The people obviously knew of the war’s conclusion, but not in detail, and it was detail he gave them. His audience sighed at the first mention of the name of Allenby, the conquering hero whose very name transliterated into Arabic reads “to the Prophet.” Mahmoud told of the fulfilling of prophecy, when the ancient tradition declaring that the Holy Land would be free of the infidel only when the waters of the Nile flowed into Jerusalem was realised, transformed from a declaration of hopelessness into actual truth when the British Army supplied water to the city, carried on the backs of a regiment of camels from its source in the Nile. He went on to tell of heroic fighting, of small groups holding off armies, of a single man who crept across a hill, invisible as a rock, to destroy the huge gun flinging shells across the miles at the distant British troops.
Each of his episodes drew admiring remarks and much sucking in of breath from the audience, murmurs and exclamations of “Wa!” during the telling, and wagging of heads coupled with laughter at each conclusion.
The greatest applause came, however, with the story of Allenby’s deception of the Turks and their German advisers. With his hands in the air Mahmoud sketched the land north of Jerusalem, his left hand describing the sea and Haifa while his right hand drew the Ghor, or Jordan Valley, that hot, miserable, malarial lowlands that separates Palestine from the vast deep desert to the east. Here Allenby had laid out his greatest trick: He would convince the enemy that he was about to strike out on his right, directly across the Jordan, whereas in reality he planned to attack on his left, circling down on them from their western flank through the Valley of Jezreel, that is known as Megiddo, or Armageddon.
Mahmoud built his story with growing drama, beginning in Jerusalem, when the Fast Hotel near the Jaffa Gate was confiscated for army use and advisers in high-ranking uniforms openly filled the town, sure signs to the Turkish spies that Allied headquarters was moving to be near the river Jordan. He then described the stealthy moving in of troops on the left flank, always at night, only into tents that had already been in position for months. When he described the false messages given to spies, his audience began to nod in appreciation, guile being a truer sign of wit than mere cleverness was.
When he launched into a detailed description of the ostensible troop movements on the Jordan itself, however, the villagers began to grin in gap-toothed appreciation at a commander who would cause lorries to drag logs up and down, raising the dust of great activity, and who would direct whole regiments to march conspicuously into the eastern lines during the heat of the day, only to have them travel quietly west again under cover of darkness to. their starting point. Out and back went the decoy soldiers, openly out to and secretly back from the Jordan Valley, a relatively few men giving the impression of a massive build-up of strength. Tent cities were planted and five pontoon bridges thrown across the Jordan while “El Aurens”—Colonel T. E. Lawrence—and his camel Bedu staged spectacular raids nearby.
But it was the fake horse lines that had Mahmoud’s listeners rolling on the carpets with tears in their eyes: twenty thousand old blankets shipped up from Egypt and draped over shrubs, some of them propped up on wooden legs, from a dusty distance taking on the appearance of a massive accumulation of tethered cavalry horses.
The Turks fell for the entire ruse, supported by their German advisers, who believed the reports of their misled spies. The Turkish empire lined up the strength of its men and guns at the eastern borders of Palestine, ready to counter the attack out of Jerusalem; when Allenby threw his true forces instead onto their unprepared western flank, the Turks had not a chance. He swept them up, took ninety thousand prisoners, and broke the back of the Turkish Army in the most decisive victory of the entire world war, pushing the remnants in rapid and growing disorder all the way to Damascus and surrender.
Mahmoud’s story was obviously the high point of the evening; anything else would be an anti-climax. With the typically abrupt leave-taking of the Arab, the party began to break up. Limp children were carried off to their beds, older boys clattered off into the four directions on scrofulous donkeys, and adults pressed the mukhtar’s hand and that of Mahmoud before walking off into the night, reciting segments of Mahmoud’s story to one another at the tops of their voices, laughing and calling and fading away.
Not everyone left. The close friends and family of the mukhtar, twenty-five or thirty men, stayed on, chatting and smoking a last pipe and conducting small business. I thought we were perhaps finished for the evening, and began to think with actual anticipation of my hard bed where at least I could stretch out my leg muscles without causing offence, when Holmes dropped a question into a brief silence.
“My brothers,” he asked, frowning in concentration as he rolled up a cigarette. “Do you think the Turk is truly gone from the land?”
EIGHT
د
Writing is the shaping of letters to represent spoken words which, in turn, represent what is in the soul.
—
THE
Muqaddimah
OF IBN KHALDÛN
The question rippled through the tent, silencing the men around the fire. I could hear the sounds of sleepy children on the other side of the cloth partition; someone shouted monotonously from the other end of the village. Holmes ran the tip of his tongue along the edge of the thin cigarette paper, sealed it, and reached for the tongs to take a coal from the fire. Men began to speak, in a frustrating jumble of voices.
Some, I thought, protested loyally that Allenby and Feisal had truly driven the Turk to his knees. Heads nodded, and hands reached for the reassurance of narghile and cigarette. Some men, though, did not agree. The men of active fighting age, men whose faces were even more guarded than the average Bedouin’s, quiet men with scars and limps, men who had done more than stand and shoot at a fleeing enemy, those men did not nod their heads and exclaim loudly at the cowardice of the Turk. They glanced at each other from under their eyelids and at Holmes, and they said nothing.
Holmes listened politely to the protestations of freedom, and allowed the subsequent conversation to drift away into a series of bloodthirsty reminiscences of wartime ghazis. I did not think, however, that he had missed the covert glances, and I was not surprised when, a few minutes later, he got to his feet and left the tent, nor that when he returned he settled down not into his former spot, but in the midst of three of the men who had been silent. One of those was Farash, the mukhtar’s son.
Reluctantly I had to agree that the questions he was about to put to the men were best done casually and quietly, so I stayed where I was in the third rank back from the fire. I looked to see what Mahmoud and Ali would do and saw that, despite the sour expression on Ali’s face, they too planned to stay where they were and allow Holmes to continue his sub rosa interrogation. Mahmoud, moreover, tore his eyes from Holmes and turned to the mukhtar.
“Perhaps you have a thing you would like me to read?” he offered.
The eager look on the mukhtar’s old face, and on several others nearby, showed that they had been hoping for the offer. Three or four men scattered, to return with precious, tattered journals in hand. The mukhtar sent a rapid-fire set of instructions at the dividing wall. In an instant, a woman’s hand appeared under the coarse striped fabric, holding out a worn copy of an English journal called Boy’s Own Paper with a dramatic cover showing a troop of khaki-clad lancers riding furiously towards an unseen enemy. The dubious expression on the central horse was echoed by its rider, understandable in my opinion since the men were probably aiming their sharp sticks at an entrenched position of troops backed by machine guns, but logic has never been a major element of patriotism. At any rate, the magazine was obviously treasured by the mukhtar, who put it on top of the half dozen similar literary offerings made by the other men, laid on the carpet in front of the scribe and public reader.
Mahmoud took his time deciding which of the journals and books he would read from, although I knew the instant I saw a familiar cover emerge from a striped
abayya which he would pick, and I was right. He passed over the Boy’s Own and a Saturday Evening Post, hesitated over an Arabic translation of an American detecting person named Nick Carter, and finally reached out for the nine-year-old copy of Strand magazine. This he opened with care, checking that all the relevant pages were intact, before he settled back on his mound of bolsters and began to read, not so much translating as paraphrasing and considerably abridging it as he went. The story Mahmoud chose for the night’s public reading was one that Dr Watson’s literary agent, Arthur Conan Doyle, had called “The Devil’s Foot.” It featured a consulting detective by the name of Sherlock Holmes.
Mahmoud might have been reading a news article about the peace talks for all the mischief his face revealed, but I thought Ali would erupt with delight. Holmes, who had remained bent down to hear whatever was being said in the soft private conversation, jerked upright at the sound of his real name, badly startled. Mahmoud read on, stern of visage but with a faint breath of humour in the depths of his voice. Holmes pulled himself together, shot me a glance that dared me to laugh, and returned to his talk, safer from interruption now that the attention of the tent (both sides of it, I thought, hearing the heavy accumulation of breathing bodies pressing against the divider from the women’s side) was on this rousing tale of greed and revenge and induced madness and terrible danger. Long before the end of it, Holmes was having difficulty in keeping his own group’s attention, but eventually he sat back, obviously content with what he had learnt, and allowed them to participate in the climactic experiment Holmes had so rashly conducted on himself and Watson, the results of which were very nearly of a sort to which clean death might have been preferable.
Mahmoud very sensibly cut short the lengthy explanations of motive and method, simplifying both down to a few lines of dialogue and a dramatic conclusion.
It was a shining success. Much discussion followed, on how one might lay hands upon this magnificently lethal substance and the sorts of crime its use might best be suited to punish, and whether or not mere passion for a woman (and an unobtainable woman at that, for a Christian monogamist) was motive enough.
Eventually, when it became apparent that Mahmoud was not about to pick up Nick Carter’s adventures or the story of the Boy’s Own lancers, talk became sporadic and desultory: one man told his neighbours that his young grandson had been taken to hospital in Hebron and was not expected to survive the experience. Another man had a horse gone lame, and asked if anyone had some remedy for a cracked hoof that had yet to be tried on the creature. Ali made a casual enquiry about, I thought, banditry in the area, saying that he was concerned about travelling east of here with such a small group. The responses varied from an automatic and obviously ignorant reassurance to a disgusted agreement that no travel was safe in these troubled times. Then he mentioned the lone corpse found in the Wadi Estemoa, without identifying it by name.
A flurry of speculation sprang up like the last flames of a dying fire, and the presence of bandits in the hills to the south-east was debated. However, the hour was late and interest soon died down. Men began to wrap themselves in their abayyas and turn into cocoons on the floor of the tent. The four of us took our leave of our host and walked the short path to our flea-infested but honourable house.
Fortunately, this night we had outlasted the village children, and we could speak amongst ourselves in low voices without fear of being overheard. Somewhat to my surprise, Holmes did not hesitate to share what he had been told. I half expected him to pretend fatigue or at least surprise when the three of us rounded on him as soon as the door was shut, particularly following Mahmoud’s stunt with the Conan Doyle story, but he did not. He would, of course, have told us what the men had said, even if grudgingly and with gaps, but I thought afterwards that the readiness of his response was by way of recognising the debt he owed Mahmoud for so willingly taking on the lesser rôle, distracting the others while Holmes questioned the men who might know something. He dropped to his heels, tucked back his kuffiyah, and started talking—in English, to my relief.
“The men I was with were all soldiers for the Turk during the first three years of the war. They deserted when the Arab independence movement began to make real headway.”
“Do not call it desertion,” Ali objected, also using English. “They were slaves reaching for their freedom, not traitors.”
Holmes waved aside the niceties of definition. “That is not important. What matters is that the three conscripts, even as long ago as 1917, were aware that within the Turkish Army, certain men were laying plans for what was to happen in this country if Turkey lost.”
“But in 1917, Turkey was winning,” protested Ali.
“So it appeared, but to a small group of officers, it was far from decided. One of these three was a member of a work party hiding supplies in a remote cave: food, clothing, weapons and ammunition, medical supplies, and detailed maps. Some of the maps, he remembers, were of El Quds. Jerusalem.”
“Wallah,” Ali breathed. Mahmoud smoothed his beard thoughtfully and dug his prayer beads from his robe.
“The supplies are no longer there—having been, shall we say, liberated by the men on their way home.
“But if there was one cache…” Ali did not bother finishing the thought.
“Who were the officers?” I asked Holmes.
“These men knew the names, but said that, having had such a personal interest in the fates of their former superior officers, they made a point of hunting them out after the war. Of the half dozen they knew were in on it, all were either dead or in the custody of the British. Now all are dead.”
“Unfortunate,” commented Mahmoud laconically.
“Yes. They did say, however, that the six officers were not acting on their own, that orders came to them. And not from Damascus but from Jerusalem.”
We meditated on this for some time, and then Mahmoud asked, “You have the names of the Turkish officers?”
“I do. Perhaps they will have left administrative tracks that could lead to their superior. Had the Germans actually been in charge of the army rather than merely advising, we could certainly depend on records having been kept. The Turks, however, were less concerned with order. I suppose Joshua is the one to follow that particular lead; can a message be got to him?”
“It can,” Mahmoud replied.
Ali shifted slightly, but before he could rise and signal that the day’s events were ended, I stopped him with two questions aimed at Mahmoud.
“Are you suggesting,” I said carefully, because I wanted this quite clear, “that what we are looking for is a group of Turkish officers who have escaped capture and gone underground? And that these officers are plotting to take the country back from the British?”
Mahmoud clearly disliked being put on the spot, but after a moment he answered. “It is not so simple. It may be more a matter of encouraging the disorder and dissatisfaction that already exist here, hidden beneath the British rule of order. ‘A dust cloud hides all.’ Think of a man stirring up a cloud of dust so as to move around without being observed. When the dust settles, the man is where he wishes to be, with no-one the wiser.”
It was a picturesque image, if inaccurate (would not a stirred-up dust cloud attract suspicion?) and not terribly informative.
“His purpose being… ?” I prodded.
This time it was Holmes who responded. “Joshua appears to believe that the unrest is intended to, shall we say, encourage the British government to withdraw at all haste from the expensive and unpleasant business of governing an intractable province. I think that with tonight’s evidence, we may assume that the architect of the unrest further intends to be in a position to occupy the vacuum of power when the British depart. It is a plan both complex and simple, well suited to a patient man with a taste for manipulation.”
“You think there is such a man, then?”
“Or as Mahmoud suggests, a small coalition. As an hypothesis it wants testing, but yes, it is a stron
g possibility.”
“And he or they direct the mullah whose safe we robbed, and murder harmless farmers, and shoot men in wadis, and—”
“Russell, Russell. Joshua all but told us that the good Yitzak was not just a farmer. Am I right, Mahmoud?”
“A spy, yes, during the war.”
Great, I thought; yet another thing that had passed me by. “Still,” I persisted, “this is a fairly ruthless approach to politics. Why hasn’t your man Joshua heard of him, or them, before this?”
Mahmoud answered me in Arabic. “ ‘When the cat looks at the feathers and says he knows nothing of the bird, does that mean the cat’s belly is not full?’ ”
It took me a while to sort that one out, first the syntax, then the meaning. Eventually, though, I thought I had it. “You’re saying that Joshua does know that there is an actual plot to take over the country. That his vague maunderings about wolves in the sheepfold and his attempts to put Holmes off the scent were a ruse. My God, the man is more devious than Mycroft. So what we’re searching for is a Turkish Machiavelli with the morals of a snake. Where do we look? Out here in the desert? In the Sinai? Jerusalem?”
Mahmoud answered with yet another aphorism, a long Arabic growl that translated something along the lines of, “Jerusalem is a golden bowl full of scorpions.” Ali chuckled in appreciation, and without warning I was hit by a bolt of fury at Mahmoud and everything he represented. It was an accumulation of things, some of them to do with him—his flat assumption of command and his aloofness, the shadowy Joshua behind his shoulder and the patronising air with which he tended to answer my ignorance, his endless proverbs and convoluted epigrams and rawest of all the ease with which he had forced me to help him fleece the poorest of villagers. There were other vexations for which he could not be blamed, but in the blink of an eye, all the irritations that plagued me welded themselves together and pushed out a question I had not intended to ask.
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