell silent at my reference to a troublesome imp.

“Why would an afreet leave a silver bangle?” the man next to me demanded.

“Why would an afreet take a chicken?” I retorted, my logic equal to his. “Afreets cause trouble. My mother’s chicken gave us many eggs, but the silver bangle, when she tried to sell it, brought only problems, for a woman down the road said we had stolen it.”

This was much more satisfying. For ten minutes we swopped stories of false accusations and genuine theft, and then I gave a final nudge.

“Why do you think the piles of soil keep coming into the Souk el-Qattanin? The new piles with old coins?”

After a moment of silence a great babble of voices burst out, which only eventually was dominated by one man, who simply had a greater lung capacity than the others.

“—the coin to my brother and we cleaned it until it shone, and then we carried it to the cousin of my brother’s wife, who has a shop on the Tarik Bab Sitti Maryam, near the place where Jesus stumbled, where many foreigners used to buy things before the war and are now beginning to return, and the cousin of my brother’s wife sold that coin to a rich Amerikani just last week for two gold lira, although he only gave my brother and me twenty-five mejidis. ”

The others politely waited until he had finished to contribute their “Wa!” of appreciation and their own stories, which circled around the suggestion I had planted in their minds, that the rich soil was being placed there by some peculiarly subtle variety of demon. I listened with only half an ear, though, because my question had already been answered by the last speaker: Yes, there was a rich and therefore deep vein of soil being worked somewhere beneath my feet.

“My father,” the man was saying, “blessed be his memory, found a purse of coins on the roadside, and when he was honest enough to report this, being a good Christian, the police beat him and threw him into the Old Serai for a week, saying that he had stolen some of the coins and wanted a reward for the ones he had left, although it was actually the police who stole them. Of course, they were Turks,” he added pensively.

“And my mother’s father’s second wife,” called one of the women…

The topic of archaeological discoveries was thrashed over until our sergeant reappeared and ordered us back to work, but I was well satisfied with the results of my own labours: someone, at night, was depositing quantities of soil from deep underground onto the surface to be hauled away. Someone, perhaps, who had borrowed two baskets from the wall of a tomb/house in Silwan that he had happened to pass. Who before that had borrowed two habits, a rope, and a handful of candles, because he thought he might need them, and he was passing. Someone who— The consideration of the someone distracted my mind satisfactorily for quite some time. I queued up with the others to have my baskets filled, and followed them to dump the rubble, but was quite unaware of any of it until I felt a hand on my sleeve.

I looked down into the face of the young cook’s helper from the inn, for whom I was beginning to feel a deep affection.

“You are required back at the inn,” the boy said.

“Who requires me?”

“Your friend.”

“I have a number of friends. ”

“Your long friend in the blue kuffiyah,” he said, and then for some reason he covered his mouth with his hand and let out a giggle.

“I will come.” I laid down my basket and went down the narrow street on his heels, picking my way over the rough surface and avoiding the holes (one of the privates had graduated to a pickaxe). On the Street of the Cotton Merchants the sergeant stopped me.

“Oi, where do you think you’re going?”

“Effendi, my presence is required elsewhere,” I said smoothly in English.

“You don’t say.”

“I fear that I do say.”

“There’s no pay for half days. All or nothing, that’s His Majesty’s way.” I doubted it very much, but was not inclined to argue over a pittance. I began to say something to that effect when my youthful companion nudged me to one side and began sweetly to cajole the dour sergeant. I left him to it, and threaded my way briskly through the bazaar towards the Jaffa Gate. I thought I heard the sergeant’s voice raised in shouts, but then I turned a corner and left them behind.

Only as I was passing through the vegetable market on David Street, restoring my spectacles to my nose, did it occur to me that a British soldier might find it suspicious that a native worker would leave without the better part of a day’s pay. I hesitated, and nearly turned back, but Holmes was waiting, and the cook’s boy had seemed to me quite resourceful enough to get himself out of that sticky situation. I trotted on up the steps of David Street to the inn.

TWENTY-TWO

?

With the decrease of civilisation, the land’s riches fade. In countries where springs existed in the days of civilisation, when the countries fell into ruin, the water of the springs disappeared into the ground as if they had never existed.

—

THE

Muqaddimah