The Sheik Yûsuf Loutfallah ibn Hishâm, in conformity with his royal prerogative, was the last to appear, but his arrival was a welcome signal that the period of suspenseful waiting was over. The Sheik confirmed this himself, barking a few words directly at the Saint which needed no interpreter to announce that they meant “Okay, let’s get going.”
“You want camel or jeep?” Tâlib amplified, with a lavish wave of his arm which embraced both forms of transportation, conveniently parked along the driveway.
Simon had already considered the possibility of stretching the reprieve to the limit by embarking on a safari to the remotest corner of Qabat, but after reckoning that that could hardly be more than forty or fifty miles, he had decided that the time he could gain would not be worth the discomfort involved.
“I shall begin here” he said, pointing dramatically to the ground at his feet, “where nobody before me has thought of beginning.”
From the buzz of comment that came from those within earshot of Tâlib’s translation of that announcement, the Saint knew that he had at least scored a point of showmanship.
He raised the hazel branch which he carried and took hold of it very carefully in the way that Mr Usherdown had taught him. It was cut and trimmed in the shape of a “Y” with long arms, and he held it inverted, in a peculiar kind of half-backwards grip, with the ends of the arms of the “Y” in the upturned palms of his hands. The main stem of the “Y” pointed almost straight up, but seemed to be in rather precarious balance because of the way he was spreading and twisting his arms at the same time, against the spring of the wood.
“You have to stretch it till it feels almost alive and fighting you,” Mr Usherdown had told him. “And then you just concentrate your mind on oil, or whatever it is you’re looking for. It’s the concentration that does it.”
Simon could feel the almost-life of the twig, reacting against the odd strained way he held it, but his concentration fell far short of the prescribed optimum. He found, rather disconcertingly, that his mind was capable of simultaneous wandering in at least three directions. One part of it remained solidly burdened with the involvements of the basic situation; another maverick element insisted on leaning back and making snide observations of the percentage of ham in his own performance; while whatever was otherwise unoccupied tried to think about oil, found it an elusive subject after picturing black sluggish streams of it in which revolved ponderous cams and gears, which merged into the oscillating stomachs of harem dancers, so that he switched quickly to the smog-belching sexlessness of a California oil refinery, and the gray haze creeping out to the Pacific Ocean where the sybarites thought it was too cold to swim but it would be wonderful to leap into straight out of the blazing sand and sky of Qabat… and he found that his intensely aimless circling had brought him smack up against the gate in the fence around the Emir’s precious private lawn.
The impulse that seized him then was pure gratuitous devilment. Letting go the hazel twig for a moment, he indicated the barrier with an air of pained indignation.
There was an awe-stricken mutter among the spectators, and Tâlib seemed to swell up in preparation for an explosion, but the Emir cut in with half a dozen words that abruptly deflated him. The gate was opened, and Simon resumed the proper grip on his oddly shaped wand and walked in.
He went on trying to think about oil, because the effort helped him to maintain a convincing aspect of strenuous concentration, but a perverse slant of association insisted on linking it next with salad dressing, and then leaving only the lettuce, fresh picked and still jewelled with morning dew, like the drops that sparkled on the grass he walked on, relicts of the mechanical sprayer which until a few minutes ago had been scattering its priceless elixir over the sacrosanct turf…
What happened next was that the hazel began to twist in his hands, the upright stem of the inverted “Y” trying to swing over to point downwards, so startlingly that he involuntarily fought against it. But it was as if the wood had become possessed of a will and a power of its own, so that with all his strength he could not hold it, and it writhed slowly and irresistibly over in his grasp until the stem pointed vertically down.
Simon Templar felt the sweat of his body chilled by a passage of ghostly wings, and would never know how he succeeded in keeping his face from looking completely fatuous.
He thought that a distant roar came to his ears from a hundred indistinguishable throats, though it might as well have been only a subjective amplification of the turmoil in his own brain, yet it seemed almost breathlessly quiet in the enclosure, where except for the Emir himself only Tâlib and one pair of sword-bearing guards had presumed to follow him. And in that brimming silence, he released the forked twig and extended his forefinger imperatively towards the spot where it fell, almost in the geometrical center of the Sheik’s most treasured enclave.
“Here,” said the Saint.
“You mean close here, outside, okay?” Tâlib said, shaken for the first time since Simon had known him into an almost incoherent dither.
The Saint’s arm and pointing finger remained statuesquely rigid.
“I mean here,” he repeated inflexibly.
Yûsuf was studying him in thunderous gloom, his head on one side like an introspective vulture. Simon met the inquisitorial scrutiny without blinking, letting everything ride with the bet that the Sheik’s cupidity would be stronger than his interest in horticulture — or at least that he was capable of the arithmetic to realize that a new oil well would buy a lot more lawns. And finally Yûsuf spoke.
“Sheik say,” Tâlib transmitted it, “you deliver, you get rich, pronto. Not deliver no goods, we cut your bloody head off. What you say, Mac?”
“You’ve got a deal, schlemiel,” said the Saint blandly.
After that it became much less orderly — in fact, it rapidly lost all semblance of order. The Emir rattled off another cataract of injunctions, and stalked away. Tâlib began to shout supplementary orders in four directions. The privileged spectators who were inside the cordon of militia pressed forward, gesticulating and shrieking in friendly conversation until they reached the fence, which bulged and bent and then meekly disintegrated before the weight of their excitement. At a word from Tâlib, the two Negroes closed in on Simon and hustled him unceremoniously through the jabbering mob. Outside the remains of the enclosure, the two other scimitar-bearers had already sandwiched in Mr Usherdown, who looked limp and pallid with stupefaction. Simon’s unit joined up with them, and the four guards formed a hollow square with Simon and Mr Usherdown in the middle and rushed them towards the palace entrance.
Simon caught one glimpse of Violet Usherdown, off to the side, with Yûsuf making gestures towards the palace, and a few of his nobles gathering curiously around, and Tâlib heading across no doubt to volunteer the assistance of his extraordinary brand of English; and then he was pushed through the great doorway and hurried into the labyrinthine route that led back to what he now felt it was somewhat euphemistic to call the guest quarters.
The massive door slammed shut and quivered with the clanking of bolts, leaving Simon and Mr Usherdown alone to gaze at each other.
At last Mr Usherdown achieved a shaky voice.
“Why did you do that, Templar?”
“I guess I was born ornery,” said the Saint. “It was such a priceless chance to trespass on Joe’s holy of holies, I just couldn’t resist it. I was quite tempted to take my shoes off and do it in my bare feet, but I was afraid that might be going too far.”