O Jerusalem

burkah, no bangles, no veil. She will not walk behind us, she will not cook our food, she will not carry water on her head. This is not, you understand, my choice; I should be perfectly happy to have her clothed head to foot and in a subservient position—the novelty would be most entertaining. However, she will simply not do that, so we must either live with it or separate. The choice, gentlemen, is yours.”

His state of undress had reached the point at which I had to turn my back, so I missed the non-verbal portions of the discussion that followed, and many of the words they used passed me by. Still, I did not need a translation for their emotional content, nor did I need to have Holmes tell me why Ali had left so precipitately, since all the women’s garments left with him. I turned back to find Holmes transformed into a Palestinian Arab.

Mahmoud through all this had placidly gone about the business of making coffee, and had now reached the stage of shaking the pan of near-black beans. He glanced up and caught my eye, then lifted his chin at the table leaning against the wall. I went over curiously and picked up the small, worn, leather-bound book that lay on the rough surface. On what would be the back cover in an English book but was the front in Hebrew or Arabic, there was a short phrase in faded gold Arabic script.

“A Koran?” I asked him. He continued shaking the beans. “Yours?”

“Yours,” he said briefly, and followed it with a flow of Arabic that Holmes translated. “ ‘Start with the knowledge of God’s Book and the duties of your religion, then study the Arabic language, to give you purity of speech.’ ”

“Is that from the Koran?”

“Ibn Khaldun,” Mahmoud said. The name was familiar, that of an early Arabic historian whose work I had not read.

“Well, thank you. I will read this with care.”

Mahmoud reached for the coffee mortar and poured the beans into it, and that was that.

Once his mind had been turned to the problem, Ali did an adequate job in producing the long-skirted lower garment and the loose woollen abayya that went over it, and the heavy sheepskin-lined coat I would need on cold nights. The sandals he gave me were still thin-soled, but they fit, and the cloth he brought for my headgear was better in hiding long hair than the loose kufjvyah my three companions wore. He even demonstrated how to wrap a turban that looked sloppy but stayed firmly fixed.

I smoothed the skirts of my abayya, wishing I had a mirror, and allowed the men back inside. Mahmoud nodded, Ali scowled, and Holmes checked to see that all the ties and belts were done correctly.

Physically, I would pass as an Arab youth. There was one more difficulty, however.

“Do we still call ‘him’ Mariam?” Ali asked sarcastically. “ ‘Miri’ would be more useful.”

Mahmoud thought about it for a moment, then cast a sly glance at his partner. “Amir.”

Ali burst into laughter, and I had grudgingly to admit that the name was amusing. Mir indicated a relationship with a prince. Ali’s suggested Miri would indicate that I was owned by the state, the property of a prince or commander; in other words, a slave— which, although it might prove accurate, depending on how much drudge labour the men got out of me, was nothing to be proud of. Amir, on the other hand, was far too grand for an itinerant boy, and I could hear already that it would be a source of amusement every time it was pronounced. Still, it seemed that I had little choice in the matter: “Amir” I was, ridiculous or not. Maalesh .

Ali and Mahmoud were anxious to be away—or, Ali was anxious, while Mahmoud firmly dedicated himself to closing up and moving on. We packed away our clothing and the kitchen (the coffee-pots and mortar, one saucepan, the goatskin for water, and a large convex iron pan called a saj for making the flat bread we seemed condemned to live on) and made ready to slip away.

My first sight of Palestine by light of day was of a rain-darkened expanse of rock. The hut was set into a crumbling hillside, its bricks the same dun colour as the surrounding stones; when I glanced back fifty feet away, the structure was all but invisible. I turned my back on our shelter, and set off into the country.

After a mile or two, I asked Holmes if he knew where we were going. I thought perhaps the two Hazrs had a house in Jerusalem or in the foothills, but it seemed that the bulk of their possessions— tents, stores, cooking pots, and mules—had been left with friends some ten miles outside of town. I gaped at Holmes, then at Ali.

“You mean, you don’t have a house?”

“A hair house,” he said, the Arabic name for a tent. “Two, now. And a third mule.”

“We’re to be gipsies? In these shoes?”

“Not gipsies,” Ali corrected me scornfully. “Bedu.”

“For heaven’s sake,” I muttered. “Couldn’t Mycroft afford to get his people a house?”

Mahmoud the silent spoke up, contributing a string of Arabic that could have been a deadly insult or a recipe for scones. I looked to Holmes; he translated.

“He said, ‘Better a wandering dog than a tethered lion.’ ”

“Oh,” I said doubtfully. “Right.”

It looked, then, as if we were to be Bedouin Arabs rather than members of a more settled community. Not, however, the romantic, deep-desert, camel-riding Bedu brought to fame by the exploits of then Major, now Colonel Lawrence and his Arab revolt. These two travelled a cramped little hill country on mules—God’s most intractable quadruped—T. E. Lawrence was at the Paris peace talks, and romance was fled from the land.

I stifled a sigh. Even General Edmund Allenby, my own personal hero of the Middle East—soldier and scholar, terrible and beloved commander, brutal and subtle builder of campaigns—would be far beyond my reach in this guise. If I so much as caught a glimpse of him, it would be from a rock at the side of the road while the general flew past in his famous armoured Rolls-Royce, splashing me with mud.

Instead of a sojourn in a marble-floored villa filled with carpets and cushions, I would be on foot, in crude sandals, sharing a tent with Holmes, and with no private toilet facilities for miles. I thought about lodging a protest at least about not being given my own tent, but decided to let it be for the present. We had slept in close proximity before, when need be, and until I could arrange something else, sharing a tent with him would be better than sharing a tent with all three males.

The afternoon wore on, the rain lessened, and I succumbed to enchantment. The thrill of being in Eretz Yisrael, the exotic sensation of the clothes I wore, the glory of watching the sun move across the sky and smelling the brilliant air and the cook fires and the sheer intoxication of Adventure made me want to dance down the stony road, twirling my rough garments about me. I did not even mind too much that we were heading away from my own goal of Jerusalem, nor that we had still been told nothing whatsoever about our mission by the two close-mouthed Arabs. I was in the Holy Land; much as I craved to set eyes upon the city itself, holy ground to three faiths, the countryside would have to suffice for now.

After an hour, we were forced to stop and pack gauze around the painful chafe of my sandals’ toe-straps. The discomfort did not put a halt to my pleasure, though, and the cup after cup of cool water we dipped out of an ancient stone trough fed by a road-side spring filled me with the sensation of communion. I did not complain, at the footwear or at the heavy burden I carried, and 1 kept up with the pace our guides set.

The sun was low at our backs as we walked along a dusty road with groves of young orange trees on either side, when abruptly first Mahmoud and a split second later Ali stopped dead, their heads raised, their postures radiating alarm. I could hear nothing but the insistent lowing of a cow, smell nothing other than the sweet evening air of the orange grove. I glanced at Holmes in a question, but he shook his head to show his own incomprehension.

Ali wheeled about and bundled us off into the trees, where we threw off our packs while Mahmoud retrieved a well-cared-for Lee Enfield rifle from one of the larger bundles. Ali slipped away into the dusk, pearl-handled revolver in hand, while Mahmoud gestured for us to follow him.

Holmes spoke in a low voice remarkably free of impatience. “May I ask—”

“No smoke,” Mahmoud answered curtly. “And the cow has not been milked. Be silent.”

We approached the farm buildings with caution and indeed, aside from the loud complaints of the cow, an unnatural silence lay heavy around us. We took up positions behind a shed from the deserted-looking house and barn, and waited.

A quarter of an hour after he had left us, Ali stepped into the open farmyard and trotted across to us. He spoke to Mahmoud; Holmes translated for me.

“Whoever did this is gone. The two hired men are in the trees, shot in the back. I saw no-one else.”