They are unusual people, the Hebrews. The most interesting thing about them is that they believe there is only one god, a harsh and austere deity who cannot be seen and who must not be portrayed in images of any sort. They have nothing but contempt for the gods of other races, deeming them wholly imaginary, mere creatures of fable and fantasy that possess no true existence. This may very likely be the case, certainly: who among us has ever laid eyes on Apollo or Mercury or Minerva? Most people, however, have the good sense not to make a mockery of the religious practices of others, whereas the Hebrews apparently cannot keep themselves from trumpeting the virtues of their own odd species of belief while denouncing everybody else most vociferously as idolaters and fools.
As you can readily imagine, this does not make them very popular among their neighbors. But they are an industrious folk, with special aptitudes for the sciences of agriculture and irrigation, and a notable knack, also, for finance and trade, which is why Nicomedes has paid such attention to them. He tells me that they own most of the best land in the northern part of the country, that they are the chief bankers here in Mecca, and that they control the markets in weapons, armor, and agricultural tools everywhere in the land. It seems advantageous for me to get to know one or two important Hebrews of Mecca and I have made attempts to do so, thus far without any success, during the course of my ramblings in the marketplaces.
The markets here are very specialized, each offering its own kind of merchandise. I have visited them all by now.
There is a spice-market, of course: great sacks of pepper both black and white, and garlic and cumin and saffron, sandalwood and cassia, aloes, spikenard, and an aromatic dried leaf that they call malabathron, and hosts of other things I could not begin to name. There is a camel-market, only on certain days of the week, where those strange beasts are bought and sold in heated bargaining that goes to the edge of actual combat. I went up to one of these creatures to see it better and it yawned in my face as though I were the dullest of rogues. There is a market for cloth, which deals in muslins and silks and cotton both Indian and Aegyptian, and a market where crude idols of many kinds are sold to the credulous—I saw a Hebrew man walk past it, and spit and glare and make what I think was a holy sign of his people—and a market for wines, and one for perfumes, and the market of meat and the one of grains, and the market where the Hebrew merchants sell their iron goods, and one for fruits of all kinds, pomegranates and quinces and citrons and lemons and sour oranges and grapes and peaches, all this in the midst of the most forbidding desert you could imagine!
And also there is a market for slaves, which is where I encountered the remarkable man who called himself Mahmud.
The slave-market of Mecca is as bustling as any slave-market anywhere, which illustrates how great a degree of prosperity lies behind the deceptively shabby façade this city displays to strangers. It is the great flesh-mart of the land, and buyers sometimes come from as far away as Syria and the Persian Gulf to check out the slavemongers’ latest haul of desirable human exotica.
Though wood is a luxury in this desert country, there is the usual platform of planks and timbers, the usual awning suspended from a couple of poles, the usual sorry huddle of naked merchandise waiting to be sold. They were a mix of all races, though with a distinct Asian and African cast, here: Ethiops dark as night and brawny Nubians even darker, and flat-faced fair-skinned Circassians and Avars and other sinewy northern folk, and some who might have been Persians or Indians, and even a sullen yellow-haired man who could have been a Briton or Teuton. The auctions were conducted, quite naturally, in the Saracen tongue, so that I understood nothing of what was said, but I suppose it was the customary fraudulent gabble that fools no one, how this buxom sultry Turkish wench was a king’s daughter in her own land, and this thick-bearded scowling Libyan had been a charioteer of the highest distinction before his master’s bankruptcy had forced his sale, and so forth.
It so happened that I was passing the auction place at noonday three days past when three supple tawny-skinned wantons, who from their shameless movements and smiles must have been very skilled prostitutes indeed, came up for sale as a single lot, intended perhaps as concubines for some great emir. They wore nothing but jingling bracelets of silver coins about their wrists and ankles, and were laughing and thrusting their breasts from side to side and winking at the crowd to invite active bidding on behalf of their seller, who for all I know was their uncle or their brother.
The spectacle was so lively that I paused to observe it a moment. Hardly had I taken my place in the crowd, though, than the man standing just to my left surprised me by turning toward me and muttering, in a vibrant tone of intense fury powerfully contained, “Ah, the swine! They should be whipped and turned out into the desert for the jackals to eat!” This he said in quite passable Greek, uttering the words in a low whisper that nonetheless was strikingly rich and captivating, one of the most musical speaking voices I have ever heard. It was as though the words had overflowed his soul and he had had no choice but to utter them at once to the man closest at hand.
The power of that extraordinary voice and the violence of his sentiment had the most singular effect on me. It was as though I had been seized by the wrist in an irresistible grip. I stared at him. He was holding himself taut as a bowstring when the archer is at the verge of letting fly, and appeared to be trembling with wrath.
Some sort of response seemed incumbent on me. The best I could do was to say, “The girls, do you mean?”
“The slavemasters,” said he. “The women are but chattel. They are not to be held accountable. But it is wrong to put chattel out for pandering, as these criminals do.”
And then, relaxing his stance a bit and looking now somewhat abashed at his forwardness, he said in a far less assertive tone of voice, “But you must forgive me for pouring these thoughts into the unwilling ears of a stranger who surely has no interest in hearing such things.”
“On the contrary. What you say interests me greatly. Indeed, you must tell me more.”
I studied him with no little curiosity. It had crossed my mind immediately that he might be a Hebrew: his horror and rage at the sight of this trifling bit of flesh-peddling seemed to mark him as a kinsman of that dour man who had made such a display of irate piety in the marketplace of idols. You will recall that I had resolved to seek contact with members of that agile-minded race of merchants here. But a moment’s closer examination of his look and garb led me now to realize that he must be pure Saracen by blood.
There was tremendous presence and force about him. He was tall and slender, a handsome dark-haired man of perhaps thirty-five years or a little more, with a dense flowing beard, piercing eyes, and a warm and gracious smile that quite contradicted the unnerving ferocity of his gaze. His princely bearing, his eloquent manner of speech, and the fineness of his garments all suggested that he was a man of wealth and breeding, well connected in this city. At once I sensed that he might be even more useful to me than any Hebrew. So I drew him out, questioning him a little on the reasons for his spontaneous outburst against the trade in easy women in this marketplace, and without the slightest hesitation he poured forth a powerful and lengthy tirade, fierce in content although stated in that same captivating musical tone, against the totality of the sins of his countrymen. And what a multitude of sins they were! Mere prostitution was the least of them. I had not expected to encounter such a Cato here.