The rocks remained every bit as uncomfortable as they had started out, to the extent that at two in the morning, flea-infested divans began to seem attractive. It was no hardship to rise early and return to the road.
We turned back towards the sea and north, and trudged for twenty dreary miles (how far I had come since the first sparkling day out of Jaffa, a bare two weeks before!) down out of the desert hills and into the Jordan Valley, where the river emptied into the Dead Sea. When it first appeared, I welcomed the green of palm and banana and sugarcane and the rustle of birds in the leaves, but with every step the air grew warmer, and so damp that it became a struggle to breathe. The mules plodded with their heads down, dripping sweat from their necks and flanks. Their humans did much the same.
The monastery of St Gerasimo was another disappointment, as were the following day the various small monasteries around the site of John the Baptist’s immersion in the Jordan. We pushed west through the thorns and the oppressive air towards Jericho, a squalid little settlement unworthy of its ancient and noble history. We were aiming our steps at the Greek monastery on the Mount of Temptation to the north of town, after which we would turn our faces towards the monastery in Wadi Qelt and then to those along the Jerusalem road, but no sooner had we shaken the town’s mongrel dogs from our heels than we stumbled upon an archaeological dig inhabited by an elderly Englishwoman with a passion for the subject as a whole, a positive lust for potsherds in particular, and a furious store of energy at her command. In our enervated state she had no trouble in seizing us and dragging us off to her home, where she questioned us and lectured us and put us up for the night, returning us to our path the following morning clean and fed if delayed and rather dazed by the assault.
From her peculiar encampment we travelled north towards the Mount of Temptation (it being a steep climb to the top, I planned on volunteering to stay behind and guard the mules). Before we reached it, though, about a mile outside of town where the track passed through a small plantation of young banana trees watered by the ages-old Jericho springs, a car stood waiting.
It was a heavy car, an open Rolls-Royce of the sort used only by the highest-ranking army staff officers, its chassis virtually indestructible over the roughest of roads. The driver sat on the running board, smoking a cigarette and watching us come along the dusty track. As we approached he straightened, flicked the end of his cigarette across the road, and nodded in a familiar way to Mahmoud.
“I’ve arranged for you to leave your mules and kit with the family in the next farmhouse,” he said politely in an English straight out of Edinburgh. “General Allenby would like a word.”
TWELVE
س
Both the sword and the pen are necessary tools for a ruler; however, at the start of a dynasty, the need for the sword is greater.
—
THE
Muqaddimah
OF IBN KHALDÛN
It was strange beyond measure, compelling and exotic, to sit motionless while the land flew past at a speed faster than legs could move one. Trees were no sooner sighted than they were gone, and I felt as though I was looking at the open-mouthed children on the roadside with an identical amazed expression on my own face.
We were in Haifa in no time at all, it seemed: one hundred miles, and it was still not too late for tea. We were driven up to a grand house (the palace of a pasha, I discovered later) that had a number of incongruous army lorries and armoured vehicles scattered about what had once been formal gardens. The driver deposited us at a portico, where a lieutenant wearing thick spectacles and a uniform that had never seen battle conditions took possession of our ragged persons with such an air of infinite politeness that one would have assumed that he ushered in similar guests every afternoon—as indeed he may have done.
The lieutenant clicked down the polished corridor, turned a corner, stopped before a door, opened it without knocking, said, “The Hazr brothers are here, sir,” stood back to let us file in, and closed the door behind us. I was dimly aware of the sound of his heels clicking away, but mostly my attention was taken by the man in the room.
The room held two men, but I do not imagine that the world has produced many individuals who would be noticed in the presence of the man whose office this was.
He was big, although not extraordinarily so. His size was more an extension of his personality: taut with power until his uniform seemed at risk of bursting. He had eyes that probed and analysed and summed up the strengths, weaknesses, and potential uses of their target in seconds, a beak of a nose, a thinning tonsure of hair, and his bullet head was tipped slightly to one side as if listening for hidden currents. Behind his back, men called him “the Bull.” This was the man of whose exploits Mahmoud had spoken in the village, the man who, in the space of sixteen months, had assembled his inherited hotchpotch of an army and moved it out of its static place in Suez in order to present the despairing British people with Jerusalem for one Christmas and the remainder of the Turkish empire for the next, the man who at that moment was the sole authority of all the occupied territory from Constantinople to the Suez Canaclass="underline" the Commander in Chief, General Edmund Allenby. He seemed to take up a great deal of space in the room.
We had paused just inside the door while Allenby swept us with those search-light eyes of his. After a long five seconds he let us loose and turned to the man seated across the desk from him, and told him, “I shall give him a decision tomorrow, when I’ve reviewed his report. Now, time for tea. Ah,” he said, as the door behind us opened with a clairvoyant promptness. “Good. Over by the fire, if you would, Arthurs. It’s as cold as England here.” He emerged from his desk, holding a hand out to Mahmoud. “It’s good to see you again, Mr Hazr. I trust you are well again? Those knife wounds can be a nasty business. Mr Ali Hazr, a good day to you as well. And you two,” he addressed himself to us, taking our hands in his powerful grip—but not, I noticed, using our names until Arthurs had laid out the tea things and shut the door behind him. The big man then turned to his aide, one of those phlegmatic, sleek-haired, blue-blooded types the diplomatic corps treasures, and an unexpected sparkle bloomed in his eye. “Plumbury,” he said, “I’d like you to meet… Mr Sherlock Holmes.” As he spoke the words he peered closely at the aide’s face, and was rewarded by a blink, apparently of astonishment. Allenby grinned as if he’d scored a point, and then the mischief was clearly in his face as he brought me forward to be introduced. “And his associate, Miss Mary Russell.”
Plumbury’s reaction was a clear victory for the Bulclass="underline" not only did the startled man blink a second time at the unwashed Arab youth standing in front of him, he went so far as to raise a pale eyebrow. The general let loose a bark of laughter.
I decided to play along with the general’s game. “How d’you do?” I said politely in my best Oxford accent, and held out an equally languid if rather unsanitary hand.
“Er, yes, quite. That is, how d’you do?” Plumbury managed.
“You stand up to the costume very well, Miss Russell,” Allenby remarked.
“Thank you, General.”
“Colonel Lawrence used to dress up as a woman sometimes to get inside the Turkish lines, but then draping a man head to toe with an Arab woman’s fittings is hardly a disguise—a person could conceal an orang-outang or a dancing bear under what those ladies wear. Yours is a different thing entirely. And you, Mr Holmes, look very much at home in your costume. I swear you look younger than you did, what was it? nine years ago? Ten, that’s right, just before my Lake Victoria trip. How is your brother?”