Moving the Palace

by Charif Majdalani

  Afterward, Samuel is invited to approach Faisal, who bids him sit to his left. Now, Faisal is quite fond of the Lebanese. Their mountain and its snows may have been, for him as for all Arabs, a kind of lantern lifted in the distance, even if he no doubt knew already, more or less, when he was in Al-Wajh, that he would never reign there. And so I imagine that, in his princely slenderness, and with quite gentle gestures nonetheless ringed by an aura of unyielding will, he speaks to Samuel, asks him about his name, then recalls the Bani Ayyad tribe, a clan of the Howeitat confederation. Samuel then alludes to old family genealogies according to which the Ayyads were descended from Arab Christian tribes before Islam, and wonders if he hasn’t, among the Howeitat, cousins very distantly removed. Faisal smiles, his retinue watches Samuel with curiosity, after which other guests come into the tent and Samuel drifts off. Early that night, he is sitting on the edge of the mound where the British officers’ tents are, gazing into the night at the town of Al-Wajh, and the lights of British ships at anchor. All around him are the hums and murmurings of camp, fires lit on every level, peopling the hillside with shifting shadows and songs both near and far. No sooner does the next morning dawn, in the dust and damp that turn every waking body into a kind of mass of thick, oozing liquid, than he finds Faisal’s army beside Covington and makes the acquaintances of the Egyptian soldiers. In the tent he shares with the captain, he studies rough maps of the region. He leaves on horseback for the nearby mountains to see what they look like, then returns and spends his days worrying when his cargo will reach port. Meanwhile, he pays a visit to a merchant in town named Hussein el Mawlud, Fernand Debbas’s correspondent to whom the goods are nominally addressed, and whom Samuel is paying generously as a frontman. After three weeks, the bundled-up palace has arrived, but Samuel cannot leave yet; he has been ordered to wait for a mission. For a month, maybe more, he receives no instructions, nor does the army move at all. Now and then, tribal chieftains come to swear their allegiance or simply suss out the situation; then suddenly, at any time of day, there’ll be a sudden burst of panic: Bedouins, soldiers, animals left to themselves—all will turn in the direction others are running, a fight has broken out between two clans, or a clash between rival lords, and each time, it is Faisal’s intervention that restores order.

  But soon, news from the fronts confirms that the Ottomans in Medina are about to try to retreat northward, and as a result, things are set in motion. Ordnance units leave on operations against the rail lines to disrupt the retreat, and then Mohammed Ould Raho is reported out there with small detachments, and finally Samuel receives his orders. He is to go and support Captain Rosemond, who is having a hard time taking action on the railway in the region around Bir Suheila because the tribes there refuse to help him, though in theory they have sworn allegiance to Faisal. In studying the maps, Samuel notices that Bir Suheila is ideally situated northeast of Al-Wajh, on the other side of the railway line, in a sector where the tribes still aren’t very reliable, but it looks easier to head north from there than anywhere else. He’s not sure whether to see in this another helpful nudge from the incredible General Moore, but nevertheless he smiles in gratitude. Two days of preparations prove sufficient, and there he is, on his way, at the head of twenty Bedouins from a Howeitat clan close to those in the region around Bir Suheila, under the command of Hamid Ibn Mansour el Hawli. Accompanying him is also a British sergeant specializing in explosives and four Egyptian soldiers trained in the use of a machine gun, as well as five mules carrying five hundred rifles. In his luggage are three thousand gold sovereigns, to aid in his discussions with reluctant tribes. It’s become a habit; he is considered qualified for such support negotiations. To top it all off, in a so-called happy coincidence, a caravan is setting out for Oum el Sarmad at this very moment. It is headed by Hussein’s cousin Fahim el Mawlud, and Samuel easily arranges for it to leave at the same time as he does, since Oum el Sarmad is twenty miles to the north of Bir Suheila.

  *

  And so it begins with a long march through the mountains, on paths that reveal, with every summit, at every turn, spectacular monuments of basalt, mammoth peaks, tablelands fit for the feasts of giants. Samuel mounts an animal Faisal has offered him and rides alongside Ibn Mansour, the old levelheaded warrior who effortlessly guides the troupe, letting himself be borne along by the natural flow of their progression. Samuel’s conversation with him about the mountains of Lebanon and the tribes of the Sudan seem to occupy the man more than setting their course, which seems to take care of itself. But he falls respectfully silent when Samuel stops talking and becomes absorbed in the astonishing beauty of the great tapering rocks, the abrupt pink mountains, and the horizon suddenly disclosing arid panoramas and crenelated summits. The first night, they stop at the oasis of Bayda; the second, in a valley hollowed out by recent rains, where water still pools in the holes and fissures. That night, around the fire, Ibn Mansour tells of the Bani Ayyad, tribes he knows, and promises to introduce Samuel to their chieftains. Then they talk of genealogies, of onomastics, and Samuel tells the tale of that poor Lebanese emigrant to England who, in order to be left alone, decided one day to make his name more English-sounding, and so from Mr. Sawwan became Mr. Shawn, not suspecting that at the same time in Edinburgh, Scotland, the final offspring of a very ancient and prestigious lineage by the name of Shawn, lay dying. And this final offspring, doubtless something of a prankster, had asked that his millions and his entire family inheritance be given to works of charity unless a Shawn could be found living somewhere in the world, to whom he would then bequeath all his worldly goods. And as fate would have it, Samuel went on, in a few weeks the little Lebanese emigrant, not understanding why in the slightest, became the trustee of a fortune whose ancestry was not his own, from then on living like a squatter in castles and spending the annuities from countless properties he’d never even heard of a few years ago. When Samuel was done, the Egyptian corporal sitting with the group by the fire declared that he, on the other hand, actually was descended from a very ancient family, that of Rameses II. He is asked if his name is Rameses, or something like it, but he answers no, his name is Mohammed Ahmed like every other Egyptian, and he laughs. His audience laughs with him, and he explains that if those cordially gathered would please follow his reasoning, and supposing that three thousand years ago, Rameses had one hundred children as they claim, and each of these children had at least, say, ten apiece of their own, well, if those cordially gathered did the math, multiplying all this by the hundreds, even thousands of generations from then till now, there was a good chance that any old Egyptian could trace his ancestry, at one time or another, to a descendant of Rameses, and therefore to Rameses himself.

  When he is done, he looks amused; he is heavily built and even a bit broad in the beam, and seems always passably cheery. Poking at the fire, he waits while his companions do their calculations. Samuel studies him discreetly and takes a spontaneous liking to him. Ibn Mansour nods, reckoning that all this is well and good, as does Fahim el Mawlud. Only the British sergeant remains stone-faced, even after Samuel politely translates the entire conversation for him. But right from the start, this sergeant has seemed such a well brought-up boy that never does the slightest hint of remonstration about a single thing—the heat, the humidity, the flies—allow itself to be glimpsed on his face with its stiff little mustache, such that Samuel finally wonders if it’s phlegm, impassivity, or indifference, but right now, he thinks it must be a kind of contempt, such that in this man’s eyes nothing is worth wasting the time for so much as a grimace. And surely it is this hint of contempt, but also a hidden shyness, that explain why during the short halts, instead of making straight for the shade of a rock, a tamarind tree, or the sheets that have been spread out, as everyone else does, the sergeant pretends to busy himself with his two camels carrying explosives, gelatin, and detonators, until Hamid Ibn Mansour or Samuel call him over, and then he comes, rigid and upright, and sits down without a word.

  On the
morning of the third day, on a broad plain dotted with spiny thickets and a few short acacias, the railway line of Al-Hejaz finally appears in the middle of the desert, offered up defenselessly, lined at regular intervals by telegraph poles. It’s too tempting and almost too easy; the little troupe takes every liberty it wants to with the tracks, blowing up the rails, uprooting poles, rejoicing at a gallop down this strip of desert in enemy territory, then vanishing inland into the mountains to the east after the caravan which has taken the lead and is heading north, toward Bir Suheila. A few hours later, Rosemond turns up behind a hill with two Bedouins, head wrapped up in an Arab keffiyeh, uniform unkempt, and in his company, Samuel makes for the camp of the Bani Suheila, where Rosemond is confronted with a tough problem. On the way, he relates that, contrary to the rumors that have reached Al-Wajh, the Bani Suheila have indeed helped him in his initiatives against the railway, and a week earlier, they derailed a train carrying forty families of deportees from the region around Medina. Rosemond managed to keep the Bani Suheila from slaughtering them along with the Turkish soldiers and ransacking all their belongings. Still, the Bani Suheila took at least some of what little goods they had, in exchange for sparing their lives. Since that day, thanks to Rosemond’s intercession, the deportees, who are clearly with Faisal, have been welcomed at the nomads’ camp, though the latter are enraged, short of water, and above all, covetous of what personal effects the deportees retain. In a nutshell, everyone is staring daggers at one another, and as a result Rosemond himself can no longer carry out his missions from fear that a massacre will occur in his absence. After an hour, as Rosemond is talking, the camp of the Bani Suheila appears.

  It is enormous, as camps go, because it is made up of two halves. That of the tribe itself, with its tents around a few wells, and that of the deportees, a wretched circle of sheets hung up between scraggly trees. Askar Chalabi el Suheili, chief of the Bani Suheila, greets Samuel and Hamid Ibn Mansour el Hawli with displays of joy, and as night is falling he invites them to dinner, along with three main worthies from among the deportees. There is also a strange fellow, a Frenchman with a shy look about him, who is among the rescued deportees and who, ever since the attack on the train, has been waiting for a solution to all this business to be found. Being here seems to distress him, and no one understands his presence, because no one, absolutely no one, speaks French: not the Bedouins, or the people of Medina, or even Rosemond. But Samuel does, and he has a brief conversation with the Frenchman, whose name is Vincent d’Argès, and who says he was part of Jossin and Savignac’s archeological mission to Arabia at the beginning of the war. When the Ottoman Empire entered the conflict, the Turks arrested him and forced him to write a report on the state of archeology in the region, and then deported him for internment. Samuel translates the Frenchman’s words as he speaks. Everyone listens and remains pensive while the rice is brought out and the meal begins. The firelight around which the gathering dines has abolished the vast magnificence that the firmament unfurls over the desert. The density of the night seems almost as imposing to Samuel as the nature on which it has shut like a lid. The atmosphere is somewhat tense, the worthies from Medina, visibly ill at ease, venturing only polite phrases and invocations, and the Frenchman, after his conversation with Samuel, has fallen silent and eats discreetly, a small pouch of sorts wedged between his legs. Askar Chalabi el Suheili, however, is interested in Samuel, and wants to know why a Bani Ayyad has a Christian, even Jewish first name, and Samuel tells him that it’s probably because he belongs to a Christian Bani Ayyad tribe. This sets the chief thinking; the worthies from Medina adopt a somber air, for to them all this seems to add to the complexity of things, of the world, and so, to ease the atmosphere a bit, people begin telling funny stories and, laughing, reach out their hands for the platters of oily rice covered in the meat of goats and sheep.

  The next day, in the rediscovered splendor of the world, beneath the great rocky peak like a skyward-pointing finger where the Bani Suheila make their camp, Samuel opens the talks. After half a day, things are clear. The worthies from Medina, unable to go home, declare that they wish to go to Mecca. They are highly uneasy around Samuel, who realizes this is because he’s a Christian. But the old Arabic he learned from his father, earthy and colorful, serves him well on this occasion. He employs it joyously, and the admiring Medinans end up becoming more obliging. Nevertheless, they have made their decision: if they must go somewhere, then to Mecca they shall go. Or to Medina, if the war is over by the time they get there. They refuse all suggestion of Al-Wajh, which is much closer but, being in no position to impose their views, they finally agree to the idea of going to Yanbu and, from there, sailing to Jeddah, the port serving the holy city. As Rosemond is of the opinion that whatever is done, the Bani Suheila must not be asked to escort the deportees, even to the borders of their own territory, and as Askar Chalabi el Suheili will for his part agree to sell only fifteen camels, which, to put it bluntly, does no good at all, Samuel finds himself in quite an awkward position. For camels he does have, and enough to pull off the job in a pinch, if everyone squeezes in a little, so Hamid’s twenty-odd men can protect the deportees.

  In the end, he takes Fahim el Mawlud aside and, under an acacia, tells him they’re going to have to change course for a moment, head south, and above all, change cargo, leaving the palace here and taking on the Medinans. Mawlud is displeased, less about changing the route than having to haul humans, that doesn’t seem like a good idea at all, and will considerably lengthen the journey’s duration as initially predicted. Mawlud is someone with a very proud look about him, but wily of eye, who at the drop of a hat will forget his princely bearing to come begging a favor. And now at the drop of this hat, he starts out prideful, fingering his prayer beads with calm and dignity, playing the malcontent, the man given something to worry about, frowning with a preoccupied air and then, when Samuel starts offering attractive sums of gold, he begins to wriggle, pockets his prayer beads in his robe, and engages in a little rascally haggling. To be done with it, Samuel gives him what he wants, and wins him over effortlessly. That evening, he gathers the Medinan worthies and the Bani Suheila chieftains and, in the presence of Rosemond, Hamid Ibn Mansour el Hawli, Mawlud, and the Frenchman, announces that the deportees will be leaving first thing in the morning, in his care, escorted by his own troops, on the camels of his own caravan. For the first time, it is clearly evident that everything the caravan is carrying belongs to Samuel, and no one makes any comments, for they recognize that he has just made a significant sacrifice, and respect him for doing so. For his part, Samuel thinks he is about to render unto Faisal and his cause, the English cause, what Moore has given him in their name. Before giving his final consent, Askar Chalabi el Suheili demands from the Medinans one final compensation for his trouble. They assure him, as they already have a hundred times, that what little they still possess is all they have left of their entire lives, that when they return home, their houses will doubtless have been destroyed, but they agree to take up a small collection. Samuel takes this a step further, announcing that he will pay another three hundred sovereigns for all the deportees together, including children and the Frenchman, and he will leave the rifles. The agreement having been struck, Samuel then has a private conversation with Chalabi el Suheili, whom he asks the favor of guarding his palace. He knows this is like entrusting a chest of jewels to a kleptomaniac, but in payment for this singular custodianship he offers gold, always gold, and promises more gold still upon his return, should his property remain untouched, and Chalabi agrees.