Moving the Palace

by Charif Majdalani

  He does so at night, when the camp is quiet. By the light of one last fire, he keeps vigil with Samuel, Hamid, Mohammed Ahmed, and two Medinan worthies. With his exquisite courtesy, as if he were timidly waiting for everyone else to finish talking before speaking in turn, he opens his mouth only after a long silence. He turns to Samuel, naturally, and declares that, now that they are no longer very far from Yanbu, there is something he would like to confide. Samuel, who speaks French fairly well, initially has no doubt as to the verb’s meaning, he thinks Vincent d’Argès is about to tell him a secret. The fire unfurls its pantomime with long reddish beckonings, leaps, and cracklings, and d’Argès confesses that at several points over the last few months, especially when they were in the Jabal Jafr, he considered leaving the caravan and striking out alone for Mada’in Saleh, where he had been working before his arrest. “I thought it over, I thought it over a great deal,” says he, staring fixedly at the dancing flame. “But in the end, I gave up on the idea. Still, I left a great many gods and goddesses there, sleeping in the sand.” At these strange words, Samuel, who has stopped raking over bits of wood at the heart of the flames, watches him attentively. The Frenchman falls silent for a moment. His face is candid and serene as ever, even in the glow from the flames. The others gathered take his silence as an opportunity to get up, since the conversation is now in a language they don’t understand and they will get nothing from it. They murmur their good nights and when they have, one by one, all vanished into the dark, d’Argès tells Samuel it is these gods and goddesses that he wishes to confide to Samuel. And he says that in the region of Raghed, near the royal tombs of Mada’in, is a place called the Son-in-Law’s Head, and he pronounces the name in Arabic—Ras es Sohr. It is a rocky outcrop the local Arabs know well. But no doubt Hamid’s Howeitat know it, too. “They will help you find it,” he says. “And if they cannot, the Bani Harf will. For the wells in the region are theirs, as is Ras es Sohr. In a cave high up the west flank of this rock, I myself have hidden statues of gods from ancient desert kingdoms, vowing I would someday return for them.” Then he falls silent once more. The wood pops in the fire, a spark flies up and falls like a shooting star onto his worn pants. Instinctively running a hand over the ruined cloth, he says, “But I will never go there again. I’ve had enough. I am weary of all this. So do it for me, Monsieur Ayyad. No one but you deserves to discover these wonders. I confide in you this task.” Samuel reminds him that he himself is soon leaving for Bir Suheila, and d’Argès could join him. They would journey to Mada’in Saleh together. “I am weary of this country and everything that has befallen me,” d’Argès repeats. “I no longer have the strength to roam the desert. I must go home to Europe. I leave you these treasures, treat them as I would have.” Smiling, Samuel asks him how he managed to work and hide the gods in the Arabian soil while speaking nothing but French. After a moment of silence, d’Argès says that it is a long story. Samuel waits, but the Frenchman says nothing more. For a moment, the two men remain silent, face-to-face. The fire is now but a firmament of red dots in the dark night of charred wood. Above, the other firmament suddenly comes to life, crisscrossed by fleeting sparks. Samuel rises, and to the Frenchman it seems he will touch the Milky Way with his brow. But Samuel says, in closing, “I thank you for your friendship. I will try to find these gods sleeping in the desert.”

  9

  SAMUEL DOES NOT ENTER THE TOWN OF YANBU BECAUSE he cannot wait to turn back, and what’s more, he has no wish to be in touch with the British military hierarchy again. His mission is over and, all that remains for him to do now is, as Moore said, slip away. When the small town appears on the coast, he asks the repatriates and Vincent d’Argès to finish their journey on foot, escorted by the English sergeant and Mohammed Ahmed, who sheds a tear at parting ways with him. He also entrusts them with what remains of the gold he was given in Al-Wajh, then lets the camels rest for a day and a night in the hills before heading back the way he came, despite bitter remonstrations from the caravaners, who feel they have earned a rest in Yanbu. Afterward, with no cargo, the journey goes infinitely faster. Hamid and Fahim el Mawlud ride beside him, as well as the twenty Howeitat he has remunerated with his own gold, the gold he carries with him everywhere, which he is bringing home to Lebanon to enrich his family and provide for his sisters’ dowry. The crossing that took months outbound now takes only two weeks, after which, instead of heading for Bir Suheila, Samuel makes a detour and heads for Mada’in Saleh. For several days, his empty caravan advances through valleys thick with limestone pachyderms or whole fields of crooked stalagmites that leave them feeling like they’ve crossed through a swirling crowd of mad dancers and wild bacchantes. This vast landscape is sweltering in the violent light of day but dawn softens its contours, dusk clads them in hyacinth, crimson, and gold, and suddenly the desert resembles the set of a lavish opera.

  One morning, the troupe finally reaches the ancient city of the Nabataeans and its rows of tombs dug into the rock, a fantastical dormitory for the eternal repose of the princes of the desert. The next day, one of Hamid’s men guides them to Ras es Sohr. The oasis is a small palm grove in the armpit of a great, round, and perfectly bald rock. On the west flank, erosion has carved a small formation, a play of curves like the cambered pleat of a folded curtain. And high up, in fact, in the fold itself, grows a thorny thicket. Samuel scales the crack, followed by his companions, who laugh at this unexpected game. Prey to an entire range of sensations—breathless, heart beating, feverish, open to all manner of aesthetic wonder—he comes upon the cave. He pushes through the thorny shrubs, getting viciously scratched, penetrates the gloom almost on all fours, and like the archeologist realizing that looters have beaten him to Pharaoh’s tomb, he finds there is nothing in the cavern—not gods, goddesses, or anything else. Just scraps of rags that have almost moldered into the sand.

  “I expected as much,” he keeps saying to Hamid and Fahim a bit later, sitting under the trees. “But still—to abscond with everything in the cave, someone had to know it was there.”

  “The Bani Harf must have stolen the treasure,” says Hamid. “There’s no other explanation.”

  “Then let us go ask them,” Samuel suggests.

  *

  The next day, the patriarch of a group of Harfi whose clan is camped out nearby—a skinny, toothless old man with a carefully groomed goatee and a sparrow hawk’s eyes—listens with a knowing and compassionate air as Samuel speaks of Vincent d’Argès. He nods and mumbles that of course the Bani Harf knew the Frenchman: quite a character, with many strange ideas. When Samuel wants to know more, the chieftain gives a vague wave of his hand. However, when it comes to the vanished treasure, he is fairly precise. According to him, the thief is most certainly Raeed Hussein el Harfi, a powerful Bani Harf chieftain who once helped the Frenchman with his excavations but sold him to the Turks. “But,” Samuel asks, “wasn’t d’Argès part of the group with the priests Savignac and Jossin?” The patriarch adjusts the sides of his headdress, and then (as if he needed to look presentable in order to be surprised) widens his eyes uncomprehendingly. Samuel repeats himself, and the chieftain laughingly declares, not at all, d’Argès (which he pronounces as Darjis, the tonic accent weighing down the second syllable of the word) was alone, by God, utterly and completely alone. Two days later, another Bani Harf chieftain confirms the likely connection between Raeed Hussein el Harfi and the disappearance of the gods, and with another question of Samuel’s, takes his time, breaks a few twigs as if in preparation for that night’s fire, and finally says that d’Argès was an odd man with odd dreams. Then, as if to conclude the meeting, he repeats pensively that at any rate, it was Raeed Hussein el Harfi, that coward, who sold him to the Turks.

  To find this Raeed Hussein el Harfi, the powerful chieftain who smaller clans claim possesses several hundred warriors, Samuel heads north, which is at any rate the direction of Bir Suheila, and as luck would have it, he winds up crossing paths with the disloyal chieftain’s very own
son, Zeid Ibn Raeed. This happens one morning when riders are reported to the east. Zeid is not with his tribe, but he is bringing back camels from pasture, and he falls in with Samuel after Samuel declares his wish to meet his father, the famous Sheikh Raeed. This Zeid is a slender, handsome boy with perfectly shaped eyebrows, luscious lips, stunning white teeth, and a broad smile. Like a a piece of sculpture from antiquity, Samuel thinks, and fairly quickly decides to tackle the question of d’Argès, no matter the resulting mess, huffiness, anger, or feigned ignorance. Though nothing of the sort ensues, what happens is more pernicious still. Zeid is not surprised when Samuel utters the name d’Argès. He acknowledges that the Frenchman spent time with his tribe, that they helped him with his work, but of course, on the subject of the gods he was to have hidden at the oasis of Ras es Sohr, Zeid knows absolutely nothing. It’s probably a pure fabrication. All this he says in snatches, in a restless way that lends little credence, for Zeid is elusive as water, answering only in hints and allusions. It is very difficult to tell just what he knows; in his robe and keffiyeh with its thin cords of gold brocade he keeps darting forward on his camel, certain members of his entourage following suit, and then coming back to the group at a trot, as if to flaunt his enthusiasm, his impetuosity, and also his impatience, or else the beauty of his mount. Unless he is seeking to seduce one or another of Samuel’s warriors, at whom he glances with interest, or Samuel himself, whom he has asked ten times over if he will agree to sell his russet camel cow.

  Between two spirited bursts of speed on Zeid’s part, Samuel manages to find a way back to his subject and get a more or less complete answer when he asks how d’Argès got any work done in the region speaking only French. “What do you mean, only French?” asks Zeid, laughing wholeheartedly. “He spoke better Arabic than you and I, and Turkish, too!” After which, as if this absurd question has just put an end to any seriousness in a conversation barely begun, making the rest of it pointless, off he shoots like an arrow, shouting right and left, carried away by enthusiasm, by unrestrained jubilation, and is soon joined by a few of Hamid’s Howeitat, for whom a call to race is irresistible, and so it goes for the whole rest of the day, across this vast empty landscape interrupted now and again by monumental domes of rock, stone dinosaurs, acropolises in the middle of nowhere. That night, they stop at a small oasis whose wells belong to Zeid’s family. He makes himself at home among the blessed flora, strolling about like Adam in Eden; no doubt he would gladly lead one of Hamid’s warriors down the garden path: in the night, he struts, he boasts, he jests, he flits about, gaze fluttering from one man to the next, goes from fire to fire and proposes a flame-jumping contest. The warriors and caravaners have made him one of their own, and laugh at his jokes, but he is beginning to irritate Samuel. During the evening, Zeid suggests a game of heads or tails to those gathered and pulls a coin from a pocket of his robe, which he’s hitched up to his belt. Heads, he calls, tosses the majidi which spins in the air, leaving the circle of light, and returning; he catches it, and goes from guest to guest showing them the result, until he reaches Samuel. Then, with a bit of legerdemain he deliberately lets only Samuel glimpse, he swaps for the Turkish coin another he tosses up and snatches from midair with his right hand, and what he now presents to the Lebanese man on the back of his left hand, with an air about him that is keen, focused, worried, and laughing all at once, is no longer Ottoman currency, or English, or French, or Egyptian, but an ancient coin, a beautiful coin from the time of the Nabataeans, with slightly battered sides, a laurel-crowned king in delicate profile ringed by Greek letters, and afterward Samuel will no longer remember if what struck him at the time was the king’s almond-shaped eye on the coin or Zeid’s, staring at him in triumph.

  At any rate, as soon as he’s sure Samuel’s gotten the message, Zeid continues his game with the others. But Samuel takes it calmly. He refuses to concede the point, certain that if he did so, Zeid would go back to playing the spoiled child who knows he is indispensable and takes advantage of one’s patience. He does not speak to Zeid before going to bed, and when they set out again the next morning, he behaves as if the boy did not exist. He no longer asks him any questions, losing all interest in him and leaving him to race off suddenly on mad stampedes. And so it is Zeid who, around midmorning, comes to tell Samuel that if he wishes, Zeid will guide him to Bir Hamed (and he points at the horizon to his left, where the desert looks the same as ever, unto infinity) where (so he claims) Sheikh Fayed Ibn Alaeddine el Talleati, the man who sold Darjis to the Turks, makes his camp this time of year. Zeid seems sure of the effect his words will have, but Samuel looks him straight in the eye and remarks that, really, in this part of the desert, everyone seems to know d’Argès, everyone has helped him, and everyone wound up betraying him. And here is Zeid bursting into laughter, exclaiming that’s for sure!, that Darjis was highly respected in these parts, chieftains were at his command, he left his mark on routes and oases, his name was graven on many a rock and palm tree, sculptors of yore unwittingly carved his likeness and minted gold coins with his profile, and the desert loves him so much that, in a place known for its echoes, no matter what word you shout it is Darjis’s name you hear in return (and he, too, pronounces the name with a strong accent on the second syllable). Samuel, the son of old poets from the Lebanese mountains, thinks that this is likely the most beautiful amorous ode uttered in these lands for quite some time, and looks upon Zeid with a certain admiration. But he lets nothing show.

  Meanwhile, Zeid continues his soliloquy, maintaining that, of course everyone betrayed Darjis, because no one wanted to follow him. “Follow him? What for?” asks Samuel, who senses that this time he has broken the wild horse, and Zeid declares, to become king of the Arabs! And he begins, mysteriously, to laugh, then pulls the infamous ancient coin from his pocket and says that Darjis wouldn’t even have needed to mint his own money, coins with his profile on them already existed, and Samuel wonders if Zeid is making fun of him, doing his little act, or if he’s so in love with the Frenchman that he’s lost his head and now takes him for one of those Hellenized kings of Arabia with magical names, Aretas, Rabbel, or Malichus, graven in profile on drachmas.

  “So why didn’t he become king?” Samuel asks.

  “He wished to unite all the tribes beneath a single banner,” Zeid answers. “He was mad.”

  “And was it because he was mad that he had me believe he couldn’t speak Arabic?” Samuel asks.

  “No, it was because he was a spy,” Zeid replies, imperturbably.

  Samuel is afraid that after a distracted answer like this the boy will take off and vanish in the dust. But Zeid keeps riding calmly by his side.

  “He came among us to find out how loyal we were to the Turks and if we had ties to the British. Perhaps he was to buy us for France. In the end, he gave all that up; he had other dreams. The dreams of a madman. He truly loved the desert tribes. But the splendors of the ancient world diverted him from reality and the present.”

  Samuel glances curiously at the young Bedouin, who at this moment seems both serious and merry, and he realizes that, for the second time, Zeid is sending him a message. That night, in front of a thorny thicket whose shadow points backward like a sword, Samuel tells him that he is willing to pay him gold pieces, and even give him his own camel—the russet cow, nimble of step, that leads with its head and is restful for its rider, is a fabulous racer, a gift from Prince Faisal—if Zeid agrees to tell him what he knows or take him to the place where d’Argès’s treasure can be found.

  Zeid says nothing, but it is as if things were now settled between him and Samuel. However, the next day he starts up again with his seductive maneuvers, his sprinting and his jokes, and his restlessness seems such that Hamid declares he is not at all reassured to have that madman as a guide. In the afternoon, riders appear on the horizon and provide the two groups a cheery escort to Sheikh Raeed Hussein’s camp, where they are greeted with stampeding, shots fired in the air, and dancing of all sorts. Tha
t night, in the welcome tent, around a massive platter of rice where the heads of sheep and gazelles sit enthroned, wide-eyed and mocking, Raeed Hussein, a man of fine manners and a level gaze, who looks anything but a traitor, tells Samuel that he himself helped d’Argès hide his findings at Ras es Sohr, but after the Frenchman disappeared, he thought to turn a profit. “Anyone else would’ve done the same,” he says in justification. Then he declares that had he known someone would come on Darjis’s behalf, he wouldn’t have pursued this line of thought, but that, anyway, the treasure was stolen in the meantime. And naturally, he has no idea who the thief was, no doubt prowlers, looters, or a tribe that worked with Darjis and knew his plans. “And what happened to Darjis?” asks Samuel, who without realizing it has used the Arab version of the Frenchman’s name. An embarrassed silence follows his question. The guests around Samuel keep reaching out to take rice and meat between their fingers, but slow their movements, waiting for their chieftain’s reply. “Everyone will have told you it was I who sold him to the Turks,” says Raeed. “That is a lie. He was arrested in the tent of Fayed Ibn Alaeddine, to whom he had gone to propose an alliance between the Bani Harf and the Talleat. Darjis had some mad ideas. He wished to rebuild kingdoms that never were, or existed only long ago.”