I woke early the next morning, the first day of 1919, when the faint light of dawn was giving substance to the canvas over my head. The air was cold but I heard the pleasing crackle of burning tinder from the direction of the fire pit in the black tent. Holmes was gone from his side of our tent, his bed-roll in a heap against the far wall, and I thought it was the sound of him going out the flaps that had awakened me.
Oddly enough, Holmes and I had embarked on a similar quest the previous summer, taking to the roads of rural Wales in the guise of a pair of gipsies, father and daughter, to rescue a kidnapped child. Of course, that was August in Wales, and therefore wet and relatively warm, and in a green countryside populated with settled folk. Plus that, the goal of our time there had been clear from the beginning—nothing at all like this, come to think of it, although the sense of the companionship was much the same.
My gentle musing from the warm cocoon of my bed-roll was rudely broken by Ali’s harsh voice commanding me to rise, punctuated by a boot against the side of the tent that nearly collapsed it on top of me. Stifling a groan, I unwrapped myself and started the day.
Only late in the afternoon and far to the south did it dawn on me what Yebna had been: I had slept the night, all unknowing, in Javneh, the birthplace of rabbinical Judaism. The Mishnah, that remarkable, convoluted, cumbersome, and life-affirming document that laid the foundation of modern Judaism, was begun in Javneh, at the rabbinical academy that had come into being following the destruction of Jerusalem in the year 70. I had been walking among the very tombs, in the self-same dust where Rabbi Johanan ben Zakkai had taught, where Gamaliel and Akiva and—
Mahmoud refused to turn back. Ali just laughed at me. Holmes shrugged and said, “Maalesh. ” I mourned, and fumed.
South we had continued, moving towards Gaza but keeping away from the relatively fertile and more populous coastal plain. We entered the fringes of desert, the hardscrabble lands where rains brought short-lived carpets of wildflowers for a few days and bald drought the other eleven months, where the nomadic peoples coaxed tiny patches of wheat and barley to grow in odd corners, yielding a few handfuls of grain in a good year, and the slightly more settled peoples gathered around wells and deep, age-old cisterns, using buckets and primitive well mechanisms to water their melons and their olive trees. This was the desert of Palestine: not the brutal deep desert of sand dunes and camels but a thorny, rocky, dry, inhospitable place where one could carve a living if one was stubborn and smart and did not expect too much. A hard land and a hard people, with occasional flashes of great beauty and tenderness. My respect for them grew along with the blisters on my feet.
The following night we stopped short of Gaza, in a flat place within sight of a well but outside a small village. The two tents went up, the traditional black Bedouin tent shared by Ali and Mahmoud in front of our smaller canvas structure, and before the first flames of Ali’s cook fire had subsided into coal, two men appeared before it, carrying letters for Mahmoud to read. One of them had an answer he needed written, and for the first time I saw Mahmoud’s brass inkwell, stuffed with cotton wool to keep spillage at a minimum, and watched him act as scribe to the man in the dust-coloured clothing. Ali went off and returned with a large and muscular haunch of goat, and after we had eaten, six men from the village showed up to drink coffee and say the evening prayers and then have the contents of a two-week-old newspaper read to them. A long discussion followed, for the most part incomprehensible to the odd, bespectacled, beardless youth in the background, who was nine parts asleep in the warm smoky fug that gathered within the low walls of woven goat’s hair, lulled by the gurgle of the narghiles, or water pipes, and the easy rhythm of the speech of a race of storytellers. Strange as it seemed, with the blood of an orange grower named Yitzak barely dry on Mahmoud’s hem and without the faintest idea of our goal, I began to relax, safe in a desert place three thousand miles from the seemingly all-knowing foe who had dogged our footsteps in England. This was a simple place, as simple as heat and cold, pain and relief, life and death. At the moment, I was alive and comfortable, and the world was a good place to be.
The interval when Mahmoud might have prepared more coffee came and passed, and eventually the narghiles ceased their burbling and the men took their leave, their loud voices fading slowly into the night. I followed them out of the tent, and stood, staring at the bright sliver of moon in the black sky, surrounded and celebrated by a million sharp stars and the splash of the Milky Way. I was bewitched by the magnificence, enthralled by the utterly alien sky, and would have stood there frozen (and freezing) had Ali not grasped me unexpectedly by the arm and whispered harshly, “Get your coat and come. Silently.”
I got my coat and I came, and I followed Holmes and the two others through the dark night until we came to this villa, and the wall, and finally to my petulant question to Holmes.
“Holmes, will you tell me please what we are doing here?”
His dry voice came back in a breath, inaudible two paces off. “We are waiting to be relieved of duty.”
I lay for a few more minutes, watching the outline of the dark villa and its uninhabited grounds, and spoke again.
“What were they talking about, all the men tonight around the fire?”
“The usual topics of farmers. The lack of rain. The price of wheat. A ghazi —raid—one group of Bedouin carried off against another, that meant trampling two fields and killing a milch cow. And of course the manifold wickednesses of the government. Mahmoud,” he added, “seemed most interested in the last, although equally careful that the others would not see his interest in politics.”
“I see,” I said, not altogether certain that I did. “Is he after evidence about the murder of Yitzak and his two hired men, or something more general?”
“Both, I should say.”
I was rather relieved to hear him say that; for the past two days neither Arab had given the faintest indication that they were anything but itinerant scribes. I was even beginning to think that the two of them were no longer actively involved in Mycroft’s affairs, and that we had been parked with them by mistake. “Then why do I get the feeling that they’re giving us meaningless tasks like mapping that site just to see what we’re going to do?”
“Probably because that is precisely what they are doing,” he replied, sounding sardonic.
“It is becoming very tedious.”
“Mmm.”
Silence again, but for the inevitable night noises of a Palestinian village. Jackals cried in the distance, a donkey brayed below us, and the cockerel that had been crowing with monotonous regularity paused for twice its normal thirty seconds, then resumed. Someone in the house at the foot of the cliff treated us to another round of his tubercular cough, then quieted. My legs were now numb except for the sharp hot points of blisters on the soles of my feet and between the first two toes where the rough strap of the sandals had rubbed the skin raw. It was becoming difficult to breathe, I noticed. It was also extremely cold.
I thought about the two Arabs in the house and about the odd current of humour that had permeated Holmes’ reply to my query— and, now that I stopped to think of it, one I had thought I detected at times over the past days as well. It was not like Holmes merely to follow directions patiently, especially when they were unreasonable directions such as guarding the villa from a single place in the rear. The country and the way of life were foreign to me, but not completely so to Holmes; the distractions that kept me from looking too closely at just what it was Ali and Mahmoud were doing with us would not apply to him. It was as if two people were blindfolded and led around in circles, one of them a stranger who did not know what was happening, the other a person who knew exactly where he was and yet allowed himself to be led about as well, thinking it a great joke. I could not understand it, and I was too cold and uncomfortable to try.