But the clouds of sand raised by the tractor attracted the attention of the bedouin. He needed a more surreptitious means of transport and naturally he thought of a balloon.
Stern had first experimented with balloons as a boy by suspending a basket beneath a sack sewn from tents. Above the basket was a crock holding a camel-dung fire. The hot air filled the sack and sent him bumping down a hillside.
Later he increased the heat of the fire many times by burning oil sludge from outcroppings in the desert rock. With this new buoyancy he could lift a larger sack and sail much higher. Alone as a boy dreaming on the wind above the Yemen, Stern had learned to read the stars.
Now he built a large balloon with a compact gondola that held a narrow cot, a small writing table and a shaded lamp. The balloon was fed by bottles of hydrogen which he cached in various remote ravines in the desert where he could descend at dawn and remain hidden during the hours of daylight, to sleep and plan the next leg of his trip while keeping secret the passage of his ship.
For Stern was careful to travel only at night. Sometimes he worked at his desk but more often he extinguished his shaded lamp and mused his way silently across the dark sky, invisible to those below when only the stars lit the desert, perhaps suggesting a tiny distant cloud when the moon was waxing through its quarters.
Back and forth he sailed from Aden to the Jordan, from the Dead Sea to Oman, hovering before daybreak to drop gently into a cleft in the rocks to anchor his ship. Stealthily then he made his way on foot down some narrow wadi to a village where he had arranged to meet a nationalist leader, sailing from intrigue to intrigue increasingly suffering from chronic headaches and chronic insomnia and chronic fatigue, celibate and isolated in his balloon, occasionally given to heart palpitations when he drifted too high in the starry night sky, already a victim of the incurable dreams he had known as a boy in the Temple of the Moon.
For as soon as he had his balloon equipped and set out to explore his mission, he discovered his cause had been reduced to a question of smuggling arms and nothing more. He had conceived of his great nation as healing the divisions of the past, his own role in helping to found it much like that of a hakïm. But the men he talked to during those first months when he was making contacts could think about nothing but guns. If he raised other subjects they cut him short.
Idiot, yelled a man in Damascus, why do you persist in this foolishness? A constitution? Laws? There’s no time for that here, you’re not at the university anymore playing with theories. Guns are what we need. When we kill enough Turks and Europeans they’ll leave, that’s the law, that’s our constitution.
But someday, Stern began.
Of course someday. Ten years from now, twenty, thirty, who knows. Someday we may have all the time in the world to talk but not now. Now there’s only one thing. Guns, brother. You want to help? Good, bring us guns. You have a balloon and can cross borders at night. Good, get on with it. Guns.
It sickened Stern and he tried to resist it because it was driving him to secret despair. He was appalled to think his splendid vision could so quickly degenerate into nothing more than smuggling arms. But he couldn’t argue with those men, he knew what they said was true and if he wanted to play a part it would have to be this.
So he sadly took all the inspired notes and lists and beautiful sketches he had made during those feverish and ecstatic two weeks in Paris, carried them high up above the desert one night and burned them, lit them one by one and dropped their flaming ashes into the blackness, then floated away to the east and early the next morning, the first day of 1914 or 5674 or 1292, depending on the prophet quoted, he delivered his first secret shipment of arms for the sake of a vast peaceful new nation he hoped to help build in the new century.
Stern’s most significant act during those early years was also the least known, a brief yet extraordinary encounter that took place accidentally in the desert. To Stern it meant nothing and when he met the same man again after a lapse of eight or nine years, in Smyrna in 1922 when the man saved his life, he didn’t even remember having seen him before.
But for the old Arab it was the most important moment in his long life.
The chance meeting occurred in the spring while Haj Harun was on his annual pilgrimage to Mecca, as usual traveling alone far from the customary routes. And as usual at all times of the year, Stern was drifting invisibly above the desert on one of his clandestine missions. At dawn he dropped from the sky to anchor his balloon and found he had nearly landed on a wizened old Arab who had been dozing like a lizard with his head under a rock. At once the barefoot man flung out his arms and prostrated himself.
He appeared both starving and lost. Stern offered him food, and water but the Arab refused to raise his face from the dust. At last he did so although nothing could induce him to rise from his knees. In that position he ate and drank sparingly as if performing some ritual.
Seeing the pathetic thinness of the man’s legs and the unnatural luster of his eyes, which he took for fever or worse, Stern begged him to accept his waterskins and other supplies. He even offered to float him to the nearest oasis if he was unable to walk, as seemed likely. But the wretched man abjectly refused everything. Instead he asked in the humblest of whispers, his voice trembling, if he might have the honor of knowing his host’s name.
Stern told him. The Arab thanked him reverently, whereupon he backed away still on his knees and continued doing so for the rest of the morning until he had crossed the horizon and was out of sight.
Once during the morning Stern happened to glance across the desert in the direction of the retreating Haj Harun who was now a mere dot on the crest of the dunes, still struggling backward on his knees, but Stern didn’t really see him and the crazed behavior of the old man made no impression on him. Instead he was busily turning the pages of his notebooks planning new routes for smuggling arms.
Initially there were some successes.
In 1914 the kaiser’s government was persuaded to pay regular bribes to both the Sherif of Mecca and his chief rival Emir ibn Saud, and Stern ferried German revolutionary orders from Damascus to Jidda. But nothing came of it because the Arabs wouldn’t do anything and the English were soon paying them more.
That same winter he arranged a secret meeting near Cairo with an influential English suffragette, a composer of comic operettas who had recently returned from an expedition to the Sudan where she had spent a long afternoon in the privacy of her riverboat cabin photographing a comely young hermaphrodite, a camel breeder currently known as Mohammed but formerly the wife of a tribal sheik.
The sheik had beaten his wife constantly, as the suffragette learned in the course of taking her photographs. Moved by the compassion she always felt for a woman who had suffered the prejudices of the world, she ended the afternoon by making passionate love to Mohammed. But to her great disappointment none of her photographs had turned out.
Stern took her to a Greek artist in Alexandria who was able to render exactly what she had seen, thereby gaining the suffragette’s support and propaganda for his cause in her subsequent operettas.
In 1918 Zaghlul was freed from internment and returned to Egypt to demand independence. In 1919 Kemal embarrassed the British by defying the sultan and the Persians resisted their British treaty. Shortly thereafter there were Arab revolts in both Syria and Iraq.
But there were also signs of coming failure in those early years.