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  “The tall rock with the vine?” he said in Arabic, and waited until I nodded. “One hundred metres, with that as the centre. We need a map.”

  “Why?”

  It seemed a reasonable enough question on my part, but his answer was not helpful.

  “ ‘A subdivision of geometry is surveying,’ ” he pronounced.

  “And… ?”

  “ ‘One who knows geometry acquires wisdom,’ ” he elucidated, then turned on his heel and walked away, with Ali close behind him. I looked at Holmes, let the crude survey instruments fall to the ground, and went back to my pile of packs to sleep.

  However, further sleep was not meant to be, thwarted by (in order of appearance) an old man in a cart, a young boy with a cow, an even younger boy with six goats, three cheerful and extraordinarily filthy charcoal burners gathering fuel, the old man in the cart returning, and a chicken. All including the chicken had to pause and investigate our curious encampment, making conversation with Holmes and eyeing his apparently dumb but not unentertaining companion.

  In the end, I threw off my cloak and my attempt at sleep, to storm over to the vine-covered rock and begin my assigned survey. I knew it was a completely pointless bit of make-work, given us by Mahmoud just to see if we would do it, but by God, do it I would, and in a manner so meticulous as to be sarcastic. Taunting, even. So I sweated beneath the sun with that length of tangled string, barking my shins on rocks and disturbing whole communities of scorpions and dung beetles, mapping out a precisely calculated square whose sides ran compass straight, placing in it every bush, boulder, and patch of sand. I measured, Holmes (when we were alone) noted down the measurements, and then I took a seat in the shade of a scruffy tree and rendered up drawings that would have made an engineer proud. Four drawings, in fact: the map; a topographical diagram; an elevation from the lowest point; and finally as precisely shaded and nuanced an artist’s rendering as I could master.

  Holmes chose a remarkably similar means of dealing with the frustration, impatience, and resentment of having been relegated to the side-lines, only instead of string and inert paper, he worked with words and fools. He sat on his heels, rolling and smoking one cigarette after another, while our visitors (except for the chicken) climbed out of carts or divested themselves of burdens and settled in for a long talk. Holmes nodded and grunted and wagged his head or chuckled dutifully as the conversation demanded, and the only time he even came close to leaving his scrupulously assumed position on the side-lines was when he asked the old man (on the cart’s return journey) if things were peaceful in Jaffa. I pricked up my ears, but it was obvious the man knew nothing about Jaffa and was interested only in equine hoof problems—his donkey’s and our mules’.

  By dusk, Holmes and I were ready respectively to strangle a visitor and shred a notebook. He stood up abruptly, and with uncharacteristic rudeness all but lifted the garrulous old man back onto his cart, waved an irritable arm at the stray chicken to dislodge it from its roost on the heap of our possessions, threw some wood on the fire, and slumped down beside it. I tossed my ridiculously precise drawings onto the ground, took out my pocket-sized Koran, and went to sit beside him. I was physically tired and mentally frazzled, but I positively welcomed submitting to the lessons that followed.

  Holmes had learnt Arabic nearly thirty years earlier during a sojourn to Mecca, and I had begun intensive lessons upon leaving London ten days before. I did not know if I would be able to absorb enough of the language in the time at my disposal to be of use, but I was determined to try, and Holmes, as always, was a demanding teacher. Our every spare moment of the past days had been given over to the lessons, in language, manners, and deportment. I knew to use only my right hand for eating, I had the most useful verb forms and the most basic vocabulary under control, and I was learning to adopt the small, tight hand motions and the head and body movements of the native Arab speaker.

  I had also received a quick tutorial concerning the society into which we were moving, Arab (both hadari, “settled,” and bedawi, “nomadic”), Jew (some of whom had ancestors here in the days of Temple sacrifice), and myriad splintered varieties of Christian. Until the war, with the Turk on all their backs, these disparate groups had existed as more or less amicable neighbours; but since the Turkish surrender, the cap was off, the long-building pressure threatening to erupt—complicated further by British attempts at even-handedness, the rise of Arab nationalism, and the growing number of brash Jewish immigrants, both Zionist and refugee.

  The British government looked to have its hands full with this tiny country in the next few years.

  None of which explained why Ali and Mahmoud had been so fearful of detection on the night we arrived. I looked up from the small leather book I had been puzzling at.

  “Holmes?”

  “Yes, Russell.”

  “You referred to Ali and Mahmoud’s ‘little games.’ Was that whole demonstration of caution a façade?”

  “Not all, no. Certainly if we’d been caught by a patrol at that hour of the night we’d have had a most unpleasant time of it. I do think, however, that the good brothers were attempting to illustrate how very awkward our presence here will be. A fact of which any sensible person would be aware.”

  “You don’t think they wanted us here? Then why did Mycroft—”

  “I don’t think they wanted us here, no. Two young soldiers trained in desert warfare they might have tolerated, although even that I doubt.”

  Lovely, I thought morosely. I was on the verge of my twentieth year, I had worked with Holmes for four of those, and I had just in the last few weeks succeeded in convincing him of my competence and my right to be treated as a responsible adult. Now I would have to start all over again with these two proud and no doubt misogynist males. I did not look forward to the task.

  “Do you think they’re trying to get rid of us?”

  He did not answer directly but with another lesson in cultural identity. “In the desert, Russell, your brother’s abilities are all that stand between you and a burial in the sand. It is why the Bedouin’s sense of loyalty is so absolute: he must have complete faith in the man who watches his back. These two don’t yet know us.”

  It seemed to me that Holmes was demonstrating a good deal more forbearance towards these Arabs than he would have had they been, say, from Scotland Yard. I said as much, and he only smiled.

  “Patience is a virtue much valued in the Arab world, my dear Russell.”

  “Patience, loyalty, and eating with the right hand,” I said crossly. His smile only deepened.

  “Wait, Russell, and watch. But for now, how much of the foregoing can you put into Arabic?”

  The fire burned low and my brain cells began quivering with fatigue, and at long last our two companions emerged from the night. Ali immediately seized a pan, stirred up the fire, and set about making a meal. Mahmoud stood looking down at the flames, his fingers travelling through his beard and over his scar. Not a word had been spoken. I stretched, and went over to fetch the drawings I had left lying on the ground. I dusted them off and handed them to Mahmoud, and because I was watching for it, I saw the brief twitch of astonishment as he looked through the pages, and something else as well—a dim gleam of chagrin? or amusement?—but he had himself well in control before he looked up, and merely gave me a brief nod of acceptance. He put them away—with care—in an inner pocket of his robe, and bent to warm his hands over the fire. When he spoke, it was in Arabic, the trickier parts of which Holmes translated for me, murmuring in my ear.

  “The mullah who spoke in Jaffa is a wandering preacher, well known as a speaker of sedition and unrest.”

  “Against—?” asked Holmes.

  “The Jews. The British. The foreigner in general.”

  “Against the Turk as well?”

  Mahmoud grimaced. “The Turk has held this land for four hundred years. The fez is no longer considered a foreign garment.”

  “Where is this mullah now?”

&nb
sp; “He has a villa near Gaza.”

  I narrowed my eyes at his tone of voice. “You sound as if you disapprove.”

  Mahmoud drew a breath and blew it out through his nose thoughtfully. “There is a saying: ‘A full heart or a full purse.’ A mullah is a man of God. Men of God seldom gather wealth to themselves. A man with a villa on the top of a hill is not a poor man.”

  Holmes, being a man who assumed the worst about anyone, a man who would not have shown surprise had the Pope been accused of forgery, grew impatient with this discussion of ethics and morals. “What of the men who were with the mullah in Jaffa?” he demanded.

  “Ah,” said Mahmoud, brightening a little. “That is interesting.” It was so interesting that he had to drop to the ground and make himself comfortable, taking out his embroidered leather tobacco pouch. “The mullah travels with two servants, a secretary and a bodyguard.”

  “It was not they who committed the murders,” Holmes said flatly.

  “You think not?”

  “Your friend Yitzak said ‘not his’ before he died. They were either the servants of some other man or not servants at all.”

  Mahmoud did not argue with Holmes: neither did he agree; he just continued to assemble his cigarette with close deliberation, and went on. “There was another man, a tall, clean-shaven man in European clothing, not a uniform, who stood back and listened. watching the other listeners. Afterwards he was seen speaking with the mullah. The two did not appear to be strangers.”

  “Ah! That is our man.”

  “You think so?”

  “Don’t you?

  Mahmoud reached for the long-handled fire tongs and did not answer, not directly. “In any case, he is gone, and no-one knows who he was.”

  “Didn’t you—” Holmes stopped. Mahmoud paused with the coal halfway to his cigarette and eyed Holmes. Ali bristled. I held my breath; but in the end Holmes did not voice his criticism, merely waved it away. “It can’t be helped. But you know where that mullah’s villa is?”

  “And that he is away from home until next week,” Mahmoud replied.

  “Good,” said Holmes. “Then to Gaza it is.”

  THREE

  ت

  Common folk have no great need for the services of religious officials.

  —

  THE

  Muqaddimah

  OF IBN KHALDÛN

  Three nights later, the refrain that had run so steadily through my mind at the beginning was back again: What on earth did I imagine that I was doing here? I ought to be home, in bed this night, in England. I ought to be in Oxford, worried about nothing more uncomfortable than the next day’s tutorial. Instead we had tumbled into this foreign land under the authority of two Arabs who told us the least they could about our goal and our setting. After delivering his report on Jaffa, Mahmoud had drawn back into his taciturn mode and Ali seemed positively to enjoy our discomfiture. It was, all in all, not an easy partnership, and if something was not done to change matters, the relationship between the four of us looked to descend from its current state of mistrust into open animosity. I had thought, for a brief moment earlier that evening, that the restraints were about to drop, but Holmes had inexplicably refrained from reacting at Mahmoud’s terse orders, and the shaky truce stood.

  The Arab’s orders had been obeyed, and here we lay, draped on our bellies atop the precarious and crumbling remains of a stone wall, keeping very still despite the discomfort because our slightest movement sent small stones tumbling down the sheer rock face at my right hand onto the roof far below. It was five days after our arrival in the country, closer to dawn now than midnight, and we were supposedly burglarising the mullah’s villa. I say “supposedly” because in fact Ali and Mahmoud were inside while Holmes and I were given the task of keeping an undetected watch lest we be discovered—although again, why we were next to each other, abandoning the majority of the house’s perimeter to the unguarded night, had not been explained. We had been there some ninety minutes, although it seemed like nine hundred. The rock beneath me had drilled itself into my softer organs and permanently rearranged the bones of my rib cage and pelvis, while the cold had penetrated even the heavy sheepskin coat I wore. I turned my head where it lay on my forearms and murmured to my companion, whom I could touch if I wished, but could scarcely see now that the day-old moon had gone down.

  “Holmes, will you tell me please what we are meant to be doing here?”

  It was the first time I had voiced the question aloud. After all, I was the one to blame for our presence here, and if it had not exactly turned out the way I had imagined, this ungentle sojourn among the sites and sights of the Holy Land, I was not about to give Ali and Mahmoud the satisfaction of seeing us turn back.

  Not that I hadn’t been tempted to walk away from them, beginning with the first day on the road. We covered barely twelve miles that day, although most of it was spent far from actual roads, picking our way around cactuses and over endless stones, and I was dropping with exhaustion when we halted in the late afternoon among some pomegranate trees near a dirty, nearly deserted pile of slumping mud huts that Ali called Yebna. He came over to where I had collapsed against a boulder and all but kicked me in the ribs to get me up and helping to make camp. My fingers fumbled with the well ropes and the water-skin seemed to weigh more than I did, but I did as I was told, ate without tasting the mess of brown pottage that was dinner, and slept like a dead thing for ten hours.

  I woke early the next morning, the first day of 1919, when the faint light of dawn was giving substance to the canvas over my head. The air was cold but I heard the pleasing crackle of burning tinder from the direction of the fire pit in the black tent. Holmes was gone from his side of our tent, his bed-roll in a heap against the far wall, and I thought it was the sound of him going out the flaps that had awakened me.

  Oddly enough, Holmes and I had embarked on a similar quest the previous summer, taking to the roads of rural Wales in the guise of a pair of gipsies, father and daughter, to rescue a kidnapped child. Of course, that was August in Wales, and therefore wet and relatively warm, and in a green countryside populated with settled folk. Plus that, the goal of our time there had been clear from the beginning—nothing at all like this, come to think of it, although the sense of the companionship was much the same.

  My gentle musing from the warm cocoon of my bed-roll was rudely broken by Ali’s harsh voice commanding me to rise, punctuated by a boot against the side of the tent that nearly collapsed it on top of me. Stifling a groan, I unwrapped myself and started the day.

  Only late in the afternoon and far to the south did it dawn on me what Yebna had been: I had slept the night, all unknowing, in Javneh, the birthplace of rabbinical Judaism. The Mishnah, that remarkable, convoluted, cumbersome, and life-affirming document that laid the foundation of modern Judaism, was begun in Javneh, at the rabbinical academy that had come into being following the destruction of Jerusalem in the year 70. I had been walking among the very tombs, in the self-same dust where Rabbi Johanan ben Zakkai had taught, where Gamaliel and Akiva and—

  Mahmoud refused to turn back. Ali just laughed at me. Holmes shrugged and said, “Maalesh. ” I mourned, and fumed.

  South we had continued, moving towards Gaza but keeping away from the relatively fertile and more populous coastal plain. We entered the fringes of desert, the hardscrabble lands where rains brought short-lived carpets of wildflowers for a few days and bald drought the other eleven months, where the nomadic peoples coaxed tiny patches of wheat and barley to grow in odd corners, yielding a few handfuls of grain in a good year, and the slightly more settled peoples gathered around wells and deep, age-old cisterns, using buckets and primitive well mechanisms to water their melons and their olive trees. This was the desert of Palestine: not the brutal deep desert of sand dunes and camels but a thorny, rocky, dry, inhospitable place where one could carve a living if one was stubborn and smart and did not expect too much. A hard land and a hard people, with occasiona
l flashes of great beauty and tenderness. My respect for them grew along with the blisters on my feet.

  The following night we stopped short of Gaza, in a flat place within sight of a well but outside a small village. The two tents went up, the traditional black Bedouin tent shared by Ali and Mahmoud in front of our smaller canvas structure, and before the first flames of Ali’s cook fire had subsided into coal, two men appeared before it, carrying letters for Mahmoud to read. One of them had an answer he needed written, and for the first time I saw Mahmoud’s brass inkwell, stuffed with cotton wool to keep spillage at a minimum, and watched him act as scribe to the man in the dust-coloured clothing. Ali went off and returned with a large and muscular haunch of goat, and after we had eaten, six men from the village showed up to drink coffee and say the evening prayers and then have the contents of a two-week-old newspaper read to them. A long discussion followed, for the most part incomprehensible to the odd, bespectacled, beardless youth in the background, who was nine parts asleep in the warm smoky fug that gathered within the low walls of woven goat’s hair, lulled by the gurgle of the narghiles, or water pipes, and the easy rhythm of the speech of a race of storytellers. Strange as it seemed, with the blood of an orange grower named Yitzak barely dry on Mahmoud’s hem and without the faintest idea of our goal, I began to relax, safe in a desert place three thousand miles from the seemingly all-knowing foe who had dogged our footsteps in England. This was a simple place, as simple as heat and cold, pain and relief, life and death. At the moment, I was alive and comfortable, and the world was a good place to be.