The shouting contest continued unabated even in Ali’s absence, touching down occasionally on Mahmoud, who would grunt a monosyllabic answer that seemed to make no discernible impression on the questioner. They ignored Holmes and me completely, but led us all cheerfully towards the back corner of the inn. We were ushered in, the flimsy door was shut carefully behind us, and I soon was given the opportunity to add to my vocabulary the words for various vermin, as well as a few expressive adjectives.
The door flew open, crashing off its primitive hinges, and half a dozen lads staggered in carrying all our possessions aside from the livestock, which when deposited on the floor left us with only one room to move in, a room currently occupied by the snoring Ali. Mahmoud caught one of the boys by the shoulder, pointed to the tent sprawling massively sodden across the floor, and told him to take it up and spread it on the roof to dry. Out went the roomful of damp, smoky, goaty hair; the cheerful voices retreated, and were heard from the open window, until finally thumps and footsteps overhead told of the task being carried out.
Next through the doorway came a meal, a platter heaped with rice and hunks of tough mutton (a change from the tough goat’s meat we had eaten most nights) and a stack of bread, with mugs of laban and bowls of dates and dried figs. The lads dribbled water over the fingertips of our right hands from a long-spouted pot, stood there talking over our heads for a while, and then went off, politely propping the door back in the doorway as they left. The three of us ate, making balls of meat and rice from the platter and tossing them back into our throats. I was gaining confidence at eating with my less dextrous right hand, but Mahmoud, long practised in the technique of eating without chewing, finished first. He wiped his greasy fingers on his robe, went to check on Ali, whose stentorian snoring never paused, and then came back.
“He sleeps,” he said unnecessarily. “You remain here; I will return.” He wrestled himself out the door and left.
Holmes and I looked at each other, wrapped ourselves in our abayyas, and went to sleep on top of the baggage.
Ali woke us late in the afternoon, complaining mightily of a sore head and grousing at the cold food he had to eat. (I shuddered at the little footprints on the platter and averted my eyes.) Before long Mahmoud swept in.
“One hour,” he pronounced. Ali immediately stood up, deposited the platter and empty bowls outside the doorway, and he and Mahmoud began to turn out and reorganise our possessions. Two cups, a bowl, and the smallest brass coffee-pot, its handle snapped off under Charlie’s boots, were set to one side, and everything else was bundled neatly into a surprisingly small pile. When the tent was carried in a short time later, smelling of sunshine, it too was reduced to a snug roll in the corner.
Holmes and I sat on our heels out of the way and watched.
Our house restored to order, Mahmoud reached for his sheepskin coat. We made haste to do the same, and followed him out of the door.
The early evening air was sharp with the smoke of cook fires and the day’s warmth was fast departing, as it always does in the desert. We walked in a leisurely fashion through the mud-brick town, past two wells busy with women and a mosque in a park, through a whirl of children playing what appeared to be an Arabic variation on cricket, and ignored by soldiers and glanced at by the native residents. Finally we entered a large and very new-looking cemetery—a military cemetery, full of the dead from Britain and Australia and New Zealand, men who had died ensuring that this, the southernmost town of the ancient Israelites, should be the first town prised from Turkish hands.
In the smoky gloom of dusk, we strolled to the end of the sad, neat little park, and then turned to retrace our steps. On our way into the cemetery we had avoided a canvas-sided army lorry that stood near the entrance—hardly surprising that Ali gave it a wide berth, as its driver was behind the wheel with a glowing cigarette. The only surprising thing was that we had not been intercepted and thrown out on our ears the instant we appeared, four untidy Arab natives daring to defile a British military cemetery. Indeed, as we approached the lorry a second time, coming closer to it in the near darkness, the driver’s door opened. I braced myself for a quick fade into the twilight, but to my relief, instead of abuse, the head that came out merely said, “You’re alone,” and withdrew.
The motor spluttered and roared into life, the driver’s door slammed shut, and we had barely time to tumble after Mahmoud up and into the back of the lorry before it was in gear and moving.
We stayed behind the canvas, though the back flap revealed the town fading behind us. The check-point on the Gaza road slowed us briefly, but the sentries did not bother to look in the back. Soon we were bouncing down the pitted road, clinging to the sides in an attempt to take the edge off the worst of the jolts. The night became colder and the road got no better, for what seemed a long time, after which we turned abruptly to the right, and the road grew worse.
Ten minutes of this, and the lorry dived into a pothole, gave an alarming crack from somewhere in front, and the engine died.
Convinced that we had broken some vital part of the machinery, I just sat. Ali and Mahmoud, however, struggled to their feet and dropped over the back. Holmes and I followed, straightening up slowly to allow our vertebrae to ease back into line.
“As the Irishman said when he was run out of town on a rail,” Holmes commented, sotto voce, “ ‘Were it not for the honour, I’d rather have walked.’ ”
“Are we there, then?” I asked.
“So it would seem.”
The headlamps of the lorry illuminated a heap of mud bricks topped with rusted sheets of corrugated iron that I should have taken for derelict but for the well-fitting door that opened on noiseless hinges at Ali’s touch. The moment we stepped inside, the lorry lamps went out. Mahmoud shut the door behind us, I heard Ali in front of me move, and then another door opened, spilling light into the tight vestibule the four of us had crowded into.
The room beyond was a singular piece of architecture, long and low, with roughly plastered walls, a floor of packed earth, and lengths of unpeeled tree trunks holding up the iron roof. Squares of flattened petrol tins were nailed up in place of window shutters, the interior whitewash had long since flaked off the wall, and the entire structure appeared about to collapse into the earth, but looks were deceiving: The ramshackle building was warm compared with the out-of-doors, and not a chink of light had shown from the outside. The two long walls, twenty feet apart, ran parallel to each other for about fifty feet, at which point the left one halted and both walls turned ninety degrees to form an L. The building was heaped with stored goods—crates, bales, and canvas-wrapped shapes. There were no internal walls in sight.
However, my attention was not on the room but on the solitary figure it held, halfway down. He was a small round man—round of body, round of head, his knuckles dimpled into the flesh of his hands—dressed in unadorned khaki and seated on a camp chair. He did not look up at our entrance, merely continuing his task, which appeared to be holding something on a stick a few inches above a paraffin stove. A plate with a few round objects sat on a tea-chest at his left knee, and another heaped high was at his right, but the incongruity of the sight kept me from acknowledging what he was doing until my nose brought me the smell, evocative of my Oxford lodging-house with its mugs of cocoa and of Mrs Hudson’s kitchen in far-off Sussex: the man was toasting crumpets.