By the time we made camp that night, having walked eighteen or twenty very uneven miles and heard nothing but Arabic since leaving Beersheva, I was exhausted. I did my chores and ate Ali’s tasteless food mechanically, and sat slumped against a bundle in front of the fire in the black tent, dimly aware of Mahmoud pounding the coffee mortar and Holmes talking again, telling another story. Without making an effort of concentration, it was just a flow of Arabic, sweetly guttural noises that ebbed and flowed against my eardrums, until my attention was snagged by the sound of my own name. I bent my ears to his words and decided after a minute that he was telling Ali and Mahmoud the tale of our Welsh adventure; as I listened, an odd thing happened. Despite, or perhaps because of, my combined lack of sleep, physical tiredness, and psychic revulsion for the ubiquitous foreign language, I suddenly realised that I was able to understand virtually everything that was being said. It was as if some internal mechanism had clicked on and the strange and laborious patterns fell neatly into place, so that even individual words that I did not actually know were clear in their context. For half an hour I sat by the fire, drinking minute cups of thick, bitter coffee and listening to Holmes build an epic out of the case in Wales.
Holmes had always been a good speaker, but this performance was, I realised later, extraordinary, particularly coming from a man long critical of his biographer’s habit of making romance out of what the detective viewed as an intellectual exercise. In the general run of things he scorned Watson’s vivid adjectives, yet that night in front of the cook fire Holmes produced a narrative decorated with embroidery and detail that even Watson might have hesitated to include. It was an exciting story, and only when it had rung to a close did I become aware of the glances that our two companions had been throwing my way. When the air was still again but for the whisper of the fire and the distant bray of a fellahin donkey, Ali turned to me with a glare. “Mouhal,” he said: Impossible.
“El haq,” I replied: The truth.
He continued in Arabic automatically. “You climbed up a tree, entered the house of an enemy, and rescued this child of the American senator? Alone? A woman—a girl?”
“It is true,” I repeated, pushing away the irritation his naked doubt caused.
“I do not believe this story,” Ali declared fiercely. A female who could not only heave him across the room and throw a knife with potentially deadly accuracy but perform heroic rescues on top of it was obviously more than he could bear.
“You would accuse me of falsehood?” Holmes asked in a quiet voice.
Ali looked from one of us to the other, no doubt seeing hot anger on my face, cold threat on Holmes’, and scorn in both. He even glanced at Mahmoud, but found no help in that blank visage.
“Exaggeration,” he said resentfully, in English.
“Very little,” said Holmes, accepting the word as if it had been an apology. He did not allow the subject to pass, however, but continued to study Ali as if the younger man were a schoolboy in danger of failing his course of study. This made Ali understandably uneasy. Holmes finally spoke, in a voice with cold steel in it.
“I can see we are going to have problems if you continue to think of Russell as a woman, and English. It could be highly dangerous. I recommend strongly that you stop, now. Think of Russell as Amir, a boy from out of the district who does not speak the local dialect very well. Refer to him using the masculine pronoun, picture him as a beardless youth, and you just might succeed in not giving us away.”
In the course of this speech Ali’s expression had gone from a smirk to disbelief to fury. He rose, his fists clenched, Holmes’ bland face infuriating him even further. He took a step forward. Mahmoud said his name, and he stopped, but turned to his partner and flung his hand out at Holmes in protest. Mahmoud spoke again, a phrase too terse for me to take its meaning, but it cut Ali off as with a blade. The angry man stared furiously at the calm seated one, then turned his back without a word and stormed into the night.
We all turned in shortly thereafter, but the night’s silence was broken by the lengthy murmur of conversation, rising and falling, from the direction of the black tent. I could hear no words, but it sounded to me as if Mahmoud did most of the talking.
In the morning Ali seemed filled with brittle cheerfulness, Mahmoud was more taciturn than ever, and Holmes was distracted and anxious to be away. We broke camp while Mahmoud made tea, then stood and sipped the hot, sweet drink in the chill dawn before entering the wadi, the shadows still stretched long against the ground.
Here at the lower end of the watercourse the wadi bottom was damp with pools of clear water, but the going was firm, with only the occasional patch of mud. Holmes walked in front, ignoring the tracks in the sandy soil, tracks left by those retrieving Mikhail’s dead body. His eyes were on the boulders above the wet line of the recent flood, and he stopped often to crane his neck at the top of the cliff above us.
The sun was overhead when we came around a bend to find Holmes standing on top of a group of three large boulders with a young tamarisk tree growing from the hill above them. We stopped. Ali gathered together a circle of stones and set about building a fire in the wadi bottom. Mahmoud retrieved his coffee kit. Soon the aroma of roasting beans filled the cold, damp canyon, but Holmes, oblivious, continued to quarter the hillside, stopping from time to time to finger a broken twig or bend close over a disturbed stone. Eventually I climbed up the rocks and joined him.
“There were at least two men,” he began without preamble as soon as my ears were within range. “And it was not a revolver but a rifle, three bullets, from there.” He jabbed a finger briefly at the top of the opposite cliff before returning to his task of gently prising pieces of stone free from the crumbling face of the cliff with the knife from his belt. “A first-rate marksman, too. He hit Mikhail’s turban with his first shot, fifty feet above here, and wounded Mikhail with this, his second.” His long fingers came out from the crack in the rock at which they had been worrying, holding a misshapen wad of grey metal between them. He displayed it to me, slipped it into his robe, and scrambled down a few feet to trace a faint smear of red-brown on the face of the rock and a small spatter farther on. “When the third one struck, he fell onto the boulder, as Joshua said.” On the boulder below, despite the intervening rainstorm, the stain was still clear.
We sat for several minutes, Holmes contemplating the sequence of events and I regretting the death of this man I had never met, until eventually the aroma of bread joined that of coffee, and we descended to take our midday meal.
When we had finished eating, the men lit their cigarettes and Holmes narrated the last scant minute of the life of Mikhail the Druse. “He was coming down into the wadi. He must have known someone was after him, because he was moving quickly, at a greater speed than is wise on this terrain, which caused him to skid and slide. He may not have known that the man with the rifle was there on the other side until the first bullet went through his turban…” He paused to lay a tuft of white threads on a flat stone. “He did wear the usual white Druse turban, I take it? I thought so. When the bullet went through it, he panicked, jumped and fell, caught himself on that rock with the black vein in it”—Ali and Mahmoud turned to look at the hillside—“and the second shot hit him, a flesh wound that bled quickly. It was on the left arm; there’s a partial hand-print farther along. This was the second round.” He took the flattened bullet from his robe and put it beside the scrap of fabric. “You can see the track of his flight down, even from here. Across the slide area, jumping to the boulder, he fell, rolled, and caught himself briefly on the dead tree, pulling it from the ground. He lost his bag then, turned to reach for it, and as soon as he stopped moving the third shot came, and he died. A short time later, the pursuer whom Mikhail was fleeing came down the same hill in Mikhail’s tracks, at a considerably slower pace. He checked to see that the Druse was dead, then went through his possessions. I would suggest that he removed something that had been written with that recently sharpened pencil we found in the pack.”