“Your limousine is waiting outside,” the pretty girl at the desk told him. “Have a nice evening.”
“I hope so,” Peter agreed. “Thank you.” The car was a small Japanese compact, and the driver was a woman,
plump and grey-haired with a friendly, ugly face like Golda Meir, Peter thought.
He let himself into the back seat, and waited expectantly for the message, “Magda sent me.” Instead, the woman bade him “Shalom Shalom”
politely, started the engine, switched on the headlights and drove serenely out of the hotel grounds.
They swept sedately around the outer walls of the old city in the gathering dusk, and dropped down in the valley of Kidron. Glancing back Peter saw the elegant new buildings of the Jewish quarter rising above the tops of the walls.
When last he had been in Jerusalem that area had been a deserted ruin, deliberately devastated by the Arabs.
The resurrection of that holy quarter of Judaism seemed to epitomize the spirit of these extraordinary people, Peter thought.
It was a good conversational opening, and he remarked on the new development to his driver.
She replied in Hebrew, clearly denying the ability to speak
English. Peter tried her in French with the same result.
The lady has been ordered to keep her mouth tight shut, he decided.
The night came down upon them as they skirted the lower slopes of the Mount of Olives, and left the last straggling buildings of the Arab settlements. The lady driver settled down to a comfortable speed, and the road was almost deserted. It dropped gently down through a dark shallow valley, with the crests of a desolate desert landscape humped up on each side of the wide metal led road.
0 The sky was empty of cloud or haze, and the stars were brighter white and clearer, as the last of the day faded from the western sky behind them.
The road had been well signposted, ever since they had left the city. Their direction was eastward towards the Jordan, the Dead Sea and Jericho and twenty-five minutes after leaving the King David,
Peter glimpsed in the headlights the signpost on the right-hand side of the road, declaring in English, Arabic and Hebrew that they were now descending below sea level into the valley of the Dead Sea.
Once again Peter attempted to engage the driver in conversation,
but her reply was monosyllabic. Anyway, Peter decided, there was nothing she would be able to tell him. The car was from a hire company. There was a plastic nameplate fastened onto the dashboard giving the company’s name, address and hire rates. All she would know was their final destination and he would know that soon enough himself.
Peter made no further attempt to speak to her, but remained completely alert; without detectable movement he performed the prejurnp paratrooper exercises, pitting muscle against muscle so that his body would not stiffen with long inactivity but would be tuned to explode from stillness into instant violent action.
Ahead of them the warning signals of the crossroads caught the headlights, and the driver slowed and signalled the left turn. As the headlights caught the signpost, Peter saw that they had taken the
Jericho road, turning away from the Dead Sea, and heading up the valley of the Jordan towards Galilee in the north.
Now the bull’s horns of the new moon rose slowly over the harsh mountain peaks across the valley, and gave enough light to pick out small features in the dry blasted desert around them.
Again the driver slowed, this time for the town of Jericho itself,
the oldest site of human communal habitation on this earth for six thousand years men had lived here and their wastes had raised a mountainous hill hundreds of feet above the desert floor.
Archaeologists had already excavated the collapsed walls that Joshua had brought crashing down with a blast of his ram’s horns.
“A hell of a trick.” Peter grinned in the darkness. “Better than the nuke bomb.” Just before they reached the hill, the driver swung off the main road. She took the narrow secondary road between the clustered buildings souvenir stalls, Arab cafes, antique dealers and slowed for the twisting uneven surface.
They ground up onto higher dry hills in low gear, and at the crest the driver turned again onto a dirt track. Now fine talcum dust filled the interior and Peter sneezed once at the tickle of it.
Half a mile along the track a notice board stood on trestle legs,
blocking the right of way.
“Military Zone,” it proclaimed. “No access beyond this point.” A The driver had to pull out onto the rocky verge to avoid the notice, and there were no sentries to enforce the printed order.
Quite suddenly Peter became aware of the great black cliff face that rose sheer into the starry night ahead of them blotting out half the sky.
Something stirred in Peter’s memory the high cliffs above
Jericho, looking out across the valley of the Dead Sea; of course, he remembered then this was the scene of the temptation of Christ. How did Matthew record it? Peter cast for the exact quotation: Again, the devil taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them. Had Caliph deliberately chosen this place for its mystical association, was it all part of the quasi-religious image that Caliph had of himself?
He shall give his angels charge concerning thee: and in their hands they shall bear thee up. Did Caliph truly see himself as the heir to ultimate power over all the kingdoms of the world that power that the ancient chroniclers had referred to as “The Sixth Order of Angels’?
Peter felt his spirits quail in the face of such monumental madness, such immense and menacing vision, compared to which he felt insignificant and ineffectual. Fear fell over him like a gladiator’s net, enmeshing his resolve, weakening him. He struggled with it silently, fighting himself clear of its mesh before it could render him helpless in Caliph’s all embracing power.
The driver stopped abruptly, turned in the seat and switched on the cab light. She studied him for a moment.
Was there a touch of pity in her old and ugly face, Peter wondered?
“Here,“she said gently.
Peter drew his wallet from the inner pocket of his blazer.
“No, hesh(-)okherhead. “No you owe nothing.”
“Toda raba.” Peter thanked her in his fragmentary Hebrew, and opened the side door.
The desert air was still and cold, and there was the sagey smell of the low thorny scrub.
“Shalom,” said the woman through the open window; then she swung the vehicle in a tight turn. The headlights swept the grove of date palms ahead of them, and then turned back towards the open desert.
Slowly the small car pitched and wove along the track in the direction from which they had come.
Peter turned his back on it, allowing his eyes to become accustomed to the muted light of the yellow homed moon and the whiter light of the fat desert stars.
After a few minutes he picked his way carefully into the palm grove. There was the smell of smoke from a dung fire, and the fine blue mist of smoke hung amongst the trees.
Somewhere in the grove he heard a goat bleat plaintively, and then the high thin wail of a child there must be a Bedouin encampment in the oasis. He moved towards it, and came abruptly into an opening surrounded by the palms. The earth had been churned by the hooves of many beasts, and Peter stumbled slightly in the loose footing and then caught his balance.
In the centre of the opening was the stone parapet which guarded a deep fresh-water well. There was a primitive windlass set above the parapet and another dark object which Peter could not immediately identify, dark and shapeless, crouching upon the parapet.
He went towards it cautiously, and felt his heart tumble within him as it moved.
It was a human figure, in some long voluminous robe that swept the sandy earth, so that it seemed to float towards him in the gloom.
The figure stopped five paces from him, and he saw that the head was covered by a monk’s cowl of the same dark woollen cloth, so that the face was in a forbidding black hole beneath the cowl.
“Who are you?” Peter demanded, and his voice rasped in his own ears. The monk did not reply, but shook one
