Clearly taking a subservient role to Aurens, a foreigner, a Christian.
Kirkbride had meant to stammer out his errand then—except that at that moment, there came the call to prayer. Wild and wailing, it rang out across the camp.
Someone had translated it for Kirkbride once, imperfectly, or so he said. God alone is great; I testify that there are no Gods but God, and Mohammed is his Prophet. Come to prayer; come to security. God alone is great; there is no God but God.
And Aurens, the Englishman, the Christian, unrolled his carpet, faced Mecca with the rest, and fell upon his face.
That kept Kirkbride open-mouthed and speechless until the moment of prayer was over, and all rose again, taking their former places.
“He did what?” The officers were as dumbfounded as he had been.
Once again, Kirkbride was back in that tent, under the burning, blue gaze of those eyes. “He said to tell Allenby that if he wanted to see the taking of Damascus, he should find an aeroplane, else it would happen before he got there.” Kirkbride swallowed, as the mess erupted in a dozen shouted conversations at once.
Some of those involved other encounters with Aurens over the past few weeks. How he had been in a dozen places at once, always riding a white Arabian stallion or a pure white racing camel of incredible endurance. How he had rallied the men of every tribe. How he had emptied Mecca of its fighting men.
How he had appeared, impeccably uniformed, with apparently genuine requisition orders for guns, ammunition, explosives, supplies. How he had vanished into the desert with laden camels—and only later, were the orders proved forgeries so perfect that even Allenby could not be completely sure he had not signed them.
How, incredibly, all those incidents had taken place in the same day, at supply depots spread miles apart.
It was possible—barely. Such a feat could have been performed by a man with access to a high-powered motor-car. No one could prove Aurens had such access—but Hussein did; he owned several. And Hussein was now with Aurens—
It would still have taken incredible nerve and endurance. Kirkbride did not think he had the stamina to carry it off.
No one was paying any attention to him; he slipped out of the officers’ mess with his own head spinning. There was only one thing of which he was certain now.
He wanted to be in at the kill. But to do that, he had to get himself attached to Allenby’s staff within the next hour.
Impossible? Perhaps. But then again, had Aurens not said, as he took his leave, “We will meet again in Damascus”?
Kirkbride sat attentively at the general’s side; they had not come by aeroplane after all, but by staff car, and so they had missed the battle.
All six hours of it.
Six hours! He could scarcely credit it. Even the Germans had fled in terror at the news of the army camped outside their strongholds; they had not even waited to destroy their own supplies. The general would not have believed it, had not French observers confirmed it. Allenby had mustered all of the General Staff of the Allied forces, and a convoy of staff cars had pushed engines to the breaking-point to convey them all to the city, but Kirkbride had the feeling that this was the mountain come to Mohammed, and not the other way around. He had been listening to the natives, and the word in their mouths, spoken cautiously, but fervently, was that Aurens was Mohammed, or something very like him. The victories that Allah had granted were due entirely to his holiness, and not to his strategy. Strangest of all, this was agreed upon by Suni and Shiite, by Kurd and Afghani, by purest Circassian and darkest Egyptian, by Bedouin wanderer and Lebanese shopkeeper. There had been no such accord upon a prophet since the very days of Mohammed himself.
Allenby had convinced himself somehow that Aurens was going to simply, meekly, hand over his conquests to his rightful leader.
Kirkbride had the feeling that Allenby was not going to get what he expected.
Damascus was another Deraa, writ large. Only the Turkish holdings had been looted; the rest remained unmolested. There were no fires, no riots. High-spirited young warriors gamed and sported outside the city walls; inside, a stern and austere martial order prevailed. Even the hospital holding the wounded and sick Turkish prisoners was in as good order as might be expected, for a place that had been foul when the city was in Turkish hands. There was government; there was order. It was not an English order; organization was along tribal lines, rather than rank, to each tribe, a duty, and if they failed it, another was appointed to take it, to their eternal shame. But it was an order, and at the heart of it was the new Arab Government.
Allenby had laughed to hear that, at the gates of the city. As they were ushered into that government’s heart, he was no longer laughing. There were fire brigades, a police force; the destitute were being fed by the holy men from out of the looted German stores, and the sick tended by the Turkish doctors out of those same stores. There were scavenger-gangs to clear away the dead, with rights to loot the bodies to make up for the noisome work. British gold became the new currency; there was a market already, with barter encouraged. Everywhere Kirkbride looked, there was strange, yet logical, order. And Allenby’s face grew more and more grave.
Aurens permitted him, and the envoys of the other foreign powers, into his office, commandeered from the former Governor. The aides remained behind. “My people will see to us, and to them,” Aurens said, with quiet authority. A look about the room, at the men in a rainbow of robes, with hands on knife-hilts, dissuaded arguments.
The door closed.
Kirkbride did not join with the others, drinking coffee and making sly comments about their guardians. He had the feeling, garnered from glances shared between dark faces, and the occasional tightening of a hand on a hilt, that all of these “barbarians” knew English quite well. Instead, he kept to himself, and simply watched and waited.
The hour of prayer came, and the call went up. All the men but one guarding them fell to praying; Kirkbride drew nearer to that one, a Circassian as blond as Aurens himself.
“You do not pray?” he asked, expecting that the man would understand.
And so he did. He shrugged. “I am Christian, for now.” He cast his glance towards the closed door, and his eyes grew bright and thoughtful. “But—perhaps I shall convert.”
Kirkbride blinked in surprise; not the least of the surprises of this day. “What was it that the caller added to the end of the chant?” he asked, for he had noted an extra sentence, called in a tone deeper than the rest.
The man’s gaze returned to Kirkbride’s face. “He said, ‘God alone is good, God alone is great, and He is very good to us this day, Oh people of Damascus.’ ”
At that moment, the door opened, and a much subdued delegation filed out of the door. Allenby turned, as Aurens followed a little into the antechamber, and stopped. His white robes seemed to glow in the growing dusk, and Kirkbride was astonished to see a hint of a smile on the thin, ascetic lips.
“You can’t keep this going, you know,” Allenby said, more weary than angry. “This isn’t natural. It’s going to fall apart.”