O Jerusalem
Laurie R. King
MARY RUSSELL-SHERLOCK HOLMES 05
Other Mystery Novels by Laurie R. King
Mary Russell Novels
The Beekeeper’s Apprentice
A Monstrous Regiment of Women
A Letter of Mary
The Moor
Kate Martinelli Novels
A Grave Talent
To Play the Fool
With Child
and
A Darker Place
For Dorothy Nicholl,
and in memory of Donald,
with love and with gratitude
Arabic Words and Phrases
abayya a robe worn over a long skirt or loose trousers and shirt
afreet a demon or troublesome imp
agahl a heavy ropelike wrap that holds the kuffiyah on the head
aleikum es-salaam a greeting (response to salaam aleikum)
bakshish a payment, tip, bribe, or donation
burkah a concealing woman’s garment
effendi an honorary address
fellah/fellahin peasant, countryman
firengi a foreigner, a “Frank”
Ghor the low-lying Jordan River valley
imam Muslim religious leader
insh’allah a saying: if it is God’s will
kuffiyah a loose headcloth
laban a drink of sour milk or diluted yogurt
maalesh a saying: oh, well…
muezzin the man who calls the faithful to prayer from a mosque
mukhtar headman of a village
mullah a Muslim religious leader
narghile a water pipe
saj curved sheet of steel used to cook flat bread over a fire
salaam aleikum a greeting: peace be with you
sitt Mrs, Madam
souk or suq bazaar
wadi water-cut valley, often dry but for sudden floods
wallah! an expression of surprise: by God!
ya walud an expression of greeting or to call attention
A Note About Chapter Headings
Baedeker’s guide to
Palestine and Syria, 1912 edition
The Muqaddimah
(Preface and Book One) of the sweeping History written by the brilliant fourteenth-century Islamic scholar Ibn Khaldûn. These quotations have been reworded slightly for the sake of brevity by the present editor.
Helen Waddell, The Desert Fathers
The Holy Qur’an
If I forget thee, O Jerusalem,
let my right hand forget its cunning.
PSALM 137:5
EDITOR’S REMARKS
The story that follows is a chapter in the life of Mary Russell, whose hand-written manuscripts I was sent some years ago (along with a puzzling collection of other objects, most of which have their explanations within the manuscripts themselves). The present volume, however, is published out of sequence, as it describes events that took place in 1919, during the period of the story I transcribed and published as The Beekeeper’s Apprentice . The Russell/Holmes saga has now reached 1923 with The Moor; yet in the current work, O Jerusalem , Russell is still little more than the great detective’s apprentice.
There are two reasons for this break in the proper order. One is simply that when I first read the manuscript, an entire section seemed to be missing, creating a gap I was not able to bridge until twenty-three neatly typed pages arrived in my mailbox, with a Slovenian stamp canceled in the city of Ljubljana. (Yet another oddity in the already mystifying provenance of these manuscripts.) Secondly, even without the since-closed gap, the current story links up closely with another manuscript dating to the winter of 1923—1924, to be published in the near future. Thematically, the pair forms a neater sequence than if O Jerusalem had been inserted second into the series.
A word about this story’s setting may be in order. In January of 1919, the Palestine that Ms. Russell entered was freshly under British authority. The previous October, British forces had broken the back of German/Turkish control over the area. The year before that, in late 1917, the holy city of Jerusalem had been freed from four centuries of Turkish control. The Paris peace talks opened on January 1, 1919, bringing together Emir Feisal, T. E. Lawrence, Chaim Weizmann, and the other authorities charged with hammering out policy and boundaries, while in the Middle East itself, unrest continued to seethe in a climate of tragic misunderstanding coupled with basic disagreement. In March, rebellion broke out in Egypt; in April, five Jews and four Arabs were killed in a series of outbursts; in September, a riot took place in Jerusalem.
The twentieth century is only the latest chapter of bloodshed in the story of the Middle East, for the history of Palestine is a litany of warfare. The Hyksos and the Egyptians, the Philistines and the Assyrians, Egypt again and Babylon were followed by Alexander, the Seleucids, and the Romans. Persian gave way to Moslem Arab, Crusader failed to hold it against Saladin; even Napoleon tried to take Palestine, losing a war to fly-borne eye disease.
In the midst of all this fighting, in the early centuries of the struggle for control over this precious land bridge connecting three continents, the small walled town of Jerusalem came into being. Built around a spring in the desert hills, on a patch of rocky ground amid three valleys, there the people lived, and there they built their holy place. Weapons evolved from bronze to iron, the city wall grew thicker and higher, and eventually, with tremendous feats of engineering that ensured the supply of water during a siege, the town shifted uphill from the life-giving spring. The holy place at its center remained.
The Temple that defined early Judaism, the center of cultic worship, was laid atop a hill. Over the centuries the Temple was damaged and repaired, devastated and rebuilt anew. In the first century of the Common Era, a troublesome rabbi and carpenter from Nazareth was paraded alongside the walls of the holy enclosure, to be executed on a hill across one of the valleys. Forty years later, the Temple was finally razed, its stones overturned, the city laid waste, its surviving population dispersed. Two and a half centuries later, the Roman Empire converted, to follow the rabbi it had executed, and under the resulting Byzantines, Jerusalem became a Christian city in a Christian country.